Chapter 1: Janhavi

# Chapter 1: Janhavi

## The Transfer

The Kolhapur bus dropped me at the ST stand at 4:17 PM on a Thursday in June, and the first thing that hit me was not the heat — Mumbai had heat, Mumbai's heat was the wet, compressive heat of a city built on reclaimed sea, the heat that sat on your skin like a second body — but the smell. Kolhapur smelled of jaggery. The jaggery factories on the Pune-Bangalore highway released a sweetness into the air that was not the refined sweetness of sugar but the dark, mineral, almost-burnt sweetness of cane pressed and boiled and reduced to the substance that Maharashtra put in its laddoos and its puranpolis and its chai when the family was the kind of family that used jaggery instead of sugar, which was most families, which was the default, which was the baseline from which sugar was the deviation.

Jaggery and diesel. The ST stand's contribution to the olfactory landscape was diesel — the MSRTC buses, the red buses that connected every town in Maharashtra to every other town with the democratic persistence of a transport system that did not discriminate between Kolhapur and Pune, between the district capital and the taluka headquarters, between the bus that was full and the bus that was fuller. The diesel was the smell of arrival. The jaggery was the smell of place.

Aai was beside me. Aai had been beside me for the entire four-hour journey from Mumbai — the Shivneri bus, the air-conditioned one, the one that Aai had booked because the regular bus was seven hours and the Shivneri was four and the three hours saved were three hours that Aai could spend unpacking the rented house on Tarabai Road instead of watching the Sahyadris scroll past the window. Aai was efficient. Aai had been efficient since Baba left — the efficiency being the quality that single mothers developed when the alternative to efficiency was collapse, the efficiency that was not a personality trait but a survival mechanism, the mechanism that converted the energy of grief into the energy of motion, the motion that kept the household moving even when the household had lost a wheel.

Baba had left three years ago. Left was the word — not died, not divorced, just left. Left the flat in Borivali. Left the teaching job at the municipal school. Left the wife and the daughter and the small, specific life that he had been living in Mumbai since before I was born. Left on a Tuesday morning in March, taking the Rajdhani to Delhi, and from Delhi — somewhere. The somewhere was the mystery that Aai had stopped investigating after the first year, the first year being the year of phone calls and police complaints and the Missing Persons report that the Borivali police station had filed with the enthusiasm of a bureaucracy that processed absence the way it processed everything — slowly, incompletely, with the assumption that the absent person would return or that the filing family would stop asking.

Aai stopped asking. Aai started moving. The moving was: sell the Borivali flat (₹38 lakhs, the price that the flat's location commanded in a market that was indifferent to the personal history of its sellers), move to Kolhapur (where Aai's sister lived, where the rent was ₹8,000 instead of Borivali's ₹18,000, where the cost of living was the cost of living in a city that was not Mumbai and that did not charge the Mumbai premium for the privilege of existing within its boundaries), enroll Janhavi in a new school (Rajaram Vidyalaya, the school that Maushi's children attended, the school that was good and affordable and that had, Maushi had mentioned in a phone call whose timing was not accidental, a running programme).

A running programme. The running programme was the detail that Aai had held onto — the detail that she had mentioned to me on the Shivneri, between Lonavala and Satara, in the section of the highway where the ghats were steepest and the bus swayed and the conversation acquired the specific intimacy of people in transit, people between places, people whose displacement produced a vulnerability that stationary life did not.

"Rajaram has a running team," Aai had said. "Maushi says they're good. State-level."

"I don't run."

"You used to run."

"I used to run in Borivali. In the colony. Around the building. That's not running, that's exercise."

"Running is running."

"Running around a building in Borivali is not the same as running on a track in Kolhapur."

"You're right. The track in Kolhapur is better."

Aai's logic. The logic of a woman who had decided that running was the thing that would save her daughter from the specific danger of a sixteen-year-old girl who had lost her father and her city and her friends in the space of three years and who was, Aai could see with the maternal diagnostic precision that no medical test could match, withdrawing. The withdrawal was not dramatic — not the Bollywood withdrawal, not the refusing-to-eat, not the crying-in-the-rain. The withdrawal was quiet. The withdrawal was the volume turned down on a television that was still on — the picture present, the sound reduced, the girl still there but less there, less loud, less herself.

Running was Aai's prescription. Running was the thing that Aai believed would turn the volume back up — not because Aai understood running but because Aai understood motion, and motion was the opposite of withdrawal, and the opposite was the medicine.

I did not want the medicine. I wanted Mumbai. I wanted the Borivali flat with the window that faced the national park and the monkeys that sat on the windowsill in the morning and the specific, chaotic, overwhelming noise of a city that was too loud and too crowded and too much and that was, because it was too much, enough. Mumbai was enough. Mumbai was the city where I had been born and where I had grown up and where I had friends and a school and a routine and a father who had been present before he was absent, and the absence was the thing that Kolhapur could not fix because Kolhapur was not the problem.

But the bus had arrived. The jaggery was in the air. The diesel was in the lungs. The ST stand was the ST stand — the specific architectural reality of a Maharashtra state transport terminal, the concrete structure that was neither beautiful nor ugly but functional, the function being the arrival and departure of people who were going somewhere and people who had arrived somewhere and me, who was neither going nor arriving but being deposited, the way a package was deposited at an address that the package had not chosen.

Maushi was waiting. Maushi — Aai's older sister, Sunanda Joshi, the woman whose presence in Kolhapur was the reason for our presence in Kolhapur, the gravitational pull of family that Maharashtra families understood as the strongest force in the universe, stronger than money, stronger than ambition, stronger than the specific inertia of a life in Mumbai that was comfortable and known and that had become, after Baba left, uncomfortable and unknown and unsustainable.

Maushi drove a Wagon R. The Wagon R was the car of Kolhapur — the car that every family in Kolhapur seemed to own, the car whose production Maruti Suzuki had calibrated to the precise economic coordinates of India's Tier 2 cities, the car that said we are comfortable but not extravagant, we have a car but not an Innova, we drive but we drive sensibly. Maushi's Wagon R was white. The white had yellowed in the Kolhapur sun — the sun that was different from Mumbai's sun, the sun that was dry and direct and that hit the skin with the specific force of a city that was not shielded by the sea's moisture.

"Janhavi!" Maushi's arms were around me before I could process the arrival of her body. Maushi hugged the way Maushi did everything — completely, with the full force of a woman whose emotional volume was permanently set to maximum, whose laughter was audible from three rooms away, whose cooking filled the house with a smell that was not just food but identity. Maushi smelled of coconut oil and hing and the specific base note of a woman who had been frying things in the kitchen before she came to the bus stand.

"You've become thin," Maushi said, holding me at arm's length, conducting the visual assessment that Indian aunts conducted on arrivals — the assessment that measured weight, height, complexion, and general wellness with the diagnostic speed of a CT scan and the editorial certainty of a judge.

"She eats," Aai said. "She just doesn't eat enough."

"We'll fix that," Maushi said. The we'll fix that was the sentence that contained Maushi's entire philosophy — the philosophy that food was medicine and love was food and the solution to most problems was a thali with extra bhakri and the tambda rassa that Kolhapur was famous for, the red mutton curry that was Kolhapur's contribution to Indian cuisine and that Kolhapur defended with the territorial intensity of a city whose identity was built on three pillars: Mahalakshmi temple, Kolhapuri chappals, and tambda rassa.

The Wagon R took us through Kolhapur. Kolhapur was not Mumbai. This was the observation that my brain made continuously, compulsively, the way a tongue returned to a missing tooth — the observation that measured every street and building and sound against the Mumbai equivalent and found the Kolhapur version different, which was not the same as worse but was, for a girl who had not chosen the move, close enough.

The streets were wider. The buildings were shorter. The traffic was calmer — not calm, this was Maharashtra, calm traffic in Maharashtra was an oxymoron, but calmer, the calmness being relative, the relative being Mumbai, against which all Indian traffic was calm the way all Indian noise was quiet compared to the specific sonic assault of a Mumbai local train at Dadar station during evening rush.

Tarabai Road was in the centre of Kolhapur — the road that ran from Mahalakshmi temple toward Rankala Lake, the road that was Kolhapur's version of a main street, the road where the shops were and the autorickshaws were and the evening crowd would gather after the temple darshan and after the lake walk and after the tambda rassa at Hotel Padma.

The rented house was on a lane off Tarabai Road. The lane was narrow — the narrowness of lanes in old Indian cities, the lanes that had been designed for bullock carts and that now accommodated Wagon Rs and autorickshaws and the occasional Royal Enfield whose rider understood that the lane's narrowness was not a limitation but a challenge. The house was a row house — one floor, two bedrooms, a kitchen that was also a dining room, a bathroom that was also a bucket-bath room, a small courtyard at the back where a tulsi plant grew in a concrete pot and where the neighbour's clothes line drooped with the weight of wet saris.

The house was small. The house was not the Borivali flat. The Borivali flat had been on the seventh floor with the window and the monkeys and the view of the national park's canopy, the green that was Mumbai's green, the green that said the city has not consumed everything, some wildness remains. This house had no seventh floor. This house had a courtyard. The courtyard's view was the neighbour's saris and the concrete wall and the sky, which was the Kolhapur sky, which was bluer than Mumbai's sky because Kolhapur's air was cleaner than Mumbai's air, the cleanliness being one of the things that Aai had listed as a benefit of the move, the list being the list that Aai had compiled to convince herself and me that the move was an improvement rather than a retreat.

I did not unpack. I sat on the bed in the smaller bedroom — the bedroom that was mine, the bedroom that Aai had assigned with the specific maternal calculus that gave the daughter the room with the window and the mother the room without — and I sat on the bed and I looked at the wall.

The wall was yellow. The yellow was the yellow of rented houses in Maharashtra — the pale, institutional yellow that landlords painted because yellow paint was cheap and because yellow was the colour of nothing, the colour that did not commit to warmth or coolness or character, the colour that said this is a wall and the wall is painted and the painting is done.

I looked at the yellow wall and I thought about the Borivali flat and I thought about Mumbai and I thought about Baba and I thought about the running programme at Rajaram Vidyalaya and I thought about the fact that I was sixteen and that sixteen was supposed to be the age of possibility and that possibility felt like a word for other people, people who had not been deposited in Kolhapur by the specific combination of a father's disappearance and a mother's efficiency and an aunt's Wagon R.

Outside the window, Kolhapur was having its evening. The evening sounds were different from Mumbai's evening sounds — no autorickshaw meter arguments (Kolhapur autos didn't use meters, Kolhapur autos negotiated), no train announcements from the distant station, no pressure cooker symphony from fourteen flats in the same building. Kolhapur's evening was the temple bell from Mahalakshmi, which was close enough to hear and far enough to be melody rather than noise, and the calls of the birds that roosted in the peepal tree at the lane's entrance, and the neighbour's television playing the Marathi news at a volume that suggested the neighbour was either partially deaf or deeply committed to the news.

The temple bell. The birds. The news.

This was Kolhapur. This was the new frequency. This was the channel that my life had been switched to without my consent, the way a parent switched a child's television channel — with authority, with the assumption that the new channel was better, with the specific parental confidence that the child would, eventually, adjust.

I would adjust. Or I would not. The adjusting was not guaranteed. The adjusting was the thing that Aai believed and that Maushi believed and that the running programme was supposed to facilitate, the running being the vehicle and the adjustment being the destination.

The running. The thing I had not done since Borivali. The thing that I had done around the building's compound — twenty laps, each lap 200 metres, the total being 4 kilometres, the 4 kilometres being the distance that I ran every morning at 5:30 AM before school, the distance that my body knew and that my lungs accommodated and that my legs performed without consultation with my brain, the running being automatic, mechanical, the running of a girl who ran not because she loved running but because running was the time when the noise stopped.

The noise. The noise of Baba's absence. The noise of Aai's efficiency. The noise of the Borivali flat's emptiness. The noise that was not sound but silence — the specific, weighted silence of a household that had been three people and was now two, the silence that occupied the space where the third person had been, the silence that was not quiet but loud, the loudest thing in the flat, louder than the monkeys and the traffic and the pressure cookers, the silence that running — the mechanical, compound-lapping, 4-kilometre running — had been the only thing that quieted.

Running quieted the silence. Running replaced the silence with breath — the in-and-out, the rhythm, the specific biological sound of a body in motion, the sound that was not external but internal, the sound of the self, the sound that said I am here, I am moving, I am alive.

Maybe Aai was right. Maybe the running programme was the medicine. Maybe the track in Kolhapur was better than the compound in Borivali.

Maybe. The word of people who had been moved against their will. The word that was not yes and not no but the space between, the space where possibility lived alongside doubt, the space where sixteen-year-old girls sat on rented beds in yellow rooms and waited for the morning to tell them whether the maybe would become a yes or remain a maybe forever.

The temple bell rang. The neighbour's television changed to a serial. Maushi's voice called from the kitchen — "Janhavi, jeva!" — the call to dinner, the call that was the same in Mumbai and Kolhapur and every Maharashtrian household, the call that said the food is ready and the food is love and the love is waiting.

I went to the kitchen. The thali was on the table — bhakri, tambda rassa, rice, dal, limbu. The tambda rassa was red. The red was Kolhapur's red — the red of the Kolhapuri mirchi, the chilli that was hotter than other chillies and that was, Maushi insisted, the reason Kolhapuris were the way they were, the heat building character, the spice building spine.

I ate. The rassa burned. The burning was good — the burning was the first thing that I had felt in Kolhapur that was not comparison but sensation, not measurement but experience, the burn on the tongue being the body's way of saying you are here, this is real, this is not Mumbai but it is somewhere and somewhere is where you are.

Somewhere. Kolhapur. The jaggery city. The tambda rassa city. The city with the running programme.

Tomorrow was the first day of school. Tomorrow was the day that the maybe would begin its journey toward becoming something more definite — a yes or a no, an adjustment or a refusal, a beginning or a continuation of the ending that Baba's leaving had started.

The rassa burned. I ate. The temple bell rang its last ring. The evening became night. Kolhapur became dark. And somewhere in the dark, on the track at Rajaram Vidyalaya, a girl I had not yet met was running — running with the speed and the certainty and the specific, terrifying grace of a person who had found the thing that I was still looking for.

The thing. The reason to run. Not away from. Not around a building. But toward.

Toward what? The question was tomorrow's question. Tonight's answer was the rassa and the bhakri and the yellow room and the bed and the sleep that would come or would not come, and either way, morning would arrive, and morning was the thing that always arrived, regardless of the city, regardless of the father, regardless of the maybe.

Morning. Always morning. The one thing you could count on.