She found Reena on Instagram.
It took three days of intermittent searching — Reena was a common name, the chawl address wasn't public, and she had no surname. But she found her through a process of elimination and luck: a post on a Sion area Facebook group from March, someone asking if anyone knew a "Reena from Noor Chawl" because they'd found her tiffin box on the train.
The comments had eight responses. None of them useful. But one person had tagged a Reena Shaikh with the comment: Is this you?
The tagged account had nineteen posts. The last was from March 24th.
Tanvi scrolled through the account.
The posts were the normal texture of a young woman's Instagram — food photographs, a trip to Alibag, a work event, a birthday dinner. The person in the photographs was small, round-faced, with a particular brightness in her expression, the specific quality of someone who was genuinely pleased to be where she was.
The posts from March told a different story through the quality of their absence.
January and February: regular. Three, four posts a week. Normal engagement, normal tone.
March 1st through 15th: two posts. One of them was the courtyard of Noor Chawl — the jamun tree, the laundry, the specific light that Tanvi recognized immediately. Caption: New home 🏡. The comments were congratulatory. Reena had responded warmly to each one.
March 20th: one post. A selfie. The brightness was gone. Not replaced by sadness — replaced by something more neutral. The face looking at the camera with an expression that was technically a smile but which had the quality of a face that had recently been shown how to arrange itself into smiling.
March 24th: the last post. A photograph of the mirror.
Not Reena in the mirror. Not a selfie reflected. Just the mirror itself, teak frame, standing against the wall that Tanvi recognized as her wall — her flat, her corner, the same scuff on the plaster above the skirting board.
The caption was empty. No text. No hashtags.
Twelve likes. Three comments asking if she was okay. No responses.
After March 24th: nothing.
Tanvi sat with her phone and looked at the photograph of the mirror for a long time.
She could not see anything in it — the mirror in the photograph was angled away from direct light and showed only the dark of the room beyond where Reena had stood to take the picture. A rectangular darkness inside a teak frame.
She zoomed in.
In the dark of the reflection, something lighter. She zoomed further.
A shape. Indistinct. The way shapes were indistinct in photographs of dark spaces — the eye finding patterns in the noise, as it always did.
She put the phone down.
She wrote to the Reena Shaikh account. A short message: Hi. I think I've moved into the flat you used to live in. I hope you're okay. If you want to talk, I'm here.
She did not expect a response.
She was right.
