The woman was taken to Indiranagar station for formal questioning and medical assessment. Before she left, she picked up the notebook from the floor where she had set it when she stood up, and she held it against her chest. Kaveri let her take it — it was not evidence yet, and the woman's instinct to keep it was itself information worth not interfering with.
When the woman was gone, Kaveri stood in the living room of Rohini Sharma's apartment and looked at it carefully. The apartment of a woman who lived alone, very specifically, the architecture of a very particular inner life. Books everywhere, all of them read — she could tell from the spines. Notebooks in multiple colours on the coffee table, organised by a system she couldn't immediately read. A large map of Bengaluru on the wall with tiny coloured dots marked on it. A framed print of the text she had noted: A place for everything. Everything in its place.
On the bedroom wall: photographs of Rohini Sharma's life. Places, people, specific moments. Kaveri went through them carefully. She photographed each one. She looked for the woman who had been sitting on the floor in the living room — dark hair, grey salwar, no identification. She looked at every photograph in the room.
She did not see her.
Then she went back to the living room. She looked at the photographs on the mantelpiece, the two framed photographs on the bookshelf, the small photograph tucked into the mirror frame of the dressing table in the bedroom. She looked at every photograph in the entire apartment, systematically, the way she did everything.
The woman from the living room was not in a single one.
A woman who did not know who she was, who said the apartment felt familiar, who was not in any of the apartment's photographs.
Kaveri wrote: Two possibilities: (1) this woman has no connection to Rohini Sharma and her "familiarity" is a false memory or performance. (2) this woman has a connection to Rohini Sharma that photographs do not document. In either case: who is she?
She went to find out.
