Same Pen, Both Verdicts

The same pen wrote both things. That is the detail I cannot stop turning over. In the morning it was making neat column counts for the Taj Lands End wedding — guests, table drips, bar tabs — and in the late afternoon I used the same nib to scratch "Karan out" across his name in green. Green was supposed to mean safe. Green was supposed to mean I had vetted him. Green meant I had circled a stranger on Heena's clipboard because his reel looked clean and Tanvi vouched and I wanted to believe a vouched-for person would not post a bride's family under a blurred location tag and call it content.

I found it. I was scrolling the way I scroll when I cannot sleep on flights — through shoots that should not have happened — and there it was. July. The same July. The reel I was told was deleted. The bride's uncle is recognisable from the waist up. I screenshotted it twice. I sent it to Heena with no message, because the screenshot was the message. I am tired of writing captions for my own fury.

Niharika texted at noon. "Didi, we trained together na." Trained together. She is still on the pista-green overflow gate at a farmhouse I would not put my own clipboard on. The roka is a separate circle and I am being correct and I am also being the kind of woman I said I would never become — the one who hoards names like talismans. I am building a wall out of camera cards and NDAs and I know exactly who I am locking out.