“You can’t fight them with courage alone,” she told Arjun one evening as they measured porridge at the ration center. “You need optics. People need to see there is another way.”
Ranjeet watched from the other side of town, and he had not forgiven defeat. He still had power in ways that troubled the Cooperative; he had people on the margins who would do as he said. But he had also lost the easiest route to his profits: Kherwa’s fear. That mattered.
Arjun looked at the faces around him: men who had once nodded when Ranjeet’s boys passed, women who had sat in doorways and watched the world tilt. He had expected fear, but he also saw something else: a refusal to be owned.