The smell hit Raj before he even reached the seventh floor – not the usual cocktail of curry, dampness, and old concrete that defined the Shakti Towers apartment building, but something else. Something that made his teeth ache and his stomach turn, like milk left too long in Mumbai's crushing heat, but worse. Sweet and wrong.
He shifted the thermal bag on his shoulder, Mrs. Desai's regular Tuesday order (dal tadka, two rotis, always lukewarm by the time he climbed the broken elevator's seven flights) weighing less than the dread settling in his chest. The fluorescent tube in the hallway flickered, casting jumping shadows that made the peeling paint look like it was breathing.
Apartment 7B. Mrs. Desai. The app showed this was his forty-third delivery to her since the lockdowns started easing six months ago. He knew her order by heart, knew she'd answer on the fourth knock, knew she'd try to tip him even though she couldn't afford it.
He knocked three times. Waited. The smell was stronger here, seeping from under her door like an accusation.
"Mrs. Desai?"
The door opened a crack, chain still on. One brown eye, clouded with cataracts but sharp as broken glass, peered out.
"Raj. Good. Come in, quickly."
"Mrs. Desai, I can't—company policy. I'll just leave it—"
"Please." The word came out cracked, desperate. "Just for a moment. Please."
In two years of delivering food through the pandemic, through the worst of the lockdowns when people were dying in hallways, Raj had never heard that particular note of terror in someone's voice. He glanced down the empty hallway, then back at her eye.
"Two minutes," he said.
She fumbled with the chain, fingers shaking. When the door opened fully, Raj saw she'd lost weight – her sari hung loose on her frame, and her cheekbones stood out like accusations against the world that had forgotten her.
Her apartment was exactly as he'd imagined from glimpses through the doorway: neat despite the poverty, books lined on makeshift shelves made from boards and bricks, a small shrine to Ganesh in the corner with a flickering LED candle. But the walls – the walls were covered in newspaper clippings, pages torn from books, handwritten notes in Hindi, English, and what looked like Marathi, all connected with red string like something from a detective movie.
"Mrs. Desai, are you okay?"
She grabbed his wrist with surprising strength. "You feel it, don't you? The smell?"
"I... there's something. Maybe a rat died in the walls?"
She laughed, bitter and short. "Rats. If only. Sit, boy. Eat something. You're too thin."
"I can't stay—"
"Sit." This time it was the voice of the English teacher she'd been for forty years before retirement and poverty had cornered her in this crumbling tower. Raj sat.
She pushed a plate of glucose biscuits toward him, then moved to the wall of clippings. "It started three months ago. Mr. Sharma in 7D. They said heart attack. Natural causes." She tapped a newspaper obituary. "Then Mrs. Krishnan in 5C. Stroke. Mr. and Mrs. Patel in 8A, covid complications – except they'd both been vaccinated, boosted, careful as temples."
"People die, Mrs. Desai. Especially—" He stopped himself before saying 'old people.'
"Especially us relics?" She smiled without humor. "Yes. But not like this. Not with that smell. Not with the marks."
"Marks?"
She pulled down a photocopy of what looked like a medical report. Someone had circled something in red ink – a note about unusual bruising on the deceased's chest, right over the heart. "My nephew works at the municipal hospital. He got me these. Every one of them, the same marks. Like something was... feeding."
Raj stood up. This was beyond his two-minute promise, beyond his capacity to help. "Mrs. Desai, maybe you should talk to someone. A doctor, or—"
"You think I'm crazy." It wasn't a question. "The old woman, alone too long, mind going soft like fruit in the heat. That's what Mr. Jindal says. That's what they all say. But you smell it, don't you? The Empty, getting hungry?"
"The empty?"
She moved to the window, looked out at the sprawl of Mumbai stretching endlessly in the afternoon haze. "Cities create them. All those people pressed together but never touching, never really seeing each other. We pass like ghosts, order food through apps, work through screens, live and die behind closed doors. All that loneliness, all that isolation – it has to go somewhere, doesn't it? It accumulates, like smog, like debt. And eventually, it gets hungry."
Raj's phone buzzed. Another delivery waiting. He needed to go, needed to escape this apartment with its wall of madness and its impossible theories. But something made him pause.
"The smell," he said. "When did it start?"
"Three days ago. Right after Mr. Gupta in 7F stopped answering his door."
The apartment next door. Raj looked at the wall Mrs. Desai shared with 7F, noticed how she'd pushed all her furniture away from it.
"Have you called anyone? The police?"
"Mr. Jindal has a key. He says he'll check tomorrow. Always tomorrow with him." She grabbed Raj's arm again as he headed for the door. "Be careful, boy. It likes the ones who are alone. The ones who've given up connecting. And in this city, that's almost everyone."
Raj left, but the smell followed him down the seven flights of stairs. By the time he reached his bike, he'd made a decision. He pulled out his phone and called his sister.
"Priya? Yeah, I'm fine. Listen, I need you to check something for me at the hospital. Pull records for anyone who's died in the Shakti Towers building in the last three months..."
She groaned. "Bhaiya, I'm in the middle of rounds—"
"Please. Just... humor me. And check for anything unusual about the bodies. Marks, bruising, anything."
"Is this about that old lady you're always delivering to? Raj, you can't save everyone."
"I'm not trying to save everyone. Just... please."
"Fine. But you owe me samosas from that place near the station."
Raj made four more deliveries, but his mind kept returning to Mrs. Desai's wall of connections, the smell that shouldn't exist, the empty apartment next door. By eight PM, when Priya finally called back, he was sitting outside Shakti Towers again, watching the windows light up one by one as people returned from work – each light a small island of isolation in the dark.
"Okay, this is weird," Priya said without preamble. "Seven deaths in three months. All residents over sixty. All lived alone. And bhaiya... they all had the same bruising pattern. The attending noted it but couldn't explain it. Like something had been pressing on their chests, right over the sternum, but from the inside."
Raj's mouth went dry. "What else?"
"Time of death for all of them was between 2 and 4 AM. And this is the really weird part – none of them had called for help. No signs of struggle. It's like they just... gave up."
After Priya hung up, Raj sat in the growing dark, watching the building. The rational part of his mind, the part that had graduated with honors in philosophy before the economy and his father's death had driven him to delivering food, offered explanations. Coincidence. Confirmation bias. The vulnerability of the elderly poor in a system that had abandoned them.
But another part, the part that had grown up on his grandmother's stories of rakshasas and vetala, of things that hungered for more than flesh, whispered that maybe Mrs. Desai was right. Maybe loneliness, concentrated and fermented in the pressure cooker of urban poverty, could become something else. Something hungry.
His phone buzzed. A new order. He almost ignored it, then saw the address: Shakti Towers, 7F.
Mr. Gupta's apartment.
The order was simple: one bottle of water, one packet of biscuits. Payment in cash. The notes section had just one word: "Please."
Raj's hands shook as he accepted the order. He drove to the nearest store, bought the items with his own money, and returned to Shakti Towers. This time, the stairs seemed longer, the shadows deeper. The smell was overwhelming now, coating the back of his throat like oil.
He knocked on 7F. Waited. Knocked again.
"Mr. Gupta?"
A sound from inside – not quite voice, not quite breath. Something between a whisper and a wheeze.
"Mr. Gupta, I'm coming in."
The door was unlocked. It swung open on darkness so complete it seemed solid, a wall of black that the hallway's fluorescent light couldn't penetrate. The smell rolled out like a living thing, and underneath it, barely audible, that wheeze-whisper sound.
"Help."
Raj pulled out his phone, turned on the flashlight. The beam carved a tunnel through the dark, revealing an apartment that was the mirror image of Mrs. Desai's but wrong, fundamentally wrong. The furniture was there but covered in something that looked like dust but moved like it was breathing. The walls were bare except for shadows that didn't match anything casting them.
Mr. Gupta was on the floor by the window, still alive but barely. An old man, maybe seventy, skeletal thin, his chest rising and falling in stutters. But it was what was on his chest that made Raj's bladder clench with the urge to run.
It wasn't visible, exactly. It was an absence, a place where light went to die, roughly the size and shape of a child but wrong, so wrong. It pressed down on Mr. Gupta's chest, and where it touched him, the old man's skin was turning gray, not the gray of death but the gray of erasure, like he was being deleted from existence one cell at a time.
The thing turned toward Raj, and he understood with horrible clarity what Mrs. Desai had meant by "the Empty." It had no face, no features, but he could feel its attention like cold fingers on his spine. It was hunger without mouth, need without form, the concentrated isolation of every person who had died alone in this city, fermented into something that fed on more loneliness, creating more of itself with every feeding.
"Get away from him," Raj heard himself say.
The Empty shifted, and somehow Raj knew it was amused. Why should it fear him? He was just another meal waiting to happen, another lonely soul in a city of twenty million strangers. He lived with his mother and sister but barely spoke to them. He had no friends, only customers. He existed in the spaces between human connections, delivering food but never sharing meals.
The perfect prey.
But then Raj remembered something Mrs. Desai had said: "It likes the ones who are alone. The ones who've given up connecting."
He pulled out his phone, found Mrs. Desai's number from the delivery app's history, and called her. She answered on the first ring.
"Raj?"
"I'm in Mr. Gupta's apartment. Bring anyone you can. Everyone. Now."
He didn't wait for her response, instead turning to Facebook live, something he'd never used before. "I'm at Shakti Towers, Apartment 7F," he said to his phone camera, his voice steady despite the terror. "There's a man dying here. He needs help. Please, if anyone's watching, come help."
The Empty recoiled, the darkness in the room flickering. It didn't like this, didn't like the connections being made, the isolation being broken. Raj kept talking, narrating what he saw, describing Mr. Gupta, calling for help. His sister was watching now, commenting, sharing. Three viewers became ten, became fifty.
Mrs. Desai arrived first, banging through the door with a cricket bat and more courage than any seventy-three-year-old should possess. Behind her came others – Mrs. Mehta from 7C, the Ahmad family from 7A, even surly Mr. Jindal, drawn by the commotion.
"Get him into the light," Mrs. Desai commanded. "All of you, touching him. No one alone. No one isolated."
They formed a chain, hands on shoulders, on arms, on hands, and together they pulled Mr. Gupta away from the thing that fed on solitude. The Empty writhed, contracted, tried to hold on, but it was weakening. Every person who entered the room, every connection made, diminished it.
"You're not alone," Mrs. Desai told Mr. Gupta, holding his hand. "None of us are alone unless we choose to be."
The Empty made a sound then, the first sound Raj had heard from it – a keening like wind through abandoned buildings, like the last breath of forgotten people, like every unanswered phone call in the city crying out at once. Then it collapsed in on itself, shrinking, condensing, until it was just a shadow, then just a bad smell, then nothing at all.
Mr. Gupta gasped, color returning to his skin. He was unconscious but breathing normally. Someone had called an ambulance; Raj could hear the sirens approaching.
"It'll come back," Mrs. Desai said quietly, as the paramedics loaded Mr. Gupta onto a stretcher. "Maybe not here, maybe not soon, but somewhere else in the city, wherever the loneliness gets thick enough. That's what cities do – they create these pockets of isolation, these feeding grounds."
Raj looked around the room, now full of neighbors who usually passed each other in the halls without speaking. Mrs. Mehta was making tea in Mr. Gupta's kitchen. The Ahmad children were opening windows to air out the apartment. Mr. Jindal was actually talking to someone other than himself, complaining about the building's maintenance but in a way that suggested concern.
"Maybe," Raj said. "But now we know what to look for. And we know how to fight it."
Mrs. Desai smiled, the first real smile he'd seen from her. "With connection. With community. With the simple act of giving a damn about each other." She patted his hand. "Thank you, boy. For believing me. For coming back."
Raj's phone buzzed. Another delivery order. He looked at it, then at Mrs. Desai, then at the room full of people who had come together to save a stranger.
"I have to go," he said. "Work."
"Of course. But Raj?" She squeezed his hand. "You'll come for dinner Sunday? Properly, not delivery. Bring your mother and sister. I'll cook."
He thought about his schedule, about the money he'd lose taking a Sunday evening off, about all the reasons to say no. Then he thought about the Empty, about how it grew in the spaces between people, in the refusals to connect, in the choice of efficiency over humanity.
"We'll be here," he said.
As he walked down the seven flights of stairs (the elevator was still broken, would probably always be broken), Raj thought about his forty-three deliveries to Mrs. Desai. He'd brought her food but never asked if she was hungry for something else – conversation, connection, the simple recognition that she existed and mattered. How many of his customers were like that, isolated behind their doors, feeding themselves but starving for human contact?
Outside, Mumbai's night was alive with its usual chaos – honking horns, street vendors, music from a dozen sources, twenty million people pressed together but apart. The city that never slept but often felt like it was sleepwalking. He mounted his bike, checked the next delivery address. Another high-rise, another anonymous door, another person choosing convenience over connection.
But now Raj knew what lurked in those choices, what grew fat on that isolation. He'd seen the Empty, faced it, helped drive it back. It would return – Mrs. Desai was right about that. It would always return as long as cities grew lonelier, as long as people chose screens over faces, efficiency over empathy.
The thought should have depressed him. Instead, it filled him with something like purpose. He was just a delivery driver, yes, but he was also a connection point, a brief moment of human contact in increasingly contactless lives. He couldn't save everyone – Priya was right about that. But he could pay attention. He could watch for the signs. He could choose to see the people behind the orders.
His phone rang. Priya.
"Bhaiya, what the hell was that video? Mom's freaking out."
"I'll explain when I get home. Actually, properly explain, not just grunt and go to my room."
"Are you feeling okay? You never want to talk."
"I'm trying something new." He paused. "Hey, that old lady I deliver to – Mrs. Desai. She invited us for dinner Sunday. Want to come?"
"Us? Like, the family? To a stranger's house?"
"She's not a stranger. I've delivered to her forty-three times. I just... never really met her until tonight."
Priya was quiet for a moment. Then: "Okay. But I'm bringing my good phone in case we need to call for help."
"Fair enough."
He ended the call and started his bike. The next delivery was waiting, another anonymous apartment in another anonymous building. But Raj would knock four times instead of three. He'd wait an extra moment. He'd ask how they were, and maybe, just maybe, mean it.
It wasn't much of a weapon against the Empty, against the vast loneliness of urban life. But it was something. And in a city where isolation could literally kill, something was everything.
The smell from Shakti Towers faded as he drove away, replaced by the familiar cocktail of exhaust, street food, and life that was Mumbai at night. Behind him, lights flickered on in windows as people came home from work, each one a potential island of isolation or a beacon of connection, depending on the choices made.
Raj made his choice. He turned off the app's "silent delivery" option and drove into the night, ready to knock on doors, to wait for answers, to remember that food was just the excuse – the real delivery was human connection, one apartment at a time.
In Shakti Towers, Mrs. Desai stood at her window, watching the delivery boy's bike disappear into traffic. Around her, the building hummed with unusual activity – neighbors talking in the halls, checking on each other, making plans for a building potluck next week. It wouldn't last, she knew. The city had a way of wearing down such impulses, of pulling people back into their shells.
But for tonight, the Empty was gone, driven back by the simple act of people choosing to care. And somewhere in Mumbai's vast sprawl, a delivery driver was knocking on a door, waiting for an answer, ready to see the person behind the order.
It wasn't much. But it was enough.
For now.