Dev is twenty-seven — fairly tall, lean, mild-mannered. He has a friend with benefits, Abhi, a year younger. They've known each other for ten years, but this particular bond began only a couple of years ago.

To everyone who knows them, they're best friends — brothers from different mothers to their respective families. They're "not gay, per se," as Dev puts it, but intimacy with each other has become integral to their friendship. Dev is privately troubled by the pronounced "feminine" side of his manner, something more than one person has pointed out to him.

Both are graphic artists with different specialisations, both make good money, and they'd been planning to start a company together — right before all of this happened. (The following sketch is inspired by intense ambiguity of Dev, resemblance to anyone is purely coincidental.)

Tanisha, Abhi's sister, is four years older than him and runs a small online business. She and Dev meet by sheer coincidence at a professional event and hit it off. Tanisha has recently come out of a breakup with a man she'd been contemplating marrying.

Dev and Tanisha start sleeping together. Being intimate with her stirs something assertive in Dev — a masculine energy he hadn't felt before. It makes him bolder. People who know him start to notice the difference.

Abhi feels the change and presses him on it. Dev, after some persuading, tells him — rather bluntly — about the affair with his sister. What Abhi feels isn't so much disappointment as jealousy. He's livid. Even so, things continue.

For Tanisha, it's a rebound, and it makes her feel liberated — she calls it "a bright emptiness." She's the dominant one in the relationship; in submitting to her, Dev recovers some lost sense of manhood. Vulnerability empowers Dev; empowerment makes Tanisha vulnerable. It's an unequal relationship — Tanisha calls the shots, and Dev does things privately to make her look good publicly.

Dev, consumed by all this, neglects his friendship with Abhi, and the two seem to reach the end of the road fairly quickly. Abhi, in turn, does something mean: he tells his sister about his own sexual history with her lover.

An explosion follows. "All men are the same," Tanisha says — then, louder, so both of them can hear it: "Including gay men."

Last anyone heard, a kind of truce had been struck. Tanisha remains Dev's lover; Abhi remains his best friend — and the two of them go back to doing what they've always done with each other. All three know this arrangement has to end, and soon. They're waiting for a disruption. A happy one, if they're lucky.