The first punch came from behind.

Vikram did not see it. He was walking home from school along the narrow lane behind the market in Varanasi, the one that smelled of ripe guavas and diesel from the generator that the cloth shop ran every afternoon during the power cuts. His backpack was heavy with textbooks and his water bottle was empty and he was thinking about nothing in particular when a fist connected with the side of his head and the world tilted sideways.

He stumbled into the wall. His glasses flew off and skittered across the gutter. When he turned around, blinking, the world blurry without his lenses, he saw a shape he knew as well as his own reflection.

Rohit. His older brother.

Rohit was sixteen and angry. He had been angry for a year now, ever since their parents' divorce, ever since he chose to live with their father and Vikram chose to stay with their mother. The anger had started as silence — weeks without phone calls, messages left on read. Then it turned to words — sharp, mean words about Vikram being a "mama's boy," about choosing sides, about betrayal. And now, on this Tuesday afternoon in the lane behind the market, the words had turned to fists.

"Fight me," Rohit said. His voice cracked the way it always did when he was trying to sound tough. "Come on. Fight me."

Vikram looked at his brother through the blur. He could see enough to notice that Rohit's eyes were red. Not from anger. From crying. The kind of crying you do alone in your room at night when you are sixteen and your family has broken apart and you do not know who to blame so you blame the person you love most because that is easier than blaming nobody.

Rohit shoved him again. "Hit me back!"

Vikram tasted blood where his lip had split against the wall. He raised his hands — not to strike, but palms open, the way you hold your hands up when you are showing someone you are not carrying a weapon. He stood there, fourteen years old and bleeding, his glasses in the gutter, his backpack strap torn, and he did not swing.

"I'm not going to hit you," he said quietly. "You're my brother."

Rohit hit him once more — an open-handed slap this time, less force, already losing the will for it. Then again, weaker still. Then he stopped. His fists dropped to his sides. His shoulders began to shake. And then Rohit was crying — not the silent kind but the loud, ugly, heaving kind — and Vikram stepped forward and put his arms around his brother and held him there in the narrow lane while the generator hummed and the guavas ripened and the world went on around two boys who had nothing left except each other.

"Even if they kill me," Arjuna says. This is not strategy. This is not weakness. This is a line drawn in the soul. There are people you will not harm, no matter what they do to you — not for a kingdom, not for the whole world, not for all three worlds stacked on top of each other. Because some bonds are worth more than any prize, and some violence would cost you something no victory could ever replace.