Chapter 5: The Lego Room

## Chapter 5: The Lego Room

Meera sat on the floor of the bookshop. The surface was rough under her palms, textured with grit. the cold floor was dry. The sand was gone. The fish were gone. the cold wind, the waves, the coconuts, the impossible vortex that had swallowed her brother. All gone. The shop was quiet in the way that a room was calm after a bomb had gone off: the subdued of aftermath, of damage, of things that had happened and could not be un-happened.

Kabir was gone.

She'd seen it. She'd seen the sand swallow him, his school uniform, his tie, his face with its expression of terror and something else, something that even in the moment of being consumed by a supernatural whirlpool looked like curiosity; and then he was gone, and the floor was wood again, and the cats were emerging from their hiding places with the offended dignity of animals who'd been inconvenienced by reality-warping events and intended to hold someone responsible.

"I'm so sorry," said a voice.

Meera looked up. Guddi was standing in the shadows between two bookshelves, her green kurta soaked, her brass spectacles askew, her enormous eyes filled with the specific guilt of a woman who'd opened a door that should have stayed closed.

"Where is my brother?" Meera's voice was a whisper. She'd tried to shout but the terror had compressed her vocal cords to threads.

"He's in the book, beta. In Treasure Island. It's—"

But Meera was already running. Through the maze of bookshelves, past the cats, past the plants, past the carved doorframe with its Mughal patterns, and out into the lane, the brass bell clanging like an alarm behind her, the sound chasing her as she sprinted through the back lanes of Kala Ghoda with the speed of a girl who'd won the inter-school 400 metres and was now running faster than she'd ever run because her brother had been eaten by a book and she needed to find the only person in her life who might, possibly, marginally be able to help.

Danny.

---

"You're going to have to come up with a better story than that," Danny said.

He was sitting cross-legged on the cold floor of his room, the room that had once been a spare bedroom and was now a miniature city built entirely from Lego. Danny had been building it for four years, ever since his father had bought the penthouse flat on Malabar Hill, and the city had grown from a single house to an entire world: buildings, bridges, landmarks from around the globe, all rendered in plastic bricks with a precision that bordered on obsession.

A line of electrical tape on the floor marked the boundary. No one crossed the tape. This was Danny's world, and other people were not welcome in it.

"I'm not making it up!" Meera protested. She was standing on her side of the tape, breathing hard, her uniform still damp from the bookshop's impossible ocean. "Danny, I can't even see you behind that bridge thing. I'm coming in."

"Do NOT cross the tape, Meera!" Danny's voice carried the distinct sharpness of a thirteen-year-old boy defending his territory. The territory in question was a Lego replica of the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, three feet long, every cable individually placed.

Danny knew this was hard for Meera and Kabir. Their lives had been rearranged six months ago when Danny's father, Tejas Malhotra, the architect, had married Meera and Kabir's mother — Sanika Mehra, the ER nurse at Hinduja Hospital. Now they all lived together in the Malabar Hill penthouse: Danny, who preferred silence and sarcasm; Meera, who preferred Bollywood and bossiness; and Kabir, who preferred books and the sound of his own observations. Three children who hadn't chosen each other, sharing a space that felt too big and too small simultaneously.

"Come out so I can talk to you," Meera demanded.

Unlike Kabir, Danny didn't feel compelled to follow Meera's orders. But something in her voice, the exact frequency of someone who was genuinely afraid, not the theatrical fear of Bollywood songs but real fear, the kind that made voices crack; made him put down the Lego separator tool, crawl under his replica of the Gateway of India, step over the Taj Mahal (Agra version, 4,287 pieces), and stand across the tape from his stepsister.

Meera was a mess. Her hair, usually controlled with a precision that Danny found exhausting, was plastered to her face. Her uniform was wet. Her eyes were red. And she was not singing. Meera was always singing; in the shower, in the kitchen, while doing homework, while breathing. The smell of cumin seeds crackling in ghee drifted from the stove, sharp and warm. The absence of singing was, Danny realized, alarming.

"Danny, I'm telling you the truth!" Maya said. She'd run all the way from Kala Ghoda to Malabar Hill, uphill, in school shoes, in October heat — and was still gasping. "Kabir was sucked into the rough floor of this bookshop. There was sand and fish and a wave and—"

"When your Aai finds out you lost your brother, she's going to take your phone away for a month." Danny said this with the automatic snark that was his default setting, but even as he said it, he felt a twinge of something. Guilt, maybe. Or the recognition that Meera's face was doing something he'd never seen: it was afraid. "She keeps her phone in her locker during shifts. I can't reach her."

"So call your dad."

"He's in Hyderabad. Some conference. He won't be back until Thursday."

"So Kabir's just... missing? And neither of our parents—"

"Danny." Meera's voice cracked. Not the theatrical crack of someone performing distress. The real crack. The sound of a rope under too much weight. "I know you don't like us. I know you didn't want Papa to remarry. I know you wish we'd never moved in. But Kabir is my brother. And—" She paused. Swallowed. "And like it or not, he's your brother now too."

Danny didn't have a brother. He'd never had a sibling. His mother had died when he was seven, suddenly, without warning, the kind of death that left a hole in a family that no amount of Lego could fill: and for six years it had been just Danny and Papa, eating takeaway in the penthouse, building things in stillness, not talking about feelings because talking about feelings was something that Danny's mother had been good at and Danny's father was not.

Then Sanika had arrived. And Meera. And Kabir. With their hugs and their "I love you"s and their noisy, emotional, Hindi-and-English-mixed way of existing that made the penthouse feel full in a way that Danny found overwhelming and, secretly, in a place he didn't examine, comforting.

He looked at Meera. At the fear on her face. At the absence of singing.

"Fine," he said. "Where's this bookshop?"

---

By the time Danny and Meera reached the sickle-shaped lane and made the third left, the shop was gone.

Where it had been, wedged between the backs of two modern buildings, its Mangalore tiles sagging, its carved doorframe decorated with Mughal patterns; there was a wall. A plain brick wall, old but unremarkable, the kind of wall that Mumbai produced in quantities that suggested the city's primary industry was wall-making.

Meera stared at the rough brick.

"It was here."

"You must have got the turns wrong." Danny was sweating; the October heat plus the uphill walk from the flat had produced that state of humid discomfort that was Mumbai's gift to everyone who lived there. "Who puts a bookshop back here anyway?"

"It was three lefts from the main road and..." She touched the rough wall. Cold. Solid. Brick. The surface of something that had always been a wall and would always be a wall and had never, at any point, been a bookshop that sold dangerous books and housed singing women and magic cats.

Had she imagined it? The thought was worse than the fear. worse, because if she'd imagined the bookshop, then she'd imagined Kabir's disappearance, which meant Kabir hadn't disappeared at all, which meant she'd simply lost him, which was not supernatural but was the ordinary, unforgivable failure of an older sister who was supposed to be in charge.

"Khat, khat!" Danny was talking to a pigeon.

The pigeon was standing at his feet, walking in tight circles, its head bobbing with the mechanical regularity of a wind-up toy. It was not a beautiful pigeon. One eye was missing. One wing hung at an angle that suggested a past disagreement with a moving vehicle. And on its chest, in a pattern that could not possibly be natural, the grey feathers formed a shape that looked, if you squinted, if you tilted your head, if you were willing to see it — like a target. A bullseye.

"Chal, hat." Danny waved his rough hand. The pigeon didn't move. "These things are disgusting. My dad says they're rats with wings. They carry diseases. And they don't come back." He paused. "Trust me."

"Don't be mean!" Meera dropped to her knees. The pigeon regarded her with its single eye; an eye that was, Meera thought, more intelligent than a pigeon's eye had any right to be. "Hey, chotu. Do you want to tell us something?"

The pigeon stared at her blankly. Danny laughed.

"Maybe try singing to it. That's your solution to everything."

Meera should have been annoyed. But the word "singing" triggered something, a memory. Guddi. The woman in the bookshop. "I sing when I'm nervous." And something else, something that Meera's musical brain had filed away without conscious thought: the pigeon had been in the bookshop. She'd seen it. Sitting on a shelf, watching, its single eye tracking their movement through the maze.

She sang. Not a Bollywood song: something softer, something that came from the part of her that was afraid and desperate and willing to try anything, including singing to a pigeon in a back lane in Mumbai.

"Chota sa kabootar, bata na raasta, Humein le chal wahan, jahan hai apna."

Little pigeon, tell us the way. Take us there, where ours is.

The pigeon's single eye focused on Meera. It cocked its head. It cooed: not the standard, mindless pigeon coo of urban birds, but a coo that had structure, rhythm, intent.

Then it walked away. Three steps. Stopped. Looked back. Cooed again.

Meera stood up.

"You cannot be serious," Danny said.

But Meera was already following the pigeon. It fluttered forward — not flying, walking with purpose, its head bobbing, its crooked wing tucked against its body. It turned a corner. Meera turned the corner.

Danny had no choice. He followed.

They chased the pigeon through lanes that Danny had never seen, and Danny had lived in South Mumbai his entire life, had explored every gali and chowk between Malabar Hill and Colaba. These lanes were different. Narrower. Older. The buildings on either side were the kind of buildings that Mumbai was supposed to have demolished decades ago; wooden balconies, carved shutters, an architecture that existed before the British and before the Mughals and before anyone had thought to put a name on a map.

The pigeon turned. They turned. The pigeon stopped. They stopped. The pigeon, impossibly, waited for them to catch up before continuing.

Behind them, Danny heard a sound. A sound like stone scraping stone, like walls moving, like the city rearranging itself in their wake. He turned and saw, his eyes widened — a wall where there hadn't been a wall. The lane they'd just walked down was gone.

"Meera—"

"I know." Her voice was steady. Steadier than Danny expected. "The lanes are moving."

"Lanes don't MOVE."

"These do."

And then they heard it: a sound like the rough pages of a massive book being turned, a FWAP FWAP FWAP that shook the warm air; followed by the heavy, final sound of a cover closing.

It came from around the corner.

Danny and Meera looked at each other. The look of two people who didn't like each other much but were, at this moment, the only people each other had.

They looked around the corner.

And there it was. The bookshop. Pustakon Ka Antim Thikana. Wedged between two buildings, its Mangalore tiles sagging, its carved doorframe intact, its display window thick with a glass that warped the world behind it.

And standing in the doorway was a woman.

She was not Guddi.

She was tall where Guddi was short, thin where Guddi was round, and her face had the stillness of someone who had spent decades learning to be calm in situations that did not warrant calm. Her hair was jet black except for a single streak of silver that swept across her forehead like a painter's brushstroke. She wore a silk sari, not the bright silk of weddings and festivals, but a deep, earthen silk, the colour of sandalwood, with a border of embroidered feathers. Actual feathers, peacock, parrot, and something golden that Danny couldn't identify; were woven into the pallu.

The pigeon, the one-eyed, crooked-winged pigeon with the bullseye chest — flew to her arm. She didn't flinch. She held it the way someone held something precious and familiar.

"Namaste," the woman said. Her voice was warm, low, the kind of voice that settled into the ears like honey into chai. "I am Noor. You were here earlier, with your brother?"

Meera nodded. Captivated, despite everything, by the sari and the feathers.

"Yes. Shukriya, Nishana." Noor sang softly to the pigeon; actually sang, a few notes, a melody that was more vibration than sound. Danny stared.

"You're singing to a pigeon."

"Birds communicate through song. We must sing to them if we wish to be heard." Meera gave Danny a look of supreme vindication.

"That pigeon's name is Nishana?" Danny asked. "Target?"

"He has an unfortunate birthmark. But he is the finest homing kabootar in Mumbai. Every time my didi moves the shop, Nishana guides me home."

"Moves the shop?" Danny's brain was doing the thing it did when confronted with information that didn't compute: rejecting it. "You can't move a shop."

"My didi Rashida has a temper and a gift for geography. When she discovered what happened to your brother, she moved the shop and rearranged the lanes. She's protective."

"The lanes can't—"

Nishana cooed. Noor tilted her head, listening. Then she looked directly at Danny.

"He says you called him a rat with wings."

Danny's mouth opened. Closed. Opened again.

"Uhh—"

Nishana cooed again.

"He also says your pigeon, Rocket, was it?: flew to Goa because the bajra you fed him was stale."

"It was fresh bajra!" Danny protested. Then he stopped. "Wait. How did—"

"Pigeons talk, beta. Most people don't listen." Noor produced a piece of dry roti from the folds of her sari. Nishana took it and flew away, disappearing over the rooftops. "Please, come in. We have much to discuss."

Meera was already moving toward the heavy door. Danny didn't budge.

"Lady, this is how every kidnapping story starts. Weird shop, no witnesses, magical woman with a bird."

"Danny!" Meera hissed.

"He doesn't mean to be rude," Meera said.

Noor smiled. The smile was neither offended nor amused. It was the smile of someone who understood that rudeness was, in thirteen-year-old boys, a form of fear.

"If you could just send Kabir out, we need to go home," Meera said.

Noor's smile faded. Not disappeared: faded, the way a lamp dimmed when the oil ran low.

"I wish I could, beti. I truly do."

"Why can't you?"

"Because he's not here. He's in the book. And getting him out..." She paused. The pause of someone choosing words carefully, the way a surgeon chose instruments. "Getting him out requires understanding what happened. And that requires tea."

"Tea?"

"All understanding begins with chai." Noor gestured toward the heavy door. "Come in. Sit. Let us talk."

Danny looked at Meera. Meera looked at Danny.

They went in.