RISE OF THE SOVEREIGN

There is a particular kind of hunger that has nothing to do with food. Arjun Sharma knew this hunger well. It lived in the hollow of his chest every morning when he woke up on a torn chatai in a one-room chawl in Dharavi, Mumbai. It lived in his mother's eyes when she counted coins at the kitchen table, her lips moving silently, her fingers trembling. It lived in his father's broken spine — not literally broken, but bent. Bent by years of carrying other men's loads, other men's arrogance, other men's dismissal. This was the hunger of invisibility. Of existing in a world that had decided, long before you were born, that you did not matter. Arjun was twenty-two years old. He had seen things that would make a weaker person collapse — and perhaps he had collapsed, many times, privately, in the dark. But he always got back up. Because he had to. His mother, Savitri, needed him to. His father, Ramesh, needed him to. His sister Priya, seventeen and bright as a new rupee coin, needed him to. And his little brother Chotu — six years old, gap-toothed, with a laugh like a temple bell — most of all, Chotu needed him to. He did not yet know that the universe was about to place something extraordinary in his hands. He did not yet know that the hunger was about to become a weapon