Golden Chai Dawn

The mist doesn't lift in Mussoorie. It just gets bored and moves on to haunt somebody else's valley.

I was on my haunches at the chai stall, third cup of the morning, watching the fog crawl off the deodars like it had somewhere better to be. Bhim was bent over his stove, coaxing the milk to a boil with the kind of patience you only learn after thirty years of doing the same thing at the same hour for the same people. The kettle hissed. A crow complained from the tin roof. Down the hill, the town was still mostly asleep, its stone rooftops poking through the white like the backs of old men in a bath.

"You're early," Bhim said without turning.

"I'm always early."

"You're early *and* you're on your third cup. That's not early. That's a problem."

I didn't answer. He wasn't wrong. I'd been up since four, which is a stupid hour to be awake in a hill town in February, but there's a particular kind of insomnia that only visits when you've spent six months pretending you're fine and your body has finally called your bluff. I'd lain in bed listening to the wind try the window latch. I'd counted the creaks in the floorboards. I'd given up somewhere around the forty-second one and pulled on my shawl and walked down the lane in the dark like a woman with somewhere to be, which I wasn't. I just couldn't stay still.

The chai was good. Bhim's chai is always good. Cardamom, a little ginger, sugar that would scandalize a doctor. I wrapped both hands around the glass and let the heat climb up my wrists.

"You hear about the guesthouse?" Bhim asked.

"I hear about everything."

"Then you heard it's been bought."

I had heard. The whole town had heard. It had been empty for two years, ever since old Mrs. Rawat died and her son in Delhi couldn't be bothered to come up and deal with it. The place had gone gray and mossy and sad, its garden choked with lantana, its shutters banging in the wind like it was trying to get someone's attention. I'd walked past it a hundred times and felt nothing in particular, which was the whole point of walking past it.

"Some fellow from Bombay," Bhim said. "Or Bangalore. One of those places."

"Which one?"

"How should I know? He's got money. He's got plans." Bhim said *plans* the way you'd say *a rash*.

"Plans for what?"

"Renovation. Restoration. All the *-ations*." He poured himself a cup and stood beside me, both of us facing the valley. "He's turning it into a hotel. Boutique, they're calling it."

"Of course they are."

"Twelve rooms. A café. Yoga on the lawn at sunrise." Bhim sipped. "I give it a year."

I laughed, which surprised me. I hadn't laughed in a while. "You're a cynic, Bhim."

"I'm a businessman. There's a difference." He nodded at my glass. "You want a fourth?"

"No."

"You want to talk about why you're really here at five in the morning?"

"No."

He shrugged and went back to his stove, and I loved him for it, for not pushing, for letting me be a stranger in the one place where everyone knew exactly who I was. That's the thing about home. You can come back after years away and everyone remembers the girl you were, and none of them can see the woman you've become, and you spend every conversation walking the line between who they think you are and who you're afraid you actually are.

I finished the chai and left the glass on the counter and walked.

---

The lane down to the library is narrow enough that two people can't pass without one of them turning sideways, and it's cobbled in the old way, uneven stones that catch the light like they're wet even when they're not. I've known that lane my whole life. I know which step is loose. I know where the drain overflows in monsoon. I know the house with the blue door where a woman used to feed stray dogs every evening at six, and I know she died two winters ago and nobody feeds them now.

The sun was starting to come through. Not fully, not yet, but the mist was turning gold at the edges, and the birds had woken up properly, and somewhere below me I could hear the first bus of the day grinding its way up the hairpin bends, full of tourists who'd spend three days taking photos of the same view I'd stopped seeing years ago.

I was thinking about the guesthouse. I didn't want to be. But Bhim had put it in my head, and now I couldn't shake the image of it, the sagging roof, the broken gate, the way the whole place had the look of something that had given up. I'd been inside it once, when I was nine. Mrs. Rawat had given me and my mother tea and biscuits and shown us the room where her husband had kept his books. I remembered the smell of it. Old paper and dust and something sweeter underneath, like dried flowers.

I remembered thinking, *I want to live somewhere like this one day.*

And then I'd grown up and left and come back, and the place had died, and now some man from Bombay or Bangalore was going to bring it back to life with his money and his plans, and I hated him for it. I knew it was irrational. I knew it wasn't his fault. But I hated him anyway, this faceless man with his *-ations*, because he was going to take the one thing in this town that still belonged to my memory and turn it into something else. Something with a website. Something with a café that served avocado toast.

I stopped at the bend where the lane opens up and you can see the whole valley, and I stood there with my hands in my pockets and watched the light spill over the ridges like someone pouring honey.

And that's when I heard it. Footsteps behind me. Quick, confident, the kind of footsteps that belong to someone who doesn't know they're walking on someone else's memories.

"Excuse me," a voice said. "Is this the way to the old Rawat place?"

I turned.

He was tall and rumpled and he had a camera around his neck and a folder under his arm, and he was looking at me like I was a signpost and not a person. City clothes. City shoes. City face.

"Yes," I said. "Keep going. You'll smell the rot."

He blinked. "Sorry?"

"The lantana. It's taken over the garden. It smells like cat piss."

He looked at me for a moment, and something shifted in his expression, a flicker of recognition that made no sense, because I had never seen this man before in my life.

"Thanks," he said slowly. "I think."

And he walked past me, down the lane, toward the guesthouse, and I stood there in the golden light with my heart doing something stupid and my hands still in my pockets, and I thought, *Oh no.*