Out of Station: A Novel - Book One the Station Duology

Sarang Deshmukh is twenty-seven, the eldest son of a Kalyan household, and he has never once left. A bank debit alert wakes him at 6:02 every morning; a family leans on every rupee he earns. His dreams live in a document titled "Someday" that he opens at night and never acts on.Then a lockdown empties the world, a laptop makes his job portable, and his younger sister asks the one question he cannot answer: what, exactly, are you still waiting for?So he leaves. Quietly, guiltily, one bus ticket at a time, working by day and traveling by stealth, down the Konkan coast and then north toward the roof of the world. Along the way he meets Zoya, a nomadic illustrator carrying her own grief, who teaches him to set the family down and simply live for an afternoon. Over five days on the road she becomes the first person to see him as more than a provider, and he lets himself want something, for once, with no one else's name on it. He never tells her. She never knows. It becomes the quiet ache he carries north.What begins as a small rebellion becomes the year that remakes him, and the people he thought he was leaving behind. A tender, funny, luminous debut novel about duty and escape, about first loves left unspoken, about the nets our families weave around us, and about learning to live in something after years of only paying for it. Book One of the Out of Station duology.