Kashi sat on the verandah where she had ordered him to sit. He could not look at her.
Phalguni stood. She did not sit down opposite him. A woman who is about to call the police does not sit.
She spoke quietly.
"Those crystals are not what you came for. What you came for is somewhere else, in this house. Where, I shall not tell you. You do not need to know."
She let that settle.
"From the second day, Kashi, I had begun to notice you. You were not watching the food. You were watching the doors. You were watching the windows. You were watching the keys at my waist. I did not say anything. Young men in new places look at everything; that is not a crime."
"But on the fourth day, I had a headache. My husband and Krishna had gone to the market. I lay down in the small room behind the kitchen and drew the curtain. You did not know I was in the house. And from behind that curtain, I watched you walk into this room. You did not steal anything that day. You only measured. You felt the weight of the chest. You ran your hand along the inside of the wooden box on the upper shelf. That was not how a curious boy moves. That was how a man moves when he is coming back."
"That was when I knew. You had come for something — and there is only one thing in this house worth coming for."
She paused.
"A necklace. My mother-in-law's. Twelve diamonds. She gave it to my husband on her deathbed twelve years ago. Only three people in this world know it exists. My husband. Myself. And his cousin in Sirsi — Ganapathi Bhatta."
"My husband would not send a stranger to rob his own house. I have told no one in twelve years. Which left only Ganapathi. And you came here saying that Ganapathi had sent you."
"That was enough, Kashi. That was all I needed."
"That evening — when you went with my husband to bring gulla brinjals from the next village for the next day's cooking — I went into the inner room. I moved the necklace to a safe place. I put those crystals in the box instead. And I waited for you to decide."
"You decided this afternoon."
Kashi had not lifted his head.
"You came to a house, Kashi, where the only person who could have suspected you was the one person you had no reason to suspect of suspecting anything. That, I think, is the only mistake your teacher did not prepare you for."
Kashi began to speak — his voice cracked, apologetic, already shaping itself into the rehearsed plea of a younger brother who was about to claim he had been forced into all of this.
Phalguni held up one hand. He stopped.
"Save your story, Kashi. Save it for the police. They will hear it before I do."
She walked to the verandah pillar where the house telephone was mounted on a small wooden shelf. She lifted the receiver. She dialled the number of the village headman, who would summon the constable from the Udupi outpost faster than she could call them herself.
Kashi looked up at her. "Amma — please — I will tell you everything. I will give you my teacher's name. I will tell you where she is. I will help you —"
"You will tell the constable everything you have just begun to tell me," Phalguni said. "And he will believe you, because there is no other way for you to make your situation lighter now. I have given you, Kashi, three days of a roof. I have given you my husband's kitchen. I have not given you, and shall not now give you, my trust. A man who has trained from fifteen to enter houses does not unlearn that training in an afternoon on a verandah. Once a thief, in the time I have left to spend on this earth, will be once a thief."
She turned back to the telephone.
The headman answered on the second ring. Phalguni told him, in a voice that did not rise above a normal speaking tone, that there was a young man on her verandah who had been caught attempting to rob her husband's house, and that she required a constable at her gate within the hour. The headman, who had known her for seventeen years, did not ask a single follow-up question.
She replaced the receiver. She turned to Kashi.
"You will sit on that verandah. You will not rise. You will not run. The cashew lanes are long, and the village constable is faster than your shoes. Whatever you wish to keep of your future, you will keep by waiting where you are sitting."
Kashi sat.
Phalguni did not sit. She stood at the edge of the verandah, beside the tulsi katte, and she watched the lane.