"Someone I love," she said. And then, with the specific clarity of the compass finding north: "Someone Layla knew I loved. Someone who became a leverage point." She looked at Nair. "In the red notebooks. The destabilisation campaign. She contacted people from my past, told stories, built a narrative. I didn't — I couldn't write all their names, it felt like involving them too directly. But someone from my life was being contacted by Layla and I had written about it." She paused. "The key. It was under Layla. I didn't drop it — if I had been holding the key it would have been — it would be somewhere else. Layla had the key."
"She had a key to this apartment," Nair said. "Not yours. To here."
"How did she get it," she said. Not a question — a direction. "Who gave her the key to this apartment."
She raised her hand and knocked. The knock produced, on the other side of the door, footsteps and then the click of a lock and then the door opened and a woman stood in the doorway.
She was in her fifties, small, with white in her hair and the face of someone who had lived with attention to the people around her, the kind of attention that left its record in the quality of the eyes. She looked at the woman in front of her and her face did something that was not surprise — the face of someone who had been waiting for a visit they could not predict but knew was coming.
"Rohini," the woman said.
Her name. Said by a voice that knew it — that had said it many times, in many registers, in all the ways a name was said by someone who had said it in the significant moments of your life. She stood in the doorway of the Malleswaram flat and she heard her name in this woman's voice and the palace opened — not one room, not one object, but a whole wing of it, all at once, the way a building lit up floor by floor when the power came back.
She remembered her mother.
Not everything — not the full inventory of thirty-three years, not immediately. But the shape of her mother: this specific woman, this face, this voice, the apartment behind her which she could now see was a space she had navigated her whole life — the specific furniture, the smell of South Indian filter coffee (the Coorg ceramic cups, her mother had had them first, she had bought the same ones because she loved her mother's and had wanted that quality of morning in her own apartment), the bookshelves that were the template for her own, the particular light of the third-floor Malleswaram morning that she had stored in the rosemary plant because the rosemary had been here first, on this kitchen ledge, in this apartment, before she had moved it to her own.
