Flying day showed up.

  That day in Thiruvananthapuram’s airport, bags piled high like a fortress around us. Passport in hand, Papa moved through each page, eyes locked tight - yet his fingers gave a tiny shake. Into something wide and unfamiliar he led us, where no cousins waited, no backup plan existed; instead, only sweat, hope, and what might come.

  Fear grip her voice, Shwetha turned to me while we moved ahead, fingers tight around mine near the checkpoint.

  The dust of Punjab's flat lands came to mind after those green hills of Kerala. Following that, Rishi’s laugh slipped into my thoughts - light, sudden. Then there was Chandru’s pencil mark on paper, rough but true. Last of all, a quiet place inside me stayed still.

  "I am," I whispered. "But for the first time, Shwetha, I’m not scared of what people think. I’m just scared of how much I’m going to grow."

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  When the plane lifted from the ground, slipping past India’s shoreline, something shifted inside me. Not quite gone, but changed - the version that followed every rule just because it was told to. That one stayed back, barefoot on the hot pavement. Now there’s another kind of quiet. One that watches. Waits. Knows exactly when speech is wasted - and when sound must tear through everything.

  Dubai stood there, patient - shaped by ambition and hard work. Me? At fourteen, no chorus behind me, just private songs tucked away, a girl caught between two homes, one rooted in Punjab, the other flowing through Kerala’s rivers, stepping forward to find out whether sound could travel that far across sand.

  THE END. (we'll see in part 2)