9

I was moved despite what I believed, despite being as certain as ever that Ramesh’s actions over the past decade and a half had been unspeakably vile and selfish.

But this too was the strangest phenomenon — to have incontrovertible evidence that Arati and the man who had destroyed her were both haunted by the same things.

Because just now, sitting across from Arati, I was being flooded with the very images Ramesh’s head had been full of a short while before: above all, of tiny Tuntuni wailing inconsolably, as though in great pain, but also of her asleep, and once again that hospital ward.

I tried to find my gentlest voice, and focus without recourse to magic on what I was about to attempt. A heartbroken mother had been waiting for it for sixteen years.

I still didn’t have the ‘answer’ I’d dreamt of presenting to Arati a few hours ago, when I’d bragged to myself that my gift would shortly fulfil her second wish. But what was this truth I had unearthed? Had it any worth at all as a clue?

‘Arati, the first thing I want to say is that I came away even more certain that Ramesh’s crimes are unforgivable. And there are so many: the crime of devastating you, the crime of separating you and Tuntuni, the crime of everything that might have befallen her, and finally the profoundly cruel crime of his silence, for which to this day he appears to feel no shame. Prison, where hopefully he will end up despite this period of bail, is utterly inadequate as a punishment for any of this. Bhaswati is determined to fight for the longest sentence possible, and she is absolutely committed to your case.’

I took a breath, and carefully chose my way of saying each word.

‘Tell me just one thing before I go on. Why did you never mention Tuntuni’s heart before?’

Arati’s eyes filled with tears. I immediately decided to continue.

‘I’m only bringing it up because Ramesh is clinging to that as his shield. That the foreigners promised to do the operation the two of you could not afford, and they were going to take her abroad for it. But apparently they demanded a full adoption.

‘He is still insisting you knew about it, but don’t worry, not Bhaswati, nor I, nor the police believe that for a moment. That lie will be easy to break, simply because there’ll be no evidence you ever received any money.

‘Arati, to tell you the truth, the most valuable thing we unearthed today isn’t the identities of the foreign couple, which I confess I don’t yet have, although they might have stayed at a hotel near Sudder Street or New Market, and we’ll find a way to pass this on to Inspector Bhadra. Perhaps, if the police ask, someone will remember two foreigners from 2001 who arrived as a couple but departed with a nine-month-old Indian child. But I think Ramesh is lying about the friend who acted as a go-between. It wasn’t some taxi driver, but instead a doctor. Because one thing we did learn this afternoon was that a doctor posted his bail! Ramesh said it was because he had once driven this man’s car, but I suspect this same doctor might have organised the adoption and bailed Ramesh out mostly to protect himself.’

‘Did he give a name?’

I shook my head, and was about to weave in a few physical details I had secretly gleaned to see if these triggered a memory, when something Arati was seeing distracted me.

‘Achcha, answer me something. Was there mainly one doctor treating Tuntuni? When she was in hospital, was there, for example, one person who mostly interacted with you, came to check up on her?’

Arati remembered immediately. A man called Arun Shome had been the primary specialist looking after Tuntuni at Chittaranjan Hospital.

‘Describe him,’ I asked, although he had already appeared in her head. Shome hadn’t been tall and had had a moustache — Arati confirmed what she was picturing — but this chap had hair, unlike the doctor Ramesh saw. No, they had never met him outside the hospital, and certainly not at his home, and no, she had never seen Dr Shome with a dog.

Nevertheless, I felt a surge of excitement. ‘Arati, tomorrow morning we are off again in my car, and can you guess where we are going? Wherever this Arun Shome now practises. I’m going to look him up right now to see if there’s an up-to-date photograph. And we’re going to confront Ramesh as well with this name to see his reaction.’

I searched for Arun Shome, then added ‘paediatric surgeon’ and clicked on ‘Images’. Arati pointed to a picture in the second row that I immediately recognised from Ramesh’s visions. We also learnt that Dr Shome had a chamber on CIT Road, almost directly opposite Chittaranjan Hospital.

‘Arati, look, Manasa helps those who know what to Google.’ Despite the pain inherent in everything we were uncovering, I could not help feeling an enormous lightness. I had been ashamed of not bringing back enough for Arati, of squandering my only opportunity to probe into Ramesh, and suddenly, extraordinarily, we had so much.

‘But what will this doctor know? In 2001 the Lake Thana police spoke to him as well, they told me, to confirm the nature of Tuntuni’s heart problem, because they had a theory that Ramesh had killed her out of desperation and run away. But they never found a body.’

‘Arati, Dr Shome is important because he recently bailed Ramesh out. Why should he do that? Why did he even give a former patient’s fugitive father a job as a driver, if indeed this is true? You just confirmed that he knew Ramesh was wanted by the police. Who does somebody these huge favours unless they are accomplices? These are the answers we’ll be seeking tomorrow, you and I, and if we don’t find them we can pass on the questions to Inspector Bhadra to ask in his own fashion.’

Arati broke down, and I stood beside her, holding her head against my stomach. I tried hard not to look at anything she was feeling just then. Tuntuni had been born with a serious heart defect whose name Ramesh hadn’t been able to remember (but we could probably get it out of Arun Shome the following morning), and which required either a very expensive and high-risk operation, or a full transplant. I understood that the probable reason Arati had never spoken of it to me was a refusal to face the possibility that Ramesh might have killed Tuntuni out of impatience or helplessness. But here he was — no matter how lowly his choice — claiming to have sold her to this couple, which at least held out the hope that she might be alive. And the only face that had flashed before him throughout the time we’d spoken, the only secret I could confirm he’d withheld from us, was a man Arati was — miraculously — able to identify.

If I hadn’t promised to visit the Jalans in a couple of hours, I would have taken Arati to Shome’s clinic right away. Yet, what more might we know by, say, this time tomorrow, or earlier still, during the morning itself? And the best part was — I felt suddenly confident of this — that even if I woke up and the gift was gone, if this manifestation proved to be as brief as it might have been for Arati, well, by tomorrow morning we might not need it any longer, at least not to resolve the mysteries of Tuntuni or Shivani. In either case, whatever would require unearthing after the discoveries of today could be carried out by usual detective methods. If, for example, I couldn’t divine the names of the foreigners from Dr Shome in the morning, or learn what had truly befallen Tuntuni and the nature of Shome’s connection to Ramesh, surely Inspector Bhadra could take over from there? Likewise, Inspector Somayya could build on anything I gleaned from Mr and Mrs Jalan this evening. If these breakthroughs (not to forget the minor matter of my own liberation from Dhanuka, and from the lie she had forced me to live) were all I managed to achieve in a mere twelve hours of possessing this ability, I would feel justifiably contented and proud.

An incredible image came to me as I closely embraced Arati, a fantasy of my own making rather than from her head: that somehow we were video-calling a teenaged Tuntuni at this very hour the following afternoon. We’d threaten Shome with the police; he’d cough up the couple’s names (of course we’d turn him in anyway); we’d look them up online; basic compassion would compel one of them to respond to the plight of Tuntuni’s biological mother who for sixteen years had had no idea where she was, from the age of nine months, and they would pass on her details to us. We’d be seated at this table, and I’d be interpreting between Arati and her daughter.

Take the gift away if you want after that, whoever you are. I can go back to life without it. Just let me give the two of them that moment.

There were eleven messages waiting for me when I looked again at my phone, just before leaving for Shivani’s place. Chaitali was delighted to offer me my column back, and loved the idea of a rebrand (‘Oh, the agony the aunt herself had to overcome, Jayadi. I love it. It makes it all much more authentic. And that story is our opening column. Can I have it by day after?’) With my permission, she would tweet the news shortly. ‘Walk-In Closet’ was about to be born.

Then she messaged back with an alternative suggestion, ‘Some Like It Hot’, to which I replied, ‘How about “Nobody’s Perfect”?’, and we had a deal.

Next, the principal of a well-known, new-ish school on the Bypass wanted to know if I was keen to be teaching again. I wrote to thank her for her interest and said I’d love to meet anytime barring tomorrow. Two other friends besides Moushumi were vying to put me up for the night, presumably in exchange for all the gossip. And the latest dope too was wanted by four journalists who’d been following the day’s swell of online support for ‘Chandra Sir’. I forwarded the same reply to each of them: By tonight I’ll definitely have a statement for you. Give me a few hours. Something big might be about to come to light.

At Shivani’s building, I signed my name in the register after Mr Jalan had authorised me to the guard through the intercom, and took the lift to the fifth floor. So, I was about to meet the father as well. I recalled Shivani had mentioned their floor in her very first message, and it filled me with fresh anger and sorrow how it proved to be her undoing. I reminded myself that the Jalans wouldn’t have a clue of what would shortly hit them. A superhero at the peak of her powers, and just now also at peak morale. Because one further thing she had learnt about herself was that, at least in her case, with great power came (only) righteousness and responsibility. Everything she’d done since the morning had been fearless, and motivated either by love or integrity.

A female help opened the door and showed me into the living room. Moments later Shivani’s father walked in, and I realised I knew him incredibly well.

As do you, and the rest of the country.