Meghana had come home to H.D. Kote for the term break expecting three months of nothing in particular — long mornings on the veranda, the smell of wet earth after the first showers, the low murmur of the Kabini backwaters beyond the tamarind trees at the edge of her family's land.
What she had not expected was the house next door to be sold.
It had stood empty for two years, that small house with its blue window frames and its narrow strip of garden running down toward the water — ever since the Achar family had moved to Mysuru for their son's college. Meghana had grown up throwing stones over its low compound wall and had never once imagined anyone would want it badly enough to buy it in a hurry.
But someone had.
A woman arrived on a Tuesday morning in a hired tempo loaded with far fewer belongings than a house that size ought to require — two steel trunks, a few sacks, a single cot, and a wooden chest that the two labourers carried between them with unusual care, as though it weighed more than its size suggested, or mattered more than its weight explained.
Meghana watched from her own gate. The woman was perhaps fifty, tall, dressed simply, her hair streaked with grey and pulled back without ornament. She did not look at the house the way a person looks at a new home. She looked at it the way a person looks at a room they have been told they must sit in, whether they wish to or not.
"Who is that?" Meghana asked her mother that evening.
"Vasanthi," her mother said, not looking up from the rice she was cleaning. "Vasanthi . She used to live near the old ferry point, on the other side of the village. I don't know why she has come here."
"She sold that house? It was much bigger than this one."
Her mother was quiet for a moment.
"People sell big houses for small reasons and small houses for big ones," she said, which was not really an answer, and which Meghana noticed, even then, her mother had not quite wanted to give.