KHOYA HUA GHAR (The Lost Home)

# KHOYA HUA GHAR (The Lost Home)

# Chapter 1: Anushka / Nateeja (Result)

That email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon, between Anushka's three o'clock student and her four-thirty.

She was sitting cross-legged on the divan in the front room of their Dadar flat, the one that overlooked the narrow lane where the paani puri vendor set up his cart every evening at six. Her fingers still carried the ghost-impressions of piano keys. The Mehta kid had spent forty-five minutes murdering a Yanni piece, and Anushka's knuckles ached from demonstrating the correct hand position eleven separate times.

Her phone buzzed against the cotton of her kurta pocket. She almost ignored it. The ceiling fan was doing that slow, hypnotic thing it did in March, when Mumbai's humidity climbed past bearable and settled into punishing, and she'd been seconds from letting her eyes close.

But something made her pull the phone out.

Subject: Congratulations! You've got a Match!

She read the line three times.

The DNA kit had been Tara's idea. Last monsoon, after the mess with Aai's medical records, the botched blood-type that didn't match either parent, the hushed phone call between Aai and Baba that Anushka overheard from the kitchen doorway, Tara had ordered the kit from a company called GeneConnect. ₹4,999. Basic ancestry panel plus relative matching. "Think of it as an investment in self-knowledge," Tara had said, using her corporate-presentation voice, the one she deployed in boardrooms at the Bandra-Kurla Complex where she managed accounts for a shipping firm.

Anushka had spit into the tube, sealed it, posted it, and then buried the entire thing under the weight of her daily routine. Piano lessons from nine to six. Aai's dialysis appointments at Hinduja Hospital every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. The forty-minute local-train commute from Dadar to Parel and back, standing in the ladies' compartment with her dupatta pressed against her nose because March in Mumbai smelled like diesel and jasmine and sweat, all at once.

She hadn't forgotten. She'd just stopped expecting.

Until now.

Her thumb hovered over the screen. The flat was silent except for the fan and the distant clatter of someone washing bartans two floors down. Steel against steel, water against steel, the percussive rhythm of a Mumbai afternoon. Sweat collected along her hairline. She could feel her pulse in her wrists, in the soft skin between her thumb and forefinger where the phone pressed.

She tapped the email open.

The body text was disappointingly sparse. No name. No photograph. No dramatic revelation. Just a single instruction: Log in to your GeneConnect account to view your match details.

"Theek hai," she murmured to herself. "One more step."

She opened the app. The login screen loaded slowly — their Wi-Fi had been unreliable since the building's cable guy had done something unfortunate to the junction box last week. She typed her password wrong twice because her fingers were trembling. On the third attempt, the dashboard loaded.

This room felt different now. The same divan, the same cracked ceiling with its water stain shaped like Karnataka, the same steel almirah in the corner with Baba's old harmonium on top gathering dust. But the air had thickened. Anushka was aware of every surface her body touched. The rough weave of the divan cover against her bare calves, the warm glass of the phone screen against her fingertips, the slight dampness of her kurta collar where it met the back of her neck.

She had purchased the cheapest panel. ₹4,999 out of the ₹12,000 she earned monthly from piano lessons, which meant she'd eaten dal-chawal for two weeks straight to compensate. She'd assumed anyone serious about finding relatives would spring for the ₹15,000 premium test with the health markers and the extended family tree. Her match, apparently, had also chosen the budget option.

Paise bachane ki aadat khandaani hai shayad, she thought. Maybe frugality runs in the family.

She pressed View Match Results.

The loading circle spun. And spun. She set the phone on the divan and pressed her palms against her thighs, feeling the cotton of her salwar bunch under her fingers. She counted the fan's rotations. Seven. Eleven. Fifteen.

The results loaded.

Match Type: Maternal line** **Relationship: Most likely — Aunt (Maasi)

She exhaled so hard the sound startled her.

An aunt. A maasi. Not a mother. Not a father. A middle distance. Close enough to know things, far enough to not be the source of the original wound.

The relief was so physical she felt it in her shoulders first, then her chest, then the backs of her knees. She slumped against the divan's bolster and pressed her knuckles against her eyes until she saw phosphenes — orange and green and violet, blooming behind her eyelids like Diwali anaar.

She could handle an aunt. An aunt was manageable.

This profile listed the match's name and location:

Sulochana Naik** **Location: Panjim, Goa

Below that: a phone number and an email address.

Goa. Not some distant country. Not across an ocean. A ninety-minute flight from Mumbai, or a ten-hour bus ride if you were the kind of person who preferred the Konkan coast unspooling outside a window to the compressed anxiety of air travel. Anushka was exactly that kind of person.

The app prompted her to share her own profile information with Sulochana Naik. Anushka stared at the toggle for a full minute. If she flipped it, this woman, this stranger who shared her blood, would see her name, her photograph (the one Tara had taken last Ganpati, Anushka laughing with sindoor on her forehead from helping with the visarjan), her location.

She flipped the toggle.

Then she opened the messaging function and stared at the blank text field.

Three drafts. The first was too formal: Respected Sulochana ji, my name is Anushka Bhosale and I believe we may be related through my biological mother. Delete. The second was too casual: Hi! I think we're related? This is wild. Delete. The third tried to split the difference and ended up sounding like a bank's customer-service chatbot. Delete.

Fourth attempt:

Namaskar. My name is Anushka. I was adopted as an infant in Mumbai in 1998. I recently took a DNA test and the results show that you may be my maasi, my mother's sister. I understand if this is unexpected. I would very much like to talk, whenever you are comfortable., Anushka Bhosale

She pressed send before she could talk herself out of it.

The whoosh sound was too cheerful for the gravity of the moment. She stared at the sent message, her stomach dropping, and then instinctively tried to pull the screen down to refresh. As if she could somehow unsend it, pull the words back through the cables and satellites and relay towers and stuff them back into her phone.

Too late.

She let her head fall back against the divan's bolster and closed her eyes. The fan creaked. Somewhere below, the paani puri vendor had arrived early. She could hear the metallic scrape of his cart wheels on the lane's broken concrete.

Back door banged open.

Tara walked in carrying four plastic bags from D-Mart, her work kurta exchanged for a faded Coldplay T-shirt, her hair in a sweaty ponytail. "Anu! Help! My arms are literally going to detach from my body."

Anushka launched off the divan so fast she knocked the bolster onto the floor. "Coming!"

She took two bags from Tara in the narrow kitchen. The one where you couldn't open the fridge and the gas stove simultaneously because the room was too small for both to coexist with a human body between them. Tara dumped coriander and green chillies onto the counter and started unpacking paneer and atta and a bag of Haldiram's bhujia that she immediately tore open and began eating.

"You look weird," Tara said through a mouthful of bhujia. "Your face is doing that thing."

"What thing?"

"The thing where you're pretending everything's fine but your left eye is twitching."

Anushka pressed her fingers against her left eye. It was, in fact, twitching. "I got a match."

Tara stopped chewing. A piece of bhujia fell from her lower lip onto the counter. "The DNA thing?"

"The DNA thing."

"Who?"

"An aunt. Maasi. In Goa."

Tara set the bhujia bag down with exaggerated care, as if it were made of glass. "Goa."

"Panjim."

"You're serious."

"Her name is Sulochana Naik."

Tara pulled out one of the two kitchen chairs, the metal one with the wobbly leg that they'd been meaning to fix since January, and sat down hard enough to make it screech against the floor tiles. "Okay. Okay. This is big. What did the profile say? Is there a photo? How old is she? Did she write anything?"

"I messaged her."

"You — " Tara's eyes widened. "Already?"

"Three minutes ago."

"Anu. Anu. What did you say?"

Anushka recited the message from memory. When she finished, Tara was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached across the counter, took Anushka's hand, and squeezed. Her fingers were warm and slightly greasy from the bhujia.

"Good," Tara said. "That was the right thing to send."

"You think?"

"I think you've been carrying this since you were old enough to understand the word 'adopted,' and if some woman in Goa can give you even one answer, then yeah. You did the right thing."

Anushka squeezed back. "What if she doesn't reply?"

"Then we eat paneer and watch Mirzapur and try again tomorrow."

---

Sulochana Naik replied the following afternoon.

Anushka was between her eleven o'clock student and her one-thirty. A gap she usually spent eating leftover khichdi and scrolling through Instagram reels of cats and cooking videos. She almost missed the notification because her phone was on silent mode, buried under a stack of sheet music on the piano bench.

When she finally saw it, her hands went cold despite the March heat.

Two words.

Mujhe phone karo.

Call me.

Below: a phone number. And a single instruction, Use WhatsApp call. International calling rates nahi lagenge.

Anushka looked up the time. 1:47 PM. The same in Goa — no time difference. She had forty-three minutes before Charu Deshmukh arrived for her lesson, a nine-year-old who was working through Grade 2 Trinity and had a habit of crying when she couldn't get the left-hand part of "Für Elise."

Forty-three minutes. Enough time to call, or enough time to talk herself out of calling.

She opened WhatsApp. Found the number. Her thumb hovered.

Kya karna chahiye? What should she do? She started typing a message to Tara, then stopped. Tara would tell her to call immediately. Tara was an action person — the kind who submitted resignation letters before securing new jobs and booked flights before checking passport expiry dates.

Anushka was not that kind of person. Anushka was the kind who kept three different to-do lists and still forgot to buy milk.

But she'd sent the message, hadn't she? She'd opened the door. This woman, this maasi, this blood relative, had responded within twenty-four hours with a directness that Anushka found both terrifying and comforting. Mujhe phone karo. No pleasantries. No hedging. Just: Call me.

She pressed the green button.

The phone rang four times. Each ring felt like a small earthquake in her chest.

"Haan?" The voice was low and slightly hoarse, like someone who'd spent years talking over the sound of waves or wind or both. There was background noise. The clatter of kitchen work, maybe, or a restaurant.

"Sulochana ji? This is, this is Anushka. Anushka Bhosale. I sent you the message on Gene, "

"Haan, haan, I know who you are." A pause. The background noise faded, as if Sulochana had moved to a quieter room. When she spoke again, her voice was steadier but not softer. "You said you were adopted in Mumbai. 1998."

"Yes. From the — from a shishu gruha in Girgaon. I was three months old."

A long silence. Anushka could hear breathing. Steady, measured, the breath of someone deciding how much to say.

"Tujha awaaj," Sulochana said finally, switching to Marathi. Then correcting herself, no, not Marathi. Konkani, with Marathi edges. "Your voice. It sounds like, " She stopped. "Never mind."

Anushka's grip on the phone tightened until the case dug into her palm. "Like who?"

Another silence. "Come to Goa."

"What?"

"If you want answers, Anushka, you'll need to come here. Some things are not for the phone. You understand?"

"I — yes, but, can you tell me anything? About my — about my birth mother? Is she, "

"Come to Goa. I'll tell you everything. Face to face." The firmness in her voice wasn't unkind, but it was absolute. "Can you come this week?"

"This week?"

"You're in Mumbai, na? It's a short journey. Come to Panjim. I have a restaurant — Sulochana's Kitchen, in Fontainhas. The old Latin Quarter. Ask anyone, they'll point you. Come, eat, and we'll talk."

Anushka's mind was spinning. This week. Goa. A restaurant in Fontainhas. "I have students — piano lessons, I'd need to — "

"Reschedule them. This is more important than piano lessons." A beat. "Unless you've changed your mind."

"No. No, I haven't changed my mind."

"Good. Then come. And Anushka?"

"Yes?"

"Don't bring anyone. Come alone. I'll explain why when you're here."

A call ended before Anushka could respond. She sat on the piano bench with the phone pressed against her ear for a full fifteen seconds after the screen had gone dark, listening to nothing, feeling the vibrations of the conversation settle into her bones like the sustain pedal held too long. The notes fading but the resonance remaining, filling the room with something you couldn't quite name.

The doorbell rang. Charu Deshmukh, seven minutes early, already sniffling.

Anushka set the phone down, straightened her kurta, and went to open the door.