The CBI Headquarters
The briefing room on the seventh floor of CBI headquarters was not a glamorous space. It had the functional austerity of all serious government buildings, white walls, tube-lights, a conference table scarred by decades of files, a whiteboard with the ghost of previous cases still faintly visible beneath layers of cleaning. A window looked out toward the green spread of Lodi Garden, which, on a March morning showed Delhi at its most forgiving, cool, bright, the sky a clean blue.
Radha arrived first, as she always did. She set her files at the head of the table, placed her notebook next to it, and reviewed the team list provided by the Joint Director.
The forensic specialist’s name on the list stopped her cold.
Dr. Shyla Krishnamurthy. MD, Forensic Medicine. AIIMS. Currently empanelled with the Ministry of Home Affairs.
She read it again. Then she sat back in her chair and said, very quietly: ‘Aaahh.’
~ ~ ~
Shyla entered the briefing room at five minutes to nine, a grey laptop bag over one shoulder and a printout of the post-mortem report in her hand. She wore her hair up and she was reading the report as she walked into the room, the way she had always read, with her whole body inclined toward the page.
She looked up when she sensed the room was not empty.
There was a woman at the head of the table. Sharply dressed, quick-eyed, with dark braids and an expression that had transitioned rapidly from professional composure to something entirely different.
They stared at each other for a full five seconds.
“Shyla?”
“Radha?”
Then, simultaneously, as though rehearsed, both of them started talking at once, both stopped, both started again, and then Radha was on her feet and Shyla had dropped her post-mortem report on the nearest chair and they were standing in the middle of a CBI briefing room, in front of a whiteboard with case numbers on it, holding each other the way you hold someone you thought you might not see again.
“You’re in Delhi?” Shyla said into her shoulder.
“Are you too?” Radha said into hers.
They separated and looked at each other. Almost 2 decades of separation had made small adjustments, Radha’s face had the particular set of someone accustomed to authority, while Shyla’s had the particular calm of someone accustomed to morgues. But behind those surfaces, both women recognised exactly who they were looking at.
“You became a forensic doctor,” Radha said.
“You became an IPS officer,” Shyla said.
“And now CBI,” Radha said.
“And now forensic pathology for CBI,” Shyla said.
They looked at each other for one more moment. Then Shyla reached into her laptop bag and produced a small, folded piece of paper that had clearly been refolded many times. Radha’s breath caught.
“You kept it,” she said.
“It’s been in my copy of And Then There Were None since the day you left for Chennai,” Shyla said. “I read it sometimes. When things were hard.”
Radha opened the inner back cover her notebook, where a much-folded, much-repaired piece of paper was affixed with a strip of tape.
“Same here,” she said simply.
The rest of the team arrived to find the two senior-most women on the SIT standing at the window looking out at Lodi Garden, talking in rapid, overlapping sentences, laughing at something with the ease of people who had picked up a conversation mid-sentence after a two-decade interruption.
The joint director’s assistant cleared his throat.
“Ma’am, the briefing is about to start”“Yes,” Radha said, turning around with the composed authority of a DIG who had not just been standing at a window having a happy reunion. “Let’s begin.”.