Chapter 15: Nishita

# Chapter 15: Nishita

## The Visit

Saturday. Visiting hours. 10 AM to noon.

The visiting room was on the ground floor of the main building — a room that had been designed, or perhaps redesigned, for the specific purpose of supervised interaction between patients and their families. The furniture was arranged to facilitate observation: four tables, each with two chairs on one side (visitors) and one chair on the other (patient), the spacing between tables wide enough for a staff member to walk through and close enough for a staff member to hear.

The staff member today was Sunanda — the night nurse, pulled onto day duty because the Centre was understaffed in the way that underfunded institutions were always understaffed, the gaps filled by the same people working double shifts and developing the particular exhaustion of a workforce that was too small for its mandate. Sunanda sat at a desk near the door, a register open in front of her, the register in which she noted the arrival and departure times of visitors and, I suspected, the content of conversations that she could overhear.

My mother arrived at 10:03. My father was not with her — he was at the bank, the Saturday half-day that ICICI mandated, the half-day that was the difference between a family's full presence and a family's partial presence, the difference that institutions exploited because partial presence was easier to manage than full presence.

Aai sat across from me. She was wearing the blue salwar kameez — the good one, the one she wore to parent-teacher meetings and temple visits and occasions that required composure, the outfit that was her armour the way the uniform was Kamble's. Her hair was oiled and braided — the Maharashtrian mother's preparation for a visit, the grooming that communicated to the staff and the institution and anyone watching: this is a mother who cares, who is present, who is not the kind of mother whose child should be in this place.

"How are you?" she asked. The question was performative — asked at a volume and with an expression designed for Sunanda's register, the surface layer of a conversation that would operate on two levels.

"I'm fine, Aai. The food is okay. The schedule is strict but manageable." Surface. Register-appropriate. The kind of answer that a cooperative patient gave to a visiting mother in the presence of a note-taking nurse.

Aai reached across the table and held my hands. The contact was physical and communicative — her thumbs pressing into my palms with a rhythm that was not random. She was squeezing. Three squeezes, then a pause, then two squeezes, then a pause. The pattern was not Morse code — it was simpler, older, the code that she had used when I was a child and they had played the guessing game in the car on long drives: three squeezes for "yes," two for "no," one long squeeze for "tell me more."

I squeezed back. Three. Yes, I have something.

She opened her bag. Brought out a tiffin — the steel tiffin that every Indian mother brought to every institutional visit, the tiffin that was simultaneously a container of food and a statement of love, the physical object that said: the food here is not enough, I am supplementing it, I am still feeding you even though you are not at my table. She opened the tiffin. Inside: poha. My mother's poha — with kanda and curry leaves and the particular ratio of turmeric to peanuts that she had perfected over twenty years and that my father had attempted every Sunday morning and had never matched.

Under the poha, wrapped in cling film, folded into a square the size of a postage stamp: a note. My mother had placed a note under the food, the cling film preventing the poha's oil from staining the paper, the paper invisible under the yellow of the turmeric and the green of the curry leaves.

I ate the poha. Slowly. With the deliberation of a girl who was savouring her mother's cooking and who was also, under the table, extracting the note from the cling film and transferring it from the tiffin to the waistband of her salwar, the transfer accomplished in the three-second window during which I lifted the tiffin to scrape the last of the poha from the bottom, the lifting obscuring my hands from Sunanda's line of sight.

The note was in my waistband. The poha was eaten. Aai's face showed nothing — the schoolteacher's composure, the face that could watch a student cheat on an exam and betray no awareness until the exam was over and the consequences were private.

"Sushma-mavshi sends her regards," Aai said. "She's working on the appeal. The hearing is in three weeks."

"Three weeks." I let the disappointment show — because the disappointment was real, and because showing it was consistent with the cooperative-patient performance, the performance that expected hope and received delay.

"She's thorough. She wants the case to be complete. She says—" Aai paused. The pause was loaded. "She says she needs the numbers. The specific numbers. From the annual report. The ones that don't match."

The sentence was the second layer. The surface said: the lawyer needs information from public documents. The depth said: I need the billing figures from the files. The numbers that don't match are the fraudulent claims. Get me the specifics.

"I'll see if I can find the annual report," I said. "The library here has some administrative documents."

The library did not have administrative documents. But the third building had a filing cabinet, and the filing cabinet had the billing records, and the billing records had the numbers that Sushma-mavshi needed.

"Good girl." Aai squeezed my hands again. Three. Yes.

Sunanda looked up from the register. The look was brief — the duration of a surveillance sweep, the eyes moving from the register to the table to the hands to the face and back to the register. The look found nothing. Two women holding hands. A mother visiting a daughter. The tiffin empty, the poha eaten, the conversation about lawyers and appeals and administrative reports.

Nothing suspicious. Everything the system expected.

---

After the visit, in Room 4, I read the note.

Aai's handwriting. Small. Careful. The handwriting of a woman who understood that the note had to be small enough to hide and legible enough to read and that these were competing requirements that demanded the precision of a person accustomed to writing on blackboards for the benefit of students at the back of the classroom.

N — Seven families now. Sushma filing PIL (Public Interest Litigation) in Bombay High Court. Need: (1) Billing amounts per patient per month — exact figures. (2) Drug names and dosages from medication records. (3) Names and admission dates of patients currently held. (4) Any evidence of restraint use — photographs if possible. Aarav is fine. Misses you. Visits next Saturday. Be careful. Aai.

The note was an assignment. The teacher assigning homework. The mother assigning survival.

I memorised it. Read it three times, each reading burning the words deeper, the neural pathways strengthening with repetition the way Mrs. Ghoshal said integration strengthened with practice — "Do it until the formula is not something you remember but something you are."

I tore the note into pieces the size of rice grains. Flushed the pieces in the bathroom. Watched the paper dissolve in the water, the words disappearing, the information now existing only inside my skull, in the specific, portable, unsearchable storage of human memory.

---

The second trip to the third building was easier than the first.

Same window. Same route. Same gravel, same neem tree, same hasp with its compromised screws. Tuesday night, 9:32 PM, the four-minute gap before the second round.

This time, I was prepared. I had a stub of pencil — stolen from the vocational activity room, where the Centre provided coloured pencils for the art therapy sessions that Sonal ran with the same earnest incompetence as her group therapy, the sessions producing drawings that were assessed for "psychological content" and filed in the patients' records as evidence of pathology or progress. The pencil was blunt but functional. I had paper — torn from the back of a textbook in the Centre's small library, the library that held thirty books, most of them donated, most of them irrelevant, the kind of library that existed as a checkbox on an inspection form rather than as a resource for residents.

The filing cabinet. The broken drawer. The files.

I worked quickly. The billing records first — the exact figures, transcribed onto the paper in the dim light from the barred window, the numbers small but clear: ₹15,000 base, ₹5,000 to ₹8,000 supplementary, ₹3,000 to ₹5,000 medication markup, total per patient per month ₹23,000 to ₹28,000. Twenty-four patients. Monthly billing: ₹5,52,000 to ₹6,72,000.

The drug names next. The abbreviations from the refrigerator vials, this time decoded — I had spent the week asking Gauri, who had asked Mehak (Room 6, the fourteen-hour sleeper), who had read the label on her own medication bottle before the bottle was confiscated: HLP was Haloperidol. OLZ was Olanzapine. RIS was Risperidone. Antipsychotics. All three. The medications prescribed to patients with diagnoses of schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, severe psychotic episodes — diagnoses that the Centre's patients did not have, because the Centre's patients were teenagers who had been admitted for truancy and fights and fabricated drug charges and who were being medicated with drugs designed for conditions that they did not possess.

The patient list. I copied names and admission dates from six files — the six I could reach in the broken drawer, the six that would have to represent the twenty-four until I could access the rest:

1. Gauri Shinde, admitted 12-02-2026, diagnosis: Adjustment Disorder with Mixed Disturbance 2. Mehak Ansari, admitted 03-11-2025, diagnosis: Oppositional Defiant Disorder 3. Rohit Gaikwad, admitted 17-10-2025, diagnosis: Conduct Disorder, Unspecified 4. Tanvi Bhalerao, admitted 08-01-2026, diagnosis: Substance Use Disorder (Cannabis) — NOTE: no positive drug test in file 5. Akash Pawar, admitted 22-03-2026, diagnosis: Intermittent Explosive Disorder 6. Snehal Jagtap, admitted 14-12-2025, diagnosis: Disruptive Mood Dysregulation Disorder

Six names. Six admission dates. Six diagnoses that were, based on what I had observed of these individuals over two weeks — Gauri who was anxious but functional, Mehak who was sedated into sleep, Rohit who was medicated into silence, Tanvi who was quietly furious, Akash who was scared, Snehal who spent every free moment doing maths problems in a notebook because maths was the one thing the Centre had not taken from her — six diagnoses that did not match the people carrying them.

The evidence of restraint. I looked at the beds again. The leather straps. The buckle marks on the leather — the impressions of tightening, the wear pattern of straps that had been used and tightened and used again. I could not photograph these without a camera. But I could describe them — the length of the straps, the position on the bed frame, the wear marks, the scuff marks on the bed's metal rails where someone restrained had pulled against the restraints, the metal showing bright scratches under the paint.

I wrote it all. The pencil moved on the paper with the urgency of a person who was both recording evidence and racing a clock, the thirty-minute window shrinking with every word, the second round approaching with the inevitability of a wave.

9:51. Nine minutes.

I closed the cabinet. Left the building. Replaced the hasp. Crossed the courtyard. Entered the dormitory. Climbed the stairs. Room 4. Bed 2.

9:55. Five minutes to spare. The margin was narrower than last time. The narrowing was concerning — the more evidence I gathered, the longer each trip took, and the longer each trip took, the closer I came to the edge of the window, the point where the mathematics failed and the night staff found an empty bed.

The paper was under my mattress. Not ideal — mattresses were the first place staff searched, if staff searched — but the only hiding place available in a room that contained four beds, one almirah, and nothing else. I would transfer the notes to the visiting room on Saturday, under the poha, under the cling film, the reverse of the delivery system that my mother had invented.

Teacher to student. Mother to daughter. The communication system of women who had been underestimated by a system that believed compliance could be manufactured by chemistry and confinement and the specific, institutional arrogance of people who controlled the locks and the schedules and the files.

The system had not anticipated my mother.

The system had not anticipated me.

The rain began again. The monsoon's persistence — the rain that fell every night in July, the rain that covered the courtyard in puddles and the tin roof in percussion and the compound in the specific atmosphere of a place that was wet and cold and confined, the atmosphere that was designed to reduce will and that was, for me, fuel.

Every drop on the tin roof was a countdown.

The appeal was in three weeks.

The evidence was under my mattress.

The fight was on.