The problem with a baseline is that once you get used to it, you stop bracing for the spikes.

By Tuesday, Shaan has settled into what he considers a detached routine. Krish texts him a grainy photo of a standard hostel meal that looks like wet gravel; Shaan replies with a single joke of a sentence about how he deserves it for choosing engineering, then sends a picture of his own actually edible takeout just to rub it in.

Krish sends him a fifteen-second voice note that's literally just the sound of his ceiling fan making a horrific screeching noise, and Shaan sends back a link to a cheap pair of earplugs. When Krish texts, What the hell is the purpose of a fabric softener even? It doesn't seem to be doing anything, Shaan walks into his own bathroom, takes a picture of the bottle his mother bought, and texts back, idk, mine works.

So... like he says, detached routine. Low-effort. It doesn't require anyone to talk about what happened last year.

Cut to 11:42 PM on Thursday.

Shaan is sitting at his desk when his phone stared buzzing, accompanied by the loud, shrill ringtone he'd forgotten to mute.

He glances down, expecting Tanvi because she often asks him to stay on call with her when she takes an auto back to the campus by herself.

Instead, the screen reads: Krish is video calling.

Shaan stares at it.

They have not video called since they were eighteen and trying to figure out if a haircut looked too stupid before a school presentation. His thumb, acting entirely on reflex, slides the green icon across the glass.

The screen opens on a chaotic, shaking blur of a tubelight, concrete ceiling, and a loud echoing racket.

"Shaan! Shaan, look at this, look at this shit—" Krish's voice is a breathless, frantic shout.

"What the hell is happening?" Shaan squints at the pixelated mess. "Why are you yelling?"

The camera swings violently to the left, the frame stabilizing just enough for Shaan to distinguish the interior of a hostel room. Except the blue plastic desk chair is currently overturned on the floor, three steel plates are rattling against the floor tiles, and standing on top of the metal wardrobe in the room is a very large, very gray rhesus macaque.

It's holding a half-eaten pack of Marie Gold biscuits in one hand and aggressive shaking a plastic hanger with the other.

"I told you, right?" Krish yells, his face suddenly flashing into the frame; sweaty, wide-eyed, and looking entirely panicked as he hides behind th partial cover of his bathroom doorframe. "I told you they learned how to open the latch! It just walked in through Mishra's balcony!"

"Why are you calling me?" Shaan shouts back, his own voice jumping an octave out of sheer absurdity. "Call the hostel warden, you idiot! Put the phone down and call security!"

"The warden is at the wedding in the village, I told you that on Tuesday!" Krish shrieks as the monkey suddenly drops the hanger and bares its teeth at the camera, letting out a sharp, guttural hiss that echoes through the phone speaker. "Mishra ran down to get the night guard but the guard is like, a hundred years old and he's asleep!"

"Try shooing it away with a broom!"

"It has a plastic hanger, Shaan! It's armed! And have you seen the teeth on this thing?"

From the hallway outside Krish's room, a chorus of loud, uncoordinated banging starts up—presumably twenty other hostel residents hitting steel buckets with spoons to scare the animal, which is only making the monkey on top of the wardrobe noticeably more furious.

It throws a stray sock directly at the camera.

"Just leave the room, Krish!" Shaan yelled, rubbing his temple with his free hand. "Walk out of the door and lock it from the outside!"

"Duuude, my laptop is on the desk!" Krish wails, the camera panning down to show a glowing screen sitting entirely defenseless three feet below the wardrobe. "My entire fluid mechanics simulation is running. If it... I don't know, pees on the keyboard or something, I'll fail the semester."

"Oh, my God, Krish, if you don't get out of that room, I'm blocking this number, I swear to—"

"Wait, wait—look, he's back."

The frame jolts as another boy in a grey undershirt sprints into the room holding a long, plastic pipe, trips over the overturned blue chair, and goes down with a loud, hollow thud against the tiles.

The monkey takes this as its cue, leaping from the wardrobe onto the desk, snatching a plastic bottle of God-knows-what, and diving cleanly out of the open balcony door into the dark Kanpur night.

The screen shakes for another five seconds before turning around to face Krish properly. He's leaning against the wall, his hair a wild mess, breathing heavily through his mouth. He's in a standard, threadbare grey t-shirt that looks like it has been through forty industrial laundry cycles.

He blinks at the camera, then down at the screen, realizes he's still holding the call up, and lets out a weak, sheepish chuckle.

"It took my roommate's Frooty," he mutters, clearing his throat.

Shaan sits back in his chair, staring at the screen. The silence of his own flat feels stark now compared to the echoing racket that had just filled it. He looks at Krish's ridiculous, sweaty face, his thumb tracking the silver ring on his middle finger.

"You are an absolute freak," Shaan tells him.

"I almost died just now, dude, be nice to me." He rubs the back of his neck, his hair still sticking up in every direction. "I should probably check on my roommate to make sure he hasn't broken anything. I'll talk to you later, Shaan."

The screen goes black before Shaan can respond; can even think of a response to the last sentence Krish said.

He sets his phone down on the desk with a sigh, and clicks his laptop mouse to get back to what he was writing.

He doesn't expect it to become a regular thing, but it does.

Three days later, around ten again, his phone starts vibrating on the desk. This time, he answers it without thinking too much about it. And this time, there's no monkeys; just Krish sitting on his hostel balcony, a dark, blurry background behind him, complaining about a professor who takes attendance too seriously.

After that, it happens every few days.

It's completely random.

Sometimes it's a voice call while Krish is walking back from the library, the sound of traffic and wind tearing into the microphone. Sometimes it's a quick five-minute video call just to show Shaan a particularly massive street dog.

Shaan doesn't initiate, but he also doesn't ask why Krish is calling instead of texting now. He just slides the green button across the screen whenever it lights up.

He handles his books and college documents with one hand while holding the phone with the other, and listens to the dull, chaotic background noise of Kanpur.