Chapter 11: Nishita

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# Chapter 11: Nishita

## The Investigation

My mother was a schoolteacher. This is important to understand, because everything that followed — the investigation, the evidence, the slow and methodical dismantling of the Kamble sisters' operation — was conducted with the tools and instincts of a woman whose profession was explaining things clearly and whose daily practice was managing thirty-five twelve-year-olds who did not want to learn about the water cycle.

Deepa Joshi did not have police contacts. She did not have journalistic instincts. She did not have the resources of an NGO or the reach of a political connection. What she had was a notebook — a ruled notebook, the kind she bought in bulk from the stationery shop in Panchgani for her students, with a blue cover and a red margin line — and the discipline to fill it.

She started on Tuesday. The day after the hearing. The day after Sushma-mavshi had said there are other families and my mother had said I'll find them with the calm determination of a woman accepting a homework assignment that happened to involve dismantling a criminal conspiracy.

Her method was simple. She went to places where parents gathered — the school gates, the market, the temple, the chai stall near the bus stand — and she talked. Not interrogated. Talked. With the warmth and patience of a woman who had spent twenty years talking to children and who understood that people, like children, did not yield information to pressure but to trust.

"I'm Deepa Joshi," she would say. "My daughter is at Panchgani International. We moved here recently from Navi Mumbai. Do you know anything about the Sahyadri Centre?"

The first three days produced nothing. The responses ranged from vague ("It's a hospital, no? For mental problems?") to evasive ("I've heard things but I don't know anything specific") to suspicious ("Why are you asking?"). Panchgani was a small town, and small towns protected their secrets the way immune systems protected bodies — by attacking anything foreign that probed too deeply.

On Friday, the notebook received its first entry.

Aai was at the vegetable market on the main road — a narrow lane of vendors selling tomatoes and onions and the particular hill-station produce that Panchgani was known for: strawberries, table grapes, mulberries, the seasonal abundance of a climate that could grow things that the plains could not. She was buying brinjals from a woman named Mangala — a Maratha woman in her fifties, dark-skinned, strong-armed, with the hands of a person who had been handling vegetables since before sunrise and who would continue handling them until the market closed at noon.

"The Centre?" Mangala said, her hands sorting brinjals by size, the practiced motion of a vendor who could assess produce by touch. "My nephew went there. Two years ago."

"What happened?"

Mangala's hands stopped. The brinjal — a purple-black one, glossy, the kind that would make good bharit — sat in her palm like a held breath.

"He was fifteen. Got into trouble at school — a fight, nothing serious. The police picked him up. The lady officer — the one with the sharp face — she came to my sister and said, 'Send him to the Centre for six months, or he faces charges.' My sister was scared. She is a widow. She earns ₹8,000 a month cleaning rooms at a hotel. She didn't know about lawyers. She didn't know about rights. She signed the form."

"What happened at the Centre?"

"He went in a boy who had been in one fight. He came out a boy who shook when he heard loud noises. He doesn't sleep well. He doesn't eat well. He was there for four months — they released him early, they said, for 'good behaviour.' But my sister says it was because they needed the bed for someone new."

"Did your sister file a complaint?"

"Complaint to whom? The police? The lady officer IS the police. The court? My sister can't afford a lawyer. She can't afford to miss a day of work. Filing a complaint means going to Wai, which means a day's wage lost, which means her children don't eat. This is how they work. They pick the people who can't fight back."

Aai wrote in the notebook. The blue cover. The red margin line. The handwriting that was round and careful — the handwriting of a woman who believed in records, who understood that the first step in dismantling a system was documenting its existence.

Entry 1: Mangala — vegetable vendor, main road market. Nephew (name?), 15 at time of admission, admitted Sahyadri Centre approx. 2 years ago. Admitted after minor school fight. SI Kamble facilitated. Mother (Mangala's sister) — widow, hotel cleaner, ₹8,000/month. Signed voluntary admission under pressure. Nephew released after 4 months. Reports trauma symptoms — sleep disturbance, noise sensitivity, appetite change. No complaint filed — financial and institutional barriers.

The second entry came on Saturday. And the third on Monday. And by the end of the second week, the notebook had seven entries — seven families, seven children, seven admissions to the Sahyadri Centre that followed the same pattern: a minor incident (a fight, a theft, truancy, a substance charge), police involvement (Kamble or a constable reporting to Kamble), the offer (rehabilitation at the Centre as alternative to charges), the admission (signed under pressure by parents who were too frightened or too poor or too uninformed to refuse), and the aftermath (children who came out changed — quieter, more anxious, some on medication that their families could not afford to continue and could not afford to stop).

The pattern was not identical in every case — the incidents varied, the duration of admission varied, the severity of the aftermath varied — but the structure was the same, the way a building's floor plan is the same even when the furniture changes. The structure was: identify a vulnerable young person, create or magnify a legal problem, offer the Centre as the solution, admit the young person, and receive the government funding that the admission generated.

The funding was the key. Sushma-mavshi had explained it: the District Mental Health Programme allocated ₹15,000 per month per patient to the Centre. Seven entries in the notebook meant seven patients, meant ₹1,05,000 per month, meant ₹12,60,000 per year — from seven families alone. If the Centre had thirty patients, the annual funding was ₹54,00,000. Fifty-four lakhs. For a facility in a hill station where the operational costs — staff, food, utilities — were a fraction of that amount.

The difference between the funding and the costs was profit. The profit was shared — how, and between whom, was the question that Sushma-mavshi was building toward, the question whose answer would connect the Centre to the police station and the police station to the court and the court to the district administration and the district administration to the specific, documentable corruption that was the foundation of the Kamble sisters' operation.

"Your mother is extraordinary," Sushma-mavshi said on the phone, reviewing the notebook's entries. "Seven families in two weeks. I've been trying to build a case against facilities like this for years. Your mother walked into a vegetable market and found the evidence."

"She's a teacher," I said. "Teachers are the best investigators. They spend all day figuring out who copied whose homework."

Sushma-mavshi laughed — the first laugh I had heard from her, a sound that was brief and genuine and that suggested that underneath the steel tumbler and the Criminal Procedure Code, there was a woman who appreciated humour, even in the middle of a case that was not funny at all.

Meanwhile, I went to school.

This sounds simple. It was not. Going to school after an arrest was like going to school after a bomb — the landscape was the same but the experience of navigating it was different, because every interaction carried the weight of the knowledge that everyone had: the knowledge that Nishita Joshi, the transfer from Mumbai, had been arrested on a Saturday night with drugs in her car.

The school knew. Of course the school knew — twenty students had been present at the plateau, and twenty students had told twenty more, and by Monday morning, the entire student body of four hundred had the information, each retelling adding a layer of distortion until the story I heard reflected back to me was almost unrecognisable: I had been dealing drugs. I had been arrested at a rave. I had been found with "kilos" of cocaine. I was going to jail. I was already in jail and the person in school was a look-alike.

The whispers were audible. Indian schools whispered the way Indian kitchens cooked — with intensity, with flavor, with the conviction that the product was essential and that the process should be visible to anyone who cared to look. I walked through the corridors and felt the whispers like weather — a change in atmospheric pressure that I could detect but not control.

Carmela was my shield. She walked beside me with the protective energy of a girl who had decided that her friend was innocent and that anyone who believed otherwise could, in her words, "go and jump in the Krishna river." She corrected misinformation with the precision of a fact-checker, the ruthlessness of a debater, and the volume of a person who had grown up in a Goan family where conversations were conducted at decibel levels that other cultures reserved for emergencies.

"She was NOT dealing. She was at a bonfire. With all of us. The substance was PLANTED. If any of you had two brain cells to rub together, you would ask why a girl with no history, no motive, and no connection to any dealer would have a random bag of powder in her car. USE YOUR HEADS."

The speech, delivered in the canteen at lunch on Monday, did not convert everyone. But it converted enough — the students who knew me, the students who trusted Carmela, the students who understood that Panchgani was small enough for a police officer to have agendas and that those agendas did not always align with justice.

Aarav was my anchor. He did not make speeches. He did not correct whispers. He sat next to me in every class, walked with me through every corridor, stood with me at every break. The physical proximity was the message — the visual statement that Aarav Mane, the school's star cricketer, the boy whose name was on the honours board in gold paint, believed in me, and that his belief was not contingent on the court's verdict but was a settled fact, as certain as his batting average and as immovable as his jaw.

Purva Kadam — the ex-girlfriend, the jealous one, the one Carmela had warned me about — was, surprisingly, silent. She watched me with an expression that I could not decode — not hostility, not sympathy, something between them, the expression of a person who was processing information and had not yet decided what to do with it.

I did not approach her. I had enough on my plate.

The plate was: school, the hearing, the investigation, the notebook, the lawyer, the parents whose marriage was simultaneously in crisis and in ceasefire (the arrest had produced an unexpected consequence — my parents had united around the common enemy of Kamble, and the unity was functional if not emotional, the marriage's first collaboration in months), the boy who kissed my forehead every morning at the school gate and who texted good morning at 6:47 AM from a phone that was not impounded because he had not been arrested because the trap had been designed for me and not for him.

The plate was full. The plate was overflowing. But I was eating from it — one bite at a time, one day at a time, one entry in the notebook at a time — because the alternative to eating was starving, and I was not, despite everything, a girl who starved.

I was a girl who fought.

I had learned it from my mother. The schoolteacher. The woman with the notebook. The most dangerous thing in the world.