The office was exactly as she had not-yet-remembered it: third floor, a building near the Koramangala water tank, one window facing east, the morning light specifically good from about nine to eleven and then indirect for the rest of the day. Two chairs across from each other — no desk between them, Dr. Lata had been clear about the desk, the desk created a hierarchy that she did not want in her space. A small table for water. A plant in the corner — a rubber plant, healthy, in a terracotta pot that someone had painted with a small geometric pattern. She looked at the rubber plant when she came in and felt it in her chest — not the rosemary feeling, something more complete, the feeling of an object in the palace that she had visited many times and which held many things and was glad she was there.
Dr. Lata was in her sixties. She had grey hair that she wore short and glasses with round frames and the quality of a person who listened with her whole body — who oriented toward you when you spoke in a way that was not performed, that was the accumulated posture of decades of paying attention to people. She looked at Rohini when she came in and she said: "Sit down, Rohini. I've been thinking about you every hour since Nair called."
She sat down. The chair was the same chair it had always been — she could feel this now, the body knowing what the mind had still not fully retrieved, the specific quality of this chair and what it meant to be sitting in it. "How much do you know?" she said.
"What Inspector Nair told me," Dr. Lata said. "And what I can infer from eighteen months of working with you." She paused. "I want to hear it from you. When you're ready."
She told it. Not the forensic version, not the statement — the version that was hers, the inside version, what it had been like to wake up not knowing her own name in her own apartment, to read her own handwriting and not know whose it was, to feel the scarf and the coffee cup and the herbs and the photographs and have them give her the knowledge without the context. She told it carefully and she told it completely and Dr. Lata listened with the whole-body attention and occasionally asked a single small question that was the question that opened the next part.
