Fiction: Eleven years later, a daughter is determined to find out exactly what killed her father

Whenever Tara packed for a trip, she started with an armload of socks and a spare phone charger.

On this wet Monday afternoon, though, the first thing that went into her lavender suitcase was a black Naruto t-shirt.

Tara had bought the t-shirt as a present for Dev. She had made sure that she would be in Mumbai for his eighteenth birthday. But the planning and shopping had been in vain.

No party invite had arrived so far – and Tara doubted that it ever would.

“I’ll probably spend all my time in Mumbai sitting on that red sofa and ordering dosas on Swiggy,” she said to herself as she snatched up the t-shirt, flung it back into her cupboard and paced up and down the attic room.

It’s difficult to walk in a room the size of a dining table – especially when one-third of the floor space is occupied by a jumbo suitcase. After a few unsatisfactory rounds, Tara headed to her desk, her computer and her wobbly three-legged stool.

Tara’s school holidays were ten weeks long. They usually raced by in a flurry of travel and friends and weeks in El Camino. This year, though, there was no travel, no friends, no El...

Read more