Chapter 16 — Epilogue: After

Six months later. Various sources.Tanvi Khatri was discharged from Lokmanya Tilak Municipal General Hospital on January 18th, 2024. The discharge summary notes "full recovery of baseline personality presentation, resolution of dissociative symptoms, patient oriented to time and place and self."She did not tell the psychiatrist what had happened in the flat. She described it, as recommended by the treating team, as an "acute stress response to a significant life transition" — moving cities, new job, social isolation. The psychiatrist agreed that this was a plausible etiology and treated it accordingly. The treatment was appropriate. She recovered.She is in Nagpur now. She works at the Andheri office remotely, on the days the team is remote, which is three days a week. She has an apartment with two flatmates who know each other from college and who are, she has reported to Poorvi, "aggressively normal in the best possible way."She checks the mirrors.Not compulsively. Not in a way that disrupts her day. But she checks. A quick assessment: her eyes moving, her face doing the things her face did. The inventory. She has made it a habit, a morning ritual, the same way someone checked the news or made their bed. A quick accounting of who was in her face looking back.She is always there.She considers this a good start to a day.* * *Mrs. Sushila Rane is still in 14/B, Noor Chawl.She has been there since 1979. She will likely be there until she is not.14/C has been empty since Tanvi left. The building society has not approved a new tenant pending the structural assessment Mrs. Rane demanded. The assessment has been delayed three times. Mrs. Rane has escalated twice. Babulal Parekh has not returned her calls.She has started putting a diya in the window of 14/C. She convinced the building secretary to let her have a spare key for "emergency access purposes" and she goes in once a week. She lights a small diya on the windowsill and she sits in the empty flat for twenty minutes.Not performing any ritual. Not saying anything. Just: being present. A conscious person, present, occupying the space. Looking at the wall where the mirror was.She has her own theory about what this does, which she has not shared with anyone except Tanvi, in a phone call in February:"A thing that feeds on self-recognition needs someone there to generate the self-recognition. If I'm there — just me, just Sushila, seventy years old and very thoroughly myself — then it knows the flat is occupied. It knows there is a self here to be learned from. And it doesn't go looking." She paused. "And I am very boring. Very thoroughly boring and ordinary. I have forty-four years of being exactly myself in this building. Nothing to learn here that's worth the effort." She paused. "I think boredom may be a form of protection, in the right circumstances."Tanvi had laughed.Mrs. Rane had waited for the laugh to finish."Call me," she said. "When you feel like it. I don't sleep much."