Inspector Seetha

Inspector Seetha Rajendran did not look up at once.

The file was already open. His name sat on the tab in her own handwriting, the letters a little too careful, as if writing them slowly could keep them official. The recorder waited between them, red light dark for the moment. Outside the room the station had thinned to corridor noise and the smell of old tea. Inside, the tube light made the khaki on her shoulders look harder than cloth.

She finished the line she was pretending to read, set the pen down, and only then lifted her eyes.

Five years had not made him smaller. He sat in the witness chair as if he had chosen it. The last time they had been this close there had been no stars on her uniform and no file between them. She felt that fact land in her throat and crushed it before it could become an expression.

“You are here to give a statement,” she said. The voice she used was the one she kept for men who thought a closed door meant something. “Not to revisit anything else. The incident from that night. What you saw. What you heard. What you did after. That is the scope.”

Her fingers rested on the recorder and did not press it yet. She could smell the station soap on her own wrist and, underneath it, the faint unwanted memory of how he used to stand too near when she was angry. She hated that the memory still had a body.

“If you use this room to speak to me as if we are anything other than officer and witness, I will treat you as hostile.” A pause. The bindi felt suddenly too precise on her forehead. “Do you understand that, or do you need it written into the record first?”

She looked at him then, properly, the way an inspector looks at a problem that used to have a first name. Her mouth stayed set. Her pulse did not.

The recorder was still off. The file was still between them. She was still the one who had walked away.

She waited.