The old tea shop near the viewpoint was gone. In its place stood a small souvenir stall selling postcards and plastic raincoats, run by a young man who had never heard the name Shivappa and said so without much interest, more concerned with a tourist bargaining over a keychain.
Rohan walked the road he remembered, though it had been widened and resurfaced, and found, after some searching, the lane that led toward what he believed was Shivappa's house. An elderly woman was hanging clothes outside a house two doors down. He asked her.
She stopped what she was doing. She looked at him for a long moment — longer, he thought, than the question required.
"You are asking about Shivappa?"
"Yes. He used to live just there, I think. The house with the tiled roof."
"That is his house," she said. Then she picked up her basket and said nothing further, and went inside, and did not come back out, even when he waited a full five minutes at her gate.
He found this strange, but he told himself it was nothing. Old people in small towns were sometimes like that — private, careful with strangers.
He walked on to the house with the tiled roof. It was smaller than he remembered, as childhood houses always are. The gate was shut with a length of wire, not locked, only wound closed the way a house is closed when no one expects a visitor. The small courtyard had gone to weeds. A cracked plastic chair sat on the veranda, rain-stained, clearly unused for some time.
No one answered when he called out.
He walked to the small provisions shop at the crossroads, the one that had been there in his childhood, run then by a man whose name he had never learned. It was still there, though the shopkeeper now was younger — a son, perhaps, or a nephew.
"I am looking for a man named Shivappa. He used to work near the old viewpoint. Do you know him?"
The shopkeeper's hands, which had been counting out change, went still for a moment.
"Shivappa anna," he said slowly. "Yes. Everyone here knew him."
"Do you know where I might find him? I used to know him, many years ago. I was a boy then."
The shopkeeper looked at him carefully — the same careful, longer-than-necessary look the old woman had given him.
"You should ask his daughter," he said finally. "Ganga. She lives near the school now. It is better she tells you."
"Is something wrong?"
The shopkeeper did not answer that question directly.
"Go and see Ganga," he said again, gently, the way one repeats an instruction to someone who has not yet understood that it is also a warning.
Rohan walked toward the school with a small, cold unease settling into his chest — the particular unease of a person who has begun to suspect the shape of an answer before anyone has said it aloud.