Chapter 2: Sarita

Sarita Kapoor was thirty-one years old, and she was disappearing.

Not physically — she was present, visible, occupying space in the world with the reliable consistency of a woman who showed up to work on time and paid her rent before the fifth and responded to text messages within a reasonable window. She lived in Bandra West, in a second-floor flat in a building that had been painted yellow in 1987 and had faded to the colour of a memory. The flat had two bedrooms, one of which had belonged to her brother Jai before he had left for a consulting job in Milan six months ago, taking with him the last human being who had made the flat feel like a home rather than a container.

She was disappearing in the way that lonely people disappear — gradually, silently, the social connections fraying one by one until the network that had once held her in place became a series of loose ends that nobody was holding. Her friends had married, moved, or evolved into versions of themselves that no longer overlapped with her version of herself. Her parents were in Nashik, calling every Sunday with the particular combination of love and concern that Indian parents deployed when they suspected their daughter was not fine but could not prove it.

She was not fine.

The anxiety had started two years ago — a tightness in her chest that arrived without invitation and stayed without explanation, the physiological expression of a nervous system that had decided, unilaterally, that the world was dangerous and that the appropriate response was constant vigilance. The panic attacks had followed — sudden, overwhelming surges of terror that bore no relationship to external reality, that could strike in the middle of a meeting or a grocery run or a perfectly ordinary Tuesday evening, converting the safe, familiar world into a landscape of threat.

She had seen a doctor. The doctor had prescribed Xanax and referred her to a therapist. The therapist had said the word "generalised anxiety disorder" with the gentle precision of someone placing a label on a package, and Sarita had accepted the label because it was easier to be diagnosed than to be confused.

But the label didn't explain the dreams.

The dreams had started at the same time as the anxiety — vivid, recurring, featuring colours that she could not name and sensations that she could not describe and a feeling of being watched by something that was neither hostile nor benign but interested, the way a scientist is interested in a specimen. She did not tell the therapist about the dreams because the dreams did not fit the diagnosis, and she had learned that doctors preferred information that confirmed their conclusions rather than information that complicated them.

She worked at an advertising agency in Andheri — a mid-level position that required creativity and delivered stress and compensated with a salary that was adequate for Bandra rent and insufficient for Bandra aspirations. The office was open-plan, loud, filled with people in their twenties who treated deadlines as suggestions and collaboration as performance. Sarita navigated it with the quiet efficiency of someone who had been doing the same thing for eight years and had stopped expecting it to surprise her.

Her best friend was Janaki — married, pregnant, radiantly happy in the particular way that pregnant women in stable marriages are happy, the happiness that is both genuine and inadvertently cruel to friends who are neither married nor pregnant nor stable. They met for coffee every two weeks at a café in Linking Road, and the conversations followed a pattern so established that Sarita could have scripted them: Janaki talked about the baby, Sarita nodded and smiled, Janaki asked "So what's new with you?" and Sarita said "Nothing much" and Janaki accepted this because accepting it was easier than interrogating it.

The flat was quiet. That was the thing Sarita noticed most — the quiet. Not the peaceful quiet of solitude but the empty quiet of absence, the acoustic signature of rooms that had been designed for multiple occupants and were now serving one. Jai's room was still furnished — his bed, his desk, his bookshelf with its collection of business books and cricket memoirs — but the furniture had the particular stillness of objects that were no longer being used, the domestic equivalent of a retired machine.

She cooked for one. She ate at the kitchen counter, standing, because sitting at the dining table alone felt like a statement she wasn't ready to make. She watched television with the volume too high because the silence between programmes was worse than the programmes themselves. She fell asleep on the sofa more often than in her bed, because the sofa was in the living room where the sounds of the street — auto-rickshaws, vendors, the distant bass of someone's music system — provided a substitute for the human presence that the flat no longer contained.

This was Sarita's life on the day that I placed Jugnu in it.

*

I had been watching her for three weeks before I made contact.

Not watching in the invasive, predatory sense — I was not stalking her. I was assessing her. The way a placement officer assesses a foster home, the way a general assesses a battlefield, the way a two-thousand-year-old vampire assesses a human being to determine whether they can be trusted with something precious.

I needed a human. Specifically, I needed a human who met a very particular set of criteria:

First: she must be alone. Not isolated — isolation bred suspicion and paranoia, qualities that would make her a poor guardian. Alone in the specific sense of having space in her life — emotional space, physical space, the particular vacancy that occurs when someone has been designed for connection and is currently without it.

Second: she must be kind. Not performatively kind, not the transactional kindness of someone who expected reciprocity, but the structural kindness of a person whose default response to suffering was compassion. This was harder to assess than it sounds. Kindness, like courage, is invisible until it's tested, and I could not test her without revealing myself.

Third: she must be unremarkable. No connections to the vampire world. No history that would draw attention. No friends or family who would ask the kind of questions that would require lies more elaborate than the ones I was already planning.

Sarita met all three criteria. She was alone — the brother gone, the friends dispersed, the parents at safe distance. She was kind — I watched her give her umbrella to a stranger during a monsoon downpour, an act that cost her a soaking and gained her nothing except the knowledge that someone else was dry. And she was unremarkable — a mid-level advertising professional in a city of twenty million, as visible and as invisible as any other woman on the Western line local.

I constructed the cover. Meera Deshmukh, social worker, affiliated with Asha Foundation, a children's welfare organisation that I had created three years ago for exactly this kind of situation. The documentation was flawless — registration certificates, a functional website, a phone number that connected to a voice-mail system that I monitored. The foster care paperwork was genuine, filed through channels that I had cultivated over the past decade for the specific purpose of placing True Blood children in human homes when the vampire world was too dangerous for them.

Sarita had applied to be a foster parent four months ago. The application had been processed by a real agency, reviewed by real social workers, and approved through real channels. The only false element was the child being placed — not a human child in need of temporary care, but a True Blood boy whose existence was a secret and whose safety depended on remaining in the human world until I could negotiate his acceptance by the True Blood clans.

I called her on a Thursday evening. Her voice on the phone was cautious but warm — the voice of a woman who was not expecting the call but was not going to reject it.

"Ms Kapoor? This is Meera Deshmukh from Asha Foundation. I'm calling about your foster application."

"Oh! Yes. I — I didn't expect to hear back so soon."

"We have a placement for you. A ten-year-old boy. He's been in institutional care and needs a temporary home. Two weeks, possibly a month."

The pause on the line was loaded — the weight of a decision being made in real-time, the calculation of a woman who had applied for foster care during a moment of loneliness and was now confronting the reality of what she had asked for.

"When?" she asked.

"Tomorrow, if you're available."

Another pause. Shorter this time. "Tomorrow. Yes. Tomorrow works."

I could hear it in her voice — the fear and the excitement, braided together the way they always are when someone is about to do something that will change their life and knows it.

*

"You placed him with her the next day?" Hari interrupted.

"The next morning. I drove him to Bandra myself."

"As Meera."

"As Meera. I sat in her kitchen and drank the chai she offered — too sweet, too milky, the particular Maharashtrian chai that uses more sugar than sense — and I watched her interact with Jugnu for the first time."

"And?"

I was quiet for a moment. The cabin hummed around us — the white noise of flight, the mechanical lullaby of a machine that was indifferent to the stories being told inside it.

"And she was perfect," I said. "Not because she was qualified or prepared or experienced. She was none of those things. She was perfect because when Jugnu walked through her door, she looked at him with the expression that every abandoned child deserves and almost none of them receive: the expression of someone who was genuinely, transparently glad to see them."