A silence. The quality of the silence was not the silence of surprise — it was the silence of someone who had been waiting for this call, or something like it, and was now deciding what to do with its arrival.
"How did you get my number?" Lakshmi said.
"The school directory. Emergency contacts."
"You said you have evidence."
"Yes. In Kavitha's classroom desk — locked drawer. She left a letter, a spreadsheet, and original mark sheets. She left them as documentation. I found them and I photographed them."
Another silence. Then: "She told me about the drawer," Lakshmi said. Very quietly. "She said if anyone ever needed to look, the master key was on the staffroom board. She told me two weeks before she left." She paused. "She was preparing. She said she had found something very serious and she needed to make sure the documentation survived regardless of what happened to her."
"Is she with you?" Naina said. Directly.
A very long pause.
"Yes," Lakshmi said. "She's been here for three weeks. She came the day she left Pune — she took a bus to Mumbai and a flight from there. She was in a bad state when she arrived. Very frightened. She said the school had made it clear that she had a choice: adjust the records and stay quiet, or face a campaign to discredit her professionally. She said they had already started one — Mr. Iyer had spoken to two other teachers and suggested she was having a personal crisis, that she had been behaving erratically. Laying the groundwork to make anything she said seem unreliable."
