CHAPTER 13

OJASWINI

I woke to screaming.

Not human screaming — the wind. The monsoon had escalated overnight from a storm into something primal, something that sounded like the sky itself was being torn apart. Rain came sideways, hammering the windows with a force that rattled the glass in the frames. The sound was relentless — not the gentle patter of a Mumbai rain shower but the full-throated roar of the Arabian Sea monsoon, the kind that sinks fishing boats and strips leaves from trees and turns dirt paths into rivers within minutes.

My room was dark. The power had gone out sometime during the night — the digital clock on the nightstand was dead, its face blank. I checked my phone: 6:14 AM. Battery at 34%. No signal. No Wi-Fi. Nothing.

A palm tree outside my window was bent almost horizontal, its fronds whipping in the wind like the hair of something drowning. Through the rain-streaked glass I could see the sea — or rather, I could see the absence of the sea, the place where yesterday there'd been a flat grey expanse was now a churning, frothing chaos of white water and dark swells. The horizon had disappeared. Sky and sea had merged into the same furious grey.

I got out of bed. The stone floor was cold under my bare feet — colder than it should have been in June, as if the storm had reached into the house and stolen its warmth. I pulled on jeans and a kurta. Splashed water on my face from the bathroom tap — it came out icy, the pipes carrying the chill of the monsoon.

I went downstairs.

The staircase was dark. The windows on the landing let in a grey, watery light that made everything look like an old photograph — desaturated, slightly blurred, as if the house existed in a different time zone from the rest of the world. My footsteps on the wooden stairs sounded hollow. Echoey. Like the house was empty, even though I knew it wasn't.

The kitchen was already occupied.

A woman stood at the counter — small, wiry, dark-skinned, maybe fifty or fifty-five. She had the compact build of someone who'd spent her life doing physical work — the kind of strength that comes not from gyms but from carrying water pots and sweeping stone floors and climbing hills to collect firewood. She wore a simple cotton sari — dark green with a pale border, the pallu tucked into her waist — and her hair was pulled back in a tight bun that showed the grey at her temples. She was making tea. The kettle was on the gas stove — the gas still worked, thank god — and the kitchen smelled like ginger and cardamom and the sharp, tannic bite of strong Assam leaves.

She moved with the efficient, confident motions of someone who'd worked in this kitchen before. Who knew which drawer held the strainer and which shelf had the sugar and where the good cups were kept — the steel ones with the brass rims that the family used, not the cheap ceramic ones in the back.

She turned when she heard me. Her eyes were dark, quick, intelligent — the eyes of a woman who notices things.

"Oh! You must be the chef." She wiped her hands on her pallu. Her smile was warm but cautious — the smile of someone who works in other people's homes and has learned to be friendly without being familiar. "I'm Arya. I take care of the house when the family isn't here."

"Ojaswini." I shook her hand. Her grip was firm. Her palm was calloused — rough skin on the heel of her hand, the calluses of someone who scrubs and sweeps and wrings. "I didn't know there was a caretaker."

"Sameer brought me over yesterday afternoon. Came in on the last crossing before the weather turned really bad." She measured tea into the strainer with the precision of someone who'd made ten thousand cups. "Madam Tapsee wanted fresh flowers for the dining table and someone to handle the cleaning. I usually stay in the guest cottage — the small building on the east side, behind the kitchen garden. Stone walls, tin roof. It leaks in the monsoon, but—" She shrugged. "Everything leaks in the monsoon."

"How long have you been working here?"

"Fifteen years. Since Deven sahib's mother was alive. Kamala-tai." Her hands slowed on the tea. The name carried weight. "That woman could cook. Not as fancy as you, I'm sure — no molecular this or deconstructed that. But honest food. Real food. Rice cooked in an earthen pot. Surmai fish curry with fresh coconut. Ambapoli — the raw mango leather she'd dry on the terrace in summer, each sheet laid out on cotton cloth, turning from green to gold in the sun."

She poured chai into two steel cups. The liquid was dark, almost mahogany, with a layer of cream on top.

"Kamala-tai knew every plant on this island. Which leaves cured stomach pain. Which roots brought down fever. Which mushrooms were safe and which would kill you." Arya handed me a cup. "She said the island teaches you, if you listen."

The chai was strong and sweet, with ginger that burned the back of my throat and left a warmth in my chest that the monsoon morning had stolen.

"You knew Sayali?" I asked.

Arya's face softened. The cautious professionalism melted away and underneath was something tender — the expression of a woman remembering a child she'd loved.

"Since she was six years old. She used to come here every summer — two months, June and July, monsoon season. Her mother would drop her off and go back to Pune. Sayali and Kamala-tai and me — we were the women of this house." She smiled into her chai. "I braided her hair every morning. Taught her to catch crabs on the beach at low tide — you have to approach from behind, grab the shell, not the claws. She was terrified the first time. Screamed so loud the birds scattered from the trees. By the end of that summer she could catch five in ten minutes."

"She called me Arya-aai." Arya-mother. "She'd follow me around the house while I cleaned, asking questions about everything — why the portraits had sad faces, why the doors creaked, why the tunnel smelled like wet stone. She knew this house better than anyone. Every room. Every passage. Every hiding place."

"She doesn't come anymore?"

"No." Arya looked at her chai. Her thumb traced the rim of the cup. "Dev sahib and Sayali had a... disagreement. About her career. She wanted to write films — screenplays, she said, stories about women and the sea and the Konkan. He wanted her in his company. Sentinel AI. Said she had a head for numbers, for business. She refused. He..." She paused. Chose her words. "He changed his will."

"Cut her out?"

"I don't know the details. I'm the caretaker, not the lawyer. I just know she stopped coming three years ago. The summer after the divorce was finalized. And the house got quieter. Kamala-tai's kitchen garden started growing wild. The crabs came back to the beach because nobody was catching them anymore."

She set her cup down. The steel rang softly against the marble.

"This house needs children in it. Without children it's just... stone and wood and memories that nobody wants."

I drank my chai. Thought about Deven's face when he'd mentioned his daughter in the library yesterday. She made her choices. The way he'd said it — like she was a stock that had underperformed. Not a child who'd tried to follow her own path and been punished for it.

"Arya. Is there any way to get phone signal here?"

"Sometimes from the tower." She pointed upward, past the ceiling, past the second and third floors. "The old watchtower on the north side of the house. It was built for watching ships — the Portuguese used it to spot Maratha raiders. Now it's the only place high enough to catch a cell tower on the mainland. Third floor, then a ladder to the roof platform. During clear weather you can get one or two bars. Enough for a text. Maybe a short call if you stand very still and hold the phone above your head."

"And during monsoon?"

She shrugged. The shrug of someone who'd lived with monsoons for fifty years and had made peace with what they take away. "Pray."

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