Can A Therapist Hide Murder Confession? Find Out In Ela's Unfinished Business

On the surface, Beri Shola appears to be a quiet, charming hill town dotted with boarding schools and tourist traps. Like many such remnants of the colonial Raj across India, it is steeped in history and eccentric traditions. Its locals are a hodgepodge from across the country that Beri Shola accepts as its own.

Piu, a forty-something therapist with a penchant for magazine quizzes, has left her old life behind to set up practice here. Sure, business isn't booming, but she has a variety of patients and an 'it's complicated' love life that keep her suitably busy.

Then, a week before the much-anticipated annual flower show, beautiful and well-connected Rose is murdered and a new patient, Ela, stumbles into Piu's office, certain that she's murdered someone. And life in Beri Shola begins to unravel.

Here's an excerpt from Gayatri Jayaraman's Ela’s Unfinished Business

Ela looked out of the window. The clouds had moved west now, and the shadow was lifting off the lake below; it had begun to glint in the sun. The sky was a deep inky blue on one end, and a sparkling azure on the other. Pines swayed sedately, unlike the wildly nodding eucalyptus behind them.  

In the distance was the television tower, a brooding presence that loomed over the skyline. Cottages dotted the hillsides, flowers in their gardens in full spring bloom. It was idyllic, like a picture postcard. She would have liked to send one home, if she had one.



Either one—postcard or home.  



‘A body would, admittedly, be pretty hard to keep quiet,’  Piu said, trying to break the ice. 



The silence hovered in the air like a sparrow that had entered the room and forgotten how to exit. 



‘I’m not mad, you know,’ Ela said quietly, without turning her head, holding her gaze steady, too steady, on the lake. ‘Most people who think they are, aren’t and most people who think they aren’t, sometimes are,’ Piu replied. Most people who entered her clinic felt the need to reassure her or themselves they were ‘normal’. She invariably attempted to ease them in with therapy humour. That almost always never went well. Still, she persisted. She wanted to be that kind of therapist, the one that clients spoke of years after they had moved on from being her patients, of ‘having shared a bond with’ and ‘being saved by’.

Jokes and quips, she hoped, were an easy way for them to carry a memory of her. Maybe she’d end up in their memoirs once they had overcome and triumphed. They certainly helped her feel less uncomfortable. Although to be honest, she was noticing they perhaps made the patients feel a bit more captive, like an audience that had bought a ticket and was now regretting it. But really that was their problem because she had a no-refund policy. ‘So long as you know,’ Ela said.

 

‘I know,’ Piu said, nodding. 



Ela caught the frigidness of her reply, like a recorded message. It felt so very flippant a response to something that had been troubling her so deeply. She turned her head sharply and caught the therapist’s gaze, eyes ablaze.  



‘Yes, but … how do you know?’ she asked, almost spitting the question out.  



Piu was taken aback.  



‘Um,’ she stuttered. ‘How do I know?’ 

‘Yes, we’ve only barely met. I find such blind faith in me  naïve, if not a bit, well, you know, condescending.’



Piu shuffled her feet awkwardly in her slippers beneath the desk. Life in Beri Shola had clearly blunted her skills. She had underestimated her client, ribbing with her far too early in the session. Trust had not yet been established.  



She gave her a quick once over now. She noticed that while  Ela was keeping it all together bodily, she was in fact, quite on the edge. There were fine lines along her neck. Her eyes alert as a tripwire, the skin beneath her eyebrows triangulated with the inner corner raised up. Clear micro-expressions of a deep-rooted sadness. Her grief muscle, in the middle of her forehead, was bracketed by her brow. She was trying so hard, Piu realized, not to cry. She held her lower jaw tilted up far too high, which made her look quick to take offence. Her shoulders were clenched defensively, her lips thin and tightly drawn, resisting even pursing. She reminded Piu of a twisty pipe-cleaner doll—tightly wound.  



Piu kicked herself for being so distracted as to have missed the signs. After many years of running this small-town clinic, at last, someone who actually needed her for something more substantial than a certificate to rob their wife of their rightful inheritance by having her declared insane, had sought her out. And she had been all frivolous and had given her power away. 



Piu sat up in her chair, pulled her jacket down, straightened her shoulders back, and cleared her throat. Right, she thought.  Let’s begin again, Piu. 



Ela repeated her question gently, insistently, articulating each word, as though speaking with quite a dull child in her classroom. 



‘Yes. I was asking: how would you know? The lake looks big enough to hide a body and I might well have shown up here after. As we get through the appointment, you may discover that, in fact, I am most certainly capable of violence and utterly mad. So I wanted to know: how do you know?

Excerpted with permission from Ela’s Unfinished Business by Gayatri Jayaraman; published by HarperCollins India

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