Sujan Ganguly
1
The rain had just begun to tap lightly against the wrought-iron balconies of Ballygunge’s aging colonial mansions when Ayesha Dutta was last seen. It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon in late July, and the streets of the upscale South Kolkata neighborhood glistened with monsoon stillness. Ayesha, seventeen and self-possessed beyond her years, had told her mother she was going to visit a friend to discuss a school literary project. Instead, she walked into the ivy-covered gates of Ananda Apartments — a five-story heritage building, once home to freedom fighters and now to retired bureaucrats, eccentric artists, and a single celebrity recluse: Arindam Roy. CCTV footage from the main entrance showed her umbrella-clad silhouette entering at 3:47 p.m., pausing to check her phone before stepping into the antique iron-cage lift. After that — nothing. The camera on the fifth-floor landing had been out of order for weeks. No one recalled seeing her leave.
When Inspector Anirban Dey arrived at the apartment complex, the sun had already dipped behind the crumbling parapets, casting long shadows down the marble corridors. Ayesha’s parents — visibly shaken and unable to comprehend her sudden disappearance — waited in the lobby with a trembling sense of dread. Dey, a man hardened by years of missing-person reports that usually ended badly, tried not to let the silence bother him. But something about the building felt off. Too still. Too watchful. He questioned the residents, including the fifth-floor tenant — the novelist Arindam Roy, who opened his door with a cigarette in hand and an amused expression. “No, officer,” he had said smoothly, “I haven’t had any visitors today. I was writing all afternoon. Alone.” His flat, Apartment 76, bore the unmistakable chaos of an artist’s cave — books in uneven stacks, scribbled notes, and an open laptop humming faintly with a blinking cursor on a blank page. Dey didn’t like the man’s tone — or his timing. But without evidence, suspicion was air.
By the time Dr. Rhea Mitra was called in, two days had passed and the media had already started calling it the “Ballygunge Disappearance.” A former academic turned criminal psychologist, Rhea stood in Ayesha’s room — a modest space filled with poetry books, art prints, and a desk cluttered with notebooks. Among them, she found something odd: a hand-written letter addressed simply to “A.R.” The content was meandering, confessional, full of admiration and unease. “I wonder,” Ayesha had written, “if your stories come from truth or if truth bends to your stories.” Rhea felt a chill rise up her spine. It wasn’t just the missing girl that disturbed her — it was the echo. Years ago, her sister Rini had disappeared under eerily similar circumstances. She remembered the same desperate silence. The same lack of closure. And now, a novelist who claims she never came, a manuscript no one has read, and a teenage girl who may have stepped into someone’s fiction — and never found her way out.
The sky above Ballygunge was the color of wet cement the morning Dr. Rhea Mitra visited Apartment 76. She hadn’t slept. Instead, she’d spent the night dissecting every sentence of Ayesha’s unsent letter, trying to map emotion into intent. Who was “A.R.” to her — a literary idol, a mentor, or something darker? Arindam Roy opened the door in a crumpled kurta, looking mildly irritated but amused, like someone tolerating the curiosity of lesser minds. “You think I had something to do with the girl?” he said, gesturing inside with a lazy arm. “You’re welcome to look around, Dr. Mitra, but you won’t find any ghosts here.” The apartment was cavernous, dimly lit, lined wall to wall with books, half-written notes, and curiosities: a rusted Remington typewriter, a framed rejection letter from The Statesman, and a handwritten quote by Nabokov: “The writer is the deceiver who must never be caught.” Rhea examined the space in silence while he poured tea with deliberate flair.
As they spoke, Arindam casually mentioned he had returned to writing after a long creative drought. “A novel,” he said, “though still in its skeletal form. You know, outlines, fragments, scenes without a spine.” He didn’t offer to show it to her, but Rhea caught a glimpse of a thick folder half-buried under loose pages on his writing desk. She made a mental note. His voice was rich, practiced — the kind that lulled you into believing lies were just misunderstood metaphors. “She never visited,” he repeated, tapping ash into a brass dish. “This is just the police and her parents needing a monster in the room. I’m convenient. That’s all.” But Rhea didn’t believe in monsters. She believed in patterns. And something about the structure of his denial — fluid yet rehearsed — told her he’d said it too often, even to himself. That evening, she asked Inspector Dey to push for a legal warrant to access the contents of the manuscript. Dey was hesitant, citing a lack of physical evidence, but eventually relented. The following afternoon, Rhea held the document in her hands — and felt her breath catch.
The manuscript, titled simply “The Porcelain Girl,” was unlike anything she had expected. The first chapter described a teenage girl with wide eyes and a restless mind, who visits an aging author in a crumbling old apartment. The girl, “Amrita,” was curious, clever, a little naïve — and utterly smitten by the writer’s mind. The second chapter blurred into something dreamlike: Amrita wandering through dusty shelves, hearing faint whispers behind locked doors, writing a letter she never sends. In the third chapter, she disappears. The author’s voice within the text turns from indulgent to remorseful — as if the story itself is grieving her absence. Rhea flipped through the pages, chills dancing along her arms. There were too many overlaps: Amrita’s school matched Ayesha’s. The quotes she’d written in her diary appeared verbatim in the manuscript. The final page ended abruptly, with a line underlined twice: “Some stories demand silence to be heard.”
Rhea stared at that line for a long time. The manuscript wasn’t a confession — it was a map. Each paragraph hinted at spaces, memories, and acts that had bled into fiction. Whether deliberately or subconsciously, Arindam had documented something real. But was he reimagining a crime he hadn’t committed — or preserving one he had? She took the manuscript home, locked herself in, and read it again from the beginning. This time, she wasn’t looking for style. She was looking for clues. What she found were timestamps disguised as metaphors. Directions cloaked in narrative detours. A structure designed like a puzzle, with one missing piece: What happened after the story stopped? And more importantly, how many “Amritas” had come before Ayesha?
3
Dr. Rhea Mitra sat alone in her dim study, the rain hissing against the windows like secrets no longer willing to stay hidden. She had read The Porcelain Girl twice, and then again, line by line, each pass revealing something darker than the last. It wasn’t just that Arindam Roy had captured Ayesha Dutta’s habits, thoughts, and voice with chilling precision — it was the fact that he had done so before she disappeared. Rhea had seen this before. Not in other cases, but in her own life. She pulled open the lacquered drawer beneath her desk, slid out an old cardboard folder, and opened it with fingers that shook more than she wanted to admit. Inside were the yellowed pages of her sister Rini’s diary, last updated the night before she vanished ten years ago. Rini, like Ayesha, had been seventeen. Sharp, creative, stubborn. And obsessed with Bengali literature. In her final entry, she had written a passage that now came back to Rhea like a slap across time: “He says truth is what you can convince others of. That fiction is just cruelty in rhythm.”
The police had found no suspects when Rini vanished — no signs of struggle, no farewell note, no clear motive. Rhea, then a 28-year-old academic, had imploded quietly: leaving her job, ending her relationship, shutting out everything but her grief. She had read dozens of books, studied the minds of killers, mapped the psychology of silence. But never found the missing piece. Until now. The similarity between the language in Rini’s diary and Arindam’s manuscript was undeniable. It wasn’t just tone — it was the cadence, the metaphors, the precise cruelty of his fiction. She had never considered him a suspect. He hadn’t even been a public figure then. But his early writing had appeared in obscure magazines under pen names. Could Rini have corresponded with him? She searched Arindam’s early bibliography, scanned university archives, and found a 1996 column in Saptahik Bangla, signed A.R. Roy, titled “Of Girls Who Disappear”. It was about a teenage girl named “Rini” who walked into a library and was never seen again — told from the perspective of a writer haunted by her vanishing.
Rhea felt the breath rush from her lungs. It couldn’t be coincidence. She printed the article, read it aloud, and heard her sister’s voice echoing back through it. Every detail — the gold-ink fountain pen, the crescent moon earrings, the sketchbook tucked in a cloth bag — all matched what Rini had carried. The piece had passed as abstract fiction at the time, a metaphor for lost youth. But Rhea no longer believed in abstract fiction. She believed in literary predation. She called Inspector Anirban Dey, her voice tight with urgency, and asked him to pull every newspaper piece ever published under Arindam Roy’s name — and any alias linked to his early career. Dey sounded skeptical, but agreed. “You think he did it before?” he asked. “Not think,” she said. “I feel it in my bones.”
That night, she returned to The Porcelain Girl and began annotating it side by side with Rini’s diary. There were too many parallels. Too much rhythm between lives supposedly unconnected. And something else began to emerge — a pattern of literary mimicry. Each girl, each disappearance, was mirrored in a different story. The names changed. The endings didn’t. Rhea realized Arindam had spent decades hiding behind fiction, camouflaging horror as literature. It was a perfect mask. In a city that revered its writers as saints of intellect, who would suspect a bestselling novelist of being a predator of minds — and lives?
As thunder cracked over Ballygunge that night, Rhea whispered to the shadows, “This isn’t about Ayesha. This is about all the girls who became chapters in his twisted epic.” And in the cold silence that followed, the echoes of her sister seemed to answer: “Find the story he never published. That’s where I am.”
4
The next morning, Kolkata wore its rain-soaked melancholy like an old poem — smudged and sagging. Dr. Rhea Mitra stood outside the dark-glassed doors of the city’s most prestigious literary archive, clutching a folder marked “Cross-references: Roy / Disappeared.” Inside were printouts of Arindam Roy’s columns, short stories, and interviews spanning nearly three decades. Many were obscure — university journals, literary magazines, online zines from the blog era — but together, they formed a tapestry too consistent to dismiss. In nearly every piece, a young woman appeared. Sometimes she was a muse. Sometimes a cautionary tale. But always incomplete. Always vanishing. Rhea wasn’t hunting just for fiction now. She was trying to catch a mind that had built its legend on rearranged truths.
Later that afternoon, Inspector Anirban Dey called her from the café below his office. “I have someone you should talk to,” he said. “Used to work under Roy. A bit of a nervous wreck, but might give you something.” That “someone” was Rayan Basu — a 24-year-old literature graduate who had once interned at Jukti Magazine where Arindam had been guest editor for a year. Rayan sat across from Rhea, hunched, fidgety, eyes flickering like faulty halogen. “He found me through a story I wrote,” he began. “Said it reminded him of himself when he was young. He invited me to his apartment for literary mentorship.” Rayan paused. “At first, it was flattering. He quoted my sentences back to me. Gave detailed feedback. But over time… he started rewriting my work. Not editing — rewriting. He’d call it ‘refining my voice.’ Eventually, I realized I was writing his stories under my name.”
Rhea leaned in. “Did he ever talk about missing people? Disappearances?” Rayan hesitated. “Once. He told me great literature has to come from absence. That you can’t write something eternal unless something real is removed. He… he said stories don’t demand sacrifice — they are sacrifice.” Rhea’s stomach turned. She asked him if he still had any of the letters Arindam sent. Rayan nodded and handed over a small packet — aged yellow paper, delicate cursive, and paragraphs dripping with veiled threats disguised as wisdom. One line chilled her: “You must let the character bleed, Rayan. If it’s not drawn from pain, it’s plagiarism.”
Meanwhile, Inspector Dey followed another lead. Digging into Ballygunge’s police archives, he found a 2011 complaint lodged by a former tenant in Apartment 76 — a woman named Sriparna Ghosh. She had accused Arindam Roy of repeated psychological harassment. He had, she claimed, eavesdropped on her phone calls, used her conversations in his short stories, and written a story where the protagonist — who mirrored her in alarming detail — died by drowning. The case was dismissed without investigation. No one wanted to touch a cultural icon. When Dey visited Sriparna’s current residence, he found a woman who still slept with all the lights on. “He turned my life into his fiction,” she said. “And when I protested, he erased me from the story entirely.”
Rhea knew now that Arindam wasn’t just a man obsessed with literature — he was a predator who used storytelling as a weapon. Not for money. Not even for fame. But for something far more sinister: control. She mapped the dates of Arindam’s major publications against local missing persons reports and found an eerie pattern — almost every three years, shortly before a new release, a teenage girl from a literary background had vanished. Always labeled as runaways. Always forgotten. She laid it all out before Anirban. “This isn’t a single case,” she told him. “It’s a pattern hidden in plain sight — a literary trap disguised as a career.”
Anirban stared at the wall for a long time. “Do we have enough to arrest him?” he asked. Rhea shook her head. “Not yet. His manuscript isn’t a confession. It’s a maze. We need the original draft — the one he never submitted. The one that doesn’t care about style.” She paused. “We need to find the version he wrote before he polished the blood off the pages.” That night, Rhea stared at her bulletin board: photos, notes, scribbles, and strings of red thread. At the center, circled twice, was a word she hadn’t dared write before.
Predator.
And below it, in a different color:
Author.
5
A letter is a confession without expectation — a thought folded into paper, addressed to someone who may never read it. Dr. Rhea Mitra had spent the better part of the last two days tracking down letters. Not published words. Not stories paraded at literary festivals or archived in magazines. But handwritten words. Private ones. The kind that never passed through editors. And it was a half-burnt journal entry in Rini’s handwriting, buried in an old box in her mother’s attic, that gave her the next clue. “He writes me back,” the entry read. “Says I make him think of rain and decay. I don’t know if that’s a compliment. I’m scared to ask.” Rhea stared at the looping script, tears prickling the edge of her vision. Her sister had never told her about a pen pal. And the style — poetic, indulgent — was unmistakable. Arindam Roy. The man had been building a novel one girl at a time. One letter at a time. And now, Rhea was ready to dismantle the illusion.
She boarded the morning train to Darjeeling — a five-hour ascent into clouds and memory — to visit the only person who might know the truth Arindam refused to write: his elder sister, Malini Roy. Once a respected literature professor at Jadavpur University, Malini had retired early and retreated to a small cottage overlooking tea fields. Her name had appeared in the acknowledgments of Arindam’s first book, then disappeared from all subsequent editions. When Rhea arrived, Malini answered the door wearing a shawl that smelled of smoke and ink. She didn’t ask who Rhea was. She simply said, “Took you long enough.”
Inside, over a fire and cups of salted Darjeeling tea, Malini spoke slowly — like someone finally freeing herself from a lifetime of silence. “Arindam was always… different,” she said. “He didn’t imagine stories. He stole them. People mistook that for genius. I knew it was hunger.” She handed Rhea a bundle of faded envelopes tied with jute string. Letters written to Arindam by aspiring writers, students, admirers. Some were banal. Others were eerily familiar — a voice, a fear, a girl trying to impress a literary giant. Among them, Rhea found three letters signed Ayesha D. Each one was more urgent than the last.
The first was excited, full of literary questions and flattery. The second hinted at unease: “I’m not sure what you meant when you said my stories had ‘real blood in them.’” The third was shorter, cryptic: “I don’t want to be remembered for how I disappear.” Rhea gripped the letter tightly, her pulse quickening. It was dated just three days before Ayesha vanished.
Malini watched her read. “He keeps the ones he doesn’t answer,” she said. “Those are the ones that matter most to him. The ones that make him feel like a god.” Rhea asked how many others she thought there were. Malini shrugged. “He never wrote with ink. He wrote with memory. And memory doesn’t bleed unless you make it.”
Before she left, Malini gave her one last thing — a typed manuscript titled “The Garden of Half-Said Things”. An unpublished work Arindam had abandoned twenty years ago. It told the story of a girl who wrote letters to a famous author and began losing her sense of self — each letter carving away her memory, until she was just a story waiting to be finished. Her name in the draft? Rini. Rhea almost dropped the pages.
Back in Kolkata that night, Rhea sat in her apartment with all the letters spread out like a crime scene. Every word, every metaphor, felt like a breadcrumb leading toward a revelation too monstrous to process. Arindam hadn’t just fictionalized these girls — he’d rewritten them. Erased their truths. Pasted his own prose over their real lives.
But the letters — the ones never published, never sent — were raw, trembling, unedited. They were the antidote to his fiction. And they held something else too: time. Dates. Thoughts. Hidden geographies. Somewhere in them, Rhea knew, was Ayesha’s location. If she could decode them, if she could follow the emotional landscape — not the plot — she could find the place where fiction stopped and the crime began.
She pinned the last letter to her board.
Ayesha Dutta. 14 July. “You said I’d make a perfect ending. But I don’t want to be a final chapter. I want to be a prologue.”
Rhea whispered aloud, as the wind scraped across her windowpanes, “Then let’s rewrite the ending.”
6
A week had passed since Rhea Mitra had stepped foot into Apartment 76, but the sense of intrusion still lingered on her skin. Something about the flat’s eerie silence felt deliberate — like a page purposefully left blank. Meanwhile, Anvesha’s disappearance continued to haunt the city. Social media was ablaze with theories. The news channels had dissected every possible angle: abduction, suicide, romantic escapade, and even voluntary disappearance. Yet nothing could drown the growing unease in Rhea’s chest. It wasn’t just a missing person’s case anymore. It was beginning to feel like a performance — meticulously staged, with all of them playing their assigned roles. And someone, she suspected, was pulling the strings with literary flair. That morning, she revisited the manuscript the police had retrieved from Sounak Dhar’s drawer — pages of prose dense with metaphor and paranoia. Among them was a passage about a girl in red “lost between commas and shadows.” Rhea stared at that line. Was it Anvesha? Or a fictional projection? She scanned the pages again and again until something odd struck her — a peculiar pattern in paragraph spacing. Taking out a ruler, she measured the gaps. They weren’t random. Every seventh paragraph was double-spaced, and the first letters of each of those paragraphs spelled out: “LETTERBOX.” Her heart began to race. She rushed back to the apartment complex, past the rusting iron gate, and to the old letterbox panel near the security post. Box number 76 had a folded envelope lodged at the back, untouched for weeks.
The envelope was cream-coloured, stained with time, and bore no stamp. Inside was a handwritten letter — neat cursive, unsigned. “Dear S, you told me truth hides in the cracks between what’s said and what’s censored. I tried to be original, but the world only loves repetition. You said you’d read my last words when I was gone. Well, here they are…” The letter veered into melancholic metaphors, ramblings about being invisible in a world that only sees perfection, and finally a chilling line: “I’ll become the kind of story you’ll never finish — no matter how many pages you write.” Rhea sat down on the stone bench near the mailbox, cold sweat clinging to her temples. It wasn’t Anvesha’s handwriting — it matched samples from another girl who had gone missing a year ago: Urmi Sen. The case had gone cold. No leads. No suspects. Just like now. And the letter — hidden in plain sight — was never found. It seemed inconceivable, yet Rhea was beginning to see the outline of something sinister. Not a single story. A pattern. A killer who edited lives like drafts — leaving behind plot holes, clues, and incomplete arcs. A murderer obsessed not with blood, but with narrative.
Back in her apartment that night, Rhea pinned photos and pages on the board — side by side. Urmi. Anvesha. The manuscript. The letter. And one image kept pulling her in: a candid shot of Sounak Dhar from five years ago at the Kolkata Literary Meet. He wasn’t alone. Standing beside him was a woman in a crimson shawl, holding a notepad with the words: “Final Rewrite.” She zoomed in. The woman’s face was familiar. Very familiar. It was the head of the publishing house that had rejected Sounak’s earlier draft three years ago. She vanished two months later. Her body was never found. Her name was Arpita Lodh. And now, Rhea was sure — the killer wasn’t just hiding in prose. The killer was the prose. The chapters weren’t fiction. They were confessions. Crafted so well, you’d miss the truth between the lines.
A deep hush had settled over Gariahat’s lanes after the rain — the kind of silence that made every footstep sound like an intrusion. Inspector Arka Nandy stood before the small tailoring shop nestled behind the main market — Silken Threads — where the latest body had been discovered. The narrow space reeked faintly of musty fabric, rusted zippers, and cheap perfume. Inside, fluorescent light flickered above, casting erratic shadows on the red-streaked worktable where the tailor — a man named Feroze Ali — lay cold and wide-eyed, his throat slashed clean with surgical precision. His needle box remained undisturbed. So did his half-stitched blouse on the mannequin — almost too neat for a crime scene. “Sir,” Constable Bhaskar whispered as he returned from behind the workshop, holding out a plastic bag sealed with gloves, “we found this note under the lining of the stitched blouse — hidden in the bust padding.” Arka read it in silence. The now-familiar red ink. This time, it said only one word: “Pattern.”
Back at the station, Arka pinned the note beside the others. He stared at the chaotic collage: the poem from the piano teacher’s drawer, the coded sentence from the spice tin, the barely legible scratchings behind the painter’s frame. Now “Pattern.” It wasn’t just a metaphor. Each victim was someone who altered, transformed, or preserved appearances — makeup, sound, texture, shape. Seamstresses, artists, perfumers, teachers — all creators of illusions. The killer wasn’t just choosing victims; they were choosing craftspeople. Something stirred in Arka’s memory. He opened a dusty case file from seven years ago — the Barasat Art Institute fire. The main suspect, a reclusive costume designer named Shamik Moitra, had vanished after being questioned. No body was ever found. Rumor said he had suffered mental breakdowns after losing his only sibling in the blaze. The report included sketches of his experimental work: masks that covered trauma, gowns that concealed burns, bodysuits designed to reshape identities. Arka’s hand froze over the sketch. There, in a penciled corner, was a design eerily similar to the silk blouse found at the tailor’s. Too similar to ignore.
Driven by instinct, Arka paid a visit to the National Theatre archives, where Shamik had once worked in costume design. The archivist, a soft-spoken elderly woman named Mrs. Ghosh, recognized the design immediately. “That’s part of the Eclipsed Souls collection,” she said, adjusting her bifocals. “Unworn. It was meant for a play about grief, loss, and masks.” Arka pressed her for more, and she reluctantly led him to the locked vault containing abandoned costume pieces. Inside, in a corner still covered in plastic, lay three mannequins dressed in velvet cloaks with slits at the chest — each slit lined with red. “He said they represented ‘wounds that dress us,’” she muttered, pale. Arka took photos, his mind racing. The killer wasn’t just murdering — they were creating an inverted theatre, a morbid costume exhibition across the city. Each victim was a prop in the killer’s final act. Someone was designing grief into the city’s fabric — literally.
That night, Arka stood on the roof of the station, staring out at the lights of Kolkata flickering beneath the clouds. He lit a cigarette, ignoring his doctor’s warnings. In this city of masks, someone was unmasking people by killing them — or perhaps punishing them for creating new identities. He thought of his own mother, a seamstress in Ballygunge, who once told him how each stitch she sewed into a sari was a prayer — not for beauty, but for survival. He felt a chill run down his spine. If this killer was Shamik — or someone inspired by him — then the murders weren’t random. They were stitched together in grief, rage, and grotesque artistry. “We’re not hunting a criminal,” Arka muttered to himself. “We’re chasing a playwright of pain.” And the curtain hadn’t fallen yet.
8
The sun was setting behind the Howrah Bridge, the orange hue casting jagged reflections on the Hooghly’s restless waters. Dr. Rima Basu stood on the edge of the abandoned Port Trust warehouse, her coat fluttering like a tattered flag. Across from her, ACP Ronit Chatterjee held his service revolver low but ready, eyes fixed on the trembling figure of Ritoban—once the silent artist, now revealed to be both victim and orchestrator. His sketchbook lay flung open beside him, pages flapping wildly in the wind, each one depicting chillingly accurate renderings of the murders—images drawn before the crimes occurred. Rima’s voice broke the silence, low and sharp: “Ritoban, we need to end this. No more riddles. No more blood.” But Ritoban only smiled faintly, as if hearing music the others couldn’t. “It was never just me,” he whispered. “I only captured what I was shown. What she showed me.” Ronit frowned. “Who’s ‘she’?” Ritoban turned his head toward the darkening water, where a distorted reflection of the old warehouse seemed to ripple and shift. “The mirror… The one in that house. It’s not just glass. It remembers. It guides.” Rima’s heart sank. The mirror—shrouded in superstition, once belonging to the deranged Maharani of Bagmari—had been dismissed as a relic. But Ritoban’s descent had begun only after inheriting that very mirror from his late uncle’s estate in Bagmari. The same mirror now stored in the evidence locker at Lalbazar.
Suddenly, Ritoban lunged for his sketchbook, flipping to a page he had hidden between layers of glued canvas. “The final murder,” he said, voice cracking. “It was supposed to be me.” The image showed himself lying on the warehouse floor in a pool of blood, his own face contorted into a peaceful smile. Ronit moved fast, kicking the book away and restraining Ritoban with one swift motion. The artist didn’t resist. “She won’t let me go. I tried to finish it. I even tried to destroy her.” Rima’s mind raced. Could a psychological artifact like the mirror induce such deep delusions? Or was there something more—something older, darker, and inexplicably aware? Back at the precinct, they brought in the mirror for examination. Forensic teams found no hidden mechanisms, no drugs, no technological tricks. But Rima insisted on one final test. Alone in the interrogation room with the mirror, she stared deep into its surface. At first, nothing. Then, faintly, a flicker—an image of her as a child, crying in the dark. Another flicker—Ronit standing over her grave. She jerked back, breath caught in her throat. “Enough,” Ronit said, pulling her out.
In the following weeks, Ritoban was committed to a high-security psychiatric facility. His sketches, numbering in the hundreds, were locked away under police seal. The Bagmari mirror was returned to storage under tight security, but strange reports followed—officers claiming to hear whispers, some even seeing fleeting glimpses of their own deaths in the glass. Rima submitted her final case report, bluntly clinical but haunted between the lines. The city moved on, as it always did. But at night, in the dark corners of her apartment, Rima sometimes caught reflections that didn’t match her movements. Shadows where none should be. She no longer kept mirrors in the bedroom. Ronit, too, left the force six months later—citing ‘stress-induced hallucinations’ and moving to the hills of Kalimpong. The case remained closed, but neither he nor Rima ever truly believed it ended.
For in the quietest moments, when the city sleeps and the waters still, the mirror waits—patient and polished—showing not just the face… but the truth no one dares see.
END
