Chapter 11: Golden Cage

Arjun Patel hadn’t slept in thirty-six hours, but his body wouldn’t let him rest. Every time he tried to lie down, the humming started—a low vibration that seemed to rise through the floor of his Cambridge apartment and crawl up his spine like electric fingers.

His Supreme Court brief lay scattered across his desk, pages covered in scratched-out legal arguments that had somehow turned into fragments of poetry. The law is a cage made of other people’s fears. He’d written that instead of analyzing Fourth Amendment precedent, his handwriting loose and wild in a way that would have horrified his Constitutional Law professor.

The coffee had gone cold hours ago. He picked up the mug and threw it against the wall, watching brown liquid streak down his Harvard diploma. The crash felt good. He wanted to throw something else.

His phone buzzed. Jessica. Again.

Where are you? Called your office, they said you haven’t been in. This isn’t like you.

He stared at the screen until the words blurred. What could he tell her? That he’d been standing in the shower for an hour that morning, water running over his skin while he sobbed for no reason he could name? That every time he looked at his law books, his stomach turned like he was staring at instruments of torture?

Fine. Just working.

Her response came immediately: Bullshit. Coming over.

“No,” he said out loud to his empty apartment. “No, you’re not.”

But she had keys. She’d arrive in twenty minutes with her concerned girlfriend face and her practical solutions, wanting to fix him like he was a brief that needed better organization. She’d see the poems scattered across his desk, the thrown coffee mug, the way he’d been wearing the same clothes for two days.

She’d see that he was falling apart, and then she’d try to put him back together into the shape she recognized.

Arjun grabbed his keys and fled.

The streets of Cambridge felt different in the pre-dawn darkness. Street lights flickered intermittently, and he could hear that humming everywhere now—not just in his apartment, but rising from manholes, from the spaces between buildings, from the earth itself. Other people walked slowly through the shadows, and when they passed under working street lamps, their faces looked like they were listening to something he couldn’t quite catch.

His BMW started on the third try. The radio crackled with static and fragments of emergency broadcasts, but underneath it all was that sound again, that impossible music that made his chest tight and his hands shake.

He drove south without deciding to, muscle memory navigating toward Providence while his mind reeled. In the passenger seat, his briefcase sat closed, full of the life he’d built so carefully. Harvard Law Review, summer internship at Ropes & Gray, offers from three top firms. Everything his parents had sacrificed for, everything that proved the Patel family had made it in America.

Everything that felt like wearing someone else’s skin.

The humming grew stronger as he crossed into Rhode Island. His hands cramped on the steering wheel, and twice he had to pull over to vomit on the roadside—his body rejecting something he couldn’t name. Each time, he dry-heaved until his throat was raw, then got back in the car and kept driving.

By the time he reached Providence, the sun was rising through a haze that made everything look underwater. The city felt abandoned except for small groups of people gathered on street corners, some of them singing in harmonies that made the air shimmer.

He parked outside Dada’s house and sat in the car, engine ticking as it cooled. Through the windshield, he could see lights in the windows—candles, not electricity. Movement inside. Family.

His phone rang. Jessica again.

“Arjun, where the hell are you? I’m at your apartment and it looks like—”

“I can’t,” he said, cutting her off.

“Can’t what? Arjun, you’re scaring me. Just tell me where you are.”

“I can’t be who you need me to be anymore.”

Silence on the other end. Then: “What are you talking about? You’re perfect. You’re exactly who—”

“I’m not!” The words tore out of his throat. “I’m not perfect. I’m not successful. I don’t know what the fuck I am, but I’m not that.”

“You’re having some kind of breakdown. Just come home. We’ll figure this out.”

Home. The word felt like a foreign language. His apartment in Cambridge, with its law books and his acceptance letters framed on the wall and his closet full of identical suits? His parents’ house in Brookline, where every conversation was about his achievements and his future and how proud they were?

“I don’t know where home is,” he whispered.

“Arjun—”

He hung up and turned off the phone.

The humming was so loud now he could feel it in his bones. It seemed to be calling him toward the house, toward something he couldn’t see but somehow recognized. His legs shook as he got out of the car, and for a moment he thought he might collapse right there on the sidewalk.

Instead, he walked to Dada’s front door and knocked.

It opened before his knuckles touched wood.

“Beta,” Dada said, like he’d been expecting him. “You look terrible.”

Arjun tried to laugh, but it came out as a sob. “I don’t know who I am.”

“Good,” Dada said, stepping aside to let him in. “That’s the first honest thing you’ve said in years.”

Inside, the house smelled like cardamom and burning sage. Priya sat at the kitchen table, her hands covered in paint, working on a canvas that seemed to move in the candlelight. She looked up when he entered, and her eyes were wild.

“You heard it too,” she said. Not a question.

He nodded, not trusting his voice.

“It’s calling us home,” she said. “But home isn’t a place. It’s remembering who we were before we learned to be afraid of disappointing people.”

The humming rose around them, harmonizing with voices from somewhere far below. Arjun felt something inside his chest crack open, like an egg finally ready to hatch. The Harvard Law Review, the job offers, the careful life he’d constructed—it all felt like a costume he could finally take off.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer,” he said to the room.

Dada smiled. “Then don’t be.”

“But I spent six years—”

“You spent six years learning something that isn’t you. Now you can spend the rest of your life discovering what is.”

Outside, he could hear voices joining the underground song. Inside, his sister painted figures with faces like light, and his grandfather nodded like he’d been waiting for this moment his entire life.

For the first time in years, Arjun felt like he could breathe.