Kabir hated Sunday nights the most, though he could never explain why to anyone.

Monday meant a spelling test. Monday meant Mrs Iyer calling on students who hadn’t raised their hands. Monday meant everything that could go wrong, replaying in his head the moment his mother switched off the light.

Tonight was no different. He lay stiff under his blanket, counting sheep the way his father had taught him, but the sheep kept turning into spelling words, and the spelling words kept turning into Mrs Iyer’s disappointed face.

At eleven, Kabir gave up. He climbed out of bed, unlatched the window, and pulled himself onto the flat rooftop the way he wasn’t technically allowed to.

The city had gone quiet below. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped. The water tank hummed its usual tune.

Above him, the sky had opened up completely.

He’d never really looked at it properly before, not like this. He counted one star, then three, then lost track entirely as more kept appearing the longer he stared, like they were shy and only came out once they trusted the dark.

“That one’s brighter,” he said to nobody, pointing at a star just left of the water tank. “Why is it brighter?”

Nobody answered, but for the first time that night, his chest didn’t feel tight.

He tried to find shapes. A kite. A crooked spoon. Something that might have been a bicycle if he tilted his head and used his imagination generously.

Somewhere between the bicycle and a shape he decided looked like his grandmother’s old scooter, Kabir noticed the tightness in his stomach had gone. He wasn’t thinking about spelling anymore. He was thinking about how far away stars actually were, and whether they knew people down here were looking up at them, worried about tests.

His mother found him twenty minutes later, curled against the water tank, fast asleep, one arm flung across his eyes to block the porch light from next door.

She didn’t wake him straightaway. She looked up too, just for a moment, at whatever it was that had finally quietened her son’s mind.

Then she carried him back down, and for once, Monday didn’t come looking for him first thing in his dreams.