Chapter 7: Anushka / Raat (Night)

# Chapter 7: Anushka / Raat (Night)

The room that had been Kasturi's was smaller than Anushka expected.

A single cot pushed against the wall. A window with iron bars and no curtain — just a wooden shutter that Shalini propped open with a stick, letting in the evening air and the sound of crickets from the garden. The walls were whitewashed but the whitewash had yellowed in patches, giving the room the look of old parchment. A bare bulb hung from the ceiling on a long wire, casting a circle of amber light that didn't quite reach the corners.

Shalini had laid out a bedsheet, white cotton with a blue border, crisply ironed, and a pillow that smelled faintly of camphor, as if it had been stored in the trunk at the foot of the bed alongside the old sarees and the face-down photographs. A steel lota of water sat on the windowsill. A hand towel, folded into a neat rectangle, rested on the pillow.

Conceicao arrived every morning at 8 AM with the regularity of a tidal event. She came from the neighbouring house, a pink house with green shutters and a yard full of chickens that had the glazed, indifferent look of chickens who had seen everything and were impressed by nothing. Conceicao herself had a similar expression: a round face, bright eyes, the kind of Goan-Catholic-grandmother energy that combined warmth with authority in proportions that left no room for disagreement.

She brought food. Always. As if the act of arriving empty-handed was a moral failing that her upbringing would not permit. Patoleo on Tuesdays (the steamed rice cakes wrapped in turmeric leaves, the sweetness of the coconut and jaggery filling contrasting with the earthy, slightly bitter taste of the leaf). Dodol on Thursdays (the dense, dark confection of coconut milk and rice flour and jaggery, cooked for hours, the consistency of toffee, the taste of Christmas regardless of the season). And on every other day, whatever she had made that morning, wrapped in banana leaf, the green wrapping itself an ingredient, imparting a subtle vegetal note to whatever it contained.

"Shalini-bai, khavn ghe," she would say, placing the food on the kitchen counter with the firmness of a woman who would not accept refusal. Eat. And then she would sit on the kitchen stool and watch while Shalini ate, and the watching was itself a form of nourishment, the ancient contract between the woman who feeds and the woman who is fed, the transaction that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with care.

Anushka noticed that Conceicao watched Shalini the way Anushka's adoptive mother watched Anushka: with the specific, penetrating attention of a woman who is checking whether the person she loves is eating enough, sleeping enough, living enough. Conceicao was not family. Conceicao was something more complicated and more durable: she was a neighbour, and in Goan villages, the distinction between neighbour and family was theoretical rather than practical.

"The bathroom is outside," Shalini said, pointing through the back door to a small attached structure at the edge of the garden. "There's a bucket and a mug. Hot water — I'll heat it on the stove if you need it."

"Cold is fine."

"The well water is very cold. This isn't Mumbai water."

"I'll survive."

Shalini stood in the doorway for a moment, her silhouette backlit by the kitchen light. She looked like she wanted to say something else — her lips parted, her hands moved toward each other and then stopped — but whatever it was stayed inside her. She nodded once and left.

Anushka sat on the cot. The mattress was thin — she could feel the rope frame beneath it, the criss-cross pattern pressing into her thighs through the cotton. She pulled out her phone. Three missed calls from Tara. A WhatsApp message: ANUSHKA BHOSALE IF YOU DON'T CALL ME IN THE NEXT HOUR I AM BOOKING A FLIGHT TO GOA.

She called.

"You're alive!" Tara's voice was so loud that Anushka had to pull the phone away from her ear. "I was literally looking at Goa flights. The cheap ones go through Hyderabad. Do you know how long that takes? Seven hours. I was prepared to do seven hours for you."

"I'm staying at her house."

Silence. Then: "At Shalini's house."

"Yes."

"In Benaulim."

"Yes."

"Your birth mother's house."

"Tara, yes."

More silence. Anushka could picture Tara sitting on the divan in their Dadar flat, legs crossed, one hand pressed against her mouth, processing. Tara processed silently; she emoted loudly. The processing was always the more important part.

"How is she?" Tara asked finally.

"She's, she's real. She's not what I imagined. She's not what you'd imagine either. She's quiet and sharp and she makes the most incredible xacuti and she told me things that I can't, " Anushka's voice cracked. She pressed her fist against her mouth, breathed through the fracture, steadied. "She told me why. And it's not a clean answer. It's messy and sad and it involves ₹500 worth of antibiotics and a dead man in a taxi and a grandmother who wouldn't look at me."

"Anu."

"I'm okay."

"You're crying."

"I'm okay and I'm crying. Both things are true." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The tears were warm on her skin and she let them come, because this room, this small, camphor-scented room that had belonged to a grandmother she'd never met, felt like a safe enough place to crack.

"Do you want me to come?"

"No. This is something I need to do alone. She asked me to come alone and she was right. This space, between me and her, it's delicate. Adding more people would change its chemistry."

"Okay. But I'm here. You know that."

"I know."

"And Aai called. She wants to know if you're eating properly."

Anushka laughed, a wet, unsteady sound. "Tell her I ate the best xacuti of my life."

"She'll want the recipe."

"She'll get it."

They talked for another twenty minutes — about nothing, about everything, about the specific domestic details that anchored Anushka to her other life: the piano student who'd cancelled, the leak in the bathroom that had gotten worse, the cat that had appeared on the building's staircase and that Tara was definitely not feeding but was definitely feeding. Normal things. The ballast that kept the ship level when the waves got tall.

After hanging up, Anushka lay on the cot and stared at the ceiling. A gecko clung to the wall near the light bulb, motionless except for the pulse in its throat, a tiny, rhythmic expansion and contraction that was the only sign of life. She watched it for a long time. There was something meditative about it, the patience of a creature that was simply existing, waiting for whatever came next without anxiety or anticipation.

Through the wall, she could hear Shalini moving in the kitchen. The clink of steel being stacked. The sound of water from the well, a rope creaking, a splash, the dull thud of the bucket hitting the well's interior wall. Then the shuffle of chappals on stone. Then the click of a latch, the bedroom door closing.

Then silence.

Anushka turned off the light. The darkness in Benaulim was different from the darkness in Mumbai. In Mumbai, darkness was always contested — by streetlights, by the blue glow of phone screens through curtains, by the never-quite-off fluorescence of the city's insomnia. Here, the darkness was complete. Dense. A darkness that had weight, that pressed against her eyelids, that filled the room like water filling a cup.

She lay in it. Breathed in it. Listened.

The crickets were a wall of sound — not individual chirps but a collective, continuous hum, rising and falling like breathing. Beneath that, the rustle of palm fronds in the garden. Beneath that, the slow drip of water from the well's rim into the earth below. Beneath that, her own heartbeat, steady, present, carrying her through the dark.

She thought about Mandakini. About the woman who had raised her, who had taught her piano and Marathi grammar and the correct way to fold a saree and the importance of arriving five minutes early to everything. The woman who had sat in a doctor's office in Mumbai and said "you grew in our hearts" while handing her a cup of butterscotch ice cream. The woman who went to dialysis three times a week and never complained, who called every morning at nine and every evening at seven, who had said "go" without hesitation when Anushka told her she'd found someone in Goa.

Mandakini was her mother. Shalini was her mother. Both things were true. Both women had shaped her. One through presence, one through absence. One through twenty-six years of daily, unglamorous love. One through a single, devastating act of arithmetic.

Anushka pressed her palm flat against the cot's mattress. The rope frame underneath. The cotton sheet above. Her hand between, holding both. That was what she was: a hand between two surfaces, touching both, belonging to neither completely, making a space that was entirely her own.

---

She woke before dawn.

Not to an alarm — to a rooster. The sound was violent in its confidence: a full-throated declaration that night was over and the world was expected to respond accordingly. Anushka blinked in the grey pre-dawn light and for a disorienting moment didn't know where she was. The ceiling was too low. The air smelled wrong, green and damp instead of diesel and humanity. The sounds were wrong — birds instead of trains, wind instead of traffic.

Then she remembered.

She got up, splashed water on her face from the lota on the windowsill, cold, shockingly cold, like Shalini had warned, and went outside.

The garden behind the house was small but abundant in the way that only neglect-tolerant tropical plants could be. The mango tree was the centrepiece, massive, ancient, its canopy wide enough to shade the entire garden. Beneath it: a tulsi patch gone wild, a banana plant with one browning bunch, a line of curry leaf bushes that ran along the back wall, and flowers, hibiscus and mogra and something purple that Anushka didn't recognize, growing in dense clusters near the well.

Shalini was already in the garden. She stood at the well with a steel bucket, pulling water. The rope ran through her hands, rough coir, the fibres bristling against her palms, and the bucket rose in jerks, water sloshing over its rim. Her saree was tucked up at the waist for ease of movement, and her feet were bare on the red laterite earth. In the grey morning light, with her hair still loose from sleep, she looked younger than she had yesterday. Less guarded. As if the night had softened something.

"You're up early," Shalini said without turning around.

"The rooster."

"That's Gopal. He has no sense of appropriate timing." She heaved the bucket onto the well's stone rim and poured the water into a smaller vessel. "There's chai inside. I made it before coming out."

"Can I help?"

Shalini looked at her. A small surprise in her expression. As if the offer of help was unexpected, as if she'd grown so accustomed to doing things alone that the concept of shared labour required a moment to parse. "You can water the tulsi. The lota is by the kitchen door."

Anushka fetched the lota, filled it from the well bucket, and poured water at the base of the tulsi plant. The earth was dry and cracked, and the water disappeared into it instantly, darkening the surface and releasing a smell of wet soil that was so elemental, so old, that it felt less like a smell and more like a memory embedded in her cells.

They worked in silence. Shalini watered the curry leaves and the hibiscus. Anushka moved to the mango tree and cleared fallen leaves from its base, gathering them in handfuls and piling them near the compost heap at the garden's far corner. The physical work was good. It gave her hands something to do and her body something to focus on, and it created a companionable space between her and Shalini that didn't require language.

After twenty minutes, Shalini set down her watering vessel and said: "Come. Chai, then I'll show you the village."

They drank chai on the verandah — same recipe as yesterday, cardamom-sweet with white sugar, and watched Benaulim wake up. The courtyard filled with small movements: a neighbour's door opening, a woman in a housecoat hanging wet clothes on a line, a boy on a bicycle pedalling past with a stack of newspapers balanced on the handlebars. A church bell rang in the distance — deep and resonant, the sound carrying across the village like a heartbeat.

"Every morning," Shalini said, nodding toward the sound. "Seven o'clock. You can set your watch by it."

"Do you go? To church?"

"Sometimes. When I need quiet. The church has the best silence in Benaulim." She smiled. The first real smile Anushka had seen from her, unguarded, brief, like a window opening and closing. "Don't tell the priest I come for the silence and not the sermon. He'll be offended."

They finished chai. Shalini went inside to change — emerging in a fresh saree, this one a muted blue with a white border — and led Anushka out of the courtyard and into the lanes of Benaulim.

The village was beautiful in the way that places are beautiful when they've been lived in for centuries. Not preserved or curated but simply inhabited, generation after generation, each one leaving marks on the walls and the roads and the trees. The lanes were narrow and shaded by coconut palms and mango trees. The houses varied: some old and Portuguese in style, with balconies and carved woodwork; some new and concrete, with flat roofs and water tanks and the ever-present satellite dish. A small shrine to Ganesh sat at a crossroads, fresh flowers and incense sticks indicating morning devotion. A cow stood in the middle of the road, chewing cud with the serene entitlement of an animal that knows the world will go around it.

Shalini walked with a steady, unhurried pace, nodding at people they passed. A woman carrying a basket of fish on her head, an old man sweeping his front yard with a jhadu made of coconut fronds, a girl in a school uniform waiting at a bus stop. She was known here. The nods she received were warm, casual, the acknowledgments of long familiarity.

"This is where I grew up," Shalini said, pausing at a junction. "That house" — she pointed to a blue-walled structure with a tile roof — "was my friend Conceição's house. We used to steal cashew feni from her grandfather's still and drink it behind the church." She pointed in another direction. "That was the school. Aai cooked there. The kitchen is still in the same building, though they've renovated it three times."

"It's beautiful here."

"It's small. When I was eighteen, 'small' was the worst thing a place could be. I wanted big. I wanted Bombay. Now, " She looked at the lane, at the cow, at the shrine with its fresh flowers. "Now I understand that small isn't the opposite of big. It's the opposite of alone."

They walked to the beach.

Benaulim Beach was wide and flat and nearly empty at this hour, just a few fishermen pulling boats onto the sand, their voices carrying across the water in Konkani, and a handful of early-morning walkers along the tide line. The sand was coarse and golden, not the fine white sand of tourist brochures but real sand, working sand, the kind that got between your toes and stayed there. That Arabian Sea was grey-green under the morning sky, its waves small and regular, breaking with a soft, repetitive hiss that was the opposite of Mumbai's Marine Drive, where the waves crashed against concrete and sent spray over the promenade. Here, the waves simply arrived, spent themselves, and retreated. Arrived, spent, retreated.

Shalini stopped at the water's edge. She didn't take off her chappals. She stood with her arms crossed, her face to the wind, and looked out at the sea with an expression that Anushka was beginning to recognize as her default state: watchful, contained, privately vast.

"Deepak wanted to come here," Shalini said. "He'd never been to Goa. He said when he'd saved enough, we'd drive down. He was going to bring you. He'd already bought a car seat — a second-hand one, from Chor Bazaar. ₹200. He was so proud of it."

Anushka's throat tightened.

"He would have been a good father," Shalini said. "Terrible at everything else. Cooking, cleaning, keeping time, remembering to charge his phone. But a good father. I'm sure of it."

"How can you be sure?"

"Because he loved you from the moment he knew you existed. Not from the moment you were born, from the moment I told him I was pregnant. His face, " She unfolded her arms and pressed her fingers against her own cheeks, as if recreating the shape of his expression on her own face. "His face opened. Like a door. Like he'd been waiting for this news his entire life and hadn't known it until it arrived."

They stood at the water's edge. The wind came off the sea, cool and damp, carrying salt and the faint iodine smell of seaweed. Anushka felt it on her face, her arms, the exposed skin of her ankles above her chappals. She felt it and she held it and she let it be what it was: the same wind that had blown across this beach when Shalini was eighteen and dreaming of Bombay, and when Govind Naik had pushed his fishing boat into the water each morning, and when Kasturi had walked to the school kitchen with lunch for a hundred children.

This same wind. The same sea. The same family.

"I'm glad you came," Shalini said. She said it to the sea, not to Anushka, as if it were easier to address the water than the person standing beside her. "I didn't know I would be. But I am."

Anushka said nothing. She took off her chappals, stepped into the foam at the wave's edge, cold, sharp, the sand shifting under her feet, and stood beside her mother in the morning light.