Dahlia now realised that the shadow followed all her movements. When she touched the water with her right hand, the woman extended her left. As she tilted her head back, those deep eyes vanished. Don’t – Don’t look away. My mirror.

From that moment on, something behind the red door had transformed itself. Was it the well or the forest? Dahlia wasn’t sure but she always came to stare at the shadow. The mirror in her room now seemed to throng with nauseating lies. That dulled glass had become a director of cheap horror films with cheesy but creepy special effects. She hated the face in it. She didn’t want to have a face. Only eyes. Yes, eyes that could see everything. Like the eyes of the woman in the well.

Had someone else also been peering into the well?

The well obsessed her, even after she returned to the outside world. She felt estranged from that world, above all from the body she didn’t want to possess. As she walked the streets in the crowd, her worn-out frame always felt like it was moving against her will. Her body and mind had undergone a separation but even so it was her body, rather than her mind, that remained a concern for those around her. Wrinkles, stretch marks, skin folds, varicose veins, pores the size of potholes. People in her world were crazy about putting these flaws under a microscope, simply for the relief at not suffering from them.

Come Friday night, her friends went out on dates. So did Dahlia. After her father had gone to sleep, she had her own enthralling tryst with what lay beyond the red door.

Sometimes she wanted to step through and never return.

—

‘Do you remember how naughty Adit was?’

A bedtime ritual. Dahlia sat next to Pa, accompanying him as he wandered among sepia-toned memories. A melancholic nostalgia that she knew by heart.

‘Do you remember when he set his report card on fire? He didn’t dare come home until late at night. Your mum and I were worried sick until a neighbour finally brought him back. He arrived in filthy clothes – only the devil knows what he’d been up to – and his face was all sulky. Did he think he could just come and go like a hotel?’

Dahlia remembered her father’s wrath. He whipped Adit with a belt. Twice.

‘I might have been a little hard on him,’ her father admitted. ‘But look at the fruits of my discipline now. Just look at the man Adit has become.’

A respectable lawyer, one of Dahlia’s key benefactors.

‘And Rama. He wouldn’t have a job at a multinational now if I’d let him keep wasting his time with that amateur band of his.’

Then Sarita, Dahlia recalled.