By the time Delhi's employed public was heading home and the evening traffic had begun swallowing Connaught Place, I had transformed into a cockroach.

Not the kind after whom people instinctively run with their slippers — but the kind that has, over the past several weeks, found a home at New Delhi's Jantar Mantar. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has been protesting here since June 28, demanding Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation. And at the centre of it all, under a green tarpaulin shelter, lies Sonam Wangchuk — thinner than he was, quieter than he has ever been, but still there.

For one night, I became one of them. I did not reveal I was a journalist. I wore a plain kurta and carried a CJP badge I was given at the entrance. I ate what they ate. I slept where they slept — or tried to. And I listened.

This is what I found.

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5:30 PM: Arrival

I arrived at the protest site around 5:30 pm, just as the afternoon's worst heat was beginning to ease. The entrance is marked by a row of CJP flags — black with a cockroach in a business suit — held up by bamboo poles. Two volunteers in yellow vests checked bags. There were no metal detectors, no police searches. One of the volunteers handed me a small bottle of water and said, without ceremony: "Welcome. Stay as long as you want."

The site is larger than it looks in news photographs. It stretches across a wide section of the Jantar Mantar complex and is divided into informal zones: a medical tent at the far left, a food distribution area near the entrance, a stage area with a PA system, and — separated slightly from the main crowd, behind a low rope barrier — the corner where Wangchuk rests.

There are perhaps two thousand people here on a Tuesday evening. Not a rally crowd — not the kind of numbers you get on a weekend march. This is the core. The ones who came and didn't leave. The ones who came back.

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6:45 PM: The Food

Dinner is simple: dal, rice, roti, a vegetable. It is cooked in large vessels by a rotation of volunteers — I was told that a different group of citizens sends food every day. On this particular evening, the food came from a gurdwara in East Delhi.

I ate sitting cross-legged on the ground with a group of four students — two from Bihar, one from Rajasthan, one from Delhi. They introduced themselves by first name only. None of them knew I was a journalist.

Rahul, 22, from Bhagalpur, had been here for six days. He had taken leave from his coaching institute. "My friend sat for NEET," he said, dipping roti into dal. "He got 690 out of 720. He should be in AIIMS right now. Instead, he is at home, depressed, not eating." He paused. "I thought: if he won't fight for himself, I will fight for him."

Priya, 21, from Jaipur, had a slightly different story. She had not been directly affected by NEET — she had cleared her engineering entrance exam. "But when I saw what happened to the NEET students, I thought: what if this had been my exam? What if I had studied for four years and then someone just sold the paper?" She looked up from her food. "It could be any of us. That's why I'm here."

The food was warm and sufficient. No one went hungry. Volunteers collected the leaf plates and the area was swept clean within minutes of the meal ending. Whatever else this protest is, it is organized.

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8:30 PM: Near Wangchuk's Corner

I moved closer to Wangchuk's resting area as the evening wound down. There was a constant, gentle stream of people walking up to the rope barrier — some silently, some with folded hands, some with tears they were clearly trying not to show.

Wangchuk was awake. He was lying on a simple cot, covered by a thin sheet despite the heat. He appeared very thin. His face, in the half-light of a lantern, looked both entirely peaceful and deeply exhausted. A doctor checked his pulse. A volunteer fanned him with a hand-held fan.

A woman in her 50s — she told me she had come from Lucknow — stood at the barrier for a long time before she spoke.

"Beta," she said finally, quietly. "Please eat something. Please."

Wangchuk turned his head and looked at her. He did not speak, but he raised his right hand slightly — an acknowledgement, a gesture of gratitude — and then closed his eyes again.

The woman walked away, pressing her hand to her mouth.

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10:45 PM: The Conversations They Have When Nobody Is Recording

This is what the cameras don't show.

After the evening speeches ended and the crowd thinned to its overnight core — perhaps four or five hundred people sleeping on blankets, in sleeping bags, on the stone floor — the conversations changed.

I sat with a group of eight people near the back of the site, sharing a packet of biscuits someone had brought. The talk was quiet and honest.

There was frustration about the absent CJP leaders. "Dipke bhai is here," one young man said — a 24-year-old from Gorakhpur named Suraj. "But some of the others, the ones who were on the stage in the first week, we don't see them." No one disputed this. There was a silence. Then someone said: "Movements are always like this. Some stay, some go. What matters is who's left."

There was fear about what would happen after July 20. "If the march happens and the government still doesn't respond — what then? Do we just go home?" asked a young woman from Hyderabad who had been at the site for four days. No one had a clean answer.

There was also — and this surprised me most — an almost stubborn, defiant hope.

"Something is different this time," said a man named Vikram, perhaps 28, from Indore, who had been here since day one of the current protest. "I have been to protests before. The Anna Hazare protests, the CAA protests, the farmers. And they all had this feeling that the government would wait us out. That they were just waiting for us to get tired and go home."

He gestured around the site — at the sleeping students, at the flags, at the lantern by Wangchuk's cot.

"This time, I don't feel that way. I feel like the government is scared. And when a government is scared of its own people, things change."

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2:00 AM: What the Night Sounds Like

The protest site at 2 am sounds like this: distant traffic, the occasional sound of someone shifting on a stone floor, low murmured conversations, and — from Wangchuk's corner — the soft beeping of a medical monitoring device.

I could not sleep. I lay on a borrowed blanket and looked at the sky above Jantar Mantar — orange-grey with Delhi light pollution — and thought about what I had seen and heard over the past nine hours.

Two thousand people, and then four hundred people, choosing to sleep on stone in July heat. Not because anyone is paying them. Not because any political party told them to. Because they are angry, and grieving, and because — for perhaps the first time in their adult lives — they feel that their anger might actually matter.

A 7-year-old girl had arrived with her parents earlier in the evening. She held a small handwritten sign that said: *"Pradhan uncle, please resign. I want to be a doctor."*

I left Jantar Mantar as the sky was beginning to pale. At the entrance, the same volunteer in a yellow vest was still there — or perhaps a different one; they work in shifts. He handed me a fresh bottle of water.

"Come back," he said. "We're not going anywhere."