As part of my work broadcasting live sports across India, I spent years moving from stadium to stadium, city to city. Everywhere I went, behind the bright lights and packed stands, I kept noticing the same faces-men from Bihar mixing concrete in the heat, carrying cables through the night, cleaning, lifting, serving. They were always at the edge of the frame, doing the hardest work for the least money, living far from their families for wages that barely kept them afloat. Those journeys stayed with me. The more matches I covered, the more I felt that, somewhere beyond the camera angle, there was another story running parallel to the game on the field-a story of migration, risk, and quiet sacrifice. Champaran and Savitri grew out of that feeling. This book is my attempt to follow those men back home, into the villages and families they leave behind, and to imagine what it would take for them not to have to go at all. Savitri's battle is not just with one god of death; it is with a whole system that makes migration feel like destiny. My hope is that, in these pages, the people I kept meeting in construction sites, broadcast crews, and city backstreets are finally seen at the centre of the story, not only at its margins