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unscrewing the lid of the flask.
    ‘How long have you been working here?’ Jak asks.
    ‘Some months now. Why?’
    ‘Nothing,’ Jak says, feigning indifference. ‘Someone I know came here earlier in the year. I was wondering if you remember her. She was your age. Nineteen. She came from Bangalore.’
    Swami shakes his head. ‘There was some problem with that girl. A police case. They sent the clerk and the hotel boy who were here then to Tuticorin. But why? Why do you want to know?’
    Jak looks at the floor, schooling his features to not give anything away. ‘Just curious. I read about the accident.’
    Swami begins cleaning up. ‘I could ask Chinnathayi. She works as the sweeper here. She’ll know, I am sure. She knows everything and everyone.’
    Jak thinks of the elderly woman he has seen sweep the corridor and knows a flaring of something akin to excitement. A feeling that has evaded him for a long time now.

    ‘Chinnathayi hasn’t come in this morning,’ Swami comes back to tell him.
    What do I do now? Jak asks aloud of himself. But Swami has an answer. ‘Sir, why don’t you go to the government hospital? All police cases are taken there.’
     
    The doctor at the district hospital glances at him as he walks into his room. He has the attendant call Jak in despite the long line of patients. ‘Yes, yes, what can I do for you?’ he beams, eyeing Jak with the rapacious hunger of a vulture waiting for road kill.
    When Jak explains who he is, the doctor’s eyes drop. The smile vanishes. ‘Please wait outside. I have a long line of patients, as you can see. Actually, why don’t you come another day? I am very busy now,’ he says, ringing the bell to alert the attendant.
    But Jak refuses to leave. He sits there, peering through a crack in the door each time a patient leaves, hoping to catch the doctor’s eye.
     
    ‘Naked. I remember now. It happened some five-six months ago, right? First week of March, if I am not wrong. How can I forget? How can anyone forget? We were all shocked by the state they brought her in. You know how it is usually… we have to cut the clothing off an accident case but in her case, someone had just flung a cloth over her. It was quite obvious that she didn’t have a stitch of clothing on her when she had the accident. It makes you wonder what she was up to.’ The government doctor turns the pages of the file in front of him, each flick of paper suggesting the contempt he feels for a young woman who is so careless of her modesty and her NRI father who brought her up so.
     
    You stare at the man’s bent head and want to punch his face. That’s my child you are talking about. If it was your daughter, would you be as callous? Would you sit there exhibiting your disapproval and emanating this ‘she deserved all that happened to her’ attitude?

    And it wasn’t an accident. You know that just as I do. They paid you off to turn it into an accident. Is that what paid for the expensive watch you wear, the mobile in your pocket, the car parked outside? You bastard!
    You clench your fist, restraining your impulse to haul the man up by his shirt and slam him against the wall.
    ‘Please, sir,’ Jak grinds the sir out with as much servitude as he can muster, hoping to evoke a slightly less guarded response. ‘We, her mother and I, still can’t understand how it happened.’
    The doctor looks up and beyond him. ‘Is her mother here?’
    ‘No.’ Jak wipes his forehead with the back of his palm. ‘No, she is not here.’
    ‘You see, that’s the problem with you people. You NRIs. You don’t understand that grown-up girls need to be with their mothers. You think this is America. You send your daughter back filled with all the permissive ideas you teach them in the West and then when something goes wrong, you blame India for it. She was here with a man, I hear. By herself.’
    ‘She wasn’t here with a man. She was part of a group. They were volunteers in an NGO programme,’