Chapter 4: Suryansh

# Chapter 4: Suryansh

## The Neighbour

The house that the department had rented for Suryansh was a converted tea estate manager's cottage on Doddabetta Road, above the police station. It had two rooms, a kitchen the size of a generous cupboard, a bathroom with plumbing that expressed itself in percussive bursts, and a verandah that looked out over the valley toward Lamb's Rock.

The verandah was the reason he had accepted the house without complaint. You could stand there at 0500, when the mist was still thick enough to erase the valley below, and watch the world reassemble itself as the sun climbed — first the treetops appearing like islands in a white ocean, then the slopes of the tea estates, then the distant thread of the Mettupalayam road switchbacking down toward the plains. It was the kind of view that made you understand why the British had dragged their entire administrative apparatus up 2,000 metres of mountain just to escape the heat.

Bahadur had claimed the verandah as his territory on the first morning. He lay with his chin on his paws, nose pointed toward the forest, ears rotating at every sound — the creak of bamboo, the call of a Nilgiri laughingthrush, the distant rumble of the morning goods train climbing the rack section. A sentinel by nature and training. Suryansh sometimes thought that Bahadur understood the concept of a perimeter better than most constables.

On the fourth morning, Suryansh was doing his exercises on the verandah — the physiotherapy routine that the army doctor had prescribed for his left leg, a series of stretches and resistance movements that he performed with the grim discipline of a man who knew that the alternative was a limp that would end his career — when he heard the sound.

It was a crash, followed by a word in Tamil that he didn't fully understand but whose emotional content was unmistakable. Then another crash. Then a sound that was either a small explosion or someone dropping a very large vessel of something liquid.

He looked over the verandah railing. The house next to his — separated by a low stone wall and a row of hydrangea bushes that had achieved the size and density of small vehicles — had its kitchen window open. Through it, he could see a figure moving with the frantic energy of someone managing a crisis.

A moment later, the figure appeared at the back door. It was a woman — late twenties, hair in a loose bun that was actively disintegrating, wearing a kurta that had been white approximately three minutes ago and was now decorated with what appeared to be sambar. She was holding a pressure cooker lid in one hand and a phone in the other, and her expression was that of a person who had just lost a war with physics.

"Excuse me," she called up, having spotted him on the verandah. "Do you know how to stop a pressure cooker from — I think the word is 'exploding'? It's not actually exploding. It's more of a vigorous... emission."

Behind her, a high-pitched whistle screamed from the kitchen, followed by the sound of something thick and leguminous hitting a ceiling.

Suryansh was already moving. He vaulted the verandah railing — a drop of about five feet, which his left leg protested with a sharp bolt of pain that he filed away for later — and was at her back door in eight seconds. Bahadur, who had not been invited but had decided to attend, followed with the effortless grace of an animal designed by evolution for exactly this kind of rapid deployment.

The kitchen was a disaster. The pressure cooker was on the gas stove, its lid missing (it was in the woman's hand), and sambar was erupting from the open top in rhythmic geyser-like pulses that had already redecorated the ceiling, the walls, and a calendar featuring a photograph of the Meenakshi Temple. The gas was still on. The flame was blue and calm, indifferent to the culinary catastrophe above it.

Suryansh reached over and turned off the gas. The sambar continued to bubble for a few seconds, then subsided with the reluctance of something that had been enjoying its freedom.

Silence.

"The lid," he said, "goes on before you turn on the gas."

"I know that." She set the lid down on the counter with a clang that suggested she was angry at the lid specifically. "I took it off to check if the dal was done. The dial was on the wrong pressure. I think. Or the gasket is old. Or the sambar is haunted."

"The sambar is not haunted."

"You don't know my sambar."

He almost smiled. He managed to keep it to a twitch. "I'm Suryansh. I live next door."

"Swathi." She surveyed the damage. A drop of sambar slid down the wall with the slow, inevitable dignity of defeat. "I moved in three days ago. This is my first time using this kitchen. I think the kitchen and I have not yet reached an understanding."

Bahadur, who had been standing in the doorway with the professional assessment of a dog evaluating a new environment, walked into the kitchen and sniffed the sambar puddle on the floor. His tail moved once — the single-wag of conditional approval. He had eaten worse during field exercises.

"Your dog," Swathi said.

"Bahadur. He's — trained. He won't cause any trouble."

"He's a police dog?"

"K9 unit. We just transferred here."

Something shifted in her expression — a recalibration. He could see her filing the information: neighbour, police officer, has a large trained dog, wears kurta-pyjama at 6 AM and exercises on verandah. The assessment was quick and thorough, the kind of evaluation that women performed instinctively in the presence of men they didn't know, and he respected it.

"Well," she said, "thank you for preventing my kitchen from becoming a crime scene."

"Do you need help cleaning up?"

"God, no. I mean — thank you, but no. I've humiliated myself enough for one morning." She looked down at her sambar-stained kurta. "I should have just gone to Quality Restaurant for breakfast."

"The place on Bedford Road? The egg puffs are good."

"You've been there? You just arrived."

"Dhananjayan — the sub-inspector — he's a walking restaurant guide disguised as a police officer."

She laughed. An actual laugh, not polite or performative, the sound of genuine amusement that came from somewhere in her chest and transformed her face from stressed-festival-coordinator to something warmer, more open. Her front teeth were slightly uneven. There was a smudge of haldi on her chin from the sambar battle. Her eyes — dark, expressive, slightly too large for her face in a way that made every emotion visible whether she wanted it to be or not — were the kind of eyes that made honesty inevitable.

Suryansh noticed all of this in approximately two seconds, and then deliberately stopped noticing, because noticing was the first step on a road he had decided, firmly and recently, not to travel again.

"I'll let you get cleaned up," he said. "If the pressure cooker gives you more trouble, there's a technique — run cold water over the lid for thirty seconds before opening. Releases the steam safely."

"Is that army training?"

"My mother's training. She cooked for five people on a single-burner stove for twenty years. She could operate a pressure cooker in her sleep. Literally — she fell asleep once during Diwali preparation and still produced perfect dum aloo."

Swathi smiled. "Your mother sounds like my grandmother. She used to say the kitchen is the most dangerous room in the house, and she wasn't wrong. She once set her sari on fire while making payasam and finished the payasam before putting out the fire."

"Priorities."

"Exactly."

They stood there for a moment, in her sambar-streaked kitchen, with Bahadur sitting between them like a furry chaperone, and something passed between them that was not yet anything identifiable — not attraction, not recognition, just the faint, preliminary awareness that this person might matter.

Then Bahadur sneezed, sending a spray of sambar droplets across both their legs, and the moment dissolved into laughter.

"I should go," Suryansh said. "Early shift."

"And I should — clean. Everything. Possibly including my career choices."

He left through the back door, Bahadur at his heel. As he walked along the stone wall that separated their properties, he heard her start to clean — the sound of a mop, running water, and a murmured stream of Tamil that sounded like either a prayer or a detailed critique of pressure cooker engineering.

Back on his own verandah, he resumed his exercises. His left leg ached from the jump. He would pay for that later. The physiotherapist in Jaipur had been very specific: no sudden impacts, no drops from height, no heroics. "Your femur is held together by titanium and goodwill," she had said. "Respect both."

He had respected neither. But the pressure cooker crisis had been resolved, and his new neighbour did not think he was a threat, which in the complex arithmetic of a woman living alone in a new town was a currency more valuable than any first impression.

He finished his stretches, showered, dressed in uniform, and walked to the station with Bahadur. The morning air was cold and clean and tasted of eucalyptus. Somewhere in the valley, a rooster was attempting to crow, producing a sound that suggested the rooster itself was not fully convinced of its own competence.

It was going to be a good day. Probably.