She did not go to the police. What would she have said? An old woman died in a chair in Ulsoor, and the diaries opened by themselves, and one of them says I am going to be on a roof on Friday with myself?
She did something she had never done before. She called her mother.
It was a Thursday, not a Sunday, and her mother answered on the first ring with a voice sharp with fear — "Rhea? What happened? Are you hurt?" — and Rhea sat on the floor of her flat with her back against the bed and the diary in her lap, and said, "Amma, did you ever feel like there were two of you? One who does what everyone expects, and one who — doesn't?"
There was a long silence on the line. In the background, Rhea could hear the pressure cooker whistling in the kitchen in Pune, and the TV, and her father complaining about the cricket.
"Every day of my life, kanna," said her mother quietly. "Every single day. Why are you asking me this?"
They talked for two hours. It was the first real conversation they had had in years. Her mother told her about the job she had been offered in Delhi in 1994 and had not taken, because she was getting married. About the version of herself she still imagined sometimes, living alone in a barsati in Lajpat Nagar, taking the bus to work, never having learned to make Rhea's father's favourite sambar. "I don't regret you," her mother said. "I want you to know that. But sometimes I wonder where she went. That other woman. Whether she's happy."
When Rhea hung up, there was a new entry in the diary.
It was not in her handwriting. It was in capital letters, desperate, pressed hard into the page. The handwriting from the metro window.
YOU'RE WASTING TIME. SHE'S STRONGER THAN YOU THINK. SHE'S BEEN WAITING FOR YEARS.
Underneath, in the older, thinner hand that had crossed out Friday — Paati's hand, Rhea knew now — a single line:
Ask her which one of you bought the diary.
Rhea stared at the two lines. She thought of the girl on the other train, her face wet with tears, holding up the page. I TOLD YOU NOT TO GET ON. She had assumed that girl was trying to save her.
But the diary did not show one future. It showed all of them. And every time a choice split, a page was written in each branch — and somewhere, in one of those branches, there was a Rhea who had listened, and avoided the 8:15, and never met Paati, and never called her mother, and never sat on this floor feeling, for the first time in months, like a whole person.
What would that Rhea want?
What would a version of you want, if she found out that she was the branch the story had not chosen?
Friday came up grey and heavy, the sky over Bangalore bruised with a monsoon that would not break. Rhea went to work. She did not know what else to do. She sat at her desk in the open office, with its beanbags and its motivational posters and its free cold brew, and she stared at her screen, and at 6:20 p.m. her phone buzzed with a message from a number she did not recognise.
Roof. Now. Bring the diary. — R
She went up the fire stairs. Eleven floors. Her heart was going the way it went before the panic came, but the panic did not come. She held the diary against her chest like a shield.
The roof was wet and empty, the city spread out around it in grey haze, traffic noise rising from Whitefield Main Road like the sea. At the far edge, by the railing, stood a woman in a grey kurta with an ink stain on the left cuff, her frizzy hair tied up in a green scrunchie.
She turned around.
It was Rhea, and it was not. Her face was the same, but harder, thinner, as if someone had been sanding it down for a long time. There were shadows under her eyes. In her hands was a brown leather diary, and its clasp was open, and its pages were full — every page, edge to edge, crammed with handwriting.
"Do you know how many times I've done this Friday?" the other Rhea said. Her voice was hoarse. "Forty-one. Forty-one times I've stood on this roof. Every time, a different ending. Every time, I write a page and it splits and I try again." She laughed, and it was a terrible sound. "I thought I was warning you. I thought I was saving you. And then I understood. Only one of us gets to keep the story. The diary chooses the one who's holding the pen at 6:40."
She held up her diary. Rhea looked at her watch. 6:38.
"Give me yours," said the other Rhea, and she was crying now. "Please. I'm so tired. I just want to go home. I want to call Amma. You got to call Amma. I heard it — I heard every word, through the pages." She took a step forward. "You've had your turn. Let me have mine."
6:39.
Rhea looked down at her own diary. It had fallen open in her hands, to a fresh page, and on that page, in the thin old handwriting of a woman who had died in a cane chair under a jackfruit tree, there was a single line she had not seen before:
There is always a third branch. Nobody ever thinks to write it.
6:40.
(Rhea gives up the diary. Or she refuses. Or she finds the third branch Paati promised. This is where the story splits — write the next page, and your future becomes one of Rhea's.)
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