Chapter 1
The Day The Garden Went Quiet
Rajasthan. October. 2001.
The kind of afternoon that makes you believe the world is fundamentally good.
There is a specific quality to October light in Rajasthan.
It doesn't fall .
It pours.
Thick and amber and unhurried, like someone tipped a jar of honey over the edge of the sky and forgot to stop it.
It turns white walls gold and gold walls into something that doesn't have a name yet.
It makes even ordinary things : a cracked clay pot, a sleeping dog, a line of drying dupattas look like they belong in a painting that someone very talented made on a very good day.
The garden of the Chauhan haveli, on this particular October afternoon, was not ordinary.
It never was.
Marigolds lined every stone path in thick, aggressive bursts of orange and yellow , the kind of marigolds that didn't ask permission, that just grew, enthusiastically and everywhere, as if they'd been personally offended by the concept of empty space.
The old neem tree near the iron gate had been there longer than anyone could remember, its roots cracking the courtyard stones in three places that the gardener patched every monsoon and the tree undid every winter.
Bougainvillea crawled up the eastern wall in violent pink.
The stone fountain in the centre, dry since July, still held its dignity.
It smelled like marigolds and wet mud and something sweet from the kitchen window.
It looked, in the October light, like a place where nothing bad could ever happen.
And in the middle of it all -
She ran.
Small feet slapping against warm stone.
A frock the colour of mustard yellow, already dusty at the hem from approximately four minutes of garden access.
Two braids - dark, thick, done up with red ribbons that morning by Dadi's careful hands , both in the process of coming spectacularly undone, because this child and neatness had a famously complicated relationship.
Advika.
Two years old.
