14

I promise Arati I’ll see Ma in the morning, in the hope that my gift can still be restored. But she seems to have made up her mind. She is going to follow their instructions and name councillor Alam. I try to extract a promise about visiting Shome as well, to which she absently nods; she doesn’t even register my offer to stand beside her at the police station or with the journalists afterwards.

In my eagerness to be helpful, I suggest that I denounce Alam in my column. Even if none of his victims reads an English-language newspaper, word might reach someone indirectly and help them come forward. In any case, the story would be all over the Bengali media; the planners of this move are right about that. It would cause him the most widespread damage.

Something mad occurs to me. I ask Arati for a moment, close my eyes, and try to reach Shivani. Perhaps, somehow, she has stayed behind. All I receive is silent confirmation that she was part of the other wishful thinking that briefly came true.

‘Arati, how is it exactly when Manasa is with you? And how do you know when it’s a demon?’

Manasa’s presence she feels continually, like an older sister rather than a goddess, answering every question she has, even silly ones she uses as a test, and holding her back from any sort of danger, such as her impulse to go across the street and murder Ramesh. And when the ‘other voice’ takes over, the one she calls a demon, there is only silence punctuated by orders. Why Manasa cannot destroy him and always remain with her, she hasn’t yet received an answer.

I suggest she get some sleep in the spare room. She holds my glance for an extra second, then asks if I know what’s in my bedroom.

Everything is exactly as I’d left it to go to Didi’s house, down to the footprints in the blood. The body is as real as could be. Even if I claimed self-defence and accused the dead woman of breaking and entering and attempted murder, I would be asked to show signs of the former, and then to explain why hours had lapsed before I reported such a serious attack. What evidence had I rearranged or disappeared?

Within ten minutes, we are in my car to my mother’s. It’s 4.50 in the morning. This visit can’t wait until a ‘normal’ hour. I try my best not to let my desperation take over my driving.

All indecision is past. At this moment, I would pay anything to have my Shakti back.

She answers her intercom immediately, as though she’s been expecting us. The watchman downstairs took some rousing and then persuading that Mrs Bhowmick in 6A is indeed my mother. He has never seen me visit before.

I don’t ask how she made it home from Jodhpur Park. She is still in her sari, as though she recently arrived.

‘What Shakti have you been given?’

She ignores my question. ‘Come in, Arati. I’m seeing you after years. Have you been well?’ Then she asks about her dressmaking.

‘What do they want from me?’

‘You see, Arati, we meet after so long, and Jaya won’t give us a minute to catch up. Shall I make everyone coffee? We probably won’t get any more sleep tonight.’

‘Ma, do you know about the woman in my house?’

She shakes her head. I decide not to say more.

‘Tell me, what is their order for me?’

‘No orders. They want to give you everything you truly want. You want access to your childhood. You want to return there whenever you like. You want to see into people’s minds and understand them in order to help. That’s all they want to give you: the Shakti to realise your own dreams.’

‘And in return?’

‘In return, for now, you help with Arati’s task. That will be a big challenge, but absolutely the right thing to do. You are both being very brave.

‘And then everything will come back,’ she concludes, as though she has memorised her lines. ‘For both of you. More than this I don’t know. Now, Arati, would you prefer tea?’

Suddenly I know what I’ll do — and immediately I see my mother packing two school lunch boxes, counting out a precise number of grapes each for Didi and me, even though she is also walking to the kitchen to make tea and coffee right now in 2017. I wonder if this is her gift, what she has been granted in return for the work she is doing — the ability to revisit our years in Bombay whenever she wishes.

Or perhaps she inhabits that other world as a matter of course, without any Shakti, always coming and going from this one.

Arati notices my tears and I whisper that we should leave. I can suddenly see in her mind Tuntuni crawling towards a toy double-decker bus on a faded orange bedsheet laid out on the floor, and understand I am being given another chance.

In the car on the way home, Arati turns to me with an enormous lightness in her face to say Manasa is with us! ‘The morning will go well, she is promising, and Shome will follow. We should both rest now.’ In the silence afterwards, I debate whether my first column should be about the rapist councillor, followed by one blowing this whole thing out of the water. Let’s bring it into the open, turn it into a hashtag and see what people say. Maybe thousands will come forward to share that they are being secretly coerced. Perhaps several have been asked to kill as a price for their Shakti. What if my prompt frees many more to speak up?

Don’t be a moron, Jaya, says a voice in no way supernatural. How many people would surrender a power that delivers them their most cherished dreams and risk exposing the price they might have paid? Get fucking real for a moment and think of the woman beside you who you’ve repeatedly pledged to help. Fuck your ego-trip blaze of glory. You’re setting fire to something you haven’t even understood. I hope you do it, just for being so incredibly reckless and immature. I hope you throw down that card in all your narcissism, and not a single soul comes forward; everyone decides you’re crazy and this time you don’t get the Shakti back. Then spend the rest of your pathetic life exactly as a continuation of your mother’s — knowing you were too afraid to grasp a freedom that was literally gifted you. At least she tried to live free for three years. You haven’t even lasted twenty-four hours.

My phone goes. I look at it when we arrive home.

‘Come and visit me in Aradhana again. Wake me up if you’re visiting at night, or come during the day. I know you don’t hate me there.’

When I open my front door, all my fear returns. Nothing else matters if the body is still there. I ask Arati to hold my hand and we push the bedroom door together.

The floor is spotless! If Arati hadn’t seen the woman, I would have concluded I was bonkers. She is, however, sporting a huge grin.

‘I knew even before opening the door that it would be gone. I asked Manasa on the way, and she told me.’

Suddenly I can hear someone else chuckling as well. Shivani too is finding my reaction most amusing.