Different Roads, Same Dream
Six months after the Mehta case closed, on a Saturday afternoon in October when Delhi had finally given up its summer and turned golden and cool, Radha called Shyla.
“What are you doing today?”
“Nothing much. Planning to just do some reading. Why?”
“Come with me somewhere.”
They drove in Radha’s car to Old Delhi, past the Red Fort and through the narrow lanes of Chandni Chowk, which smelled exactly the way Old Delhi has always smelled, of frying jalebis and incense and centuries, and then across the city, south, through the wide avenues and green separators of Lutyens’ Delhi, until they reached the residential neighbourhood of Saket where Shyla lived, and then further, to a school.
A government girls’ secondary school in South Delhi. Not elegant, not famous, functional, a little worn, with chipped paint and a small library that occupied a converted storeroom. But inside the library, which was run by a young, energetic teacher named Ms. Kavita, there was a reading club that met on Saturday afternoons.
Ms. Kavita had written to Radha asking if a CBI officer might come and talk to her students about investigation and careers in law enforcement. Radha had said yes, and had brought a friend.
The girls who came to the reading club were twelve to fifteen years old. Some were still in school uniforms, some had changed. They sat in plastic chairs arranged in a rough circle, looking at the two women with the careful assessment of teenagers, deciding quickly whether this would be interesting or a waste of a Saturday.
Radha introduced them both simply. CBI officer. Forensic pathologist. Real cases. Real work.
The interest shifted. Sharpened.
“Can women really work in the CBI?” one girl asked. She was small, with thick-framed spectacles that slid down her nose when she looked up.
Shyla felt something move in her chest. She pushed her own glasses up.
“I am standing in front of you,” she said. “What do you think?”
The girl considered this. ‘I think yes.’
“You are correct,” Shyla said.
“What should we study?” asked another girl, older, who had a notebook in her lap and a pen she was rotating between her fingers with nervous energy. “to become good at thinking like you?”
Radha and Shyla looked at each other. The look contained twenty-five years of Saturday afternoons at the Jayanagar Public Library, of stories from Radha’s father and arguments about Agatha Christie and Feluda, of notebooks and folded pieces of paper carried across decades.
“Sherlock Holmes,” Radha said. “Start with Holmes. He teaches you to observe.”
“Then Agatha Christie,” Shyla said. “She teaches you that the answer is always in the thing you dismissed as obvious.”
“Then Feluda,” Radha said. “Because the world you are investigating is this world. Read someone who investigates it as it is.”
“And keep notes,” Shyla added. “About what you want. About who you want to become. Write it down. Date it. Sign it. And read it every day. Never lose your goal.” She paused.
The girl with the notebook was writing this down. The girl with the spectacles was watching with the sharp, assessing eyes of someone who has just been told something she already suspected was true.
Outside the library window, October Delhi was going about its business, autorickshaws honking in their cheerful incessant way, a vendor calling out his prices, two children arguing with the passionate brevity of children who will have forgotten the argument by evening. The ordinary sounds of an Indian afternoon.
Inside this tiny room of children, something was beginning. But both women had once been girls in plastic chairs with notebooks, in a city far from this one, listening to a man describe a building in New Delhi where the most important investigations in the country were conducted.
They had written it down. They had signed their names. And then, slowly, separately, by roads that had diverged and then converged again as roads do when they share a destination, they had found their way there.
The Dream Pact, in the end, had been simpler than a contract and more durable than a promise. It was just two girls telling each other the truth about what they wanted, and then refusing, against considerable resistance and across considerable distance, to stop wanting it.
That is the kind of dream that tends to come true.