“You don’t look old enough”, said Sarayu as she adjusted Vael’s hair.

They had gone shopping the same evening that they had come back from the typewriter service centre. And they had bought well-fitting adult clothes for Vael. Luckily her father’s shoes fit him and so they didn’t have to buy that.

“Well, what else can we do about that?” asked Vael, his voice a mixture of tension and excitement. When Sarayu had told him all that had happened at the service centre he had been completely bowled over. When she had left him home without telling him anything he had been angry and frustrated. But when she detailed her whole thought process of how she had an idea about using the typewriter to find the shop that printed the bill of purchase and how she found the oldest typewriter service shop in Chennai that had been servicing typewriters for decades and how she visited the shop under the pretext of repairing the typewriter and how she formulated the whole charade about a school project and how the technician had found and given her the location of the shop that still used the same typewriter that was used to print the bill of 1964, he was left speechless.

And when she explained her next plan to the three of them, they were utterly and completely taken aback by not only her thought process, but by her courage in following the thread she had caught hold of and going where it led her. Muthuramalingam instantly vetoed the plan saying that it was too much of a risk and that they should approach the police with what they had.

Sarayu asked him, “Tell me Thaathaa, what do we have?”

“Provenance documents of the idol, a photo of it and the address of the shop that has the typewriter which printed the bill of purchase from long ago”.

Even as he spelled out these things, he understood how weak his words sounded and how flimsy the evidence was, if it could be called that. Surprisingly, it was Seethalakshmi who sided with Sarayu in carrying forward her plan.

“You are just going to buy a handicraft item”, she said simply.

For that was what the shop whose location was shared to Sarayu was. She had obviously Googled it the minute she had got into the car outside the service centre and had formulated her plan as soon as she saw that it was still a handicraft store that still sold handicraft items, but under a different name.

When his wife put it like that, Muthuramalingam realized the truth behind those words. Their plan was to buy a handicraft item, nothing else. Once they had another printed invoice from the shop, printed on the same typewriter, then perhaps they had something concrete to go to the police with.

It was not the plan that made Muthuramalingam nervous. It was the way in which Sarayu planned to carry it out and execute it that made him nervous.

“Thatha, why are you worried? Isn’t Vael a foreigner who would be going back home to his country? Am I not an interpreter for Vael whose Thamizh is not good enough for bargaining and purchasing? Are you not the driver who will be driving the car?” Sarayu asked her grandfather.

Put like that, Muthuramalingam could not deny that none of the above were falsehoods. And so they had agreed to carry out the plan and were now getting Vael ready, trying to make him look like an older tourist.

“Anna, you just have to manage the rest with your walk and body language and your accent. Don’t forget to put on your heaviest Aussie accent while there”, instructed Sarayu. “And what do you do if you see a computer and the invoice is about to be printed out?

“I make a big fuss about how I haven’t seen a typewriter before in my life and how I would like the invoice printed on it for it to be a souvenir”, answered Vael.

Sarayu nodded her approval and turned to her grandfather.

“And Thatha, do you remember what you have to do?” she asked her grandfather.

“Yes. Keep a respectful distance always from both of you and don’t react to anything that you may be saying or doing inside the shop”, answered Muthuramalingam hesitantly.

“Yes, that’s all. Don’t be nervous. If you are then it will show in your body language. They have to believe that we haven’t seen each other before today”, Sarayu emphasised.

“And Paatti, I’ll keep texting you as and when possible. And call you once we are out of the shop”, she said. “Anyway, I’ve installed the ‘MyFamily’ app on all our phones. I showed you how to open and track that, right? Do you remember how to do that?” Sarayu asked.

Seethalakshmi nodded.

“You can track us on that. I’ll call before entering the shop and after leaving it”, she told her grandmother.

She then looked around at everyone. Vael looked like a foreign tourist, if not an older adult, with his grown-up clothes and his hair slicked back. He also had a pair of sunglasses that he would be wearing. She had given him her father’s old backpack and stuffed it with things that a tourist might carry, important among them being a water bottle. She turned her attention to her grandfather and saw to her satisfaction that he had worn white trousers and a white shirt, making him look like an experienced call driver. She knew she didn’t have to do or be anything different other than a school girl and so she had put on a pair of jeans and a kurti and tied her hair in a ponytail. She too carried a back pack, but not the one Vael had gotten for her.

“Do you have the Australian dollars with you?” asked Sarayu as the final check.  

Vael nodded. He had a little more than a thousand Australian dollars and around a hundred American dollars with him, the cash he had brought with him when he arrived in India.

So many things could go wrong with her plan. But so many things could go right too. It had been an absolute stroke of pure luck to have found the shop in the first place. If that luck held out a little longer… Sarayu sighed inwardly and mentally straightened her shoulders.

“Then we are all set. Let’s go”, she said and led the way out.