The first week was the logistics of a new life in a new city.
The agency was in Bandra — forty minutes by train from Sion, which was the specific kind of commute that Mumbai made seem reasonable because everyone had a commute that was forty minutes at best and four hours in the wrong weather. The work was fine. Copywriting briefs for three brands simultaneously, the kind of work that required a different part of the brain than creativity but was not uncreative, and her team lead Asha was direct and fair and the office had good chai.
She called her mother on the fourth day.
"How is the flat?" her mother said.
"Good," she said. "Small but good."
"Are you eating?"
"Yes."
"Who is cooking?"
"I am."
This was a significant overstatement. She had boiled eggs twice and ordered Zomato six times. But the spirit of self-sufficiency was real.
"The area is safe?" her mother said.
"It's a chawl," she said. "Everyone knows everyone. It's very communal. Very safe."
This was accurate as far as she could verify in four days. The communal quality was real — the courtyard functioned as a shared living room, children crossing between flats freely, the smell of five different kitchens at dinner time. She had been greeted by name, already, by three neighbours whose names she did not yet know.
She felt, in the first week, something that was close to right about the flat. The window, the sheera from Mrs. Rane, the jamun tree in the courtyard. The way the evening light came through at five and turned the walls a particular golden colour that she had taken a photograph of and almost sent to Poorvi before deciding it was too try-hard.
The mirror was the only thing she did not feel entirely right about.
Not that anything was wrong with it. It worked perfectly — it was clean, well-angled, practically useful. But it had a quality she noticed without being able to name: a slight delay, or the impression of a slight delay, between her movement and the reflection's response. Probably the light. The evening light in the flat came from one direction and the mirror was positioned to catch it, and the angle meant that at certain hours the reflection was in slightly different quality of light than she was. That was all.
She wrote in her journal on the sixth day: Week one done. I think I'm going to be okay here. I think this might actually work.
She believed this.
She believed it for eleven more days.
