Pramod Gupta
Chapter 1:
The Pushkar sky was ablaze with the twilight gold of November, washing the desert fairground in hues of copper and crimson. Thousands of camels stood tethered under brightly colored tents, while locals and tourists milled about—some bartering over livestock, others snapping photos of bearded snake charmers and turbaned herders. Drums beat in rhythm with the swirling ghagras of Rajasthani dancers, and the air smelled of roasted peanuts, camel sweat, and incense. Yet amid this festival of color and tradition, a shrill scream pierced through the evening cacophony. It came from a sandpit just beyond the edge of the fairgrounds, near a withered acacia tree where children often played. When the local constable arrived minutes later, pushing through the gathering crowd, he found a young European woman crouched beside a half-buried body—her pale face drained of blood. The corpse was that of a middle-aged Rajasthani man, shirtless, the skin of his chest scorched by something that resembled a tribal tattoo—dark, angry, etched with such precision that it looked as though it had been branded into his flesh. It was circular, spiraling inward with what appeared to be ancient symbols and eye-like motifs. The constable immediately radioed forensics. The Camel Fair had stopped being a celebration; it had become a crime scene.
Forensic Investigator Rudra Rathore reached Pushkar from Jaipur by nightfall, the wheels of his police jeep kicking up dust along the narrow desert road. He was tall, rugged, and carried a weather-beaten leather satchel packed with UV torches, gloves, tweezers, and a camera. A faint line of kohl from the day’s heat had smeared under his deep-set eyes, but he was unfazed. This wasn’t his first body in the desert—but this was the first one that spoke in such ancient language. As Rudra approached the corpse under the harsh beam of halogen floodlights, he took a deep breath. The tattoo wasn’t decorative; it was ritualistic. He noted the precision, the burn pattern, and the charred edges of the skin. It hadn’t been done with ink. It had been branded. “Oxidized copper, possibly,” he muttered, mostly to himself. As the attending doctor examined the cadaver for cause of death—blunt force trauma to the head—Rudra focused entirely on the design. Something about the spirals nagged at his memory. He photographed it in sections, each click echoing off the desert silence, then took a swab of the blackened skin. Around the dead man’s neck hung a broken beaded thread—something worn by folk performers or fakirs. No wallet. No ID. But tucked beneath his waistband was a small pouch of dried rose petals and turmeric—items Rudra recognized from rural rituals. “This man didn’t just die,” Rudra said quietly. “He was offered.” The constable blinked. “Offered to what?” Rudra stood up, brushing sand from his trousers. “That’s what I intend to find out.”
The next morning, as the sun spilled gold across the sandstone streets of Pushkar, Rudra sat alone on a rooftop chai stall, staring at the tattoo photograph on his tablet. He had run it through the police database—no matches. Not gang-related. Not criminal branding. But something older. Something ceremonial. He called an old acquaintance, Professor Hiralal Ojha, retired folklorist from Rajasthan University. Over a crackling call, the professor gasped as Rudra described the symbol. “Bhuthan Sampraday,” he whispered. “What?” Rudra leaned in. “The Bhuthan were a desert tribe—exiled a century ago by the Maharajas. Their symbols were banned. This… this spiral you’re describing… it’s called Kaal-Gola. It was used in death rituals to mark revenge. To seal memory into flesh.” Rudra frowned. “Memory into flesh?” The professor exhaled. “The Bhuthan believed that if someone wronged the tribe, their bloodline must be marked. One by one. Each death carries the same mark. As if the tattoo is hunting the next victim.” Rudra’s fingers tensed around his cup. His gaze drifted to the sand dunes beyond the city, glowing amber in the morning sun. The tattoo wasn’t a message. It was a warning. And this wasn’t the first body. He was willing to bet it wouldn’t be the last. As camels bellowed in the distance and temple bells chimed faintly from the ghats, Rudra Rathore realized something chilling: the killer wasn’t hiding in the shadows—he was announcing himself in symbols written in blood.
Chapter 2:
The town of Jaisalmer lay like a golden mirage in the afternoon sun, its honeyed stone fort glinting against the blinding sky as if time had forgotten to move. A call came through while Rudra Rathore was still reviewing lab results from the Pushkar case. Another body had been found. This time not in a bustling fair, but deep within the labyrinthine alleys behind a spice merchant’s shop in Jaisalmer’s old bazaar. Rudra arrived by evening, the golden sandstone of the ancient city swallowing him whole as he stepped out of his vehicle. The body had been discovered by the merchant’s grandson while chasing a ball into a narrow alley—an abandoned courtyard filled with broken furniture, cracked idols, and a rusted hand pump. The corpse was propped sitting upright against the wall, legs folded, eyes wide open as though meditating in death. But the signature was unmistakable. Branded deep into his chest—again over the heart—was the same spiral tattoo, burnt into the skin with frightening accuracy. Rudra crouched and gently touched the mark with gloved fingers. This victim was older, maybe in his sixties, well-fed, with a gold ring still clinging to a stiffened finger. Again, no ID. Again, a pouch tied at the waist—this time containing black mustard seeds and crushed marigold petals. It wasn’t random. These objects meant something. Rudra felt it now, the rhythm, the method. He wasn’t chasing a killer. He was reading verses from a dark, unfolding epic where every corpse was a syllable.
That night, sitting beneath the yellow lamplight of his rented haveli room, Rudra sifted through the case notes with a growing sense of unease. Both victims had been found at heritage locations—Pushkar and Jaisalmer—places steeped in centuries-old traditions and buried memories. The tattoo wasn’t just repeating itself—it was evolving. In the second body, Rudra noticed additional etching around the spiral—tiny symbols like eyes or teardrops. He ran an enhancement. There were five marks, arranged around the central spiral like petals around a flower. It reminded him of desert temple inscriptions he’d once glimpsed while visiting the ruins at Kiradu. But he needed cultural context, not forensic logic. And so, reluctantly, he made a call to Dr. Meher Qureshi, a cultural anthropologist and his former research rival from his university days. Meher was known for her unorthodox work on desert tribes, oral history, and tattoo anthropology. She answered after the second ring, her voice sharp but familiar. “What are you into this time, Rathore?” He explained, sending her the image. Silence stretched, then her tone changed. “Where did you get this?” she asked. He could hear the clink of bangles and papers being shuffled. “This is Bhuthan iconography. But not just Bhuthan—it’s part of a ritual sequence known as Smaran Yantra. It means ‘the memory wheel’.” Rudra stared at the spiraled tattoo on his tablet again, now more than ever realizing it wasn’t merely a signature. “This is a murder sequence,” Meher continued. “Each spiral represents a family line. The petals… they’re for names yet to be crossed out.”
By the next morning, Meher arrived in Jaisalmer. Dressed in a rust-red kurta and a black shawl stitched with mirrorwork, she carried with her a leather folio filled with hand-drawn sketches of tribal tattoos, charts, and symbols gathered from her years of documenting lost desert lineages. At the morgue, she examined the second body in silence, her expression unreadable. Then, gently pointing to the spiral, she said, “This is tribal math. The killer is not improvising—he’s following a script.” She then unfurled an old parchment she had copied from a Bhuthan manuscript years ago—nearly identical symbols spiraled around what looked like a deity with fire in its eyes. “This was used in rituals to remember betrayal,” she said. “When a tribe was wiped out or a family dishonored, one elder was assigned to remember. That memory became a burden—marked onto the skin, passed down. And sometimes, revived.” Rudra looked at her, the air thick with incense and formalin. “You’re saying someone is carrying out revenge… for something that happened generations ago?” Meher nodded. “Not someone. A descendant. Maybe the last.” Outside, the yellow city buzzed with tourists buying carved elephants and Rajasthani puppets, oblivious to the poetry of vengeance unraveling in their midst. For Rudra, however, the case was no longer confined to cold steel tables and blood patterns. It was now tied to a forgotten massacre, a cursed symbol, and a killer who believed in memory more than justice. As he watched the spiral etched on the second victim, a silent truth settled over him—this wasn’t a series of murders. This was a prophecy in motion.
Chapter 3:
The heat in Barmer was sharper, more intimate, like a blade resting flat against the skin. Dust hung in the air like smoke, and every step stirred it into small whirlwinds. Rudra and Meher arrived late in the afternoon, summoned by news of a third body found near the edge of the desert village of Kolu, close to the ruins of an abandoned temple once dedicated to forgotten folk deities. The scene was different this time—more isolated, more deliberate. The body was positioned beneath a centuries-old sandstone arch, half-swallowed by sand, the forehead smeared with what looked like vermillion. The burn mark was present again—this time larger, more complex. The spiral was encircled by seven dots arranged in a crescent arc. Rudra squatted beside the body as the wind picked up, flinging sand across his boots and into the folds of his shirt. “This isn’t just a mark anymore,” he murmured. “It’s a diagram.” Meher leaned over, her eyes narrowing. “This is a yantra,” she said slowly. “A ritual geometric code. The killer is escalating. With each death, he’s not just branding—he’s building.” The victim, a local bureaucrat named Satyanarayan Luhar, was known for heading a land acquisition board in the ’90s. Rudra’s mind raced. “Wasn’t this area contested tribal land back then?” he asked. Meher nodded grimly. “Displaced communities. Forgotten protests. If the Bhuthan were among them…” She trailed off. Rudra glanced around—the half-crumbling walls, the dusty idols smeared in forgotten turmeric, the silence that was too perfect. This wasn’t a killing site. It was an offering ground.
That night, Meher and Rudra sat in a tiny mud house lent to them by a local schoolteacher, the kerosene lamp flickering between them. Spread across the floor were photos of the three bodies, symbol tracings, and historical documents that Meher had dug out from an old academic archive in Jodhpur. Rudra noticed something chilling: the evolution of the tattoos wasn’t random. Each spiral added elements from older Bhuthan symbols, as if tracing a ritual journey—from mourning to wrath. The first had a plain spiral. The second, petals. The third, a crescent of dots. Meher pulled out a weathered palm-leaf etching depicting the “Bhuthan Kriya”—a sequence of revenge rites performed for each slain ancestor, usually by the last surviving kin. “According to this,” she said, tapping the leaf gently, “there were seven oaths taken by the Bhuthan ‘smaran bhakta’—a memory keeper. Seven acts of vengeance. Seven marks. Seven souls.” Rudra stared at her. “So there will be four more murders?” She didn’t answer. Instead, she handed him an old charcoal sketch of a desert shrine, nearly buried in sand, with the seven tattoo marks etched across a stone floor. “This place existed once. Legend says it was where the Bhuthan prayed before exile. If we can find it, maybe we’ll find the meaning behind this ritual. Or the name of the last bhakta.” Rudra knew what this meant—the killer wasn’t just exacting revenge. He was completing a sacred design. Somewhere, an ancient ledger of wrongs was being balanced in blood.
By morning, the two had tracked down an elderly folk singer, Bapu Girdhari, who remembered lullabies from his childhood that spoke of “the men of ash and spiral.” They met him under a neem tree, his milky eyes searching their faces as he hummed a tune half-remembered. “They marked the sky with fire. Seven they lost. Seven must fall.” He pointed toward the dunes, whispering of a place known in old songs as “Khoon-Ki-Chowki”—The Altar of Blood.” A caravan trail, now buried in time, once led to it. Rudra pulled out an old topographic map of the region; Meher aligned it with tribal folk routes. When they overlaid the murder locations with the trails, a geometric alignment began to form. It resembled the same spiral pattern—widening, unfolding westward. Rudra’s breath caught. “He’s not just killing. He’s drawing something on the land itself.” The weight of that realization sank in. The killer was using Rajasthan as canvas and corpses as ink. That afternoon, they set out across the dunes in a rented jeep, bouncing over sand hills, following instinct and folklore. Hours later, sunburnt and exhausted, they reached the edge of an old plateau where seven stones stood arranged in a semicircle—weather-beaten, stained. Upon one, faint and flaking, was the exact tattoo from the third body. The altar was real. It existed. The prophecy was alive. And somewhere, perhaps watching from behind the heat haze of the dunes, was a man carrying the weight of seven oaths—and four more names not yet crossed out.
Chapter 4:
The desert air changed as they entered the village of Rohitpura, a quiet hamlet veiled by dust and time, tucked along a forgotten stretch of the Marwar plateau. There were no signboards, no cellphone signals—only mud-brick homes, tethered goats, and the slow rhythm of rural life. Children stared curiously from doorways as Rudra and Meher asked for Bhanwari Devi, the name passed to them by the folk singer who remembered lullabies about spirals and fire. A woman in her seventies, they were told, who no longer spoke except in rhyme, and who lived alone at the edge of the village, in a crumbling haveli built of yellow stone and ghosts. When they found her, seated in a charpai under a neem tree, she didn’t look up. Draped in a deep indigo ghaghra-choli, her silver hair coiled in a loose bun, Bhanwari Devi hummed under her breath—a tune familiar to Meher, one she had heard years ago during fieldwork in the tribal belts of Banswara. “Bhool mat jaana re, reet purani…” Bhanwari’s arms were covered in tattoos—not decorative, but layered with spirals, dots, crescents, and symbols that mirrored those found on the victims. Her gaze met Rudra’s slowly, with eyes milky yet alert. When Meher introduced herself and gently asked about the symbols, Bhanwari said nothing for a moment. Then she sang, in a half-murmur, “Saat naam likhe gale par… jinhe reet ne chhoda tha. Khoon se likhe jaayenge…” Seven names written on throats, left behind by law, written again in blood. Rudra stiffened. It wasn’t a song—it was a curse preserved in melody.
Inside her home, walls blackened with soot and lined with terracotta figurines of tribal gods, Bhanwari showed them a bundle wrapped in red cloth. Inside were yellowed papers, torn pages from palm-leaf manuscripts, and a charred wooden board etched with seven symbols around a central spiral—an identical match to the altar stones in the desert. “This is the Bhuthan oath,” Meher whispered, translating as Bhanwari sang softly. “Seven clans. One was slaughtered. The bhakta survives, carries names in flesh. Each time the moon bows, one must fall.” Rudra pointed to the bottom of the spiral—there, unmistakably, was a glyph identical to the forehead mark found on the third victim. These weren’t spontaneous killings. They were part of a ritual script, each murder an act of ancient penance, carried out by someone not just obeying history—but reviving it. Bhanwari pointed at one torn fragment. It contained a sketch of a ritual fire, with what looked like a boy standing inside a ring of stone, surrounded by masked figures. “What is this?” Rudra asked. “The memory ritual,” Meher translated. “The boy is the ‘smaran bhakta.’ He witnesses the oath. He remembers. He returns.” Rudra sat back, heart pounding. This killer—they weren’t driven by madness. They had been trained, shaped by folklore, memory, and generations of silence. Bhanwari’s lullaby echoed in the stillness: “Jinhe dhoondhte the, ve kab ka jaa chuke… par yaad unki, matti mein likhi hai.” Those who you sought are long gone, but their memory is etched into the dust.
As they left Bhanwari Devi’s haveli, the sun began to set behind the dunes, casting long shadows across the village. Rudra lit a cigarette, the smoke curling like one of the spiral tattoos that had haunted his nights for days now. “She didn’t just preserve stories,” he muttered. “She preserved instruction.” Meher looked shaken but certain. “Whoever the killer is, he’s following this cycle to the letter. And Bhanwari’s song is the map.” They returned to the jeep and opened a file containing names of officials involved in the Rohitpura displacement drive twenty-eight years ago. The names were old, some deceased, others unreachable—but Rudra circled four. Three were dead already—victims one through three. The fourth, still alive, lived in a bungalow in Udaipur. The pattern was no longer theory—it was unfolding before them with ruthless order. That night, as Rudra lay sleepless in the corner of the guest room lent by the village panchayat, he opened his journal and drew the spiral again. But this time, he didn’t trace it as a symbol. He traced it as a path—a trail not only marked on flesh, but on land, on memory, on time. The Bhuthan had not vanished. They had been erased. And now, someone was writing them back into history—with fire and blood.
Chapter 5:
The morning air in Udaipur was crisp, carrying the scent of wet stone and lotus as mist drifted off Lake Pichola. Rudra and Meher drove through the sleepy city streets toward the marble-tiled bungalow of Omprakash Vyas, a retired land records officer—last on the list of survivors from the Rohitpura acquisition project. Unlike the previous victims, Vyas was still breathing. The two officers found him in a shaded veranda surrounded by bougainvillaea and peacocks, sipping cardamom tea with trembling hands. He was in his seventies, his face creased by years of silence. When Rudra introduced himself and showed the spiral tattoo sketches, the old man grew visibly pale. “We didn’t know it was Bhuthan land,” he muttered, though his voice betrayed guilt. “There were no claimants. The government gave us paperwork. We were told it was barren.” Meher leaned forward. “But you saw people. The tribal shrines, the women gathering water… you saw them, didn’t you?” Vyas didn’t answer directly. Instead, he stared past the gate toward the hills. “We turned our backs. And now someone is turning it back on us.” Rudra showed him images of the dead men. Vyas nodded weakly. “We were all there that week. All signed the same order.” That evening, just as Rudra feared, a call came from the Udaipur police. Vyas was found dead inside his prayer room—kneeling, eyes open, chest burned with the spiral now adorned with seven tiny flame marks. Rudra clenched his jaw. The killer had struck within hours, moving faster now. It was no longer just folklore—it was a ticking litany. The prophecy was one corpse closer to its final verse.
That night, Rudra worked alone in the dimly lit forensic lab inside the regional police headquarters. With the fourth body now on the slab, his patience had snapped into methodical coldness. Under a microscope, he studied the tissue surrounding the tattoo burns. Microscopic copper traces confirmed his earlier theory: the tattoos were seared using hand-forged copper needles, their tips carved with ceremonial etching. The burn depth, the cleanliness, the technique—it was surgical, even reverent. This wasn’t torture. It was ritual branding, and the tool had likely been used many times. Rudra reconstructed the branding sequence using 3D mapping and superimposed images from all four victims. A pattern emerged: each mark built toward a larger geometric shape—a desert mandala, layered with meaning, possibly completing itself with the final death. He stared at the model until his vision blurred. What disturbed him more was that each symbol also acted like a coordinate point—as if someone was carving something onto Rajasthan’s soil using human beings as posts. Meher arrived near dawn, holding a torn piece of parchment she had retrieved from Bhanwari Devi’s house. “The last verse,” she said breathlessly. “The Bhuthan bhakta was not only a memory keeper. He was also a mapmaker. When the seven were marked, their graves aligned to summon the tribe’s spirit back into history. A resurrection through death.” Rudra stared at her. “You’re saying the killer believes he’s restoring a tribe by killing its destroyers?” Meher nodded. “It’s not vengeance. It’s a ritual cartography.”
As the sun rose, they drove west toward the outskirts of Jalore, following the killer’s symbolic trail across the state. Along the way, Meher read aloud translated passages from the Bhuthan Kriya Granth, an ancient manuscript once banned by princely states for inciting rebellion. The killer was reenacting this rite with frightening precision. “Each death must occur near ancestral land or sacred water,” she read. “Each mark must be sealed by fire, and the witness must carry the ash.” Rudra’s hands tightened on the wheel. They now had reason to believe the killer was preserving ash or burnt flesh from each murder. But for what? Fueling a final rite? Or creating something symbolic with the remains? Their thoughts were interrupted by a call from the forensics team in Jaipur—a breakthrough. A partial print had been found on the inner lining of the third victim’s waistband. Not much, but enough for a familial match. The print belonged to a missing child from 1997, presumed dead after a riot in the tribal belts near Barmer. The child’s mother was Bhuthan. His father was never identified. Rudra’s blood ran cold. “He didn’t die,” Meher whispered. “He survived. Raised on songs of revenge. He’s the last bhakta.” A ghost born of genocide, molded by lullabies, now walking in shadows with ink and flame. As the jeep sped through the crimson dunes of Marwar, Rudra knew only one thing for certain—the final act of this ritual would not wait for the law. It would happen on ancient land, under firelight, and with names still bleeding across the sand.
Chapter 6:
The city of Bikaner rose like a sandstone mirage from the desert haze, stoic and sunbitten, with its carved balconies and red fort looming over crisscrossing alleys. Rudra stood outside an old haveli in the Nathusar area, where a fifth body had been discovered at dawn—this time, a woman, aged around fifty-five, once a senior judge known for authorizing the sealing of tribal community lands during the early 2000s. Her body had been placed carefully atop a silk dhurrie, a bronze lamp still burning beside her, her hands folded in prayer. And on her chest, once more, the spiral flared—this time with twelve marks around it like clock hands. A new element had appeared: a thin line of calligraphy in Rajasthani dialect inked in red pigment across her ribs. Rudra photographed the line and called Meher immediately. When she arrived, her face froze. “It’s a couplet,” she said softly, her fingers tracing the air above the woman’s skin. “‘Jin ke lahu se likhe gaye geet, unhi ki zubaan mein nyay aayega’ — Justice will arrive in the tongue of those whose blood wrote the song.” Rudra frowned. “So he’s quoting something?” Meher nodded slowly. “No. He’s composing. These are not just ritual acts anymore. He’s turned murder into poetry.” The room was filled with silence thick enough to touch. For the first time, Rudra wasn’t staring at a killer’s signature. He was staring at authorship.
Back at the district control center, Rudra pinned a fresh sheet onto the murder board. Five victims. Five symbols. Five cities. And now, five lines—one found beneath ultraviolet light, another stitched inside a waistband, one inked faintly in vermillion powder near a shrine, and this latest—written openly on the skin. He wrote each down and rearranged them, guided by Meher’s fluency in dialect and symbolism. Slowly, the couplets began to form a chant. Each line flowed into the next, like the refrain of a Bhuthan mourning song. Meher shivered. “It’s a death hymn. He’s building something bigger. The language isn’t modern Rajasthani. It’s pre-Sanskrit dialect—Bhuthani verse-form.” They searched old tribal folktales and discovered a pattern: in Bhuthan culture, poems were also prophecies. A completed verse sequence was read during resurrection rites—to invite the spirit of the lost tribe back to the earth. “We’re not just chasing a killer,” Rudra said grimly. “We’re chasing someone who thinks he’s writing the resurrection of a civilization.” Meanwhile, another forensic alert came through. The ink used for the red calligraphy matched a rare pigment extracted from crushed lal mitti and goat blood—used only in pre-colonial Rajasthan by tribal scribes and ceremonial priests. Someone was not just mimicking tribal customs. Someone had inherited them. Meher’s hand shook as she held the translation in front of her. “He’s not insane,” she whispered. “He’s devout.”
As night bled over Bikaner’s skyline, Rudra sat in the precinct’s back room, staring at the killer’s verses, trying to decipher a future step. The next line mentioned “panch rath ka veer”—the hero of five chariots. Meher recognized the reference. “Panchrath Mandir, near Jodhpur,” she said. “An ancient site turned into ruins after mining expansions. It was tribal ground, razed twenty years ago.” Rudra’s jaw clenched. Another old name surfaced—Dheeraj Maheswari, the gemstone magnate whose company had been involved in that very mining project. Rudra had interrogated him weeks ago, but the man had shrugged it off. “I fund temples now,” he had boasted. “Let the past stay buried.” Now Rudra realized—the killer didn’t believe in buried pasts. He was digging them up, one victim at a time, turning each scar into a stanza. The verse hadn’t just marked the next location—it had named its next subject. Rudra exhaled smoke into the cold desert air and muttered, “Maheswari, you’re not part of history yet. But someone is writing you into its end.” He and Meher climbed into the jeep, eyes heavy but nerves alive. Somewhere in the sands ahead, the sixth death was already half-composed—just waiting for blood to complete the line.
Chapter 7:
The desert before sunrise looked like a graveyard of gold. Rudra’s jeep carved a trail through the dunes near Osian, not far from Jodhpur, chasing the coordinates hidden within the sixth verse of the killer’s evolving chant. Meher had translated the latest couplet to mean: “Where five chariots once slept beneath the wind, the sixth shall fall under the curse of stone.” That could mean only one thing—Panchrath Mandir, the once-sacred tribal temple complex demolished for mining a generation ago. All that remained were seven large stone slabs scattered in a neglected field, now ringed with acacia trees and mining debris. But the site wasn’t empty. As dawn poured its amber light across the sand, Rudra spotted a crude tent pitched near the altar stones. The air smelled of firewood and something faintly metallic. Inside the tent, they found tools—metal rods etched with spiral carvings, dried flowers, a pouch of red pigment, and a sheaf of yellowed parchment that looked eerily like death manuscripts. The ground was marked with foot patterns encircling the slabs, smoothed deliberately as if rehearsed. “He’s been here,” Meher whispered. “Preparing this for days. Maybe weeks.” Rudra turned sharply as they noticed a shape moving in the distance—a man in white, climbing the edge of a ruined platform. Too thin for Maheswari. The killer was watching his own play unfold from the shadows, waiting for the final actor to appear.
They reached Dheeraj Maheswari’s palatial mansion in Jodhpur by noon, only to be told by guards that he’d left for a “pilgrimage” the day before—destination undisclosed. Rudra’s frustration ignited like kerosene. He knew the man was arrogant enough to dismiss danger, and stupid enough to walk straight into the killer’s narrative. A breakthrough came when a city news outlet posted an early-morning Instagram photo of Maheswari at Osian’s sand dunes—bragging about “reclaiming ancestral soil” with his yoga instructor. Rudra showed the image to Meher. “He’s at the shrine already. Probably thinks he’s untouchable.” They raced back, tires kicking up sand as they passed wandering herders and abandoned stone trucks. But as they neared the site, it was too late. Maheswari’s body had already been posed. Draped in ritual cloth, chest bare, arms stretched outward in the same folded prayer pose as victim five, he lay dead on the sixth altar stone, blood pooled beneath his back. The spiral was there again—this time finished, with six concentric petals and a seventh marked only in ash, a placeholder waiting to be filled. But more chilling than the mark was the poem: etched into the stone below his body in red mud and blood, another line of verse: “With six gone to dust, the final must walk willingly, or the curse shall remain.” Rudra stood frozen. “He’s not hunting the last one,” he said. “He’s inviting them.”
That night, they camped at the edge of the shrine, under the ghost-light of the moon and the crackle of dry wood. Meher poured over the parchment retrieved from the tent—a translation of the Bhuthan Ritual of Seven Returns. Each murder was not only a sacrifice, but a summoning, meant to realign history where it had been fractured. The seven stones of the shrine were once used to bind kinship lines. If desecrated, they were to be cleansed in blood—not randomly, but by those whose ancestors had committed erasure. The final line of the poem confirmed Rudra’s deepest suspicion: “The last must be a witness born of guilt, not blood—a man who serves silence yet carries memory.” Meher looked up. “It’s not another bureaucrat or judge. It’s someone closer. Someone like…” Her voice broke off. Rudra didn’t answer. He stared out at the dunes, thoughts thundering. He had grown up in Jaipur. His grandfather had worked in district land affairs. Had he been part of this? Was that why every mark felt familiar? Every pattern known? Meher reached out and touched his wrist. “He’s calling you, Rudra.” Wind howled across the sand. The killer had written six deaths as stanzas, leaving the final line for the reader to finish. Rudra realized he wasn’t just a detective in this story. He was a name waiting to be carved. And the shrine wasn’t just a crime scene. It was the end of a song written in bone, fire, and justice denied for a hundred years.
Chapter 8:
The city of Jaipur, bright and chaotic by day, had taken on a different face by night—haunted, as if its pink walls remembered secrets they had buried for generations. Rudra drove in silence, Meher beside him, both still shaken by what they had read beneath the sixth body. “The last must walk willingly…” It was not a riddle anymore. It was a summons. Back in his childhood home—now abandoned for years—Rudra searched through his grandfather’s trunk, a rusted box wrapped in muslin and sealed with tape long peeled off. Inside were files, yellowed letters, and brittle sheets of official documents. Among them was the deed to the Rohitpura Clearance, the tribal land acquisition that had sparked everything. Signed in three places. Rudra recognized the names of the first five victims. But the fourth signature, in thick black ink, read: “Nihal Singh Rathore”—his grandfather. Rudra sat back slowly, bile rising in his throat. His own bloodline was linked to the spiral curse. The killer hadn’t chosen him randomly. He was in the pattern. Meher crouched beside him, eyes filled with reluctant understanding. “You’re not the target, Rudra. You’re the fulfillment. The verse ends with you not dying—but witnessing. You’re the only one who can complete this by stopping it. Or letting it happen.”
The next day brought with it no peace—only a letter. Hand-delivered, with no return address, no fingerprints, only a spiral drawn in faint charcoal on the back of the envelope. Inside was a handwritten note in perfect Rajasthani: “Come alone to where the fire meets the ash. The seventh stone awaits.” Enclosed was a photograph—grainy, low light—a close-up of a shrine altar with blood already spilled. And at its edge: a child’s toy. A red wooden camel, carved and faded, the same kind Rudra had carried as a boy. Meher looked at him. “He knows your past better than you do.” Rudra felt the walls of his profession collapse around him. Logic, motive, evidence—none of it mattered now. This was no longer an investigation. It was a reckoning. Rudra packed no weapon, no badge, only his grandfather’s file and a small vial of desert ash from the previous shrine. “If he’s completing something,” he said, “then maybe we can break it—not with force, but with memory.” That night, under a half-moon, Rudra arrived alone at the ruined well near Kuldhara, the deserted village whispered to be cursed. The seventh stone stood upright in the center of a dry courtyard, faint firelight flickering from the edges. The spiral was freshly etched. The killer was near.
He emerged from the shadows like a myth made flesh—barefoot, clothed in white dhoti and wrapped in a scarf stitched with tribal patterns. Face gaunt, eyes sunken but glowing with conviction. “You came,” the man said. “As the verse promised.” Rudra stared at him. “Who are you?” The man smiled faintly. “I’m not a name. I am what they erased. I am Bhuthan remembered.” He stepped closer. “Your grandfather signed their death. You now sign their return.” He extended a small copper brand toward the stone. “One last mark. One last verse. You are the end of the forgetting.” Rudra felt the weight of history press on him—the crimes of blood, the silence that followed, the spirals inked across time and bone. “No,” he whispered. “I won’t burn another name. I’ll speak them.” He dropped the documents to the ground. “Nihal Singh Rathore. Omprakash Vyas. Dheeraj Maheswari. All of them. Their sins will be known, not cleansed.” The killer’s hands trembled. “But their blood must match the dust,” he said. “It is the way.” Rudra stepped into the spiral drawn on the ground. “Then end it with me. But I won’t be silent.” And in that moment—ritual broken, prophecy fractured—the man fell to his knees. Weeping. The copper brand clattered to the earth. Rudra did not arrest him. He simply sat beside him until sunrise, among the stones, letting the wind scatter the ash of both memory and myth.
Chapter 9:
The morning after the seventh ritual site felt like waking from a fever dream. Rudra sat in silence on the edge of the broken courtyard in Kuldhara, his back against a stone pillar scorched with fresh soot. The killer—whose name was never spoken—had been taken into custody without resistance. He hadn’t run, hadn’t fought. He had simply walked behind Rudra like a man who had fulfilled a promise written in blood generations ago. The arrest was clean, quiet, but the headlines were anything but. “The Spiral Killer Captured”, “Serial Murders Across Rajasthan End in Ritual Shrine”, “Forensic Officer Tied to Tribal Curse”. News anchors speculated, spiritual gurus dissected symbols on prime-time, and social media buzzed with amateur theories. But only Rudra and Meher knew the real shape of it: this had never been about murder alone. It had been about memory. Systematic, sacred, violent memory. As they drove back toward Jaipur, Meher read from the killer’s handwritten confessions—poems, really—half-written in red ink and tribal script. “I carried the silence,” he wrote. “And so I let it speak in fire.” Rudra closed his eyes. He could still feel the heat from that final night. The killer had not just taken lives. He had forced a civilization to look back.
At the Jaipur Police Headquarters, Rudra was called in for internal questioning. Not as a suspect, but as a participant too closely bound to the case. The higher-ups didn’t like what they called “the mythologizing” of the investigation. “You let a criminal complete six murders,” a commissioner had said bluntly. “And walked unarmed into the seventh.” But Rudra had stopped trying to explain logic to men who saw justice only in case numbers. He submitted his files: the Bhuthan manuscripts, the tattoo tracings, the coordinates of each murder site, the ashes he had collected from each body and sealed in separate forensic jars—labeled not with numbers, but with names. When he left the room, he knew his time as a field officer was over. But something deeper had awakened in him—something Meher too had come to feel. They drove together to Rohitpura one final time, back to Bhanwari Devi’s haveli, where the old woman greeted them with a smile that was half peace, half sorrow. She handed them an urn of grey clay, filled with the ashes of her tribe’s forgotten past. “Scatter it,” she said, “where the wind sings, not where blood sleeps.” They did just that—standing on the dunes near Osian, where the wind tore across the sand and lifted the dust into the sky like smoke from an invisible pyre.
In the weeks that followed, Rudra withdrew from service and moved into a modest house outside Pushkar. He grew his beard, wrote in longhand, and let the silence settle into his bones. Meher visited often, carrying new material—books on forgotten tribes, museum records, oral folk songs from the Bhuthan’s diaspora in Gujarat. Together, they compiled it all—not into a report, but into a manuscript. They called it “The Bhuthan Spiral: A History of the Erased”. It was part forensic case study, part cultural resurrection, part hymn. Rudra included a final chapter titled “The Ones Remembered”, with seven pages—each dedicated to one of the victims, but also the seven forgotten families they had once dispossessed. The publisher didn’t believe it would sell. But the people did. The Bhuthan name returned to textbooks. Tribes in Rajasthan demanded recognition. Murals appeared in alleyways, paintings of the spiral not as fear—but as memory. One morning, a letter arrived at Rudra’s doorstep. No sender. Inside, a single sentence: “You did not complete the verse. You broke it. That is enough.” Rudra folded the letter, placed it in the same trunk where his grandfather’s deeds once lay, and locked it. The murders were over. The ashes had settled. But the dust would always remember.
Chapter 10:
Years passed. The sands of Rajasthan, ever shifting, had swallowed footprints, scrubbed blood, and softened the stones of shrines once etched in ritual. But the spiral—that symbol of memory, pain, and return—had taken root. Not on flesh anymore, not scorched into victims, but carved in quiet corners of history. It appeared in tribal festivals, painted on children’s cheeks as remembrance. It was stitched into shawls worn by women of the desert—bright crimson threads winding into circles that had once meant vengeance, now standing for visibility. In Jaipur, the museum of folk arts reopened a forgotten wing—“The Bhuthan Archive”, curated by Meher Singh. She stood before its first exhibit on opening day, a glass case that contained nothing but a charred copper branding iron and a handwritten chant from the killer’s verse, now simply titled: “The Poem of Return.” Rudra did not attend. He had chosen a quieter role, writing under a pseudonym for local journals, and teaching tribal folklore to graduate students who knew little of the legacy they inherited. But on that day, he stood at a distance from the museum gates, watching crowds enter—not to mourn, but to learn. The spiral, he realized, could no longer be erased. It had been witnessed.
At home in Pushkar, Rudra lived alone. A small clay urn sat on his shelf beside a police badge, both gathering dust now. Every year on the date of the seventh death, he took out a faded red cloth and unfolded the seven parchment verses that the killer had composed—one for each death, each memory, each sin. He read them out loud—not because he believed in the ritual, but because silence had once allowed the blood to flow. Reading them now was not agreement. It was resistance. One morning, he received a letter forwarded by Meher—a package from a tribal community in the Gujarat hills. Inside was a handmade doll, its face painted in spiral tattoos, and a message: “We tell their names now.” Rudra held the doll for a long time, eyes stinging. Not because of grief. But because somewhere in that small thread-bound figure was a truth that could not be executed, buried, or incinerated. Justice had not arrived in a courtroom, but in memory. And maybe that was the only kind possible when history itself had worn the mask of forgetting. He walked out to the desert edge behind his home, letting the wind whip his scarf, and buried the doll beneath a flowering shrub. “Rest in witness,” he whispered.
The killer—the nameless bhakta—was now serving seven life sentences in Ajmer Central Jail. He refused all appeals, gave no interviews, spoke no further verses. Yet even in silence, his legacy had spread beyond intention. Not as fear. But as reckoning. Academics debated him. Activists cited him. Politicians avoided the subject altogether. But the spiral he had left behind had etched itself into something larger. Something unerasable. And Rudra—haunted but humbled—never tried to forget it. He carried it, not like a scar, but like a map. A reminder that truth is not just what is told, but also what is remembered. As he sat at his desk, finishing the last chapter of his book—“Bloodlines in Dust”—he wrote a single final line: “The spiral is not the symbol of revenge. It is the shape of return.” And he closed the notebook gently, the sunset painting spirals of its own across the desert floor outside.
THE END
