Aarav D’Souza
Part 1 – The Drummer’s Son
The monsoon had begun to soften the air of Goa, the heavy rains washing the red earth until it gleamed like polished stone. Coconut palms bent with the weight of wind and rain, and the Mandovi River ran fuller than before, carrying with it the murmurs of villages and the silence of temples that had once echoed with songs. In one such village, hidden away among groves of jackfruit trees, a boy named Ananta sat with his father’s old drum resting on his knees. The drum was no longer played in public. Its skin was patched, its wood scarred by time, yet when his fingers tapped against it, the sound rolled like a pulse older than memory.
Ananta had grown up with rhythm woven into his veins. His family had served as drummers for the temple of Mahadeva, calling the faithful to prayer at dawn, filling the evenings with beats that mirrored the rising stars. The drum was their inheritance, not just wood and leather but the sacred duty of keeping the heartbeat of the community alive. Yet all of that had changed when the Portuguese soldiers arrived, carrying muskets, crosses, and laws that declared the temple bells must be silenced. Where once music had summoned worshippers, now church bells rang instead, sharp and foreign, carrying the echo of conquest.
His father had been the last to strike the drum in the temple courtyard. Ananta remembered the day clearly, though he had been no more than a child. Soldiers in breastplates had stood in the courtyard, their eyes hard and cold. A priest in black robes had nodded once, and his father had lowered his drum. The silence that followed was heavier than the sound of cannon fire. Since then, his father’s shoulders had stooped, as if bent beneath the weight of silence itself.
“Your hands are quick, but the world has no place for our music anymore,” his father said often, his voice rough like river stones. “Better to till the soil, or learn their ways. Drums are for another time.” But Ananta could not stop. At night, when the rains drowned all sound, he played softly in the dark. The rhythm gave him comfort, as though ancestors gathered close to remind him he belonged to something larger than fear.
That morning, as clouds broke and sunlight spilled across the wet fields, Ananta carried the drum down to the riverbank. He tapped it in slow beats, matching the oar strokes of fishermen rowing across the swollen water. Children paused in their play, listening, before their mothers pulled them away with nervous hands. Music, once a common language, had become dangerous.
Ananta did not care. To play was to breathe. He struck faster now, letting the rhythm rise like the call of thunder. For a brief moment he imagined the temple alive again—lamps lit, chants rising, bells swinging in harmony with his drum. But the illusion shattered when a cough echoed behind him.
His father stood there, weary eyes watching, a bundle of firewood balanced on his shoulder. “You risk too much, boy,” he murmured. “If the wrong ears hear you, we will lose more than music.”
Ananta lowered his hands, the final beat still trembling in the drum’s skin. “If I stop, Baba, then what remains of us? They have silenced the bells, must we silence our hearts too?”
The old man said nothing. He only turned, his sandals sinking into the wet earth, leaving Ananta alone with the fading echo. Yet even silence could not erase the defiance that had begun to grow within him.
That evening, as dusk wrapped the village in shades of indigo, Ananta walked through the narrow lanes, carrying the drum slung over his shoulder. The houses smelled of wood smoke and fish curry; oil lamps flickered in clay niches. He noticed how neighbors averted their eyes when they saw the drum. Fear had made them strangers to their own traditions.
He reached the abandoned temple courtyard. The walls were cracked, vines creeping up carved pillars where gods once stood in painted glory. Soldiers had desecrated the sanctum; the idol was gone, carried away or broken. But the stone floor still held the memory of footsteps, the air still whispered of chants. Ananta set the drum down and began to play.
The sound rose against the ruined walls, each beat echoing louder than he expected. The rhythm was not only his—it was the rhythm of those who had come before, and perhaps of those yet to come. His hands blurred, the beats tumbling into patterns that belonged to no scripture but to the pulse of life itself.
He did not see the figure at first, standing at the edge of the courtyard. A girl, cloaked in the fading light, her face partly hidden by a scarf. She listened with rapt attention, her posture neither fearful nor hostile. When he stopped, startled by the presence of another, she stepped forward.
“That sound,” she said, her words touched with a lilt he had only heard in the mouths of foreigners, “it is unlike anything in our churches. It is… alive.”
Ananta’s heart pounded as hard as the drum had moments before. Who was this girl, dressed finely, her skin pale in the lamplight, her accent betraying Lisbon more than Goa? She smiled faintly, as though sensing his fear. “Do not stop. Please. Play again.”
But Ananta only tightened his grip on the drum, unsure whether this encounter was chance or danger. The temple walls seemed to lean in, listening. The silence grew thick, filled with questions that neither of them yet dared to answer.
Part 2 – The Bell Maker’s Daughter
The rains had cleared by the next morning, leaving the streets of Old Goa damp and shining as though polished by unseen hands. The air smelled of wet stone and the tang of sea breeze drifting up from the Mandovi. In the whitewashed quarters near the great cathedral, Isabel Rodrigues leaned from her balcony and watched the city stir awake. Merchants lifted their shutters, fisherwomen carried baskets to the market, and the bronze bells of the cathedral rang out over rooftops, their metallic thunder rolling across the river.
For most in the settlement, those bells were symbols of power and salvation. For Isabel, they were reminders of everything she had left behind in Lisbon: the narrow cobbled streets, the dark wooden churches, her mother’s voice singing hymns as she stitched linen by candlelight. When her father, Captain Duarte Rodrigues, had been assigned to Goa to oversee military affairs and supervise the bell foundry, Isabel had been forced to follow. She had been sixteen then, her heart filled with curiosity and fear, stepping onto this new land where the air felt heavier, richer, and alive with sounds she had never known.
Now, two years later, Goa still bewildered her. Its markets overflowed with spices so pungent they made her eyes water. Its festivals burst with colors that rivalled the finest fabrics of Europe. And yet, beneath all this brilliance, there was silence—the silence of temples stripped bare, of chants forbidden, of drums that no longer echoed at dusk. Isabel had sensed it from the beginning, though her father never spoke of such things.
Captain Duarte was a man of strict convictions. His life revolved around duty, faith, and the iron will of empire. He rose before dawn to pray, then oversaw the training of soldiers or the casting of church bells, his voice sharp as steel. He loved his daughter, Isabel knew, but his love was heavy with command. “This land is not for you to understand,” he often told her. “It is for us to rule, to guide, to correct.” Isabel nodded when he spoke, but in her heart she resisted. She did not want only to command; she wanted to listen.
That was why she ventured often into the streets when her father was occupied, dressed in plainer clothes, her dark hair covered with a scarf. She wandered the markets, lingered at the riverbanks, and sometimes slipped into abandoned courtyards where vines grew unchecked. It was in one such place, the ruined temple on the edge of a village, that she had first heard the drum.
The memory of the sound still pulsed in her body. She had stood hidden among the shadows, listening as the boy—tall, lean, his face fierce with concentration—struck rhythms that made her breath catch. It was unlike the measured toll of bells or the restrained harmonies of hymns. This music lived, breathed, danced. It was raw and yet precise, carrying with it centuries of devotion. She had not meant to reveal herself, but the music had drawn her forward, and words had escaped her before she could stop them: “It is alive.”
The boy’s eyes had widened with suspicion, his hands gripping the drum as though it were both weapon and shield. Isabel had stepped closer, but he had said nothing. The silence between them had been tense, charged with questions. She had wanted to ask him to play again, to teach her what the rhythm meant. But then he had turned away, vanishing into the twilight like a ghost.
Now, standing on her balcony, Isabel could not shake the memory. She wanted to hear that sound again. She wanted to know why the music that should have frightened her instead filled her with longing.
That evening, after the cathedral bells had finished tolling vespers, Isabel walked with her father to the foundry. It was a cavernous building where fires burned hot and molten bronze was poured into moulds shaped for bells. Her father spoke proudly of their work. “Each bell we cast carries the voice of heaven,” he said. “When they ring, they remind the people of who holds power here.”
Isabel nodded politely, but as she watched the glowing liquid metal flow, she thought of the boy’s drum. His sound had not come from fire and iron; it had come from skin and wood, from the human hand itself. Which, she wondered, carried the truer voice of heaven—the bell imposed by authority, or the drum born from the heart?
That night she dreamed. In her dream, bells and drums clashed in the sky, their sounds colliding like storm clouds. From the chaos emerged a strange harmony, a rhythm that carried both weight and freedom. When she woke, her pulse still beat to its echo.
The next day she returned to the ruins. The monsoon rains had left the courtyard slick with moss, but she did not care. She waited, listening to the whisper of cicadas and the rustle of banyan leaves. Hours passed, and still the boy did not come. She almost turned back when she finally heard it—a low thrum, hesitant, then rising in confidence.
Ananta stepped into the courtyard, unaware at first that she was there. His fingers struck patterns quick and sure, filling the air with defiance. Isabel’s breath caught. She took a step forward, letting the sound wrap around her. This time she did not hide.
“You came back,” she said softly.
The boy looked up, startled, his hands stilling. He scowled. “Why are you here?” His words were sharp, mistrustful.
“Because I wanted to listen,” Isabel answered, lifting her chin. “Your music—” she hesitated, searching for words. “It speaks differently than anything I have known. It is like the earth itself is talking.”
Ananta’s gaze lingered on her. “You should not be here. Your people silence our temples. They do not want this music to be heard.”
Isabel flinched, but she did not look away. “And yet it lives. I heard it. I feel it now. Will you teach me what it means?”
For a long moment he was silent, his eyes wary. Then he struck the drum once, the sound deep and resonant. “It means we still exist,” he said.
Isabel’s heart leapt, not only at the words but at the possibility they carried. She stepped closer, closer than she had ever dared before. The ruined temple walls bore witness as two worlds—conqueror and conquered—stood face to face, bound by a rhythm that neither empire nor faith could silence.
Part 3 – A Forbidden Melody
For three evenings after their second encounter, the ruined temple remained empty but for the wind that threaded itself through cracked pillars and the lizards that darted over fading carvings. On the fourth, a folded jackfruit leaf appeared on the threshold, held shut by a thorn—something a child might play with, nothing anyone would remark upon. Ananta paused, then stepped inside. He found her waiting in the shadow of a banyan root that had pushed through the roof and braided itself down the wall like a rope. The light was thin and green there, as if straining through river water.
“I was not sure you would come,” she said.
“I was not sure it was safe,” he replied, then lifted the leaf and showed it to her. “A sign?”
“A small one.” She smiled. “It keeps the rain out of secrets.”
They stood for a moment in the quiet, hearing outside the distant voices of women returning from the wells, the clatter of pots, a dog barking. Ananta set the drum gently on the stone ledge where lamps had once stood and considered the stranger standing before him, no longer quite a stranger. He had spent nights trying to decide whether to trust her. He had watched Portuguese soldiers parade through streets like masters of a new season. He had watched neighbors slip their drums under cots at the rumor of a patrol. Yet the memory of her listening—the careful, unguarded way her face opened to sound—kept tugging him back here.
“What is your name?” he asked finally.
“Isabel,” she said. “Isabel Rodrigues.” She hesitated, then added, “My father is Captain Duarte. He oversees soldiers—and bells.”
Ananta’s shoulders tightened at the last word, though he kept his voice even. “I am Ananta. My father kept time for our god.”
“Kept?” she said softly.
“Until they took the bell,” he answered, and both of them heard in his voice the scrape of that old wound. He lowered his gaze. “Why do you want my music?”
Isabel’s answer came slowly, as if each word had to feel its way across a divide. “Because when I hear it, I remember the world is not only made of orders. It is made of breath. It is made of hands. The bells command from above, but your drum… it rises from the ground.” She glanced at the ledge. “Will you play?”
He knelt and drew with his fingertip in the dust: a line of five dots, then a gap, then a line of seven. “There are cycles,” he said, “ways to count time so the heart can follow.” He tapped, palm and fingers, soft at first—five pulses that felt like footsteps approaching, then seven like rain gaining speed. Isabel’s lips parted. When the pattern returned, she whispered the count with him, stumbling but willing, until the numbers fell away and only the shape of it remained.
When she lifted her head, the bells in the distance began to peal—first one, then the answering chorus from the cathedral by the river. The sound rolled over rooftops as implacable as tide. Ananta felt the old anger rise—how the clang demanded kneeling from those who had not chosen it. He pressed his left hand hard to the drumhead to mute it and tapped lightly with the right, searching, mapping the bell’s overtone with a dry, heartbeat click. “Listen,” he said. “Even the iron voice can be made to sway.”
Isabel closed her eyes. The bells called like bronze hammers, but beneath them a second line walked—his quiet counter-rhythm, threading between the clangs like a weaver’s shuttle. She began to hum, tentative at first, then with more certainty, a melody from her childhood—one of the Marian hymns her mother had sung while mending linen. The tune, stark in its simplicity, moved in a narrow arc, pure as late sunlight across water.
Ananta did not know the words, but he knew yearning when it lifted under bone. He caught the contour and shaded it with his palm strokes, answering the hymn’s straight path with curving phrases that rose and fell like a fisher’s net. The temple seemed to inhale. For a few breaths the two lines—her steady prayer, his flowering pulse—ran parallel without touching. Then, as if surprised by their own courage, they crossed. The hymn leaned into an off-beat; the drum gave up a little of its stubborn earth; the bell outside, unknowing master of the moment, tolled its measure. The sound that took shape belonged to none of them and to all of them at once.
Isabel opened her eyes and laughed—softly, as if afraid to frighten the thing they had made. “What is it?” she whispered.
“A path through a wall,” Ananta said.
They worked until the light thinned to indigo. When Isabel struggled to keep the count, he drew another pattern in dust—two slow, two fast; two slow, three rising—marking with pebbles where she should lean her breath. When her melody slid too easily into the sweet, he answered with a dry strike of fingers near the rim to remind it of salt and road. He learned that her voice warmed when the phrases curved downward as if bowing, and she learned that his hands carried a smile you could hear even when his face was stone. When they rested, they did not speak at once. They watched a bat slice the air and vanish under the broken lintel.
A patrol passed in the lane outside: boots, a snatch of laughter, a smell of iron. Isabel’s mouth tightened. “If they found us—”
“They won’t,” Ananta said, though unsure. He wrapped the drumcloth around the instrument and tucked it behind a collapsed shrine where a carved lotus had surrendered to the creeping fig. “We leave no marks.”
“Except the one we just made,” she said, tipping her head toward the space between them, where the new melody still seemed to shimmer.
They began to meet twice each week, never at the same hour, never approaching by the same path. Sometimes they worked in silence for long minutes before finding the thread; sometimes one sound from a bird or a cartwheel would deliver it ready into their hands. Isabel brought scraps of parchment, and when she hummed a line she would draw it as a curve, high for high, low for low, until the page looked like a hill path. Ananta laughed and, not to be outdone, pricked the drum-skin lightly with a thorn, mapping where his palm fell for certain phrases—a secret topography of touch.
On the seventh meeting, rain broke open without warning. They retreated to the inner sanctum where the roof still held. Water curtained the doorway. Isabel shook droplets from her scarf, then reached for the drum. “Show me,” she said. “Let me try.”
He hesitated, then slid it into her lap, guiding her left hand to rest flat and gentle, teaching the weight of quiet. “Hold the center like a sleeping child,” he said, and moved her right fingers to the edge. “Speak with the fingertips first. The palm tells a story only after the village trusts you.” She imitated the soft strokes, clumsy, then suddenly, for three beats, true. The drum answered with a surprising warmth, as if pleased. Isabel’s eyes lit.
“What did I do?”
“You listened,” he said.
In exchange, she taught him a few syllables of the hymn’s prayer, not the whole text, only the bones of the line—Ave, ave—as if to admit him through a door and still leave other doors locked. When he repeated them, the Latin rounded at the edges in his mouth and became something new, as her name had become in his mind: not Isabel, which felt like the edge of a blade, but Ishabela, which turned like a small boat on a river bend.
They made their first vow without calling it one: if a folded leaf with a thorn lay on the threshold, it meant safe; if the leaf had no thorn, danger. If they heard two slow knocks, two quick, they should flee; if three steady, one held breath, they could stay. Such small codes felt childish and also enormous, like a secret school in a world outlawing letters.
Sometimes, in the lull after a phrase, Isabel spoke of Lisbon—of fog horns and sardines roasting in alleyways, of processions where women’s voices stitched the dark together. Sometimes Ananta told her of temple mornings—oil lamps smudging the air, rice flour patterns at thresholds, his father’s drum speaking to the sky until the sky answered with birds. They did not argue about which was greater. The music held them to a stricter discipline than pride.
Yet edges moved. Once, when she reached to adjust the cloth, her fingers brushed his wrist; he flinched as if the skin there were full of cymbals. Another time the drum slipped and he caught it with both hands, too close to her, and in that closeness heard not melody, not rhythm, but a faint tremor under her breath that did not belong to fear or to song and that he carried home like a warm coin hidden in the mouth.
On a night perfumed with wet earth and crushed tulsi, they tried to bind the hymn’s opening to his rain-beat in a way that would survive the bells. It would begin with her voice alone, as if a single lantern were lit in a long corridor. Then his pulse would enter, not beneath but beside, meeting it like a friend turning into the same lane from another road. For the turn—a place where empires often placed their guards—he found an off-beat that felt like stepping over a shallow ditch without breaking stride. When they reached the last line, where hymns often climbed into heaven, he guided it back down, into the ribs, as if to say: the sky can wait; the ground has a claim.
Isabel listened, then nodded, serious in a way that made her look briefly like her father and yet entirely not him. “We should not keep it only in here,” she said. “I want to hear this where others must hear their bells.”
“Then we must carry it like water cupped in our hands,” Ananta answered. “And not spill.”
A night bird called. The rain slowed. Outside, far off, a bell tested the silence with a single stroke. It sounded less like a command than a question. They smiled at one another, conspirators now, and in that moment named their work without speaking: the forbidden melody—the path through a wall that they would walk until the wall remembered it had always contained a gate.
Part 4 – The Inquisition’s Shadow
The rains slackened, leaving the air heavy with the smell of damp soil and smoke from cooking fires. But in the narrow streets of Old Goa, another kind of heaviness spread—fear. Whispers moved from ear to ear, hushed at doorways, carried like secrets between neighbors. Men avoided speaking too loudly in the markets, and women who once sang while pounding rice husked their work in silence. A shadow had lengthened over the land: the Inquisition.
It had begun quietly, with notices tacked at church doors and orders issued by captains like Isabel’s father. At first, it was about “correction”—a call for those who had been baptized but still kept old rites, or those who clung to symbols of gods now forbidden. But soon the scope widened. Families who refused to eat beef were reported. Men who hummed a chant at night found soldiers at their doors. A boy caught carving a lotus on his wooden toy was dragged away. No one knew what happened to those taken. They vanished into the cells near the cathedral, and silence swallowed their names.
Ananta felt the weight of that silence more than most. One evening, his cousin Madhav failed to return from the market. His mother waited with oil lamps lit until dawn, but no footstep sounded. Days later, word reached them that Madhav had been accused of refusing baptism and mocking the faith of the Portuguese. No trial was seen. No body was returned. Only the echo of his laughter remained, and the emptiness at the dinner mat.
That night, Ananta’s father spoke with a bitterness deeper than age. “This is what comes when bells ring in place of drums. They break not only our music but our bones.” He looked at Ananta with eyes both proud and afraid. “You must stop meeting in the temple ruins. If they hear even a whisper of your playing, you will be lost like Madhav.”
But Ananta could not stop. The drum was no longer just an inheritance—it was resistance, a pulse against the silence that sought to consume them. Still, his father’s warning lingered in his chest like a cold stone.
When he met Isabel again, she too carried news of dread. “They question even the Portuguese who grow too fond of this land,” she told him. “A priest I knew from Lisbon has been summoned for ‘leniency’ because he allowed a Hindu widow to light a lamp in her home. They fear anything that does not bend completely.”
Ananta studied her, half amazed, half doubtful. “And you? Do you bend?”
She lifted her chin. “I came here thinking the bells were voices of heaven. But now… sometimes they sound like chains. I cannot close my ears to what I see.”
They sat in silence then, broken only by the call of a night bird. Ananta tapped the drum softly, a heartbeat barely audible. Isabel hummed in reply, low, careful, as if the air itself might betray them. Their secret song had begun to feel like a dangerous treasure, a light hidden beneath cloth.
One evening, soldiers marched into Ananta’s village. Their boots splashed in puddles, their lanterns swinging. They entered homes without knocking, pulling out idols hidden under mats, searching for drums, for markings, for anything that carried memory of old gods. Ananta stood at the corner of the lane, fists clenched around his drum hidden beneath a sack of grain. His mother pulled him inside just as a soldier’s gaze swept across the street.
From behind the doorway, Ananta watched them drag out a neighbor’s old man who had refused to cut his sacred thread. His cries echoed down the lane until they were swallowed by the boots. The villagers did nothing—only bowed their heads, fear weighing heavier than loyalty.
That night Ananta dreamed of drums being set ablaze, their skins curling, their wood shrieking in fire. He woke with sweat on his back, the monsoon air too thick to breathe. He thought of Isabel then, her voice weaving through his beats, fragile but fierce. Perhaps their melody was the only proof left that another world was possible.
The next time they met, Isabel came with urgency in her step. “Ananta,” she whispered, “my father suspects something. He asked why I linger near the river, why I slip away. He has forbidden me from leaving the quarters without a servant. If he knew…” Her voice trailed, the fear plain.
“You must not come again,” Ananta said sharply, though the words cut him as they left his mouth. “It is too dangerous.”
But Isabel shook her head, eyes blazing. “No. If I stop, then they have won twice. Once by silencing you, and again by silencing me.”
Her defiance startled him. She was daughter of the very man who cast the bells that tolled over his silence, and yet here she stood, risking her father’s wrath for a song born in ruins. He reached for the drum, struck a deep slow beat, then another, then lifted his eyes to her. “Then we must carry our song more carefully. Each note a secret, each silence a shield.”
She smiled, though her hands trembled. “A forbidden melody.”
“Yes,” he said. “But one that cannot be unlearned.”
As days passed, tension in Goa thickened like the monsoon sky before a storm. The Inquisition’s reach grew longer. In markets, spies listened. In churches, sermons carried warnings sharper than swords. Yet in the broken temple, two voices still wove themselves together—an inheritance of drum and hymn, of defiance and longing.
One evening, Isabel brought a scrap of parchment stolen from her father’s desk. On it was drawn a sketch of a new bell, larger than any before, meant to be hoisted above the cathedral. “When this rings,” she whispered, “its sound will be heard for miles. They say it will drown everything else.”
Ananta’s jaw tightened. He struck the drum once, a sound that reverberated against stone. “Let it ring. We will not be drowned.”
But even as he said it, he knew shadows were circling closer.
For in the alleys, a collaborator—an Indian man who had converted for power—had begun to watch. He had seen Isabel slip through the lanes, her scarf pulled low. He had seen Ananta vanish into the same ruins. And he had begun to wonder what secrets their silence might hold.
The melody was no longer only theirs. It had been overheard, if not by ears, then by the hungry eyes of betrayal.
Part 5 – The Secret Rehearsal
The rains had retreated for a brief spell, leaving the skies pale and streaked with late sun, the kind that softened the red earth into a muted glow. In that strange quietness of the season between storms, Isabel walked quickly through the narrow lanes, her scarf drawn close around her face. Each step was measured, cautious. She had learned to watch for shadows now, to note the lingering gazes of strangers, to keep her breath steady when soldiers passed. She had also learned to ignore the thrum of fear inside her chest, for if she obeyed it, she would never see Ananta again.
The ruined temple loomed ahead, its walls darkened by moss, its pillars eroded like old teeth. She paused at the threshold, her hand brushing against the folded jackfruit leaf with thorn—a sign they had agreed upon. Safe. She exhaled and entered.
Ananta was already there, his drum resting across his lap, the cloth removed, the skin gleaming faintly in the last light of day. He looked up when she entered, his face guarded, as though even this reunion was a risk too large to bear. Yet beneath the tension in his jaw, Isabel caught the flicker of relief.
“You should not have come,” he said softly, though his fingers had already begun tracing invisible rhythms against the edge of the drum.
“You say that every time,” she replied, kneeling opposite him. “And every time, I come. If I stopped, would you play alone?”
He glanced at her, then shook his head. “The music does not live alone anymore. It belongs to us both now.”
The words, simple as they were, warmed her in a way she could not explain. She untied the cloth bundle she carried and spread out its contents: scraps of parchment where she had drawn curving lines to represent melodies, half-remembered hymns scratched in Latin, sketches of bells from her father’s foundry. “I brought these,” she said. “Perhaps they can help us shape something larger. Something complete.”
Ananta leaned forward, studying the scraps. His brow furrowed as he tapped the drum softly, matching beats to the curves. “We could try,” he murmured, “to weave them together. Your hymn and my rhythm. But we must be careful. Too much, and it will sound like two armies clashing. Too little, and one will swallow the other.”
Isabel smiled. “Then we rehearse. Slowly. Until they learn to walk side by side.”
The rehearsal began tentatively. Isabel hummed a line of the hymn, her voice trembling at first but then steadying with practice. Ananta listened, letting the syllables hang in the air before answering with a beat, soft and measured. At first they collided—the hymn rising when the drum sank, the drum quickening when the hymn stretched long. Isabel faltered, biting her lip.
“Again,” Ananta said. He adjusted, striking the skin not at the center but nearer the rim, letting the sound echo sharper, closer to her pitch. She hummed again, slower this time, listening for his counterpoint. When her voice slipped, his rhythm caught it; when his beat threatened to overpower, she softened the melody until it rode above him like a bird on an updraft.
Hours passed unnoticed. The ruined temple filled with a sound neither wholly hers nor his but something born of both. The hymn no longer felt like a commandment; it curved into the earth, breathing with the drum. The drum no longer felt like rebellion alone; it lifted, winged by her voice.
At one point Isabel broke into laughter, her voice echoing against stone. “Do you hear it? It’s alive!”
Ananta smiled—rare, but real. “It was alive the first time you listened.”
They rested, sitting side by side against a broken pillar, the drum between them. Outside, night thickened, and fireflies appeared, their brief sparks like silent applause. Isabel leaned her head back, gazing at the stars beginning to pierce the dark. “What if we could play it openly? Before both your people and mine? Would they hear what we hear?”
Ananta was quiet for a long time. When he finally spoke, his voice was low. “Perhaps they would hear only danger. Music has become a boundary. To cross it is to invite punishment.”
“But what if music itself is the bridge?” she whispered.
Her words hung in the air, fragile yet luminous. He turned to look at her, his face shadowed, his eyes unreadable. “Then we are building a bridge in the dark. And if the soldiers find it, they will burn it before anyone can walk across.”
They rehearsed again, their secret growing bolder. They invented small cues: a rising hum meant he would quicken; two sharp taps meant she must hold the note longer. They rehearsed until their breath fell into one rhythm, until they could almost anticipate the other’s next move. Isabel’s Latin phrases bent into shapes the drum knew instinctively, while Ananta’s beats carried echoes of waves, monsoon winds, and the pounding heart of a land refusing to vanish.
For the first time, Isabel dared to sing words aloud, not just syllables: Ave Maria, gratia plena… The Latin rang strange in the ruined temple, a language of empire and church, yet when the drum joined, it no longer belonged only to cathedrals. It belonged to them. Ananta did not understand the meaning, but he felt the weight of devotion in her tone, and he carried it with his beat as if it were another god being honored.
When the final note faded, Isabel looked at him, eyes shining. “We must keep this safe,” she whispered. “It is ours. A secret prayer.”
“A forbidden prayer,” he corrected.
“Yes,” she said, her voice fierce. “But a prayer nonetheless.”
Neither of them knew that outside, hidden in the shadows of a half-collapsed wall, someone else listened. The collaborator, a man named Gaspar, crouched low, his breath shallow. He had followed Isabel once before, curious about the captain’s daughter slipping into native lanes. Tonight he had found her destination. And now, as he heard the hymn tangled with the drum, his lips curled into a smile.
To him it was not beauty, not defiance, not bridge. It was opportunity. A weapon to wield, a secret to sell.
When Isabel finally rose to leave, Ananta caught her hand—not in embrace, but in urgency. “Be careful,” he said. “There are eyes in every shadow now. If your father learns of this—”
She cut him off, her voice steady. “If my father learns, then he will hear what I have heard. And if he cannot hear it, then perhaps he has forgotten how to listen.”
Her words lingered long after she had gone, her footsteps fading into the night. Ananta sat alone in the ruins, the drum warm beneath his hand. He played one last soft rhythm, a pulse meant not for soldiers or priests, but for the memory of what they had just created.
It was a rehearsal, yes—but more than that, it was a promise. A song forbidden, yet alive, waiting for the day it might ring louder than the bells.
Part 6 – The Festival of Contradictions
The feast of Saint Francis Xavier had always been a spectacle. Even before Isabel arrived in Goa, she had heard tales in Lisbon of pilgrims who traveled across oceans to venerate the missionary’s remains. Now, years into her life here, she had seen it herself: streets transformed into rivers of color, torches carried in long processions, garlands of marigold and jasmine braided into arches, and the endless toll of church bells swelling like the ocean’s tide.
This year, though, the festival carried another weight. The Inquisition’s shadow hung over the celebrations. Soldiers patrolled more heavily, priests thundered with sermons against idolaters, and the people, though smiling, carried an unease in their bodies. Yet the feast must be held, the rituals performed, the bells rung louder than doubt itself.
Isabel dressed in a plain blue gown and fastened a rosary at her waist. She stood beside her father at the cathedral steps as the procession began. The saint’s casket, draped in velvet, was lifted high. Voices rose in chants, priests swung censers spilling thick smoke, and bells rang until the very stones of the city trembled.
Captain Duarte, solemn and proud, surveyed the crowd. “Remember this, Isabel,” he said, his voice heavy with certainty. “This is order. This is unity. No drum, no chant, no false god can ever rival this.”
But Isabel, her ears ringing with iron bells, thought of a different sound—the fragile but fierce melody she and Ananta had coaxed into life in the temple ruins. It pulsed now beneath her ribs, even as the bells threatened to drown it. She pressed her hands together, pretending to pray, while inside she clung to that secret rhythm.
Elsewhere, in the throng of pilgrims and townsfolk, Ananta moved unseen. He wore a coarse cotton tunic and carried no drum, only a small hollowed gourd tucked under his arm, the kind street musicians sometimes used. He had no intention of drawing attention, but he could not resist being near. Isabel was somewhere among the crowd—he could feel it. And the sound of bells, harsh and triumphant, provoked him more than he could bear.
He watched dancers from converted families move to the clanging rhythm dictated by the church. Their steps were stiff, as though forced to mimic joy. Then, just beyond them, a group of local children clapped and stomped in time to something different—a rhythm too subtle for most to notice. Ananta smiled faintly. Even in chains, the pulse survived.
He tapped the gourd softly, blending his sound into the noise of the crowd. Nobody looked twice. To them he was just another villager keeping time. But Isabel heard it. From the cathedral steps, through the toll of bells and the rise of hymns, her ear caught the familiar off-beat: two slow, two quick, a call they had rehearsed. Her breath caught, and her head turned instinctively toward the crowd.
Their eyes met. Only for a heartbeat, but enough. She did not smile—she dared not. But her lips moved, shaping words only he would recognize: Ave Maria.
Ananta answered with a sharper tap, mimicking the very syllables of her voice. In that instant, their forbidden melody threaded itself into the feast. No one else knew. No one else could hear. Yet in the midst of this display of conquest and order, their song lived.
The contradictions of the festival revealed themselves more starkly as the evening wore on. At the marketplace stalls, Portuguese officers handed out bread to the poor, while at the same time spies took names of those who failed to cross themselves. In the lanes behind the cathedral, traders sold beads and crucifixes, while old women whispered mantras under their breath as they counted coins.
Isabel walked with her father, receiving greetings, nodding at priests. But her gaze kept flicking toward the crowd. She saw Ananta once more, now among a circle of men who had begun to beat small clay pots with sticks. To most, it seemed part of the revelry, harmless noise. But Isabel heard the shape of their rhythm—echoes of the very pattern she had hummed only nights ago.
Her heart raced. He was daring to slip their song into the world, hidden beneath the cover of festival chaos. Every beat was a gamble. Every note risked discovery.
And then it happened. The rhythm swelled. The crowd, restless from hours of procession, began to clap along, some laughing, some dancing. The clay pots beat faster, sharper, bolder. For a moment, the bells themselves seemed to falter, their authority cracked by a pulse that belonged to the earth.
Isabel’s father noticed. His brows drew together. “What is this nonsense?” he barked. “Too much noise! This is a holy feast, not a market brawl.”
He signaled to a soldier. “Break it up.”
Panic fluttered in Isabel’s chest. She stepped forward quickly. “Father, they mean no harm. It is the people’s joy. Should we not allow it, on a day of celebration?”
Captain Duarte scowled but hesitated, perhaps wary of causing unrest amid so many pilgrims. He waved the soldier back with a growl. “Let them play, then. But keep watch. Joy can turn to rebellion faster than fire catches dry leaves.”
Ananta, hidden among the drummers, had seen the exchange. He caught Isabel’s eyes once more, and though his face remained impassive, the drumbeat shifted—three quick taps, their secret signal for safe. Relief washed over her, though it was thin and temporary.
As night fell, the festival reached its climax. Fireworks burst above the cathedral, their sparks scattering across the river like fallen stars. Bells rang until the air quivered. Priests raised their voices, calling the faithful to bow. And yet, in the shadows of the square, the forbidden rhythm continued, steady and unyielding, pulsing through the crowd like an underground current.
Children danced, villagers stamped their feet, laughter rose. The Portuguese officials dismissed it as harmless festivity. Only Isabel and Ananta knew that within that rhythm lived their secret prayer, their forbidden melody, rehearsed in ruins but now alive in the open air.
For Isabel, it was both triumph and terror. Triumph, that their song had escaped the temple walls. Terror, that if discovered, it would condemn them both. She pressed her rosary tighter, whispering words not to the saint or to the church, but to the music itself: Stay hidden, stay alive.
When the feast ended and the crowds dispersed, Isabel lingered at her balcony, watching lanterns bob along the riverbank. She thought of Ananta somewhere out there, carrying his drum back under cloak of night. She thought of Gaspar—the collaborator whose eyes she had noticed more than once in recent days—hovering near, always watching. And she wondered how long their bridge of music could stand before someone set fire to it.
For now, the festival was over. But the contradictions it revealed—the clash of bells and drums, of faith and defiance, of love and fear—would only sharpen in the days to come.
The Inquisition’s shadow had not lifted. It had only grown longer.
Part 7 – Betrayal in the Night
The festival’s echoes still lingered in the streets, but by the third night the bright garlands had withered, the torches had burned out, and only the smell of smoke and trampled flowers remained. What had seemed like joy to most had felt to Gaspar like opportunity ripening in silence.
Gaspar had once been called Govind before his baptism, before his hunger for survival bent him toward the Portuguese. He had been a clerk in the salt market, cheated often, ignored more often. Conversion had given him a new name, a silver cross to hang at his throat, and—most importantly—the ear of the priests and captains. He had learned quickly that in Goa now, information was currency. Secrets were wealth. And the sight of Isabel Rodrigues slipping through lanes to meet a native drummer was a treasure too valuable to hoard.
For weeks he had watched, first with idle curiosity, then with calculation. He had crouched behind walls, trailed her scarf’s flutter in the twilight, listened to the strange weaving of hymn and drum. At first, he did not understand what he heard. But he knew it was forbidden. Anything forbidden was power in his hands.
On the night of betrayal, Gaspar walked quickly through the wet streets toward the guardhouse near the cathedral. He rehearsed his story: the captain’s daughter, consorting with a pagan boy, rehearsing chants to mock the bells. He savored the shock that would flare in Duarte Rodrigues’s face, the gratitude that would follow. A captain rewarded loyalty, and Gaspar longed for reward like a starving man for bread.
But even as he approached the guardhouse, the night hummed with another sound. Faint, elusive—a drum.
In the ruined temple, Isabel sat with Ananta, their shoulders brushing as they bent over the drum. The rehearsal had grown more daring since the festival. Emboldened by their success, they sought now to shape the melody into something larger, almost a performance.
“Here,” Isabel said, humming a rising phrase. “If you place your beat beneath this line, it will sound as though the earth itself is lifting the words.”
Ananta struck gently, adjusting, listening. The rhythm carried her upward, and she smiled. “Yes. Like that. Higher, but rooted.”
For hours they wove sound against silence, laughter against fear. Outside, the monsoon gathered clouds, thunder growling distantly like a warning.
Yet even in that fragile joy, Isabel felt unease. “Someone watched us at the festival,” she confessed suddenly. “A man—I’ve seen him before. Always watching. I fear he follows me.”
Ananta stiffened. “Gaspar,” he muttered, naming the collaborator he had long distrusted. “I’ve seen him, too. He hovers near the lanes like a jackal.”
“What if he speaks?” Isabel whispered. “What if my father learns?”
Ananta’s jaw tightened. “Then your father will hear truth twisted into chains.” He touched the drum. “But the music will not be silenced. Not even by him.”
Isabel reached for his hand, and for a moment their fingers entwined across the drum’s skin. Neither spoke of love—it was too dangerous a word—but both felt it in the silence between their breaths.
Meanwhile, Gaspar’s words spilled like poison into the captain’s chamber. Duarte Rodrigues listened in disbelief as the informer described his daughter meeting a villager in abandoned ruins, weaving pagan chants into holy hymns. His fist clenched around the hilt of his sword.
“You lie,” Duarte growled.
But Gaspar had learned to dress lies in just enough truth. “I saw her, senhor. Many times. I heard the drum with my own ears. They profane the hymn of the Virgin with heathen beats. Would I dare speak such treason if it were not true?”
The captain’s face darkened. To think that his daughter, the child he had raised to kneel before the cross, had consorted with a native boy—to think she might betray not only him but the faith he lived for—it was unendurable.
“Show me,” Duarte said.
That night, Isabel and Ananta lingered too long. Rain had begun to fall, a slow drizzle tapping against the broken stones. They huddled beneath the banyan’s canopy, unwilling to part. Ananta tapped the drum softly, Isabel humming, their secret song threading through the storm.
Neither heard the approach of boots. Neither saw the torches until they flared suddenly at the courtyard’s edge.
“Isabel!” The voice cracked the night like thunder. Her father’s voice.
She froze, blood draining from her face. Ananta leapt to his feet, the drum still in his hands. Soldiers poured into the ruins, their blades glinting wet in the firelight. Gaspar followed, his smile thin and triumphant.
Captain Duarte strode forward, his gaze a storm of fury and grief. “What is this?” he roared. “What sin have you brought upon my house?”
“Father, please—” Isabel began, but he cut her off with a raised hand.
“You, a Rodrigues, mingling with this boy? Singing with him? Defiling our faith with pagan noise?” His voice broke with rage. “Have you no shame?”
Ananta stepped forward, the drum clutched like a shield. “She defiles nothing,” he said, his voice steady though his heart pounded. “We made music. That is all. Music that belongs to no empire, no temple, no cross. Only to us.”
Duarte’s eyes blazed. “Silence! You dare speak so to me? To a captain of His Majesty’s empire?” He drew his sword. The soldiers shifted, eager for command.
Isabel threw herself between them, her arms outstretched. “Father, stop! He is no enemy. He is a musician, nothing more. You do not hear because you will not listen!”
But her words, trembling and brave, only enraged him further. “You shame me,” he spat. “You shame your mother’s memory. Guards—seize him!”
The soldiers lunged. Ananta struck the drum once, a desperate thunderclap that echoed through the ruins. He dodged, weaving between blades, the beat of survival guiding his steps. Isabel screamed as soldiers closed around him.
In the chaos, Gaspar reached for her arm. “Come, senhora,” he hissed, pretending protection but reveling in triumph. She tore free, eyes blazing with hatred.
“Traitor,” she spat at him.
Ananta fought like a cornered animal, striking soldiers with the drum’s wooden rim, ducking beneath blades. But there were too many. A blow to his back sent him sprawling, the drum slipping from his grip. A soldier’s boot pinned it, crushing its skin.
“No!” Ananta cried, but the sound was drowned by thunder overhead.
Captain Duarte raised his sword, his face a mask of fury. “You will never profane this land again.”
“Father!” Isabel screamed, throwing herself in front of Ananta. The blade stopped inches from her, trembling in the captain’s grip. His chest heaved, torn between duty and blood.
For a long, terrible moment, no one moved. Rain poured harder, torches sputtering, shadows lurching against the walls.
Finally, Duarte lowered his sword. “Bind him,” he commanded. “He will face trial for blasphemy.”
The soldiers dragged Ananta to his feet, binding his wrists. Isabel clutched at his arm until they pulled her back. Their eyes met—hers burning with tears, his with unyielding defiance.
The drum lay broken in the mud, its voice silenced. Yet in Ananta’s gaze Isabel saw it still: the forbidden melody, alive in his breath, unbroken by chains.
Gaspar watched from the shadows, satisfied. The betrayal was complete.
But the story, like the storm above, was far from over.
Part 8 – The Trial of Sound
The dungeon beneath the arch of the cathedral smelled of rust, mildew, and fear. Moisture dripped steadily from the vaulted ceiling, a sound that marked time more cruelly than any bell. Ananta sat chained to a stone pillar, wrists bound so tight that the rope cut into his skin. Around him, the silence pressed thick, broken only by distant moans of other prisoners. The broken drum had been carried away, a relic now in the hands of his enemies. Yet in his mind, he still felt its pulse. He closed his eyes, and the rhythm whispered against the darkness: two slow, two quick. His heart beat to it, reminding him he was not yet erased.
When Isabel entered, disguised in her maid’s cloak, her breath caught at the sight of him. The torchlight revealed his face bruised, his arms scarred, but his eyes still alive. She hurried forward, ignoring the guard’s suspicious glance. “I had to see you,” she whispered.
Ananta lifted his chin. “They will use me as example,” he said flatly. “They will call it blasphemy, treason. A boy who dared to drum against bells.”
“No.” Isabel grasped his bound hands, heedless of the blood on the rope. “I will not let them. I will speak.”
“You?” He shook his head. “You are your father’s daughter. They will not believe you.”
“They may not,” she admitted, voice breaking. “But if I say nothing, then I too become Gaspar. A betrayer. My silence would be the loudest crime of all.”
Ananta stared at her, and for a moment his anger softened. “Then speak, if only so the sound will not die in here.”
The trial was held the next morning in the great hall of the cathedral. The chamber was vast, its ceiling painted with saints gazing sternly down, its floor black and white like a chessboard. At the far end, the tribunal sat—three inquisitors in black robes, their faces grave beneath white coifs. Captain Duarte stood beside them, stiff with fury, unwilling to look at Isabel. Soldiers lined the walls, and townsfolk crowded in, murmuring in fear and curiosity.
Ananta was brought forth in chains, his ankles scraping against stone. Gaspar was already there, smirking, eager to taste the power of his accusation.
The chief inquisitor raised his voice, sharp as a blade. “Ananta, son of the temple drummer, you are charged with profaning holy music, corrupting the faithful, and luring the captain’s daughter into heathen rites. How do you plead?”
Ananta met his gaze without flinching. “I played a drum. She sang a hymn. We made music. If that is profanation, then the fault is not ours but in the ears that will not listen.”
A murmur rippled through the hall. One of the priests banged a staff. “Silence! This insolence itself is proof of guilt.”
Gaspar stepped forward, bowing low. “I saw them, holy fathers. I heard their blasphemy. The hymn of the Virgin twisted into pagan rhythm, meant to mock the bells of Christ.”
Ananta spat at his feet. “You heard not mockery but harmony. But a jackal cannot tell the difference between prayer and laughter.”
Gaspar recoiled, and the hall buzzed again until the inquisitor raised a hand. “Enough. Let the evidence be brought.”
Two soldiers carried forward the broken drum. Its skin sagged, torn from the night of Ananta’s capture. The inquisitor gestured to it as though it were a corpse. “This object is proof. Pagan in origin, used for idolatrous rites. Its very sound is temptation.”
Then Isabel rose from her seat. Her voice rang clear, trembling but firm. “It is not temptation. It is breath. It is heartbeat. It is not heathen—it is human.”
The hall fell into shocked silence. All eyes turned to her. Captain Duarte’s face went pale. “Isabel,” he hissed, “sit down.”
But she did not. She stepped forward, facing the tribunal. “Yes, I sang with him. I sang the hymn my mother taught me, words holy to your ears. And the drum did not profane it. It carried it, lifted it, made it alive. If music that joins two hearts is sin, then perhaps we have misunderstood heaven itself.”
Gaspar sneered. “She is bewitched! The boy has ensnared her with his devil’s rhythms.”
Isabel turned on him, eyes blazing. “No, Gaspar. You see witchcraft because your own heart is deaf. You betrayed us because envy rules you. But truth is louder than betrayal.”
The tribunal shifted uneasily. One of the inquisitors whispered to another. Captain Duarte’s jaw trembled, his hand clenching and unclenching at his side. He wanted to silence his daughter, yet something in her defiance reminded him of his late wife—the woman who once hummed lullabies that even the bells could not drown.
The chief inquisitor cleared his throat. “Child, you speak boldly. But you place yourself against the church, against your father. Do you not fear damnation?”
Isabel straightened her back. “I fear only silence. A world where bells ring but no one listens to the heart beneath them—that is damnation to me.”
The hall erupted in gasps. Some villagers in the crowd lowered their heads, hiding faint smiles. Soldiers shifted, uncertain. Even the priests looked unsettled, as if unsure whether to condemn or admire such fire.
Ananta, though still bound, felt a strange triumph stir in his chest. Their melody had reached the very heart of the cathedral. Not in sound, but in words. Isabel had carried their forbidden song here, before all.
The tribunal withdrew briefly to deliberate. Whispers filled the hall like restless birds. When they returned, the chief inquisitor’s expression was cold. “The boy is guilty. For his defiance, for his persistence in heathen ways, he shall be exiled from Goa. His family’s lands will be seized, his name struck from record. The girl—” his eyes flicked to Isabel, “—is forgiven, for she has spoken under influence. She shall be confined until her father deems her penance fulfilled.”
Captain Duarte’s shoulders sagged with relief that his daughter’s life was spared. But Isabel’s eyes burned with fury. “You may exile him,” she said, her voice rising above the murmurs, “but you cannot exile his sound. You cannot chain the pulse of the earth. Even if you burn every drum, the rhythm will rise in the footsteps of the people, in the waves of the river, in the very beating of your own hearts.”
The inquisitors stiffened, scandalized. Soldiers began dragging Ananta away. Isabel struggled against her father’s grip, calling his name. “Ananta! Remember—our song lives!”
He turned once, meeting her gaze across the hall. Bruised, bound, but unbroken, he spoke a single phrase before they pushed him through the doorway: “A forbidden prayer.”
The words echoed, not only in Isabel’s ears but in every silent corner of the cathedral.
That night, the bells tolled long and loud, declaring the church’s victory. Yet for many who had heard Isabel’s voice and seen Ananta’s defiance, the sound rang hollow. Beneath the clang of bronze, another rhythm stirred—unseen, unheard, but alive.
And in her chamber, locked away, Isabel pressed her ear to the wall and tapped softly, two slow, two quick. Somewhere in exile, she hoped, he would hear it.
Part 9 – The Last Bell
The dawn of Ananta’s exile broke with a muted sky, the monsoon clouds hanging low, heavy with unspent rain. Soldiers marched him through the streets of Old Goa, his wrists bound with coarse rope, his ankles raw from chains. A small crowd gathered, some whispering prayers under their breath, others staring in silence, afraid to show sympathy. To the Portuguese officials, this was justice. To the villagers, it was a warning.
The broken drum was carried ahead of him, slung carelessly on a soldier’s shoulder. Its torn skin sagged like a wound that would never heal. Each time Ananta’s eyes caught sight of it, his chest ached. But deeper than pain was resolve. A drum may be broken, but its rhythm lives where no sword can reach.
The procession stopped at the dock, where a small boat waited to carry him downriver and out toward the hinterlands. Exile meant being torn from his home, his family, his village—it was as close to erasure as the Inquisition could order without spilling noble blood. Isabel was not there. He knew she was confined in her father’s house. Yet in his heart, he felt her presence, like the echo of a note sustained beyond hearing.
Before boarding, he turned once toward the crowd. Soldiers shoved him forward, but not before he locked eyes with a boy perched on the edge of the gathering—a temple child, no more than ten. Ananta gave him a look, sharp and intent. Remember. The boy nodded, his small hands tapping against his thighs in a rhythm that only Ananta would recognize: two slow, two quick. A signal. A promise.
That same morning, Isabel stood at her balcony, her wrists bruised from her father’s grip. She had been locked inside since the trial, her movements watched, her words dismissed as the folly of a bewitched child. Duarte Rodrigues had spoken little to her, his silence heavier than his anger. To him, she had shamed their family. To her, he had betrayed what little trust remained between them.
When she heard the bells tolling across the river—the bells announcing the departure of Ananta—her chest tightened until she could hardly breathe. She pressed her hand against the rosary at her waist, but no prayer rose. Only the melody she and Ananta had created together filled her mind. She hummed it softly, daringly, even though the maid in the corner gasped and crossed herself.
“They cannot keep me silent,” Isabel whispered, more to herself than to anyone else. “If he is gone, then I must carry it for us both.”
Ananta’s exile was meant to be quiet, but word traveled faster than soldiers. In villages along the Mandovi, people whispered of a drummer who had defied the bells, a boy who dared play with the captain’s daughter. Some feared the story, some scorned it, but many carried it as one carries an ember under cloth.
On the second night of his journey, the boat was moored at a riverside clearing. Guards made camp, their laughter crude, their wine strong. Ananta sat apart, bound but alert. The broken drum lay near the fire, abandoned, its hollow body blackened with soot.
When the soldiers finally slept, he dragged himself toward it. His wrists bled against the rope, but he managed to lift the drum, cradling it as one holds a dying friend. He struck it once, softly. The sound was weak, ragged, but alive. Tears blurred his vision. He played again, slow, deliberate, the rhythm fractured yet insistent.
The night seemed to lean closer, listening. The river answered with its pulse, the trees with their rustle. The drum’s last voice wove itself into the dark. It was not the proud, defiant thunder of old, but a fragile heartbeat, stubborn in its refusal to die.
Back in Old Goa, Isabel woke to the sound of bells. It was midnight, and the great bell of the cathedral was being tested for the morning mass. The clang rolled across the city like cannon fire. But as she listened, another sound rose in her memory—the broken drum’s last call. She sat upright, her eyes burning with sudden clarity.
She could not remain locked behind walls while Ananta was silenced beyond the river. She had to act. She pulled her cloak around her, slipped from her chamber, and moved quietly through the halls. The guards were half asleep. Her father was still at prayer. Isabel stole into the night.
She knew she could not free Ananta from exile. But she could free the song. And if she could free it, then in some way, she freed him.
At dawn, the cathedral square filled with worshippers. Captain Duarte stood tall, proud beside the new bell that had been hoisted above the tower—a bell larger than any before, forged to declare empire and faith in one voice. Priests prepared to bless it, swinging censers heavy with smoke. The people gathered, obedient, heads bowed.
Then Isabel appeared. She walked into the square with her hood thrown back, her steps unshaken. Gasps rippled through the crowd—here was the captain’s daughter, defiant, unrepentant. Soldiers moved to stop her, but she raised her voice, strong and clear.
She began to sing.
It was the hymn—Ave Maria—but not as the priests knew it. Her voice curved with the memory of Ananta’s drum, bending the notes into rhythms that tugged at the earth itself. She stamped her foot against the stones, the echo rising like a drumbeat. The crowd froze. The priests stared, scandalized.
Captain Duarte’s face turned ashen. “Isabel!” he thundered.
But she did not stop. Her voice soared, weaving hymn and rhythm together, defiance and devotion fused as one. Children in the crowd clapped timidly. Women hummed low, their lips trembling. Men shifted, stamping feet. The forbidden melody, born in a ruined temple, now rose in the very heart of empire.
The great bell tolled overhead, trying to drown her. Its bronze voice thundered, but Isabel’s song cut through, weaving with it, reshaping its command into a question.
“Listen!” she cried between verses. “This is not sin—it is breath! Not rebellion—it is life!”
The crowd stirred, uncertain, yet unable to unhear what they had heard. For the first time, the cathedral square rang with something beyond control: the rhythm of two worlds refusing to bow.
Word of her act reached Ananta days later, carried by a fisherman who had seen the spectacle. Shackled though he was, weary from exile, he felt strength surge in him anew. The drum might have died in his hands, but Isabel had given it another life. Their forbidden prayer was no longer theirs alone. It had become a voice carried in many throats, a rhythm rising in many feet.
And so, though the boat carried him away, Ananta’s song remained.
The last bell had tolled, but the last drum had not yet fallen silent.
Part 10 – Echoes Beyond Time
The years after Ananta’s exile passed like tides: sometimes rushing, sometimes still, but always reshaping the shores of memory. He was carried inland, far from the river and the sea, to villages where Portuguese law reached less firmly but where suspicion still lingered. His family was scattered, their names struck from record, their temple reduced to stone bones under vines. Yet Ananta endured. He worked fields by day, his wrists calloused from rope and hoe. But at night, when the world softened into dark, he tapped rhythms against his thigh, against wood, against the earth itself. The drum was gone, but his body remembered. He whispered the beats under his breath, carrying them like a hidden ember, waiting for the day they would rise again.
For Isabel, life within her father’s house became a prison painted in whitewash and silence. After her defiance in the cathedral square, Duarte had confined her more strictly, forbidding her from stepping beyond the threshold without escort. He believed time and penance would erase the fire in her. But Isabel carried the song in her chest like contraband. At night, she hummed into the walls, tapping against the wooden frame of her bed in the secret rhythm—two slow, two quick. Servants whispered that she was cursed, that the boy’s music haunted her. Duarte, though stern, never dared to speak of it again. Perhaps he feared that naming it would make it stronger.
But the people remembered. Those who had gathered in the square that day, who had heard the captain’s daughter sing with a forbidden rhythm, carried the memory in whispers. Children clapped the beat in games. Women kneading dough let their hands fall into its pattern. Fishermen hummed it as they pushed boats into the tide. It spread like an underground river, unseen yet alive.
Ten years passed. The Inquisition tightened and loosened in waves, sometimes burning hotter, sometimes fading into mere threats. The bells still rang, thunderous, claiming heaven and earth. But beneath them, other sounds persisted.
Ananta, now a man weathered by exile, found his way back to the coast under another name. His hair was streaked with early gray, his back bent from years of labor, but his hands—his hands were still drummers’ hands. In secret gatherings by riverbanks, he played again, this time on pots, on hollow logs, on anything that could carry a beat. Villagers listened, some fearful, some awed, all hungry for the pulse they had been denied.
One evening, as fireflies lit the river’s edge, a young boy asked him, “Master, where did this rhythm come from? It feels older than the earth.”
Ananta smiled faintly. “It came from a song sung once in ruins. A hymn and a drum that should never have met, yet did. It belongs to no one now. It belongs to you.”
Isabel’s path diverged. When her father died of fever, she inherited his household but not his authority. The Portuguese governors saw her as a woman too unruly, too tainted by scandal. She was allowed to live quietly, provided she caused no more disruption. And so she lived alone, her days spent in gardens, her nights with the song. She never married. She never left Goa.
But she wrote. On scraps of parchment, she transcribed the curves of melodies, the rhythms Ananta had taught her, the fragments of Latin hymns twisted into new shapes. She hid them in a small chest, beneath linens, where servants would not pry. She wrote not as a dutiful daughter of empire, but as a witness: “Here lies a prayer not bound to cross or idol. Here lies a song that breathes.”
Years blurred into decades. The faces of Isabel and Ananta vanished into the folds of history. Their names were not carved into monuments, not recorded in chronicles of conquest. To officials, they were forgettable: a rebellious girl, a silenced drummer.
But songs do not need names to survive.
In small churches along the Goan coast, villagers began singing hymns that carried faint traces of another rhythm. Priests frowned, called it rustic error, but the people did not stop. In wedding processions, the beat slipped into the stamping of feet. In fishing songs, the pulse surfaced beneath the roar of waves. The forbidden melody, reshaped, disguised, endured.
A century later, a Jesuit scholar wrote of “strange syncopations” in local music, puzzled by how European hymns seemed to sway like palms in monsoon winds. He did not know he was hearing the ghost of a drum once played in ruins, and a girl’s voice that dared to join it.
Centuries passed. Empires rose and fell. The bells of Old Goa grew cracked with age, some silenced by rust, others fallen in earthquakes. Yet the music lived. It threaded itself into Goan folk songs, into lullabies, into the hum of women weaving baskets, into the footfall of dancers at village feasts. The rhythm—two slow, two quick—appeared again and again, sometimes unnoticed, sometimes celebrated, always alive.
And with it, the story survived, though changed in every retelling. Some said it was a monk and a fisher girl. Others claimed it was a Portuguese nun and a temple boy. Still others swore it was merely a legend invented to explain the strange rhythm in their songs. But always, at the heart of the tale, there was a forbidden prayer, a melody that crossed walls meant to divide.
In the present day, tourists wander through the ruins of Old Goa. They marvel at the grandeur of cathedrals, the echo of bells long gone. Few pause at the vine-choked temple walls, cracked and forgotten. Yet sometimes, when the evening air is still, a guide will tell them: “Here, they say, a drummer once played with the captain’s daughter. Their music was forbidden, but it lives still. Listen, and you may hear it.”
And sometimes—only sometimes—the wind through the banyan roots sounds like a drum. A birdcall bends like a hymn. The two weave together for a fleeting moment before dissolving back into silence.
The tourists smile, shake their heads, and move on. But the guide lingers, tapping two slow, two quick against his thigh. He does not know why he does it. Only that it feels right.
For history belongs to conquerors, but memory belongs to the people. And memory, like rhythm, cannot be silenced.
Ananta’s exile faded. Isabel’s defiance was buried. Gaspar’s betrayal earned him nothing but contempt whispered in forgotten corners. Captain Duarte’s authority crumbled with time.
But the forbidden melody—the song born in ruins, shaped by hymn and drum, carried by love and defiance—echoed beyond them all.
It still echoes. In the streets of Goa, in the festivals where drums and bells now share space, in the voices of singers whose tongues shape words neither wholly European nor wholly Indian, but something new, something alive.
The Silent Bells may have tolled, but the rhythm they tried to drown became eternal.
