The last campaign event ended at nine PM on the eve of the election.
By law, active campaigning had to stop twenty-four hours before polling. Nine PM was when the final permitted event concluded — a ward-level meeting in Ward 8, her strongest ward, which she had ended early because ending a strong event early communicated confidence and she was confident and she wanted the voters to see it. His last event had been in Ward 7 — she had tracked it through the news coverage, which had been comprehensive and which showed him, in the last photographs of the campaign, at a community kitchen in a refugee colony, serving food alongside the volunteers, which was either genuine or well-staged and was probably both, because he was the kind of person for whom genuine and well-staged coexisted without apparent contradiction.
They arrived back at the flat within fifteen minutes of each other. His team was ahead of hers — she could see the light on in the living room when she came up in the lift, and when she opened the door the flat had the specific quality of a space that had just emptied, the residual energy of people who had been working at maximum capacity for thirty days and had just stopped.
He was standing at the window. Not sitting — standing, which was different. Looking at the city outside, which was the night-before-election city, the specific quality of Lucknow at ten PM the night before a major poll — the flags and bunting in all party colours, the ink-stained fingers that wouldn't happen until tomorrow but that you could feel in the air, the city that was about to vote and knew it was about to vote.
She set down her bag. She stood for a moment. The flat was very quiet — both teams had been sent home, the whiteboards cleared, the campaign materials filed or packed. The ordinary flat underneath all the campaign infrastructure was visible again for the first time in thirty days: a three-bedroom apartment in Civil Lines, neutral, waiting.
"Done," she said.
