She woke up on a wooden floor.
Not a carpet, not a mattress, not the kind of surface a person chose to sleep on. A wooden floor — old teak, the kind that had been here long enough to develop a specific smell, wood oil and time and the accumulated presence of someone who had walked this floor every day for years. She was on her side. Her cheek was against it. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw was the leg of a sofa, pale blue upholstery, the specific blue of something chosen deliberately by someone who had a favourite colour and knew what it was.
She lay there for a moment. She was aware of herself from the outside in — body first, awareness of limbs and cold and the particular ache of having slept on a hard surface, and then the internal inventory, and then the gap where the inventory should have had a name and didn't. She had a body. She had a position in a room. She did not have a name, or a before, or a reason for being here.
She sat up slowly. The room came into focus: a living room, high ceilings, morning light coming through curtains that were white cotton with small blue embroidered flowers, the kind of curtains that someone had bought and hung with care. Books on shelves along the left wall — floor to ceiling, hundreds of them, organised in a system she could not immediately read but that had a system, clearly, the shelves were not random. A round dining table with two chairs. A kitchen visible through an arch. The sofa she had been sleeping beside — pale blue, with three small cushions in complementary shades. A low coffee table with a stack of notebooks and a single coffee cup, unwashed.
The coffee cup was Coorg ceramic — she knew this the way she knew the feel of a word that had been memorised without conscious memorisation. She did not know how she knew it.
She stood up. The room tilted slightly and then steadied. She was wearing a cotton salwar — grey, plain — and she had no idea whether she had arrived in it or put it on or had always been wearing it because she could not access a before. She walked to the kitchen, which felt like the right thing to do — the kitchen was oriented around a central island, herbs growing in small pots on the window ledge, a coffee maker on the counter that was the high-quality kind, the kind that someone had researched before buying. On the wall above the coffee maker, a printed card in a wooden frame: A place for everything. Everything in its place. She looked at this for a longer time than it required.
