Mayurakshi Sharma
1
The monsoon had painted Lucknow in sepia — wet alleys shimmering under rusted streetlights, the scent of damp earth clinging to the city’s bones. Zoya Rizvi sat on the floor of her small apartment in Hazratganj, hunched over a half-broken laptop and sipping over-steeped chai. The newsroom she once called home had shuttered six months ago; now, freelance gigs and occasional bylines were all she had to show for her stubborn honesty. She was finishing a piece on encroachment near the Gomti when her encrypted ProtonMail pinged. The subject line read simply: “1994. Truth rots slowly.” Attached was a downloadable link labeled SHK.avi and a single sentence: Watch this before it vanishes. They always make things vanish.
Curiosity piqued, Zoya clicked through layers of firewalls until a grainy VHS-era video blinked to life. The footage was shaky, clearly filmed from behind a wooden jharokha, perhaps in a haveli. In the frame: a man, his hands bound, being beaten by two young men while others watched silently. There was no sound, only the low hiss of old tape. Zoya leaned in, her pulse rising. The faces weren’t clear at first, but as the attacker turned toward the camera, the fuzzy image froze her. It was unmistakably Raghav Pratap Singh, now the poster boy of a nationalist political wave, being hailed as the next Chief Minister. The second face, older and slimmer, bore the unmistakable features of Wasim Haider, the urbane minority leader and Singh’s fiercest rival. What the hell were these two men doing together in 1994? And who was the man being beaten? Zoya replayed it thrice before her laptop abruptly shut down. The screen went black, and a faint electric burning smell curled into the air.
Outside, the rain began again, harder this time. Zoya grabbed her bag, inserted the USB where she had saved the video, and rushed to the cyber café in Aminabad where she sometimes backed up work. The streets were nearly empty except for a few cyclists and a wedding band trudging under plastic tarps. Inside the café, she uploaded a copy to cloud storage, encrypting it with her mother’s birth date as the password. She knew one thing with absolute certainty—this wasn’t just a historical curiosity. This was explosive. This video could rip through the surface of Lucknow’s upcoming elections like a storm through a house of cards. But she also knew what came with touching raw nerves of power in Uttar Pradesh: silence, erasure, accidents. As she stepped outside, a white Scorpio SUV parked across the street blinked its headlights once, then twice, before slowly driving away. Zoya’s spine stiffened. The game had begun. And she had just picked up the first pawn.
2
The next morning, Zoya stood in front of the crumbling façade of Mehtab Manzil, the haveli she had traced from the video’s architecture — arched courtyards, latticework windows, and a distinct sandstone fountain that still stood, though dry and moss-covered. The house sat quietly in a forgotten lane of Chowk, behind a shuttered meat market and a half-burnt cinema hall. Locals called it “bhoot bangla,” though no one seemed to know why. An old paanwala across the street finally gave her something: “1994 mein kuch hua tha… ek patrakar tha, Sunder Pal. Milta tha sabse, phir ek din gaya, wapas nahi aaya.” A missing journalist, from the same year as the video. That couldn’t be a coincidence. Zoya jotted it down and slipped the paanwala a ten-rupee note. As she turned to leave, a teenager in a red shirt whispered into his phone and disappeared into the alley.
Zoya walked around the haveli, noting the sealed gates and broken glass. She took photos of the courtyard through the bars and compared them to frames from the video. It matched perfectly — the fountain, the alcove, the jharokha. She climbed a broken boundary wall and sneaked in, heart pounding. Inside, the walls were pockmarked with graffiti and dried bird droppings, but the room from the video — with its sunken floor and a burnt-out carpet — still reeked faintly of old sweat and smoke. As she raised her phone to record a video note, she heard a thud behind her. She spun around. A man in a black raincoat stood near the archway, silent, face hidden by the hood. Before she could speak, he raised a finger to his lips, then pointed at the door. “Time to go,” he said softly and disappeared as suddenly as he had come. Zoya didn’t wait. She scrambled out, slipped on wet marble, and bolted through the back alley until she hit the main road.
It wasn’t fear that gripped her now — it was adrenaline. Something had happened at Mehtab Manzil in 1994, something too dangerous to be spoken of. The deeper she dug, the more she sensed invisible eyes watching her. That evening, while checking her scooter parked under her building, she found the brake cable sliced clean. Not frayed, but surgically cut. Someone had planned for her to ride it — and possibly crash. Her hands trembled, but her mind sharpened. This wasn’t just politics anymore. This was a ghost story playing out in the realm of the living. And she, it seemed, had become its chosen narrator.
3
Zoya had always known Old Lucknow to be a labyrinth of poetry and power, but nothing prepared her for the eerie grandeur of Haider Manzil, the ancestral haveli of Wasim Haider. Nestled between two crumbling minarets and hidden behind a faded wooden gate, it felt like time had folded in on itself within these walls. Inside, it was another world: velvet drapes, silver hookah stands, calligraphy on fading walls, and silence that echoed memories. Zoya was escorted by a khadim through narrow, carpeted hallways to a high-ceilinged chamber where Begum Qudsia Haider sat in an armchair, wrapped in cream shawls, her pale eyes sharp despite her age. She didn’t rise or smile. “So, you are the girl chasing shadows,” she said in a voice brittle with authority. Zoya didn’t correct her. She simply nodded and sat when motioned to. Qudsia tapped the silver base of her hookah once and said, “This isn’t your story, but it wants you in it. That is far more dangerous.”
The conversation drifted slowly, like mehndi drying on skin. Qudsia spoke not of her son Wasim but of the past—of Wajid Ali Shah, of betrayal, of puppet courts and real knives. “You think this is about a video,” she whispered, “but this game began long before you were born. Your tape is just a move on an old chessboard. The men you see—Wasim, Raghav—they are not enemies, not truly. They are cousins in the legacy of deceit.” Then she handed Zoya a weathered diary, its leather cover etched with a peacock. “This belonged to my grandfather, Mir Afsar Ali, court historian under Wajid Ali Shah. Read what betrayal looks like when dressed in culture.” As Zoya took the diary, Qudsia added, almost offhandedly, “The man in your video, the one being beaten… he wasn’t a stranger. He had the misfortune of being honest. A very costly mistake in Awadh.”
Walking out of Haider Manzil, Zoya felt the diary burn in her bag like contraband. Every page inside was a poetic metaphor, yet each stanza hinted at something darker—power plays masked as art, staged betrayals, puppeteers who composed ghazals with one hand and held knives in the other. Outside, the azaan echoed through the gullies, and Zoya paused at a chai stall, re-reading the line that froze her: “In the court of Wajid, the traitor was rewarded not for loyalty, but for timing.” The rain had returned, soft and patient. She knew now the video wasn’t a revelation; it was bait. The real story was much older and infinitely more dangerous. This wasn’t about bringing truth to light. It was about surviving long enough to tell it.
4
The rain hadn’t stopped in two days. Lucknow felt suspended in time—its domes weeping, its drains overflowing, its secrets rising like steam from wet stone. Zoya found herself standing at the threshold of a crumbling government guesthouse near Kaiserbagh, where retired Intelligence Bureau officer Yashpal Rathore had reportedly taken up post-retirement quarters. The receptionist hesitated at first, murmuring “Saab doesn’t meet journalists,” but after Zoya slipped a note under the door marked Regarding 1994 – Urgent, she was called in. Inside, the room smelled of mothballs and silence. Rathore sat in a wooden chair by the window, his shawl neatly folded over one shoulder, eyes like dull coals behind thick glasses. He didn’t greet her. He didn’t even turn fully. “You’re playing with embers, Miss Rizvi,” he said softly. “And embers burn slow but deep.”
Zoya tried pressing him with questions—the identity of the man in the tape, the alliance between Wasim and Raghav in 1994, the vanishing of Sunder Pal. Rathore didn’t answer any of them directly. He stared out the window as if watching an invisible parade of ghosts. But he did speak, in clipped sentences. “That year… an informant gave us a tip about a political ‘purge’ disguised as a property dispute. We sent a man—young journalist, enthusiastic. Went missing. File was closed under pressure.” He paused, then added, “Do you know what makes Uttar Pradesh ungovernable? It’s not religion. Not caste. It’s memory. People remember everything—especially the lies.” Before Zoya could ask more, he stood abruptly and ended the conversation. “You came for truth. Truth doesn’t knock. It slides things under doors.” And just like that, she was escorted out.
That night, Zoya returned to her apartment and found a manila envelope wedged between her grill and the door. Inside were a series of photocopied documents: old IB memos, a newspaper clipping from 1994 about a ‘mob lynching’ in Chowk, and one blurred photograph showing a bruised man in a torn kurta, with a caption: Sunder Pal, local activist, last seen June 1994. At the bottom of the envelope was a page in Rathore’s handwriting: The kings weren’t the only players. Look at the pawns. Some were sacrificed too early. Zoya sat frozen. Sunder Pal hadn’t just been a journalist. He had been investigating the same land deals between the Haider and Singh families, land that would later become high-end real estate in Gomti Nagar. He was the first to die. And now, decades later, someone was ensuring that his story died too. Zoya closed her eyes, feeling the weight of it all. The board was older than she thought. The players were fewer. But the stakes—oh, the stakes had never been higher.
5
Delhi’s theatre district buzzed with rehearsals, rain-soaked chai cups, and the thunder of backstage arguments, but none of it distracted Zoya as she stepped into the low-lit rehearsal space of Abhishek “Abbu” Singh, the estranged younger brother of Raghav Pratap Singh. The room smelled of greasepaint, sweat, and soaked canvas. On stage, actors in traditional Awadhi attire rehearsed a scene from Shatranj ke Khiladi, Satyajit Ray’s classic. The irony wasn’t lost on her. Zoya waited near the exit until Abhishek noticed her. He walked over, a lean man in kurta-pyjama, spectacles sliding down his nose, visibly displeased. “You’re late. Or maybe I’m too early for the ghosts you’ve come to stir,” he said dryly. Zoya introduced herself and explained everything—from the video to the envelope to the connection with Sunder Pal. His expression flickered between disinterest and deep discomfort. Finally, he gestured toward an old wooden bench. “If you’re here to ask about Raghav, you won’t like what you hear.”
Over the next hour, Abhishek unraveled a quiet tragedy. Their father, Rajendra Pratap Singh, had been a principled MLA in the early ’90s, committed to secular values and land reform. But in 1994, after a heated confrontation with Wasim Haider over encroachment on temple land, he died in a mysterious car accident that was ruled ‘mechanical failure.’ Days later, Raghav—barely 18—disappeared for a week, only to return colder, sharper, and politically awakened. “Something changed him,” Abhishek said. “He stopped quoting Nehru and started mimicking Savarkar. He once called our father ‘weak.’” Zoya mentioned the video. Abhishek’s hands trembled slightly. “He made a choice that week… to ally with Wasim. A secret alliance, born in blood.” Abhishek had left soon after, unable to bear the transformation. “Politics wasn’t dirty,” he said bitterly. “My brother made it criminal.”
Zoya left the rehearsal with more questions than answers, but a new clarity. The rivalry between Wasim and Raghav wasn’t real—it was theatre, orchestrated for public consumption, for votes, for polarisation. They were partners in profit, enemies in poetry. And Sunder Pal? He had walked into their little charade with a pen and a conscience. She stopped at a street-side tea stall and opened the diary given by Begum Qudsia. One page was marked by a folded corner. It read: “When the rook and bishop conspire, the king doesn’t fall. The pawn does.” That line played over and over in her mind as she boarded the train back to Lucknow. She now had enough to blow the story open—but she also knew she was stepping into the final act of a performance that had already claimed lives. The audience didn’t even know the curtain was about to rise.
6
The train pulled into Lucknow Charbagh at 4:37 a.m., shrouded in dense fog and quiet dread. Zoya clutched her backpack close, feeling the chill not just in the air but in her bones. She made her way directly to the Alambagh apartment of Rahul Saxena, the missing whistleblower who had first sent her the 1994 video. His building was a peeling concrete block, tucked between an under-construction mall and a shuttered banquet hall. She knocked three times—no answer. The door was slightly ajar. Inside, the flat was in disarray. Cushions ripped open, drawers overturned, the hard drive of the desktop smashed to bits. Zoya stepped carefully, her phone flashlight scanning the floor until it landed on a message scribbled in chalk on the wall near the balcony: “They know. Hide what they can’t find.” She ran to the fridge, her instincts from years of field work kicking in, and there, behind a jar of pickle, taped under the freezer coil, was a small USB stick marked “Pawn 6.”
Back at her apartment, Zoya decrypted the drive using Rahul’s initials and date of birth—a combination she’d guessed from a forum post. Inside were documents, audio files, and one folder titled: “Gomti Nexus”. It contained screenshots of WhatsApp chats, payment trails from shell companies, and surveillance footage showing Wasim’s aide Munna Haider meeting with Singh’s campaign manager. But most damning was a ten-minute video clip—Rahul’s own confession. “If you’re watching this, I’m probably gone. I was hired to manage digital strategy for Singh’s campaign. They wanted viral videos, manufactured outrage. But then I found archived data buried deep—tapes, land deal scans, the 1994 footage… and a report that said Sunder Pal wasn’t just murdered. He was buried beneath Mehtab Manzil. The floor was rebuilt over his grave.” Zoya paused the video, hands trembling. The room suddenly felt smaller, the air thinner. Her mouth went dry.
Moments later, her phone buzzed. Private number. A voice she didn’t recognize said: “Stop digging, Miss Rizvi. We know what you’ve seen. We know where you are. Journalists die in road accidents every day. Stay silent, stay alive.” The call ended. Her screen glitched for a moment—just long enough for her to realize she was being monitored. Zoya grabbed her phone, the USB, and left the apartment. She no longer felt safe anywhere familiar. At a roadside cyber café in Indira Nagar, she uploaded the files to an offshore server with timed auto-leaks. It was a desperate move, but necessary. If anything happened to her, the world would still see what she’d seen. As she stepped back out into the street, the city looked different—darker, less forgiving. Zoya knew now that the story wasn’t just political. It was personal. And the people pulling the strings weren’t just powerful—they were prepared to kill to keep their board intact.
7
The next morning arrived like a sledgehammer. Zoya woke up in a rented room above an old bookshop in Aminabad, surrounded by yellowed Urdu novels, flickering tube lights, and the smell of ink and damp paper. Her phone buzzed relentlessly—dozens of missed calls, messages from media colleagues, and a single text from an unknown number: “Nice try. But your truth won’t trend for long.” The files Rahul had risked his life to expose had made it briefly online. Her exposé, titled “Pawns of the People: The Secret Alliance Behind Uttar Pradesh’s Kingmakers”, had been up for just forty-three minutes before being scrubbed from every platform. Mirror links were vanishing in real time. Her social accounts were suspended on vague grounds of “violation of community guidelines,” and anonymous trolls flooded her email with threats. The digital erasure was surgical, as if someone had rehearsed this shutdown long ago.
Zoya headed straight to the independent media house JanPath, one of the few left that hadn’t sold out to political advertisers. The editor, Shalini Mehra, was an old contact—and perhaps the last gatekeeper still willing to risk everything for the truth. Zoya explained everything in breathless urgency: the 1994 cover-up, Sunder Pal’s disappearance, the alliance between Wasim and Raghav, the fake rivalry fed to the public. Shalini didn’t blink. “We’ll print it in the morning. Full spread. Front page. No syndication, no edits. Just your words.” Zoya walked out feeling a small victory pulse in her chest, but it lasted only minutes. Outside the office, she noticed a motorcycle idling across the street. Same rider, same helmet, from the night she was followed at Mehtab Manzil. She turned into a bookstore, ducked through the back, and emerged onto the main road, heart pounding. Somewhere between fear and adrenaline, she began to laugh. “So this is what the truth costs,” she muttered.
Hours later, as the printing press clattered through the night, Zoya took refuge at Abhishek Singh’s house, who now insisted on keeping the door bolted and a cricket bat near his bed. He had read her full report and said nothing for a long time. Then, finally, he whispered, “They’ll never let this pass quietly.” That night, over instant noodles and conspiracy theories, they drafted Plan B: a press conference at Lucknow Press Club, live-streamed on decentralized servers, with the story narrated in Zoya’s voice. “They can scrub websites,” she said, “but they can’t erase memory if people hear it themselves.” In the soft light of a dying inverter, she opened the leather-bound diary of Mir Afsar Ali again and read aloud the line she’d underlined a hundred times: “Ink is dangerous only when the writer bleeds with it.” The chessboard was no longer silent. It was screaming. And she was finally ready to scream back.
8
The abandoned British-era Lucknow Club stood like a relic of lost power—its ballroom stripped of chandeliers, its walls peeling with echoes of colonial whispers and princely arrogance. That night, under the shroud of rain and secrecy, Wasim Haider and Raghav Pratap Singh arrived at the club from separate directions, their motorcades stopping discreetly in the shadows. Zoya, hidden on the upper floor behind a broken partition, had planted her listening equipment hours earlier, disguised in the cracked marble cornices and behind a dusty portrait of Queen Victoria. The air inside was thick with tobacco, silence, and unspoken calculations. Raghav poured two glasses of whiskey as Wasim lit a cigar with ceremonial flair. What followed was not an argument, but a ritual—two kings rehearsing their final move.
“Old man Rathore’s girl is causing more trouble than expected,” Raghav said, swirling his drink. Wasim exhaled slowly, replying, “She’s like that Sunder Pal fellow. Young. Righteous. Disposable.” Zoya clenched her fists. The casual tone with which they discussed lives lost, stories buried—it chilled her. “We started this together,” Raghav continued, “back when your father and mine thought they were untouchable. We finished what they couldn’t. And now, it’s time for the final consolidation.” Wasim nodded. “The riots in Kanpur. The student protests. We fan the fires just enough. Then we walk in together—new alliance, unity ticket. Hindu-Muslim brothers saving Uttar Pradesh from chaos.” They clinked glasses. It was a show. A beautifully choreographed betrayal of the people who believed they were enemies.
Zoya listened, every word confirming what she had feared: the rivalry was engineered, the riots planned, the communal violence staged. The ghost of Sunder Pal was never meant to return, but she had dragged him back into daylight. As the two men exited, Zoya retrieved her recording device, heart hammering in her chest. Outside, thunder roared as the motorcades vanished into the monsoon mist. She ran back through the overgrown lawns, soaked to the skin, but no longer scared. The recording was everything—a confession, a blueprint of treachery, a dagger made of sound. By the time she returned to Abhishek’s house, her clothes were dripping and her eyes were bloodshot. “We have them,” she whispered. He said nothing, just handed her a towel and opened his laptop. The next day’s live broadcast would not just expose corruption—it would unravel an illusion that had ruled the state for three decades. In the mirror, Zoya didn’t recognize herself. The journalist was gone. What stared back was something else entirely: a queen, perhaps, with nothing left to lose.
9
The rain had not ceased for three days, as if the city itself mourned the truth it was about to witness. Zoya sat in the makeshift studio Abhishek had set up inside the derelict ancestral haveli of a former zamindar—where walls were soundproofed with old quilts and power ran on a stolen line from a forgotten transformer. The clock ticked closer to 9:00 PM. Outside, satellite vans from rival channels circled like vultures sensing blood. Inside, Zoya held the pen drive containing the damning audio like it was a piece of her father’s soul. Abhishek stared at the screen, his finger hovering above the “Go Live” button. “Once we press this, there’s no unknowing it,” he said. She replied calmly, “There’s no unseeing dead bodies either. They made the rules. We’re just announcing the checkmate.”
The feed went live. The screen split: on one side, Zoya’s face—wet-haired, dark-eyed, unsmiling; on the other, an old photograph of Sunder Pal Singh, labeled: “Journalist. Father. Martyr.” Then came the audio. First, the familiar voices of Wasim Haider and Raghav Pratap Singh, cordial, laughing, speaking in a tone meant for private clubs and private crimes. As the file played, line by incriminating line, hashtags exploded online: #BetrayalInLucknow, #FalseEnemies, #SunderPalWasRight. Within thirty minutes, Wasim and Raghav’s PR teams issued bland denials. By the first hour, a mob had surrounded Raghav’s residence in Hazratganj. By midnight, Lucknow was trembling. Not with chaos, but with a strange new silence—one that comes before the ground gives way. Zoya didn’t move from the chair even after the live feed ended. She sat frozen, as if waiting for a verdict she had already accepted.
Around 2:00 AM, someone knocked on the haveli gate. Abhishek peeked out from the jharokha. It wasn’t the police. It was Inspector Imtiaz, alone, coat soaked, breath fogging in the lantern-light. He entered without a word and placed a file on the table. “Postmortem of Sunder Pal Singh,” he said. “You were right. The accident was staged. Spine snapped before impact. Poison in the blood. We found the original doctor. He’d been hiding in Bhutan.” Zoya stared at the file without touching it. “I don’t need to read it,” she whispered. “He’s spoken loud enough tonight.” Imtiaz lit a cigarette and stood by the window. “They’ll come for you, you know. Maybe not now. But they will.” Zoya nodded. “Then let them come. I’m not running.” Outside, dawn cracked like a wound in the sky. The city stirred, restless and raw. Statues of party leaders were draped in black cloth. Posters were torn. Banners burned. A truth long buried beneath vote banks and slogans had finally clawed its way to the surface. Zoya didn’t know what would happen tomorrow. But tonight, in the ruins of privilege and power, she felt something she hadn’t in years—her father’s voice in her chest, not just as memory, but as thunder.
10
A week after the broadcast, Lucknow resembled a city exhaling its first honest breath in decades. The tremors unleashed by the revelation still rippled through power corridors, but the fear had begun to shift sides. Raghav Pratap Singh had gone underground, his bungalow sealed by a CBI team dispatched from Delhi. Wasim Haider, once hailed as the liberal conscience of the nation, faced an arrest warrant and had reportedly fled to Dubai. The Joint Committee on Journalistic Ethics, which had once denied Sunder Pal Singh’s claims, released a formal apology and posthumously reinstated him. But for Zoya, justice wasn’t in statements or political resignations. It was in a sealed room, on the top floor of a long-forgotten hospital wing—Room 413. That’s where they had kept him before the staged accident. That’s where the screams had been heard, then silenced. She had never seen the room. Until now.
The room was abandoned, thick with the smell of iodine and rust. The window was jammed half open, letting in the dry July wind. Abhishek held the flashlight while Inspector Imtiaz stood guard below. The bed frame was still there, as was the bloodied strap that had once held a body captive. In the corner, behind an oxygen cylinder, she found it—a leather-bound journal, stained but intact. Her father’s. Inside were notes scrawled in his angular handwriting. Names. Dates. Page 27 mentioned a “Session with R.P.S.”—the same initials for Raghav Pratap Singh. Page 42 mentioned “Audio extracted. Need backup. Z knows nothing. Good.” She pressed the book to her chest and sat on the floor. “He knew they’d come for him,” she said. “He left this for me. Not for the world—for me.” Abhishek knelt beside her. “You’ve become what he was. And more.” She shook her head. “No. I’ve become what they feared.”
Three days later, Zoya was invited to a memorial event at the Press Club of India. She refused. She instead visited a school for tribal children her father had once secretly funded. She spent the day there, away from cameras, away from panels and pundits. That evening, she received a call from a number saved in her father’s old phone as “Sparrow.” A woman’s voice. Calm. Elderly. “The work isn’t over, Zoya,” she said. “Room 413 was only a chamber. The house of silence still stands. Are you ready to burn it down?” Zoya didn’t answer immediately. Then softly, “Not burn. Record. Broadcast. Repeat.” The call ended. No name, no trace. But Zoya knew that the game was bigger than just two villains exposed. This was an architecture of erasure, with deep foundations and many doors still unopened.
That night, she stood alone on Observatory Hill. The wind howled through the rusting telescope dome, just as it had the first night she arrived. Only now, she wasn’t looking for ghosts. She was listening for echoes. And she heard one—a laugh, familiar and warm. Her father’s. Not in sorrow, but in pride. Zoya closed her eyes. She reached into her satchel and pulled out the journal, placing it beside the soil. Then she turned on her recorder. “This is Zoya Singh. Journalist. Daughter. Witness. This is not the end. This is the beginning of testimony.” The recorder blinked red. The night didn’t feel dark anymore. The wind carried her voice across rooftops and alleys and empty halls where truths still slept. Somewhere, someone would hear. Somewhere, the silence would crack again.
END
