Kabir Anand
1
The old ceiling fan in Detective Inspector Meenal Rathore’s apartment made a dry, rhythmic creak as it turned in the summer night heat. She sat at her desk in a sleeveless kurta, case files spread open, a mug of cold tea forgotten at her elbow. The city outside was quieter than usual, its usual honking and scooter rumbles dulled at this hour. Her phone buzzed sharply at exactly midnight, the screen flashing an unknown number. She answered out of habit, expecting a drunken domestic complaint or a false alarm. Instead, a low, carefully measured voice came through the line, so calm it was unsettling. “In the next twenty-four hours, a man will die in Bhopal. The next day, another. And the day after, another still. Three days, three bodies—unless Rajiv Malhotra confesses to the real gas tragedy.” Meenal sat up, pen poised over her notebook. “Who is this? What do you mean by ‘real gas tragedy’?” she asked, but the voice continued as if reading from a script. “He knows what he did. And if he does not admit it, the blood will be on his hands. Yours too, Inspector.” The call ended with a faint click, followed by silence. She stared at the phone screen, the number already vanishing into a block of digits she knew would lead nowhere.
By morning, Meenal had convinced herself it was nothing more than a malicious prank. Anonymous threats were common, and invoking the 1984 gas tragedy was a way for angry citizens to provoke a reaction. The tragedy still hung in the air here, forty years on—memorial plaques, coughing survivors in old city lanes, whispered family stories—but it had also become a political bargaining chip for activists, opportunists, and corporate rivals alike. She left for the police headquarters with the memory of the voice still tugging at her. Inspector Arif Sheikh, her junior and constant shadow, met her at the entrance with a fresh cup of tea and a file of overnight reports. “Nothing serious,” he said, flipping through pages. “One shop theft, one street fight. All petty.” Meenal kept the call to herself. The last thing she wanted was her team chasing phantoms while real crimes waited. By late afternoon, the day’s heat hung heavy over the city, the kind that made tempers short and shadows long. Meenal was preparing to leave when the station phone rang—not hers, the main desk’s. A constable took the message, his voice faltering as he repeated the address. She caught the words “Union Carbide plant gates” and “body found” before she was already moving.
The abandoned plant still rose like a ghost on Bhopal’s industrial outskirts—rusted fences, shattered windows, walls scrawled with angry graffiti in Hindi and English: Maut ka mahal, “palace of death.” A crowd had gathered near the main gate, some holding phones high for photos, others just watching with grim familiarity. The stench of old chemicals clung faintly to the air, mixing with the smell of dust and sweat. The victim was slumped against the locked gate, head tilted unnaturally, a length of industrial cord wound tight around his neck. His skin was pale, lips faintly blue, and his hands showed deep rope burns as if he had struggled. Dr. Leena Mukherjee arrived minutes later, crouching by the body and muttering under her breath. “Strangled. No more than an hour ago. Killer knew what they were doing—fast, precise, left no time to scream.” Meenal stepped back, scanning the scene. The positioning was deliberate; the body was propped facing outward, as if greeting the onlookers, the dead eyes fixed toward the road. Above the gate, the plant’s faded sign still bore the name that haunted the city. A press photographer’s camera shutter clicked rapidly. Meenal turned sharply to Arif. “Clear the crowd before they trample the evidence. And find me ID.”
It came within minutes—a worn leather wallet, tucked into the victim’s shirt pocket. Inside was a laminated ID card with the name Vikram Joshi, listing him as a safety inspector for Malhotra Chemicals. A folded sheet of paper was tucked behind it: a letter of resignation dated just two weeks earlier, citing “serious ethical concerns” and addressed directly to Rajiv Malhotra. Meenal felt the cold settle in her chest. The call was no prank. The killer had named their target in spirit if not in name—this was someone connected to Malhotra, and his death was staged as an opening statement. Somewhere out there, the voice from last night was waiting for her to understand the message. She glanced once more at the silent gates of the plant, imagining the toxic cloud that had poured out of them decades earlier, killing thousands. Now, someone was dragging that history into the present, one body at a time. And if the caller’s timeline was real, she had less than twenty-four hours before the next killing.
2
The morning after the first murder, the Bhopal Police headquarters was already buzzing with murmurs and news alerts. Meenal walked in carrying the resignation letter found on Vikram Joshi, her mind running over its implications. In the briefing room, a lean man in his forties sat with his legs crossed, a weathered canvas bag at his feet and a camera hanging loosely from his shoulder. His clothes were rumpled, his stubble uneven, but his eyes carried a sharp, restless energy. “Inspector Rathore?” he asked as she entered, his voice low and deliberate. “Anik Sen. I’ve been trying to reach you since the news broke.” Meenal knew the name—once a respected investigative journalist, now relegated to smaller publications after too many confrontations with corporate power. She kept her tone guarded. “This isn’t a press conference.” He leaned forward, sliding a battered folder across the table. Inside were photocopies of survivor testimonies from 1984, some stamped ‘confidential,’ others marked with red pen circles around specific deaths. “The man at the plant gate wasn’t random. Whoever killed him is following a pattern—recreating certain deaths from that night. The choice of location, the method, even the time of day… it’s all symbolic. Survivors would understand the message immediately.” Meenal’s brow furrowed. “And what message is that?” Anik’s lips tightened. “That the tragedy never really ended.”
Later that afternoon, Meenal drove to the gleaming headquarters of Malhotra Chemicals. The contrast to the rusted gates of the Union Carbide plant was jarring—mirror-polished glass façades, manicured lawns, and a quiet hum of air-conditioned opulence. Rajiv Malhotra received her in his office, a space lined with antique clocks, each ticking at a slightly different rhythm. He was perfectly groomed, his silver hair swept back, his posture one of calculated authority. Meenal laid the ID card and resignation letter on his desk. “Vikram Joshi worked for you. He’s dead. Strangled. The killer sent a warning that this would happen unless you ‘confess to the real gas tragedy.’” Malhotra’s eyes flicked to the letter but his face betrayed nothing. “Inspector, my company had nothing to do with that night in 1984. And if some deranged individual thinks they can use my name to justify murder, they’re mistaken.” Meenal studied him for a beat. “Who else knew about Joshi’s resignation?” He shrugged. “HR, maybe a few colleagues. It’s irrelevant. You should be looking for radicals, not harassing industry.” As she stood to leave, his phone rang, and though he tried to conceal it, she caught the faint change in his expression—a tightening around the jaw. The call was short, his answers curt. “I told you already, this is nonsense. I will not play your games.” The receiver went down harder than necessary. Meenal didn’t need to ask who it was.
Outside, the air felt heavier, the afternoon sun glaring off the bonnet of her jeep. Anik was waiting by the entrance, camera in hand. “Let me guess—he got the second warning?” She gave a small nod. “And refused to cooperate,” she added. Anik’s gaze drifted toward the building. “If the killer’s pattern holds, the second murder will be staged tomorrow, tied to another piece of 1984 history. And if Malhotra won’t talk, the killer will make sure the city does.” Back at her office, Meenal spread Anik’s photocopied testimonies across her desk. One account spoke of survivors collapsing near the Upper Lake, their lungs burning from the gas. Another described children huddled in the old city, their faces smeared with powdered chemicals. The testimonies were a grim map of grief, and somewhere in it, the killer was choosing their markers. She traced her finger along the notes, wondering which memory would become a crime scene next. Arif appeared at her doorway, holding a sealed envelope. “This just came for you. No return address.” Inside was a single sheet of paper, handwritten in neat block letters: The next will drown, as the city watched in ’84. Beneath it, a time was written—24 hours.
That night, the weight of the ticking clock followed Meenal home. She sat on her balcony overlooking the city lights, the note resting on the table beside her untouched dinner. In her mind, she could already see the rippling surface of the Upper Lake under a hot sun, the faint taste of dust and chemicals on the wind. Somewhere, someone was planning the next tableau, and they had given her exactly one day to stop it. She thought of Malhotra in his clock-filled office, confident the world could not touch him. She thought of Anik’s warning about the killer’s symbolism, and how the city’s history was being rewritten in fresh blood. Pulling her notebook closer, she began sketching possible locations, cross-referencing survivor accounts with maps of the city. Every second felt sharper, more precious, like a countdown she could hear but not see. When the church bell in the old quarter tolled midnight, she looked at the note again. Twenty-four hours had just become twenty-three.
3
The morning broke humid and windless, the lake’s surface reflecting a pale, cloudless sky. Meenal arrived at the Upper Lake to find a small crowd of joggers and fishermen corralled by police tape, their voices hushed but restless. The body had been spotted at dawn, floating near the stone steps that descended into the water. Divers had already brought it ashore—a woman in her late fifties, her skin pallid and waterlogged, her sari clinging to her frame like a second skin. Around her waist, tied with deliberate knots, were two rusted gas mask filters, heavy enough to have kept her submerged until she drifted into shallower waters. The filters’ rubber edges were cracked with age, the faded serial numbers barely visible. Meenal crouched beside the corpse, her eyes narrowing at the strange juxtaposition of drowning and industrial relics. The onlookers whispered behind her, their murmurs carrying an echo of old memories—how, on the night of the gas tragedy, people had fled toward this very lake, believing the water could cleanse the burning in their eyes and lungs.
Dr. Leena Mukherjee arrived, squatting beside the body with her ever-present clipboard. “She didn’t die here,” she said after a quick inspection, brushing damp hair from the victim’s forehead. “Water in the lungs is minimal. She was unconscious—maybe already dead—before she entered the lake. Whoever did this wanted her found here.” Meenal glanced toward the calm expanse of water, picturing the chaos of forty years earlier—hundreds wading in, gulping the surface water in desperation, only to collapse from the toxins still clinging to their skin and clothes. “Why the gas mask filters?” she asked. Leena’s brow furrowed. “Symbolism, maybe. Those filters were standard factory issue back then. They didn’t work against methyl isocyanate, but handing them out made management look responsible.” Her voice held a quiet bitterness, as if she’d told the same story too many times. Arif approached with a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a laminated ID card, the edges warped from water exposure. “Victim’s name is Manorama Patel. Runs a community kitchen in the old city. And, uh… she’s on that survivor list you’ve been looking at.” That single fact snapped the pieces into sharper focus for Meenal—the killer wasn’t picking random targets. This was personal.
Back at headquarters, Anik Sen leaned over the table as Meenal spread the new evidence beside the photocopied survivor testimonies. “I remember her,” Anik said, tapping Manorama’s name on the list. “She was seventeen in ’84. Said she spent the entire night in the lake, holding her younger brother above water. He died before sunrise.” Meenal felt the weight of that detail. “So the killer’s recreating her memory—only this time she’s the one drowning.” Anik’s gaze hardened. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This isn’t random violence. These are executions built from memory.” Meenal began marking the murder sites on a map of Bhopal, each one correlating with a location from survivor accounts: the Union Carbide gate where workers tried to warn the neighborhood, now Vikram Joshi’s death; the Upper Lake, a false refuge, now Manorama Patel’s resting place. Two murders, two sites tied to personal tragedies. She traced a circle around the old city’s Chowk Bazaar, where another cluster of testimonies mentioned gas drifting between narrow lanes. A chill ran through her—if the pattern held, that could be next.
As evening settled, Meenal found herself driving along the lake’s edge, the water catching the orange glow of the setting sun. The crowds had thinned, leaving the stone ghats quiet, almost peaceful. Yet in the stillness, she could imagine the shadows of that night—men stumbling, women carrying limp children, the air burning in their throats. She thought of the killer, somewhere out there, piecing together these memories with surgical precision, forcing the city to relive its worst night in slow, deliberate fragments. If this was a survivor, then they were more than just angry—they were methodical, intimate with the history, willing to weaponize it. As she pulled away, her phone vibrated with a new message from an unlisted number: The third will hang where the market breathes. The words settled over her like a cold hand. Twenty-four hours again. And this time, she feared the crowd itself might become part of the stage.
4
The survivor list lay spread across Meenal’s desk like a forgotten census of the damned—rows of names typed on yellowing paper, each with a column for age, occupation, and status. Some were crossed out in red, others marked “relocated,” “untraceable,” or simply “deceased.” Meenal and Arif spent the morning cross-referencing the names with current municipal records. The results were grim. Many had died in the years following the tragedy—respiratory illnesses, cancers, sudden heart failure. Others had vanished entirely, their trails cold by the late ’90s. But one entry snagged Meenal’s attention: Shiv Prasad Sharma, 32 years old in 1984, a machinist at Union Carbide. The file listed him as dead on December 4th, 1984, his body “recovered near Plant Sector 3.” Yet there was no accompanying photograph, and the autopsy section was left blank. A faint pencil note in the margin read, no identification tags found. Meenal tapped the page with her pen. “If he was officially declared dead but never actually examined, it’s possible he walked away.” Arif frowned. “Walked away? From the dead list?” She leaned back. “If he survived and vanished under a different name, he could’ve avoided compensation fraud checks, avoided everything.”
When Anik arrived, the smell of rain clinging to his jacket, she slid the list toward him. His eyes scanned the page, pausing at Shiv Prasad Sharma. “You know what ‘Narmada’ means to survivors?” he asked. “The river that’s both life and death. Some say it carries away sins, others that it remembers every body it takes. If this guy’s alive, he could be our caller—someone who watched the city believe he was dead, and decided to haunt it for real.” Meenal wasn’t convinced yet, but the symmetry was unsettling. Anik added, “I’ve been chasing whispers about a man living under an alias in Hoshangabad district, working odd jobs, never staying long. No photographs. No bank records. If he’s our ghost, he’s been careful.” Meenal jotted the location, her mind already mapping the distance from Bhopal. The timing would be tight with the 24-hour deadline ticking toward the next murder. “We don’t have the luxury of a long manhunt,” she said. “We need proof he exists before we can even think of moving on him.”
In the middle of this, a separate thread began to tug at her attention. A discreet informant in the city planning office had sent her a short video clip—grainy CCTV footage of Rajiv Malhotra’s Bentley parked outside a modest bungalow in Shahpura. The house belonged to DCP (Retd.) Mahesh Thakral, one of the lead officers in the original 1984 investigation. Thakral had been quietly forced into early retirement in ’86 after “procedural irregularities” were uncovered, though the details were never made public. Meenal replayed the footage, noting the time stamp—late evening, lights in the house still on. Arif leaned over her shoulder. “Why would Malhotra be meeting him now?” She thought about the possibility of buried evidence, unfiled witness statements, maybe even altered death records. If someone like Shiv Prasad Sharma had slipped through the cracks, Thakral might know how—and why. The coincidence was too neat to ignore. “Because,” she said slowly, “if there’s a ghost walking among the living, Thakral might have been the one who buried him on paper.”
By nightfall, the rain had tapered into a fine mist, leaving the city’s streets glistening under lamplight. Meenal drove through the older quarters, thinking about the way the survivor list seemed less like a record and more like a half-finished ledger—names that never got their due, deaths that didn’t match the official story. Somewhere in that bureaucratic void, “Narmada” was shaping their theatre of revenge. The thought of Rajiv Malhotra sitting comfortably in his office, meeting retired officers in the shadows, made her jaw tighten. If Malhotra knew the caller’s identity, he was gambling with lives by staying silent. At her flat, she pinned the survivor list to the wall alongside photographs of the two murder victims, drawing lines to possible connections with Malhotra’s circle. In the centre of it all, she pinned the name Shiv Prasad Sharma, underlined twice. The killer might be a ghost—but ghosts still left footprints. And she intended to find every single one before the next body appeared.
5
The chaos in Chowk Bazaar was immediate and suffocating. Even before Meenal reached the scene, she could hear the shouting—traders trying to calm their customers, shop shutters rattling down, the wail of a child lost in the crush. Uniformed officers struggled to push back the swelling crowd, their whistles sharp against the market’s usual cacophony of bargaining voices. Above the maze of stalls selling spices, silks, and brassware, a grim sight swayed in the evening breeze: a man’s body suspended from an overhead cloth canopy, the coarse rope cutting into his neck. His head lolled to one side, his face dusted with a fine white powder that glittered faintly under the harsh market lights. Meenal’s first breath near the scene caught in her throat—a sharp, chemical tang that made her eyes prickle. “Pesticide,” said Dr. Leena Mukherjee when she arrived moments later, her gloved hands carefully brushing the powder from the victim’s shirt. “Lungs are packed with it. He inhaled it before death. The hanging is staging.” The choice of weapon was deliberate and cruel—these were agricultural pesticides still common in the region, deadly in doses far smaller than what had been forced into the man’s body.
Meenal scanned the area as the forensic team worked, noticing how the canopy under which the victim hung covered the busiest part of the bazaar, where hundreds of people would have walked by in the hours before closing. Whoever had killed him wanted the body found in the most public, chaotic way possible. Arif returned from questioning stall owners with little to offer; the market’s tight alleys had given the killer plenty of cover. “Name’s Rafiq Ali,” he said, flipping open his notebook. “Fifty-five. Ran a wholesale spice shop on the north side of the market. No known enemies. But…” He hesitated, glancing at Meenal. “He’s on the survivor list too.” The pattern solidified like a tightening noose—three murders, three survivors, each killed in a way that mirrored or twisted their experience during the gas tragedy. Meenal’s eyes drifted upward to the rope swaying slightly in the air. Hanging in public was humiliation, but filling his lungs with poison before that was personal. She knew she needed someone who could read the subtext in these methods, someone who understood the survivor network intimately. That name came to her without hesitation: Saira Khan.
Finding Saira was not straightforward. She lived in a narrow lane behind an old mosque in Jehangirabad, in a two-room house crowded with plants and the faint scent of camphor. At first, she resisted even opening the door, her lined face visible only through the crack of the chain lock. “I told you people everything in ’85,” she said sharply. “No one listened then. Why would I talk now?” Meenal explained about the killings, about the pattern, about Rafiq Ali’s death that afternoon. At the mention of his name, something in Saira’s eyes shifted. She unhooked the chain and motioned them in. Inside, the single bulb above their heads buzzed faintly. Saira settled into a wicker chair, her hands gripping the armrests. “Rafiq was there that night,” she said slowly. “Not just as a survivor—he was a runner for the factory workers. He carried messages between shifts. On the night of the leak, he told me he saw men with scarves over their faces, moving through the alleys. Some had knives, some sticks. Not all the bodies that fell were from the gas.” She paused, her gaze unfocused as if replaying the images. “Some were killed because they knew too much—about faulty tanks, about orders to ignore safety valves. Workers who had threatened to go to the press. I saw one man’s throat cut right in front of me. The gas was just… convenient cover.”
The weight of her words settled heavily between them. If what Saira claimed was true, then the killer’s methods weren’t just symbolic—they were exposing an older, buried layer of violence from that night, one the official records had scrubbed away. Meenal asked if she recognized the name Shiv Prasad Sharma, but Saira shook her head. “Names change in forty years,” she murmured. “Faces too. But guilt? That doesn’t fade.” As they left, the market lights were being switched off in unison, the streets emptying faster than usual. Fear had begun to seep into the city’s daily rhythm. In the car, Meenal stared at the case board on her phone, the lines between victims now tangled with this new thread: deliberate murders during the disaster itself. It meant their killer wasn’t just avenging gas victims—they were avenging a silenced truth. The next target could be anyone who had seen that truth and lived. And if Rajiv Malhotra’s late-night visits to a retired police officer were connected, then the noose—both literal and metaphorical—was tightening around more than just the killer’s neck.
6
The archives smelled of dust and metal, a scent that clung to the back of Meenal’s throat as she pushed open the rusting cabinet drawers. Decades-old files sat in uneven stacks, their edges curling like dried leaves. She had special clearance to be here—technically for reviewing procedural records from the 1984 investigation—but she knew the real reason she’d been let in was because no one else cared enough to look. Most of these papers had never been digitised; their contents existed only in brittle folders stamped Confidential in fading red ink. Hours passed as she combed through handwritten reports, incident logs, and faded photographs. The more she read, the more the official narrative fractured. A pattern emerged in the margins: scattered references to night-shift security guards at the Union Carbide plant found dead not from gas inhalation, but from blunt force trauma. Their deaths were noted in internal memos but never in the public death toll. Beside one guard’s name, an officer had scribbled body removed before dawn—buried Sector 12. The report ended there, unsigned, as if someone had plucked the pen away mid-sentence.
In another folder marked simply Miscellaneous, she found a series of burial logs from the city’s outskirts. Some entries were dated December 4th, 1984, with locations far from the main burial grounds. The descriptions were disturbingly vague: Male, approx. 35, head injury, no ID, or Female, approx. 20, multiple contusions, no autopsy. These weren’t victims who collapsed in the streets from methyl isocyanate—they were people who had been beaten, stabbed, or otherwise silenced before the gas cloud even dissipated. The implication was chilling: amid the chaos, someone had used the disaster as a cover to eliminate inconvenient witnesses. Meenal pulled the victim profiles from her current case and began cross-checking them with these old burial records. Two of the names matched—Rafiq Ali from the market hanging, and the first victim at the factory gates. They weren’t random survivors. They were people tied, however distantly, to the plant’s security and operations on the night of the leak. The killer’s spree was less about symbolic revenge and more about completing a purge that had started forty years ago.
By late afternoon, her desk was a storm of open files, scrawled notes, and photographs of crime scenes old and new. She pulled Rajiv Malhotra’s historical connection to the plant into focus—his father had been on the board of Malhotra Chemicals, which supplied solvents and machinery parts to Union Carbide before the disaster. Rajiv himself had been a junior manager in 1984, a fact curiously absent from most public biographies. She’d been told he had airtight alibis for the current murders—high-profile meetings, security escorts, corporate functions—but a deeper look at the timestamps showed cracks. For the night of the second killing, his “charity gala” appearance was supported only by a press photograph with no visible clock or date, published days later. For the market hanging, his driver’s GPS log placed the Bentley less than two kilometres from Chowk Bazaar that morning. The alibi wasn’t just shaky—it was possibly fabricated. Meenal felt the slow, cold realisation settle: Rajiv wasn’t merely covering for someone; he might be directly tied to the events the killer was avenging. Whether he was orchestrating the current murders or trying to hide his role in the old ones, his silence was no longer that of an innocent man.
When she finally stepped outside, the sky was the colour of tarnished silver, the air heavy with the threat of rain. She thought of “Narmada,” the phantom survivor whose voice had sparked this race against time. If the caller was indeed Shiv Prasad Sharma—or whatever name he now used—he wasn’t killing indiscriminately. He was dismantling a conspiracy brick by brick, forcing the truth into daylight one body at a time. But the truth was slippery; in a city like Bhopal, memories could be buried as easily as bodies. As she drove away from the archives, Meenal knew the next step would be dangerous. She needed to confront Rajiv, not in his boardroom or behind his security detail, but somewhere he couldn’t control the narrative. The clock on the dashboard ticked over to a new hour, and she felt its weight. If the pattern held, she had less than a day before the next murder—and she was no longer sure she could keep ahead of it.
7
The call came just after dawn, slicing through the stillness of Meenal’s apartment like a blade. No distortion filter this time — the voice was low, deliberate, and male, every word measured. “Inspector Rathore,” the caller said, “you’re running out of time. Tell me — what is the air you cannot breathe?” Before she could respond, there was a faint metallic clink, like a chain being dragged over concrete, and the line went dead. She replayed the riddle in her mind as she dressed, its phrasing coiled with menace. The air you cannot breathe… Poison? Smoke? Gas? Or something more literal — air sealed away? The thought itched at the edge of her brain as she met Anik at the station. His eyes were bloodshot, a sign he’d been up combing archives of his own. “He’s escalating,” Anik muttered. “First it was symbolic. Now it’s personal.” They drove in silence toward the old railway yard, following a vague report from a maintenance worker about a “bad smell” and a broken padlock on one of the disused storage access points.
The yard was a forgotten skeleton of the city’s industrial spine — rusted tracks vanishing into weeds, freight sheds sagging under decades of neglect. A group of workers stood near the entrance to an underground tunnel, their faces pale. Meenal pulled on gloves and ducked inside, her torch beam slicing through the dust-laden dark. The air was heavy, thick, and metallic; each breath felt like it took more effort than the last. Twenty meters in, the tunnel widened into a low-ceilinged chamber. In the center lay the victim — a man in his forties, sprawled on the concrete, mouth open as if frozen mid-gasp. His fingernails were broken, deep scratches marking the walls where he’d tried to claw his way out. Dr. Leena’s assessment was grim: slow suffocation. “No ventilation,” she said quietly, shining her light up at the sealed hatch overhead. “He died long before anyone could hear him.” In the corner, half-buried under debris, were corroded barrels marked with faded chemical codes — inventory that had never appeared in any public ledger. The riddle’s answer clicked into place with a sick certainty: the air you cannot breathe was the air in here, the stagnant pocket where toxic memory still lingered.
Back at headquarters, the mood was tense. Meenal’s superior, Deputy Commissioner Shukla, called her into his office and closed the door. “You’ve got a problem,” he said without preamble. “And it’s not the killer. It’s the people upstairs. They want this wrapped up — quietly. No more digging into the old case, no more dragging Malhotra’s name into the press.” The warning was as much an order as it was a threat. Anik, waiting in the corridor, had already guessed the conversation’s content. “They’ll protect him at any cost,” he said bitterly as they walked out. “If you push harder, you won’t just lose the case. You’ll lose your badge.” But Meenal couldn’t let it go. The victim in the tunnel — identified as Sudhir Patankar — had been a junior accountant at the railway depot in 1984. His name appeared in a handwritten ledger noting off-book storage payments for “miscellaneous materials” — the same type of barrels she’d seen today. He wasn’t random. He was another loose thread from the night of the gas leak, now violently severed.
That evening, the city seemed quieter than usual, as though holding its breath. Meenal sat in her car overlooking the darkened silhouette of the old plant, the hum of insects loud in the humid air. Her phone vibrated with a message from an unknown number: You’re closer than you think, but you still can’t breathe where I can. Attached was a photograph — a blurred, low-light shot of the very chamber where Sudhir had died. The image was time-stamped an hour before the body had been found, proof the killer had lingered to watch the aftermath unfold. Anik’s voice on the line was tight with urgency when she called him. “He’s baiting you,” he said. “He wants you in his game, not on the outside of it.” She looked again at the message, at the taunt embedded in those words. Political pressure was building to end the investigation, but the killer’s pressure was worse — a tightening noose made of secrets and airless rooms. And she knew, with a kind of exhausted certainty, that if she didn’t follow him into the places no one wanted to go, someone else would be found there next. Breathless.
8
Saira’s apartment was a dim mosaic of old photographs, newspaper clippings, and hand-painted sketches tacked to the walls. The air smelled faintly of sandalwood and dust, the scent of years spent in quiet vigilance. When Meenal arrived, Saira was seated cross-legged on the floor, an old leather-bound diary resting in her lap. Her hands trembled slightly as she passed it over. “I started it the night the gas came,” she said, her voice low. “I was sixteen. I drew what I couldn’t write down.” The diary’s pages were thick with age, each one filled with drawings—clouds swirling into skull-like shapes, clocks with broken hands, and shadowy figures standing in doorways. At first glance, they looked like the dreamscapes of a traumatised mind, but something about the repetition of certain symbols pulled at Meenal’s attention. There were sequences—three clouds, then a clock, then a single line pointing to a building. The sketches were dated, and as she scanned them, Meenal realised the most recent entry was only a week old. In it, the clouds hung over a rectangular structure with boarded windows, the clock hands frozen at 3:17.
Anik joined them, and together they spread the diary across the table. He pointed to the rectangular structure. “That’s not abstract,” he murmured. “That’s the old Sharda Hospital in the north quarter. Shut down after the disaster.” Meenal knew it well—it had been a makeshift treatment center for children with severe gas exposure, many of whom never left. The time on the clock might be the moment the killer planned to strike. She radioed Arif for backup, and they headed out, the late afternoon heat pressing against the car windows. The hospital loomed in the distance like a bleached skeleton, its white paint long since blistered and peeled. Inside, the air was thick with mildew and the faint rust tang of old metal. The corridors were littered with broken gurneys, shattered glass, and discarded oxygen tanks. Somewhere deep within the building, she heard a muffled cry. Her heart kicked into overdrive as she followed the sound, weaving past collapsed ceiling panels and flapping curtains that whispered with each step she took.
She found the victim in a dark ward at the far end of the east wing—a young activist, bound to a bedframe with chemical tubing, a rag tied around his mouth. His eyes were wide with panic, his breathing shallow from the stifling air. Meenal cut him free, calling to Arif to get him out immediately. But even as relief flooded her, she knew it wasn’t over. A faint creak echoed from the doorway. She turned sharply, catching a fleeting glimpse of a figure disappearing into the shadows—a man in a dark jacket, moving fast and silent. She gave chase, boots pounding against the cracked linoleum, but the hospital was a labyrinth of collapsed hallways and blocked exits. Twice she thought she had him cornered, only to find empty air and the faint echo of footsteps. The killer knew the building well, slipping away like smoke. By the time she reached the exterior, the back gate was swinging open on its rusted hinges, the street beyond empty except for the distant rumble of a departing motorbike.
It was only when she returned to the ward that she noticed the object on the floor by the bed—a small, tarnished whistle, simple and unadorned, its metal dulled with age. She bent to pick it up, and the moment her fingers closed around it, the breath caught in her throat. She knew this whistle. It was identical to the one her father had carried when he worked as a railway guard—identical down to the tiny dent near the mouthpiece. Her father had died when she was a child, and his whistle had been buried with him, or so she’d always believed. For a heartbeat, she couldn’t move, her mind refusing to bridge the impossible gap between memory and reality. Anik’s voice cut through her shock. “What is it?” he asked. She slipped the whistle into her pocket, her voice steady but her pulse roaring in her ears. “It means,” she said quietly, “that the killer just made this personal.” And with that, the game between hunter and hunted took on an entirely new weight—one that reached far deeper than the case itself.
9
Rajiv Malhotra’s office was a monument to wealth and self-assurance—glass walls framing the city skyline, teak paneling that seemed to swallow sound, and a desk so wide it could have been mistaken for a boardroom table. Meenal stood at its edge, her case file spread open like a prosecutor’s exhibit. “You lied,” she said flatly. “Not just about the plant’s safety records, but about shipments made off the books in late 1984. Chemicals that never appeared in any report.” She slid across a faded bill of lading, stamped with the Malhotra Chemicals insignia, alongside an internal memo linking those shipments to a factory worker named Harish Solanki—a man listed as dead since the night of the gas leak. Rajiv’s eyes flickered at the name, the first crack in his carefully built façade. “You’ve been digging in the wrong place, Inspector,” he said, leaning back. “The gas leak was an accident. What happened afterward… wasn’t.” His voice lowered. “There was another incident that night. An experiment. We were developing a pesticide formula—more potent than anything on the market. It failed. Badly. A tank ruptured. The release was intentional—meant to burn off the evidence before the government could intervene.”
The words hung in the air like a second, invisible cloud of poison. Meenal felt the floor shift beneath her. “You used the disaster as cover,” she said slowly, piecing it together aloud. “The deaths, the panic—it hid your mistake.” Rajiv didn’t flinch. “It wasn’t my mistake alone. There were others—scientists, investors, bureaucrats. They all wanted it buried. And Harish?” He gave a humorless smile. “He knew too much. He should have died in the leak. He didn’t. We made sure no one ever saw him again.” Meenal’s pulse thudded in her ears. She had what she needed—a confession tying Rajiv not just to corporate negligence, but to premeditated mass harm. She reached for her phone to call in the arrest, but Rajiv raised a hand. “Inspector, if you think you can make this stick without burning down half the state’s political machinery, you’re naïve. People will silence you before they let me talk.” His arrogance was undiminished, but there was something else in his eyes now—fear. He knew someone else was moving against him.
The meeting was interrupted by a noise that didn’t belong in an executive suite—a muffled thud from the corridor, followed by the brief, high-pitched whine of feedback through the desk intercom. Rajiv’s personal security detail didn’t answer when he called their names. Meenal’s instincts kicked in. She moved toward the door, hand on her service weapon, but the moment she stepped into the hall, the overhead lights cut out, plunging the space into shadow. A figure moved in the dark, fast and deliberate. There was a sharp hiss, and something—chloroform, by the smell—hit her senses like a punch. She stumbled back into the office, vision swimming. Through the haze, she saw Rajiv being grabbed from behind, a black hood yanked over his head. His muffled protests were cut short as he was dragged bodily toward the service exit. By the time Meenal regained her footing and sprinted after them, the corridor was empty except for the faint smell of engine exhaust from a vehicle already gone.
She stood in the parking bay, scanning the street beyond, her mind racing. The killer had taken him—not to silence him, but to stage his final act. Rajiv Malhotra, the untouchable titan, was now bait in a deadly game whose clock was almost run out. Anik arrived minutes later, summoned by her terse call. He took one look at her expression and didn’t need to ask what had happened. “We’re out of time,” he said grimly. Meenal felt the weight of the whistle in her pocket, the killer’s calling card, and knew Anik was right. The next 24 hours wouldn’t just be about stopping a murder—they’d be about deciding whether justice was better served in a courtroom or in the dark hands of someone who had already rewritten the rules.
10
Rajiv Malhotra’s office was a monument to wealth and self-assurance—glass walls framing the city skyline, teak paneling that seemed to swallow sound, and a desk so wide it could have been mistaken for a boardroom table. Meenal stood at its edge, her case file spread open like a prosecutor’s exhibit. “You lied,” she said flatly. “Not just about the plant’s safety records, but about shipments made off the books in late 1984. Chemicals that never appeared in any report.” She slid across a faded bill of lading, stamped with the Malhotra Chemicals insignia, alongside an internal memo linking those shipments to a factory worker named Harish Solanki—a man listed as dead since the night of the gas leak. Rajiv’s eyes flickered at the name, the first crack in his carefully built façade. “You’ve been digging in the wrong place, Inspector,” he said, leaning back. “The gas leak was an accident. What happened afterward… wasn’t.” His voice lowered. “There was another incident that night. An experiment. We were developing a pesticide formula—more potent than anything on the market. It failed. Badly. A tank ruptured. The release was intentional—meant to burn off the evidence before the government could intervene.”
The words hung in the air like a second, invisible cloud of poison. Meenal felt the floor shift beneath her. “You used the disaster as cover,” she said slowly, piecing it together aloud. “The deaths, the panic—it hid your mistake.” Rajiv didn’t flinch. “It wasn’t my mistake alone. There were others—scientists, investors, bureaucrats. They all wanted it buried. And Harish?” He gave a humorless smile. “He knew too much. He should have died in the leak. He didn’t. We made sure no one ever saw him again.” Meenal’s pulse thudded in her ears. She had what she needed—a confession tying Rajiv not just to corporate negligence, but to premeditated mass harm. She reached for her phone to call in the arrest, but Rajiv raised a hand. “Inspector, if you think you can make this stick without burning down half the state’s political machinery, you’re naïve. People will silence you before they let me talk.” His arrogance was undiminished, but there was something else in his eyes now—fear. He knew someone else was moving against him.
The meeting was interrupted by a noise that didn’t belong in an executive suite—a muffled thud from the corridor, followed by the brief, high-pitched whine of feedback through the desk intercom. Rajiv’s personal security detail didn’t answer when he called their names. Meenal’s instincts kicked in. She moved toward the door, hand on her service weapon, but the moment she stepped into the hall, the overhead lights cut out, plunging the space into shadow. A figure moved in the dark, fast and deliberate. There was a sharp hiss, and something—chloroform, by the smell—hit her senses like a punch. She stumbled back into the office, vision swimming. Through the haze, she saw Rajiv being grabbed from behind, a black hood yanked over his head. His muffled protests were cut short as he was dragged bodily toward the service exit. By the time Meenal regained her footing and sprinted after them, the corridor was empty except for the faint smell of engine exhaust from a vehicle already gone.
She stood in the parking bay, scanning the street beyond, her mind racing. The killer had taken him—not to silence him, but to stage his final act. Rajiv Malhotra, the untouchable titan, was now bait in a deadly game whose clock was almost run out. Anik arrived minutes later, summoned by her terse call. He took one look at her expression and didn’t need to ask what had happened. “We’re out of time,” he said grimly. Meenal felt the weight of the whistle in her pocket, the killer’s calling card, and knew Anik was right. The next 24 hours wouldn’t just be about stopping a murder—they’d be about deciding whether justice was better served in a courtroom or in the dark hands of someone who had already rewritten the rules.
End
