You don't take personal leave and leave your family photo on your desk.
Rajan had been watching her look at the desk. When she turned, he met her eyes. He did not say anything. He did not need to.
"Tell me," she said. Quietly.
He took a long time. His monitor was on, his call queue open — he was technically at work, technically available for calls, and this conversation was happening in the interstices of a regular shift, in the pauses between the mechanism.
"There was another one," he said finally. "Before you arrived. A man named Suresh. He had been here eight months. He was very systematic, like you — he documented everything. He got quite far. He found the floor ten button and he pressed it."
A call came in on his line. He answered it, handled it efficiently in forty-five seconds, closed it. Then: "He came back from floor ten. He seemed fine. He worked for three more weeks. Then he took personal leave." A pause. "He's not reachable now. HR says he's fine, taking time."
"But he's not," Meera said.
"I don't know," Rajan said. "I genuinely don't know what happened to him. I know he went to floor ten and after that he was different. He still came to work. He did his job correctly. But he asked different questions — or rather, he stopped asking questions. Completely. The curiosity was gone. He was — present but not engaged. Like the lights were on and someone was running the mechanism but the person who had been there before was not."
