She sat at the kitchen table and she wrote, in the back of one of the green notebooks, what she had just experienced. She wrote it in the same compressed, slanting handwriting as the rest of the notebooks and did not notice she was doing this until she had filled half a page. She looked at the handwriting on the page. She looked at the handwriting in the notebook beside her. They were the same. Exactly, precisely the same — same compression, same rightward slant, same way of forming the letter 'g' with a loop she had never seen described as unusual but which was unusual, distinctive, identifiable.
Her handwriting was the same as the handwriting in the notebooks.
She sat at the kitchen table of Rohini Sharma's apartment and she looked at her own handwriting next to Rohini Sharma's handwriting and they were the same handwriting and she understood, sitting there, what the cold had been about. What the familiarity had been about. What if you are reading this and you do not know who you are had been for.
She had written that line to herself. It was her handwriting, in her notebooks, in her apartment. The memory palace had been built by her. The herbs and the sofa and the system on the bookshelves and the photograph of the hillside — she had arranged all of it. She had lived here. This was her apartment. She was not a witness who had woken up in a stranger's home. She had woken up in her own home and not known it was hers, because the trauma of the night before had taken the most basic thing — the name she answered to, the self she woke up as — and had put it somewhere she could not currently find.
She was Rohini Sharma.
The woman in the morgue was not Rohini Sharma. The woman in the morgue was someone else.
She sat very still for a long time. The apartment was around her — her apartment, her bookshelves, her herbs, her sofa, her blue curtains with the embroidered flowers that she had bought at a shop in Indiranagar two and a half years ago because the colour was exactly right. She sat in her own home and she did not know yet what had happened the night before, did not know how she had ended up on the floor beside a dead woman, did not know what the night had contained that had removed her from herself so completely that she had woken up not knowing her own name.
But she knew one thing now that she had not known this morning.
She picked up the phone. She called the single number. When Nair answered, she said: "Inspector. I know who I am."
