5

The voice says she is Shivani!

It tells me that the woman on the floor (because it’s a woman lying there, in a purple and green salwar kameez, and with long, loose hair) is someone who had chosen to pay their price. Evidently, she had been gifted invisibility. Which, it seems, fades when you die, because there she is, still leaking blood — someone I’ve no recollection of seeing before, which would tally with what I’ve heard about orders to kill strangers. My bedside light is now on, so that I can face both the murdered body before me and the truth that I was the stranger appointed to die.

Oh, and the voice claiming to be Shivani is invisible too. And silent. I hear her speaking directly into my head. I haven’t a clue where she is located. My attacker’s death seems indisputable, and whoever is transmitting these words to me must certainly have slit her throat, probably with her own knife, which is also lying on the floor. But whether this is Shivani (how can it be her??), and what her next move will be, I have no idea.

I’m sitting up, my throat in great pain. From corner to corner I scan my bedroom, looking less for a girl than a hidden mind. Somebody else who is invisible, who has saved my life, but cannot be who she is claiming and therefore I mustn’t trust, is still in my house.

She insists she is Shivani, and also that I need to move. In any case, she says, as you have just seen, remaining indoors is no guarantee of safety.

‘But how can you be Shivani?’

‘In the same way that I can be invisible. That this woman was invisible. But we don’t have time for this. There’s somewhere you need to be, where you’ll see a whole lot more.’

Still I cannot see her. It cannot even be claimed that I ‘hear’ her. It is, in fact, not that different from the experience of talking to myself, which would have been an obvious conclusion were it not for the body on the floor.

Are you sure, Jaya, I block out everything else and ask. Are you sure you didn’t surge up in absolute desperation and slash her throat, and now are recoiling from your own action with an equal and opposite horror? Isn’t the voice claiming to be Shivani a very understandable part of your shock?

Because Shivani was cremated. Someone from the police would have attended the cremation, after they had attended the scene of her fall and performed a post-mortem on her body. The broken body that was Shivani. Some truths cannot be magicked away, no matter how much we would wish it.

There is a pause, as though I have won the argument. For which, ironically, the prize would be the obligation to confess to murder.

‘The broken body was Shivani, and yet I’m still here. Look, Aunty, how badly do you want to learn about what’s happening? You’ll miss your best chance.’

I remain dumbstruck.

‘We have to go now. It’s not far, but he’ll be there very soon.’

She pauses, then says this impossible thing, from right inside my deepest thoughts, as though she has my gift: ‘If you don’t make your choice soon, you won’t be able to help anybody. You’ll be lost in these nightmares forever, and no one will even try to reach you.’

Am I your price for coming back to life, Shivani? The next step to regaining your body? Is that why you had to kill this creature first? You’ll only get your life back death by death?

But I am getting out of bed as I think all this, because of one word the voice has used.

Like almost any kid her age, the girl I’d met at the Park Street Barista, otherwise so sullen and mistrustful, had also called me Aunty.

‘So tell me something no one else would have any way of knowing about the evening we met. And how you can be here when I know for a fact that the police have conducted a post-mortem on your body. Did you have a yearning to be a ghost?’

Snarky as I’m trying to be, these words are coming from a woman in the shower demanding answers of the bathroom air.

Silence. I brush my hair, then head out of the bathroom to get dressed. A part of me has held some hope, but the body, and its blood, are still there. I think about touching it once, but I’ve already done all the wrong things since the woman died, including showering the traces away and now planning to leave her here overnight. All because I am trying my utmost to hold on to the conviction that nothing happening just now can be real.

What if it is, Jaya? What if she’s still here when you, and Arati, return in the morning? You can at least tell Arati the whole truth, or claim you decided to pay the price, but how would Inspectors Bhadra and Somayya react to your involvement with a third case, this time of a murdered woman clearly dead for several hours on your bedroom floor? You could plead coincidence and circumstantial association with Arati and Shivani, but this one really couldn’t be more hands-on, could it?

I consider calling Bhaswati right away, at four minutes past midnight. The bell went, bitch came in, seemed normal at first, then rushed me: look at the finger marks around my throat! I think she’s someone who hated Chandra Sir! Yes, Bhaswati, let’s go with that. That’s actually kind of plausible.

Stop it! I swat away my own madness. What are you contemplating? What are you believing? Don’t write off so easily the possibility of returning home in a few hours and finding no trace of a body because the demon will have withdrawn this failed spell. It could well be that no one has been killed here. For a whole complex of reasons, most probably to soften me up for their future demands, I’m being bombarded with one perplexing fabrication after another, sometimes from the distant past, as in the case of my grandmother’s death, while this one had been terrifyingly present, but each equally illusory.

‘When the iced coffee arrived, you saw they’d put whipped cream on top. You took the glass off the plate and moved all the cream onto it. To be different, because I was so disappointed that Chandra Sir hadn’t come, and didn’t trust you at all, I ate only my cream, even though I hated it.’

Then Shivani added, ‘You know what’s ironic? I spent our first meeting not believing in you, and now you’re returning the favour.

‘Anyway, please pick up your car key as well as the key to your sister’s place, because that’s where we’re going. We have ten minutes. It should be enough though, right?’