He clicked on the soundtrack he wanted. A pop-up appeared: CONGRATULATIONS! YOU WIN AN iPHONE!

He slammed the laptop shut, his heart a jackhammer. The flash drive burned in his pocket like a stolen jewel.

His friend Raghu, a wiry computer science student with glasses thicker than a Tamil thriller’s plot, had given him the address scrawled on a chit of paper.

He heard footsteps on the staircase. His mother was home early.

The ceiling fan in Kumar’s Mylapore room spun in lazy, useless circles, doing nothing against the April heat. Outside, Madras was melting. Inside, eighteen-year-old Kumar was staring at a crack in the wall, listening to the whine of a failing hard drive.

He never visited Madras Rockers again. He never told anyone about the message. But sometimes, late at night, when the fan hummed and the hard drive whirred, he would glance at his laptop and wonder: Who was the wall? And what did they want with a shadow?