"Did you pack your kurta and pyjama, Ishaan and Aaron?" Mrs Banerjee was shouting from another room.
"HAI MA!!!" Aaron shouted out from the other room as he was busy packing his suitcase with "Provisional" art supplies.
"Ahhh!!! Now I should be set," Aaron exhaling as he packed half of his suitcase with art supplies and clothes.
"You do know, right, we are only going for 2 weeks, it's not as if you need to pack this much, and you still will need to pack your backpack", Isabella said with a concerned look as she stood by the door.
"Arrey, you don't understand, inspiration can strike any minute, can you really stop it and what if I don't have the necessary stuff?" Aaron adamantly said as if he were some world-renowned artist.
"Whatever you boys better not forget, we still need to go in the evening to get our sarre's and sweets from the shop", Estella reminded them.
Ishaan clapped his hands as he remembered something, "OH, thank god you reminded me that I would have forgotten about the sweets. Seriously, what would I do if you weren't here?"
Estella, being proud, said, "I know you're hopeless without us"
The Banerjees were busy packing to go to their ancestral home in Kolkata to celebrate the Durga Puja; it was their time-honoured tradition that all the members of their family must come during the puja.
"Ohhh man, I am just waiting to see Ram's reaction when we introduce the girls to them", Ishaan said in an ecstatic voice as he prepared his bag.
Isabella is leaning against the wall, "Ohh!! Boy, it seems we are going to have a lot on our plates."
"OHH, you don't know", Aaron added.
The morning chaos of backpacks rolled into the lazy afternoon. Aaron and Ishaan had taken a power nap after packing and slept straight through till five, emerging from their room with the disoriented confidence of people who had absolutely no regrets about it.
"You slept for three hours," Estella said flatly.
"Preparation," Ishaan replied, without missing a beat.
Mrs Banerjee was already by the door, dupatta on, purse in hand, looking at her sons with the expression of a woman who had long ago made peace with her circumstances. "Chalo, if we don't leave now, the good sweets will be gone, and your Kaka will never let me hear the end of it."
The sweet shop was two lanes over — a small, overstuffed place called Gupta & Sons that smelled of sugar and old wood and had been in the same spot since before any of them were born. The moment the door opened, the girls were hit with a wall of warm air carrying the scent of fresh sandesh, roasted cashews, and something deep-fried that they couldn't name but immediately wanted.
"This is a sweet shop?" Isabella said, looking at the towers of stacked boxes and the rows of trays behind the glass counter.
"This," Ishaan said reverently, "is a temple."
The shop uncle recognised Mrs Banerjee immediately and launched into rapid Bengali that the girls couldn't follow at all — but they didn't need to, because the tone told them everything. He was teasing. Mrs Banerjee was laughing. And somewhere in the middle of it, he pointed at Aaron and Ishaan with a look that could only mean these two, already?
The boys both looked at the ceiling.
"What did he say?" Estella whispered to Ishaan.
"Nothing," Ishaan said immediately.
"It was definitely something."
"It was nothing important."
Isabella glanced at Aaron, who had suddenly developed an intense interest in reading the label on a box of mishti doi. She smiled and said nothing.
Mrs Banerjee ordered with the ease of someone who had done this every year for two decades — boxes of nolen gur sandesh, rosogolla for the journey, dry sweets for the puja offerings. Mr Banerjee, meanwhile, was negotiating with the uncle over the price of an extra box of sondesh with the energy of a man fighting for something he believed in deeply.
"Baba!" Aaron said, "It's two hundred rupees."
"It's the principle," Mr Banerjee replied.
He got the discount.
They walked home through the early evening, the lane already changing — a truck of marigolds idling outside someone's building, two men hauling bamboo poles toward the park at the end of the street, a loudspeaker somewhere testing a dhak recording that cut in and out between static. The city was warming up.
Isabella slowed without realising it.
"It's starting already?" she asked.
"It starts weeks before," Aaron said. "By tomorrow night, you won't be able to walk a hundred metres without hitting a pandal."
She looked at a half-built bamboo frame strung with unlit bulbs, workers moving around it in the fading light. Something about it — the unfinished thing, the preparation, all that anticipation held inside scaffolding — made her stop for just a moment.
Aaron noticed. He didn't say anything.
The bags were by the door by nine. The house smelled of the incense Mrs Banerjee lit before any long journey — a habit so old nobody questioned it anymore. Mr Banerjee checked the train tickets three times. Ishaan ate a rosogolla from the journey box and replaced it with a note that said I owe you one rosogolla - management. Mrs Banerjee found it, sighed, and went to bed.
The alarm went off at four.
It was not a gentle alarm.
"I set it as a truck horn as motivation," Ishaan said, from somewhere under his pillow.
"I will end you," Aaron replied, not moving.
Somehow, by four-forty, they were all outside — bags loaded into the waiting auto, the air cool and strange at that hour, the sky still completely dark. The girls had managed to look composed. The boys had managed to locate their shoes. It was, by any reasonable measure, a success.
The auto moved through streets that felt like a different city.
At four in the morning, Delhi didn't disappear — it transformed. The traffic was gone, but the city wasn't empty. Workers moved along the footpaths, chai stalls were already lit, and in the parks and open grounds, the pandals were rising — half-built, glowing from the inside with work lights, marigold garlands half-strung between poles, a goddess's painted face visible through a gap in the scaffolding, not yet finished, not yet revealed.
Isabella turned in her seat and watched one pass by.
A man on a ladder was adjusting a string of lights that weren't on yet. Another was painting something at the base of the structure, bent close to the work. The frame around the idol was bright gold and deep red, and the face behind it was calm — eyes half-open, expression that wasn't quite serene and wasn't quite fierce.
She didn't say anything.
Aaron was watching her from the other side of the auto. He'd seen this before — the way the city looked before the festival fully woke up. He'd grown up with it. But watching her see it for the first time did something to the familiar image.
"Wait till you see it finished," he said quietly.
Isabella turned back. The pandal was already behind them.
"I'm starting to understand," she said, "why you never miss this."
The auto pulled up to the station entrance as the first pale line of light appeared at the edge of the sky. New Delhi Railway Station. Platform 4. The platform was already alive — families with towers of luggage, vendors with chai, a group of old men playing cards on a bench like they'd been there all night, which they probably had.
Ishaan grabbed the heaviest bag without being asked, already moving toward the platform with the confidence of someone who knew exactly which compartment was theirs. Mr Banerjee herded everyone forward. Mrs Banerjee counted heads twice.
They found their seats. Bags went up. Everyone settled.
The train gave a long, low horn.
Then it began to move — slowly at first, the platform sliding away, the station lights thinning out. And then the city gave way — rooftops, water tanks, a temple spire caught in the first grey light.
Estella pressed her face to the glass. "It's so flat," she said, half to herself.
"You'll get used to it", Ishaan replied, sitting opposite, completely relaxed.
The train picked up speed. The city disappeared completely.
Somewhere between waking and sleep, Isabella watched the dark landscape rushing past and thought about pandal lights and unfinished things, and men on ladders at four in the morning, arranging something beautiful that no one had seen yet.
She smiled at the window and let the rhythm of the train carry her the rest of the way.