A place for everything. Everything in its place.
— Rohini Sharma, Flat 12, Jasmine Towers, HSR Layout, Bengaluru.
She closed the notebook. She set it on the stack with the others. She went to the kitchen and she stood at the herbs and she touched the rosemary — the leftmost position, the beginning, the root. The smell was immediate and with it the morning in the hills, the coffee, the beginning of the project that had ended here and had not ended at all.
Outside, Bengaluru was doing what Bengaluru did. The monsoon had arrived — it rained now most afternoons, the specific Bengaluru monsoon rain that was heavy and purposeful and stopped completely as suddenly as it began. The city in the rain had a quality she had always loved, the specific way the streets went quiet under it and then resumed, the city's version of a breath held and released.
She was going to Mysore next week. Ananya's apartment and two days of not being in the palace — being away from it, carrying it inside her the way it had always been carried inside her, the original version, the internal palace that the apartment had been externalising. The internal palace that had survived the night of the nightstand and the five days of not knowing her name, that had sat in its positions in the objects around her and waited for her to come back and read it.
She was going to Mysore. She was going to stay for two days. She was going to come back and she was going to reorganise the shelves for the fourth time — for what came next, for the new rooms, for the phase of the palace that was being built in the territory on the other side of everything she had been through.
She did not know yet what the new rooms held. She was going to find out by building them, carefully, putting each thing in the position it belonged, trusting the system that had already brought her home once and would bring her home again if she needed it. She was a person who built things carefully. She was a person who kept records. She was a person who, when she did not know who she was, had the presence of mind to start at the beginning and let the apartment tell her.
She was Rohini Sharma. The palace was hers. She was going to keep building.
