The building was on the third cross in Malleswaram — a four-storey residential block from 1992, white-painted, the specific architectural grammar of Bengaluru's early post-liberalisation apartment buildings, wide verandas and teak window frames and the specific proportion of rooms that had been generous when built and now felt merely adequate. The key matched the main gate lock — old type, brass, the lock that the building's residents had been asking to have replaced for years and which the owner's association had not yet got around to. The gate was open during the day.
She had known it would open when she put the key in. She had known the weight of the key and the resistance of the lock before she touched either of them. Nair had taken her here, with a junior officer in a separate car, and she had stood outside the gate and looked at the building and felt the full rosemary feeling — stronger than the plant in the kitchen, the actual root of it, the thing the plant had been pointing toward. This was where the rosemary morning had been. This building, this address, this specific quality of morning light on old plaster.
"Whose apartment?" Nair said, looking at the building's directory board.
"Third floor," she said. "Left side." She didn't need the directory. "I'll know the door."
Third floor, left side: Flat 7. The door was a pale green that had been repainted multiple times, the current green sitting over previous colours visible at the edges of the frame. She stood in front of it and felt the inside of herself being very full of something — not memory, not yet, but the weight of everything the memory held, the total accumulated significance of this door and what was on the other side of it.
"Who lives here?" Nair said.
