Grey Shirts

Three shirts. That was the first thing, and for a while it seemed to be the only thing.

They hung on wire hangers from a steel rail in the alcove by the window, grey, all three of them, buttoned to the collar and spaced so evenly that someone must have measured. Meera put her finger between the first and second. Then between the second and third. Two fingers' width each time. Below them, on the floor of the alcove, stood one pair of black sandals with the heels worn down on the outside edge.

Flat 7-14, Block C, ninth floor of twelve. Thirty-one square metres, according to the plate by the door, which Farhan had opened at 10.10 by holding his warrant card to a reader the colour of a betel stain. The lock had clicked, a small dry sound, and the door had swung in on its own as though it had been expecting them.

'He lived here five years,' Farhan said.

'Who told you that?'

'The block record. First intake of staff housing. July 2031.'

Meera looked at the kitchen counter. One steel plate stood upright in the drying rack. One tumbler beside it. One spoon lay flat on the drainboard, and that was the full inventory of a man's meals for five years. The two-ring hob had a film of grey dust on it you could have written your name in. She did not. She bent and looked at it sideways, against the light from the window, and saw no marks at all.

Farhan was opening cupboards. Each one was empty, or nearly. A packet of Provision salt, unopened. A box of matches. A roll of the brown tape the depots used for parcels.

'No phone,' he said. 'No laptop. No tablet. There's not even a charger.' He went to the socket beside the bed, a single mattress on a wooden frame, and crouched. 'Look at this. He was an allocation engineer. He kept the whole system running, and there's nothing to plug in.'

'He didn't carry a phone on him either.'

'Because somebody took it. And somebody came here and took the rest.' He stood, brushing his trousers. 'A man who writes code doesn't live like a sadhu, madam. Somebody cleaned this place out before we got here.'

'Cleaned it,' Meera said.

'Stripped it. You know what I mean.'

She did know. She had walked into perhaps forty flats in twenty-six years where someone had got there first: a chartered accountant's office in Fort with the drawers pulled out and left hanging, a builder's bungalow in Chembur where the safe stood open and the carpet still had the four square dents from where a cabinet had been dragged off it. People who strip a place are in a hurry. They leave edges.

'Come here,' she said.

He came. She pointed at the shelf above the bed, a plank of laminated board with nothing on it. The dust lay across it in one even coat, wall to wall.

'If something had been sitting there for five years and was taken on Tuesday night,' she said, 'there'd be a clean patch where it stood. There isn't one. Same on the desk. Same round that socket.' She tapped the plastic plate with her biro, and a little grey cloud came away. 'Nobody's pulled a plug out of that this year.'

Farhan looked at the socket for longer than he needed to.

'So he was poor,' he said finally. 'In his habits, I mean.'

'Nobody's poor here. You told me that yesterday.'

He didn't answer. Down in the courtyard a delivery drone came in low with the whine of a dentist's drill, set something down outside Block D, and lifted off again.

Meera went to the bathroom because it was the only room left. It was the size of a railway compartment toilet: tap, bucket, squat pan, a shower head on a bracket, white tiles to shoulder height. She stopped in the doorway.

The rest of the flat smelled of dust and closed windows. This room smelled sharp. Wet cement, faintly chalky, the smell that had hung over her mother's kitchen in Dadar for a week in 1994 when the plumber redid the wall behind the sink.

She ran a finger along the lowest row of tiles. It came away clean.

The grout was another matter. Along the third row up, at the height of her knee, it was paler than the rest, the grey of new pencil lead against the yellowed seams above and below. She pressed it with her thumbnail and it gave, very slightly, like cheese left out of the fridge.

She started at the corner by the door and knocked on each tile with the second knuckle of her right hand. Tock. Tock. Tock. The sound of tile laid on solid wall, flat and dull. Farhan stood in the doorway because there was no room for him anywhere else.

'What are you doing?'

'Listening.'

Tock. Tock. The fifth tile along the third row answered differently. A thinner sound, with a little hollow behind it, the way a melon sounds when the vendor at Vashi market thumps it to show you he isn't cheating. She knocked the tiles on either side to be sure. Tock. Then the odd one again. Tunk.

'Bring me the plate,' she said.

'Madam.'

'The steel plate. In the rack.'

He did not move. 'This is a death scene, possibly. If there's something behind there, forensic should take it out. We photograph it in place. We log it. If we break the wall ourselves, a lawyer will say we put whatever it is in there.'

'Which lawyer?'

'Any lawyer.'

'You've got a camera on your phone. Photograph the tile now. Photograph me taking it out. Photograph whatever's behind it.' She held out her hand without looking round. 'And when forensic come, ask them how long it took them to get here from Panvel this morning.'

He went. She heard the plate lift out of the rack with a small ring. He photographed the wall from the doorway, then from a crouch, then handed it to her rim first, as if it were a weapon.

The plate was cheap Provision steel, thin enough to flex. She worked the edge into the soft grout along the top of the tile and drew it across, and the grout came out in a damp grey ribbon. She did the left side, then the right. The bottom she left alone. When she pushed down on the top edge, the tile tipped forward on its lower seam like a letterbox flap and she caught it in her palm.

Behind it was a gap cut in the plaster, roughly the size of a brick laid on its side. Someone had lined it with a square of polythene, the kind the depots used to wrap bedding. Inside the polythene was a book.

Farhan's phone clicked three times behind her.

She lifted it out with two fingers on the spine. A notebook, octavo, bound in dark blue cloth worn grey at the corners, the sort they still sold at stationery shops in Matunga for students who liked to feel serious. Ninety-six pages, it said on a sticker inside the back cover. Rs 145. A pencil had been used for everything. She could see the shine of graphite on the paper when she tilted it toward the small window above the shower.

The entries ran in columns, neat, cramped, ruled by hand. A date. Two initials, sometimes three. Then a pair of numbers separated by a slash.

18.04.35 · SP · 61/2

02.05.35 · NKB · 140/11

29.06.35 · RD · 214/9

She stopped on that one. On the back of her left hand, under 3,80,000, the biro still read 214. She did not say anything about it. Farhan was reading over her shoulder, close enough that she could smell his aftershave, something with lime in it.

There were pages of them. She turned through quickly, not reading, only counting. Eleven entries on a page, sometimes twelve. Some pages had a second column added later in a softer pencil, single words she would need her glasses for. Toward the back the handwriting got smaller, as if he had begun to worry about running out of room.

The last written page had four entries. Three were complete. The fourth sat on its own line at the bottom, under a ruled gap.

10.02.36 · · 2/1

The date. The pair of numbers. And between them two dots of pencil with nothing between the dots, where the initials should have been.

'The tenth,' Farhan said. 'He died on the eleventh.'

Meera held the page to the light. The paper between the dots was smooth. No eraser marks. Nothing rubbed out. He had simply left the space empty.

They sat on the floor of the main room because there was nowhere else to sit. Farhan folded his long legs under him like a boy at a wedding lunch. Meera lowered herself onto the concrete more slowly and felt it in her left knee. The notebook lay open between them on its polythene, and the window threw a slab of white light across it.

She put her glasses on.

'It's a bug log,' Farhan said. 'I'm almost sure. Engineers keep these. The first number is a line in the code, the second is how bad it is. Severity. Two is minor, eleven is serious.'

'Line two hundred and fourteen.'

'Or a module. Something like that.' He tapped the margin, not the page. 'And the initials are who reported it, or who he assigned it to. Ledgerless has fourteen categories. Every category has a team. He was keeping track of who was sitting on what.'

'In pencil. Behind a bathroom wall.'

'He didn't trust devices. You saw the shirts. He was particular.'

She turned back a page. 14.08.35 · BT · 188/3. Then forward. 03.10.35 · NKB · 97/40. She held her finger under that one until he looked at it.

'Severity forty,' she said.

He frowned. 'Maybe the scale changed.'

'Or it's a number that went up. Ninety-seven to forty is down, if you're standing in a line. Two hundred and fourteen to nine is a long way down.' She took the calculator out of her kurta pocket and keyed it in without looking at the buttons. 'Two hundred and five places. Somebody went in at two hundred and fourteen and came out at nine. That's not a bug. That's a man moving.'

'Nobody can move in Ledgerless. That's the whole point of it. The machine decides.'

'Then this is a list of times the machine decided strangely.'

Farhan was quiet. Outside, a woman was calling a child in Marathi, the same name four times, rising each time. He picked a flake of dried grout off his trouser knee.

'Fine. Say you're right. Say these are positions. Then it's a software matter, and the person who can read it properly is the tech lead at the consortium office, fourth floor. I can take it there this afternoon. They'll pull the logs against the dates in an hour.'

'And the tech lead reports to whom?'

'To allocation.'

'To Mr Malhotra, who knew my husband's name.'

'He's a friendly man, madam. He knows everybody's name. He sent flowers when my father had his hip done.' Farhan's voice had gone tight. 'You've been in the zone one day. You can't decide the whole building is crooked because a man was polite to you.'

'I haven't decided anything about the building. Dev Rao decided. He worked on the fourth floor, and he cut a hole in his own wall rather than keep this on it.' She said it more sharply than she meant to and saw it land. 'He didn't trust them. I'm inclined to give his opinion some weight. He was the one who knew them.'

'So who do we give it to? Not forensic, not the consortium. You?'

She did not answer that. She was turning pages again, faster now, and this time she was reading the left-hand column instead of the numbers. The pencil initials went past in their small upright capitals. SP. RD. NKB. GHM. BT. A dozen sets of letters, most of them appearing once, twice. She went back to the biggest falls, the ones where the first number was in the hundreds and the second was in single figures, and laid her calculator flat on the page beside each one as she went, working out the drop and pencilling nothing.

Five largest. She looked at the initials beside each of them.

BT. BT. BT. NKB. BT.

She checked the dates. June, August, November, January. Spread out. Patient. Not one person moving one place up a queue, but someone being moved, over and over, into the front of it.

'What?' Farhan said.

'Nothing yet.'

She closed the notebook on its own polythene, folded the plastic over twice and slid the whole thing into the inside pocket of her cotton jacket, where she used to keep seizure receipts. It sat flat against her ribs, 96 pages, Rs 145.

Farhan watched her do it. He opened his mouth and closed it.

'That's evidence,' he said.

'Yes,' Meera said. 'You photographed it.'

'I photographed it.'

The knock came before he could say anything else. Three raps, flat-handed, on a door that had no bell.

Farhan got up first. Meera stayed where she was, one hand resting on her jacket, and watched the door open on a woman of about forty in a crushed blue salwar, a wheeled suitcase behind her with an airline tag still looped through the handle. HYD. She had Dev's narrow face and none of his tidiness. Her dupatta had slipped to one shoulder and she had not bothered to fix it.

'Who are you?' she said. She was looking past Farhan, at Meera on the floor. 'Why are you in his flat?'

Farhan showed his card. The woman read it properly, both sides, and gave it back.

'Pallavi Rao,' she said. 'His sister. They phoned me at nine last night. Nine. He was lying there from the morning and they phoned me at nine.' She came in and stopped, because there was nothing to stop at. 'Where is everything?'

'This is everything,' Meera said.

Pallavi looked at the three grey shirts on their hooks for a long moment. Then she looked at Meera. 'And you? You're not police.'

'Not any more.'

'Then what are you?'

Meera got up, which took two movements and the wall. She could have said consultant. She could have given Kavita Menon's thirty days and the read access. 'I'm someone who doesn't know where your brother was going at ten o'clock on a Wednesday night,' she said. 'I don't know who he was meeting or why he'd climb a gantry eleven metres up. I was hoping you might.'

Pallavi's mouth moved. Some of the stiffness went out of her shoulders, not all of it.

'Nobody knew where Dev was going,' she said. 'That was Dev.'

There was one steel plate and no cups. Pallavi unzipped the front of her suitcase and took out a Milton flask, a stack of paper cups from the train and a packet of Parle-G gone soft in the humidity of a sleeper coach. They stood in the kitchen because the kitchen had a counter to lean on. The tea was sweet and lukewarm and tasted of the flask.

'He hated this place,' Pallavi said. 'No. That's wrong. He liked the work. He said the food was better than our mother's, which was a lie he told to annoy me.' She broke a biscuit in half and did not eat either half. 'He called on Sundays. From a phone box at the depot, can you imagine. Ten minutes exactly. He timed it.'

'When did you last see him?'

'Diwali. He came for four days.' She turned the paper cup in her fingers. 'He bought Rohan a scooter. My son, he's seventeen, he's been after us since he was fourteen. An Activa, the new model. A hundred and four thousand.'

'On a loan?'

'Cash.' Pallavi gave a short laugh, embarrassed by it. 'He took Rohan to the showroom in Kukatpally and paid from a cloth bag like a farmer selling onions. The salesman counted it twice. My husband asked him where an engineer who gets everything free finds one lakh in notes, and Dev laughed. He said, "I'm being paid to learn." That's all. Being paid to learn. Then he took Rohan for ice cream.'

Farhan had stopped chewing. Meera did not look at him.

Being paid to learn. Not paid to do. Someone had handed Dev Rao money, more than once, in bundles that did not match, and he had taken it, spent some on a scooter for a boy, and gone home to write down what he had been shown. Initials. Dates. Two hundred and fourteen to nine. He had been inside, and he had been taking notes, and the last entry had no name because he had not yet learned it.

The notebook sat flat against her ribs. She was conscious of its corners.

'Madam.' Pallavi was looking at her. 'One more thing. Someone phoned me this morning on the train, near Solapur. A man. Very polite. He said he was from Dev's office and he was sorry for my loss.' She put the paper cup down on the counter. 'He asked whether Dev had sent me any papers. A book, he said. Anything handwritten.'

'What did you tell him?'

'I said my brother didn't write letters.' Pallavi looked at the empty room, at the shirts, at the pale square of fresh grout behind the bathroom door. 'Did he?'