She received this information in the apartment. Nair called with it personally — not because it was required, but because Nair was the kind of person who delivered significant things herself. She listened and said thank you and when the call ended she sat for a moment with the phone in her hand and then she set it down and she went to the kitchen and she made chai and she stood at the herbs on the window ledge.
The rosemary was in the leftmost position. Still. Still the beginning. But the beginning was different now from what it had been when she planted it — different from what she had understood it to be when she first built the palace. The Coorg morning had been fully recovered by then: six weeks after the incident, the memory had come back with the clarity of something that had been very carefully filed and had waited very patiently. The morning in Coorg, her mother's kitchen, the beginning of the project of building the palace. And the person who had been with her — not a romantic person, not a dramatic story, simply a person she loved who had been sitting across the table that morning when she had understood, fully, what she needed to build.
Her friend Ananya, who had moved to Mysore the previous year and whom Layla had spent months convincing Rohini was too busy to call. Ananya, who had been reached by Nair during the investigation and who had arrived at the apartment on Day Seven with specific fury about the things Layla had been telling her to keep her away from Rohini and with very good filter coffee from a shop on the way. Ananya, who had sat on the pale blue sofa and said "you were always going to be okay" with the certainty of someone who had known Rohini long enough to know this was true, which was how Rohini had understood that it was.
The palace had expanded since then. She had been building rooms.
The work with Dr. Lata continued — Thursday mornings, the same chair, the same morning light, the long careful work of understanding what had happened over three years and what it had cost and what she had survived it with. The work was not linear. There were weeks when the rooms opened easily and weeks when they didn't, when the palace was dim and the objects were in their places but she couldn't see what they held, when the therapy felt like standing in a space she had built and not being able to read it. And there were weeks when something that had been inaccessible suddenly came clear — a specific memory, a specific understanding, a specific feeling that had been waiting in the place she had put it for the right moment to be retrieved.
She was very patient. She had built herself a system. She trusted the system.
