Advaita has an unusual ability: when she looks into someone’s eyes, flashes of hidden truth sometimes appear. She can glimpse grief behind a smile or fear beneath anger, but she cannot always tell what the images mean. When a stranger’s trouble awakens memories of her father’s death, Advaita must learn that compassion means helping without claiming to know, control, or carry another person’s life.
Act I: Ordinary Things, Unordinary Eyes
Part 1
Advaita burnt the first roti because she was looking at the neighbour's balcony.
Mrs. Bedi had been standing there for several minutes, holding a white bedsheet against the railing and speaking to someone on the phone. From the kitchen, Advaita could see only half her face and the movement of her free hand. Mrs. Bedi laughed twice during the conversation. The second laugh was louder than the first.
Advaita turned the roti over, scraped the black patch with a knife, and put it on a plate.
Her phone rang near the sink. It was her mother asking whether she had bought the turmeric her aunt wanted.
“I bought it yesterday,” Advaita said.
“Which turmeric?”
“Mummy, how many kinds of turmeric do you think I buy?”
“The good one. The one in the yellow packet.”
“They are all in yellow packets.”
Her mother said something to someone in the background, then returned to the phone. Advaita opened the cupboard and looked at three yellow packets standing beside the lentils.
“I'll send you a photograph,” she said.
“Don't send a photograph. Just tell me the name.”
Advaita read the label aloud.
“That one is fine,” her mother said. “Your aunt says the other one has too much colour.”
“Then tell Auntie to buy her own turmeric.”
Her mother laughed. Advaita laughed too, although she was already reaching for the second roti.
She was twenty-six and had lived alone for eleven months. The apartment had one bedroom, a kitchen large enough for one person to cook in without turning sideways, and a balcony where the laundry dried slowly during the monsoon. The landlord had painted the walls a pale cream before she moved in. Near the bedroom door, a strip of paint had begun to peel, and the switchboard beside it was loose.
Advaita had told the landlord about the switchboard three times.
He had promised to send an electrician twice.
She had stopped asking.
Her hair was tied in a low knot with a black clip. Several strands had escaped near her ears, and the humidity had curled the short hairs at the back of her neck. She wore a faded blue kurta with a small ink stain near the right cuff. Her silver earrings were different from each other because she had lost one of the pair during a bus ride and replaced it with a cheap imitation from a roadside stall.
She had a round face, a broad forehead, and thick eyebrows that rarely behaved as she wanted them to. Her right eyebrow sat a little higher than the left, making her look doubtful even when she was paying attention. Her eyes were dark brown, with lighter flecks near the pupils that appeared in direct sunlight. People sometimes told her she had observant eyes.
She never knew what to say to that.
She had once read about Noor, a woman who kept her life running so efficiently that nobody thought to ask what it cost her. Advaita had remembered the story because Noor’s colleagues saw someone dependable, while the harder things remained out of sight. The story was called Noor and high-functioning emptiness, and Advaita had sent it to a friend with no explanation.
The truth was that she often missed things. She forgot birthdays, misplaced keys, and once spent an entire afternoon searching for a notebook that she had put in the refrigerator while carrying groceries. She could walk past a familiar person on the street without noticing them if she was thinking about something else.
It was only when she looked directly at someone that the other thing sometimes happened.
She had not told her mother about it.
She had tried once, when she was nineteen, and her mother had asked whether she was sleeping properly. Advaita had said yes. Her mother had advised her to reduce the amount of time she spent reading at night.
They had never discussed it again.
Mrs. Bedi came inside from the balcony, carrying the bedsheet. Her phone was still against her ear. She said goodbye to whoever was on the other end, then looked across at Advaita through the open kitchen window.
“Are you making parathas?”
“Rotis.”
“They look like parathas from here.”
“Then your eyesight is getting worse.”
Mrs. Bedi laughed again. She was sixty-two, wore her grey hair in a short bob, and had a habit of asking questions while already preparing to leave. She had lived in the building for fifteen years and knew which tenants paid their rent late, which ones had relatives visiting, and which ones argued with delivery drivers.
“My son is coming on Sunday,” she said.
Advaita nodded. “The one in Chandigarh?”
“Yes. He has got a promotion.”
“That is good.”
“Very good. He will be managing the new branch now.”
Mrs. Bedi came closer to the window. Advaita put the second roti on the plate and reached for the rolling pin.
“He says he will bring the children next month,” Mrs. Bedi continued. “They have exams now. Everything is exams. Even the little one has exams.”
“How old is she?”
“Seven. Seven years old and already she has more books than I had in my entire school.”
Advaita smiled. “What will you cook for them?”
“Everything. Rajma, paneer, puri. My son says he has stopped eating fried food, but he eats it when he comes home. Men have rules until they see their mother's cooking.”
Mrs. Bedi said this with satisfaction. She looked towards the stove, where the roti had begun to puff.
Then Advaita looked at her eyes.
The kitchen seemed to drop away for a second.
She saw a narrow hospital corridor with green chairs against the wall. A plastic bottle lay on its side near a pair of sandals. Mrs. Bedi sat at the far end of the corridor with both hands pressed between her knees. Her mouth was open, but no sound came out. A man stood in front of her, holding a folded piece of paper.
The image vanished.
Advaita blinked. The roti had puffed unevenly, and a brown bubble had formed on one side.
“Are you listening?” Mrs. Bedi asked.
“Yes.”
“What did I say?”
Advaita lowered the flame. “You said your son is coming on Sunday.”
“Before that.”
“I don't know.”
Mrs. Bedi shook her head. “I was saying that I have to get the curtains washed before they come. The children pull everything down.”
“Then don't wash them. Nobody is going to inspect your curtains.”
“You don't have children. You don't know.”
“That is true.”
Mrs. Bedi stood quietly for a moment, watching Advaita put another roti on the plate.
“Anyway,” she said, “I should go. The laundry man is coming.”
She turned towards the door.
Advaita wanted to ask her about the hospital corridor. She wanted to ask whether someone had been ill, whether the man with the folded paper had been her son, whether the sandals belonged to her or to someone else.
Instead, she said, “Your bedsheet is still wet at the bottom.”
Mrs. Bedi looked down.
“Oh, that side never dries properly.”
She went back to the balcony.
Advaita finished making breakfast and ate standing beside the kitchen counter. She had two rotis, a bowl of leftover potato curry, and the last of the curd. She washed her plate afterwards, wiped the counter where the flour had scattered, and carried her tea to the living room.
She had seen something she could not explain, and she had let the only person who might have explained it leave without a question.
She thought of Karan, from the story about loyalty without reward, and how loyalty could become a habit that continued long after anyone had asked for it. She closed the thought there. Mrs. Bedi had not asked her for anything, and Advaita had no proof that the image meant what she feared it might mean.
Across the courtyard, Mrs. Bedi was pinning the bedsheet to the railing again.
Her phone rang once more.
She answered it.
Advaita sat down on the sofa.
The hospital corridor stayed with her longer than it usually did. She could still see the green chairs, the fallen bottle, the folded paper in the man's hand. She did not know whether the scene had already happened or whether it belonged to something that might happen later. Sometimes the flashes were memories. Sometimes they were fears. Sometimes they seemed to have no connection to the person standing in front of her.
Once, she had looked into a schoolteacher's eyes and seen a little boy hiding a broken watch inside a flour tin. She had mentioned it to the teacher, who had gone pale and asked how she knew about the watch. It turned out that the teacher's son had broken his father's watch and hidden it in the kitchen. Advaita had never met the boy.
Another time, she had seen a woman standing outside a railway station with a suitcase and a red scarf. She had asked the woman whether she was going somewhere. The woman had slapped her.
Advaita had not told anyone about either incident.
She finished her tea and put the cup on the table.
By eleven, she had to go to the market for vegetables, detergent, and a new bulb for the bathroom. She changed into a green kurta, tied her hair again, and checked the money in her purse. Before leaving, she stood near the front door and listened to the sound of a pressure cooker from the apartment below.
Then she went out.
At the vegetable stall, she bought tomatoes, potatoes, green chillies, and a small bunch of coriander. The vendor was a thin man with a moustache that had begun to turn grey. He put the coriander in the same bag as the tomatoes, although Advaita asked him twice to keep it separate.
“You people ask for everything separately,” he said.
“Because you put everything together.”
“Then take another bag.”
“You have already charged me for one.”
He looked at her, then at the queue behind her.
“Fine, madam. Here.”
He handed her another bag.
Advaita took it and moved aside.
The man behind her was holding a packet of biscuits and a bottle of cooking oil. He looked to be in his early thirties, with a narrow face and a small cut above his left eyebrow. He wore a pale shirt that had darkened with sweat at the collar.
He smiled at the vendor.
“Put it on my account. I'll pay tomorrow.”
The vendor shook his head. “You said that yesterday.”
“I know. Tomorrow, definitely.”
“You said that on Monday too.”
The man laughed, but his eyes changed.
For an instant, Advaita saw a small room with a mattress on the floor. A woman sat beside a child who was sleeping with one arm over his head. There was an empty medicine bottle near the wall. The man stood outside the room, counting notes in his hand. He removed one note, then another, and placed them back in his pocket.
Advaita looked away.
The man turned towards her.
“Do you have a problem?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“You were looking at me.”
“I was looking at the queue.”
He glanced behind him. Three people were waiting.
“Then look at the queue.”
Advaita picked up her vegetables and walked towards the pharmacy at the corner.
On the way, she remembered a story about Tara, who had stayed in a relationship long after physical closeness had disappeared. Advaita had read it when a friend sent her the piece on Tara and intimacy without sex. She had thought about it then because she had known people who could describe the details of a relationship perfectly while avoiding the one question that mattered to them.
She bought detergent at the next shop and a bulb from a hardware store. By the time she returned home, the green plastic bag had left a red mark across the fingers of her right hand.
She put the vegetables in the kitchen, took off her sandals, and washed her hands.
Her phone showed two missed calls from her mother.
She called back.
“Did you buy the turmeric?” her mother asked.
“Yes.”
“Which one?”
Advaita closed her eyes for a moment.
“The one you approved.”
“Good. Your aunt is asking whether you can come on Saturday. She wants help with the cupboard.”
“What is wrong with the cupboard?”
“The door is not closing.”
“Call a carpenter.”
“She wants you to look at it first.”
“Why?”
“Because you know these things.”
Advaita glanced at the loose switchboard beside the bedroom door.
“I don't know these things.”
“You always say that, but then you do them.”
Her mother began talking about her aunt's kitchen, the new neighbour in the building, and the price of onions. Advaita listened while putting the detergent under the sink.
After a few minutes, her mother asked whether she was eating properly.
“Yes.”
“What did you eat?”
“Roti and potato curry.”
“Only that?”
“And curd.”
“You should make something green. You never eat enough vegetables.”
“I bought coriander.”
“Coriander is not a vegetable.”
Advaita laughed despite herself.
When the call ended, she stood in the kitchen with the phone in her hand. The afternoon light had moved across the floor. Somewhere outside, a child was practising the same line of a song again and again, getting the words wrong each time.
Advaita put the washed coriander into a steel container and left it beside the sink. The green kurta she had changed into before going to the market was still on her, with its hem brushing the tops of her sandals. A few strands of hair had escaped the black clip at the back of her head. She pushed the container farther from the edge of the counter and took the small packet of mathris she had bought on her way home from the shop near the pharmacy.Then she locked her apartment and walked down the stairs.
We had spoken on the phone two evenings earlier. I had mentioned that I was making tea on Sunday, and she had said she might come over if she finished her errands. She had a habit of making arrangements that sounded uncertain until she appeared at the door.
When she reached my home, I was in the kitchen cutting onions for lunch.
She knocked twice.
I opened the door to find Advaita standing outside with a small paper packet in her hand, with the knife still in my hand, which made her look at it before she looked at me. She wore a green kurta, dark trousers, and flat sandals. A few strands of hair had come loose near her ears, and she kept moving the packet from one hand to the other while I looked for the latch.
She stepped inside and looked towards the living room.
“Are you preparing lunch or settling a dispute?” she asked.
“Lunch.”
“Good. I thought I should check.”
She held out the paper packet.
“These are for you. The shopkeeper says they are fresh, which is what shopkeepers say when they want you to buy something.”
“What are they?”
“Mathris. From the shop near the pharmacy. My mother says the man there makes them properly, although she also says his prices are ridiculous.”
I took the packet. “Should I ask him to reduce the prices?”
“You can try. He will probably charge you extra for asking.”
“Have you eaten?”
“Yes,” she said. Then she paused. “Actually, I had breakfast. I haven't eaten since.”
“Good. I haven't, actually. I had breakfast, but that was a long time ago, and then I went to the market, and there was this man selling coriander who behaved as if I had asked him to donate a kidney.”
I closed the door behind her.
“He charged you too much?”
“He put the coriander in the same bag as the tomatoes. I asked him to separate them, and he said people ask for everything separately these days. As if I had invented vegetables.”
She laughed and sat down on the sofa.
I went to the kitchen to make tea. She called after me to ask whether I had sugar, then followed me to say that she had stopped putting sugar in her own tea because her aunt had developed diabetes and everyone in the family had begun behaving as if sugar were a criminal offence.
“There is nothing wrong with sugar,” she said, leaning against the kitchen doorway. “There is something wrong with eating six sweets after dinner and then blaming the sugar.”
I returned to the kitchen, washed my hands, and put the onions aside.
“Tea first,” I said. “Then we'll eat something.”
“That sounds sensible.”
She sat at the table while I made tea. She told me about her aunt's cupboard, which apparently had a door that refused to close. Her aunt wanted Advaita to inspect it before calling a carpenter, though neither of them knew what Advaita was expected to do beyond opening and shutting the door.
“She thinks I can repair anything,” Advaita said. “Last month she gave me a pressure cooker that had been making a noise for three years. I asked her why she hadn't taken it to a repair shop. She said she wanted me to look at it first.”
“Did you?”
“I looked at it. It was a pressure cooker.”
I brought the tea to the table with a plate of biscuits. She took one and bit into it while telling me that her mother had recently become concerned about sugar because an aunt had developed diabetes. The family had responded by discussing everyone's diet, including that of people who had not been asked for an opinion.
We spoke about the price of groceries and a neighbour who had bought a new washing machine despite claiming that she could not afford to repair the old one. Advaita had strong opinions about household appliances and very little patience for people who complained about the cost of things after buying them.
Then she stopped in the middle of a sentence.
She looked towards the window, where a delivery man was trying to fit a large cardboard box through the entrance of the building opposite.
“Something happened today,” she said.
I waited while she watched the man put the box down and wipe his forehead with his sleeve.
“At the vegetable stall,” she continued. “There was a man buying biscuits and cooking oil. He asked the vendor to put the things on his account. The vendor reminded him that he had already done that twice.”
“Did you know him?”
“No. I'd never seen him before.”
She took another biscuit, broke off a piece, and ate it.
“He laughed when the vendor reminded him about the money. But when I looked at his eyes, I saw a room. There was a child sleeping on a mattress, a woman sitting beside him, and an empty medicine bottle near the wall. The man was standing outside the room, counting notes.”
She rubbed the scar across her index finger.
“I saw him put some of the money back in his pocket. I don't know why that detail stayed with me.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“He asked whether I had a problem because I was looking at him. I told him I was looking at the queue, which was ridiculous because I was looking directly at his face.”
She gave a short laugh, but her fingers continued rubbing the scar.
“I keep thinking about that child. I don't know whether there was a child. I saw one, but I don't know what it means.”
She looked at me.
“Have you ever looked at someone and seen something they haven't told you?”
I put my cup down.
“No,” I said. “Not like that.”
She nodded, as if that was the answer she had expected.
For a while, she said nothing. Then she asked whether I had any more biscuits.
I pushed the plate towards her.
She took another one.
“There's something else,” she said. “It happened with Mrs. Bedi this morning.”
And she began telling me about the hospital corridor.
I took out the leftover vegetable pulao from the refrigerator, warmed it in a pan, and brought two plates to the table. Advaita ate while telling me about her aunt's cupboard, which apparently had a door that would not close and a carpenter who had quoted an amount she considered offensive.
She had a way of speaking that made small inconveniences sound like ongoing legal disputes. She would begin a sentence, interrupt herself to correct a detail, and then return to the original complaint as if the interruption had strengthened her case.
By the time we finished eating, she had told me about her mother's opinion of turmeric, and a neighbour who had bought a new washing machine despite claiming that she could not afford to repair the old one.
She was stirring the last of the rice on her plate when she stopped speaking.
I carried the plates to the kitchen.
“Can I ask you something?” she said.
“You can.”
“Do you ever look at someone and get the feeling that they are saying something completely different from what they mean?”
I returned with the tea.
“Sometimes.”
“No, I mean really different. Not when someone says they are fine and you can tell they are upset. Everyone can do that. I mean when you look at their eyes and see something that they haven't told you, something you couldn't possibly know.”
She held the cup with both hands and looked down at it.
“It happened again today,” she said. “At the vegetable stall.”
I sat opposite her.
She stopped to take a sip of tea.
“I saw the man counting money. He put some notes back in his pocket. I don't know why I saw that. I don't know if it happened yesterday or last month or if it was something else entirely. But it was there, and I was standing in front of him with a bag of tomatoes.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“No. He asked me if I had a problem because I was looking at him.”
She gave a short laugh.
“I told him I was looking at the queue. Which was a stupid thing to say, because there were only three people behind him, and I was looking directly at his face.”
She put the cup down and rubbed the scar across her index finger.
“I keep thinking about the child. I don't even know if there was a child. I saw one. That isn't the same thing, is it?”
I did not answer.
Advaita looked towards the kitchen, where the packet of mathris lay beside the bread bin.
“Do you have any more tea?” she asked.
“There is some left.”
“Good. I could use another cup.”
I went to the kitchen to heat the water.
Act I: Ordinary Things, Unordinary Eyes (continued)
She had told me the previous evening that she would visit after her errands. We had not fixed a time. She knew where I lived, and I knew she would come if nothing else detained her.
When I opened the door, she held up the packet.
“I bought these near the pharmacy. They were cheaper than the ones at the bakery, and the shopkeeper said they were fresh. He says that about everything, though.”
“Then we’ll have to find out.”
“They smell fine. I checked.”
She stepped inside and put the packet on the dining table. Her mismatched silver earrings caught the light when she turned towards the kitchen. She had a narrow shoulder bag with her, the cloth worn soft at the corners, and she placed it on the chair rather than hanging it from the back.
“Have you eaten?” I asked.
“Yes. At home. Two rotis, potato curry, curd. I wasn't hungry when I got back, but I knew I would be later, so I ate.”
“Tea?”
“Yes, but not too strong. I had some at home.”
I went to the kitchen. She followed, stopped at the doorway, and asked if I had bought coriander. I told her there was some in the refrigerator.
“Keep it separate from the tomatoes,” she said. “The vendor put mine in the same bag. I told him not to, and he looked at me as if I had asked him to separate the leaves from the plant.”
I took two cups down from the shelf.
“What happened?”
“At the stall?”
I nodded.
“Nothing much. A man behind me wanted biscuits and cooking oil on account. The vendor said he'd already done that twice. The man said he would pay him on Friday.”
“And?”
“And the vendor said Friday had become a very long day.”
She laughed, then stopped to correct herself.
“No, he didn't say that exactly. He said he couldn't keep giving things away. Something like that.”
I poured the hot water into the teapot.
“Did the man pay?”
“No. He left without the oil.”
“Did he take the biscuits?”
“Just the packet he had picked up. The vendor took it back before he reached the road.”
She looked towards the window above the sink. From there, the neighbouring building's balconies were visible, including one where a bedsheet hung over the railing.
“I saw something when I looked at him,” she said.
I waited.
“It was brief. A child on a mattress. A woman sitting beside the child. There was an empty medicine bottle on the floor. The man was counting notes, and he put some back into his pocket.”
“Was the child ill?”
“I don't know.”
“Was it his child?”
“I don't know that either.”
She said this without irritation, but her fingers had begun moving against the seam of her bag. She noticed and pressed the bag flat with her palm.
“I don't know what I saw before or after that bit. Sometimes it's only one thing. Sometimes I get a place and no people. Sometimes I get a face and something that might have happened years ago. I can't ask someone to explain a picture they haven't shown me.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“No. He noticed me looking.”
“What did you say?”
“That I was watching the queue.”
“Were you?”
“Not really.”
She gave a small, uncomfortable laugh.
“I could have said something else. I could have asked if everything was all right, but what would that have done? He was already standing there being told he couldn't buy food without paying for it. I didn't want to make him explain himself to a stranger.”
I brought the cups to the table. She opened the packet of mathris and pushed it towards me.
“Try one before you decide whether they're good.”
I took one. It was crisp and a little too salty, but not stale.
“They're fine,” I said.
“Fine is what people say when they don't want to recommend something.”
“They're good.”
“That's better.”
She took one herself and bit into it, scattering a few crumbs onto the plate. Then she asked whether I had been working all morning. I told her I had, mostly on a piece I could not seem to finish.
“What is it about?”
“A woman who keeps making excuses for someone.”
“Does she know she's doing it?”
“I haven't decided.”
Advaita looked at me over the rim of her cup.
“That's a useful position to be in.”
“What do you mean?”
“You can keep her doing it until you decide.”
The conversation moved to a neighbour's renovation, the cost of vegetables, and a message her mother had sent about an aunt who wanted help sorting through an old cupboard. Advaita had said she would go over on Sunday, though she was already trying to think of a reason not to. Her mother had asked her to look for a set of brass bowls that had belonged to her grandmother. Advaita remembered the bowls but not where they had been kept.
“You'll find them,” I said.
“Maybe. Or someone will have given them away and forgotten.”
She took another bite, then wiped the crumbs from her fingers with the edge of a tissue.
For a while, we spoke about ordinary things. She told me the bulb she had bought was the wrong fitting, and that she would have to return it. I asked why she had not checked the old one before leaving home.
“I did check it.”
“And?”
“I took the wrong one with me.”
I laughed. She did too, her mouth opening wide enough to show the crooked lower tooth she sometimes tried to hide. Then she glanced towards the kitchen, as if she had remembered something there.
“There was another thing,” she said. “Not about the man at the stall. About Mrs Bedi this morning.”
“She was telling me about her son's promotion. She kept talking about the new office and the school her grandchildren might go to if they moved. I looked at her while she was speaking, and I saw a hospital corridor.”
“Is she ill?”
“That's what I don't know.”
She set the half-eaten mathri on her plate.
“There were green chairs against the wall. A plastic bottle on the floor. Her sandals were beside her feet, and she was sitting with her hands between her knees. There was a man holding a folded piece of paper. That was all.”
“Did you ask her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because she was talking about her grandchildren.”
She said it as though that were the most practical answer available. Then she picked up the mathri again, although she did not take another bite.
“I could have asked if she'd been to the hospital recently. But if she had, what would she think? And if she hadn't, what would I tell her? That I saw her sitting in a corridor that might not exist?”
“Perhaps it was something from the past.”
“Perhaps.”
She looked at me directly. In the light from the window, her eyes appeared almost black, with small amber flecks close to the pupils.
“I keep telling myself that it might be old. Or that I saw something from a television programme and attached it to her. There are explanations for some of it. I don't always know which explanation belongs to which thing.”
She stopped there. I did not ask what she thought the corridor meant, and she did not offer a guess. The tea had cooled enough to drink, and she took a sip before asking if I had any more of the mathris.
I pushed the packet towards her.
She took one, folded the top of the packet loosely, and left it on the table between us.
Advaita stayed for another hour. We spoke about her mother's habit of buying things in duplicate, and a woman in her building who had started feeding a stray dog despite being frightened of dogs. The conversation wandered as conversations do when neither person wants to announce that something important has been said.
When she finally stood to leave, she asked if she could take the remaining mathris home.
“Of course.”
“My mother likes these. She'll say they're too salty, then finish the packet.”
She folded the top carefully and slipped it into her bag. At the door, she stopped.
“Can I ask you something?”
“You can.”
“If you knew something painful about someone, something they hadn't told you, would you tell them?”
“I don't know. It would depend on what I knew.”
“What if you were sure?”
“Then I'd have to think about whether telling them would help.”
She considered that, looking down at the packet in her bag.
“That's the problem,” she said. “Sometimes I think knowing something means I have to do something about it.”
“Does it?”
“I don't know.”
She left without waiting for an answer.
I thought about the hospital corridor she had described. Green chairs, a plastic bottle, sandals beside a woman's feet. It was an oddly ordinary collection of details. There was nothing supernatural about a hospital corridor. Nothing unusual about an older woman sitting in one, or a man holding a folded paper.
What troubled me was not the image. It was the possibility that Advaita had begun to treat every image as an obligation.
She had spoken about the man at the vegetable stall as if she had been handed a problem that belonged to him. She had spoken about Mrs Bedi as if silence might make her responsible for whatever happened next. Yet neither person had asked her to carry anything.
I wondered when she had first begun to believe that seeing another person's pain meant she had to respond to it.
I did not call her to ask.
Two days later, Advaita came to my house again, though this time she did not bring anything.
She stood outside the door with a cloth bag hanging from one shoulder. Her green kurta had been replaced by a faded yellow one, and her hair was tied back more tightly than usual. She looked tired. Not dramatically tired, not the sort of tiredness that invites concern from strangers. She looked like someone who had slept badly and had spent the morning doing things she could not postpone.
“Are you busy?” she asked.
“I was writing.”
“Can I sit for a while?”
I moved aside.
She put her bag on the chair and sat down. I asked if she wanted tea.
“No. Actually, yes. Sorry. Tea would be good.”
While I made it, she told me that Mrs Bedi had been away from the building that morning. The watchman had mentioned seeing her leave with a suitcase. Advaita had watched from her balcony, then spent twenty minutes wondering whether she should go downstairs and ask the watchman where Mrs Bedi had gone.
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“Why good?”
“Because he might not have known, and you would have spent the rest of the day trying to interpret his answer.”
She gave me a look.
“You make me sound ridiculous.”
“I didn't say that.”
“You were thinking it.”
“I was thinking you must be exhausted.”
She was quiet while I brought the tea. Then she told me that Mrs Bedi had returned in the afternoon. She had gone to Chandigarh to visit her son, apparently, and had come back with a box of sweets for the watchman. Nothing about the visit suggested a hospital. Nothing explained the corridor.
“Maybe it was something that happened years ago,” Advaita said.
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe it was something that will happen.”
She looked annoyed with herself for saying it.
“I know. I know how that sounds. I don't think I can predict the future. I'm not sitting here waiting for disasters. But sometimes the images feel like warnings, and I can't tell whether the warning is real or whether I'm frightened because I've seen it.”
“What do you do when you can't tell?”
“Usually? Nothing. Then I feel guilty about doing nothing. Then I try to help someone else with something I can actually fix.”
She said this with a bluntness that made it sound less like a confession than a complaint about an inconvenient habit.
“Does that help?” I asked.
“For a little while.”
She took a sip of tea.
“Last month, I helped a woman in my building fill out forms for a hospital appointment. She had trouble reading the English instructions, so I went through them with her. Then I took her to the clinic because she was frightened of going alone. I stayed until the doctor called her name. She thanked me and went inside.”
“What happened after that?”
“Nothing. I went home.”
“Actually, something did happen. I had been meaning to make an appointment of my own for three months. I didn't make it that day either.”
She looked at the tea as if the answer might be written on its surface.
“It's not that I don't care about myself,” she said. “I buy groceries. I pay bills. I remember to change the water filter. I can keep a house running. But if something hurts and nobody else can see it, I can leave it there for weeks. If someone else has a problem, I can spend the whole afternoon on it.”
I asked what the appointment was for.
She shook her head.
“Nothing urgent. That's what I keep saying. Nothing urgent, so it can wait.”
She did not elaborate, and I did not press her. There are questions that can be asked only once without becoming a demand. I had asked mine.
We sat for a while. A pressure cooker whistled in the flat next door. Someone in the street called for a child who did not answer. Advaita finished her tea and asked whether I had a pen she could borrow.
“For what?”
“To write something down before I forget.”
I brought her a pen and a scrap of paper. She wrote a name, then a number beneath it. She folded the paper twice and put it into the side pocket of her bag.
“An appointment?” I asked.
“Possibly.”
She stood, thanked me for the tea, and went out.
I watched her walk to the end of the lane. She did not turn around.
For the rest of the afternoon, I kept thinking about the folded paper. I had no way of knowing whether it held the name of a doctor, a friend, or someone she had promised to help. I had no way of knowing whether she would use it.
That evening, my phone rang. It was Advaita.
“Do you remember the man at the vegetable stall?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I saw him again today.”
I waited.
“He was outside the chemist's shop. He had a child with him.”
“Was it the child you saw?”
“I couldn't tell. The child was wearing a red shirt. That's all I know.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I was on the other side of the road. He was buying medicine. He saw me and nodded.”
“And you?”
“I nodded back.”
There was a pause.
“I wanted to ask if everything was all right,” she said. “But I didn't. I didn't know what I would be asking him to tell me. And I didn't know if the thing I saw was even about him.”
“What did you do instead?”
“I bought my toothpaste and came home.”
Her voice was dry, almost amused.
“I know. Very ordinary.”
“Ordinary is allowed.”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
She breathed out through her nose.
“I keep thinking about the child, though. That's the trouble. I can go about my day, but the picture stays somewhere at the back of my head. Then I see a child in a red shirt and I start looking for details. Is he tired? Is he ill? Is the man his father? I turn a person into a list of clues, and then I feel terrible because he's just a child buying medicine with an adult.”
She stopped.
“I don't want to do that to people.”
“Then don't decide what the picture means before you know.”
“And if I never know?”
“Then you never know.”
She was silent for a moment.
“You make that sound easy.”
“It isn't easy. It's still possible.”
She did not answer. I heard a cupboard door close at her end, followed by her mother's voice asking where she had put the turmeric. Advaita called back that it was beside the stove.
“I have to go,” she said. “She's looking for something that's right in front of her.”
“Good luck.”
“She'll find it. She always does.”
The call ended.
I sat with the phone in my hand for a few seconds before putting it down. I had no special insight into Advaita. I could not see what she saw, and I could not tell her which images mattered. I could only notice what she did when she was frightened: she found a task, someone who needed help, a cupboard to sort, a form to fill in. She made herself useful until there was no time left to sit with the question.
Perhaps this was how she had learned to live with the things she saw. Perhaps it was simply how she had always lived, and the visions had given the habit a new excuse.
I did not know.
A week passed. Mrs Bedi's balcony remained empty for two mornings, then the bedsheet appeared again. The man from the vegetable stall did not come up in our conversations. Advaita told me that she had returned the wrong bulb and bought the correct one. She went to her aunt's house and found the brass bowls in a cupboard behind a stack of old newspapers. Her mother, she said, had been right about the cupboard all along.
The appointment did not come up again.
I wondered whether she had made it. I could have asked, but I did not. I was beginning to see that my own curiosity could become another demand placed on her. She had told me what she wanted to tell me. The rest belonged to her.
Then, one afternoon, she arrived with a small steel container of potato curry.
“My mother made too much,” she said. “She told me to give some to you before it spoils.”
I took the container and asked her to stay for lunch. She said she had eaten, then admitted she had only had a banana. We warmed the curry and ate it with the rotis I had left from the morning. She told me about her aunt's cupboard, about a missing key, about a cousin who had arrived late and blamed the traffic even though he lived three streets away.
She was halfway through telling me about the cousin when she stopped speaking.
I looked up.
“What is it?”
She was looking at me.
For a few seconds, her expression changed. Not into fear, exactly. More like the stillness that comes over someone who has heard a sound in another room and is deciding whether to investigate.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Advaita.”
“I don't know.”
She looked away, then back at me.
“I saw something just now.”
I waited.
“It might be nothing. I don't want to say it and make it into something.”
“Then you don't have to.”
She pressed her lips together. Her face was familiar to me, the broad forehead, the slightly uneven brows, the right one sitting a little higher than the left. I had seen her look at people many times. I had never seen her look quite like this.
“Can I tell you one thing?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“I don't think the things I see are always about the people I'm looking at.”
She stopped there, as if she had already said more than she intended.
Outside, someone dragged a chair across a balcony floor. The sound scraped along the building and disappeared.
“What do you think they are about?” I asked.
Advaita shook her head.
“I don't know. Sometimes I think they're showing me what people don't say. Sometimes I think I'm putting my own fears into other people's lives. Sometimes I think both things can be true.”
She looked at the food between us.
“I can see when someone is carrying something. Or I think I can. But I don't always know what to do with it. And I don't know why I can look at someone else's pain for hours and still avoid my own for months.”
She did not say what her own pain was. She did not need to. The sentence sat between us, plain and incomplete.
I wanted to ask about the appointment. I wanted to ask what she had seen when she looked at me. I wanted, selfishly, to know whether I had become another person in one of her private images.
Instead, I passed her the remaining roti.
She took it, tore off a piece, and ate.
We finished lunch. She washed her plate despite my telling her to leave it. Then she dried her hands and went to the door. Before leaving, she turned back.
“I might call you later.”
“All right.”
“I might not.”
“All right.”
She nodded once and left.
I did not ask what she had seen in my eyes. I was not sure I wanted to know.
The next time Advaita called, she was standing in a queue at the bank.
“I have been here for forty minutes,” she said. “An old man has been arguing with the cashier about a signature, and the woman behind me keeps sighing as if I personally arranged the banking system.”
“Have you reached the counter?”
“No.”
“Then why are you calling me?”
“Because I need to tell someone that the woman behind me has sighed eleven times.”
I laughed. She did too, and for a moment she sounded like herself again, impatient with the world in a way that had nothing to do with what she saw in people's eyes.
Then she said, “I made the appointment.”
I stopped laughing.
“For what?”
“The appointment I told you about. I called this morning. They gave me a slot for next Thursday.”
She did not explain further. I did not ask her to.
“That's good,” I said.
“Don't make it a big thing.”
“I won't.”
“And don't ask me about it next Thursday.”
“All right.”
“I might tell you myself.”
“I'll wait.”
She was quiet for a moment. I could hear the bank's announcement system in the background, a voice calling a token number that seemed to have no effect on anyone.
“Sometimes I think I tell you things because you don't try to fix them,” she said.
“Sometimes I try very hard not to.”
“That counts.”
The line went silent for a few seconds. Then she complained about the queue again, and we spoke until her number was called.
On Thursday, she did not mention the appointment. Neither did I.
A few days later, I saw her outside the pharmacy near the market. She was standing beside a parked scooter, reading the label on a packet of biscuits. The shopkeeper was trying to explain a discount to a customer, and two schoolchildren were arguing about whose turn it was to carry a bag.
Advaita looked up when I called her.
“Have you eaten?” I asked.
“Why does everyone keep asking me that?”
“Because you keep saying you haven't.”
“I ate.”
“What?”
“Poha.”
“When?”
She gave me an irritated look.
“This morning. I am not a houseplant. I don't need someone checking whether I've had water and sunlight.”
“Fine.”
She smiled despite herself and put the biscuits into her bag.
We walked towards the market together. I asked whether she had seen the man from the vegetable stall again. She said she had, but only from a distance. He had been carrying a large sack of rice on one shoulder. She had not seen the child.
“I don't look for him now,” she said. “Not deliberately.”
“Do you still think about what you saw?”
“Sometimes.”
She watched a cyclist weave between two parked cars.
“I've been trying something. When I see an image, I tell myself I don't have to decide what it means immediately. I can leave it alone for a while.”
“Does that work?”
“Sometimes. Other times I spend the next hour thinking about whether leaving it alone is the right thing to do.”
“That sounds tiring.”
“It is.”
She stopped outside a shop selling stainless steel utensils. A woman stood near the entrance, arguing with the shopkeeper about the price of a pressure cooker. The woman was holding a purse in one hand and a folded receipt in the other. Advaita watched her for a few seconds, then turned away.
“Did you see something?” I asked.
“I don't know.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
“No.”
We continued walking.
There was a time, I thought, when I might have asked her to describe it anyway. Curiosity can dress itself up as concern. It can pretend that a person's unusual experience belongs to everyone who hears about it. I had begun to recognise that impulse in myself, though recognising it did not always stop me.
At the crossing, Advaita waited for a gap in the traffic.
“I used to think that if I could see what people were hiding, I could help them before things got worse,” she said.
“And now?”
“Now I think I was giving myself too much responsibility.”
The light changed. We crossed with a group of people carrying shopping bags.
“People have problems they don't tell anyone about,” she continued. “Some of them need help. Some of them don't want help from me. Some of them don't even know what they need yet. Seeing something doesn't tell me which situation I'm in.”
She said it plainly, without the certainty of someone who had arrived at a final answer. It sounded more like a rule she was trying to remember.
At the corner, she bought a bunch of coriander. The vendor tied it with a thin rubber band and placed it in a separate bag without being asked.
Advaita noticed.
“That's considerate,” she said.
“He probably doesn't want you to argue with him about tomatoes.”
She laughed.
“Probably.”
We parted at the bus stop. She had to go home, and I had to collect a parcel. Neither of us made a promise to meet again.
That evening, I thought about the woman outside the utensil shop. I wondered what Advaita might have seen in her eyes, and whether it had been anything at all. The uncertainty bothered me more than it should have. I wanted her ability to have rules, clear ones, rules that would tell me when a vision was true and what a person ought to do with it.
But Advaita had never offered such rules. She had never claimed that the images were always accurate, or that she knew how to interpret them. Other people had supplied those ideas for her. They had called her gifted, strange, perceptive, blessed. Some had asked her to look into their eyes and tell them what she saw. Others had avoided her altogether.
She had told me once about a woman who came to her after a family argument and asked whether her husband was lying. Advaita had seen a dark room and a man standing beside a window. She had said she did not know what it meant. The woman had accused her of withholding the truth.
“What did she want you to say?” I had asked.
“That he was lying. Or that he wasn't. She wanted a verdict.”
“And you couldn't give her one.”
“I didn't have one.”
The woman had left angry. Advaita had spent the rest of the evening wondering whether she should have said something kinder, something that would have made the woman feel less alone. She had not considered that the woman might have been asking the wrong person the wrong question.
That was one of the difficulties of knowing Advaita. Her refusal to claim certainty did not always protect her from the burden of other people's expectations. Sometimes it made her feel that she had failed them.
She was learning, slowly and unevenly, that there were things she could notice without taking ownership of them. That was not the same as becoming indifferent. She still remembered the child beside the mattress. She still thought about Mrs Bedi's hospital corridor. She still looked at strangers' faces, though she tried not to turn every glance into an investigation.
And she had made an appointment for herself.
I did not know whether she had kept it. I did not know what she had told the person she met, or what she had chosen to leave unsaid. She never brought it up, and I did not ask.
The following Sunday, she sent me a photograph of the brass bowls she had found in her aunt's cupboard. They were arranged on a kitchen counter, polished unevenly, with one bowl noticeably smaller than the others.
Her message read: My mother says these belonged to my grandmother. My aunt says they belonged to someone else. Nobody knows. We are keeping them anyway.
I replied that this sounded like a sensible family decision.
She sent back a laughing face, then another message.
Do you think people can see too much?
I typed several answers and deleted them. Finally, I wrote: I think seeing something and knowing what to do with it are different things.
She did not reply.
Later that night, I wondered whether my answer had been useful or merely convenient. It was easier to say that seeing and knowing were different than to ask what someone should do when offered no comfort. It was easier still to leave Advaita to work that out for herself.
I had no special wisdom to give her. I could listen, offer tea, share lunch, ask whether she had eaten. I could refrain from asking what she had seen when she did not want to tell me. None of those things made me responsible for her, and none of them made me entirely innocent of the wish to know.
A week later, she came by again. She brought no food and had no particular reason for visiting. We sat by the window and spoke about a power cut, a leaking tap in her kitchen, and the price of onions. At one point, she looked directly at me and went still.
I noticed it. Of course I noticed it.
She looked away first.
“There's something I could tell you,” she said.
“You don't have to.”
“I know.”
She rubbed her thumb against the edge of her sleeve, then stopped.
“I don't know if it's something I saw or something I thought. I can't separate the two right now.”
“All right.”
She looked at me again. Her eyes were dark, with those small amber flecks that seemed to appear only when the light fell at a certain angle.
“Can we talk about something else?” she asked.
“Yes.”
So we did.
We spoke about the leaking tap. We spoke about whether the plumber would come on time, and whether the new shop at the end of the road would sell decent bread. Advaita disagreed with my opinion about the bread and said I had been buying the wrong kind for years.
When she left, she said she would see me soon. She did not say what she had seen.
I sometimes think about that afternoon. I think about how badly I wanted to know, and how little that desire had to do with helping her. I wanted the image because it would have given me a piece of her that she had not chosen to share. I wanted to know whether she had seen something about me, something I had hidden even from myself.
Perhaps the image had been nothing. Perhaps it had been something important. Perhaps it had been a memory, a fear, a fragment of someone else's life that had arrived in the wrong place. Advaita could not tell me, and I could not tell her.
The next time I saw her, she was standing in her kitchen, cutting potatoes for lunch. She was wearing the faded blue kurta with the small ink stain near the cuff. Her mismatched earrings were back, and the thin red thread around her wrist had begun to fray.
She was complaining about the price of cooking oil when she looked up at me.
For a moment, I thought she might stop speaking. She did not. She finished her sentence, turned back to the cutting board, and asked whether I preferred the potatoes cut small or large.
“Small,” I said.
“Then you can help.”
She handed me the knife.
We worked side by side, talking about nothing that needed to be solved. Outside, a woman called to someone across the lane. A pressure cooker began to whistle. Advaita pushed the cut potatoes into a bowl and reached for the coriander.
I watched her hands move through the familiar work. I did not ask what she could see in my eyes.
I still don't know whether that was the right decision.
The potatoes took longer than they should have because I kept cutting them unevenly. Advaita inspected my work and declared that I had no respect for vegetables.
“You've cut one into four pieces and another into eleven.”
“They'll cook at different speeds.”
“Exactly. And then you'll complain that some are soft and some are hard.”
She took the knife from me, trimmed one of the larger pieces, and handed it back. Her expression was serious enough to make me laugh.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“People say that when they mean something.”
“Then I mean nothing.”
She gave me a look and returned to the stove.
Lunch was ready twenty minutes later. We ate in the kitchen because the dining table was covered with papers, and Advaita complained that I had put too much salt in the dal. I told her she was welcome to cook next time. She said she would, provided I bought the correct vegetables and learned to cut them properly.
When she left, she carried home a small container of dal and half the rotis we had made. She had not brought anything with her, but she never seemed to leave empty-handed. There was always something she had helped with, something she had carried, some task that had become hers before either of us noticed.
That evening, I wondered how often people had mistaken her willingness for an invitation.
A month later, Mrs Bedi's son came to visit.
I knew because Advaita called me in the afternoon, while I was trying to finish an article, and told me that the building's watchman had helped carry two suitcases upstairs. She had seen the son from her balcony. He was taller than she remembered, she said, and had begun to lose his hair.
“Did you speak to Mrs Bedi?” I asked.
“She's gone out with him. They were taking a taxi.”
“Perhaps they're visiting relatives.”
“Perhaps.”
There was no urgency in her voice. She sounded almost pleased with herself for leaving the matter there.
“I'm not going to ask the watchman where they're going,” she added.
“I hadn't suggested you should.”
“You were about to.”
“I wasn't.”
“You have a very suspicious silence.”
We talked about other things. Before hanging up, she told me that she had finally changed the appointment she had mentioned weeks earlier. She had postponed it once, then called again to arrange another date.
“Are you going?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Good.”
“Don't start.”
“I said one word.”
“One word can be enough.”
She ended the call before I could answer.
I smiled at the phone, then put it down and returned to my work.
Advaita continued with her usual life. She went to the market, visited her aunt, helped her mother with errands, and complained about a neighbour who left wet clothes dripping onto the balcony below. When she came to see me, she brought a packet of biscuits and told me the shopkeeper had charged her more than the printed price.
“Did you argue?”
“Of course I argued.”
“And?”
“He gave me the difference.”
“Then it worked.”
“No. Then I spent ten minutes arguing over six rupees. That isn't the same thing.”
She sat down and began telling me about a woman she had met at the clinic. The woman had been waiting for her daughter, who was late. They had spoken for a while, mostly about the heat and the long wait. Advaita had looked at her eyes once and seen nothing unusual.
“Nothing at all?” I asked.
“Nothing that I could identify. Her face was just her face.”
“Was that a relief?”
Advaita thought about it.
“I don't know. I didn't feel cheated.”
She said it with a small smile.
“That's something, I suppose.”
She did not explain what the appointment had been for. I did not ask.
I began to notice a change in the way Advaita spoke about what she saw. Not a dramatic change, and certainly not a disappearance. She still sometimes stopped in the middle of a sentence when an image came to her. She still watched people's faces with an attention that could make strangers uncomfortable. But she had stopped treating every image as an instruction.
One afternoon, she told me about a woman at the bus stop who had been crying quietly while holding a bag of oranges. Advaita had sat beside her for a few minutes. She had asked whether the woman needed water. The woman had said no. Advaita had stayed until the bus arrived, then watched her board.
“That was all?” I asked.
“That was all.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
She frowned at me.
“Why would I want to?”
I had no answer. She was right to question it. I had become accustomed to hearing about her visions, and some part of me had begun to expect them. The ordinary kindnesses were less interesting to my curiosity, though they were probably more useful to the people who received them.
Advaita seemed to notice my silence.
“Sometimes I can help without knowing anything,” she said. “I can sit beside someone. I can ask if they need water. I can let them cry without demanding a reason.”
“And sometimes you can't help.”
“Sometimes they don't want me to.”
She looked at me steadily.
“That's allowed too.”
I thought of the man at the vegetable stall, and the child on the mattress. I thought of Mrs Bedi's corridor, with its green chairs and fallen bottle. None of those images had come with instructions. Advaita had supplied the instructions herself, then blamed herself when she could not follow them.
“Do you still see things when you look at people?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Has anything become clearer?”
“No.”
She said it without disappointment.
“Some things are clearer because I've asked questions. Some things aren't. Some images disappear. Others stay around for no good reason. I still don't know what all of them mean.”
She leaned back in her chair.
“I used to think the ability was the difficult part. It isn't. The difficult part is living with not knowing.”
That was the closest she came to explaining what had changed. She did not say she had become a different person. She did not claim to have found peace with what she saw. She still worried about people, still made herself busy when her own thoughts became difficult, still sometimes mistook concern for responsibility.
But she had begun to leave a little room between an image and an action.
It was not much. It was something.
One evening, Advaita came to my house after a visit to her aunt. She looked tired and had a faint streak of flour on the front of her kurta.
“My aunt made me help her prepare dough,” she said. “She says I don't visit enough, and when I do visit, I sit around asking questions.”
“Do you?”
“Sometimes. She has interesting cupboards.”
She sat down and told me about an old photograph she had found among her aunt's papers. It showed a young woman standing beside a doorway, holding a baby. Nobody in the family could agree on who the woman was. Advaita's mother thought she was a distant cousin. Her aunt insisted she was a neighbour who had helped the family during a difficult year.
“Did you recognise her?” I asked.
“No.”
“Did you look into her eyes?”
Advaita gave me a flat look.
“She was in a photograph.”
“I know.”
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because I was curious.”
“That's your problem.”
She laughed, and I did too.
Then she grew quiet.
“I looked at the photograph for a long time,” she said. “Not because I saw anything. I was trying to imagine what it must have been like to be that woman. To hold a baby while everyone around you forgot your name.”
“Perhaps they hadn't forgotten.”
“Perhaps. But nobody knew who she was.”
She looked towards the window.
“I think about people whose stories are lost. People who did things for others and never got mentioned again. I don't know why that bothers me so much.”
“Maybe because you want to know what happened to them.”
“Maybe.”
She was quiet for another moment.
“Or maybe I want to believe that if I notice enough, nobody will disappear completely.”
I did not answer at once. The sentence seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised me. She looked down at her hands, then shook her head.
“Forget it. That sounded ridiculous.”
“It didn't.”
“It sounded as if I think I can save everyone by looking at them.”
“Do you think that?”
“No.” She paused. “Sometimes.”
She rubbed the flour from her kurta with the heel of her hand.
“I know people disappear even when someone remembers them. I know noticing isn't the same as saving. I know all that. But there's still a part of me that thinks if I look carefully enough, I might find the thing everyone else missed.”
“Do you think that's why you avoid looking at yourself?”
She stared at me.
For a moment, I thought I had gone too far. She stood up and walked to the window, where the streetlights had begun to come on. I did not follow her or try to fill the silence.
When she spoke, her voice was quieter.
“Maybe.”
She turned back.
“I don't know what I'd find if I looked carefully enough.”
I wanted to tell her that she did not have to find anything. That a person was not a problem to be solved, and that she could live without turning every unanswered question into a task. But those were easy things to say from the safety of someone else's life.
So I asked if she wanted tea.
She said yes.
While the water boiled, she returned to the table and began talking about her aunt's photograph again. She remembered that the baby had been wearing a woollen cap, although the picture had been taken in summer. She wondered whether the photograph had been altered or whether the family had simply dressed the child warmly. The conversation moved back to small details, and I let it.
I never asked her whether she had looked at herself that evening.
I had a feeling she would not have known what to tell me.
Months passed. The seasons changed, and the lane outside my house filled with the sounds of schoolchildren, delivery scooters, vendors, and the occasional dog that barked at nothing anyone else could see.
Advaita continued to visit. Sometimes she brought food. Sometimes she arrived empty-handed and asked whether I had any work she could help with. I learned to say no when I had none, though she occasionally found a task anyway. She helped me sort a stack of old papers one afternoon, then complained that I kept documents nobody would ever need again.
“You have a receipt from a phone you don't own anymore.”
“It might be useful.”
“For what?”
“I don't know yet.”
“That's not a reason.”
She threw the receipt away.
She was still Advaita. She could be impatient, sharp, generous, distracted, and stubborn within the space of a single conversation. She could spend half an hour helping a stranger and then refuse to answer a perfectly ordinary question from me because she was tired. She could notice the smallest change in another person's expression and miss the obvious thing sitting in front of her.
She still saw things in people's eyes.
One afternoon, she told me she had seen a young man standing alone in a railway station, holding a red scarf. She had no idea whether the image belonged to the past, the future, or a place she had never visited. She had not approached anyone. She had gone home, made lunch, and written down what she remembered so that she would not spend the rest of the day trying to keep it in her head.
“Did writing it down help?” I asked.
“A little.”
“Will you do anything with it?”
“No.”
She considered the answer, then amended it.
“Not unless I learn something that gives me a reason.”
I nodded.
She seemed satisfied with that, though I could not tell whether she had found the answer comforting or merely practical.
The following week, she came over with a bag of guavas her mother had bought from a roadside vendor. We sat at the table and cut them into pieces, discarding the bruised parts. Advaita complained that the fruit was too hard. I told her she had picked it herself. She said she had not been consulted.
We ate the guavas with salt and chilli powder. She told me about a cousin who was planning to move to another city, about a leak in her aunt's kitchen, about a woman who had returned a library book six months late and argued that the fine was unreasonable.
Then she stopped, knife in hand, and looked at me.
I recognised the pause. I had seen it before.
“Do you see something?” I asked.
She looked down at the guava.
“Maybe.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
She thought for a while.
“No.”
“All right.”
She resumed cutting the fruit. A small piece slipped from the board and landed on the table. She picked it up, examined it, and ate it rather than throwing it away.
We continued talking. The light faded outside, and the neighbour's television grew louder through the wall. When Advaita finally left, she took the remaining guavas home for her mother.
I watched her go down the stairs. At the landing, she stopped to speak to a woman carrying a sleeping child. She listened, answered something I could not hear, and continued down.
I never learned what she had seen in my eyes that afternoon. I never learned whether she had seen anything at all.
Perhaps that was the point, though I would not claim to know.
Advaita had spent years looking for the truth in other people, as if the hidden thing would explain the visible one. She had not stopped looking. She had only begun to accept that an image could arrive without a clear meaning, and that another person's life did not become hers simply because she had glimpsed a corner of it.
Her own life remained stubbornly ordinary. There were bills to pay, groceries to buy, relatives to visit, and appointments she sometimes postponed. There were mornings when she was kind and afternoons when she was short-tempered. There were things she could say to strangers that she could not say to people who knew her well.
And there were still things she did not say to me.
I could have asked more questions. I could have tried to persuade her to tell me what she saw, or what she feared, or what she had written on the folded piece of paper. Sometimes I wanted to. But I had begun to see that a person's silence was not always a locked door. Sometimes it was simply a room in which they had not invited anyone to sit.
The last time we spoke about her ability, she was standing in my kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil. She had come to borrow a container and was explaining why she needed it.
“I keep thinking I should be able to do more with what I see,” she said. “Then I remember that I don't even know what I'm seeing half the time.”
“What do you do then?”
She shrugged.
“I make tea. I call my mother. I go to the market. I try not to turn a stranger's face into a question I have to answer.”
The kettle clicked off.
She poured the water, added tea leaves, and asked whether I wanted sugar. I said yes. She put in one spoonful, stirred, and handed me the cup.
Then she looked at me.
For one brief moment, her face became still.
I did not ask what she saw.
She turned back to the counter and began washing the spoon. Outside, a vendor called out the price of oranges. A pressure cooker whistled in the flat above us. The ordinary sounds of other people's lives continued, with no promise that we would ever know the whole of them.
Advaita dried the spoon and placed it beside the sink.
“Do you have any more sugar?” she asked.
I showed her the jar.
She opened it, checked inside, and said we would need to buy more.
Neither of us mentioned my eyes again.
The next morning, Advaita called to ask whether I knew a reliable electrician.
“The switch in my kitchen has started making a clicking sound,” she said. “Not all the time. Only when I turn on the light.”
“Then don't use it until someone checks it.”
“I know that.”
“I'm only saying.”
“And I'm only telling you that I know.”
I gave her the number of the electrician who had repaired my ceiling fan. She wrote it down, repeated the digits to make sure she had them right, and ended the call.
By lunchtime, she had arranged for him to visit. She also went to the market, bought vegetables, and stopped at her aunt's house to collect a steel container she had left there the previous week. She told me all this when she called again in the evening, though I had not asked for a report.
“The electrician says the wiring is old,” she said. “He'll come back tomorrow with the right parts.”
“Good.”
“And my aunt gave me a bag of guavas. She says they're too hard, but she bought them anyway.”
“Families are complicated.”
“Guavas are complicated. Families are worse.”
She was laughing when she said it. Then the laughter faded, and she asked whether I remembered the photograph of the woman holding a baby.
I did.
“I asked my mother about it,” she said. “She thinks the woman might have been a neighbour who helped my grandmother after my grandfather died. But she's not sure. My aunt has a different story.”
“Will you find out?”
“Maybe. I've asked two people. I'm not going to interrogate the entire family.”
I heard her put something down on a hard surface.
“There's a strange thing about remembering people,” she continued. “You can remember what they did for you and still forget who they were when nobody needed them.”
I thought of the unnamed woman in the photograph, the baby in the woollen cap, and the family members arguing over a history none of them could quite reconstruct.
“Perhaps that's true of everyone,” I said.
“Probably.”
She did not turn the conversation towards herself. We spoke about the electrician again, then about a neighbour who had borrowed a pressure cooker and returned it with a dent in the lid. When the call ended, I went back to my work.
I wondered whether Advaita had seen something in the photograph after all. I wondered whether she had begun asking questions because the woman had become important to her, or whether she simply wanted to know the name of someone whose story had been misplaced.
I could not tell. I was learning that not every question she asked had a hidden answer, and not every silence concealed a revelation.
Sometimes she was simply curious.
A few weeks later, I met her at a small grocery shop near the bus stop. She was comparing the prices of two brands of detergent, holding one packet in each hand.
“This one is cheaper,” I said.
“It is also smaller.”
I checked the labels. She was right.
“You've caught me.”
“You were not difficult to catch.”
She put the packets back and chose a third brand. We stood together while the shopkeeper weighed some rice for an elderly customer. Advaita asked whether I needed anything. I said no.
The customer counted the money in her purse, discovered she was short by a few rupees, and began removing items from her basket. The shopkeeper told her to leave the rice and pay the balance next time.
She looked embarrassed.
Advaita watched her for a moment. I watched Advaita.
The older woman thanked the shopkeeper, gathered her things, and left. Advaita picked up her detergent and paid.
“Did you see something?” I asked once we were outside.
“No.”
She adjusted the handles of her shopping bag.
“I thought about offering to pay, though.”
“Why didn't you?”
“She had already put things back. The shopkeeper was letting her pay later. If I'd offered, she might have felt worse.”
“Perhaps.”
“Or perhaps she would have been grateful. I don't know.”
She started walking, then stopped to let a scooter pass.
“I keep trying to find the perfect response to everything. If I see someone struggling, I want to help without embarrassing them. If I don't help, I worry that I'm being selfish. If I ask a question, I might intrude. If I stay quiet, I might miss something important.”
“There's rarely a perfect response.”
“I know. But knowing that doesn't stop me from looking for one.”
She said this without self-pity. It sounded like a fact about herself that she had grown tired of carrying around.
We walked to the bus stop together. A group of schoolchildren had crowded beneath the shelter, their bags scattered across the bench. Advaita stood at the edge and waited for them to make room. One boy moved his bag without being asked.
“Thank you,” she told him.
He nodded and went back to his conversation.
Advaita watched him for a second, then looked at the road.
“See?” she said. “Sometimes people notice.”
“Sometimes.”
“Sometimes they don't.”
“Also true.”
Her bus arrived. She climbed aboard, found a place near the window, and waved once before it pulled away.
I walked home carrying nothing but the memory of our conversation. It was an ordinary afternoon, and nothing had been resolved. The woman at the grocery shop had gone home with her rice. The boy had moved his schoolbag. Advaita had bought detergent.
There were no hidden messages in any of it that I could identify.
That did not make the afternoon meaningless.
The following winter, Advaita told me she had begun writing down the images she saw.
“Not all of them,” she said. “Only the ones that stay with me.”
She had bought a plain notebook from a stationery shop. The cover was brown, the pages unlined. She kept it in a drawer beside her bed, away from the grocery lists and bills that occupied most of her household's paperwork.
“What do you write?” I asked.
“What I saw. What I actually saw, not what I think it means. If I remember a colour, I write the colour. If I remember a place, I describe it. If I don't remember something, I leave it out.”
“And does that help?”
“It stops me from changing the details every time I think about them.”
She looked at me.
“I used to remember an image, then spend days thinking about what it meant. By the end of the week, I couldn't tell which details had been there at the beginning and which ones I'd added myself.”
“That makes sense.”
“It does. Which is irritating, because I'd rather have a more interesting explanation.”
She smiled.
I asked whether she had written about the hospital corridor.
“Yes.”
“The man at the vegetable stall?”
“Yes.”
“The child?”
She hesitated.
“Yes.”
“Have you written about anything you've seen recently?”
“A few things.”
“Can I read them?”
“No.”
She answered quickly, without embarrassment or apology.
I nodded.
“Fair enough.”
She seemed relieved that I had not asked again.
“I don't know what the notebook will tell me,” she said. “Maybe nothing. I'm not trying to prove anything. I just want to stop turning every image over in my head until it becomes something else.”
“Then it sounds useful.”
“It's a notebook. Let's not give it too much credit.”
We laughed, and she changed the subject.
I never saw the pages. I never learned whether she had filled the notebook or abandoned it after a few weeks. She did not tell me, and I did not ask.
But I noticed that she sometimes paused before describing an image, as if she were checking it against something she had written. When she did speak, she was more willing to say that she did not know.
It was a small change in language. It did not make her certain of anything. It did not make the visions stop. It gave her a way to leave some questions unanswered without feeling that she had failed to do her part.
Her own life remained difficult in the ordinary ways. She argued with her mother about money. She forgot to pay a bill until the last reminder arrived. She put off making a decision about a course she wanted to take. She worried about relatives who never asked how she was doing, then agreed to help them whenever they called.
Sometimes she noticed the pattern herself.
Sometimes I had to notice it for her.
And sometimes neither of us noticed until a week had passed and she was exhausted again.
There was no clean division between the Advaita who saw into other people and the Advaita who avoided herself. They were the same person, making ordinary decisions with the limited information she had. Her ability did not excuse her habits, and her habits did not explain everything about her ability.
I had once imagined that if she could learn to see clearly, she would know what to do. I no longer believed that. Clarity could tell a person that someone was suffering. It could not decide what help would be welcome, what truth ought to be spoken, or how much of another person's life belonged in one's own hands.
Those decisions remained difficult, even for someone who saw things the rest of us could not.
One afternoon, long after I had stopped asking about the notebook, Advaita came to my house with a bag of oranges. She put them on the table and said her mother had bought too many.
“You can take some back,” I told her.
“She'll only send them with me again.”
We began peeling the oranges. The skins came away in thick strips, releasing a sharp, clean smell into the room. Advaita separated the segments and placed them on a plate.
For a while, we spoke about the usual things. Her aunt had misplaced a set of keys. The electrician had returned to replace the faulty switch. The woman who lived upstairs had started learning to drive and had already scratched the side of her car.
Then Advaita looked at me.
I recognised the stillness before she spoke. It had become familiar, though I could not say I had grown accustomed to it.
“What is it?” I asked.
“I don't know.”
She lowered her eyes to the orange in her hand.
“I saw something. Or thought I did.”
“Do you want to tell me?”
She considered the question for longer than usual.
“Not yet.”
“All right.”
She looked relieved, but only for a moment. Then she frowned, as if she had remembered something she needed to say.
“I don't want you to think I'm avoiding my own life just because I don't tell you everything.”
“I don't think that.”
“Sometimes I am avoiding it. Sometimes I just don't know what to say. Those are different things.”
“Yes,” I said. “They are.”
She placed the orange segment on the plate and wiped her fingers with a napkin.
“I've been thinking about what you said once. About not having to answer every question.”
“I hope I didn't make it sound easy.”
“You didn't.”
“I still want answers. I just don't want every question to become an emergency.”
Outside, a vegetable vendor called out his prices. A child answered from somewhere above us. Advaita turned towards the window, listening, and for a moment I thought she might have seen something again.
She did not say anything.
Instead, she pushed the plate of oranges towards me.
“Eat. They're sweet.”
I took a segment. It was, as she had promised, sweet.
We finished the oranges and talked about dinner. She had potatoes at home, she said, and enough rice for two days. I told her she could take some of the dal I had made that morning. She refused, then accepted half a container when I insisted.
At the door, she stopped and looked back at me.
“Can I tell you something another day?”
“Whenever you want.”
She nodded.
Then she left, carrying the dal and the remaining oranges.
I did not know what she had seen. I did not know whether it had been a memory, a warning, a fear, or a fragment of something that had nothing to do with either of us. I did not know whether she would tell me tomorrow, next month, or never.
For once, I did not try to turn that uncertainty into a question.
The door closed behind her. I put the plate in the sink and began washing it. From the lane came the sound of a scooter starting, followed by the familiar call of the vegetable vendor moving towards the next street.
I could not see Advaita anymore, but I could picture her walking home, thinking about dinner, the faulty switch, the oranges her mother had bought, and whatever it was she had not yet told me.
I hoped she would make her appointment when she needed to. I hoped she would learn to leave some of the world's troubles where they belonged. I hoped she would find a way to attend to her own pain without requiring it to become visible to someone else first.
But hope was not knowledge.
And knowledge, I was beginning to see, was not the same as care.
I dried the plate and put it away.
The next morning, Advaita sent me a message asking whether I knew where to buy a good kitchen knife. She said hers had become blunt and that she was tired of crushing tomatoes while trying to cut them.
I sent her the address of a shop near the market.
She replied: I'll go tomorrow.
Then, a minute later, she sent another message.
Unless something comes up.
I looked at the words for a moment. Then I put my phone down and went back to work.
I did not ask what might come up.
The next afternoon, Advaita called me at half past four.
“Are you home?”
“Yes.”
“I'm coming over.”
“What's happened?”
“Nothing has happened. Why does everyone need something to have happened before they visit?”
“Come over.”
She arrived twenty minutes later, carrying a cloth bag with two tomatoes, a packet of biscuits, and a folded piece of paper. She looked annoyed, though not at me. Her hair was tied in its usual low knot, and the silver earring on her left ear caught against the loose strand beside her cheek.
“I saw him again,” she said.
“The man from the vegetable stall?”
She nodded. “His name is Ramesh. I heard the pharmacist call him that.”
She sat down and took the folded paper from her bag. It was a prescription, creased down the middle.
“I was buying a bulb from the hardware shop next door. He was at the chemist's counter. The pharmacist said the medicine would cost more than he had brought. Ramesh asked him to take one strip off the bill.”
“Did you speak to him?”
“Not then. I stood there like an idiot, listening to a conversation that wasn't mine.”
She unfolded the paper, smoothed it with her palm, then folded it again.
“I saw the room once more. The mattress, the child, the woman. This time I saw a red plastic cup beside the mattress. That's all. I don't know if the child was sick. I don't know if the woman was his wife. I don't know if the room was even real.”
“What did you do?”
“I bought the medicine.”
She looked at me sharply, as if expecting a verdict.
“I asked the pharmacist how much it cost. I paid the difference. Ramesh told me he would return the money. I said he didn't have to.”
“Did he accept it?”
“After arguing with me for five minutes.”
“Then what?”
“He asked why I was helping him.”
“What did you say?”
She looked down at the prescription.
“I told him I had some money.”
It was an answer, but not the whole truth. We both knew that.
“He didn't thank me,” she added.
“Did you expect him to?”
“No. I just thought he might say something. Anything.”
She leaned back in the chair.
“He looked embarrassed. Then he got angry. He said he wasn't a beggar. I told him I hadn't called him one. He said people always say that just before they start treating you like one.”
“What did you tell him?”
“Nothing useful.”
She gave a short laugh without amusement.
“I wanted to explain that I hadn't done it because I knew something about him. I wanted to tell him I didn't know anything. But that would have sounded even worse.”
I let her speak.
“On the way home, I kept thinking about the image. I was pleased with myself for helping him, and then I was ashamed of being pleased. I kept trying to decide whether I had done the right thing.”
“Was he able to buy the medicine?”
“Yes.”
“Was that what you wanted?”
She looked at me.
“Of course.”
“Then perhaps you don't need to settle the rest today.”
She opened her mouth to answer, then shut it. For a few seconds, she looked almost angry. I wondered whether I had said something careless.
Finally, she said, “I hate how easily I can spend an entire day thinking about a stranger.”
“Do you spend the same amount of time thinking about yourself?”
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
She looked at the prescription again.
“That's the problem, isn't it?”
I did not tell her it was. She had already said it herself.
Three days later, Advaita came to my house without calling first. I was in the kitchen when I heard her knock. When I opened the door, she was holding a small paper bag and looking as if she had rehearsed a sentence all the way up the stairs.
“Ramesh came to my building,” she said.
I moved aside to let her in.
“He found me through the pharmacist. He wanted to return the money.”
“Did he?”
“Yes. He had it folded inside a newspaper. He kept insisting I take it.”
She put the paper bag on the table. Inside were two guavas.
“He brought these as well. He said his daughter likes them, but she had more than she could eat.”
“You saw his daughter?”
“No.”
“He said it was his daughter who needed the medicine. She has been ill for a while. The medicine wasn't for something terrible, at least not according to what he told me. I didn't ask for details.”
She sat down.
“He said he works wherever he can find work. His wife takes care of the girl. Sometimes he gets paid late. Sometimes he doesn't get paid at all. He told me all this because he thought I had already guessed it.”
“Had you?”
“I'd seen a room. That's not the same as knowing his life.”
She said it firmly. Then her expression softened.
“He looked so tired. I wanted to tell him that I was sorry. But I wasn't sorry for helping him. I was sorry that he had to explain himself to me.”
“What did you say?”
“I took the money. He looked relieved. I accepted the guavas. He looked more relieved. Then we stood there for another minute, not knowing what to say.”
She picked up one of the guavas and examined a brown mark on its skin.
“I asked him whether his daughter was feeling better. He said she was. That was the end of it.”
She put the fruit down.
“I don't know whether the image showed me the truth. I know some of what he told me matched it. But I could have seen the room and still got the story wrong. I could have decided he was irresponsible, or that his wife was careless, or that he was hiding money. The image didn't tell me what kind of man he was.”
She looked at me.
“I had made a whole story out of a few details. Then I went and acted on it.”
“You also asked him a question and listened to his answer.”
“I did. But I had already decided I knew enough to help.”
She fell silent.
For the first time since she had told me about the vision at the vegetable stall, she seemed less interested in defending what she had done than in examining why she had done it.
“I think I need to stop treating what I see as an instruction,” she said.
“Perhaps.”
“And I need to stop treating other people's problems as a place to hide.”
She did not look at me when she said this.
I waited.
“My mother called yesterday,” she continued. “She asked whether I had made the appointment again. I told her I had. She asked why I kept postponing it.”
“Why had you?”
Advaita pressed her lips together.
“Because I didn't want to go.”
“That's a reason.”
“It's not a very good one.”
“It doesn't have to be good to be true.”
She looked at me then, and I saw how difficult it was for her to stay with the subject. Her eyes moved towards the window, the table, the bag on the floor. Anywhere but my face.
“I keep telling myself that nothing is wrong enough to deserve attention,” she said. “I can manage. I can go to work, buy groceries, help my aunt, remember everyone's birthdays. I can do all the things people expect me to do. So I tell myself I'm fine.”
She swallowed.
“And then someone else needs help, and suddenly I have a reason to get out of my own head.”
I wanted to ask what she had been avoiding. I wanted to know what had made her postpone the appointment, and why she had chosen to tell me now.
But I did not want her to feel that she had to produce an explanation simply because she had admitted there was a problem.
“Have you made another appointment?” I asked.
“Yes. For Monday.”
“Will you go?”
“I don't know.”
She gave a small, unhappy smile.
“I'll try.”
It was not a promise. It was not a revelation. It was the most honest answer she had given me.
We ate the guavas. They were firm and a little sour, and Advaita complained that Ramesh should have brought oranges instead. I told her she could not complain about a gift from someone she had barely known a week earlier.
“I can complain about the fruit without complaining about the person.”
“That's convenient.”
“It's also true.”
She laughed, and the conversation moved elsewhere.
When she left, she took the empty paper bag with her. I watched her walk down the stairs, one hand resting on the strap of her shoulder bag.
I did not know whether she would keep her appointment on Monday. I did not know whether she would ever tell me what she had been avoiding. I only knew that, for once, she had spoken about her own life without first finding a stranger's pain to explain why she was there.
It was not a cure for anything. It was one afternoon.
For now, one afternoon would have to be enough.
On Monday, Advaita went to her appointment.
She told me three days later, while standing in my kitchen and arguing that I had bought the wrong brand of tea.
“I went,” she said.
I put the packet down. “How was it?”
“Difficult.”
She said it without looking at me.
“I spent the first fifteen minutes explaining why I didn't need to be there. Then I spent another ten minutes explaining why I had made the appointment. The woman listened to all of it. She didn't tell me I was being ridiculous, which was irritating because I had prepared several arguments against that.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Me.”
She sounded faintly offended by the fact.
“Not what I see in other people. Not Mrs Bedi or Ramesh or the woman at the bus stop. Me. What I do when I'm frightened. What I do when someone else needs something. How busy I can make myself when I don't want to think about my own life.”
She pulled a chair out and sat down.
“I told her I couldn't remember when it started.”
“Do you want to remember?”
“I want to know why I do it. That's not necessarily the same thing.”
She looked at me then.
“She asked me what I thought would happen if I stopped helping everyone.”
“What did you say?”
“I said people would manage.”
“And what did she say?”
“She asked why that frightened me.”
Advaita fell silent.
For once, she did not fill the silence with a story about someone else.
“I didn't have an answer,” she said.
The kitchen window was open. Somewhere below us, a pressure cooker whistled, followed by a child's impatient call for lunch. Advaita listened until the sounds faded.
“I don't know what I'm supposed to do with that question,” she said.
“You don't have to answer it today.”
She gave me a tired look.
“You say that about everything.”
“Because you keep trying to finish everything in one afternoon.”
She almost smiled.
Then she told me something she had never told me before.
When she was seventeen, her father had spent several months in and out of hospital. Her mother had been frightened, her younger brother had been preparing for his examinations, and the house had become a place where everyone spoke carefully around everyone else. Advaita had learned to anticipate what needed doing before anyone asked. She cooked when her mother was away, kept track of medicines, answered relatives' calls, and told her brother that everything would be fine.
Her father died that winter.
After the funeral, people kept praising her for being strong. They said her mother was lucky to have her. They said she had handled everything so well.
“I didn't know what else to do,” Advaita said. “Everyone was falling apart, and I thought if I stopped doing things, the whole house would fall apart with me.”
“But it didn't.”
“No. It didn't.”
She pressed her hands together on the table.
“My brother went back to school. My mother began cooking again. My aunt came over every afternoon for a while. People kept living. I was the one who couldn't seem to stop being useful.”
She looked towards the window.
“I think I started believing that if I noticed a problem early enough, I could keep something terrible from happening. And when I couldn't, I blamed myself for not noticing sooner.”
I said nothing.
“When I started seeing things in people's eyes, it fitted too neatly into that belief. Suddenly I had another reason to watch everyone. Another reason to think I might be able to prevent something.”
She shook her head.
“But I couldn't prevent my father's death. I couldn't make my mother less frightened. I couldn't make my brother stop missing him. And I can't know what will happen to Ramesh's daughter just because I saw a child on a mattress.”
Her voice broke slightly on the last sentence. She stopped, annoyed with herself, and reached for a tissue.
“I don't want every person I meet to become a responsibility,” she said. “I don't want to spend the rest of my life trying to arrive before the bad thing happens.”
That was the first time she had described what she saw without making the vision the centre of the story.
The centre was the girl she had been at seventeen, standing in a house full of grieving people, convinced that being useful was the same as being strong.
And now, at twenty-six, she was still trying to keep the house from falling down, even when the house belonged to a stranger.
“What did the woman say?” I asked.
“She said I couldn't make a promise to protect everyone. She said I could care about people without taking responsibility for every outcome.”
Advaita looked at the tea packet on the counter.
“I didn't like that answer either.”
“Perhaps you don't have to like it.”
“No,” she said. “But I might have to live with it.”
She stayed for lunch. We ate dal and rice, and she complained that I had made too much. Before leaving, she put the remaining food into a container and said she would take it home.
At the door, she stopped.
“I still see things,” she said.
“I know.”
“Some of them might be true.”
“Yes.”
“And some might not.”
“Yes.”
She nodded, as if she had expected me to argue.
“I don't want to stop caring about people.”
“You don't have to.”
“But I need to stop pretending that caring means I can save them.”
She left before I could answer.
That evening, I thought about the hospital corridor, the child beside the mattress, and the woman holding a baby in an old photograph. I thought about how easily a glimpse could become a story, and how quickly a story could become an obligation.
Advaita had not solved the mystery of what she saw. She had not stopped seeing it. She had not become free of the habits she had carried since her father's death.
But she had finally named the thing she had been avoiding.
It was not another person's hidden pain.
It was her own.
A week later, she called to tell me that Ramesh's daughter was doing better. He had mentioned it to the pharmacist, who had mentioned it to her. She sounded relieved, but she did not turn the news into proof that her vision had been correct.
“I helped him buy medicine,” she said. “That's what happened. Everything else is still a guess.”
“And how are you?”
There was a pause.
“I'm trying to answer that question honestly.”
For Advaita, that was not a small thing.
She still went to the market. She still helped her mother and visited her aunt. She still watched people's faces, and sometimes she saw things she could not explain. But when an image came, she tried to leave room for the possibility that she did not know what it meant.
And when someone needed help, she tried to ask what they needed instead of deciding for them.
She did not always succeed.
Neither did I.
The last time she visited that month, she brought a packet of mathris and complained that the shopkeeper had raised his prices. We ate them with tea, talking about the ordinary frustrations of our lives. Before she left, she looked at me for a little longer than usual.
I wondered whether she had seen something.
She wondered too, perhaps. I could not know.
“There's something I might tell you one day,” she said.
“You can tell me if you want to.”
She nodded and picked up her bag.
Then she went home.
I never learned what she had seen in my eyes that afternoon. Advaita never told me, and I never asked again.
Perhaps the image had meant something. Perhaps it had been a memory, a fear, or nothing more than a fragment without a story attached.
For once, neither of us needed to decide.
A few days later, Advaita called me from outside a hospital.
“I need to tell you something,” she said.
Her voice was steady, but she spoke more slowly than usual.
“Are you all right?”
“Yes. I'm outside the building. My aunt is inside with a neighbour. I came with them because the neighbour had an appointment, and she didn't want to go alone.”
“Is something wrong?”
“No. Not with me.”
“I saw a woman in the waiting room. She was sitting with a little boy, and she kept checking the door. When I looked at her, I saw a room with a suitcase beside the bed. A man was standing near the window. The woman was crying, but she was trying not to make a sound.”
I waited for her to continue.
“I wanted to ask her what had happened. I wanted to tell her she didn't have to pretend she was fine. I wanted to do something.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“What happened instead?”
“The boy dropped his packet of biscuits. I helped him pick them up. His mother thanked me. Then the nurse called their name, and they went inside.”
She let out a breath.
“I don't know what I saw. Maybe it was something that had happened to her. Maybe it was something else. She didn't ask me for anything, and I didn't know enough to offer anything useful.”
“That sounds sensible.”
“Don't congratulate me. I still spent the next twenty minutes wondering whether I should have spoken to her.”
I could hear a vehicle passing close to the phone.
“But I didn't follow her,” she said. “I didn't try to find out which room she had gone into. I didn't turn her into a problem I had to solve.”
“And how do you feel about that?”
“Uncomfortable.”
She laughed once.
“Very uncomfortable, actually.”
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
“I'm going to go home now,” she said. “My mother asked me to buy tomatoes, and if I come back without them, she'll think I've forgotten how shopping works.”
“Buy the tomatoes.”
“I intend to.”
She ended the call.
That evening, I thought about the small distance between seeing someone's distress and deciding what it meant. Perhaps that distance was where Advaita's real work began. Her unusual ability might always remain uncertain, but the choice to treat another person with dignity did not depend on it.
Her intuitive awakening was not a sudden revelation or a declaration that she could read every hidden truth. It was quieter than that: the difficult recognition that compassion did not grant her ownership of another person's story.
She still had questions. She still carried the image of the hospital corridor, and she still did not know what she had seen in my eyes. Her own grief had not disappeared simply because she had finally spoken about it.
But she had begun to let some questions remain unanswered without turning them into emergencies.
And perhaps that was enough for one ordinary day.
Advaita had spent years looking into other people's eyes, searching for the truth they could not bring themselves to say aloud. She had seen loneliness behind laughter, fear beneath anger, and grief hidden beneath the most ordinary conversations. Sometimes her visions were accurate. Sometimes they were fragments she could not explain. The uncertainty had never stopped her from trying to help.
But the woman at the hospital had unsettled her for a reason she could no longer ignore.
The woman had been sitting beside a little boy, pretending to read a message on her phone while tears gathered in her eyes. Advaita had seen a suitcase beside a bed, a man standing near a window, and a woman crying without making a sound.
She had recognised the posture before she recognised anything else.
It was the posture of someone trying to keep a family from falling apart.
She had worn that posture herself at seventeen, when her father was dying and her mother could barely speak without crying. Advaita had answered telephone calls, remembered medicines, cooked meals, and reassured her younger brother. She had made herself useful because usefulness gave her something to do with her fear.
After her father died, everyone praised her strength.
Nobody asked what happened when she was alone.
For years, she had carried that silence into other people's lives. When she sensed pain, she tried to reach it before it could become unbearable. She listened, offered help, solved practical problems, and stayed long after others had gone home. She told herself she was being compassionate. Sometimes she was. Sometimes she was also trying to save the frightened girl she had once been.
Both things were true.
The next morning, she returned to the hospital.
She had no certainty that she would see the woman again. She had no vision to guide her, no special knowledge about which corridor to enter. She bought a cup of tea from the stall outside and sat on a bench near the entrance.
For nearly an hour, nothing happened.
Then the woman appeared, walking slowly beside the boy. He was holding a packet of biscuits. His mother carried a folded prescription and a cloth bag.
Advaita stood.
She almost walked towards them. Then she stopped, remembering how easily concern could become intrusion.
When the woman glanced in her direction, Advaita asked, “Would you like some tea? I bought too much.”
The woman looked at the cup, then at Advaita.
“No, thank you.”
“All right.”
Advaita sat down again.
A minute later, the woman approached her.
“Do you come here often?” she asked.
“No. My aunt had an appointment yesterday.”
The woman nodded. She seemed to be deciding whether to leave.
“My husband died last month,” she said suddenly. “Everyone keeps telling me I must be strong for my son. I know they mean well. I just get tired of being strong.”
Advaita felt the familiar urge to say something that would make the pain easier. She wanted to tell the woman that she would manage, that her son would be all right, that time would change the shape of her grief.
She said none of those things.
“I'm sorry,” she replied.
The woman looked down at the prescription in her hand.
“I keep forgetting he's gone. I still think I should call him when something happens.”
Advaita's throat tightened.
“I did that with my father,” she said. “For a long time, I'd hear something funny and think I should tell him. Then I'd remember.”
The woman looked at her.
For once, Advaita did not search for another image. She did not need to see a bedroom, a suitcase, or a man beside a window. The woman had told her what she wanted her to know.
They sat together for a few minutes. The boy finished his biscuits and asked his mother if they could go home. She nodded, thanked Advaita, and left.
Advaita watched them cross the hospital courtyard.
She had not solved the woman's grief. She had not prevented another loss or found a hidden answer. She had simply sat beside someone whose pain she could recognise because she had carried a version of it herself.
And something in her own grief had shifted, not because the woman had healed her, but because Advaita had finally spoken about her father without immediately turning the conversation towards somebody else's needs.
That evening, she went home and opened the notebook in which she recorded her visions. She found the page describing the hospital corridor, with its green chairs, fallen bottle, sandals, and folded paper.
Below the description, she wrote a new sentence:
Seeing pain does not mean I have to carry it for someone.
She read it twice, then closed the notebook.
Her ability remained what it had always been: a glimpse of something she could not fully explain. It could help her notice what another person concealed, but it could not tell her everything about that person's life. It could reveal a possibility without turning that possibility into a fact.
Perhaps that was what the old idea of a third eye had been trying to describe. Not a magnifying glass that made every fear larger, but a mirror that allowed a person to look carefully, without confusing what appeared with everything that existed.
Advaita still saw flashes in people's eyes. She still sometimes mistook concern for responsibility. She still missed her father, and there were days when she kept herself so busy that she barely noticed her own exhaustion.
But she had begun to understand that compassion did not require her to become the answer to every sorrow she encountered.
She could offer help and accept a refusal. She could listen without demanding a confession. She could care for another person without abandoning herself.
The next morning, her mother called to ask whether she would come over for lunch.
“Yes,” Advaita said. “I'll be there.”
“And bring the turmeric if you pass the shop.”
“I will.”
Her mother began telling her about a neighbour's daughter who was having trouble at work. Advaita listened, asked a question, and let her mother finish.
She did not immediately offer to intervene.
Instead, she put the turmeric on her shopping list, made herself breakfast, and sat by the window while she ate.
For several minutes, she allowed herself to be a woman having breakfast, missing her father, and wondering what the day might bring.
She did not look into anyone's eyes.
She did not need to.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the story The Girl Who Could See Truth in People’s Eyes about?
The story follows Advaita, a young woman who sometimes sees flashes of hidden truths when she looks into people’s eyes. Her unusual ability brings her close to other people’s pain while keeping her from facing her own grief.
2. What does Advaita see when she looks into someone’s eyes?
She sees brief, vivid images that may reveal something a person is hiding or struggling with. However, these flashes are not always easy to interpret, and she cannot be certain that every image tells the whole truth.
3. Why is Advaita’s ability both a gift and a burden?
Her ability helps her notice suffering that other people might overlook, allowing her to respond with compassion. At the same time, she risks mistaking what she sees for what another person needs, while using their troubles to avoid her own pain.
4. How does the death of Advaita’s father affect her?
After her father dies, Advaita takes on responsibilities and tries to remain strong for her family. The grief she keeps at a distance influences how she responds to other people, making it easier to attend to their pain than to acknowledge her own.
5. What is the central message of the story?
The story explores the difference between noticing someone’s pain and claiming to know everything about it. Advaita’s ability suggests that compassion means being present for others without assuming that their lives can be fully explained, controlled, or carried by someone else.
Spill the Tea
Spill the Tea explores the private truths people carry beneath ordinary conversations, familiar routines, and carefully maintained appearances. Each story looks at the complicated choices people make when love, grief, loyalty, and loneliness collide. Advaita’s story asks what happens when seeing another person’s pain becomes easier than facing your own.
Tushar Mangl is a writer whose work explores human relationships, emotional conflict, and the quieter struggles hidden beneath everyday life. Through the Spill the Tea series, he tells stories about imperfect people navigating difficult feelings and choices.
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