Chapter 5: Anushka / Pehla Din (First Day)

# Chapter 5: Anushka / Pehla Din (First Day)

This house was the same and it was different.

The same: the red oxide floor, cool under bare feet. The mogra bush on the verandah, heavy with flowers, the white blossoms throwing their sweetness into the November air with the extravagance of a plant that had been waiting three months to perform for someone specific. The Singer sewing machine in the corner of the living room, its black body gleaming, its needle poised over a half-finished blouse piece like a pen paused mid-sentence. The kitchen with its brass lota near the stove and its steel thali rack and its window that looked out onto the backyard where the mango tree stood, leafless now, October had stripped it, a skeleton of branches against the blue.

The different: photographs. Three framed prints of Anushka on the living room wall, next to the framed photograph of Deepak that had been there for years. In the first, Anushka was at the piano in Shalini's house. The Casio on the cutting table, her fingers mid-chord, her face in profile. In the second, Anushka and Shalini on the verandah, Conceição's work, taken from the garden without either of them noticing. In the third, Anushka alone on the beach at Benaulim, the Arabian Sea behind her, the wind in her hair, the golden hour light making her look, Anushka thought, like someone she almost didn't recognize. Someone unguarded. Someone who belonged.

"When did you put these up?" Anushka asked, standing in front of the photographs, her suitcase still in the hallway.

"Last month." Shalini was in the kitchen doorway, watching Anushka look at the photographs with an expression that was both proud and cautious, the expression of a person who has made a decorative decision and is not sure if it will be approved. "Conceição helped me choose the frames. She said the wooden ones. I wanted the steel ones. We argued for forty minutes. Conceição won. Conceição always wins."

"They're beautiful."

"They're you."

Anushka touched the frame of the third photograph — the one on the beach. This wood was warm. She could feel the grain under her fingertips, the texture of the object that held the image that held the memory. Three months ago she'd been standing on that beach, not knowing that Shalini was watching, not knowing that Conceição had a phone, not knowing that this moment, this ordinary moment of standing and looking at the sea — would be elevated to the status of a framed object on a wall in a house that was becoming, slowly and irrevocably, a second home.

"Come," Shalini said. "Eat. Then rest. Then we talk."

---

Different: everything else. Or rather, different: her. She was different in this house now, and the house knew it. Three months ago she had arrived as a stranger, a visitor, a woman with a DNA test result and a question. She had walked through these rooms with the careful step of someone in a museum, touching nothing, disturbing nothing, reading the objects the way you read plaques beside exhibits. Now she walked through with the step of someone who was beginning, tentatively, to claim space. She placed her bag on the bed in the guest room without asking permission. She opened the kitchen cupboard for a glass without waiting for Shalini to offer. She sat on the verandah with the specific posture of someone who expected to be here, who was not visiting but returning.

The distinction was important. Visiting was temporary. Returning was a statement. It said: I was here before, I left, and now I have come back, and the coming back is deliberate, chosen, an act of will rather than circumstance.

Shalini noticed. She noticed everything, the woman who had spent four decades in Muscat developing the observation skills of a person who lived alone and for whom the small changes in the environment were the only conversation the day offered. She noticed that Anushka placed her slippers beside the door without lining them up against the wall, the way you place slippers in a house that is yours. She noticed that Anushka's hand went to the light switch in the hallway without looking, muscle memory from three weeks, the body remembering what the mind had not yet acknowledged.

"Tu ghar visarli nahi," Shalini said quietly. You haven't forgotten the house.

"Nahi, Aai. Ghar mala visarla nahi." No, Aai. The house hasn't forgotten me.

That food was excessive.

Shalini's table held: prawn xacuti (the good kind, with roasted coconut and whole spices, the kind that took three hours to make and fifteen minutes to eat), rice (red, from the local mill, parboiled, the kind that had texture and taste and didn't dissolve into paste the way the commercial stuff did), sol kadhi (pink, coconut-milk-and-kokum, cold, the digestive that was also a drink that was also a statement of identity because sol kadhi was Konkan and Konkan was home), sannas (the fermented rice cakes that puffed up in the steamer like small white clouds, spongy and faintly sweet), kismur (dry prawn coconut relish, the condiment that made everything better the way salt made everything better, fundamentally, unconditionally), and bebinca (seven-layered, the dessert that took six hours to make because each layer had to be baked individually, the dessert that was a monument to patience, the dessert that Shalini had started making three days ago because she knew Anushka was coming and bebinca was the Goan equivalent of a welcome banner).

"Shalini, this is — for ten people."

"It's for one person who hasn't eaten properly in three months."

"I have been eating properly!"

"You've been eating Mumbai food. That's not properly. That's surviving." She ladled xacuti onto Anushka's thali with the authority of a woman who considered feeding a moral obligation. "Eat."

Anushka ate. The xacuti hit her tongue and she felt the burn. Not the sharp burn of chilli but the deep, complex burn of roasted spice, the kind that built slowly and stayed, warming the mouth from the inside. The sannas absorbed the gravy. The sol kadhi cooled the burn. The kismur added crunch, texture, the dry-against-wet contrast that made every mouthful a composition.

She ate with her hands. In Mumbai, at home, she used a spoon sometimes, Tara had bought a set of Ikea cutlery that sat in a drawer and made them feel cosmopolitan, but here, in this house, with this food, hands were the only option. Food required fingers. Rice required pressing. The xacuti required mixing. The sanna required tearing. It was tactile eating, the kind where the hands were as involved as the mouth, where the temperature and texture of the food against your palms was as much a part of the experience as the taste.

"How are your students?" Shalini asked, sitting across the table, not eating, watching Anushka eat with the focused attention of a woman conducting quality control.

"Good. One's preparing for Trinity Grade 5. She's talented."

"What's her name?"

"Isha. Isha Patwardhan. Twelve years old. Plays Beethoven like she's met him."

Shalini nodded. "And the boy? The one who plays. What was it? The Greek thing?"

"Yanni. Krish. He's still terrible. But enthusiastic."

"Enthusiasm is better than talent. Talent without enthusiasm is a singer who won't sing." She paused. pause was loaded. "I should know."

Anushka looked up from her thali. Shalini's face was doing the thing — the Shalini thing — where the surface was calm but the underneath was moving, like a river that looks still from the bank but has a current that can pull you under.

"Are you still singing?"

"Every day."

"In the kitchen?"

"In the kitchen. On the verandah. Sometimes at Conceição's house. She makes me sing while she cooks. She says my voice improves her sorpotel." A pause. "I sang at church last Sunday."

"At church?"

"At St. John the Baptist. Father Rodrigues asked me. The regular singer — Florina, you met her — she had a throat infection. So he asked me." She looked at her hands. "I said no. Then I said yes. Then I said no again. Then Conceição drove me to the church and pushed me through the door."

"What did you sing?"

"A hymn. Laudate Dominum. Mozart." She looked up. "My hands were shaking. My voice was. Not shaking. Strange. Hands knew I was scared but the voice didn't."

"That's because the voice knows what it's doing. The hands don't sing. They just hold things."

Shalini smiled. A real smile, not the careful, calibrated smile she'd used in Anushka's first visit, the smile that measured how much warmth was safe to show, but an unguarded one. A smile that reached her eyes and stayed.

"You sound like your father."

"Do I?"

"Deepak used to say things like that. Simple things that were actually — not simple." She stood. Collected Anushka's thali. "Finish the bebinca. Then rest. Your room is ready."

---

Room was ready.

The same room from three months ago — the small room at the back of the house that had been Deepak's study and was now the guest room that was now, slowly, becoming Anushka's room. That transformation was subtle but unmistakable. Last time: a bed, a table, a chair, a window. This time: a bed (same), a table (same, but with a small vase of fresh mogra flowers on it), a chair (same), a window (same, but with new curtains — cotton, pale blue, the fabric slightly stiff from being new), and on the wall, a small framed photograph that hadn't been there before.

Anushka looked at it.

Deepak.

Not the formal portrait from the living room — not the one where he wore a pressed shirt and looked directly at the camera with the composed expression of a man sitting for an official photograph. This was different. This was candid. Deepak on a beach, Benaulim, probably, the same beach where Anushka had been photographed without knowing — sitting on the sand, looking at the sea, his profile sharp against the light. He was young in this photograph. Thirties, maybe. Before the illness that killed him. Before the grief that came before the illness. He was just, a man on a beach, looking at the water, with the expression of someone thinking about something that mattered.

On the back of the frame, in Shalini's handwriting:

So you know his face in the morning light. — S

Anushka put the frame down. Sat on the bed. A mattress was new — firmer than the old one, which had sagged in the middle like a hammock. A sheets were new. The pillow was new. fan was new — larger, quieter, the upgrade Shalini had mentioned in the text about mothers noticing sweating.

Everything was prepared. Everything was ready. The room said: You are expected. You are wanted. You have a place here.

She lay down. The ceiling fan turned. The mogra scent came through the window with the November breeze — Goa's November, which was nothing like Mumbai's November, which was not really autumn but the end of the monsoon's aftermath, a season that didn't have a proper name but felt like a beginning.

She closed her eyes.

She slept in her mother's house.