Chapter 2: The Phone

## Chapter 2: The Phone

Two days passed in the lodge. Two days of not sleeping, of jumping at every sound, of watching the bruise on her cheekbone shift from purple to green to a sickly yellow.

Ruhani spent the time doing what she did best: working.

From her cracked laptop screen, she compiled everything she had. The RTI documents showing that Nagpur Central Hospital's psychiatric ward, Ward 7, they called it; had admitted 342 patients in the last three years. Of those, 137 had died. Another 89 were "transferred" to facilities that, when she dug into them, didn't appear to exist.

That left 116 patients who'd been released. She'd tracked down sixty-three of them. Forty-one refused to speak to her. Twelve had moved out of state. Seven had given interviews; the ones she'd already put on her channel.

And three had disappeared entirely. No forwarding address. No phone records. No social media activity after their discharge dates.

Gone. Like they'd never existed.

The morning of the third day, Ruhani took a rickshaw to her mama's house in Wardha. She needed clothes, a charger for her dying laptop, and, though she'd never admit it, she needed to feel safe, even if just for a few hours.

Mama was at work. His wife, Savita mami, had gone to the market. The house should have been empty and quiet.

Instead, Ruhani opened the front door and stopped breathing.

The place was destroyed.

Not ransacked, demolished. The furniture was overturned, the couch cushions slashed open, stuffing spilling out like entrails. Photo frames had been ripped from the walls and smashed. The TV screen was cracked in a spiderweb pattern, as though someone had punched it. Glass crunched under her chappals as she moved deeper inside, her hand covering her mouth.

In the kitchen, they'd poured atta from the container onto the floor and smeared cooking oil across the walls. The pressure cooker was dented, like someone had used it as a weapon against the countertop. The steel thalis were scattered across the floor, some bent nearly in half.

How strong do you have to be to bend a steel thali?

Her bedroom, the small one at the back that Mama kept ready for her visits, was worse. Her notebooks were shredded. The backup hard drive she'd hidden in the almari was gone. The wall where she'd taped her notes and photos connecting the hospital's staff to city officials was stripped bare — not a single piece of paper left.

But it was the message scrawled across the wall in red paint that made her legs give out.

CHUP RAHO. YA MAR JAO.

Stay silent. Or die.

Ruhani sank to the floor, her back against the bed, and the tears came before she could stop them. Not from fear. From rage. Pure, black, boiling rage.

They'd come into her family's home. They'd destroyed her mama's things. The man who'd taken her in after Baba died, who'd paid her college fees without once making her feel like a burden, who kept a jar of her favourite orange candy on his desk because he remembered she'd loved it as a child.

These people had no boundaries.

"Enough," she whispered, her jaw tight. "Enough."

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, smearing tears and grime across her cheek, and forced herself to think.

The hard drive was gone. Her notes were gone. But she'd backed everything up to the cloud. And the email she'd sent to Sanika was still sitting in her editor's inbox.

They could destroy every physical copy. They couldn't destroy the internet.

Ruhani stood, her legs unsteady but her mind sharp. She needed to move. Staying here was dangerous; if they'd found Mama's house, they could come back.

She grabbed a bag from the almari and stuffed in whatever clothes weren't destroyed. A toothbrush. Her charger. Two thousand rupees from the emergency stash Mama kept in a steel dabba behind the rice container.

She was at the front door when she noticed the shoe rack.

One pair didn't belong. Heavy boots, caked in red mud — the kind found near the riverbed on the eastern edge of town. Police-issue boots, the type constables wore. Someone had walked in wearing them and either forgotten them or left them deliberately.

Ruhani stared at the boots.

Police-issue.

Her blood ran cold.

---

She didn't go back to the lodge. Instead, she took a state transport bus to Amravati; three hours of bad roads and worse suspension, her body aching with every pothole. She paid cash, sat in the back, and kept her dupatta pulled across her face.

In Amravati, she found another budget lodge. Eight hundred rupees a night, paid in advance, no ID required. The evening air was layered with the smell of incense from the neighbour’s puja and the distant, greasy warmth of street food being fried. The owner was a heavyset man who watched cricket on a tiny screen behind the counter and barely looked at her when she signed a fake name in the register.

The room smelled like damp concrete and agarbatti. The bedsheet had been washed but not ironed, and there was a water stain on the ceiling that looked like the map of Maharashtra.

Home sweet home.

Ruhani plugged in her laptop and phone, then sat on the bed cross-legged, trying to assemble the pieces.

Someone had tried to kill her. Then they'd threatened her. Then they'd destroyed her mama's house and stolen her evidence. And the boots suggested police involvement; which she'd suspected for months but hadn't been able to prove.

Dr. Tejas Chaudhary ran the psychiatric ward. But Chaudhary was a doctor, not a gangster. Someone was protecting him. Someone with power. Someone who could send police to do their dirty work.

Who?

Her phone buzzed. Unknown number again.

She almost didn't answer. Almost.

"Hello?"

"Ruhani Malhotra?" A woman's voice this time. Young, maybe her age. Nervous.

"Who is this?"

"My name is Tanvi. Tanvi Deshmukh. I work at NCH — I'm a doctor there. Was a doctor." A pause. "I saw your video. The one you posted after the accident. I need to talk to you."

Ruhani's pulse quickened. "How did you get this number?"

"I have a friend who knows your editor. Please, I don't have much time. I'm calling from a PCO. I don't want them tracing this."

A PCO. A public call booth. Who still used those? Someone who was genuinely scared.

"Talk," Ruhani said.

And Tanvi did.

---

What Tanvi told her in those eleven minutes changed everything.

Tanvi Deshmukh was a junior psychiatrist at NCH. Her sister, Dr. Ananya Deshmukh, had been a senior psychiatrist there until fourteen months ago, when she'd been accused of stabbing her boyfriend, Parth Mane, in his sleep.

"She didn't do it," Tanvi said, her voice breaking. "They framed her. She was getting too close to something. I don't know what, exactly, but she'd been acting strange in the weeks before it happened. Paranoid. She told me once that she'd found 'files that didn't make sense.' Then Parth was attacked and they blamed her."

"Where is Ananya now?"

"Ward 7. She's been a patient in the same ward she used to run. They keep her sedated. She can barely speak when I visit."

Ruhani closed her eyes. A doctor. Turned into a patient. In her own ward.

"And Parth?"

"He was in a coma for almost a year. He woke up about two months ago. His mother took him out of state — I don't know where. But Ruhani..." Tanvi's voice dropped lower. "Parth remembers things. He called me last week. He said it wasn't Ananya. He said there was someone else in the room that night."

The hair on Ruhani's arms stood up.

"There's more," Tanvi continued. "There's an inspector. Inspector Hemant Patil. He's been collecting evidence on the hospital for years. Files, recordings, notes. He has everything. But he won't do anything with it because his wife, Sneha, is connected to Chaudhary's people."

"Connected how?"

"Sneha works at the hospital. She's the head of administration. She basically runs the non-medical side. And she and Chaudhary—" Tanvi paused. "I shouldn't say more on the phone. Can we meet?"

"When?"

"Tomorrow. There's a chai stall in Katol, on the Nagpur-Katol road. It's called Pandey Ji Ki Chai. The owner is a friend. Eleven in the morning."

Ruhani wrote it down.

"Tanvi," she said before the woman could hang up. "Why are you calling me? Why now?"

Silence. Then: "Because they're going to move Ananya. I heard a nurse talking about it. They're transferring her to some private facility in Chhindwara: and once she's there, I'll never see her again."

Her voice cracked on the last word.

"I've been trying to save her for fourteen months. I can't do it alone anymore."

The line went dead.

Ruhani sat in the silence of her dingy room, staring at the water stain on the ceiling.

Inspector Hemant Patil.

A cop with evidence. A cop's wife connected to the hospital. A doctor imprisoned in her own ward. A boyfriend who remembered the truth.

This wasn't just a story anymore. This was a war.

And she'd just been recruited.

---

She barely slept, her mind cycling through Tanvi's words, turning them over like stones in a riverbed. At dawn, she splashed cold water on her face from the bathroom tap, the geyser was broken, naturally — and dressed in clean clothes from the bag she'd packed at Mama's house.

The bus to Katol took forty-five minutes. She sat by the window, watching the landscape change from city to semi-urban to rural: cotton fields stretching to the horizon, power lines sagging between wooden poles, a temple's spire catching the early morning sun.

Pandey Ji Ki Chai was exactly the kind of place she'd expected: a tin-roofed shack on the side of the road with plastic chairs and a counter blackened from decades of coal-fired stoves. The chai was served in kulhads, clay cups that crumbled at the edges; and the smell of ginger and cardamom was thick enough to cut with a knife.

Ruhani ordered a chai and sat at the table farthest from the road.

Tanvi arrived at 11:07.

She was younger than Ruhani had imagined. Twenty-eight, maybe twenty-nine. Dark circles under her eyes that spoke of sleepless nights. She wore a simple salwar kameez, no jewelry except a thin gold chain with a small pendant; a Ganesh, for protection.

They studied each other for a moment. Two women who had no reason to trust each other except that they shared an enemy.

"You look worse than I expected," Tanvi said, eyeing the fading bruise on Ruhani's cheek.

"You should see the other guy." Ruhani pushed a kulhad of chai toward her. "His car didn't have a scratch."

Tanvi almost smiled. Almost. Then the weight of everything came flooding back, and her face crumpled.

"I don't have much time," she said, pulling her chair closer. "I'm supposed to be at a medical conference in Nagpur. If anyone asks, I was there."

"So talk."

And Tanvi did. For forty-three minutes, while the chai grew cold and Pandey Ji pretended not to listen, Tanvi Deshmukh told Ruhani everything she knew about Nagpur Central Hospital's Ward 7.

About the patients who went in for depression and came out in body bags.

About the "experimental treatments" that Dr. Chaudhary administered behind locked doors.

About the files Ananya had found; patient records that showed medications being prescribed at ten times the normal dosage.

About the families who'd been paid five lakhs each to keep their mouths shut.

About Inspector Hemant Patil, who'd been compiling evidence for three years but couldn't use it because his wife was in bed, literally and figuratively, with the people running the show.

And about a phone.

"Hemant keeps a personal phone," Tanvi said. "Separate from his department one. It has everything: voice recordings, photos of documents, screenshots of financial transfers. He showed me once, when we were—" She stopped. Swallowed. "When we were close."

Ruhani didn't press. She could see the shame and pain in Tanvi's eyes. An affair with a married cop. A married cop whose wife was connected to the people who'd imprisoned her sister.

"If I could get that phone," Ruhani said slowly, "I could blow this whole thing open."

Tanvi shook her head. "You don't need his phone. He lost it."

"Lost it?"

"Two nights ago. The night of your accident." Tanvi leaned forward. "Hemant was at the scene. He was one of the officers who responded. He told me he was there to 'clean up' — his words. But he lost his phone somewhere near the crash site."

The blood drained from Ruhani's face. The water ran between her fingers, cold and insistent. The phone. A police officer's phone. With years of evidence. Somewhere on Route 6, near the wreckage of her car.

She was on her feet before Tanvi could finish her chai.

"Where are you going?" Tanvi called after her.

"To find that phone."