Eighty Rupees

The man who sold Rhea the diary had no teeth and one very clean white shirt, and he would not take less than eighty rupees for it.

"It is old," he said, in Kannada and then again in English when she did not answer quickly enough. "Real leather. Very old. Look." He opened it and fanned the pages under her nose. They were thick and cream-coloured and completely blank, and they smelled faintly of sandalwood and rain. "No one has written in it. You will be the first."

Avenue Road on a Saturday afternoon is a river of people and scooters and handcarts and old books stacked in towers on the pavement, and Rhea had come there looking for a second-hand copy of a statistics textbook, not a diary. She was twenty-six, a product analyst at a fintech startup in Whitefield, and she did not keep diaries. She kept spreadsheets. Her therapist had suggested journalling, six months ago, when the panic attacks started, and Rhea had nodded politely and downloaded an app and never opened it.

But the diary was beautiful. Dark brown leather, soft as a glove, with a strap that wound around it twice and a small brass clasp shaped like a closed eye. And the man had very kind eyes, and she felt suddenly, stupidly sorry for him, sitting on the hot pavement with his one clean shirt.

She gave him a hundred. He did not give her change. When she looked back from the corner, he was gone, and so was his stall, and there was only a gap in the row of booksellers, exactly the width of a man and a blanket.

She thought nothing of it. Avenue Road is like that.

That night, in her flat in Indiranagar, she sat on the bed with the diary on her knees and a pen in her hand for twenty minutes and wrote nothing. What was she supposed to say? Dear diary, I am good at my job and bad at everything else. Dear diary, my mother calls every Sunday to ask when I am getting married. Dear diary, three weeks ago I had a panic attack in the Trinity metro station and a stranger held my hand until it stopped and I never even asked her name.

In the end she wrote the date at the top of the first page — Saturday, 14 June — and under it, feeling foolish, Bought this today. Not sure why. And she closed the clasp and put it on her bedside table and went to sleep.

In the morning there was a second entry.

It was on the second page, under a date she had not written: Monday, 16 June. Tomorrow. And it was in her handwriting. Not like her handwriting. Her handwriting — the lazy loop of her y's, the way she crossed her t's too far to the right, the little slant that her school teachers had tried and failed to correct for ten years.

It said:

Don't get on the 8:15 metro.

That was all. Four words and a full stop, pressed so hard into the page that the pen had nearly gone through.

Rhea sat on the edge of her bed and stared at it for a long time.

The rational explanations lined up in her head like tickets in a queue. She had written it in her sleep. She had written it and forgotten — stress did strange things to memory, her therapist said so. Someone had broken into her flat, learned to forge her handwriting perfectly, and left a cryptic message in a diary she had owned for twelve hours. She rejected them in order, from the least likely to the most, and found she did not have anything left.

She took the 8:15 metro on Monday anyway. Of course she did. She was a product analyst. You do not change your behaviour because of a single anomalous data point.

The train was packed, as always. She stood by the doors, one hand on the rail, earphones in, and watched the stations slide past. Indiranagar. Swami Vivekananda Road. Baiyappanahalli. Nothing happened. She felt her shoulders begin to loosen. She felt, a little, like laughing at herself.

At 8:31, between Baiyappanahalli and the next station, the train stopped in the middle of the elevated track, and the lights went out.

People groaned. Someone's phone torch came on. The announcement system crackled and said nothing. Rhea felt her heart start to go, the old familiar tightening, the walls of the carriage beginning to lean in. Not here. Not now. She gripped the rail and counted her breaths — in for four, hold for four — and looked out of the window to anchor herself on something far away.

On the track beside theirs, the other track, the one going the opposite direction, a second train had stopped too. Its carriage was dark as well, directly level with hers, so close she could have reached across the gap and touched its windows.

A woman was standing at the window opposite her, one hand on the rail, earphones in.

It was Rhea.

Not someone like her. Her. The same frizzy hair tied up with the same green scrunchie. The same grey kurta with the ink stain on the left cuff that would not wash out. The same face, the same mouth, except that the other Rhea's face was wet with tears, and she was staring straight at her through two panes of glass, and she was holding up the diary.

It was open. On the page, in big, desperate capital letters, she had written:

I TOLD YOU NOT TO GET ON.

The lights came back on. Both trains lurched and began to move, in opposite directions, and the other window slid away, and the other Rhea was gone.

Rhea did not go to work that day. She went home, and locked the door, and opened the diary with shaking hands.

There was a new entry. Tuesday, 17 June.

Okay. You didn't listen. That's fine. I didn't listen either, the first time. Now listen carefully, because I don't know how many pages we have left.

Something happens on Friday. I can't write what, it won't let me — every time I try, the words cross themselves out. But you can stop it. Only you. And you have to start by finding the woman who held your hand at Trinity station.

She is the only other person who has ever owned this diary.