Mahima: Goodbye
August 1980
She hadn’t planned it. She didn’t even know she was going to do it. Shekhar and his father were away at work. When her mother-in-law went for her afternoon nap, she went upstairs to her bedroom, thinking, I want to say goodbye to Mallika, and I want to see Mummy and Daddy. Then she found herself picking up her handbag and tossing a pair of gold earrings into it. The rest of her jewellery was in her mother-in-law’s Godrej, since her mother-in-law said it was safer there. She never had any cash either and might need the earrings for petrol. Then she took the car keys from the drawer in Shekhar’s so-called study – by now, she knew very well what sort of studying he did there – then went downstairs, filled an empty orange squash bottle with water, picked up a pack
