The Crown They Stole

By the time Professor Menon asked how many people in the room believed they could tell when someone was manipulating them, almost every hand went up.

Riya’s didn’t.

She sat near the open windows of the lecture hall, turning a pen slowly between her fingers as Professor Menon surveyed the raised hands with an expression that suggested his students had just proved his point for him.

“Interesting,” he said. “Either I’ve been teaching an exceptionally self-aware class, or most of you are far more confident than you should be.”

A few hands came down amid quiet laughter.

Riya smiled and looked at the empty page in front of her.

People liked to imagine manipulation as something obvious. Threats. Lies that could be caught. Someone cruel enough to recognize as cruel. It was more comfortable that way. Nobody liked considering how easily trust could make even intelligent people stop asking questions.

“Most people believe manipulation is something that happens to gullible people,” Professor Menon continued. “We imagine we would recognize it. That we would notice when somebody was influencing our decisions. Why is that assumption dangerous?”

The room fell quieter.

Beside Riya, Ananya had stopped taking notes several minutes ago and was making an increasingly poor attempt to remain awake. Riya nudged her notebook with the end of her pen.

Ananya opened her eyes. “I was listening.”

“You were asleep.”

“I can do both.”

“That isn’t how consciousness works.”

Before Ananya could defend herself, Professor Menon looked in their direction.

Riya knew that look.

“Riya,” he said, “perhaps you can rescue your friend. Why don’t people recognize manipulation when it’s happening to them?”

She thought about it for a moment before answering.

“Because the best manipulation doesn’t feel like manipulation.”

Professor Menon waited.

Riya glanced down at the bracelet around her wrist before continuing. “It usually comes from someone you already trust. If you believe someone loves you, you don’t question every decision they make for you. Most of the time, you find reasons to believe they mean well.”

Something about her answer seemed to satisfy him.

“Exactly.”

He turned back towards the board, and Riya finally lowered her pen to the page.

Trust changes what people are willing to question.

She underlined it once.

Then the lecture continued.

People saw what they were prepared to see.

It was one of the reasons she’d chosen psychology in the first place. Human behavior had fascinated her long before she had the vocabulary to describe it. People lied while insisting they valued honesty. They hurt people they loved and protected people they claimed to hate. They remembered events incorrectly with complete confidence and defended beliefs they had never actually chosen for themselves.

At seventeen, Riya was one of the youngest students at the Coromandel Institute of Behavioural Sciences. The age difference had mattered when she’d first arrived. People had stared, asked questions and assumed she must be some sort of genius.

The attention lasted less than a month.

University had a reliable way of making everyone too tired to remain interested in somebody else’s life.

Riya preferred it that way.

By the time the lecture ended, she’d filled four pages and Ananya had managed to remain conscious for the final twenty minutes. They packed their things while the classroom emptied around them.

Ananya wanted coffee. Riya declined before she could turn it into an elaborate plan.

“You always go home after class.”

“That’s because I live there.”

“You know what I mean.”

Riya did. She simply enjoyed making Ananya work for her argument.

“Maa made lunch.”

That settled it. Ananya had eaten at their apartment often enough to know that Meera considered refusing food she’d already prepared a character defect.

They walked through the courtyard together, where the humidity had turned the air thick enough to make the shade almost useless. Riya’s phone vibrated before they reached the gate. She didn’t need to check who it was.

“Your mother?” Ananya guessed.

Riya looked at the message.

Class over?

“Yes.”

“You’re seventeen.”

“I know my age.”

“Does she?”

Riya laughed and typed that she was on her way home. A second message appeared almost immediately, reminding her not to eat outside.

There was something comforting about being predictable enough that Meera knew exactly when to expect her.

Riya said goodbye to Ananya at the gate and took an auto home. Pondicherry passed around her in familiar fragments: scooters slipping through traffic, old buildings washed in pale yellows and whites, flowering bougainvillea hanging over compound walls. The city wasn’t particularly large, and after growing up there she knew enough of it to recognize where she was without looking at street signs.

She also knew where the sea was even when she couldn’t see it.

That had always been true.

On days when everything became too much, Riya went to the water. Sometimes she sat there for ten minutes; sometimes Meera had to call and demand she come home before dinner. The habit had started so young that neither of them remembered exactly when it began.

Her fingers moved absently over the thin bracelet on her wrist.

The gold was scratched with age, the oval charm worn smooth in places. It had belonged to her biological mother, one of the few possessions that had reached India with her.

Riya remembered neither of her parents.

There were photographs, of course. Enough that their faces weren’t unfamiliar. She knew the sound of their names and pieces of their lives, but memories couldn’t be inherited. No matter how long she looked at a photograph, it couldn’t give her back the feeling of being held by someone she’d lost before she was old enough to remember them.

She had learned not to ask photographs for things they couldn’t provide.

Meera had filled most of those empty spaces anyway.

The apartment smelled of spices and fried potatoes when Riya arrived. She had barely shut the door before Meera called from the kitchen and told her to wash her hands.

Riya smiled to herself.

Some things were more reliable than clocks.

Meera was standing over the stove when she entered the kitchen a few minutes later. Her hair had been twisted up carelessly, and the glasses she needed for reading were sitting on top of her head, forgotten.

“You’re late.”

“Seven minutes.”

“Exactly.”

Riya sat at the table. “I didn’t realize seven minutes qualified as a disappearance.”

“With you, seven minutes becomes an hour very quickly.”

There was no real irritation behind it. Meera put a plate in front of her and returned to the stove, asking about college while she finished preparing her own lunch.

Riya told her about the lecture, including Ananya’s attempt to sleep through it. She left out the part where Professor Menon had called on her because she’d been talking too.

Meera knew anyway.

“You were disturbing her.”

“I was preventing her from embarrassing herself.”

“You were talking in class.”

“That is a very negative interpretation.”

Meera gave her a look that ended the argument.

Riya ate.

This was home to her. Not because of the apartment itself, which had a temperamental air conditioner and a kitchen cupboard that refused to close properly, but because Meera was in it.

There had been a time when Meera had been her nanny. Riya knew that in the same distant way she knew facts about her infancy. The title had stopped fitting long before she understood what it meant. Employees didn’t stay after everything fell apart. They didn’t raise a child who wasn’t theirs for seventeen years.

Meera had been there for fevers, school admissions, scraped knees, exam results and every ordinary day in between. She could tell from Riya’s face when something had gone wrong at college and somehow always knew when she was lying about having eaten.

Calling her Maa had happened naturally.

Riya couldn’t remember the first time.

After lunch, she carried her books into her bedroom with every intention of working. Professor Menon’s assignment was due the following week, which meant there was still enough time for procrastination to feel harmless.

She lasted nineteen minutes.

The clouds outside had darkened, and the thought of the beach had already lodged itself in her mind.

Meera didn’t even look surprised when Riya emerged in an old T-shirt and announced where she was going. She only reminded her to be home before dark.

Riya promised, knowing both of them had different definitions of before dark, and left.

The sea was restless that afternoon. Wind had driven away some of the usual crowd, leaving stretches of wet sand open between scattered families and walkers. Riya carried her sandals and wandered until the noise from the road softened behind the waves.

Nothing had happened.

That was the thing people never understood about her habit of coming here. They assumed she had to be upset.

Sometimes she was.

Sometimes she simply liked being somewhere that didn’t expect anything from her.

Riya sat on the sand and drew her knees up, watching the horizon disappear beneath gathering clouds. Professor Menon’s lecture returned to her unexpectedly.

People saw what they were prepared to see.

She wondered how often she did the same thing.

Probably more than she realized. Knowing the terminology didn’t make her immune. That had been her own point.

Her phone buzzed inside her bag. Ananya had sent a photograph of an empty document with a message asking whether staring at an assignment counted as working on it.

Riya smiled and replied that it depended on how intensely she stared.

The conversation dissolved into nonsense from there.

By the time Riya finally stood, her feet were sandy, and the wind had pulled half her hair loose. She headed home thinking about dinner, unfinished coursework and whether she could convince Meera that buying ice cream on the way didn’t count as eating outside.

There was nothing remarkable about the day.

No warning that it would be one of the last ordinary ones she would have for a very long time.

And if someone had told Riya that her life was already beginning to change in places she couldn’t see, she probably would have laughed.

She understood people, after all.

Or at least, she thought she did.