An interlude between Chapters 2 and 3. A breath before Kerala.
The hotel was called the Marikar Residency. It had been built as a merchant’s townhouse in the 1920s and converted to guest rooms in the 1970s. It stood three blocks inland from the backwaters in the old colonial half of Kollam, in Kerala, at the exact hour of the afternoon when three-hour rain gave way, briefly, to a monsoon light that anywhere else would have been called wistful. Lu, in his professional experience, did not use wistful.
He was in Kerala because the man he had, on a Tuesday, agreed to accompany to a specific archive had, on Wednesday, sent him a train ticket to Kollam and no explanation. Lu had, in eleven years, learnt that a man like that, when he sent a train ticket to a small port town and did not explain, was worth going along with for at least one night in a hotel.
The lobby was the colour marble-mopped-since-2003 had become. A ceiling fan turned at the specific pace ceiling fans turn when they have been turning for a hundred years without ever being reset. Three prints on the wall — Kerala backwater scenes from a 1958 photographer whose name nobody knew any more — all crooked in the same direction. On the counter was a small brass bell that Lu strongly suspected nobody had, in the fifty-one years of the hotel’s guest-room life, actually rung. On the wall above a shelf hung an old wooden guest register, the sort used until the year they had changed to computers, and it was dated on its spine in two eras.
Kollam was the town from which the Malayalam year counted itself. In 825 of the Common Era — for reasons no one had ever entirely been able to explain — the local calendar had reset to zero. The reason for the reset was, in local historians’ considered opinion, not found in the surviving documents. In the surviving documents’ considered opinion, it was not found in the local historians. It was, as of that specific afternoon, Kollam Era 1201.
Twelve hundred and one years of a place quietly keeping its own arithmetic while three separate colonial empires had, in sequence, arrived to explain to it what it should think it was. Lu, in eleven years of journalism, had come to trust places that kept their own arithmetic. They tended to know things.
Meera, the clerk, was a woman in her early forties whose name Lu could read on a laminated badge angled slightly toward him. She wore glasses that had, at some point in the previous decade, developed the habit of slipping. She wore a saree pinned neatly at the shoulder. She wore airport-shop slip-ons of the specific make Kerala Regional Airport sold at the departures shop. Under the counter, a paperback in Malayalam sat closed without a marker. Meera had been trained, at some point in the last six years, not to lose her place.
She was, at the moment Lu approached the counter, filling in a form.
She turned it around and slid it across.
“Full name.”
Lu picked up the pen — a hotel biro, blue, likely to leak — and wrote Lu.
He put the pen down.
Meera read the form. She looked at the form. She looked at him. Her glasses slipped one and a half inches. She did not push them up.
“Full name,” she said again, more slowly.
“That is the full name.”
“Sir. There is more.”
“There is not more.”
She waited. She had been trained, at some point in the last six years, to wait.
Lu, who had been trained, at some point in the last eleven years, not to answer the waiting, did not answer it.
He looked around the lobby. Nothing about it was unusual. This was, in its own quiet way, the unusual thing.
The drawer marked LATER, which he had recently closed on purpose and understood to be full, opened. It examined the lobby. It filed a small thing about the brass bell. It closed again.
He wanted a cigarette. He had, three months ago, quit smoking. He wanted a cigarette anyway.
He turned back to Meera. He picked the pen back up. He wrote, in the space below Lu, the sentence he had written on forms since he was twenty-three:
Wild. Sharp. Clear.
He turned the form around and slid it back.
Meera read it. She did not, this time, look at him. She stamped the form. She handed him a brass key on a wooden tag with the number 34 burned into it.
“Third floor,” she said. In her Kerala English, the word third had exactly three consonants that Lu could hear.
Somewhere in the building, a door closed at exactly the pace of a door closing on time.
Lu took the key and walked to the lift.
He did not, on the way, check his reflection.