For three days, Kashi was a model student. He rose at five. He swept the kitchen courtyard. He learned to grate the curry leaves without bruising them. He sat cross-legged on the floor while Ramakrishna explained why the dry chilli must be roasted before the coriander, and why the asafoetida must enter only when the oil had cooled by a degree or two. Ramakrishna watched him learn and was happy.
What Ramakrishna did not know — what no one in that house yet had cause to suspect — was that Kashi had been a student for many years before he had ever entered the kitchen at Ambalpadi. His true teacher was a woman. She had taken him in when he was fifteen, and the curriculum she had set him in the years since had not concerned itself with curry leaves or coriander. He had been trained to enter houses. To study them without seeming to. To take what he had been sent to take, and to leave so quietly that the house would not realise it had been robbed until many days later, when the trail had grown cold and his face was no longer in the district.
She had set him a task. She had described, in unhurried detail, this very house. She had described the inner room. She had described what would be found in the steel almirah within. He had been instructed to acquire it, by whatever means and at whatever pace the house permitted, and to bring it back to her.
So he did what she had taught him. On the first day he learned the rhythm of the kitchen: when Phalguni went to the well, when Ramakrishna stepped outside to receive vegetables, when Krishna left for school. On the second day, he located each room of the house — not by entering them, but by remarking aloud how lovely a particular pillar was, or asking innocent questions about the age of the verandah, and watching, from the corners of his eyes, the doors his hosts opened and the doors they did not. On the third day, while sweeping the kitchen courtyard, he counted the keys at Phalguni's waist. There were four.
By the fourth morning, he knew where the inner room was, that it was locked, and that the small brass key at the centre of her set was the one she touched first whenever she walked past the door.
The opportunity came on the fifth afternoon.
Ramakrishna had been invited to cook for a small gathering at the village temple. He had taken Krishna with him to help carry the brass vessels. Phalguni had said, at the gate as they left, that she would go to the next house to deliver a bottle of pickle to a neighbour who had asked for some, and would return in an hour.
Kashi watched her walk down the lane. He waited. He counted, in his head, to three hundred.
Then he rose from the verandah and walked, with the unhurried steadiness of a man who knew exactly where he was going, into the empty house.
From the inside of his kurta he produced a small ring of thin metal picks — tools that had served him in three previous houses across three different districts of Karnataka. The lock on the inner room door yielded in under two minutes.
He stepped inside.
He knew, with the certainty of a man who had been told and re-told and made to repeat, that what he had come for was in this room.
The steel almirah stood against the far wall. Its lock was older and simpler than the one on the door. He worked patiently. The almirah opened with a small, almost satisfied click.
And there, on the upper shelf, exactly where he had been told to find it, lay a small wooden box wrapped in red cotton.
His hand closed around it.
He sat down upon the floor of the inner room. He unwrapped the red cotton with the careful hands of a man unwrapping a gift. He lifted the lid of the small wooden box.
He stared.
For a long moment, he did not understand what he was looking at.
Crystals. Small, faceted, pale. Strung together upon a length of yellow thread.
Not what he had been told to find. The kind of beads one bought for two hundred rupees at any fair in the temple towns.
He had stolen, perfectly, the wrong thing.
He sat motionless. His mind raced. Had he opened the wrong box? Had he entered the wrong almirah? Had his teacher been wrong about the house?
He did not hear the footstep behind him.
"Who are you?"
He turned, very slowly.
Phalguni stood in the doorway of the inner room. She had not gone to the neighbour's. She had stepped only to the gate, watched him watch her leave, and returned soundlessly through the side entrance her husband had built into the kitchen wall the year Krishna was born — an entrance Kashi, in five days of studying the house, had not thought to count.
She did not raise her voice. She did not need to.
"Kashi. Who are you?"