34: Cleaning House

7 September 2000

Anila had been the first to notice that Rekha had not called on her for a few days now. She and the others had run away when her madam became violent and erratic. However, they all figured that she would come to her senses soon and call them back. She always did. But the call for her to return home never came.

According to the others who had crept back to check on the penthouse, the curtains had not been drawn in days. The silence itself had weight, pressing down on the servants who had once scurried through that house like mice.

For two days, they had stayed away, afraid of her temper, whispering among themselves about the things they had last seen - her pacing barefoot through the halls, eyes rimmed red, smashing vases with her own hands, laughing one moment and weeping the next. But at last, worry overcame fear. Anila and Rama, who had been with Rekha for more than a decade - faithful in the way only old retainers can be - crept back to the penthouse, clutching each other’s hands as they turned the heavy brass key.

The sight that met them stopped them cold. Broken glass crunched underfoot. Cushions had been slashed, their stuffing strewn across the floor like snow. Empty bottles littered the side tables. Perfume clung to the air, sickly-sweet, trying to mask decay...

And in the center of it all, sprawled across the velvet divan, lay Rekha Das.

Her face was pale, but the kohl around her eyes was smudged in a way that made her look almost painted, like a tragic heroine from some forgotten play. The silk of her gown clung to her, torn at one shoulder. Her bangles had slid down her wrist, one cracked, the others ringing faintly as Anila fell to her knees beside the body.

“No...” Anila’s voice broke into a wail. Rama pressed his palms together, trembling, whispering the name of God over and over, as though prayer might turn back time. But it was too late.

The police came, then the doctors, and soon the verdict was written in careful, clinical words: suicide, induced by depression.

The staff spoke in hushed tones to anyone who would listen. How Rekha had barely slept the week before. How she raved about people watching her from mirrors. How she had screamed at shadows, destroyed her own possessions, and once even threatened to throw herself off the balcony. They remembered her in fragments - her laughter that could cut as sharp as a knife, the jewels she wore even at breakfast, the way she used to dominate a room with nothing but the flick of her wrist. All of that had withered in just a handful of days.

The city awoke to the news with the same ferocity it reserved for football matches and film scandals. The headlines screamed louder than the temple bells:

“Socialite Rekha Das Found Dead in Ballygunge Penthouse”
“Beauty, Madness, and the Fall of a Queen”
“Rekha Das: Tragedy or Scandal?”

Front pages dripped with her name, her face, her story. Reporters dredged up party photos from the nineties, her infamous sneer caught mid-cigarette, the emerald necklace that once drew gasps at Oberoi. Sidebars catalogued her lovers, her feuds, her rumored debts. They called it “the end of an era.”

And Calcutta, as always, devoured it whole. At tea stalls, between sips of syrupy chai, men shook their heads.

“Too much beauty always drives women mad,” one muttered.

At the salon, women whispered behind mirrors.
“I heard she was seeing ghosts.”
“No, no - she was a witch, running some secret business.”

Rickshaw-pullers spat paan into the gutter and declared, “She was a whore. Everyone knew. Still ... she was stunning, na?”

And so the city mourned her the only way it knew how: with gossip and half-truths, slander and sympathy tangled together, memory reduced to perfume and rumor.

Rekha Das was gone. Already, the myth of her was louder than the woman had ever been.

Across town, Priya folded the newspaper quietly and slid it into the bin outside the apartment block she had come to call home. She had read none of it, not really. The words had blurred before her eyes, one headline bleeding into the next. Suicide. Depression. Tragedy. All dressed up in the city’s usual mixture of pity and venom. She did not need any of it. She already knew the truth, and she had seen enough of the Syndicate to understand the difference between a woman unraveling and a woman silenced.

It had been too clean, too sudden, too final. Rekha Das might have been descending into paranoia and rage, smashing her penthouse like a child breaking toys, but Priya had seen her kind before. Women like Rekha clung to life with claws. They did not let go without a fight. No, this had Syndicate written all over it. A suicide staged neatly for the press, for the public, for history.

And yet, as much as the thought chilled her, Priya also felt a flicker of relief. They had moved quickly. They had found Rekha’s blackmail stash, pulled it out of her gilded cage before the Syndicate swept in. If they had been slower, the files, the photographs, the recordings - everything - would have vanished along with her body. And worse, they would have been the ones to discover the violence itself. Priya was glad for that, at least. Glad she had not had to stand in a room with Rekha’s last breath echoing in the air.

It was a strange feeling, to be spared grief by death. Rekha had been cruel, manipulative, and vile in ways Priya still flinched to remember. After all, she was a victim of her and the Syndicate as well. She felt no pity for her demise but she had also been human. Somewhere beneath the silks and venom, she had been a woman who laughed at her own jokes, who fussed over the angle of her eyeliner, who must have loved her daughter in her own twisted way. The Syndicate had taken even that away, stripping her of choice and leaving the city to chew over rumors and lies. Priya shook her head and forced herself back into the present.

The stairwell smelled faintly of damp stone and dust as she climbed, her hand brushing the chipped banister. When she unlocked the apartment and stepped inside, the silence met her like a wall. Dust had collected on the balcony table. The curtains sagged tiredly. The fridge hummed in the corner.

She rolled up her sleeves. There was work to do.

She moved through the rooms steadily, not rushing. Windows cracked open to let in the air. Sheets stripped from beds, folded away, replaced. The stove was checked and scrubbed. Priya smiled a little remembering the messages that Bharath wrote for all of them with breakfast. She looked forward to those again. It had been too long since she got a message from him. She always rolled her eyes in public - but collected them in a scrapbook that no one knew about. Bharath would tease her mercilessly if he knew.

Shrugging the pleasant memory away, Priya cleaned the little vase on the counter recalling Anya’s stubborn insistence that there should always be flowers in it, even if they had to be plucked from a roadside bush and filled them with marigolds. Towels were stacked neatly in the bath. Pillowcases smoothed. She kept a packet of mango bites tucked under Celina’s pillow. She looked forward to Celina’s squeals when she found it. Kim’s bookmark slipped quietly back into her dream journal. Anya’s vanity drawer restocked with the lotions and moisturizers she had once teased Priya about borrowing.

It was more than preparation. It was a ritual. Each small act a way of calling them home. She wanted them to walk in and feel safe, not haunted. She wanted them to know that this place could hold them, steady them, welcome them back from the storms outside.

When the last towel was folded and set aside, Priya leaned against the kitchen doorway. The room smelled of lemon cleaner and soft cotton, touched by the pale morning light. It should have felt enough. Instead, something restless stirred inside her.

Her mind drifted back to the phone call the night before. Hema’s voice, quieter than she had ever heard it, steady like a river. He had not spoken as Bharath’s father or as the sharp-eyed man who had once ruled boardrooms, but as her Appa. He had told her to take her time. To at least peek through the doorway before closing herself off. To remember that she deserved to try.

And then there was Satyu.

He was not dazzling like Bharath or dramatic like Anya or ethereal like Kim. He did not swagger like Celina or charm a room without trying. He simply stood there. Steady. True. And in his presence, she found herself unraveling in ways she did not expect, allowed to break, allowed to rebuild. That frightened her more than any Syndicate blade ever had. Because it was real.

She had not told Hema everything, but he had seen enough. “You do not owe him anything,” he had said. “But you owe yourself the right to try.” The words had stayed with her all night, twisting and turning as she lay awake.

Now, standing in the clean, quiet apartment, she could almost imagine how the others would react if they knew. Anya would gasp dramatically, then immediately begin plotting a “sister-approved strategy” to make it happen. Kim would blush and murmur something so shy yet sharp it would cut right through Priya’s defenses. Celina would smirk and call her a control freak who finally met her match. And Bharath - oh, he would never let her live it down. He would smirk for weeks, quote every line she had ever thrown at him, and probably say something horrifically sentimental in Tamil just to make her squirm.

The thought made her smile despite herself. “I’m doomed,” she whispered. And for once, she did not mind.

Her smile faded when her thoughts circled back to Bharath himself. She had missed him more than she had let herself admit. The fear still lived in her chest, the memory of seeing him battered, broken, nearly gone. She had been so sure she would lose him, that her strength, her cleverness, her will would not be enough. And then those girls - those remarkable, radiant girls - had stepped in, had lifted him not just from death’s edge but into life again. They had brought him back in ways even Priya could not. For that, she would always be grateful.

And now he was coming home. Her brother. The one she had chosen and who had chosen her back. The thought steadied her as nothing else could.

But even with that comfort, another worry pressed at her chest. The girls in the Syndicate’s stash houses. Would Rekha’s death ripple outward? Would they be punished, silenced, erased to tie up loose ends? Priya felt the fear rise like bile, and she clenched her fists. No. She would not let that happen. She would check on them herself if she had to. They had already been discarded once; she would not let them be erased.

And then there was Anya.

Priya thought of her as a younger sister - reckless, bright, maddening, but hers. Now she had lost her mother. Evil as Rekha had been, she had still been a mother. Priya knew what that absence felt like, the hollow that never quite closed. She worried for Anya, how this loss would settle on her shoulders, how it might twist her anger or deepen her fire. Priya wanted to shield her, even if she knew Anya would never allow herself to be shielded.

She exhaled slowly, her eyes resting on the brightened kitchen, the folded towels, the flowers in the vase. Everything in its place. Everything was ready.

For a long moment, she stood there, hands curled around the edge of the counter, the smell of cleaner and marigold mixing in the air.

Her life had changed in ways she still could not believe. The throwaway girl from Bankra Road, once invisible, now stood in a home she had helped make, waiting for a family that had chosen her without price and without guilt. She had faced Syndicate knives, Hema’s awe, Satyu’s quiet truth, and Bharath’s near-death. She had survived it all.

And yet, as the morning light spilled across the floor, she knew one thing more clearly than anything else:

They were coming home.

And when they did, she would be ready.

Meanwhile in Amritsar, Bharath woke to the soft weight of Kim’s head on his chest and the rhythm of three steady breaths interspersed with his own. Morning light, thin and pearly, slipped around the heavy curtains of the Amritsar hotel room and traced the edges of the “constellation” they had fallen asleep in - Kim tucked over his heart, Anya sprawled diagonally with one arm flung possessively across his stomach, and Celina curved along his side. Somewhere beyond the glass, the city was waking, and if he listened closely he thought he could catch a ribbon of kirtan from a far-off gurdwara mixing with the low rumble of traffic.

He lay still for a while and let the simple fact of morning soak into him. He was alive. He was warm. He was not in a hospital bed or flinching at the memory of boots and fists. He was here, held by the women who had refused to let him go. The thought made his chest tighten in a way that was almost painful, the good kind that accompanies a blessing you do not feel worthy to receive. He kissed Kim’s hair and felt her stir, then settle again with a small contented hum.

Last night had been the first true exhale after days of bracing. The scene at Kim’s house had ripped through all of them - family splitting, neighbors shouting, the mob turning from rumor to frenzy in a heartbeat. The hospital had been its own surreal circus, with fluorescent lights and whispered orders and the heavy thump of worry in every corridor. They had promised themselves a quiet night out, a walk by the lake, maybe dinner at the famous dhaba if they could brave the crowds without being recognized.

When they finally reached the hotel, though, their plans collapsed between the door and the bed. They had tossed their bags in a heap and fallen onto the mattress, still half-dressed and running on fumes, and the quiet they found with each other had been better than any reservation.

It had started with laughter, because that is how their family repaired itself when it could. Anya had sprawled across the duvet and launched into an exaggerated reenactment of the nurses sneaking glances at Bharath’s chart and then at his face, as if one did not match the other. Celina had added sound effects, complete with dramatic gasps and a surprisingly accurate imitation of Dr. Kapoor’s clipped tone when he told them to “please stop making the ward a film set.” Kim had covered her mouth and tried to be dignified, and had failed beautifully.

Bharath remembered the moment he lost it too - Anya miming one elderly uncle elbowing another in the corridor outside radiology, both swearing on their honor that they had seen Celina first when she walked past in a white saree, and the second uncle declaring loudly that he had not merely seen her, he had attained darshan. The memory sent a helpless grin crawling across Bharath’s face even now.