Her father came into her room with a steel plate; on it, chunks of peeled sugar cane. ‘Akash got it for you.’ Akash was the driver. ‘It’s black ganna. He said to eat it first thing, even before you touch water.’ She sat up.
Every morning she went to the pathology lab for a blood test. Once a week she took the reports to the doctor. Her bilirubin went up, then down. She became unreasoningly hungry, and lay in bed eating toast and reading long, undemanding books.
The office fell away. She dreamt sometimes of a detail of her life there, and would wake to think of its unreality: the database, or an email about a meeting to discuss the way the city’s parks were being taken over by private businesses. Sathya phoned once or twice, to ask where Leela had filed a particular record, then to tell her of Joan’s latest annoying habit. ‘When are you coming back to the freak show?’ he asked, almost without curiosity.
She wrote to Amy, and other friends, but heard back only sporadically. It was as though she were between worlds; no longer part of the London life she had exited, nor her new life.
As the weeks passed, she wandered about the house in the afternoons, watched squirrels duel in the trees outside, and later walked in the lanes around the building, looking in at the crumbling summer houses, and the bored watchmen sitting outside them. Five weeks after she had come home, she felt more energetic, more restless. She went out with her mother to buy clothes; Mrs Ghosh said Leela looked too scruffy for someone working in an office. She accompanied her father on his stroll in the evening. She read a new novel. She called Sathya, and asked him to tell Joan she’d be in the office on Monday.