[Transcript of statement given by Kavya Iyer to Sub-Inspector Priya D'Souza, Anjuna Police Station, November 12, 9:30 PM]
I need to tell you about Meera properly, because the other two won't. Rohit will have described her as a wife. Kabir will have described her as a lover. Neither of those is who she was. She was, before anything else, my friend. My person. The one I called at 3 AM, the one who knew my passwords, the one who could tell from my voice on the phone whether I was fine or pretending to be fine. We'd been that for each other since we were nineteen, which is fourteen years of the kind of knowledge that marriage and love affairs can't replicate, because they weren't there at the beginning.
I am a clinical psychologist. I work with patients in Bangalore who are dealing with trauma, grief, and the particular cruelties that people inflict on each other in the name of love. I am trained to observe, analyse, and withhold judgment. I am going to try very hard to do all three in this statement, and I am going to fail, because Meera is dead and objectivity dies with the people we love.
Here's what neither Rohit nor Kabir knows. Here's Kavya's secret.
Meera was sick.
Three months ago, during a routine check-up at a hospital in Panjim, Meera was diagnosed with a glioblastoma — a malignant brain tumour, grade four, inoperable due to its location near the brain stem. The oncologist gave her six to twelve months. Aggressive treatment might extend that to eighteen, but the quality of those months would be poor — nausea, cognitive decline, the slow erasure of everything that made Meera Meera.
She chose not to treat. She told no one except me.
Not Rohit. Not Kabir. Not her parents. Just me. Because I was the one person in her life who she trusted to hear the worst news and not try to fix it. Rohit would have tried to fix it — he'd have thrown money and specialists and experimental treatments at it, because that's how he loves, by managing. Kabir would have grieved so loudly it would have consumed whatever time she had left. I was the only one who could sit with the information and let her decide what to do with it.
And what she decided to do was live.
Not survive — live. She made a list, literally a handwritten list on a yellow legal pad, of everything she wanted to do with whatever time remained. Most items were small: watch the sunrise from every beach in North Goa. Learn to make Goan fish curry from the woman at the Anjuna market. Finish the novel she'd been writing for years. Write letters to the people she loved.
