CHAPTER 23

NOT OJASWINI

It's time.

I've rehearsed this moment forty-seven times in my head. I know the count of steps from the back door to the guest cottage — sixty-three, if I take the stone path, forty-eight through the garden where the grass deadens sound. I know the cottage door opens inward. I know the hinges are on the left. I know Arya sleeps on the right side of the cot, facing the wall, because I watched her through the cottage window on three consecutive nights to confirm the pattern.

Arya was always the loose thread. The one variable in my script that I couldn't write around. She knows the house too well — every room, every corridor, every hidden space behind the paneling that the Portuguese builders carved into the walls for smuggling opium and gold. She knows the cameras because she dusted the smoke detectors and picture frames where I hid them. She knows the hidden room on the fourth floor because she cleaned it when I was a child — vacuum and damp cloth, once a month, even though nobody used it, because Arya cleaned everything, maintained everything, kept this crumbling colonial mansion breathing long after it should have been left to the termites and the monsoon.

She knows me.

Not the me I've become. The me I was. The girl with the long braid and the scraped knees who spent summers on this island catching crabs and eating Arya's sol kadhi — the coconut milk and kokum drink, pink and sweet and sour, served in steel glasses on the veranda while the Arabian Sea crashed against the rocks below. She would recognize my face in a heartbeat. My walk. The way I tilt my head when I'm thinking. The birthmark on my left wrist shaped like a cashew nut. One look and the entire narrative collapses.

The rain covers every sound. Not muffles — covers. Erases. The monsoon is a wall of white noise, a static roar so complete that I could fire a gun and the cottage wouldn't hear it. I cross the garden in bare feet — the mud is warm between my toes, body-temperature, monsoon-heated earth that squishes and gives, and the grass is sharp, the wild Konkan grass that grows ankle-high between the flagstones, each blade a tiny serrated edge that nicks the soles of my feet.

The guest cottage is dark. No glow from the kerosene lamp. No movement behind the curtained window. Arya sleeps early — 9:30 PM, every night, fifteen years of the same pattern. She wakes at 5 AM. She drinks her chai with two sugars and a piece of stale rusk. She is the most predictable person I have ever known, and that predictability is what makes this possible and what makes it unbearable.

She sleeps like the dead.

Not a metaphor. Not yet.

The door isn't locked. It never is. Arya trusts this island the way she trusts the sunrise — as a fact, not a choice. She's been here fifteen years. She braided my hair when the monsoon humidity made it impossible to manage — tight French braids, pulling hard enough to make my eyes water, her rough fingers working through the tangles with the same efficiency she brought to scrubbing the kitchen floor. She taught me to find crabs under rocks on the beach — flip the rock, wait for the scuttle, grab from behind so the pincers can't reach your fingers. She taught me to crack coconuts with a single strike of the back of a machete. She fed me puran poli when I cried.

She called me Sayali-baby until I was thirteen.

I stand in her room. The darkness is total but I don't need light. I know this room by feel — the dresser on the left wall, two steps from the door, the chair by the window where Arya sits to read her Marathi newspaper, the cot against the far wall, the thin mattress, the cotton sheet she uses even in winter because she runs warm. The air smells like her — coconut oil and phenyl floor cleaner and the faint sweetness of the supari she chews after meals. The room smells like safety. Like childhood. Like every summer I spent on this island before my father decided I was worthless.

She's on the cot. Breathing slow. Deep. The breath of dreamless sleep — a woman who has nothing on her conscience, nothing keeping her awake, nothing to fear from the darkness.

I could make this painless. I should make this painless. She deserves that.

But I learned from my father that mercy is a luxury of people who can afford consequences. And I can't afford Arya waking up tomorrow, seeing the chaos — the blood, the bodies, the chef running — and telling the police: Sayali was here. I know Sayali. I recognize her. She has a birthmark on her left wrist shaped like a cashew nut.

One sentence. That's all it would take. One sentence from a fifty-five-year-old housekeeper and my entire script — six months of planning, four months of surveillance, two months of psychological manipulation — dissolves like sugar in hot water.

The pillow is soft. Goose-down. One of the old ones from the main house that Arya salvaged when Tapsee redecorated. It smells like Arya's coconut oil.

I press it down.

Arya doesn't struggle long. Her body convulses — an involuntary reflex, the diaphragm fighting for air that isn't there, the legs kicking against the sheet. Her hands come up — I feel them against my forearms, her rough fingers gripping my wrists, the grip strong at first then weakening, then gone. Her heels drum against the mattress — fast, then slow, then still.

Sixty seconds. Maybe less. I count.

One. Two. Three.

A scriptwriter counts everything. Structure. Beats. The rhythm of a story. The precise duration of a suffocation scene — I researched it. Four to six minutes of oxygen deprivation causes brain death. But unconsciousness comes in thirty to sixty seconds. The body gives up before the brain does. The fight goes out of them like air from a punctured tire — not all at once but in a slow, terrible deflation.

Forty-seven. Forty-eight. Forty-nine.

Her hands fall from my wrists. Her feet stop. The mattress stops creaking.

Fifty-six. Fifty-seven.

I hold for another sixty seconds. To be certain. Because certainty is the only currency that matters now.

When it's over — when the body beneath the pillow is still and cooling and the breathing has stopped and the room is silent except for my own heartbeat and the rain — I arrange the room. Pillow back in position. Sheet straightened. Arya's hands folded on her stomach. I close her eyes with my thumb and forefinger. The lids are warm. Soft. The skin of a woman who put coconut oil on her face every night for fifty years.

I close the door. Walk back through the rain. Forty-eight steps through the garden. The mud is warm. The grass is sharp. The monsoon hammers my skull and shoulders and I open my mouth and let the rain fill it because my throat is so dry I can't swallow.

The mud swallows my footprints.

By morning, there will be nothing left of me in this garden except the monsoon and a woman who called me baby and whose last conscious sensation was the smell of her own coconut oil pillow pressed against her face by the hands she used to braid my hair.

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