Chapter 6: Nishita

# Chapter 6: Nishita

## The Setup

The setup was elegant. I say this without admiration — the way an engineer might describe a bridge that was beautifully designed but built to collapse. Sub-Inspector Reshma Kamble was an artist of entrapment, and her medium was vulnerability.

It started with the locker.

Monday morning. I arrived at school, walked to my locker in the Standard 12 corridor — locker 247, second row, between Carmela's 246 and a boy named Harsh Deshpande's 248 — and found it open. Not broken open — the lock was intact, the combination dial undisturbed — but the door was ajar, and the contents had been rearranged by someone who had either searched it or wanted me to believe it had been searched.

My books were still there. My pencil case. The extra dupatta I kept for when the air conditioning in the library was aggressive. But something was added: a note, handwritten, on a torn piece of notebook paper, the letters printed in block capitals.

I KNOW WHAT YOU SAW ON THE WAI ROAD. DON'T TELL ANYONE.

I stared at the note. The handwriting was anonymous — block capitals prevented identification, the paper was standard, the ink was blue ballpoint, the kind available at any stationery shop in Panchgani. The message was the same as the text — the insistence that I had "seen" something, that I possessed knowledge that I did not possess, that I was a witness to something that I had not witnessed.

"Hey." Carmela arrived, saw my face, recalibrated her morning greeting from cheerful to concerned. "What's wrong?"

I showed her the note.

Carmela read it. Her expression moved through the processing stages — confusion, concern, the particular hardening of features that indicated she was transitioning from observer to strategist. Carmela D'Souza did not panic. Carmela D'Souza assessed.

"Who could get into your locker?"

"I don't know. The combination is — I haven't given it to anyone."

"The school office has master codes. Teachers, peons, the admin. But they wouldn't leave a note like this."

"Someone's messing with me."

"Or someone wants you to think you saw something you didn't, so that when you're asked about it, you're already confused."

The analysis was sharp. Carmela's intelligence was the kind that flourished in the specific conditions of boarding school — where privacy was limited, information was currency, and the ability to read situations accurately was a survival skill.

I folded the note. Put it in my bag. Went to class. Tried to concentrate on Mrs. Ghoshal's integration lesson and failed, because the note occupied the part of my brain that was supposed to be integrating functions and was instead integrating fear.

---

The second piece of the setup arrived on Tuesday.

I was driving home — the usual route, Mahabaleshwar Road, seven minutes — when my phone buzzed in the holder on the dashboard. I did not check it while driving — the road was narrow, the curves were blind, and I had inherited my mother's conviction that checking a phone while driving was the vehicular equivalent of playing Russian roulette.

At the cottage, I checked. Same unknown number. Sub-Inspector Kamble.

Nishita Joshi, Class XII, Panchgani International School. Father: Bhushan Joshi, ICICI Bank. Mother: Deepa Joshi, teacher. Previous address: Shanti Heights, Sector 17, Vashi, Navi Mumbai. You were observed on the Wai road near the Sahyadri Centre perimeter on Wednesday. Security cameras have recorded your vehicle (MH-04-EX-7723). You are required to present yourself at Panchgani Police Station for a statement. Failure to comply will result in a formal summons.

The message was different. The previous messages had been vague — suggestions, implications, the language of someone testing the water. This was specific. My full name. My parents' names. My address. My vehicle number. The specificity was the point — it was not information gathering, it was information displaying. Kamble was showing me that she knew everything, that the asymmetry between us was total, that I was transparent and she was opaque.

The Sahyadri Centre perimeter. I had driven past the Centre on the Wai road — the building was visible from the road, a large structure on a hilltop, surrounded by a boundary wall that I had noticed without paying attention. I had not been "near the perimeter" in any meaningful sense. I had been on a public road. I had bought strawberries.

But the message reframed the geography. In Kamble's version, I was not a student driving on a public road. I was a person observed near a restricted area. The vehicle was not passing — it was "recorded." The language transformed innocence into suspicion, proximity into proximity to wrongdoing.

I did not go to the police station. I did not respond to the message. I put the phone down and made chai — the ritual of Indian crisis management, the boiling of water and milk and tea leaves and sugar as a physical response to emotional disruption. The chai was too sweet — I had added sugar without measuring, my hands shaking, the spoon depositing more than intended — and I drank it standing at the kitchen window, looking at the valley, the green hills turning grey in the evening light.

---

The third piece arrived on Wednesday. Not a message — a visit.

I was at the cottage. Aai was at school. Baba was at the bank. I was alone — the afternoon hour between school ending and parents arriving, the hour that was mine, that I usually spent doing homework or talking to Zoya on FaceTime or watching the mango tree's shadows move across the bedroom wall.

The doorbell rang. The bell was old — a mechanical bell, the kind with a button that activated a hammer inside a brass dome, producing a sound that was more clang than ring and that carried through the cottage's stone walls with a resonance that was audible in every room.

I opened the door. Sub-Inspector Kamble was standing on the veranda.

In person, she was smaller than she had appeared on the road. The uniform was pressed — the creases on the sleeves sharp enough to cut, the belt buckle polished, the shoes black and gleaming. Her hair was pulled back in a bun, the regulation style, tight enough to pull the skin at her temples. She wore no makeup except kajal — the black liner that accentuated her eyes and made the assessment in them more visible, the way a frame makes a painting more present.

"Nishita Joshi?" she said.

"Yes."

"Sub-Inspector Kamble. Panchgani Police Station. May I come in?"

The question was a formality — the kind of question that police officers asked when the answer was expected to be yes and when a no would be noted, filed, and used. I stepped aside. She entered the cottage.

She looked at the living room. The assessment was quick — the sweep of a person who catalogued environments professionally. The modest furniture (rented, the landlord's selection, the aesthetic of a retired government servant who favoured teak and floral upholstery). The family photographs on the shelf (Aai and Baba's wedding, my Standard 10 graduation, the Vashi flat's Ganpati celebration). The stack of textbooks on the dining table. The chai cup I had left on the kitchen counter.

"You live with both parents?"

"Yes."

"Father is ICICI Bank? Branch manager?"

"Yes."

"Mother is a teacher? Panchgani Municipal School?"

"Yes."

The questions were not questions — they were confirmations. She already knew the answers. The questions were for my benefit, to demonstrate that she had already done the work of knowing me.

"Nishita. I sent you messages. You did not respond."

"I didn't know what you wanted."

"I told you what I wanted. You were on the Wai road on May 15th. Your vehicle was recorded on the security cameras of the Sahyadri Centre for Behavioural Wellness. I need to know what you were doing there."

"I was buying strawberries."

"Strawberries."

"From Patil Strawberry Farm. It's on the Wai road. I drove past the Centre on the way."

Kamble looked at me. The look was long — the duration of a look that was not searching for information but transmitting it. The information was: I do not believe you.

"The Sahyadri Centre is a government-registered facility for the treatment of behavioural disorders in adolescents. It operates under the supervision of the District Mental Health Authority. The perimeter of the Centre is a restricted zone. Unauthorized vehicles are not permitted within—"

"I was on the road. The public road. I didn't go near any perimeter."

"—within five hundred metres of the boundary wall. Your vehicle was recorded at a distance of approximately three hundred metres."

"Because the road goes past the Centre. Any car on that road is within three hundred metres."

Kamble's expression did not change. The face was a wall — smooth, hard, revealing nothing, reflecting everything. She reached into the folder she was carrying — a brown government-issue folder, the kind that Indian bureaucracy deployed for all communications, the physical weight of the state carried in cardboard and string.

She produced a photograph. Printed on standard paper, colour, the resolution adequate but not excellent. It showed a white Dzire — my Dzire — on the Wai road, the angle from above, the timestamp in the corner reading 15:47, 15-05-2026.

"This is your vehicle," she said.

"Yes."

"Stopped on the road. Adjacent to the Centre boundary."

"I was stopped because — there was a pothole. I slowed down."

"The vehicle appears to be stationary."

"It wasn't. Or it was, for a moment. Because of the pothole."

The conversation was a trap. Every answer I gave was being processed, filed, recontextualized. The pothole was real — I remembered it, the jolt, the brief stop — but in Kamble's framing, the stop was not a response to road conditions. It was surveillance. I was not a student buying strawberries. I was a person who had stopped near a restricted facility and who needed to explain why.

"Nishita. I'm not here to accuse you. I'm here to understand. But I need you to be honest with me. Did you see anything unusual near the Centre?"

"No."

"Did you hear anything?"

"No."

"Did anyone ask you to go to the Wai road? Did anyone mention the Centre?"

"No. I went for strawberries. That's it."

Kamble closed the folder. The string tie wrapped around the cardboard button with the practiced motion of a person who closed government folders dozens of times a day.

"I believe you," she said. The words were warm. The face was not. "But I need you to understand that the Centre is under investigation. What I've told you is confidential. If you discuss this conversation with anyone — your parents, your friends, your teachers — it could compromise the investigation. Do you understand?"

"I understand."

"Good. I'll be in touch if I need anything further."

She left. The brass bell on the door did not ring when she closed it — she closed it softly, with the particular care of someone who was aware of the sounds she made and who chose to make none.

I stood in the living room. The family photographs watched me from the shelf. The chai cup sat on the counter, cold now, the surface filmed with the thin layer that cold chai developed, the skin of a beverage that had been abandoned.

I was frightened. Not the dramatic fear of films and novels — not the racing heart, the trembling hands, the gasping breath. A quieter fear. The fear of someone who has been visited by an authority that has power over her and who does not understand why the authority is interested and who has been told, explicitly, not to tell anyone.

The isolation was the design. The silence was the tool.

I did not tell my parents. I did not tell Aarav. I did not tell Carmela.

I stood in the living room of the cottage in Panchgani and felt, for the first time since arriving, that the clean air and the valley view and the extraordinary strawberries were not the whole story of this town.

There was another story. It was the story of the building on the hill with the concertina wire. And Sub-Inspector Kamble was writing it.

And she had just written me into the first chapter.