Chapter 5: Nishita

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# Chapter 5: Nishita

## The Incident

The incident happened on a Wednesday, six weeks after I arrived in Panchgani, and it began with something so small that I almost did not record it — the way catastrophes begin, not with thunder but with a shift in air pressure that only the instruments notice.

I was driving home from school. Aai had stopped doing the morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up in the third week — the cottage was a seven-minute drive from the school, the road was a single lane with almost no traffic, and the Dzire was available because Baba had started taking the MSRTC bus to the Panchgani branch, a decision that my mother described as "economical" and that I understood was punitive, a small withdrawal of shared resources that was part of the ongoing negotiation of a marriage in trouble.

The Dzire was mine between 3 PM and 6 PM. I drove to school in the morning, parked in the visitors' lot (the school did not have a student lot because most students were boarders and the day scholars were, in the institution's gentle hierarchy, a tolerated minority), and drove home in the afternoon. The route was simple: school gate, eucalyptus road, left on Mahabaleshwar Road, seven minutes, cottage.

On this Wednesday, I took a detour. The detour was Aarav's fault — he had mentioned a strawberry farm on the Wai road that sold fresh cream strawberries directly from the field, and I had been thinking about strawberries since lunch, the way you think about something that someone you like has described with enthusiasm: not because of the thing itself but because of the person's voice while describing it.

The Wai road was quieter than the Mahabaleshwar Road — narrower, less maintained, running through agricultural land where strawberry beds and table grapes occupied terraced fields on both sides. The road curved through the landscape with the gentle logic of a path that had been a footpath before it was a road, following the contour of the hillside rather than cutting through it.

I was on this road, driving slowly — the Dzire's suspension protested the potholes with the mechanical indignation of a car designed for city streets encountering rural infrastructure — when I saw it.

A police Bolero, parked on the shoulder. Not unusual — police vehicles in Panchgani were a common sight, especially on the Wai road, where the highway patrol maintained a presence for reasons that were either traffic enforcement or the collection of informal revenue from truck drivers, depending on who you asked.

What was unusual was the woman standing next to the Bolero.

She was in uniform — khaki, the Maharashtra Police standard, with the insignia of a sub-inspector on her shoulders. She was compact — shorter than me, but with the muscular density of someone who had trained her body to be a tool rather than an ornament. Her face was angular, the cheekbones prominent, the jaw sharp, and her eyes had the particular quality of eyes that assessed everything and revealed nothing — the eyes of a person who had learned, through practice or temperament, to keep the calculation internal.

She was watching me. Not glancing — watching. The kind of watching that had a direction and an intensity, the visual equivalent of someone pointing.

I drove past her. Checked the rearview mirror. She was still watching. The Bolero's engine was running — I could see the exhaust in the cool air — and her hand was on the vehicle's door, as if she were deciding whether to get in and follow.

She did not follow. I drove on. Found the strawberry farm — Patil Strawberry Farm, a hand-painted sign on a wooden post, the fields visible from the road, the strawberries red against the brown earth. I bought a box. The strawberries were extraordinary — the firm, sweet, almost painful sweetness of a fruit picked that morning, the flesh dense and the flavour concentrated by the altitude and the cool nights and the specific terroir of the Western Ghats. I ate three in the car, the juice running down my chin, and drove home.

I did not think about the police woman again until Thursday.

On Thursday, I drove home on the Mahabaleshwar Road — the usual route, no detour, no strawberries. I was on the stretch between the school and the cottage — the stretch that was residential, quiet, lined with cottages and guesthouses and the occasional heritage bungalow that had been converted into a boutique hotel — when the Bolero appeared behind me.

It was the same vehicle. The same woman. She was driving, alone, and she was following me with the patient proximity of someone who was not in a hurry and who wanted me to know she was there.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel. The plastic was warm from the afternoon sun, and my palms left damp prints on its surface — the physiological signature of fear, the sweat that the body produces when the brain detects a threat that the conscious mind has not yet processed.

The Bolero followed me for two kilometres. It maintained a distance of approximately thirty metres — close enough to be visible in the rearview mirror, far enough to be deniable. When I turned onto the lane that led to the cottage, the Bolero did not follow. It continued on the Mahabaleshwar Road, and I watched it disappear around the curve with the specific relief of a person who has been watched and has stopped being watched and does not know why either state existed.

I told no one. I did not tell my mother because my mother was managing enough — the new job at the Panchgani branch of the school where she was now teaching Standard 8 Science, the commute, the silence with my father that had hardened from uncomfortable to structural, the daily effort of maintaining a household in a new town with a husband who was physically present and emotionally elsewhere. I did not tell Aarav because telling Aarav would require explaining the detour on the Wai road, and explaining the detour would require explaining why I was on the Wai road, and explaining why I was on the Wai road would lead, inevitably, to the strawberries, and the strawberries would lead to him, and I was not ready to follow that path to its destination.

I told myself it was nothing. Police officers drove on roads. Police officers looked at cars. The coincidence of the same officer on two consecutive days was exactly that — coincidence, the kind of pattern that the human brain manufactured from random data because the brain was designed to detect threats even where none existed.

I was wrong.

Friday. The vada pav cart. 3:15 PM.

I was eating. Aarav was eating. Carmela was drinking chai from the chai stall next to Dhondu's cart — a stall run by a man named Ganpat who made chai with the particular Marathi intensity of someone who believed that tea should be strong enough to make decisions on your behalf.

My phone buzzed. Unknown number.

You recorded something on your phone yesterday. I know what you saw. We need to talk.

The message made no sense. I had not recorded anything. I had not seen anything — I had driven home, eaten strawberries, done homework, argued with my father about the Wi-Fi password (he had changed it without telling us, which Aai interpreted as a passive-aggressive boundary and I interpreted as forgetfulness), and gone to bed.

I stared at the message. The green chat bubble on the white screen. The unknown number. The words that meant nothing and that felt, despite meaning nothing, like the first stone of an avalanche.

"What's wrong?" Aarav asked. He had the sensitivity of an antenna — he detected changes in the people around him the way seismographs detected tremors, the needle moving before the earth did.

"Nothing. Wrong number." I locked the phone. Put it in my pocket. Ate the rest of the vada pav without tasting it, which was a crime against Dhondu's art but which was the inevitable consequence of eating while afraid.

That evening, at the cottage, another message. Same number.

I'm Sub-Inspector Kamble, Panchgani Police Station. You were on the Wai road on Wednesday. Your vehicle was spotted near a restricted area. This is an official inquiry. Please respond.

I did not respond. The restricted area claim was nonsensical — the strawberry farm was not restricted, the road was public, and the only thing I had done on the Wai road was buy fruit and eat it in my car. But the message was official. A sub-inspector. The name Kamble — a Maratha surname, common in Maharashtra's police force, carrying the institutional weight of the state's law enforcement apparatus.

I Googled "Panchgani Police Station." Found the number. Found the staff list. Found Sub-Inspector R. Kamble — the woman in the khaki uniform, the angular face, the assessing eyes. Her photograph on the police station's website showed her in formal pose, the uniform pressed, the insignia visible, the face arranged in the expression of institutional authority that police officers adopted for official photographs.

She was real. The inquiry was real. And I had no idea what she wanted.

I did not sleep well that night. The mango tree outside my window moved in the wind, its leaves casting shadows on the wall that looked, in the particular paranoia of 2 AM, like hands reaching.

On the nightstand, my phone sat in the charger's cradle, the screen dark, the unknown number stored in its memory.

Sub-Inspector Kamble.

I did not know then what she was. I did not know about the Sahyadri Centre, or the patients, or the system that she and her sister — Dr. Kamble, the Centre's head psychiatrist — had built together, the system that required a steady supply of new admissions and that targeted the vulnerable and the alone and the young.

I did not know that I was being selected.

But the selection had begun.