Aditi went missing on a Sunday. The gulmohars lining the streets were smothered in bright red blooms that April. The sun blazed away from dawn. Ma and Baba had spent hours in the kitchen that day, gently teasing each other while slicing onions, roasting spices, cooking a chicken, chopping vegetables. Sunday lunch was a much-loved ritual in our house. My exams had just got over. I woke up late, went to bed when I pleased. My parents didn’t complain. My alarm clock, which I had swaddled in a sweater and buried at the bottom of my cupboard, was no more the boss of me.
I remember the fragrance of the chicken curry Baba had cooked that Sunday. He’d served us the dish before, but the rich, spicy scent drifting out of the kitchen that noon will forever be the marker of Aditi’s disappearance for me. Funny how memory works. The oddest things will tug at you sometimes, sending you crashing back into the past.

We lived on the fourth floor. Aditi, her brother, and her parents were on the ground floor. Their apartment came with a garden: a small patch of earth fenced in by a red brick wall. Aditi had planted tulips there once. When they bloomed (yes, they did), the flowers lit up the garden like pretty snowdrops. Aditi was a champion swimmer, the star of her university team, and our very own neighborhood celebrity. Her house was filled with trophies. Her photographs smiled at us from the sports section of newspapers.

I remember how the sun dimmed that Sunday after we finished lunch. Ma cleared the table. I volunteered to help Baba wash the dishes. Suddenly, without warning, the heat lost its sting and a breeze blew in. Miles and miles away from Delhi, rain or snow could have been falling on the Himalayan peaks. In a small town at the foothills of the Himalayas, a swim meet had just got over. Aditi and her teammates had won, beating out teams from ten universities across the country. There must have been a celebration—cheering and dancing, maybe some music, cake, fizzy drinks. Her coach later told the police that Aditi seemed happy (“thrilled” is the word he used, I think). She had celebrated the win with her team mates.   

Next to the campus where the swim meet was held stood a forest filled with pines. An ancient forest; gnarled trunks and roots as thick as ropes everywhere. The sun filtered in through lush green canopies. Some parts of the forest were too dense for even the sun to penetrate. The police combed the forest because Aditi’s phone signal had petered away where the forest began. The last time she used her phone was at the edge of the forest. And then there was silence.

My parents went to visit Aditi’s parents at their house. They offered to help in whatever way they could. The police were searching for Aditi, but she was probably just another name on their ‘girls gone missing’ list. Ma said Aditi’s mother was very quiet. She didn’t say a word to my parents. Aditi’s father talked about how he had found an excellent match for his daughter: same caste, excellent family, and the boy had a Harvard MBA. The engagement was in a month, the wedding, six months later when the bridegroom would fly back to join a multi-national company in Bombay. Aditi’s father kept talking about the upcoming wedding as if her disappearance was a minor blip on the radar. The police would find her soon, he swore. The engagement, and the wedding, would happen as planned.

I remember a wintry morning when I had run into Aditi at the gate of our apartment complex. The grass was wet with dew. Clouds drifted in the morning sky like wisps of cotton. Sparrows chirped, the well-fed parrots nesting on the mango trees flitted from branch to branch. Aditi came running towards me, her ponytail swinging in the breeze. She was wearing a black tracksuit and a white cap. With a grin, she yanked off her cap and flung it at me. “Catch!” she yelled, making me jump. I dropped the cap and muttered an apology. It felt like I had failed a test, a really important one. She bent down, picked up her cap, and with a smile and a wave, was off. “There she goes. Faster than light. Faster than sound,” I’d once heard a commentator shout out on TV when Aditi set a new record in the pool.

When my parents went to visit Aditi’s parents after she went missing, her brother was holed up in his bedroom. He was two years younger than her. An engineering student who never really cared for his sister’s sporting career. Why did she have to spend so much time in the water? All those practice sessions, diet restrictions, endless travel for meets. Since she was a child, she had done nothing but splash about. She always followed her coach’s instructions; exercised, swam, stuck to her diet. Was she a fish or a girl? No friends but her team mates (her fellow seals, he used to call them). No time for boyfriends. While girls her age were partying or shopping or trying on dresses, she would be doing laps in the pool. Timing herself. Dreaming of setting a record. Or shattering one.

The police said they were trying their best to find Aditi. They had unearthed a set of bones from the forest, but tests showed that these were the remains of another girl, a case filed about a year ago. Her name was Maria, not Aditi. She was about the same age as Aditi though. If they had the resources (and the inclination), the police would probably have found other missing girls and women in the forest as well. The homeless, the wanderers who got lost in the forest’s labyrinth, the ones who were driven out of the world into the forest’s arms. Their bones could be scattered anywhere. Their spirits tucked away under the dense green canopies like secrets. The police, however, gave up on the forest soon. After handing over Maria’s bones to her family, they filed Aditi away under the list of cases they couldn’t crack. She was a question mark like so many other girls in their files. The world was full of such mysteries…

I remember how quietly Aditi’s family moved out of our building. They packed up their belongings, emptied out their apartment, and left without saying goodbye. The movers’ van must have rolled up to their doorstep at midnight. Their leaving was a covert operation. A vanishing planned and executed in stealth. Even the chatty neighborhood uncles and aunties who perched on their balconies all day, watching us like hawks, were clueless about their plan. Everyone, including my parents, was surprised to find the house shuttered. Ma said they may have moved to a new city. Baba thought they had headed back to Aditi’s father’s or mother’s ancestral home. The city threw up too many questions. They may have decided to look for refuge in a totally different setting.   

I scaled their garden wall at noon and dropped down on the slightly wet ground. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, but something, some unknown force or need, made me want to take a look at that deserted house. The garden was empty. Aditi’s tulips were long gone. A few pots were scattered around but there were no plants in them. A golden candy wrapper fluttered in the air, skipped over the flower beds, and landed at my feet. My shoes left marks on the ground as I walked to the front door. A big fat lock held it in place. The windows stared at me like unblinking eyes. They were firmly shuttered. A koel sang from somewhere close by and the notes echoed in Aditi’s garden, rising and falling without a care. I remember sitting on her doorstep, leaning my head against the door, staring at the clouds above. Maybe I was looking for a sign in the sky. A signal about Aditi’s whereabouts. The clouds calmly drifted by. The koel finished the song and flapped away. The light drew strange patterns on the wall in a while. The world kept turning as if it was just another day. As if Aditi was another puzzle no one felt the need to solve.

At Aditi’s college, they held a memorial. Are memorials reserved for the dead or do the missing deserve them too? There was some talk about it, but in the end, they decided it was all right to call it a memorial. On a brittle winter morning, her teachers talked about her perseverance and her capacity for hard work. Her coach called her his brightest star. His eyes misted over when he took her name. Clips of the champion winning races and gliding across the water were played, and a list of some of the records she had set was projected on the screen. Her triumphs were too many to fit on the screen. Her team mates went up to the stage and gave speeches, praising Aditi’s talent, her generous spirit, her daring. Some of them broke down mid-way and had to be escorted back to their seats.

Everyone spoke of her in the past tense. It didn’t seem right to use the present tense, but no one was sure the past tense was the right way to go either. Aditi was gone, but it was entirely possible she could return. She was lost, but she could be found. What if she came back one day just the way she had left? What if she walked in soon after the memorial got over?

Her teachers had tried to contact Aditi’s parents before organizing memorial, but their address was fuzzy. Her brother was easier to track down because he was a student. He did not respond to their email informing him of the memorial and inviting him to it. His silence puzzled them. Was he offended by the fact that they were holding a memorial for his missing sister? If that was the case, they would give up on it. All they wanted was to cherish her memory. And they would have loved it if her family gave them their blessing.

I remember reading about Aditi’s memorial in the city pages of a newspaper. Along with the report, there was a photograph of her standing in a pool, face turned towards the camera, goggles pushed up on her head. The water, waist-high, lapped at her. She was smiling as if the world was hers to win. “Faster than light. Faster than sound,” the TV commentator’s shouts echoed in my ears as I stared at her photograph.

I still scan the papers for news of her. I don’t know what I’m looking for—a report about her being found, safe and well; a write-up about her winning a match or smashing a record; a passing mention of her in a sports column, a reference to her many triumphs…One morning, at a busy crossing not far from home, I saw a girl dressed in a black tracksuit, sporting a white cap on her head. For a second, I thought she looked familiar. The cap, the suit, the way her ponytail swung in the breeze—all of it reminded me of Aditi. But before I could get closer or call out to her, she darted down the street and was gone.