Chapter 3 — Mrs. Rane

Mrs. Sushila Rane had lived in 14/B, Noor Chawl since 1979.She had been twenty-three when she moved in as a new bride. Her husband had worked at the textile mill in Dharavi until the mills closed and then he had found other work and then, in 2011, he had died of a stroke while sitting in the chair he sat in every evening to watch the nine o'clock news, and Mrs. Rane had continued sitting in the adjacent chair and had watched the news alone every evening since.She was, by the measure of Noor Chawl, an institution. The person who knew everything, who had seen tenants come and go in every flat for forty-four years, who had the kind of memory that was not nostalgia but inventory — precise, organized, capable of producing specific details on demand.She knew every person who had lived in 14/C since 1979.She did not discuss the most recent one.Tanvi knocked on her door on the seventeenth — the same evening she had not been able to get an answer from Babulal Parekh.Mrs. Rane opened the door. She looked at Tanvi's face with the reading quality Tanvi had noticed at the first meeting — not intrusive, just thorough."Come," she said. Not a question.Tanvi came in. The flat was the mirror of hers in layout but forty years more occupied — the furniture deep with use, the walls thick with photographs, a small puja corner with a lamp that had been burning for so long the wall above it was the specific shade of blessedness.Mrs. Rane made tea without asking. Tanvi sat on the sofa that was covered with a specific synthetic fabric that she associated immediately with grandmothers and felt, involuntarily, safer."How is the flat?" Mrs. Rane said."Good," Tanvi said. Then: "Actually — I wanted to ask you something."Mrs. Rane poured the tea. Handed over the cup. Sat in the opposite chair with her own cup. The positioning of someone who was ready to receive a question she had been expecting."The mirror," Tanvi said. "The full-length one. In my flat. Do you know where it came from?"Mrs. Rane's hands, on her cup, went still. A brief stillness. Then she drank her tea."What's made you ask?" she said.Not a deflection exactly. A calibration. The question of someone who needed to know how much the asker had already seen."I've been noticing things in it," Tanvi said. She said it carefully. "Things that are probably nothing. Tiredness, probably. But the mirror wasn't listed in the flat's furnishings and the landlord won't tell me who it belonged to, and I wondered if you—""The previous tenant," Mrs. Rane said, "was a girl named Reena."She said it with the flatness of someone releasing a specific word they have been holding."How long did she live there?" Tanvi said."She moved in on March 3rd. This year." A pause. "She stopped being seen around March 28th." Another pause. "The flat was empty when you moved in." She drank her tea. "Babulal cleaned it himself. He did not let anyone else in."