The rain hammered Mumbai like a million tiny fists, and Rajesh Mehta's motorcycle sputtered through the flooded streets of Andheri, the food order growing cold in his insulated bag. His phone, wrapped in three layers of plastic against the monsoon, showed 11:47 PM. Thirteen minutes to deliver, or another complaint, another step closer to deactivation from the app.
The apartment building rose from the darkness like a concrete tombstone, its few lit windows the only proof that life existed inside. Rajesh checked the order again, squinting through the rain-smeared screen of his phone. Apartment 1408, chicken biryani, extra raita, two naan. His stomach growled—he hadn't eaten since morning, saving every rupee for his mother's dialysis.
The elevator was broken, because of course it was. Fourteen floors up the stairwell, his legs burning, his breath coming in gasps that had nothing to do with fitness and everything to do with the two packs of bidis he smoked daily to keep the hunger at bay. The hallway on the fourteenth floor stretched before him, dimly lit by flickering tube lights that made everything look like a scene from one of those horror movies his roommate watched on his phone.
1408. There it was, at the end of the corridor. But something felt off—no light under the door, no sounds of television or conversation. In his experience, people ordering food at midnight were usually awake. He knocked, three quick raps that seemed too loud in the silent hallway.
The door opened a crack, chain still on, and that's when Rajesh realized his mistake. The number on the door wasn't 1408—it was 1403. The 3 had been hanging upside down, looking like an 8 in the bad light. He was about to apologize, to turn away, when the door opened wider, and he saw inside.
A man was tied to a chair in the living room, his face a roadmap of bruises. Blood dripped from his nose onto an expensive-looking carpet. Another man stood beside him, holding something that gleamed—pliers, Rajesh's mind supplied helpfully, though he wished it hadn't. The standing man was wearing a police uniform, the three stars of a commissioner bright on his shoulders.
For a moment that stretched like taffy, nobody moved. Rajesh's brain, exhausted from the day's work, took its sweet time processing what he was seeing. The commissioner's face—he'd seen it before, on posters around the city. Arvind Khosla, the man who'd cleaned up the red-light district, who gave speeches about law and order.
"Shit," Khosla said, and it was such a mundane thing to say while standing next to a torture victim that Rajesh almost laughed. Almost.
Then hands grabbed him from behind, powerful hands that smelled of cigarettes and something metallic—blood, his helpful brain supplied again—and dragged him inside. The door clicked shut behind him with a finality that made his bladder suddenly, urgently full.
"Well, well," said the man who'd grabbed him, releasing him only to stand between him and the door. This one was lean, wiry, with the kind of careful movements that suggested violence held in check. "What do we have here? A delivery boy who can't read numbers?"
"I'm sorry," Rajesh stammered, the biryani bag still clutched in his hands like the world's most useless shield. "Wrong flat. I'll go. I didn't see anything."
The lean man smiled, and it was worse than if he'd snarled. "Oh, but you did, didn't you? You saw quite a bit." He moved closer, and Rajesh could see the tattoo peeking out from under his collar—a mechanical gear with Sanskrit written around it. "They call me Bilal. The Mechanic. Do you know why?"
Rajesh shook his head, though he had a pretty good idea and didn't like it one bit.
"Because I fix problems," Bilal said, pulling out a knife that was definitely not regulation for any police force. "And you, my friend, are a problem."
The tied man in the chair groaned, and Khosla walked over to him, casual as anything. "Shut up, Javed. We're busy." He turned to Rajesh. "What's your name, delivery boy?"
"R-Rajesh. Rajesh Mehta." There was no point lying; they had his phone, could see the app, his whole life laid out in digital breadcrumbs.
"Well, Rajesh Mehta," Khosla said, sitting down on the couch like they were having tea, "you've walked into something rather unfortunate. Javed here was stealing from me. Moving girls without paying his tax. Very bad for business."
Girls. The word hung in the air like a poisonous cloud. Rajesh had heard whispers, of course. Everyone in Mumbai had. Girls from Bangladesh, Nepal, sometimes even from the villages of Bihar and Jharkhand, promised jobs in the city and ending up in places that didn't appear on any map.
"I won't tell anyone," Rajesh said, hating how his voice cracked. "I have a sick mother. She needs me. Please."
Bilal laughed, a sound like grinding gears. "Everyone has a sick mother in this city, boy. It's practically a requirement."
Khosla stood up, walked over to Rajesh. This close, he could smell the commissioner's cologne, expensive and somehow obscene in this context. "Here's the thing, Rajesh. I can't let you walk out of here. You understand that, right? But I'm not an unreasonable man. You work for QuickBite, yes? You know the city, all the addresses, all the back routes?"
Rajesh nodded, not trusting his voice.
"I might have use for someone like you. Deliveries of a different kind. Better pay than biryani runs, I can promise you that."
The tied man—Javed—made another sound, and Bilal walked over to him, almost gentle, and did something with the pliers that made Javed scream through the gag in his mouth. The scream was muffled but somehow worse for it, like hearing someone drowning underwater.
"Or," Khosla continued, as if nothing had happened, "Bilal can take you for a ride. Your choice."
It wasn't a choice, and everyone in the room knew it. Rajesh nodded again, his whole body shaking now. "I'll do whatever you want."
"Smart boy." Khosla pulled out his phone, typed something. "I'm sending you an address. You'll make a pickup tomorrow night. A package. Bring it to the warehouse in Dharavi—Bilal will text you the details. Don't open it, don't look inside, don't get curious. Curiosity is what got our friend Javed here in his current predicament."
Another scream from Javed. Rajesh's hands were shaking so badly he nearly dropped his phone when it buzzed with the incoming message.
"Can I... can I go now?"
"One more thing," Bilal said, and before Rajesh could react, the man had taken his photo. "For insurance. You run, we find you. You talk, we find your mother first. Understood?"
"Yes."
"Good. Now get out. And Rajesh?" Khosla's voice stopped him at the door. "Deliver that biryani to 1408. No need to waste good food."
Outside in the hallway, Rajesh's legs gave out. He sat on the floor, back against the wall, trying to breathe. The biryani bag was still in his hands, somehow still warm. He looked at the apartment numbers again. 1403, 1404, 1405... and there, at the end, 1408. The 8 was clear as day now.
He stood up, legs wobbling, and made the delivery. The customer, a software engineer judging by the three monitors visible through the doorway, complained about the delay. Rajesh apologized, took the one-star rating that would definitely come, and made his way back down fourteen flights of stairs.
The rain had gotten worse. His motorcycle started on the third try, and he drove home through streets that looked different now, darker, full of shadows that might be watching. His phone buzzed with another message from Bilal: "Tomorrow. 10 PM. Don't be late."
His mother was asleep when he got home to their one-room flat in Ghatkopar. The dialysis machine sat in the corner like an accusation—60,000 rupees a month to keep her alive. He sat on his mattress on the floor, still in his wet clothes, and tried to think.
He could run. Pack what little they had, take his mother, disappear into the vastness of India. But where would they go? How would he pay for her treatment? And Bilal had his photo now, his information. In the age of Aadhaar cards and digital everything, where could you really hide?
His phone buzzed. For a heart-stopping moment, he thought it was Bilal again. But the name on the screen was one he hadn't seen in two years: Priya Sharma.
"Saw you tonight. We need to talk. Café Coffee Day, Phoenix Mills, tomorrow 3 PM. Come alone. Your life depends on it."
Priya. From college, before he'd dropped out to care for his mother, before she'd become some hotshot journalist. How had she seen him? Where?
He looked at the message again. Your life depends on it. After tonight, he believed it.
The next day crawled by like a wounded animal. Rajesh made his regular deliveries, jumping every time his phone buzzed, seeing Bilal's lean face in every shadow. His mother seemed better today, able to sit up and eat the khichdi he'd made, and the normalcy of it made everything else seem like a bad dream.
At 2:45, he parked his motorcycle outside Phoenix Mills, the high-end mall looking like something from another planet compared to his usual delivery routes. The Café Coffee Day was on the third floor, all glass and chrome and prices that made him wince.
Priya was already there, in a corner booth, wearing sunglasses indoors like some Bollywood star. But when he sat down, she took them off, and he could see the fear in her eyes.
"You walked into the wrong room last night," she said without preamble.
"How do you—"
"I've been watching that apartment for three weeks. Hidden camera in the hallway. I saw you go in, saw you come out looking like you'd seen a ghost. Which, in a way, you did. You're supposed to be dead right now, Rajesh."
She pushed a tablet across the table. On it was a photo of Javed, the tied man from last night. Except in this photo, he was smiling, standing next to what looked like his family.
"Javed Ansari," Priya said. "He was my informant. Was being the operative word. They found his body this morning in a drain near Kurla."
Rajesh's stomach turned. The coffee Priya had ordered for him suddenly smelled like acid.
"Khosla's been running a trafficking ring for fifteen years," she continued, voice low. "Girls from everywhere, sold everywhere. The police protect him because he is the police. Half the force is on his payroll. The other half is too scared to do anything."
"Why are you telling me this?"
"Because you're going to help me bring him down."
Rajesh almost laughed. "I'm a delivery boy. I'm nobody."
"Exactly. You're nobody, which means you can go anywhere, be invisible. And now you're on the inside. That pickup tonight? You're going to wear this." She pulled out what looked like a button. "Camera. Audio. Everything uploads to the cloud automatically."
"They'll kill me."
"They'll kill you anyway, eventually. Once you've outlived your usefulness. This way, at least your death means something."
"My mother—"
"I can protect her. Move her to a private facility, better care. I have resources."
"You're a journalist, not a—"
"My mentor was murdered six months ago," Priya interrupted. "Investigating this same ring. They made it look like a car accident, but I know better. I've been building this case since then. I have almost everything I need, but I need someone on the inside. Someone with access."
She leaned forward, and for a moment, he saw the girl from college again, the one who'd argued passionately about justice and truth in their political science class, before life had beaten different paths for them.
"Help me, Rajesh. Help me and I'll make sure you and your mother get out of this alive."
He wanted to say no. Every instinct screamed at him to run. But he thought of Javed's screams, of the girls Khosla had mentioned so casually, of his mother dying slowly while men like Khosla lived like kings.
"Okay," he heard himself say. "What do I need to do?"
The pickup that night was in Bandra, a package from a nondescript apartment building. Rajesh wore the button camera Priya had given him, hidden among the other buttons on his delivery uniform. His hands were steady as he knocked on the door, steadier than they'd been in his entire life. Fear, he was discovering, had a limit. Once you passed it, you entered a strange calm, like the eye of a storm.
A woman answered, young, maybe twenty, with the kind of beauty that stopped traffic. But her eyes were dead, and there were bruises on her wrists that makeup couldn't quite hide.
"You're the delivery boy?" she asked in accented Hindi. Bangladeshi, maybe.
"Yes."
She handed him a small package, wrapped in brown paper. "Be careful with it," she said, and for a moment, something flickered in those dead eyes. "Please."
He wanted to ask her if she needed help, but Bilal's warning echoed in his head. Don't get curious. So he just nodded, tucked the package into his delivery bag, and left.
The warehouse in Dharavi was exactly what you'd expect—a maze of narrow alleys that seemed designed to swallow people whole. Bilal was waiting outside, smoking a cigarette that smelled like cloves.
"On time. Good." He held out his hand for the package.
Rajesh handed it over, the camera catching everything. Bilal unwrapped it without ceremony—it was money, bundles of two-thousand rupee notes, probably a lakh or more.
"Tomorrow, same time, different pickup," Bilal said, rewrapping the money. "This time, you'll be transporting something more delicate."
"What kind of—"
Bilal's hand moved so fast Rajesh didn't see it coming. The slap sent him sprawling into the mud.
"What did Khosla tell you about curiosity?" Bilal asked, standing over him.
"Sorry," Rajesh gasped, tasting blood.
"Get up. And remember, we're watching you. Always watching."
As Rajesh drove away, his face throbbing, his phone buzzed. Priya: "Got it all. The money, the conversation. You did good. But we need more. Can you get into Khosla's office?"
He texted back: "Are you insane?"
"There's a festival at the police headquarters tomorrow. Annual celebration. Lots of people, lots of confusion. You could deliver food, get lost in the crowd."
It was insane. But then again, his whole life had become insane the moment he'd knocked on the wrong door.
The next evening found him at the police headquarters, legitimate delivery bag in hand—Priya had actually placed an order for the senior officers' mess. The place was chaos, cops everywhere, families, politicians giving speeches about the noble police force. Rajesh moved through it all like a ghost, just another invisible service worker.
Khosla's office was on the third floor. Rajesh had memorized the layout from plans Priya had somehow acquired. The door was locked, but the window was open—this was Mumbai, where even corruption needed ventilation.
He climbed out onto the ledge, three floors up, his delivery bag slung across his chest. Don't look down, he told himself, edging along the narrow concrete lip. The window to Khosla's office was three meters away. Two meters. One.
Inside, the office was a shrine to the commissioner's ego. Photos with politicians, awards, commendations. And there, on his desk, an open laptop.
Rajesh plugged in the USB drive Priya had given him. It would copy everything automatically, she'd said. Five minutes max. He watched the progress bar crawl across the screen, each second feeling like an hour.
Voices in the hallway. Footsteps. The door handle turned.
Rajesh yanked out the USB, dove behind the desk just as the door opened. Through a gap, he could see shoes—expensive leather, probably Italian. Khosla's voice: "I'll just be a minute."
The commissioner walked to his desk, so close Rajesh could smell his cologne again. If he looked down, even slightly...
Khosla's phone rang. "What? Now? Fine, I'm coming."
The footsteps retreated, the door closed. Rajesh waited another thirty seconds, then crawled out from behind the desk, his whole body shaking. Back out the window, along the ledge, into the other room where his delivery bag waited.
He was walking out of the building, trying to look casual, when a hand fell on his shoulder.
"Rajesh?"
He turned, expecting Bilal, expecting death. But it was just another delivery driver, someone he knew vaguely from the QuickBite waiting areas.
"Thought it was you! What are you doing here?"
"Delivery," Rajesh managed, his heart still trying to escape through his ribs.
"Same. Crazy money for these government orders, right?"
They walked out together, talking about nothing, and Rajesh had never been so grateful for mundane conversation in his life.
That night, Priya called. "You got it. Everything. Financial records, contact lists, even photos of the girls with their buyers. This is it, Rajesh. This is enough to bring them all down."
"So we're done?"
"One more thing. We need Khosla on tape, admitting to everything. Without that, his lawyers will find a way out."
"How?"
"The pickup tomorrow. Bilal said it would be 'delicate,' right? It's probably a girl. They move them on festival nights when everyone's distracted. You need to get Khosla talking, get him to admit what he's doing."
"He's not stupid. He won't just confess."
"Then make him angry. Angry people say things they shouldn't."
Make a corrupt police commissioner angry. Sure. What could go wrong?
The pickup location the next night was a construction site in Navi Mumbai, one of those half-finished towers that dotted the landscape like broken teeth. Bilal was there, but so was Khosla, and three other men Rajesh didn't recognize.
"Big night," Bilal said, and there was something in his voice, an excitement that made Rajesh's skin crawl.
They led him inside, up five flights of stairs to a half-finished apartment. There were three girls there, huddled together, the oldest maybe sixteen. They looked at Rajesh with eyes that had seen too much.
"These are special," Khosla said. "Virgin goods. Worth more than you'll make in ten lifetimes. You're going to drive them to the port. There's a container waiting, ship to Dubai."
Rajesh felt the camera button recording, felt the weight of what was happening. These weren't packages or money. These were children.
"I don't—" he started, and maybe something showed in his face, because Khosla's eyes narrowed.
"You don't what?"
This was it. Make him angry. "I don't understand how you sleep at night," Rajesh said, his voice steadier than he felt. "These are kids."
Bilal started forward, but Khosla held up a hand. "Let him talk. Last words and all that."
"You know?" Rajesh asked.
"That you've been recording everything? That Priya Sharma thinks she's clever with her hidden cameras and cloud uploads?" Khosla smiled. "I've known since the beginning. Why do you think I let you live that first night?"
Rajesh's blood turned to ice water.
"You see," Khosla continued, walking closer, "I needed to know what Priya had, who else was involved. You've been very helpful, leading us right to her. We picked her up an hour ago."
"No."
"Oh yes. She's probably in a container herself by now. Journalists fetch good prices in certain markets. All that education, you know."
The girls whimpered, and one of Khosla's men told them to shut up in a language Rajesh didn't recognize.
"But you," Khosla said, pulling out a gun, "you're just a loose end now."
That's when the lights went out.
The darkness was absolute, the kind you only get in half-finished buildings with no emergency lighting. Rajesh dropped and rolled just as Khosla fired, the muzzle flash briefly illuminating the room like lightning.
Screaming. Running. Another gunshot. Rajesh crawled towards where he remembered the door being, his hands finding something warm and wet—blood, someone's blood.
Emergency lights suddenly blazed on, harsh and white, and the room was full of police. Real police, not Khosla's men. They were shouting, "Down, everyone down!"
Rajesh saw Khosla raising his gun towards the girls—if he couldn't sell them, he'd kill them rather than leave witnesses. Without thinking, Rajesh launched himself at the commissioner, catching him around the waist. They went down hard, the gun skittering across the unfinished floor.
Bilal was there suddenly, his knife out, but a cop's bullet caught him in the shoulder, spinning him around. He went down quoting something in Urdu that might have been poetry.
"Clear!" someone shouted, and then gentler hands were helping Rajesh up.
"You did good," a familiar voice said. Priya, not in a container after all, wearing a bulletproof vest with PRESS written on it. "I'm sorry for the deception, but we needed him to confess, to believe he'd won."
"You used me as bait."
"I used us both as bait. But look." She gestured to the girls, who were being wrapped in blankets by female officers, led carefully away. "They're safe now. All of them."
Khosla was on the ground, handcuffed, his perfect uniform torn and dirty. He looked up at Rajesh with pure hatred. "You have no idea what you've done. The people I work for—"
"Will find someone else," Priya interrupted. "They always do. But today, right now, you're done."
The next few hours were a blur of statements and questions. Rajesh learned that Priya had been working with a joint task force all along, that the button camera had been uploading to police servers as well as her cloud storage. Every word, every confession, all admissible in court.
By dawn, he was sitting in a hospital room where his mother was hooked up to better machines, in a private room Priya's "resources" had arranged.
"You look tired, beta," his mother said, her voice stronger than it had been in months.
"Long night, Ma."
"Delivering food?"
He thought about everything—the wrong door, the screaming, the girls' eyes, Bilal's poetry, Khosla's gun. "Something like that."
Priya appeared in the doorway, looking exhausted but triumphant. "Forty-three arrests so far. The biggest trafficking bust in Mumbai's history. You're going to be famous, Rajesh."
"I don't want to be famous. I just want to be left alone."
"Fair enough. But there's a reward. Crime Stoppers, plus a fund some NGOs put together. Enough to pay for your mother's treatment for the next five years, maybe enough left over for that restaurant you used to talk about in college."
A restaurant. It seemed like a dream from another life, before he'd knocked on the wrong door and seen what lurked behind Mumbai's perfect facades.
"What about you?" he asked Priya.
"I have a story to write. And then another, and another. That's what I do—I open doors, show people what's inside."
She left, and Rajesh sat with his mother, watching the sun rise over Mumbai through the hospital window. The city looked different now, neither better nor worse, just revealed. Every building could hide a Khosla, but also a Priya. Every wrong turn could lead to horror, but also to unexpected courage.
His phone buzzed. A delivery request from QuickBite. He looked at it for a long moment, then declined. He was done with deliveries, done with knocking on strangers' doors.
But perhaps, he thought, watching his mother sleep peacefully for the first time in months, perhaps sometimes the wrong door was exactly the right one. Sometimes you had to see the darkness to appreciate the light, had to walk through hell to find your way home.
The rain had stopped. Mumbai steamed under the morning sun, six million people starting their day, most of them never knowing how close they lived to monsters, or to heroes, or how thin the line between them really was.
Rajesh closed his eyes and, for the first time since that night, didn't see Javed's tortured face or the girls' empty eyes. Instead, he saw a small restaurant, his mother healthy and helping with the cooking, the smell of biryani that he'd made himself, delivered to no one, shared with people who came because they wanted to, not because they had to.
It wasn't much of a dream, maybe. But it was his, earned in the hardest currency there was—survival, conscience intact, in a city that ate both for breakfast.
The wrong door had nearly killed him. But it had also, in its way, set him free.