Chapter Twelve
The room was wrong.
Shivansh woke at six with the particular alertness of a man whose body had been trained to read its environment, and something in the environment was wrong before he had identified what it was.
He lay still for a moment. Light levels — correct for the season.
Sound — the house at its normal morning frequency. Temperature—
He turned his head.
The left side of the bed was empty. This was not unusual. She sometimes rose before him.
He looked at the window.
Two herb pots. There had been four.
He sat up.
He looked at the wall where her grandmother's photograph had been for twelve months, the photograph he had watched her replace twice against his mother's unspoken campaign to remove it. The nail was there. The photograph was not.
He stood up and went to the wardrobe.
Her side: the hangers were present. The clothes were not. Not entirely — she had not taken everything, or had not had room for everything — but enough. The organised absence of a woman who had known exactly what she was taking and had made deliberate decisions about it.
He stood in front of the wardrobe and he looked at the empty hangers for a long time.
Then he went to his phone.
"Abhinav."
"Bhai." Abhinav was awake, or woke up immediately, which amounted to the same thing. "It's six—"
"Come to the house."
A pause of approximately one second. "Twenty minutes," Abhinav said, and was gone.
Shivansh stood in the room for four minutes.
He did not pace. He stood by the window and looked at the two remaining herb pots — the rosemary and the other one, left behind, the ones too large to carry easily — and he looked at the nail on the wall, and he stood very still, and something moved through him that he did not allow to move through his face.
He went downstairs and made coffee. He stood at the kitchen counter and drank it and looked at the garden and said nothing.
Mrs. Pillai appeared at seven, took one look at him, and said nothing either. She was a woman of considerable wisdom.
Abhinav arrived at seven-fifteen.
"Her car is in the garage," Shivansh said, before Abhinav spoke. "She took a bag. Some of the herbs. The photograph of her grandmother. I need to know what else she took and when she left."
Abhinav looked at him. "Bhai—"
"Start with the household staff. Someone saw something. Work from there."
Abhinav nodded and went.
By eight o'clock, the night guard had confirmed the side entrance at three-seventeen.
By nine, Abhinav had located the auto driver, who had taken her to the Lajpat Nagar metro, and established that she had been carrying a single bag.
By ten, they knew the phone she'd had was still in the room — left on the desk like a deliberate severing — and that a new prepaid phone had been purchased in cash at Connaught Place four days ago.
"She planned this," Abhinav said, at noon.
"Yes." Shivansh was at his desk. He had been at his desk for three hours. The files in front of him had not been looked at.
"The restaurant has been told she's on leave of absence. The manager—" Abhinav checked his notes— "Deepak. He won't say anything beyond that she called him directly. He doesn't know where she is."
"He knows something."
"Yes. But he won't say it."
Shivansh was quiet for a moment. "Don't press him," he said. "Leave the restaurant alone."
Abhinav looked at him. This was not the standard approach.
"Leave it," Shivansh said again. "She built that herself. It's not a lead, it's — leave it."
He looked back at the files that were not being read.
"Bank accounts?" he said.
"She moved money. Her own savings — nothing joint. Three transfers over two weeks, small amounts, to an account we don't have direct access to. She was careful. She has enough to sustain herself for—" Abhinav calculated, briefly— "eight months, minimum, if she's frugal. Longer if she's working."
Eight months.
Shivansh put his pen down on the desk.
"She has been planning this for at least two weeks," Abhinav said.
"Longer," Shivansh said. "She was already planning when she was still sitting at this dinner table." He said it without expression, and the absence of expression was the expression.
Sonakshi came to the study at two.
She knocked, which she did not usually do, which meant she had been told and had prepared. She came in and sat down in the chair across from his desk and she said, "I heard," and she arranged her face into the configuration of appropriate maternal concern.
Shivansh looked at her.
He said nothing. He looked at his mother's face and he read it — he had been reading that face for thirty-three years, he knew every register of it — and he saw, under the arranged concern, the thing she was working to keep from the surface.
Relief. Carefully managed, mostly contained, but there.
He said nothing.
Sonakshi said, "These things happen. Some people are not suited—"
"Thank you, Maa," he said. His voice was completely level. "I'll let you know if I need anything."
She looked at him. She read the dismissal for what it was. She stood, smoothed her sari, and left.
The door closed behind her.
Shivansh sat in the chair and looked at the closed door for a moment.
Then he picked up his pen and began actually working through the files.
Manik came at six.
He did not knock. He came in and sat in the chair Sonakshi had vacated and he did not say anything immediately.
He looked at his brother across the desk and Shivansh looked back at him, and the silence between them was the particular silence of two people who had grown up in the same house and knew each other's noise.
"How are you," Manik said.
"Working," Shivansh said.
Manik looked at the files. "Are you."
Shivansh set the pen down. He looked at his brother and something shifted in his face — not much, not visible to anyone who didn't know him, but Manik knew him. "I'm going to find her," he said.
Manik said, carefully, "Bhai. She left. She made a choice—"
"She is my wife."
"I know."
"She is my wife," Shivansh said again, with the particular quality of a man who had made a statement he intended to be the end of the conversation, "and I am going to find her, and I would like to know if you know anything that would be useful."
Manik was quiet for a moment. "I don't," he said, and it was the truth. "She didn't tell me. I think—" he stopped, then said it: "I think she knew I'd tell you."
Shivansh said nothing.
"For what it's worth," Manik said, "she didn't leave because she didn't—" he stopped again, frustrated with his own sentence. "She wasn't indifferent, Bhai. Whatever else. She wasn't—"
"I know," Shivansh said.
The quietness of it stopped Manik. He looked at his brother. Shivansh was looking at the window, where the evening light was coming in at a low angle, and his face held something that Manik had not often seen in it.
He did not push.
He left at seven and sent food up because he knew Shivansh would not think to eat, and sat in his own room and looked at the wall and thought about Mihika in a two-room flat somewhere in Delhi, alone and deliberate and gone.
Shivansh did not sleep.
He sat in the room at eleven, at midnight, at two in the morning, and he sat in the armchair — her armchair, the one she had fallen asleep in on a hundred nights with a book in her lap — and he looked at the two remaining herbs on the windowsill.
She had left two behind. She had taken two.
He thought about this.
She had taken the ones small enough to carry. She had left the ones too large. She had not abandoned them — she had made a practical choice, and the ones she couldn't take she had left in the place where they would still have water and light.
She was taking care of the plants she couldn't carry.
He sat in the armchair at two in the morning and looked at the herbs she had left behind and felt something move through him that he had no language for, because he had not, in thirty-three years, needed language for it.
He had not needed language for loss. He had not needed language for the particular quality of a room that used to contain a specific person and now contained only the evidence of them.
She had taken his kurta.
He had noticed this, inventorying the room.
The dark blue one he'd left on the chair.
He had turned this over in his mind several times since morning — the deliberateness of it, the choice it represented.
She had packed one bag with precision and intention and she had, in that bag, put something of his.
He looked at the window.
Abhinav came at seven the next morning.
He came in without knocking because this was Abhinav, who had been entering rooms without knocking since the two of them were twenty-two and getting into things that required someone trusted at your back.
He looked at Shivansh in the armchair, where he had evidently spent the night, and he looked at the files on the desk that had been worked through in the small hours, and he set a cup of coffee down within reach and said nothing about any of it.
"Find her," Shivansh said.
Abhinav said, "Bhai—"
"Find her, Abhinav."
Abhinav said, "You should know she covered her tracks well. This is going to take—"
"I don't care how long it takes." Shivansh looked at him directly. "I don't care what it costs. Find her."
Abhinav held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded. He picked up his phone and began.