Chapter 13: Nishita

# Chapter 13: Nishita

## The Routine

The Centre operated on a schedule that was posted on the dining hall wall in laminated print, the lamination yellowed at the edges from age and humidity, the schedule itself unchanged — Gauri told me — since the facility's founding three years ago.

6:00 AM — Wake-up 6:30 AM — Morning hygiene 7:00 AM — Breakfast 8:00 AM — Morning group therapy 9:30 AM — Individual sessions (as scheduled) 11:00 AM — Vocational activity 12:30 PM — Lunch 1:30 PM — Rest period 3:00 PM — Afternoon activity (recreation/education) 5:00 PM — Evening group therapy 6:30 PM — Dinner 7:30 PM — Free time 9:00 PM — Lights out

The schedule was a cage made of hours. Every moment was accounted for. Every transition was supervised — a staff member appeared at each changeover, clipboard in hand, counting heads the way a shepherd counted sheep, the count not for the sheep's benefit but for the shepherd's, the numbers confirming that the flock was intact and that no one had wandered.

I learned the routine in two days. By the third day, I was performing it — the wake-up, the hygiene (cold water; the Centre's water heater worked intermittently, and the intermittence correlated suspiciously with Dr. Kamble's presence: hot water on days she was in the compound, cold on days she was not), the breakfast (idli on Monday Wednesday Friday, upma on Tuesday Thursday, poha on Saturday, nothing remarkable on Sunday — "nothing remarkable" being the staff's description of whatever the cook produced from the weekend's reduced supplies).

The group therapy sessions were the Centre's public face — the thing that visiting officials and inspecting authorities would be shown, the evidence that the facility was providing "therapeutic intervention" as mandated by the court order. The sessions were held in the therapy wing's group room — chairs in a circle, a whiteboard, a counsellor named Sonal who was twenty-six and who had a Master's in Clinical Psychology from a college in Pune that I later learned was not accredited, which meant that her degree was the educational equivalent of a decorative certificate: it hung on the wall and meant nothing.

Sonal ran the sessions with the earnest incompetence of a person who had been taught theory and not practice. "Let's talk about our feelings today," she would say, and the circle of twelve teenagers — ranging from fourteen to eighteen, admitted for offences ranging from truancy to theft to "behavioural problems" that were as vague as the diagnosis that accompanied them — would sit in the silence that followed the question, the silence of people who had learned that sharing feelings in this place was not therapeutic but diagnostic, that every word spoken in group was noted on the clipboard and added to the file and reviewed by Dr. Kamble, who decided, based on the file, whether a patient was "progressing" or "resistant."

"Resistant" was the word the Centre used for patients who did not comply. The word carried weight — the weight of a medical term that had been repurposed as a disciplinary one, the way "non-cooperative" had been repurposed from a diagnostic observation to a threat. Resistant patients were given additional sessions. Resistant patients had their free time reduced. Resistant patients were, in the most severe cases, moved to the third building.

Nobody talked about the third building. Gauri had warned me. The other patients confirmed, through the specific vocabulary of avoidance — the sudden silence when the building was visible from the courtyard, the redirected gaze, the change of subject — that the third building was the Centre's dark room, the place where the schedule's symmetry broke and the routine's predictability ended.

I did not ask about the third building. I filed the avoidance. I performed the routine. I attended the group sessions and said enough to be classified as "cooperative" and not enough to be classified as "insightful," because insight, in Sonal's framework, meant vulnerability, and vulnerability, in the Centre's economy, was currency that could be used against you.

---

My individual sessions were with Dr. Kamble herself.

Every Tuesday and Friday, 9:30 AM, the head psychiatrist's office. The mahogany desk between us. The leather chair on her side, the plastic chair on mine — the furniture's asymmetry a physical expression of the power differential that the session was designed to reinforce.

Dr. Kamble was good. This was the terrifying part — she was good at what she did, the way a con artist was good, the way a manipulator was good, the way anyone who had spent years perfecting a skill was good at deploying it. She asked questions that sounded therapeutic and were actually investigative. She listened with the posture of empathy and the intention of assessment. She noted my responses not for their emotional content but for their strategic value — what I knew, who I had told, whether I was the kind of patient who would be silent or the kind who would cause problems.

"Tell me about your family, Nishita."

"My parents are supportive. My mother visits every week. My father works at the bank."

"And your relationship with your father? How would you describe it?"

"Normal."

"Normal is a broad word. Can you be more specific?"

I could be specific. I could tell her about the texts and the colleague and the 1 AM departures and the move to Panchgani that was supposed to fix everything and fixed nothing. I could give her the specific vulnerability that she was mining for — the family dysfunction that could be documented, interpreted, pathologised, turned into a diagnosis that justified extended treatment and extended treatment that justified continued funding.

"Normal means normal. We have a good relationship."

"Your file indicates that your family relocated from Navi Mumbai due to your father's transfer. Was this a difficult transition?"

"It was fine."

"Fine is also a broad word."

"Fine means fine. I adjusted. I made friends. I liked my school."

Dr. Kamble wrote in the file. The pen moved with the precision of a person whose writing was both clinical and creative — the notes that would shape the narrative, the narrative that would shape the diagnosis, the diagnosis that would shape my stay.

"And the substance that was found in your vehicle? Can you tell me about your relationship with substances?"

"I don't have a relationship with substances. The substance was planted."

"By whom?"

"By your sister."

The sentence left my mouth before the calculation caught up with the impulse. The sentence was the truth and the truth was dangerous and I had just handed the Centre's head psychiatrist the information that I was not cooperative, not compliant, not the kind of patient who would serve her six months quietly and generate her ₹15,000 per month without complication.

Dr. Kamble's pen stopped. The cessation was brief — the duration of a recalculation, the time it took for the professional mask to absorb the impact and reassemble.

"That's a very serious accusation, Nishita."

"It's a very serious situation."

"I understand that you're angry. Anger is a natural response to—"

"I'm not angry. I'm accurate. The substance was planted by Sub-Inspector Kamble. The arrest was fabricated. The court order was the result of a process that your sister initiated and that you benefit from. I'm here because my admission generates government funding for your facility. I am not a patient. I am a revenue stream."

The silence that followed was the silence of a room where something had been said that could not be unsaid — the structural silence, the silence of a foundation being tested by a load it was not designed to bear.

Dr. Kamble closed the file. Placed the pen on the desk. Folded her hands — the professional gesture, the gesture of a person who was about to deliver a statement rather than ask a question.

"Nishita. I am going to note in your file that you are experiencing paranoid ideation. This is not a punishment — it is a clinical observation. Paranoid ideation is common in adolescents under stress, and your situation — the arrest, the court order, the separation from your family — is a significant stressor. I am going to recommend additional therapy sessions and a psychiatric evaluation for possible medication."

The words were delivered with the warmth of a doctor prescribing treatment and the precision of a threat disguised as care. The message was clear: accuse us, and we will diagnose you. Speak the truth, and we will medicate you. Fight, and we will document your fight as a symptom.

"I don't need medication."

"That will be determined by the evaluation."

"I want to speak to my mother."

"Phone privileges are on Sundays, 4 to 5 PM. You know the schedule."

"I want to speak to my lawyer."

"Your lawyer can visit during approved visiting hours. Tuesdays and Saturdays, 10 AM to noon."

I stood. The plastic chair scraped the floor — the sound of a body in motion, a body that was not willing to remain seated while its autonomy was being dismantled.

"Sit down, Nishita."

I did not sit. I stood in the office of the woman who was keeping me in this place and looked at the framed degrees on the wall — the MBBS, the MD, the Fellowship — and thought: these degrees are real. The medicine is real. The authority is real. And the abuse of all three is also real, and it is happening in this room, in this compound, behind the concertina wire, to me and to Gauri and to every other child whose file sits in that cabinet.

"I'm going to my room," I said.

"Nishita—"

"I'm going to my room. I am cooperative. I attend therapy. I follow the schedule. But I am not going to sit here and let you write lies in my file and call them diagnoses."

I left. The door closed behind me. The corridor was empty — the other patients were in vocational activity, the staff were in the admin office, the compound was in the mid-morning lull that existed between the schedule's mandated events.

I walked to Room 4. Sat on Bed 2. Looked at the window — the boundary wall, the wire, the sky.

The sky was blue. The same blue. Always the same blue. The blue that did not care.

Gauri came in at 11:30 — the vocational activity ending, the patients returning to the dorms for the brief interval before lunch. She saw my face and sat on Bed 3 without asking what had happened, because Gauri had been here for five months and she knew what individual sessions with Dr. Kamble produced: the particular expression of a person who had been told that their truth was a symptom.

"She diagnosed you," Gauri said. Not a question.

"Paranoid ideation."

Gauri nodded. The nod of a girl who had received her own diagnosis — "adjustment disorder with mixed disturbance of emotions and conduct," a diagnosis that sounded clinical and meant, in translation, "a child who was admitted to a facility she doesn't need and who is unhappy about it" — and who understood that the diagnoses were not medicine but accounting, each one a line item in the Centre's financial justification.

"Don't let them medicate you," she said. "The pills they give — I don't know what they are. The labels say one thing. The effects feel like another. Two of the girls in Room 6 take them. They sleep fourteen hours a day. They don't talk. They don't react. They're not better. They're quieter. And quieter is what the Centre wants."

"How do I refuse?"

"You can't refuse directly. If you refuse, they note it as non-compliance, and non-compliance leads to the third building. So you accept the prescription, you take the pill at med time, and you hold it under your tongue. When the staff moves to the next patient, you spit it into your hand and flush it later. The pills dissolve slowly — you have about forty seconds before the taste becomes unbearable."

The technique was specific. The technique was the knowledge of a girl who had been in this place for five months and who had developed survival strategies with the methodical precision of a prisoner of war — which, I was beginning to understand, was not a metaphor but a description.

"Thank you, Gauri."

"Don't thank me. Help me. Help all of us. Your mother is doing something — I heard the staff talking. She's been going to families. She's collecting information. If she's building a case, she needs what's inside this compound. She needs the files. The medication records. The admission documents. She needs proof."

"I'll get it."

The promise was made on a bed in a room with a lock on the outside of the door, by a seventeen-year-old girl who had been arrested for a crime she did not commit and who was now inside the facility that had been the destination all along, and the promise was not strategic or calculated or the product of a plan. The promise was the thing that happens when a person who has been pushed to the wall discovers that the wall is not the end but the beginning — the beginning of the fight that the wall was designed to prevent.

I would get the proof. I would get the files. I would find what was in the third building.

And I would burn the Kamble sisters' operation to the ground.

The promise sat in the room like a lit match. Small. Bright. Waiting for fuel.

The fuel would come.