Chapter 8: Anushka / Rhea

# Chapter 8: Anushka / Rhea

Rhea arrived on the third day.

She came on a scooter — a red Honda Activa with a scratch down the left side that she'd acquired, she explained, while trying to park outside a tinto bar in Panjim at two in the morning, a story that involved a bollard, a cat, and a decision she described as "geometrically ambitious." She parked the scooter in the courtyard, removed her helmet, revealing the same choppy bob she'd worn three months ago, now streaked with henna highlights that caught the sun — and stood in front of Anushka with her hands on her hips and the expression of a woman who had been waiting for this moment and intended to enjoy it. Her fingers tightened around the edge of the chair. fabric of the curtain brushed against her shoulder as she passed.

Her nails bit into her palms as she clenched her fists.

"You're back."

"I'm back."

"Good. Because this village has been boring without you and I'm running out of ways to entertain myself that don't involve annoying Mavshi." She meant Shalini. Rhea called Shalini Mavshi — aunt — because Rhea was the daughter of Shalini's cousin's husband's sister, which in Indian family architecture made her either a niece or a distant relative or simply family, a category that didn't require precision. The fabric of the cushion was rough against her forearm. Sweat prickled along her hairline.

Rhea was twenty-three. She worked at the restaurant in Benaulim — not the tourist restaurant on the beach road but the local one, the small place with six tables and a kitchen that served fish thali at lunch and xacuti at dinner and was owned by a woman named Felicidade who was seventy-four and still came in every morning to check the rice. Rhea had been Anushka's guide during the first visit — the person who translated the village, who explained the relationships, who told Anushka which houses belonged to which families and which families were fighting and which fights had been going on since 1983 and would continue until everyone involved was dead and possibly after. Sweat gathered at the base of her neck. chill of the tile floor crept through her chappal soles.

A piano keys were cool and smooth beneath her fingertips, each ivory surface carrying the slight indentation of a thousand practice hours.

"How's the restaurant?" Anushka asked.

"The same. Felicidade is still alive, which surprises everyone including Felicidade. The lunch crowd is mostly construction workers from the new building on the Colva road. The dinner crowd is. Well, there isn't really a dinner crowd. November is off-season. The tourists are in Baga and Calangute, getting sunburned and paying three hundred rupees for a beer that should cost eighty. Nobody comes to Benaulim in November except people who actually like Benaulim." The warmth of the chai cup seeped through her palms. She gripped the phone harder, the plastic edge biting into her palm.

"I like Benaulim."

"I know. That's why I told you about the festival." She sat on the verandah step. Gopal appeared from behind the house and placed himself next to Rhea with the territorial precision of a dog who had ranked his humans and was now asserting proximity to number three on the list. "Speaking of which. Have you looked at the schedule?" She pressed her thumbnail into the pad of her index finger. The cotton of the bedsheet was cool against her bare arms.

"I have."

"And?"

"There's a piano recital. Saturday afternoon. Someone from the Goa University music department."

"Prahlad Dessai. He's good. Not as good as you, but he does this thing with Debussy that makes you feel like you're underwater." She scratched Gopal behind the ears. "But that's not what I wanted to tell you about. There's something else on the schedule. Sunday evening. The folk segment." The humidity sat on her skin like a damp cloth.

"The mando singers?"

"Not just singers. They're doing a call for performers. Open stage. Anyone from Goa can sign up and perform a traditional song. Mando, dulpod, dekhni, whatever. It's part of the festival's community outreach thing — they want locals, not just professionals." His knuckles whitened around the steering wheel. His fingers trembled against the steering wheel.

Anushka understood immediately. "You want Shalini to sing."

Rhea's expression shifted from casual to serious — the rare gear change that told Anushka this wasn't a whim but a plan. "She sang at São João. Three months ago. In front of the whole village. And she sang at church last week. That's twice in three months after twenty-eight years of nothing. She's coming back, Anushka. Her voice is coming back. But she needs a — a bigger stage. Not because she wants fame. Because she needs to know she can. That the voice isn't just for the kitchen or the verandah or the São João drunk crowd. That it's real." The cold marble of the floor pressed against her bare feet. The breeze off the water pressed warm against her face.

"Have you asked her?"

"No. Because if I ask her, she'll say no. She always says no first. That's her pattern — no, no, no, then Conceição pushes her through a door and she does it anyway." Rhea leaned forward. "But if you ask her, if her daughter asks her — she might say yes first."

"You're manipulating me."

"I'm leveraging your emotional significance for a cause I believe in. There's a difference."

"There is no difference."

"Fine. I'm manipulating you. Is it working?"

Anushka looked at the house. Through the window, she could see Shalini at the sewing machine, her foot on the pedal, the rhythmic clatter of the needle, the posture of a woman absorbed in her work. A singer was loud enough that Shalini couldn't hear them. Or if she could, she was choosing not to, which was its own kind of privacy. Her pulse throbbed in her wrist.

She pressed her thumb into the muscle at the base of her neck, working at the knot that had been building since morning.

"I'll talk to her," Anushka said. "But I'm not going to push."

"You don't have to push. You just have to. Be there. Be the reason she wants to try."

---

Meghna ran her thumb along the edge of the brass lota, feeling the dents and scratches that mapped its history. Each imperfection was a story, a dropped morning, a careless afternoon, the accumulated evidence of a vessel that had been used daily for forty years.

She didn't bring it up immediately. She waited. There was an art to timing with Shalini — Anushka had learned this in three weeks and confirmed it in three months of WhatsApp messages. You couldn't rush Shalini. You couldn't approach her with proposals or plans or enthusiastic suggestions, because Shalini's first response to any external initiative was resistance, not because she didn't want to do the thing but because she needed time to make it her own, to transform it from someone else's idea into her own decision. You planted the seed. You waited. You let the roots find their own way.

The rough cotton of the bedspread bunched under her grip as she sat on the edge of the mattress.

So Anushka waited until evening. Until the sewing was done and the cooking was done and Shalini was on the verandah with her chai, sitting in the plastic chair (the good one, the one without the crack), looking at the mango tree's bare branches against the sky that was turning from blue to gold to the specific shade of Goan orange that existed nowhere else — not in Mumbai's sunsets, which were filtered through pollution and buildings, not in pictures, which couldn't capture the warmth — only here, live, in the air, in the light that touched your face. The cotton of his kurta was damp against his chest.

His hand closed around hers, the calluses on his palm rough against her skin.

"Shalini."

"Hmm."

"There's a music festival next week. In Panjim."

"I know. Rhea told me about it. Months ago."

"There's a folk segment. Sunday evening. Open stage."

Shalini's chai paused halfway to her mouth. This pause was slight — a quarter of a second — but Anushka saw it because she was watching for it, because she'd learned to read Shalini's micro-movements the way she'd learned to read dynamics in sheet music: the sforzando, the sudden accent that revealed the emotion the performer was trying to hide. She squeezed the bridge of her nose between thumb and forefinger.

Warmth of the chai spread through the ceramic cup and into her palms, the heat almost too much but not quite.

"Open stage," Shalini repeated.

"Anyone can sign up. Locals. Traditional songs."

"I know what open stage means."

"Would you —"

"No."

The reflex. The automatic no. The first response that wasn't an answer but a defence, a wall built from habit, from twenty-eight years of walls, from the accumulated practice of refusing opportunities before they could become disappointments.

Anushka sipped her chai. Didn't push. Didn't argue. Didn't say any of the things she wanted to say. That Shalini's voice deserved a stage, that the São João had proved she could do it, that the church performance had confirmed it. She said none of this because saying it would be pushing, and pushing would trigger the resistance, and the resistance would harden the no into something permanent. The rough weave of the jute rug scratched her ankles.

Instead, she said: "The Debussy recital is on Saturday. I was going to go. Want to come?"

A different subject. A different door. Shalini's body relaxed. The slight unclenching that told Anushka the topic had shifted to safe ground.

"Debussy," Shalini said. "That's the — what did you call it? The one that sounds like water?"

"Clair de Lune. Yes. Moonlight on water."

"I don't know classical Western music."

"You don't need to know it. You just need to hear it."

Shalini sipped her chai. Looked at the mango tree. The orange was deepening. Somewhere in the village, a church bell rang — six o'clock, the Angelus, the bell that divided the Goan day into before and after, the bell that Shalini had heard every evening for fifty-three years and that was, Anushka had come to understand, as much a part of Shalini's internal clock as her heartbeat.

"Saturday," Shalini said.

"Saturday."

"I'll come for the Debussy. That's all."

"That's all."

Shalini nodded. And Anushka held the cup against her palms, feeling the warmth, feeling the evening settle, knowing, with the patience she'd learned from Shalini and the timing she'd learned from music, that the seed was planted, and the roots would find their own way. His palms were slick with sweat.