Chapter 5: The Second Saturday

Meghna — 2019

The night Jaya disappeared was a Saturday in December—the second Saturday, which would later acquire the specific significance of a date that divides a life into before and after, the way an earthquake divides a landscape into what stood and what fell.

They had gone to the dhaba together—Sharma's, the one on the highway between Waknaghat and Solan, the dhaba that served truck drivers and college students and the occasional tourist who had been told by a travel blog that authentic Himachali food could be found at roadside establishments where the tables were steel and the rotis were the size of hubcaps and the dal was cooked in a pressure cooker the size of a small child. Sharma's was not authentic Himachali food—it was North Indian highway food, the universal cuisine of the GT Road translated to a mountain highway: butter dal, paneer tikka, the rajma-chawal that was served on steel thalis with the institutional efficiency of a kitchen that fed two hundred people a day and that measured quality not by taste but by volume.

But the food was not why they went. They went because Sharma's had a bar—a room at the back, separated from the dining area by a curtain and a step, where the bottles lined the wall and the television played cricket or Bollywood songs depending on the bartender's mood and where the regulars gathered on Saturday nights with the specific camaraderie of people who understood that drinking in a Himachali dhaba was not about the alcohol but about the brief, contained liberation from the week's constraints.

Meghna Sharma—no relation to the dhaba's owner, a coincidence that provided endless material for jokes she was tired of—was twenty-six, an assistant teacher at the government school in Waknaghat, and possessed of the specific combination of practicality and impatience that characterised women in small Himachali towns who had been educated enough to see the limitations of their circumstances and not enough to escape them. She had a BA from Shimla University, a B.Ed from the same, and a posting at the same school she had attended as a child, which she experienced not as continuity but as confinement—the circular path of a life that had gone away and come back and was now walking the same corridors and sitting in the same staff room and eating the same canteen food and wondering whether this was what the education had been for.

Jaya Negi was her correction. Jaya was everything Meghna was not: spontaneous where Meghna was cautious, loud where Meghna was measured, beautiful in the careless way of a woman who did not inventory her beauty or deploy it strategically but simply possessed it and moved through the world with the unselfconscious confidence of a person who had always been looked at and had decided that being looked at was not a personality trait. She worked at the Block Development Office—clerk, data entry, the specific bureaucratic position that required presence rather than performance and that left her evenings free and her weekends restless.

They had been friends since school—since Class 8, when Jaya had sat beside Meghna on the first day of the new term and said, with the directness that would become her defining quality: "You look like the kind of person who has interesting thoughts but doesn't say them. I'm the kind of person who says everything. We should be friends."

They had been friends since. Twelve years. The kind of friendship that survives college, distance, different career paths, and the specific pressures that small-town India places on women who are twenty-six and unmarried and whose mothers have begun the campaign of matrimonial suggestions with the persistent, grinding efficiency of a military operation.

The dhaba was crowded that Saturday. December in Waknaghat meant cold—the particular Himachali cold that entered through the gaps in doors and the spaces between layers of clothing and that no amount of alcohol could fully defeat, though the attempt was enthusiastic. Meghna and Jaya sat at a table near the bar, their jackets zipped to the chin, their hands wrapped around glasses of rum and warm water—the Himachali winter drink, the specific combination that warmed the throat and the stomach and produced the gradual relaxation that was the purpose of the evening.

Jaya was talking about a man. Not the matrimonial kind—the other kind, the kind who appeared at the edges of a small-town woman's life and who represented, depending on the woman's disposition, either danger or possibility. He worked at the forest department—a range officer, transferred to Waknaghat from Kullu, good-looking in the specific way that Himachali men were good-looking when they spent their days in the mountains and their evenings in the gym that had opened in Solan and that the young men of the district attended with the dedication of a religious practice.

"He asked me for chai," Jaya said, leaning forward, her voice carrying the conspiratorial excitement of a woman sharing information that was both mundane and momentous. "Not coffee. Not dinner. Chai. At that new place on the highway, the one with the glass walls. He said he wanted to talk about—" She air-quoted. "—'the forest management plan.' As if anyone discusses forest management plans over chai."

"Maybe he actually wants to discuss forest management plans," Meghna said, because someone had to be the rational one.

"Meghna. Nobody discusses forest management plans at a café with glass walls while wearing aftershave. I could smell him from across the office. Remy something. The bottle costs more than my monthly salary."

They laughed. The laughter was warm—the specific warmth of two women who knew each other well enough to laugh at the absurdity of romance in a town where everyone knew everyone and where the act of having chai with a man at a glass-walled café was, by Monday, public knowledge discussed at every chai stall and every office water cooler between Waknaghat and Solan.

The evening continued. Drinks were consumed. The television played a Bollywood film from the '90s—Shah Rukh Khan running through a mustard field, the specific cinematic image of romance that every Indian woman over twenty had been raised on and that no Indian woman over twenty believed and yet watched anyway, because the alternative was the news, and the news was worse. The crowd thickened. The noise level rose. The combination of alcohol and winter and Saturday-night liberation produced the gradual dissolution of inhibitions that was the dhaba's primary product.

At 10:30 PM, Jaya said she was going to the bathroom.

She did not come back.

Meghna waited. Five minutes—normal, the line was long. Ten minutes—unusual but not alarming. Fifteen minutes—Meghna went to check. The bathroom was a separate structure behind the dhaba—a concrete block with two doors, lit by a single bulb that attracted moths the size of coins and that cast the specific, insufficient light that made everything beyond its radius invisible.

Jaya was not in the bathroom. Not in the dhaba. Not in the parking lot, where the trucks idled and the cars sat in rows and the cold Himachali night pressed down with the weight of altitude and darkness. Meghna checked her phone—no messages, no missed calls. She called Jaya's number. It rang. It rang and rang and went to voicemail, and the voicemail greeting was Jaya's voice—cheerful, alive, the voice of a woman who existed in the recording and did not exist in the parking lot—and Meghna stood in the December cold with the phone against her ear and the first, tentative tendril of fear wrapping itself around her chest.

She had seen something. Earlier, when Jaya had walked toward the bathroom—a shape, a silhouette, a figure in the periphery of vision that Meghna's conscious mind had not registered but that her subconscious had filed in the category of things-that-don't-belong. A man. Standing near the trucks, wearing a dark jacket—navy or black, indistinguishable in the poor lighting. Not moving. Not smoking. Not doing any of the things that men in parking lots at dhabas at 10:30 PM typically do. Just standing. Watching.

Watching Jaya.

Meghna could not swear to it. The memory was peripheral—the visual equivalent of a word overheard in a crowd, present but not clear, significant only in retrospect when the event it preceded gave it meaning. But the shape was there, in her mind, filed alongside the missing friend and the ringing phone and the December cold, and it would remain there—lodged, immovable, the single piece of evidence that the police would not find useful and that Meghna would not surrender—for as long as it took to find Jaya or to find the man in the dark jacket.

She called the police. Inspector Adhikari—retired now, replaced by Sub-Inspector Rajesh Chauhan, a younger man with a mustache and the specific energy of a newly promoted officer who had not yet learned that most cases in Waknaghat resolved themselves and that the ones that didn't were not resolved by energy but by luck—arrived at Sharma's dhaba at 11:45 PM with a constable and a notebook and the institutional optimism of a police force that believed in procedure.

They searched. The dhaba, the parking lot, the road in both directions, the fields behind the bathroom block. They found nothing. No phone. No purse—Jaya had left her purse at the table, which meant she had intended to return. No footprints—the ground was frozen, the Himachali December cold preserving the earth in the specific hardness that preserved nothing. No witnesses—the dhaba's patrons had been inside, drinking, watching Shah Rukh Khan, and had not seen a woman walk toward the bathroom and not come back.

Jaya Negi disappeared from Sharma's dhaba on the second Saturday of December 2019 as completely as if the mountain air had absorbed her.