CHAPTER 20

OJASWINI

Lunch was mechanical.

I cooked the way you cook when your body remembers what your brain has abandoned — hands moving through sequences they've performed ten thousand times, muscle memory carrying the weight that consciousness couldn't bear. Rice: basmati, soaked, rinsed three times until the water ran clear, cooked in a pot with a tight lid, the steam building, the grains swelling. Dal: toor dal, pressure-cooked with turmeric and a pinch of asafoetida, tempered with cumin seeds and dried red chilies and a clove of crushed garlic that sizzled and turned golden in the hot ghee. The surmai fish from the cooler — the last of the Malvani preparation, the remaining fillets simmered in yesterday's leftover coconut masala, the gravy reduced and thickened, the fish flesh flaking.

I don't remember tasting any of it. I don't remember plating it. I remember the sounds — the hiss of the tempering, the click of the burner, the clatter of the steel ladle against the pot — but the flavors were gone. My palate had shut down. Fear does that. It hijacks the senses it doesn't need and redirects everything toward survival: hearing sharpens, vision narrows, but taste and smell — the senses of pleasure, the senses of a chef — go dark.

Tapsee didn't eat. She stayed in her room. I could hear her moving around — slow, unsteady footsteps, the creak of the bed frame — but she didn't come down. I left a tray outside her door: plain rice, dal, a glass of nimbu pani with extra salt. The food of convalescence. The food you feed someone whose body is fighting.

Deven ate alone in the dining room. Reading something on his iPad, scrolling with one finger, eating with the other hand. He looked like a man enjoying a holiday — relaxed, unhurried, comfortable in his space. He didn't comment on the food. Didn't ask where Tapsee was. Didn't look up when I cleared his plate.

I washed the dishes. Scrubbed the counters. Swept the kitchen floor. The mechanical tasks of cleaning — the hot water, the soap, the repetitive motion — bought me time to think without looking like I was thinking.

At 2 PM I told Arya I was going for a walk.

"In this rain?" She was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing a cup of chai, her reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. She'd been going through the household accounts — a thick ledger bound in cloth, the pages yellowed, the entries written in Arya's neat Devanagari script.

"I need air."

She looked at me with those knowing eyes — dark, steady, the eyes of a woman who had spent fifteen years watching this family and understood more than she said. "The boathouse has a covered porch. You can sit there. There's a bench."

I walked down the stone path to the dock. Counted the steps — 112, just as I'd estimated. The rain was warm and relentless — monsoon rain, not the cold European rain I'd experienced once on a culinary trip to London, but thick, tropical, body-temperature rain that hit your skin and merged with your sweat until you couldn't tell which was which. By the time I reached the boathouse my kurta was plastered to my body, my hair streaming, the fabric of my salwar heavy with water and clinging to my thighs.

The boathouse was small — ten feet by twelve, maybe. Corrugated metal roof that amplified the rain into a continuous roar. A wooden bench along one wall, the wood grey and salt-bleached. Two kayaks stacked against the opposite wall — plastic, sun-faded, the kind used for recreational paddling. A coil of rope. A life jacket hanging from a nail. A kerosene lantern. And in the corner, mounted on a wooden shelf at shoulder height, a VHF radio.

Old model. Heavy. The casing was grey metal, dented and scratched. Dials on the front — frequency selector, squelch, volume. A handheld microphone on a coiled cord, the kind that bounces when you pick it up. The brand name was worn away but the model number was still visible: ICOM IC-M700. A marine transceiver. The same model I'd seen in the background of Sameer's marina office.

I picked up the microphone. The cord stretched. The radio hummed — it was already on, drawing power from a 12-volt battery mounted underneath the shelf.

Channel 16. 156.800 MHz. The international maritime distress frequency. The frequency that every fisherman on the Konkan coast monitors. The frequency that Sameer said he listened to 24/7 from his marina.

I turned the frequency dial. The numbers clicked past — 14, 15, 16. Static hissed from the speaker, a wall of white noise punctuated by distant ghost voices — fishermen, coast guard patrols, cargo ships — all of them too far away, too fragmented to understand.

I pressed the talk button. The static went silent.

"Sameer? It's Ojju. Are you there?"

Released the button. Static flooded back.

Nothing.

"Sameer. Please."

My voice cracked on the second word. I pressed my forehead against the cold metal housing of the radio. The metal was damp with condensation. Rain hammered the corrugated roof — a sound like a thousand small fists beating against tin, relentless, deafening.

A crackle. A break in the static. Then his voice — distant, broken by interference, but unmistakable. The voice of someone who had promised to listen.

"Ojju? I hear you. Copy. What's wrong?"

Relief hit me like a physical blow. My knees buckled. I sat on the bench, the microphone pressed to my mouth.

"I need to leave. Today. Now. Can you come?"

Silence. Then: "The sea's still bad. Winds at 55 kmph, gusting to 70. Waves three to four meters. I can try but—"

"Please."

"—but it's dangerous. Crossing in these conditions, I'd be risking both our lives. A boat my size — a 32-foot fishing trawler — can handle two-meter swells. Three meters is the limit. Four meters..." He paused. "What happened?"

I pressed my forehead harder against the radio. The metal edge bit into my skin. Rain hammered the roof. Through the open side of the boathouse I could see the sea — grey, angry, the waves cresting white and smashing against the dock pilings with a force that sent spray ten feet into the air.

"I can't explain right now. Just — is there any way?"

"At first light tomorrow. The IMD forecast shows the low-pressure system moving northeast overnight. Wind dropping to 35 kmph by 4 AM, waves down to 1.5 meters by dawn. I'll be there at 5:30 AM. First light. Can you hold on until then?"

Dawn. Twelve more hours.

Twelve hours in this house with Deven and his dead eyes and his fabricated evidence and his gentle, patient, algorithmic voice explaining how he was going to destroy my life.

"Yes," I said. "I can hold on."

"Ojju." His voice changed. Dropped the casual maritime cadence. Became something else — firm, direct, personal. The voice of a man making a promise he intended to keep with his life. "Lock your door tonight. Stay in your room after dark. Don't open the door for anyone — not Deven, not Tapsee, nobody. And if anything happens — anything — if you hear something wrong, if someone comes for you, if you feel unsafe for even one second — get to this radio. Press the button and talk. I monitor Channel 16 on a receiver next to my bed. You speak and I will hear you. And I will come. Sea or no sea. Waves or no waves. I'll come."

"Okay."

"Promise me."

"I promise."

"I'll be there at dawn, Ojju. I promise too."

Static swallowed his voice. The connection dissolved into white noise, the radio hissing and crackling, the ghost voices of the Konkan coast murmuring in frequencies I couldn't decode.

I hung up the microphone. Sat on the bench. The rain blew in through the open side of the boathouse and soaked my feet. My sneakers were already ruined — waterlogged, the canvas dark and heavy. I didn't care. I sat and watched the sea throw itself against the dock and counted the hours.

Twelve hours.

Seven hundred and twenty minutes.

I could survive twelve hours. I'd survived worse. I'd survived my father's drinking. I'd survived the first year of the restaurant when I couldn't make rent and had to choose between paying the electricity bill and eating dinner. I'd survived the night Riddhi called from the hospital after a bad allergic reaction and I drove across Mumbai at 2 AM on a scooter in the rain.

I could survive this.

I had to survive this.

Because somewhere on the mainland, a man with rough hands and a library full of books was going to wake up at 4 AM and check the wind and start his engine and cross three kilometers of monsoon sea because I'd asked him to.

And I was not going to make him cross that sea for a dead woman.

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