CHAPTER 36

OJASWINI

The coast guard arrived at 7:42 AM.

I know the time because Sameer checked his watch — the waterproof Casio with the rubber strap, the dial scratched from years of saltwater and dock work — and said: "Twelve minutes. Not bad for monsoon conditions." As if he were reviewing a restaurant's delivery time. As if the last hour hadn't happened.

He'd untied me while Sayali was still crumpled against his chest. Cut the electrical cord with a kitchen knife he'd taken from the block on the ground floor — a cheap knife, stainless steel, the kind that comes in a set from DMart. The cord fell away from my wrists and the blood returned to my fingers in a rush of pins and needles, the sensation of circulation resuming after being cut off, the nerves firing complaints in rapid sequence. My injured hand was worse — the swelling had increased during the hours it was bound, the fingers thick and purple and nearly immobile, the knuckles the size of small plums.

"Can you stand?" Sameer had asked. His voice was the same voice — steady, factual, the voice of tide schedules and VHF protocols. But his hands were shaking. I noticed because he was holding my wrists while he cut, and the tremor transferred through his fingers into my skin. The first crack in his composure. The only one I'd see.

"Tapsee," I said. The word came out cracked — my throat was dry, my lips split, my tongue thick with dehydration and blood from the cut inside my cheek. "She's on the eastern beach. Unconscious. Clontriptyline overdose. She needs cardiac monitoring and IV fluids and—"

"I found her." He was already helping me to my feet. "Before I came inside. Put her in the recovery position. She was breathing. Pulse was irregular but present." He'd said this the way he'd say the tide is at 4.2 meters and the current is running east — data, not emotion. Actionable information. "I covered her with a tarp from the boathouse."

Then: two boats. The sound preceded the sight — twin marine diesel engines, the deep throb of displacement hulls cutting through monsoon chop, audible through the mansion's stone walls as a vibration more than a sound, the kind of bass note you feel in your chest before you hear it in your ears. Then the engines throttling down — the pitch dropping, the rhythm slowing — and then voices. Male voices. Authoritative. The Marathi of official India, crisp and procedural, the language of forms and protocols and jurisdiction.

Six officers. Two paramedics. They came through the front door in a formation that was not quite military but not quite civilian — the formation of men who'd been trained for emergencies and who recognized, immediately, that this was one. Their boots were heavy on the stone floor — the sound of authority arriving, of the state entering a space where the state had been absent. They carried equipment — medical kits, a stretcher, handcuffs, a radio that crackled with static and dispatch codes.

The paramedics took Tapsee first. Two of them, moving at a run toward the eastern beach with a stretcher between them, guided by Sameer's directions — follow the tree line, she's under the third palm from the hatch opening, the tunnel hatch is still open, watch your step. They brought her back fifteen minutes later on the stretcher — her face covered with an oxygen mask, an IV line running from a bag held high by one paramedic while the other monitored the portable cardiac monitor strapped to his belt. The beeping of the monitor was irregular — the same chaotic rhythm I'd felt in her pulse for hours, now translated into electronic sound, the machine confirming what my fingers had already known.

Then Deven — he was still alive. Barely. The Wüsthof knife was still embedded in his back, the paramedics leaving it in place because that's what you do with a penetrating wound, you stabilize the object and let the surgeons remove it. His breathing was a wet rattle — the sound of a punctured lung trying to inflate through fluid, the sound of a body fighting a battle it was losing centimeter by centimeter. They loaded him onto the second stretcher. An oxygen mask over his face. His eyes were closed. His skin was the color of old newspaper.

Sayali was handcuffed by two officers. She didn't resist. Didn't speak. Didn't look at anyone. Her face was blank — not the calculated blankness of her earlier performance, but the true blankness of exhaustion. The blankness of someone who'd used up every emotion — rage, grief, calculation, despair — and had nothing left. An empty vessel. A script that had run out of pages.

The thin cut on her throat from the utility knife — the line where she'd pressed the blade before Sameer stopped her — was still bleeding slightly. A paramedic cleaned it with iodine. She didn't flinch. Didn't register the sting. She was somewhere else — somewhere behind her eyes where the noise of the world couldn't reach.

An officer approached me. He was compact, mid-forties, a mustache that followed the precise contours of his upper lip, his khaki uniform dark with rain at the shoulders. His eyes assessed me the way a doctor assesses a patient — quickly, comprehensively, cataloging injuries.

"Ma'am? I'm Sub-Inspector Patil, Sindhudurg District Police. Are you the one who placed the distress call on Channel 16?"

"That was Sameer." I pointed. My hand — the good one — was shaking. I couldn't stop it. The adrenaline was finally metabolizing, the body's crisis chemistry giving way to the aftermath chemistry, the cortisol and norepinephrine breaking down into their component metabolites and leaving behind this — the shaking, the nausea, the strange floating sensation of a body that had been running on emergency reserves for six hours and was now, suddenly, safe. "Sameer Naik. He runs Brixton Marine Services at the Devbagh marina."

"We'll need a full statement from all parties."

"I'll give you everything. Every detail. From the beginning."

They took us to the mainland by boat. The crossing was rough — monsoon swells rolling the coast guard vessel in long, nauseating arcs, the hull slamming into wave troughs with impacts that I felt in my bruised ribs, the spray coming over the gunwale in sheets that tasted of salt and diesel. But I didn't care. I stood on the deck with my face in the rain and my hands gripping the rail and I watched the island shrink behind us — the grey cliffs, the green forest canopy, the mansion's roof barely visible through the trees — and every meter of water between me and that place felt like breathing again. Like the sea was washing the island off my skin.

At the Malvan coast guard station, I sat in a plastic chair in a fluorescent-lit room — the light was the harsh white of government buildings, the kind that hums and makes every surface look clinical, the walls painted that particular shade of institutional green that exists only in police stations and hospital corridors. The chair was hard — moulded plastic, the kind that makes your tailbone ache after twenty minutes. The room smelled like phenyl floor cleaner and old paper and the particular staleness of a space that is never quite aired out.

I told Sub-Inspector Patil everything. Three hours. Every detail. My voice was hoarse by the end — the throat raw from dehydration and the hours of screaming and talking in the tunnel and on the beach. From Tapsee's Instagram DM to Deven's fabricated WhatsApp messages to Sayali's confession on the beach. I left nothing out. Not the charcoal. Not the tunnel. Not the moment I threw sand in Sayali's face. Not the moment she hit me with a rock and the world folded.

Patil listened. Took notes in a ruled notebook with a government-issue pen — the blue ink that smears when you touch it. His face was professionally neutral — the face of a man who has heard confessions and complaints and the full spectrum of human catastrophe and has learned to receive them without expression. But twice I saw something flicker behind the neutrality — when I described the deepfake evidence, his eyebrows rose a millimeter. And when I described Arya's death — the word dikra on her lips as she died — something in his jaw tightened, and he stopped writing for three full seconds.

"The cameras," he said. "Mr. Naik mentioned wireless cameras throughout the property."

"Sayali installed them. Fourteen. Sameer found the receiver frequency from the boathouse using his marine electronics equipment."

"And the fabricated WhatsApp messages on Mr. Shrivastav's phone?"

"His company literally builds deepfake detection tools. He created AI-generated conversations to frame me for murder. WhatsApp messages, UPI transaction records, Instagram DMs — all fabricated using his own company's proprietary models."

Patil paused his pen. Looked at me over the notebook. "Ma'am, are you saying the victim used artificial intelligence to fabricate criminal evidence?"

"I'm saying a cybersecurity billionaire used his own company's technology to create evidence that would pass forensic analysis. Evidence designed to frame me — a chef — for the murder of his wife. And his daughter — who he hadn't spoken to in three years — used that same evidence as a foundation for a separate triple murder plot that he never saw coming."

Patil put his pen down. Rubbed his face with both hands — the gesture of a man whose Sunday morning had been commandeered by a case that was going to require resources and jurisdictions and expertise that a Sindhudurg district police station did not possess.

"I need to call the Cyber Crime division," he said. Then, almost to himself: "I need to call CBI."

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