Chapter 1: Nishita

# Chapter 1: Nishita

## The Transfer

The transfer happened because my parents believed geography could fix what therapy couldn't.

We were moving from Vashi to Panchgani — from a three-bedroom flat on the seventh floor of Shanti Heights, Sector 17, where the view from my bedroom window was the Vashi creek and the APMC market's corrugated roofs, to a rented cottage on a hill station road where the view would be, according to my mother's breathless description, "mountains and strawberry farms and clean air, Nishi, clean air."

I did not want clean air. I wanted my bedroom. I wanted the creek view and the sound of the goods trains on the Harbour Line at 2 AM and the specific, comforting stink of the fish market that drifted up to the seventh floor on hot afternoons — a smell my mother called disgusting and I called home. I wanted Zoya and Isha and the corner table at Café Durga where we spent every Saturday afternoon sharing one masala dosa between three people because the dosas were enormous and our pocket money was not.

I wanted my life. The one I had been building for seventeen years in Navi Mumbai, the one that included a school I understood and friends I loved and a city that made sense to me, the one that was now being packed into cardboard boxes and loaded into a Tata Ace tempo by two men named Raju and Santosh who handled our furniture with the tender care of men being paid by the trip rather than by the hour.

"Why are we doing this?" I asked, carrying the last box from my room down the corridor. The box was labelled NISHI — BOOKS in my mother's handwriting, the letters round and careful, the handwriting of a woman who still believed in labels and order and the possibility that moving four hundred kilometres would make her husband stop sleeping with his colleague from the Thane branch of ICICI Bank.

My mother — Deepa Joshi, née Kulkarni, forty-three, schoolteacher, the kind of woman who ironed her nightgowns — gave me the smile. The tired one. The one that said: I know this is hard. I know you're angry. I am also angry, but I am holding it together because one of us has to, and your father has abdicated that responsibility along with several others.

"Baba got the transfer to the Panchgani branch. It's a fresh start."

"A fresh start." I set the box down. The corridor was empty now — bare walls, marks on the paint where the photo frames had hung, the ghost of our family visible in the rectangles of unfaded colour. "Aai, a fresh start is getting a new haircut. Moving to a hill station four hours away because Baba can't keep his phone in his pocket is not a fresh start. It's witness protection."

"Nishita." The full name. The warning shot.

"I'm just saying."

"Don't just say. Help me carry this to the tempo."

I carried the box to the tempo. Raju and Santosh loaded it with the efficiency of men who had been moving Navi Mumbai families for years and who understood, without being told, that every cardboard box contained not just objects but the compressed emotional residue of a household in crisis. They handled the NISHI — BOOKS box with slightly more care than the KITCHEN — MISC box, which was either professional discernment or coincidence.

My father was already in the car. The white Maruti Dzire — the car of Indian middle management, the vehicular equivalent of a company lanyard — was parked in the society's basement, engine running, air conditioning on, my father behind the wheel with the expression of a man who believed that sitting in the car with the engine running constituted "being ready to leave" while his wife and daughter did the actual work of dismantling a home.

Bhushan Joshi. Forty-six. Branch manager, ICICI Bank, Vashi. Now branch manager, ICICI Bank, Panchgani. Transferred at his own request, which was the corporate euphemism for "transferred because the situation at the current branch had become untenable due to the branch manager's inability to maintain professional boundaries with the assistant manager of personal loans."

He was not a bad man. I want to say this clearly, because the story that follows will make it easy to conclude otherwise. My father was not cruel, not violent, not absent in the dramatic ways that fathers in films were absent. He was present. He came to my school functions. He helped with my maths homework until I surpassed his abilities in Standard 9. He made terrible Sunday morning poha — too many peanuts, not enough kanda — and served it with a pride that exceeded its quality. He was a decent father who was a weak husband, and the weakness had consequences that were now being loaded into a tempo and driven to the Western Ghats.

"Ready?" he asked through the car window.

"Does it matter?"

"Nishi—"

"I'm ready." I got into the back seat. The leather was hot from the afternoon sun — Navi Mumbai in May, forty-one degrees, the kind of heat that turned cars into ovens and ovens into redundancies. My thighs stuck to the seat. The sensation was familiar, even comforting — the specific discomfort of a Mumbai summer, the heat that I would not feel in Panchgani's twenty-four-degree pleasantness.

Aai got in the front. Adjusted the rearview mirror. Applied lip balm — the particular pre-journey ritual of Indian mothers, the anointing of the lips before the long drive, as if chapped lips were the one adversity that could be prevented.

"Seatbelts," she said.

We drove. The Vashi flyover, the Palm Beach Road, the Sion-Panvel highway, the familiar landmarks of a city I was leaving — the Wonders Park that I had begged to visit as a child and that had disappointed me every single time, the CIDCO Garden where Zoya and I had walked every evening during board exam preparation, the InOrbit Mall where Isha had bought the lipstick that started the lipstick phase that lasted six months and produced a collection of seventeen shades that she still stored in a shoebox under her bed.

I put in my earbuds. Played music. Stared out the window. Did not speak to either parent for the first two hours, which was my contribution to the family's emotional processing: silence as protest, the teenager's weapon of choice, deployed with the precision of someone who had been refining the technique since Standard 8.

The Expressway ended. The ghats began. The road narrowed and climbed, the hairpin bends arriving with the regularity of a metronome, each turn revealing a new perspective on the valley below — green, vast, the Western Ghats in their monsoon-approaching glory, the hillsides covered in a green so deep it looked black in the shadows. The temperature dropped. The air changed — from the thick, humid, petroleum-scented air of Mumbai to something thinner, cooler, carrying the smell of wet earth and eucalyptus and the faint sweetness of the strawberry farms that lined the road.

"See?" Aai said, turning to me with the hopeful expression of a tour guide whose tourist was not impressed. "The air."

I removed one earbud. Acknowledged the air. Replaced the earbud.

Panchgani arrived in the late afternoon. The town was smaller than I expected — a single main road (the Market Road), a lake (Bhandardara — no, that was somewhere else; this was the Table Land approach), and the kind of shops that hill stations maintained for tourists: ice cream parlours, chikki shops, corn-on-the-cob vendors with their charcoal braziers producing a smoke that smelled of butter and lime and childhood holidays.

The cottage was on a lane off the Mahabaleshwar Road — a two-bedroom structure with a red oxide floor, a corrugated tin roof, a garden that had been maintained by the previous tenant with the dedication of someone who loved plants, and a view of the valley that was, I conceded privately and would never concede publicly, extraordinary. The hills fell away from the garden wall in green terraces, and in the distance, the Krishna river valley spread like a map, the river itself a silver thread in the afternoon light.

"Your room," Aai said, opening the door to the smaller bedroom. The walls were white. The window faced east — morning sun, the valley, a mango tree whose branches came close enough to touch from the sill. The floor was cool under my feet. The silence was enormous — not the silence of a Mumbai flat, which was always filled with the ambient noise of twelve million people living on top of each other, but the silence of a place where the nearest neighbour was fifty metres away and the loudest sound was the wind in the trees.

I put my box of books on the bed. Sat next to it. Looked out the window.

Somewhere in Vashi, Zoya and Isha were at Café Durga, sharing a masala dosa that I was not eating. Somewhere in the ICICI Bank Vashi branch, a woman named Pallavi Deshmukh was sitting at a desk that was thirty feet from where my father used to sit, and the thirty feet was the distance that had broken my family.

I did not cry. I was seventeen, and I had decided, somewhere on the Expressway between Navi Mumbai and Panchgani, that I was done crying about things I could not control. The move was done. The cottage was real. The mango tree was outside my window. My life in Vashi was over.

My life in Panchgani was beginning.

I did not know, sitting on that bed with my box of books and my anger and the extraordinary view, that Panchgani would do far worse to me than take me away from my friends.

I did not know about Aarav yet.

I did not know about Sub-Inspector Kamble.

I did not know about the Sahyadri Centre for Behavioural Wellness, which sat on a hilltop three kilometres from the cottage, behind a boundary wall topped with concertina wire, and which was not — despite its name, despite its website, despite the framed photographs of smiling patients in the reception area — a place of wellness at all.

But I would learn.

Everyone in Panchgani learned, eventually.