The scarf was not Rohini's. The scarf was L's — was Layla's. Rohini had kept it. On the hook. Not hidden, not returned. On the hook where she would see it every time she left the apartment or came home. First time I understood.
She sat with this for a long time. Then she went to the blue notebook's entry for the rosemary plant:
Rosemary, kitchen window, leftmost position — R2, 1.1. First. Before everything else. The beginning is here. If someone needs to start: here.
R2. She went to the kitchen. She looked at the rosemary plant — small, healthy, the specific grey-green of rosemary that was being regularly tended. She touched the leaves. The smell came immediately, the sharp botanical clarity of rosemary, and with it — something moved. Not the rosemary feeling, not the sense of something behind a door. Something through the door.
A room. A specific room that was not this apartment — a different room, brighter, with a larger window and a different view. Not Bengaluru, somewhere else. Hills visible through the window. A kitchen table — not this one, a smaller one — and two people at it. She could feel the two people without seeing them clearly. She could feel the light and the hills and the smell of rosemary from a plant on a different window ledge. She could feel the specific quality of a morning in a specific place at a specific time that had been important and that she had placed here, in the leftmost position on the kitchen ledge, as the first memory, the beginning, the root.
The memory did not tell her who she was. It told her that she had been somewhere with someone, in a kitchen with a view of hills, and that morning had been where everything she had built since had started. It told her that the someone she had been with had been important. It did not tell her the someone's name.
