I unpack by opening up my bag and upending the contents onto the bed. Then I go straight into the bathroom and apply the hair color to my head. While I wait for it to work, I call Amber.
“Where’s my package?” I ask.
“Good morning to you too,” she says tiredly. “My tracking shows it was delivered to the hotel ten minutes ago. . . .”
“Thanks—I’ll check with the front desk.”
But even as I’m heading for the phone next to the bed, there’s a knock at the door of my room. I open up and a square box, tightly wrapped in layer after layer of plastic, is handed over to me. Still on the line with Amber, I take it, lock my door, and cut it open using my penknife. I smile.
“Got it,” I tell her, stuffing the contents into my backpack.
“Good to know,” she says dryly. “Send pictures of yourself. I’d like something to throw darts at.”
I smile and hang up. It’s time to rinse off my hair and get over to the school where the attack happened.
Sitting in the cab, watching my driver edge forward about ten inches every five minutes, I have plenty of time to assess how the traffic works here. Most trucks have a sign on their backs asking for “Horn Please.” Far from blaring horns to indicate annoyance, the driver explains, horns are used all the time to ask slower vehicles to move to one side, so that the car behind can pass.
“It’s a wonderful mode of communication,” he explains ecstatically, in lilting English. “It means everything runs smoothly.”
Well, that’s a rather optimistic take on the traffic carnage outside our window, but I let it pass. After a few more frustrating minutes, I bail out on the bumper-to-bumper gridlock and walk the remaining mile to the school. On the way, I pass an electronics store where televisions line the windows—on each one of them the attack on Kit’s school is the major news story of the morning. In all, eleven girls have lost their lives. I pause to watch. Old photos and concert clips of my mother are interspersed with live footage of the crime scene, sealed off by police guards and reams of police tape. Family First has taken responsibility for the bomb, releasing a brazen statement that demands that foreigners stop coming to India to corrupt young women and enslave them with Western values. I feel my temples throb with anger as I watch the news feed, but I turn away newly energized by my mission to track down the monsters who find it acceptable to kill young girls to make their point.
As I approach the school itself, I slow down so I can scope it out from a distance. Mournful threads of smoke still curl up from a damaged roof. Blown-out windows gape emptily. And police guards are everywhere. The school sits on its own large plot at the corner of a busy city block, much of which is sealed off right now. But two streets along is a row of shops and restaurants thronged with people; probably locals hanging around to see what’s happening in the aftermath of the attack. I choose a bustling burger place crammed with customers, and hurry inside, making straight for the bathroom.
As I empty my bag, I look at myself in the chipped mirror that sits over the sink. My hair is much darker now, almost black. It looks natural but my skin still feels too pale for this ruse to work, surrounded as I am by Indians with a richer skin tone. But there’s not much I can do about that now, other than inserting dark brown contact lenses to cover the green color of my eyes. I pull on the items that Amber had delivered to my room—khaki pants and standard lace-up shoes that pinch at my toes. Next, I button on a khaki shirt with chest pockets and epaulets. It fits snugly on top of my skinny T-shirt. Lastly, I try on a navy cap carrying an embroidered logo on the front, and the words “Mumbai Police” on the side. I tug the cap down, trying to hide as much of my face as I can. Thrusting my jeans and boots into my backpack, I head out into the street, trying to look as if I know where I’m going.
Walking with an air of confidence, I circle around toward the school, looking for an entry point. There are police on all the corners of the building, while at the front gates, TV news vans, photographers, and reporters jostle for position. There’s certainly plenty of confusion there, and because of that, a possible way to slip in, unnoticed, but it also feels very exposed. Then, from the corner of my eye I see a police van pull up to a side street. A group of twelve officers, a couple of them women, jump down and wait to be deployed. I sidle closer as someone senior in plain clothes comes over to them and barks some instructions in Hindi. They all start moving, briskly, toward the school, and as they duck under the police tape, I step in alongside them and move inside too. There’s a sense of urgency to everyone’s movements, which means no one stops to talk or look much at each other, thank goodness. I don’t wear out my luck though. As soon as I can, I drop back, a little behind the others, and duck into the first doorway that I find.
I’ve been briefed that there are eight classrooms in the three-story whitewashed structure,
