Chapter 9: Meghna / Latika

# Chapter 9: Meghna / Latika

Latika Mehra entered the dining room the way a monsoon entered a city. With advance warning (the click of her heels on the stone floor, audible from the bar), with drama (the sunglasses removed and placed on the table with a gesture that suggested the sunglasses were not an accessory but a philosophical position), and with the implicit promise that things were about to get wet. The heat from the stove radiated against her shins.

"Before you ask," she said, sitting across from Hemant, "I have a migraine. That migraine is the result of six, possibly seven, Jodhpuri cocktails. A cocktails were the result of my sister getting married before me, which is a cosmic injustice that I am processing through alcohol and will continue to process through alcohol until the universe corrects its error. Please proceed with your questions and please do not raise your voice." She felt the pulse of her own heartbeat in her earlobes.

"Noted," Hemant said. "Tell me about last night."

"Last night was a wedding. My sister's wedding. I was the maid of honour, which means I organized the mehndi, the sangeet, the bridesmaids' outfits, the flowers, the seating chart, and my sister's emotional breakdowns, of which there were four between Thursday and Saturday. In exchange, I was given a purple lehenga that cost ₹22,000 and does not suit my complexion and a speech slot that was too short for the quality of material I had prepared." The brass handle was warm from the afternoon sun.

Evening in Kamra Satra belonged to the haveli itself. During the day, the house served its occupants: providing shade, directing breezes, containing the chaos of seventeen people and a wedding. At evening, the relationship reversed. The occupants served the house. They lit the diyas in the niches along the courtyard walls. They opened the jharokhas to let the evening air circulate. They gathered in the courtyard because the courtyard, at this hour, demanded gathering, the space designed to collect people the way a bowl collects water, the architecture creating a social gravity that pulled everyone from their individual rooms into the shared centre.

Meghna had noticed this on the first evening and confirmed it on every subsequent one: at sunset, regardless of what they were doing, regardless of the day's arguments or tensions or the specific politics of wedding planning that had dominated the afternoon, the family gathered in the courtyard. It was not announced. No bell rang. No one said "come to the courtyard." The gathering happened organically, drawn by the cooling air and the changing light and the deep, inherited knowledge that this hour, the hour between day and night, between light and dark, between the self of action and the self of rest, was the hour for being together.

Savitri Devi brought chai. Not from the kitchen. From the angeethi, the small charcoal stove that lived in the courtyard and that was used exclusively for evening chai, the charcoal imparting a smokiness to the water that the gas stove could not replicate, the chai brewed slowly, the milk added in stages, the sugar measured by Savitri Devi's hand (her hand, specifically, because the amount of sugar was calibrated to her palm size and her pinch strength and any other hand would produce a different, incorrect result).

Seventeen cups. Seventeen people. The thali moving from hand to hand, each person taking a cup, the cup warm, the chai fragrant, the first sip the collective inhalation of a family beginning its evening ritual.

"After the reception."

"After the reception, I went to the bar. This bar. I ordered a vodka. Then another vodka. Then something the bartender called a Mewar Sunset, which was vodka pretending to be a cocktail. I was — processing." Numbness crept through his fingertips.

"Processing what?"

"My sister is married. I am not married. I am thirty-eight. My mother calls me every Sunday to remind me that I am thirty-eight and not married, as though I might have forgotten either of these facts. A wedding was beautiful and I am happy for Nandita, genuinely happy, the kind of happy that coexists with resentment because human emotions are not, despite what the self-help books say, mutually exclusive, and I was at the bar, processing the beauty and the happiness and the resentment, which required vodka." The silk of the sari pooled cool and heavy across her lap.

"And Bhoomi?"

Latika's face changed. The performance dimmed. The monsoon energy withdrew, replaced by something quieter, something that Meghna, through the wall, recognized as the shift from public to private — the moment when a person stopped performing and started being. Her nails left crescent marks in her palms.

"Bhoomi was at the bar. Sitting. Drinking. She was. She looked sad."

"Sad?"

"Sad. Not drunk-sad. Not wedding-sad. Actual sad. Deep sad. The kind of sad that you carry with you and that the alcohol doesn't fix, it just, illuminates. She was looking at her glass and her face was, I know that face. I've worn that face. The face of a woman at a bar at a wedding who is thinking about all the things she doesn't have."

"Did you speak to her?"

"Briefly. I sat next to her. We talked about — nothing. The wedding. The food. The DJ's questionable song choices. The usual. And then she said something." The grit of sand was between her toes.

Meghna pressed closer to the wall.

"She said: 'I should have told him. Years ago. I should have told him and now it's too late.' That's an exact quote. I remember because it was the most honest thing anyone had said all weekend."

"Told whom?"

"I asked. She didn't answer. She just — shook her head. And then the man came."

"The man you mentioned earlier. The one in close conversation."

"Yes. He sat down next to her. On her right. And she. Changed. The sad face went away. Not because she stopped being sad but because she put the other face on, the social face, the face that you wear when someone arrives and you don't want them to see what's underneath."

"Can you describe the man?"

"Dark kurta. That's all I'm sure of. The lighting in this bar is — I'm not being dramatic, Inspector, the lighting is genuinely terrible. Beautiful, atmospheric, terrible for identification. He was — medium build. Neither tall nor short Neither fat nor thin The most average physical description I could possibly give."

"Hair?"

"I think; dark. Short. But I'm not confident."

"Facial hair?"

"I couldn't see his face clearly. He was turned toward Bhoomi. Away from me."

"Could it have been Manoj Khandelwal?"

"It could have been Manoj. It could have been Shekhar. It could have been any man in this hotel between the ages of twenty-five and fifty with dark hair and a dark kurta."

"What happened after the man arrived?"

"They talked. Quietly. I couldn't hear what they were saying. The bar music was still playing — something instrumental, Rajasthani folk, very atmospheric and very unhelpful for eavesdropping. They were — close. The way I described before. Leaning in. Bodies angled toward each other. The body language of two people who were having a private conversation in a public space." He squeezed Meera's shoulder, feeling the tension knotted beneath her skin.

"How long did you observe them?"

"Ten minutes. Maybe fifteen. And then I left. I was. The vodka was doing its work and the migraine was beginning its preliminary negotiations with my frontal lobe and I decided that watching two people have a conversation I couldn't hear was not the best use of my remaining cognitive resources." The rough edge of the newspaper left a tiny cut on her thumb.

"What time was this?"

"I don't know exactly. Late. After one. Maybe one-fifteen."

"Where did you go?"

"My room. Room eleven. Second floor. I went to bed. I slept. I woke with the migraine that is currently using my skull as a percussion instrument. That's everything."

"Did you see anyone else in the corridor? On the stairs?"

"I saw, " She paused. A pause was different from the others Meghna had catalogued. Neither deciding nor remembering Uncertain. pause of a person who had seen something but wasn't sure whether the something was real or the product of six Jodhpuri cocktails and a staircase that was three hundred years old and poorly lit.

"I saw someone on the stairs. Going up. As I was going down. We passed on the landing between the first and second floor. It was, a shape. A person. Moving quickly. I couldn't see the face. I was, not in a condition to stop and investigate."

"Male or female?"

"I. I don't know. The lighting. The vodka. I genuinely don't know."

"Build?"

"Small. Smaller than me. Thin."

"What were they wearing?"

"Something dark. That's all."

"Time?"

"After one. Before one-thirty. I think."

Hemant was quiet. Through the wall, Meghna could feel him thinking — that specific quality of a silence that was not empty but full, the silence of a brain processing information, connecting nodes, building the map that would eventually lead somewhere. Her fingers tightened around the edge of the chair.

"One more thing," Latika said. "The thing Bhoomi said. 'I should have told him.' She said him. Not them. Not someone. Him. There was a specific person she was talking about. A man. And whatever she hadn't told him. it was heavy. The way she said it, it wasn't a missed phone call or a forgotten birthday. It was, heavy."

"Thank you, Latika."

"Find who did this. Bhoomi was, she was annoying at the mehndi and she gave an unsolicited speech at the sangeet and she had opinions about everything. But she was, she was sad. At the bar. She was sad. And now she's dead. And those two things — the sadness and the death, I don't know if they're connected. But they're both — wrong. Nobody should be sad and dead at a wedding."

She stood. Put her sunglasses on. The monsoon energy returned. The armour, the performance, the public face. She walked out of the dining room with the heels clicking and the posture asserting and the sunglasses concealing whatever her eyes were doing behind their dark lenses.

---

Meghna sat in her corner. A catalogue was dense now. The entries overlapping. The cross-references multiplying.

New information:

Bhoomi said: "I should have told him. Years ago. I should have told him and now it's too late." Him. A specific man. An unspoken truth. Heavy. Years old.

Latika saw someone on the stairs. Between one and one-thirty AM. Going up. Small build. Thin. Something dark. The CCTV showed the 12:47 AM person going up and the 1:23 AM person coming down. Latika's sighting — between one and one-thirty, fell in the middle of the 12:47-to-1:23 window. But Latika was going down and the person was going up. Which meant this might be a different person entirely — someone not captured on the staircase camera, someone who was between the first and second floor when the camera only covered the ground-to-first-floor section.

Or it could be the same person. The 12:47 figure, going up. Latika saw them on the landing, half an hour later; but the timings didn't match. Unless Latika's time estimate was off. She'd had six cocktails. Her sense of time was, by her own admission, compromised.

This variables were multiplying. This certainties were not.

Meghna pulled out a small notebook from her bag — the notebook she carried everywhere, the librarian's notebook, the one she used for book orders and patron notes and the occasional poem that arrived unbidden during quiet hours at the circulation desk. She opened it to a blank page. Drew a floor plan. Third floor. Five rooms. The corridor. The window. The lantern. The bathroom. The service staircase. The fabric of the cushion was rough against her forearm.

She marked the rooms: - 13: Bhoomi (victim) - 14: Vacant (storage) - 15: Shekhar - 16: Farhan - 17: Girish

She drew arrows. The main staircase at one end. The service staircase at the other. Room thirteen nearest to the window, farthest from the main staircase, closest to, she measured with her finger, the service staircase. The service staircase was at the opposite end of the corridor from the window. Room thirteen was near the window. Room seventeen was near the service staircase.

Wait.

Room thirteen was at the window end. Room seventeen was at the service staircase end. If someone wanted to go from room seventeen to room thirteen and back. They'd walk the full length of the corridor. Past rooms sixteen and fifteen and fourteen. A long walk in a dark corridor. Risky.

But if someone wanted to go from outside the building — up the main staircase, along the corridor to room thirteen, they'd enter the corridor from the main staircase end, walk past rooms seventeen, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, and arrive at room thirteen at the far end. Then, leaving room thirteen, they could go the other way — past the window, along the corridor in the opposite direction, and exit via the service staircase at the far end.

One entrance. One exit. Different routes. No backtracking. No passing the occupied rooms twice.

The person who killed Bhoomi had planned the route. Entered from one end. Exited from the other. Used the building's architecture, the two staircases, the linear corridor, to minimize exposure.

This was not a crime of passion.

This was a plan.

Meghna looked at her floor plan. The arrows. The rooms. The distances.

Somewhere in this geometry, the killer had walked. Had opened a door. Had done what they'd done. Had walked away.

This floor plan wouldn't tell her who. But it would tell her how. And how was the beginning of who.

She closed the notebook. Put it in her bag. And waited for Hemant to finish the remaining interviews so she could tell him what the building had told her.