Chapter 15 — What Came Back

November 10th through November 14th. The last days in the flat.She slept in the flat that night.Poorvi and Mrs. Rane wanted her to come back to 14/B. She said no. She said she needed to sleep in her own flat, in her own bed, under her own ceiling, because the flat was her flat and she had five weeks of rent paid and she was not going to be driven out of it by what had happened and what had almost continued happening.She slept with the lights on. The bathroom light was on. The kitchen light was on. She was aware of this. She accepted it.She woke at seven.She lay in bed and looked at the ceiling, which was her ceiling, which she had looked at before every morning for five weeks and which was the specific familiar ugly white of a ceiling that had been painted and repainted many times.She thought: I eat dessert first when no one is looking.She thought: let me check.She got up. She went to the kitchen. She found the small box of Kaju katli that her mother had sent in a courier box three weeks ago and which she had been eating sparingly because she wanted it to last. She took a piece. She ate it. Before breakfast.She laughed.She laughed before she had finished the thought of laughing, the laugh arriving ahead of the awareness of the laugh, the specific Tanvi-timing of a person who laughed at their own jokes before the joke was done.The sound of it in the flat surprised her.It surprised her so much that she laughed more.She called Poorvi."I laughed," she said."Good morning to you too," Poorvi said."I ate dessert first. And I laughed. The right way."A pause."Good," Poorvi said. Her voice was the voice it was when it was trying not to be emotional and couldn't quite manage. "Good."* * *She asked Babulal to remove the mirror on the twelfth.He came himself. He stood in the flat and looked at the mirror for a long time and then he had two men carry it out and down the stairs and into a van. He did not say where it was going. He did not look at Tanvi when he left.She stood at the window and watched the van pull away.The wall where the mirror had been showed a slightly different shade of paint — less faded, where the frame had protected it from the years. A rectangle of less-faded wall. The shape of the thing that had been there.She left the flat on the fourteenth.Not because she was afraid. Because the agency had given her a transfer she'd applied for — Andheri office, closer to family connections, new team. Because Nagpur was six hours away and her mother's voice on the phone sounded like what she needed it to sound like. Because five weeks in a flat was five weeks, and the weight of what had happened there was a weight she could carry but not while she was still in the room where she'd accumulated it.She took everything.She said goodbye to Mrs. Rane on the morning of the fourteenth.They stood in the corridor — the same corridor she had walked for five weeks, the specific linoleum, the light fitting that buzzed — and Mrs. Rane looked at her the way she had looked at her on the first day, with the thorough look, the inventory. But it was different now.