This is a guest post by AVANTIKA TEWARI

It was night when the man died.

In the thick, humming night of a city that never truly sleeps — only flickers. Flickers between traffic signals and app pings, between delivery promises and the quiet violence of exhaustion.

He collapsed just beyond Gate Number Three in a residential colony in Delhi, somewhere between the parked dumpers and the weary under-construction site of the Metro.

He fell softly, without spectacle. The kind of death a city absorbs without noticing, like rain into dust.

In a few days, the Resident Welfare Association had drafted a statement — not out of grief, but out of inconvenience: “What if it had been one of us?”

The question hung in the air like a perfume of moral panic. A swift and bloodless message was delivered — the dumpers, it was agreed, would no longer be stationed near Gate Number Three. Continue reading The Man Who Died at Gate Number Three: Avantika Tewari →