Aparajita Tiwari
One
The train to Prayagraj rolled into the station just before dawn, its rusted wheels screeching softly against the tracks as if whispering secrets to the holy city. Nandita Mukherjee stepped out, clutching her leather satchel and the fading warmth of a voice note from her brother, Neel. It was barely thirty-six seconds long—his voice low, deliberate, and edged with urgency. “They’re watching me… The third dip is a front. Too many missing faces. If anything happens…” Then silence. No location. No follow-up. Just those words, haunting and cryptic. The air smelled of smoke, camphor, and wet earth as she pushed past seas of saffron-clad sadhus, sleeping pilgrims, and vendors lighting stoves with cracked fingers. The Kumbh had already begun, and with it came a flood not just of faith, but of frenzy. Above the city, a red sun fought to rise through a shroud of fog, and below, Nandita felt the churn—of bodies, of prayer, and of something else, something darker that writhed beneath the chants and conch shells.
She had never been to a Kumbh Mela before, never imagined herself among ash-smeared sadhus or wandering saints proclaiming liberation through ritual. But this wasn’t a pilgrimage; it was a search. Neel Mukherjee, senior CBI officer and the only family she had left, had vanished three days ago while on a covert intelligence assignment. Officially, he wasn’t even in Prayagraj. When she called his colleagues, they denied knowing of any operation. When she reached out to the local police station, a weary officer had yawned and told her to file a missing persons complaint “after the shahi snan gets over.” But Nandita wasn’t just a schoolteacher with a brother problem—she was stubborn, precise, and dangerously curious. That’s what Neel always said, half-joking, half-proud. As she boarded a rickety e-rickshaw and moved toward Sector 13, where temporary tent cities sprawled like canvas fortresses, she noticed the first of many faces on missing posters fluttering on barricades. Most were pilgrims. Some were children. All were gone. Just like Neel.
By the time she reached the Sangam—the confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati—the crowd had swelled into something unrecognizable. Helicopters hovered above, loudspeakers blared instructions, and policemen tried feebly to contain the tide of humans pressing toward the river. And yet, there was a stillness under it all, an eerie rhythm that told her this chaos wasn’t entirely unplanned. She met Inspector Mahesh Tiwari at the temporary police outpost—a stocky, tobacco-chewing man with eyes that looked like they’d stopped caring a long time ago. He listened to her story with polite disinterest until she mentioned Neel’s name and rank. Something flickered in his expression, but he masked it quickly. “If your brother’s gone missing here, madam,” he said gruffly, “then the Ganga has already taken him. People come here to wash sins. Some don’t come back.” His words chilled her, not just because of what he implied, but because they mirrored what the voice note suggested. Something was happening during the third immersion—something more than ritual. Nandita stepped out of the tent and looked once more toward the river. In that moment, amid a million voices chanting for salvation, she made herself a silent promise: she wouldn’t leave this city without finding her brother. Or the truth.
Two
The sun rose higher, burning through the morning haze as Nandita waded deeper into the madness that was Sector 13—a massive temporary settlement stitched together with bamboo, plastic sheets, and devotion. She walked past langar tents feeding thousands, makeshift hospitals treating dehydration and infection, and security checkpoints where bags were only half-checked. The volume of the crowd pulsed like a living organism. Yet, Neel’s trail remained invisible. At the edge of the tented sector, she came across a restricted enclosure marked “Drone Surveillance Command.” The words meant little to a layperson, but to someone like Nandita—who had spent evenings listening to Neel rant about tech-driven intelligence gathering—it was a blinking arrow. She managed to bluff her way inside by posing as a journalist from a local paper. The technician in charge, a bored man in his twenties wearing a Shiv Sena badge on his vest, barely glanced at her forged ID. On his monitor were hours of drone footage of the Sangam, the akharas, the bathing ghats—pilgrims appearing like ants in saffron, all moving toward the water. “Rewind to three days ago,” she said quietly. “Third shahi snan. Sector 13, near Akhara 9.” The technician clicked a few keys, and there it was.
At first, she didn’t notice anything. The aerial footage showed a million bodies pressing against the barricades, dipping in rhythm with conch blasts and mantras. But then, in a narrow lane between two food stalls, she saw him—Neel. He was not in his usual formal wear. He had grown a short beard and wore a pale kurta with a dusty gamcha over his shoulder. He was gesturing to someone out of frame. The technician zoomed in. The other man stepped into view, and Nandita felt the blood drain from her face. He was wearing ochre robes, his head partially shaved, with a tulsi bead necklace glinting in the sun. But his posture was wrong—rigid, tense. His eyes flicked over Neel’s shoulder as though worried about being watched. The two men argued for a few seconds before the frame blurred, and a group of naked Naga sadhus blocked the view. When the shot cleared, Neel was gone. Vanished into the crowd. “Can you track this guy?” Nandita asked, pointing at the godman. The technician shook his head. “Signal interference. Too many drones. Some parts are missing.” Of course they were. It was as if someone knew exactly when to disappear.
As she left the command tent, the noise outside had turned feral. A bull had broken through the crowd and was rampaging across the open area. People screamed, scrambling to get out of the way. Nandita stepped aside into the shadow of a bhandara tent and stood still, her mind racing. That man in the footage. She had seen his face before—not in life, but on a poster plastered all over Prayagraj. Swami Viratnanda, leader of the powerful Bhairav Tapobhumi Akhara. Revered. Untouchable. But if Neel had argued with him—and then disappeared—something far more dangerous was buried beneath this holy gathering. Nandita knew now that this wasn’t just a search. It was a fight against power wearing the mask of piety. She stared at the river once again, watching people dip themselves in faith and emerge without knowing what the current had taken. Somewhere, behind all this noise, lay her brother. And somewhere nearby, Swami Viratnanda was still walking among them—untouched, unbothered, and very much aware that someone had started watching back.
Three
It took Nandita three hours of walking, waiting, and dodging guards to reach the outskirts of Bhairav Tapobhumi Akhara, the spiritual empire of Swami Viratnanda. Unlike the colorful, open akharas buzzing with rituals and music, this one was eerily silent and self-contained. Tall bamboo fences wrapped in saffron cloth blocked the view from the outside. There were no public prayers, no sermons over loudspeakers. Just the soft hum of diesel generators and armed volunteers with bluetooth earpieces, patrolling like private security. She stood near a food donation stall and watched. Inside, groups of foreign devotees walked in single file toward the central tent—westerners in robes, most of them wearing glazed expressions as if sedated by peace or something stronger. Nandita’s schoolteacher instincts noticed odd patterns—no children, no old sadhus, and an unusually high number of medical volunteers wearing gloves but not masks. A man at the gate called out to her: “Sister, are you looking for blessings?” Without missing a beat, she lowered her voice, softened her eyes, and nodded. “Yes, I came from Kolkata. I want to offer service… to the Swami.” He smiled, motioning her in.
Inside, the silence grew heavier. The air smelled sterile—too sterile for a tent city. The paths were lined with marigolds, but beneath them, rubber tubes ran toward a generator room marked “Private.” Nandita passed rows of meditation tents, noticing that several were closed and guarded, despite being labeled “open satsang”. Her unease deepened when she spotted an odd bulge beneath the main tent—like a cellar or sunken floor. It was unusual; the Kumbh grounds were flat, temporary. Nothing here should be underground. She played her role carefully, offering to help at the medical station where rows of cots held tired pilgrims. A nurse handed her a bottle of saline. “No questions. Just hang these and keep walking,” she said flatly. As Nandita moved between the beds, she noticed that many of the “patients” were unconscious—not resting, not sleeping—deeply drugged. A woman in her thirties, healthy-looking, was attached to a heart monitor with an oxygen tube she didn’t seem to need. Her fingers were ink-stained, like someone who had been fingerprinted. Then she saw the wrist—a hospital tag with no name, just a number. A patient… or a commodity?
A soft voice behind her made her jump. “You don’t belong here.”
She turned to find a middle-aged man in a faded white kurta, stethoscope slung lazily around his neck. He didn’t look hostile—just sad, as if exhausted by what he had seen for too long. “I’m not a spy,” she whispered. “I’m looking for my brother. CBI. Name’s Neel Mukherjee. He came here and vanished.” The man sighed. “Then you should leave tonight. Quietly.” She stared at him. “Are you a doctor?”
“I was. Dr. Saeed Akhtar. AIIMS. Now just… surviving.” He looked around and lowered his voice further. “This is not an ashram. It’s a warehouse. And the Swami doesn’t offer salvation—he exports it by the kilo.” Before she could ask more, he walked away, vanishing behind a curtain marked “Men’s Ward.” As the evening prayer bells rang, Nandita stepped outside the main tent. The walls had no windows. The faithful had no questions. And somewhere inside, she felt, were people like Neel—held, hidden, or already gone. Her fingers trembled as she took out her phone and typed a single line in her notes:
“Begin with the bodies that don’t return to the river.”
Four
Night in Prayagraj during the Kumbh was unlike anything Nandita had imagined—an ocean of lights flickering over endless tents, the Ganga glowing faintly under the reflection of oil lamps, and the hypnotic drone of bhajans melting into the buzz of generators and distant cries. But beneath that divine hum, something sinister pulsed. After leaving the akhara, Nandita returned to her makeshift lodge in Sector 14, a room barely larger than a bathroom, shared with two other women. She couldn’t sleep. Dr. Saeed Akhtar’s words haunted her. A warehouse. A man with a stethoscope and dead eyes. And the unconscious pilgrims with numbered wristbands. Just after midnight, she stepped out with her phone flashlight, driven by an intuition too sharp to ignore. Near the cremation ghat, she saw them—three white ambulances without sirens, parked beside a broken bamboo barricade. No police. No press. No prayers. Men in medical uniforms carried out stretchers with bodies wrapped in plastic, not cloth. She crouched behind a truck and watched, barely breathing. There were no rituals, no chanting. Just kerosene, quick lime, and fire. It wasn’t a funeral. It was disposal.
She backed away in horror, almost tripping over a rusted donation bin beside a Ganga aarti stall. As she steadied herself, her hand brushed something metal inside—a cheap recorder, half-buried under coins and flowers. She picked it up. It was old, dusty, but familiar. Neel had used this model during field interviews. Her fingers trembled as she pressed play. Static. Then his voice, faint but clear: “If you’ve found this… I may not be alive. They’re using the snan to move the bodies. Pilgrims vanish. No trace. No list. Even the system’s part of it. Akhara 9 is the front—watch the medical tents. Trust no one in uniform.” The clip ended abruptly. She clutched the recorder like a talisman. Her brother had seen this coming. He had left a breadcrumb. But there was more—his coded notebook, which she had assumed was just a travel log, might hold real clues. She ran back to the lodge, pulled out the book, and opened to the page marked “Day 3.” Strange symbols. Names of ghats. Numbers beside them. One in particular stood out—20/07/5—circled in red. She had no idea what it meant, but something told her it wasn’t a date.
The next morning, she returned to the police outpost with her findings. Inspector Mahesh Tiwari listened, leaning back in his chair, a fresh smear of tobacco staining his lower lip. When she played Neel’s voice recording, his casual demeanor cracked. He stood up, walked to the window, and stared out at the mass of pilgrims dipping into the river. “You think this is new?” he muttered. “Last Kumbh, twenty-seven sadhus disappeared. Half of them ‘found’—buried. Others? No record. We filed reports. No one followed up. And the ones who did… got transferred.” Nandita pressed him, “So what now? You’ll ignore it again?” Tiwari turned to her, eyes hard. “No. Not this time. If your brother risked his life for this, we owe him more than silence.” He opened a dusty cabinet and handed her a thick, sealed file. “This was classified. Someone shelved it years ago. Your brother requested it a week before he came here.” Inside were grainy photos of corpses missing kidneys, organ trafficking reports from across three states, and a hand-scribbled note: “Kumbh is not just faith. It’s the perfect fog.” Nandita stared at the pages, nausea rising. She looked out the window. The Ganga shimmered, holy and vast, but all she could see now was red beneath the surface.
Five
The wind across the Sangam carried a peculiar chill that morning, one that had little to do with weather and more to do with the shadow of secrets unraveling faster than Nandita could process. Armed with Neel’s cryptic notebook, the voice recording, and Tiwari’s reluctant cooperation, she began to comb through the lowest layers of the festival—the hidden corners, the overpacked medical shelters, and the less-spoken-of “women’s rehabilitation tents” near Sector 18. That’s where she found Rani, or at least, that’s what the name on the shelter’s register claimed. Rani was about twenty-five, dressed in borrowed clothes and carrying a silence that felt heavier than most confessions. She had once worked at a “devotional massage center” run by volunteers linked to an ashram on the outskirts of Varanasi. The place, she whispered, was nothing more than a prison wrapped in incense and mantras. She had been trafficked at seventeen, sold twice, and nearly killed when she tried to escape. “They say the river purifies,” she said, her voice cracked and low. “But it also hides. And it carries bodies faster than the truth can float.”
Nandita spent the next two hours coaxing out details. Rani had seen pilgrims taken away after fainting at mass bathing events. Not to hospitals—but to secret tents with tarpaulin walls and no official logos. She remembered one in particular—a man with sharp eyes, in a white coat, whose hands never shook. “He gave me something in tea. I slept for three days,” she said. When shown a photo of Dr. Saeed Akhtar, Rani flinched but then slowly nodded. “That’s him. But he helped me escape. I think… he was trapped too.” That same day, Nandita and Tiwari searched for Dr. Akhtar again, but his medical station had vanished. Where once there were twenty cots, now there was an empty platform. The ground beneath had been scrubbed clean with bleach. A volunteer in a red shawl said the camp had moved to Sector 7 “for renovation.” No one knew exactly where. “They clean their footprints with devotion,” Tiwari said bitterly. “And in this crowd, even murder gets lost between mantras.” But Nandita refused to back off. That evening, Rani handed her a folded note—a hand-drawn map showing a stretch of land behind Akhara 9, marked with a tiny red “X”. “I heard the name once. Shav Vihar. A cremation point not on the official list. That’s where they take the ones who don’t wake up.”
She didn’t get far that night. Around midnight, her lodge room was broken into. No theft. No violence. Just a silent intrusion. Her backpack, containing Neel’s notebook and the voice recorder, had been turned inside out. Her pillow slit open. A single line was scrawled across her mirror in red lipstick: “Faith watches.” Nandita sat on the floor, her heart pounding. Someone knew she was digging too deep. Someone powerful. And yet, she didn’t feel fear. What she felt was fury—boiling, sharp, and ancient. They had tried to erase Neel. Now, they were trying to erase her. But every time they erased a trace, she would draw two more. At dawn, she and Tiwari drove out to the edge of the river, to the unmarked cremation site from Rani’s map. There, among half-burnt logs and cold ash, she found it: a stack of discarded identity cards buried in a rusted drum. Voter IDs. Aadhar cards. One of them still had a photo of a young man, eyes half-closed, marked “Donor – Type B+.” In that instant, Nandita understood. This wasn’t crime. It was commerce in its ugliest form—disguised as charity, executed with faith, and protected by silence. The river kept flowing beside her, as if indifferent. But Nandita wasn’t indifferent anymore. She was about to become the storm the Ganga had never asked for.
Six
The ghats were quieter by late evening, the air heavy with the scent of wet earth, incense, and the distant echoes of bhajans. Nandita stood near a forgotten lane that curved behind the Panchayati Akhara—an area largely avoided by pilgrims after sundown. It was Arjun who had suggested the place, a back-alley where unsanctioned camps cropped up under the protection of crooked local authorities. As they moved cautiously past makeshift tin shelters and rusted water tanks, a shadow detached itself from a corner and approached them with a limping gait. He was an old man in saffron rags, with sunken eyes and a permanent twitch in his left cheek. In his wrinkled hand, he held what appeared to be a rusted iron key hanging from a jute string. “You are looking for someone who shouldn’t be found,” he said without preamble, fixing his gaze on Nandita. Her breath caught in her throat—he knew.
The man, who called himself Baba Ghanshyam, claimed he had once worked in the cremation sector of the mela—an unspoken caste-bound world that handled death, fire, and the final journey. Years ago, he had witnessed people being burned in pyres without names—bodies that didn’t belong to families, bodies no one reported missing. “Now they come in the back of meat trucks,” he whispered, pointing towards the river. “Sometimes they still breathe when they come.” His words chilled them. He handed over the rusted key with trembling fingers, hinting it opened an abandoned shack behind the old electricity supply office. “It was once a storage shed,” he said. “Now it stores silence.” Arjun looked skeptical but took the key anyway. That night, Nandita barely slept. The idea of her brother lying lifeless in some half-forgotten room in the shadows of the Mela’s grandeur gnawed at her gut like slow poison.
The next morning, before sunrise, they made their way to the shack. The door creaked open after several tugs, revealing a narrow, cobweb-covered room lined with rusted cots and blood-stained tarpaulin. A pungent odor of antiseptic and rot hit them instantly. On a shelf lay neatly arranged glass jars with unidentifiable human samples floating inside. Nandita turned away to gag. In the dim light filtering through a broken window, they spotted a metal cabinet. Arjun used a crowbar to force it open. Inside were stacks of files and photographs—mugshots, medical forms, and organ compatibility reports. And then, under a pile of dusty x-ray films, Nandita found a file labeled “CASE: BLUE HAWK – NEEL MUKHERJEE.” Her hands trembled as she opened it. The file listed Neel’s blood group, medical history, even his eye color. The last page had a single line scrawled across it in red ink: “Cleared for harvesting.” Her scream was silent but thunderous in her chest. Arjun caught her as her knees buckled. They now knew her brother was not just missing—he was marked. And time was running out.
Seven
The akhada was unlike anything Nandita had experienced so far. As she crossed under an ornate cloth arch reading “Yogi Mahadev Giri Maharaj Ji ka Divya Darbar”, the air changed. Smoke of burning incense mingled with the scent of camphor, saffron-robed men moved in near silence, and eyes followed her with a stillness that was more unsettling than welcoming. Yogi Mahadev Giri sat on an elevated wooden throne, surrounded by flowers, fruit baskets, and garlanded photographs of gods. He had the kind of serene face television gurus wear—half-compassion, half-detachment. Nandita’s heart pounded as she bent slightly in respect, trying not to betray the desperation in her voice. “I came to seek your blessings, Maharaj Ji,” she said softly, slipping an envelope with Neel’s photo among the offerings. The yogi’s assistant, a sharply observant man with a rudraksha-beaded necklace and gleaming eyes, intercepted the envelope and whispered something into the yogi’s ear. Mahadev Giri’s expression didn’t change, but he nodded slowly and beckoned Nandita closer. “Your journey has just begun,” he said, his voice deep and honeyed, “but you will find your answers beneath what is hidden—not above, not beside. Go where the pilgrims don’t. Where the dead go before they are ash.”
Shaken but fueled by that cryptic blessing, Nandita left the akhada and wandered past the fringes of the Kumbh’s main areas. Through a maze of narrow alleys formed by makeshift tents and sheds, she arrived at the Nirmal Ghat—a secluded bank rarely visited by pilgrims. She watched quietly as stretchers carrying lifeless bodies arrived, some wrapped in white cloth, some in bloodied sheets, before being handed over to cremation workers who barely paused to say a prayer. Here, death moved in silence. It was here that she found a small chai stall, manned by a one-eyed man named Maiku, who after a few cups of tea and her careful coaxing, spoke of the “shadow boats” that carried corpses away—not for cremation, but for something else. “Sometimes they don’t come back empty,” he whispered, eyes flickering. “They carry wood one way, and black bags the other. I’ve seen them—when the river’s low, you can hear the motors at night.” Nandita followed the scent of this lead like a trail of incense smoke, letting it guide her through the murky terrain of the dead.
That night, Nandita returned and hid behind the wooden walls of a derelict pandal overlooking the Nirmal Ghat. Just past midnight, she heard it. A low thrum. A motorboat with its lights off, gliding across the river. Two men in surgical masks unloaded something heavy onto a gurney on the shore and quickly wheeled it behind the cremation shed—not toward fire, but toward a camouflaged ambulance waiting in the shadows. Her heart thudded as she captured the scene on her phone, the images shaky but unmistakable. This was it—proof that the dead were being diverted, stolen. But why? And for what? She didn’t need the answer spelled out. The rumors of missing bodies, the network that Neel might have infiltrated—this was the heart of it. Organ trafficking. She now knew that her brother hadn’t vanished in the Kumbh; he had fallen into its deepest abyss. And she, an unlikely pilgrim in her own rite, had touched the edges of something blacker than night.
Eight
The night air in Prayagraj was thick with the scent of damp earth and burnt ghee, the distant chanting still echoing from the riverbanks as Nandita crouched beneath the rotting wood of a derelict office behind the Langar camp. With the help of Ashraf’s contact—an old sadhu-turned-informant named Shambhu Baba—she had finally reached what was once the private storage office of a defunct NGO called “Jeevan Daan.” What had posed as a charitable organization during the last Kumbh had, according to the baba, served as a front for the trafficking operation. Ashraf stood outside, watching the lane, while Nandita’s torch flickered across dust-covered furniture and scattered files. She forced open a rusted filing cabinet, the screech sharp in the silence. Inside lay a series of leather-bound registers that looked far too methodical for a charity. She flipped through the pages, her breath catching as she read: names, blood types, organ matches, coded locations, payout amounts. At the bottom of one list, the name “Arjun Sen” was marked with a red stamp: RETRIEVED. Her hands trembled. He had been processed—by his own agency, or something else?
As she stepped outside clutching the ledger, Ashraf gave her a nod. “We’ve got to get this to someone we can trust,” he said, but his eyes betrayed unease. They met at the river’s edge with Aparna, who was already there, seated in her wheelchair, hooded and silent. She had received the image of the ledger on her secure line and confirmed it with horror. “This is bigger than anyone imagined,” she whispered. “The operation isn’t just backed by corrupt local godmen—it has ties within CBI, maybe even the Ministry.” Her voice shook, not with fear but with fury. “And Arjun’s name here means they either sacrificed him or he’s still alive—held somewhere until all this blows over.” As Ashraf started questioning their next move, Nandita made her decision. “We leak the ledger to the media,” she said. “Not everything. Just enough to start a fire they can’t control.” Aparna gave a slow nod. “But that’ll paint a target on our backs.” “They’ve already marked us,” Nandita said. “Now we mark them back.”
Before the trio could disperse, a sudden glare of headlights flooded the riverside. A jeep skidded to a halt, and masked men poured out—guns raised, moving fast. Ashraf pushed Nandita behind a stone ledge as Aparna wheeled herself behind an overturned boat. The air cracked with gunfire. Nandita’s ears rang as bullets struck the ground near her feet. Ashraf returned fire with a pistol he had tucked in his waistband, his shots controlled and precise. But the masked men didn’t seem to care who they hit—this was about silencing them before the ledger reached anyone else. In the chaos, Nandita crawled back toward the ledgers, now soaked with river mist, trying to protect the pages with her shawl. A sharp cry made her turn—Aparna had been hit in the arm. Blood soaked through her sleeve, but she still had her phone in her other hand, uploading the scanned images to a secure cloud. Nandita shouted at her to stop, but it was too late. “Let them come,” Aparna said through clenched teeth. “They’ve already lost control of the truth.” With the first light of dawn bleeding into the misty river, the men retreated. They had failed. The ledger was now out in the world. And Nandita, holding her sister-in-law’s bleeding arm, knew there was no turning back. The Kumbh Mela’s sanctity had been desecrated, and only fire could purify the rot that had taken root.
Nine
The air in Prayagraj had turned thick with a strange electricity, as if the Kumbh itself sensed that the sanctity was being peeled away to reveal something sinister beneath. Nandita sat silently in a hidden corner of the Sangam tent city, listening to the recordings from Arjun’s bugged conversation with the sādhu known as Mahant Vishwaraj. The disguised godman, cloaked in saffron and holiness, was in truth the linchpin of the syndicate—a puppet master threading surgeries, disappearances, and bribes into the religious fervor of Kumbh. Nandita’s fingers trembled over the playback device as she heard her brother Neel’s voice—subdued, possibly drugged—mentioning a “third immersion.” Arjun interpreted it as a codename for the final stage of the organ trafficking process: after surveillance and abduction came erasure—both of the victim’s body and identity—within the holy waters of the Ganga.
As the sun set, Nandita and Arjun planned their next move. They had traced a temporary medical setup concealed behind an NGO tent near Sector 16—a sector notoriously chaotic and largely undocumented. Under the guise of providing free check-ups to pilgrims, surgeries were being performed under the radar. Arjun, disguised as a local sadhu, would infiltrate the tent while Nandita would wait at the ghats with her phone camera, ready to livestream anything if things went wrong. But nothing prepared them for what they found. Inside, rows of cots held sedated men and women—many missing a kidney, some still hooked to drips with bloodstains hastily wiped off. A folder full of donor tags lay near a rusted fridge that served as an organ bank. Arjun managed to grab documents, photos, and a USB before triggering a silent alarm. Chaos erupted. He barely escaped through the crowd, his disguise slipping as he reached Nandita at the ghats, heart pounding.
As they regrouped in their safehouse, Nandita looked over the contents of the USB—scanned passports, blood reports, donor-recipient matching lists, and chillingly, a video showing Neel being wheeled into the same tent just two nights ago. Her face tightened as Arjun said softly, “They didn’t kill him—yet. He was valuable. O-negative blood. They’ve probably moved him for the final procedure.” They realized with growing horror that “The Third Immersion” wasn’t just a metaphor—it was scheduled during the last holy bathing day in two days. It would be the largest gathering yet, and the perfect cover for a large-scale ‘cleansing’ of evidence. For Nandita, the line between faith and fear had long been blurred, but now her mission had clarity. She would walk into that final dip—not as a pilgrim, but as a storm.
Ten
The final bathing day of Kumbh had arrived, and with it came a tide of millions. From the ghats to the fields beyond the tent cities, human forms flowed like rivers themselves, chanting, praying, weeping, and dipping into the sacred confluence of Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati. Amidst the sanctity, Nandita stood draped in a tattered sari, a tilak smeared across her forehead, eyes burning with purpose. Arjun moved beside her in the guise of a mute monk, his arms covered in ash, a long wooden danda in his hand that hid within it a sharpened blade. Today wasn’t for observing. It was for extraction.
They had learned from the USB data that the syndicate’s mobile operation—the so-called “Immersion Van”—was set to execute its final harvest at sunrise, before the first rays of light washed the ghats in gold. The victims were kept in an underground chamber beneath an abandoned police supply kiosk in Sector 9. That location—known to very few—was used during off-hours by the traffickers to ‘cleanse’ their trail. Nandita and Arjun slipped through throngs of kalpwasis and sannyasis, merging with the living current. The closer they got, the stranger the air became. The faint stench of chlorine, medical waste, and incense was unmistakable.
Breaking in was less difficult than expected. The area was so heavily draped in spiritual camouflage—mantras echoing from speakers, fake priests doing rituals outside—that no one suspected what lay beneath. Arjun removed a hidden trapdoor and descended into darkness while Nandita kept watch. Inside, a narrow tunnel led to a white-lit chamber where five people lay sedated, including Neel. His breathing was shallow, and a dialysis machine thrummed ominously near his bed. Arjun injected a reversal drug he had stolen from the earlier medical tent, praying it would work fast. Meanwhile, from her perch above, Nandita spotted movement—two men in security uniforms with walkie-talkies approaching. She didn’t hesitate. Pulling out a tear gas canister hidden in her satchel, she rolled it toward the tunnel entrance. Screams followed. She jumped in behind the smoke and sealed the trapdoor shut.
Inside, Neel had started to groan. His eyes fluttered. “N—Nandita?” he murmured. She choked back tears and whispered, “We’re getting you out, Bhai.” Arjun lifted him gently while the others helped a conscious woman who began crying the moment she realized they were escaping. The walls began to shake. Backup had arrived. It wasn’t long before fists slammed the trapdoor from above. But Arjun, anticipating this, had already triggered an explosive charge set on a side wall—a minor blast, enough to create a passage into a nearby drain tunnel. They carried Neel through water and filth, every second a gamble.
By the time they emerged from a storm outlet near Sector 12, the first rays of sunlight had touched the ghats. Overhead, a strange red hue stained the sky—a rare lunar eclipse during the bathing hour, dubbed a “Blood Moon” by astrologers. Thousands looked up in awe. None knew that in the belly of the Kumbh, a far darker eclipse had just passed. Neel, barely conscious, gripped Nandita’s hand. Arjun pulled a cloth over their heads as police sirens howled in the distance.
They had proof. They had Neel. But above all, they had survived the night of the blood moon. The storm had passed—for now.
End
