अध्याय 2 / 12
CHAPTER TWO
Nobody Goes Up There
I found her at ten to six the next morning, squatting at the outdoor tap behind the kitchen with forty steel plates.
"Bansi."
She didn't look up. "Bahu ji shouldn't come here. It's wet."
"What did you call me last night?"
"Bitiya."
"You didn't say bitiya."
"I said bitiya." A plate went into the stack. Water ran over her wrists. "Old woman's mouth. Sometimes it says one thing, sometimes another."
Here is a thing about my work. I sit in a courtroom in Tis Hazari and I put down what people say, exactly, including the parts they wish they hadn't said, including the half-second before they change a word. After six years you stop hearing sentences. You hear the joins.
Bansi had answered before I finished the question.
She'd had the answer ready since last night.
I crouched down next to her on the wet cement, which ruined the border of a sari that cost more than her yearly salary, and I said, "Who is Chidiya?"
Her hands stopped in the water.
"Bansi. Who was expected here? Three days. Which room did you keep ready?"
She turned her head and looked at me and her eyes were wet and old and absolutely terrified, and she opened her mouth—
"Bansi!" From the veranda. Badi Maa, not raised, not hurried. "The pandit is coming at seven, has anybody thought about that, or should I do it myself?"
Bansi was up and gone with the plates in under four seconds, and she was fast for a woman of sixty, and I stayed crouching by the tap with my hand in the cold water because I needed a reason to be there when Badi Maa came round the corner.
She looked at me. She looked at the tap.
"There's a bathroom inside," she said.
"I wanted air."
"Hm." She adjusted the shawl on her shoulder. "Come and eat. Your things have been put away, so don't go pulling out the suitcase and making a mess of it."
That was the first thing.
I went up and opened the almirah and everything I owned had been unpacked, refolded and arranged. My clothes. My cosmetics. And on the top shelf, squared off neatly, the plastic folder with my documents in it — the folder that I had put at the very bottom of the suitcase, under the shoe bag, on Wednesday night.
Nobody had taken anything.
They had just wanted me to know they'd looked.
"So this is the drawing room, which nobody uses. This is the other drawing room, which nobody uses. This is Papa's puja room, this is the pantry, this is the kitchen you're not supposed to enter but everyone enters." Nishtha was giving me the tour with a cup of tea in one hand and enormous enjoyment. "That's Choti Bua's room when she's here. Pray she isn't here."
"And upstairs?"
"Our rooms. Mine, yours, Mummy-Papa's on the other side because Papa can't do stairs since the stroke, they built him the lift."
"Third floor?"
She kept walking.
"Nishtha. Third floor?"
"Nothing. Papa's old office and the store." She drank some tea. "Nobody goes up there."
"Why?"
"Because it's full of files from 2009 and there are pigeons." She smiled at me, a fraction late. "Come, I'll show you the terrace, there's a nice—"
"Is it locked?"
Nishtha Rathore, twenty-four years old, warm as a lamp, looked at me for one second too long.
"Everything's locked in this house," she said. "Even the sugar."
She wasn't wrong about the sugar. In the pantry, on a nail hammered inside the doorframe behind the flour tins, hung a ring of nine keys with paper tags in Hindi, and Bansi took it down every morning and hung it back every night.
I read all nine tags while pretending to look for tea leaves.
The eighth one said upar.
At two in the afternoon that house went to sleep like a hospital.
The men were at the site office. Badi Maa took her rest between two and four and the whole ground floor knew it. Nishtha was on her phone in her room with the door shut. Bansi went to her quarter behind the garage.
I took the eighth key at 2:14.
The staircase to the third floor was outside the main body of the house, a narrow service flight off the back landing, and by the fourth step the air changed — hotter, closer, thick with that smell of dust and old paper and pigeon that gets into your teeth.
The padlock was brass and heavy and older than me. It opened stiffly.
A long room. Two rooms, actually, one running into the other through an archway. Iron almirahs. A drawing table with a broken leg propped on bricks. Bundles of files tied in red cloth. Two dust sheets over shapes.
And on the far wall, above the drawing table, a rectangle.
You know the kind. Where a frame has hung for years and the wall behind it stays the colour the wall used to be, and the wall around it fades, so when you take the frame down you leave a clean pale scar.
There were four of them on that wall.
Somebody had taken down four pictures at once.
I went along the almirahs. Files. Tender documents. A cardboard box with a woman's things in it — hairclips, a spectacle case, a phone charger, a half-used bottle of nail polish in a colour I recognised so completely that I had to put my hand flat on the almirah door for a moment.
Coral. She wore it for two years. She used to do it while talking, badly, with her left hand.
In the second room, against the wall, a tin trunk with a green stripe and a bunch of old marigolds dried on top of it, like an offering.
I was reaching for the trunk when I heard the outside door open.
Footsteps on the landing. A man's.
There is a gap of about eight inches behind the last iron almirah where it doesn't sit flush against the wall, and I was in it before I decided to be, sideways, with dust in my mouth and thirteen metres of lehenga fabric that I dragged in after me like a body.
He came as far as the doorway.
He didn't come in.
I could see a wedge of him through the gap between almirah and wall — a shoulder, part of an arm, the side of a knee. Adi. Blue shirt, sleeves rolled.
He stood there.
I counted. I always count. It's involuntary now.
Forty-one seconds.
He didn't move, he didn't touch anything, he didn't look for anyone. He stood in that doorway and looked at the room the way you look at a person in a hospital bed when there's nothing to say and you've already said it.
Then he stepped back and pulled the door shut.
I heard the hasp settle. Then the padlock, and the click of the shackle going home.
Then his feet going down.
I gave it three minutes. Then I came out and put my hand on the door and pushed and it moved a quarter-inch and stopped dead.
I did not shout.
Understand what shouting costs. Shouting means Badi Maa comes up. Shouting means the second morning of my marriage is the morning the new bahu is found locked in the dead wife's room with the pantry key in her fist.
So I did the arithmetic and I went looking for the other way out, because a room this size in a house this size does not have one door.
It took eleven minutes to find it. At the end of the second room, behind stacked chairs, a low door bolted on my side — the connecting door to the terrace.
I could get out.
And because I could get out, I stopped hurrying, and that's why I noticed the dust sheet.
It was over something flat leaning against the wall, and the shapes were wrong for furniture. I pulled it off.
Six picture frames. Turned to face the wall.
I turned the first one around.
Meher's wedding portrait. The formal one, the studio one, the two of them on a gold sofa with a garland between them.
Her face had been scratched out.
Not smudged. Not torn. Somebody had opened the frame, taken the photograph out, and worked at her face with something sharp until there was nothing but grey pulp and shredded paper fibre, and then put it back behind the glass and turned it to the wall.
His face was untouched.
Her hands were untouched. Both of them, in her lap, covered in mehndi.
I turned the second frame. The same. The third. The fourth. Every one. Her face gone, everything else perfect, the frames dusted, the glass clean.
Somebody had done this carefully, in this room, and then hung four of them back on hooks and taken them down again later.
I couldn't take a frame. I could take a photograph.
The smallest one had a cardboard back held by four bent metal tabs, and I bent them up with my thumbnail and lifted the board out, and there was her ruined face, and behind her ruined face, folded once down the middle, was a second photograph.
Colour. Slightly out of focus. Taken across a road, through traffic, with the front half of a parked auto blurring the bottom edge.
A woman coming out of a gate in a grey kurta with a cloth sling bag on her shoulder.
The gate is Tis Hazari. The gate I have walked out of at 5:15 in the evening for six years.
The woman is me.
I know when it was taken, and I don't need the pencil writing on the back to tell me, though the pencil writing is there — a date in small careful figures in a hand I have never seen in my life.
I know because of my left arm.
In the photograph, from my knuckles to halfway up my forearm, is a plaster cast. I broke that wrist on the eleventh of September last year, coming off my scooter on the Rani Jhansi flyover in the rain. I wore that cast for six weeks and I couldn't write for all of them.
I had been Ira Malhotra for ten months.
Somebody had known exactly where to find Kavya Sethi for fourteen.