Kavitha Rao came back to Pune on Saturday afternoon, on a bus from Dadar in Mumbai, with a bag and her laptop and three weeks of careful, frightened thinking behind her and a lawyer — technically her brother-in-law — who had accompanied her on the journey because his wife had insisted.
His name was Karthik. A corporate lawyer from Chennai with a background in regulatory compliance, which was, as he said to Naina when they met in the lobby of a hotel in Shivaji Nagar, "more relevant to this situation than anything I would have expected to need when I married Lakshmi." He was calm and organised and had already, on the bus journey, prepared a filing strategy for the State Board of Secondary and Higher Secondary Education.
Kavitha Rao sat across from Naina in the hotel lobby and was both exactly what the photographs in her apartment had suggested and also different from them. The photographs had caught the contained posture, the careful intensity. In person, three weeks of stress had made the containment more effortful. But she was not broken by what had happened. She was, Naina thought, the kind of person who got angry rather than defeated, and the anger was very quiet and very deep and had had three weeks to settle into something more useful than emotion.
