Chapter 14: Nishita

# Chapter 14: Nishita

## The Third Building

I went to the third building on a Tuesday night, eleven days after my admission, during the thirty-minute window between lights-out and the night staff's first round.

The window existed because of mathematics. The night staff — two people, a male orderly named Bharat and a female nurse named Sunanda — were responsible for monitoring three buildings and twenty-four patients. Their rounds followed a pattern that I had observed over eleven nights, lying in Bed 2 with my eyes closed and my ears open, tracking the footsteps: Room 1 at 9:15, Room 2 at 9:18, Room 3 at 9:21, Room 4 at 9:24, Room 5 at 9:27, Room 6 at 9:30, then the therapy wing (empty at night, but checked because procedure required it), then the admin building (also checked), then back to the staff room for chai, then the second round at 10:00.

The gap between 9:30 and 10:00 was thirty minutes. Thirty minutes during which no one was in the dormitory corridor. Thirty minutes during which the courtyard was dark — the compound's lights were turned off at 9 PM to save electricity, a cost-cutting measure that Dr. Kamble had implemented and that was now, inadvertently, my ally.

Gauri was awake. She was always awake at this hour — the sleep disturbance that she attributed to the Centre and that the Centre attributed to her "adjustment disorder," the circular logic of an institution that caused the symptoms it diagnosed.

"Don't," she whispered.

"I have to."

"If they catch you—"

"They won't catch me. Thirty minutes. I've timed it."

"The third building is locked."

"I know. But the lock is a padlock on a hasp. The hasp is screwed into wood. The wood is old. I've been looking at it from the courtyard for eleven days."

Gauri was silent. The silence of a girl who understood that the person next to her had made a decision and that the decision was not open to discussion, only to support.

"Be careful," she said.

I slipped out of bed. The grey salwar kameez — I slept in it because changing clothes in the dark was an unnecessary complication — was wrinkled but functional. My feet were bare. The floor was cold — the red oxide that was standard in Maharashtra's institutional buildings, the temperature a function of the altitude and the hour and the season. July in Panchgani was monsoon season, and the nights were cold enough to see your breath if the light were on, which it was not.

The corridor was dark. The dormitory doors did not lock from inside — only from outside, a detail that I had filed on Day One and that was now useful: I could leave the room without unlocking anything, without making the sound that a lock made when it turned, without leaving the auditory evidence of departure.

The staircase. Down. Each step placed on the outer edge, where the wood was supported by the wall and where the creaking was minimal — a technique I had learned from Tejas, who had spent six years sneaking out of the school dormitory and who had developed a biomechanical theory of staircase navigation that included specific foot placement angles for each type of wood. I had not anticipated, when Tejas explained his theory over vada pav, that I would be applying it in a psychiatric facility while evading night staff. Life was full of unexpected applications of knowledge.

The ground floor. The dining hall was to the left, the admin office to the right, the main door straight ahead. The main door was locked — the night lock, the heavy one, the lock that said you are not leaving. But I was not going to the main door. I was going to the side exit — a door in the dining hall that opened onto the courtyard, a door that was not locked because the courtyard was inside the compound and the compound was surrounded by the wall and the wire and the guard at the gate, and the logic of the security was perimeter-based rather than internal, which meant that once you were inside the perimeter, the internal doors were not considered threats.

The courtyard. Dark. The neem tree was a shape against the sky — the sky overcast, the monsoon clouds low, the air wet with the humidity that preceded rain. The third building was twenty metres away, across the courtyard, behind the neem tree, the distance both short and enormous — short in metres, enormous in risk.

I crossed the courtyard. The ground was gravel — the small stones pressed into my bare feet with the specific discomfort of a surface designed for shoes, each stone a point of pressure that I felt individually, the way you feel things when your senses are heightened by fear. The gravel did not crunch — I walked slowly enough that each foot placement was controlled, the weight distributed, the stones shifting but not grinding.

The third building. Up close, it was smaller than it appeared from the dormitory window — a single-storey structure, the walls whitewashed, the whitewash peeling in patches that looked like continents on a map. The roof was corrugated tin — the standard roofing of rural Maharashtra, the tin that amplified rain into a percussion and that was, tonight, silent under the overcast sky.

The door was on the building's north side, facing away from the dormitory, invisible from the rooms above. The padlock was as I had observed — a standard steel padlock on a hasp that was screwed into a wooden door frame. The wood was old — the grain dark, the surface soft with age and moisture, the screws sitting in holes that had been widened by years of thermal expansion and contraction.

I did not have tools. I had my fingers and the hairpin that I had extracted from my braid — the metal pin that held the braid's end, a pin that was thin, flexible, and strong enough to serve as a lever if the leverage point was correct.

The hasp. Two screws, each about an inch long, in wood that was soft. I worked the hairpin's point under the hasp's edge — the metal between the hasp and the wood, the gap wide enough for the pin's width — and levered. The screw turned. Not much — a quarter-turn, maybe less — but the movement confirmed that the wood's grip on the screw was compromised, that the years of monsoon and sun had done the work that I could not do with brute force.

Three minutes per screw. The first screw came out with a final quarter-turn that my fingers completed, the thread releasing from the wood with the soft sound of surrender. The second screw followed. The hasp hung loose. The padlock, still locked, hung on the hasp like a decoration — locked to nothing, securing nothing, the security system defeated by weather and time and a hairpin.

I opened the door.

---

The smell hit first. Not the compound's confinement smell — something sharper, more chemical. The smell of cleaning products layered over the smell of something organic, the smell of a place that was cleaned frequently and thoroughly because the thing being cleaned was not ordinary.

The building was one room. The room was divided by a curtain — a heavy curtain, the kind used in hospitals to separate beds, hung from a ceiling-mounted track. On one side of the curtain: two beds, the institutional kind, with metal frames and thin mattresses. Straps on the beds — leather straps at the wrist positions and the ankle positions, buckled, the leather worn smooth by use. An IV stand next to each bed, the metal pole gleaming dully in the dim light that came through the room's single window — a window that was barred, the bars casting parallel shadows on the floor.

On the other side of the curtain: a desk. A filing cabinet. A refrigerator — the small kind, the kind used in laboratories and pharmacies, the kind that hummed with the particular frequency of a compressor keeping something cold.

I opened the refrigerator. The light inside was blue — the blue of cold, the blue of preservation. The shelves held vials. Twenty, maybe thirty vials, each labeled with a handwritten sticker: a name, a date, a dosage. I read the labels. The names were patient names — I recognised three: Gauri Shinde, Mehak Ansari (a girl from Room 6 who slept fourteen hours a day), Rohit Gaikwad (a boy from Room 2 who had been at the Centre for eight months and who spoke in monosyllables and moved with the underwater slowness of a person who was medicated beyond function).

The dosages were numbers that meant nothing to me — 5mg, 10mg, 20mg, the medical shorthand that required context to interpret. The drug names were abbreviated: HLP, OLZ, RIS. I did not know what these abbreviations meant. I photographed them — not with a phone, because my phone was impounded, but with the camera in my mind, the mental photograph that I would transcribe later, the names and numbers burned into my memory with the intensity of a person who understood that what she was seeing was evidence.

The filing cabinet. Three drawers. The drawers were locked — a different lock, a small key-operated lock, the kind that required a key I did not have. But the top drawer's lock was broken — the mechanism jammed, the keyhole blocked by something that had been inserted and broken off, the evidence of a previous attempt by a previous person who had been in this room and who had tried to access the files and who had failed but who had left the lock damaged enough that the drawer could be opened with force.

I opened the drawer. Files. Patient files — the thick Manila folders that Indian institutions used, each one labelled with a name and an admission number and a date. I pulled three at random. Opened them.

The files contained admission documents, medical histories, treatment plans, and billing records. The billing records were the revelation. Each file had a billing section that listed the monthly claims submitted to the District Mental Health Programme: ₹15,000 per month per patient, as Sushma-mavshi had described. But the billing section also listed additional claims — "supplementary treatment charges" of ₹5,000 to ₹8,000 per month, "medication costs" that were itemised at rates three to four times the market price of the drugs listed, "specialist consultation fees" for consultations that, based on the dates and the fact that the Centre had no specialists on staff other than Dr. Kamble, could not have occurred.

The total billing per patient was not ₹15,000 per month. It was ₹25,000 to ₹30,000 per month. For twenty-four patients, the Centre was billing the government between ₹6,00,000 and ₹7,20,000 per month — ₹72,00,000 to ₹86,40,000 per year. Seventy-two to eighty-six lakhs. Per year. For a facility whose actual operational costs, based on the food quality and the staff count and the water heater that worked intermittently, could not have been more than twenty lakhs.

The difference — fifty to sixty lakhs per year — was the Kamble sisters' profit.

I memorised what I could. Three file names. Six billing figures. The drug abbreviations. The strap marks on the beds. The refrigerator's contents. The room's layout. Every detail a stone in the foundation of the case that my mother was building outside the wall and that I was now building inside it.

I closed the files. Closed the drawer. Closed the refrigerator. Stood in the room and looked at the beds with their straps and the IV stands and the curtain that divided the room into the part that was visible and the part that was hidden, and I understood what the third building was.

It was not storage. It was not maintenance.

It was the place where the Centre's most resistant patients were taken. The place where the medication was administered not by mouth but by IV. The place where the straps held wrists and ankles to the bed frame while the drugs — whatever HLP and OLZ and RIS were — entered the bloodstream with the slow, cold efficiency of a drip.

It was the punishment room. The quiet room. The room where compliance was manufactured by chemistry and restraint.

I left the building. Replaced the hasp — the screws pressed back into their holes, the wood grip enough to hold them in place, the padlock hanging on the hasp as if nothing had been disturbed. The hairpin went back into my braid. The courtyard was still dark. The neem tree was still a shape against the sky.

I crossed the gravel. Entered the dining hall. Climbed the staircase — outer edges, minimal creaking, Tejas's biomechanical theory in practice. The corridor. Room 4. Bed 2.

9:56. Four minutes before the second round.

I lay in bed. My heart was beating in a pattern that was not its normal pattern — faster, harder, the cardiac rhythm of a body that had been in danger and that was now processing the danger retroactively, the adrenaline arriving after the fact like a fire engine arriving after the fire.

"Well?" Gauri whispered.

"I know what's in there."

"What?"

I told her. The beds. The straps. The drugs. The billing records. The profit. The architecture of the system that had been built to process them — not as patients but as products, not as children but as revenue, each admission a line item, each diagnosis a justification, each month of confinement a payment that flowed from the government's coffers to the Kamble sisters' accounts.

Gauri was silent for a long time. The silence of a girl who had suspected and was now confirmed, the silence of a person whose fear had been validated by evidence.

"What do we do?" she asked.

"We get the information out. To my mother. To the lawyer. The next visiting day — Saturday — I'll tell them everything."

"They monitor the visits. The staff sits in the room. They listen."

"Then I'll write it. Small notes. Hidden. My mother will know to look for them."

"And if they find the notes?"

"Then I'll memorise it. And I'll speak it. In code, if necessary. My mother is a teacher. She taught me to read. She taught me to write. She can teach me to communicate in a room full of listeners without the listeners understanding."

The plan was imperfect. The plan was the plan of a seventeen-year-old girl lying in a bed in a facility that was not what it claimed to be, and the plan's imperfection was its strength, because imperfect plans were human plans, and human plans adapted, and adaptation was the thing that the Kamble sisters' system — rigid, procedural, dependent on compliance — could not accommodate.

I closed my eyes. The monsoon rain began — the first drops on the corrugated tin roof, the sound building from individual taps to a continuous percussion, the rain's rhythm filling the room with the white noise that was, in this place, the closest thing to peace.

The rain fell on the compound. On the dormitory. On the therapy wing. On the third building, where the beds with straps waited in the dark and the refrigerator hummed its cold blue hum.

The rain did not distinguish between the buildings. The rain fell equally on all of them.

But I would not be equal. I would not be quiet. I would not be compliant.

I would be the thing that the system had not anticipated: a patient who was also a witness. A girl who was also a weapon. A revenue stream that was also a fire.

The rain fell.

I slept.

And in the morning, I began to fight.