Chapter 3: Swathi

# Chapter 3: Swathi

## The Festival Office

The Nilgiris District Cultural Authority occupied two rooms on the second floor of a building that also housed a ration shop, a photocopy centre, and a tailor who specialised in school uniforms. The staircase smelled of damp cement and photocopier ink. A cat — grey, one-eyed, supremely indifferent to Swathi's existence — sat on the landing and did not move as she stepped over it.

The office itself was a revelation in managed chaos. One room served as the "administration centre" (a desk, two plastic chairs, a filing cabinet that hadn't been opened since the previous festival coordinator had left in what Dhananjayan at the police station would later describe as "a nervous episode"). The second room was the "creative workspace," which meant it had a whiteboard, a projector that worked only when connected to a specific laptop at a specific angle, and a window that offered a view of the Nilgiris massif so staggeringly beautiful that Swathi had to physically turn her chair away from it to focus on work.

Her team consisted of three people.

Deepa Murthy was twenty-four, Kodagu-born, coffee-estate-raised, and possessed of the rare ability to hold six phone conversations simultaneously while also eating a meal. She was the assistant coordinator, which in practice meant she was the only person who knew where anything was. Her desk was a landscape of sticky notes in four colours — pink for urgent, yellow for important, green for "can wait but shouldn't," and blue for "already dead but nobody has noticed." She wore her hair in a single braid that reached her waist and had the habit of chewing the end of it when thinking, which was most of the time.

"You're Swathi-ma'am?" Deepa said, not looking up from her phone. She was texting with both thumbs at a speed that suggested either extraordinary dexterity or the complete abandonment of vowels. "Welcome. The previous coordinator left a handover document. It's three pages. Two of them are his resignation letter. The third is a list of vendors who have already been paid advances but may or may not actually exist."

"May or may not exist?"

Deepa finally looked up. Her eyes were sharp, assessing, the eyes of someone who had grown up watching her family negotiate coffee prices with middlemen. "Two of the listed vendors have phone numbers that go to the same chai stall in Kotagiri. One vendor address is a post office. And the headliner band — Shruti Resonance — dissolved six weeks ago. The drummer married the guitarist's wife. Or the guitarist married the drummer's wife. Accounts vary. Either way, the ₹1.8-lakh advance is gone."

Swathi sat down. The plastic chair creaked beneath her with a sound that perfectly expressed her internal state. "What about the other two team members?"

"Bala is our logistics person. He's currently in Mettupalayam picking up the sound equipment that was supposed to arrive last week. His phone has been unreachable since yesterday, which either means he's in a dead zone or he's at his girlfriend's house in Salem. Both are equally likely. And Kumaran is our volunteer coordinator. He's sixty-three, semi-retired, and handles the community liaison work. He knows every panchayat head, every tea estate manager, and every temple priest in the district. He's also currently in the hospital."

"The hospital?"

"Kidney stones. He says he'll be back in ten days. The doctors say three weeks. Kumaran says the doctors don't know his constitution, which is built on a lifetime of Nilgiris honey and early-morning walks. He may be right. He walked seven kilometres the day after his appendectomy in 2019."

Swathi opened her laptop, pulled up the festival spreadsheet, and stared at the 847 rows of data that she had meticulously compiled from Chennai. In the fluorescent light of this two-room office, with a one-eyed cat on the landing and a headliner budget that had evaporated, the spreadsheet looked less like a plan and more like a monument to optimism.

"Deepa."

"Ma'am?"

"Call me Swathi. How bad is it? Scale of one to ten."

Deepa considered this with the seriousness it deserved. "Seven. But a fixable seven. The venue is confirmed — Sim's Park, they've given us the east lawn and the amphitheatre. The government grant money is in the account, minus the coordination fees. We have nineteen confirmed vendors out of forty needed. The sound and lighting contractor is reliable — he did the Ooty flower show last year and didn't electrocute anyone. The food court is half-planned. And the weather forecast for the festival weekend is 'partly cloudy with a chance of everything,' which in Coonoor means it could be perfect or it could be a monsoon. Nobody knows. The mountain decides."

"And the headliner?"

"Gone. We need a new one. Budget remaining for entertainment: ₹4.2 lakhs, which sounds like a lot until you realise that any act worth headlining charges at least ₹3 lakhs, and we also need to pay for the opening act, the children's stage, and the late-night acoustic session."

Swathi closed her eyes. Behind her eyelids, she could see the spreadsheet. Row 1, still red. Headliner act — CRITICAL — Status: UNFILLED.

She opened her eyes. "Right. First things first. I need to see the venue. I need to meet Kumaran, even if he's in the hospital. I need every vendor file the previous coordinator touched. And I need coffee."

Deepa smiled for the first time. "The coffee I can do immediately. There's a place on Bedford Road — Quality Restaurant, it's been there since 1947, the filter coffee is the best in Coonoor. Everything else will take slightly longer."

"Let's start with the coffee, then."

---

Quality Restaurant was not, by any traditional definition, a restaurant. It was a narrow room with six marble-topped tables, a glass case displaying buns and puffs that had achieved a state of gentle staleness, and a coffee counter staffed by a man named Selvam who had been making filter coffee at this location for thirty-one years. The steel tumblers were dented and beautiful. The davara — the flat-bottomed cup into which you poured the coffee to cool it — was stained with decades of decoction. The walls were painted the shade of blue that Indian restaurants had collectively agreed upon sometime in the 1970s and never reconsidered.

Swathi wrapped her hands around the tumbler. The warmth seeped into her palms — she hadn't expected Coonoor to be this cold in monsoon season. Chennai had been thirty-six degrees when she left. Here it was sixteen, with a wind that carried moisture from the valley below and deposited it on every surface, including her skin, which felt permanently damp in a way that was novel and slightly unpleasant.

"Tell me about the town," she said to Deepa.

Deepa poured her coffee from tumbler to davara and back — the smooth, practised motion that every South Indian learned from watching adults, the arc of brown liquid catching the light. "Coonoor is the second-largest hill station in the Nilgiris, after Ooty. Population about 45,000, plus the tea and coffee estate workers, plus the tourists. It's quieter than Ooty, which is why people who actually live in the Nilgiris prefer it. Less commercialised. More actual mountain town, less tourist trap."

"The festival has been running for how long?"

"This is the third year. The first year was small — basically a coffee-tasting event in Sim's Park with some local music. About 2,000 people came. Second year was bigger, maybe 8,000. They added an arts component — local Toda tribal crafts, Irula honey, Badaga embroidery. It got attention. The Hindu ran a piece. Some travel bloggers came. The district collector saw an opportunity. Hence the ₹2.3-crore grant, the formal Cultural Authority structure, and — well — you."

"And the previous coordinator?"

Deepa's expression was diplomatic, which in Swathi's experience meant the truth was worse than whatever she was about to say. "He was a good man. Experienced. He had organised the Madurai Chithirai Festival for seven years. But Coonoor..." She paused, searching for the right word. "Coonoor doesn't follow Madurai rules. In Madurai, you apply for permits, you get permits, everything has a process. Here, the process is that you go to someone's house at 7 AM, drink their coffee, listen to their grandmother's opinion about the weather, and eventually, maybe, they agree to let you use their land for a parking area. It requires patience of a specific kind."

"And he didn't have that kind of patience?"

"He had spreadsheets. Coonoor doesn't run on spreadsheets."

Swathi looked down at her phone, where her 847-row spreadsheet was still open. "Noted."

Deepa caught the look and laughed — a warm, unguarded sound that revealed the Kodagu girl underneath the professional exterior. "Don't worry. Spreadsheets are fine. Spreadsheets are great. Just... also bring coffee when you visit people. And don't rush them. The mountain has its own clock."

They finished their coffee. Selvam brought a second round without being asked, because in Quality Restaurant, a single coffee was considered a medical emergency. Swathi paid — ₹40 for two coffees, which in Chennai would have bought half a coffee at a chain cafe — and they walked out into the Coonoor morning.

The town was waking up properly now. Auto-rickshaws puttered along the main road with the particular optimism of vehicles that shouldn't technically be able to climb a gradient but did anyway. Schoolchildren in blue uniforms walked in clusters, their laughter bouncing off the stone walls of old colonial buildings. A vegetable vendor was arranging carrots — Nilgiris carrots, the orange so vivid it looked artificial — in neat rows on a pushcart. The air smelled of eucalyptus and wet earth and, underneath, the sweet green scent of tea being processed at the factory down the hill.

Swathi's phone buzzed. A WhatsApp from an unknown number:

This is Kumaran. Deepa told me the new coordinator has arrived. Come to the Government Hospital, Ward 3, Bed 12. Bring my reading glasses from the office — top drawer, left side, wrapped in a blue cloth. Also bring the vendor files. I have been making calls from the hospital. Three more vendors confirmed. Also the kidney stone has passed. I will be back in the office by Thursday.

Swathi showed the message to Deepa. Deepa shook her head with obvious affection. "Thursday. The man had surgery yesterday."

"Is he always like this?"

"Always. He organised the first Coonoor festival from his daughter's wedding reception. Made five vendor calls between the mehendi ceremony and the pheras. His daughter still hasn't forgiven him."

Swathi pocketed her phone and looked up at the Nilgiris massif, its peaks now visible above the retreating morning mist. Somewhere up there was Sim's Park, where in twenty-two days, 15,000 people were supposed to gather for a festival that currently had no headliner, half a vendor list, and a logistics manager who might be in a dead zone or might be in Salem.

She had a spreadsheet. She had Deepa. She had Kumaran, who was apparently unkillable. And she had coffee that cost ₹20 a cup and tasted like it had been brewed by someone who loved the craft more than the profit.

Worse starting positions existed. She had once organised a college cultural fest with a budget of ₹12,000 and a team that consisted entirely of her roommate and a boy named Sriram who was there only because he was trying to impress Swathi's roommate. They had pulled it off. The boy had not impressed the roommate, but the fest had been excellent.

"Let's go see Kumaran," Swathi said. "And then the venue. And then every vendor on this list, one by one."

Deepa nodded, already reaching for her phone. "I'll call ahead. His wife will want to know we're coming. She has opinions about visiting hours."

They walked toward the hospital, and Swathi noticed, with the observational instinct of someone trained to notice things, that Coonoor's roads didn't have straight lines. They curved and switchbacked and occasionally doubled back on themselves, following the mountain's contour rather than fighting it. A town built by negotiation with the landscape rather than domination of it.

Maybe Deepa was right. Maybe the mountain had its own clock.

Swathi would learn to read it. She had twenty-two days.