Finding a stranger in Bangalore is not like finding a stranger in a film. There is no helpful security guard with CCTV footage and a heart of gold. There are twelve million people, and most of them look tired, and all of them are late.
Rhea did it the way she did everything: with data.
She knew the date — Thursday, 22 May — because it was the day after her team shipped the payments feature, and she had worked until two in the morning and had not slept, which was why the panic attack had come. She knew the time: 6:40 p.m., the peak of the evening rush. She knew the platform: Trinity, towards Whitefield. She remembered three things about the woman. A cotton saree, pale blue, with a thin silver border. Grey hair in a long plait. And a voice that had said, over and over, in Tamil-accented English, while holding Rhea's cold hand in her warm dry one: "It is not happening now. It already happened. You are only remembering it. Let it pass."
It already happened. You are only remembering it. At the time, Rhea had thought it was just a kind thing to say.
She spent Tuesday evening at Trinity station, on the platform, from six until eight. The woman did not come. She spent Wednesday there too. On Wednesday, at 7:15, a metro employee in a blue uniform came over and asked if she was all right, and Rhea — for reasons she could not explain — held up the diary and said, "I'm looking for the lady who used to own this."
The employee looked at the diary. His face changed.
"Paati," he said. Grandmother. "You mean Paati. The one with the book." He glanced up and down the platform, then lowered his voice. "She used to come every evening for years. Sit on that bench. Write in a brown book just like that one. She always knew when there would be a delay. Always. We used to ask her, Paati, will the 7:10 be late today? She would look at her book and say, fifteen minutes, and she would be right." He hesitated. "She stopped coming three weeks ago."
Three weeks. The night she had held Rhea's hand.
"Do you know where she lives?"
He did. Everybody on that platform did, it turned out; Paati had been bringing the staff murukku every Deepavali for eleven years. She lived in Ulsoor, in an old house behind the lake, the kind of Bangalore house that has almost vanished — red oxide floors, a tiled roof, a jackfruit tree in the courtyard.
The gate was open. The front door was open. The house was full of the smell of camphor and old paper, and on every surface — on shelves, on the dining table, in stacks against the walls, in steel trunks, spilling out of an almirah — there were diaries. Brown leather diaries, exactly like hers, hundreds and hundreds of them, each with a brass clasp shaped like a closed eye.
Paati was sitting in a cane chair in the courtyard, under the jackfruit tree. She was much smaller than Rhea remembered. She was wrapped in a shawl despite the June heat, and her eyes were closed. On her lap lay a single diary, open to a blank page.
"You took the 8:15," Paati said, without opening her eyes. "Everybody does, the first time."
"Who are you?" Rhea's voice came out smaller than she meant it to.
"I was you," said Paati. "Sixty years ago. A different girl, a different city, the same eighty rupees." She opened her eyes, and they were very clear and very tired. "The diary does not tell the future, child. That is what everybody thinks. It shows you the futures. All of them. Every time you make a choice, it splits, and a page is written in each branch. The girl on the other train — she is you, in the future where you listened. She is trying to warn you about her Friday. But her Friday is not yours. Not yet."
Rhea sat down hard on the courtyard step.
"Then what happens on my Friday?"
Paati looked at her for a long moment. Then she held out the diary from her lap, open to the blank page.
"That," she said, "depends on who holds the pen."
As Rhea took it, words began to appear on the page — not written, not by any hand she could see, but surfacing up through the paper like ink rising in water. Her handwriting. Dated Friday, 20 June.
I am standing on the roof of my office building in Whitefield. It is 6:40 p.m. Somebody is standing next to me. I know her. I've always known her. She's holding the other diary. She says there can only be one of us—
The words stopped. Then, slowly, in a different handwriting, older and thinner, they crossed themselves out, one line after another, until the page was black.
Beside her, in the cane chair, Paati had closed her eyes again. Her hands lay still in her lap.
"Paati?"
She did not answer. The jackfruit tree rustled in a wind that did not touch anything else in the courtyard.
All around the house, in every room, Rhea heard the soft, unmistakable sound of hundreds of brass clasps clicking open at once.
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