Nikhil Vartak
1
The morning rush at Dadar station had already peaked by 8:15 AM—porters yelling over the screech of arriving locals, chai vendors navigating through tired office-goers, and the ever-present static of platform announcements blending into the Mumbai noise symphony. Sub-Inspector Tanya Naik stepped onto Platform Three with the weariness of someone who hadn’t finished her first week in the city. Her boots made a dull thud on the wet concrete, and she blinked slowly at the wall of commuters parting around a huddle of constables near a shuttered tea stall. The rain had left the platform slick and grimy, and the yellow police tape fluttered like a nervous heartbeat in the monsoon breeze. A corpse lay slumped against a pillar, its mouth grotesquely stuffed with soaked paan leaves, the red streaks dripping down like smeared lipstick. No wallet, no phone, just a single item in his breast pocket—an old matchbox with the words “Laal Paanda” scribbled inside in fading ink.
Tanya crouched beside the body, studying the lifeless face—a man in his fifties, thick neck, healed scar under his left eye. There was something odd about the stillness of the crime scene—like the city had paused just long enough to remember something unpleasant. The constable beside her, Patil, leaned in and whispered, “Madam… looks like Guru Satam.” The name meant little to Tanya, but the way Patil said it—half fear, half reverence—made her raise an eyebrow. “He died years ago, no?” she asked. Patil hesitated, then replied, “That’s what they all thought. Shot dead in ’96, Mahim. Body never found. Old Laal Paanda gang ka aadmi.” The name tugged at some vague memory from her academy training—something about the 1993 riots, old smuggling routes under train lines, and gangs that had once ruled these lanes like kings. But if Guru Satam was long dead, who the hell was this man—and why the hell was he dumped like a warning here, with the gang’s forgotten name shoved into his mouth like a ritual?
As the body was zipped up and the forensic team began dusting the scene, Tanya stepped back, watching the local trains speed by, their windows filled with indifferent faces. She felt the city pressing in—its noise, its secrets, its relentless push forward. She had asked for a transfer to Mumbai believing her Goa cases had hardened her enough, but already, something about this murder felt older, deeper. A message, maybe. Or a reawakening. The idea that a ghost from the past could crawl back into the city’s veins and die on her platform, on her first case, made her stomach twist. She glanced again at the matchbox—Laal Paanda—red panda. A name from the old gangland files. And suddenly, Dadar didn’t feel like a station anymore. It felt like an entrance. A door to something long buried, now clawing its way back to the surface.
2
The Mumbai Crime Records Bureau smelled of mildew and bureaucracy—stale paper, rusted cabinets, and the kind of dust that had witnessed too many untold truths. Tanya sat at a metal desk under a whirring ceiling fan, flipping through a stack of aging case files bound in twine and handwritten labels. “Laal Paanda,” she repeated under her breath, watching the name appear in one docket after another—murders, extortions, protection rackets, black-market gold, all dated between 1992 and 1996. The gang had ruled the Dadar-Mahim belt during the most volatile years of post-riot Mumbai, led by figures with names that echoed like myths in the city’s chawls: “Guru Satam,” “Lalbaug Tillu,” “Sadiq Battery,” and a mysterious backer known only as “Number 5.” But by mid-’96, the gang vanished from police radar—no formal arrests, no official dismantling—just silence. One case mentioned Guru’s “probable death in a gang ambush,” but the body was never recovered, and the case was quietly closed, marked in red: inactive, presumed deceased.
Tanya frowned, tracing the margins of one file where the name Devchand Naik appeared—just once, under “persons of interest.” Her own surname. Her father’s? She stared at it too long, brushing it off as coincidence, but the feeling gnawed at her. That evening, she returned to her shared police quarters in Sion and made two calls. One to a retired officer in Goa she trusted, asking about underworld movements post-1993. The other to the forensic lab, demanding a DNA test on the body. No answers yet, but she could feel the story tightening around her—like a city pulling her into its older, darker lungs. She sat on her cot with a small notepad, drawing lines between names, years, and places. The riots, the smuggled gold, the vanishing of Laal Paanda, and now—this corpse, dumped on Platform Three as if to say: We’re not done.
By morning, she was back in Dadar, this time on foot, walking its arterial bylanes where families lived in crumbling chawls next to welding shops and tea stalls. She stopped by a paan vendor near the murder site and casually mentioned the name “Guru.” The old man froze for a split second—barely noticeable, but enough. “He used to come by,” he muttered. “Thought he’d died long ago.” When Tanya asked when he saw him last, the vendor shrugged. “Maybe two weeks? Was buying Rajnigandha and black supari. Looked older. Tired.” That placed Guru in the city long before his body turned up. Tanya now knew two things: one, the murder wasn’t random—it was a message from someone who remembered exactly who Guru Satam was. And two, someone from the past was dragging the city’s old sins back into the light. As a local train thundered past on the overhead line, she looked up and whispered to herself, “You’re not a ghost. You came back for something.” And just like that, the bylanes of Dadar no longer felt like old streets—they felt like veins. And something was beginning to pulse.
3
In the backroom of a dimly lit gym in Ghatkopar East, the air was thick with the stench of sweat, camphor, and ambition. Broken dumbbells lined the walls, and a Shivaji Maharaj poster stared down upon a group of young men gathered in silence. At the center of it all stood Raj Jagtap, known on the streets simply as RJ. Dressed in a black kurta with blood-red Puma sneakers, he spoke softly—each word deliberate, dipped in confidence, and laced with unspoken threats. “Mumbai forgets quickly,” he said, pacing the concrete floor, “but I don’t.” His words weren’t just talk. Over the past six months, RJ had quietly taken over extortion chains in Kurla, dance bar routes in Chembur, and most recently, a private construction deal in Matunga that mysteriously cleared overnight. The older gangs whispered that he wasn’t just some street thug—he was calculating, patient, and worse—he had backing. From where? No one was sure. But his meteoric rise had begun to draw comparisons to someone who once walked these lanes in red—Guru Satam.
Later that day, RJ met with a visiting Dubai dealer in a closed meat shop in Sion Koliwada. A hush-hush meeting, no electronics allowed. RJ leaned in and laid a dusty map on the butcher table—an old drainage blueprint from 1994, showing storm tunnels under Mahim and Dadar. “It’s still there,” he said with quiet intensity. “They never dug it up.” The dealer, a bearded man with a Rolex and a face that knew fear, nodded. The implication was clear—RJ wasn’t just expanding territory. He was hunting. For something long hidden. For something that someone—maybe Guru Satam—might have come back for before dying. As RJ stepped out into the twilight, his men surrounded him like shadows, and for a second, his reflection on a glass window bore a strange resemblance to the old photos of Guru—same jawline, same intensity, same fire. Bloodlines, after all, don’t disappear. They ferment.
Back at the station, Tanya read RJ’s name in a half-redacted report from 2010—juvenile crime, minor assault, father unknown. A small note in pencil caught her eye: Possible links to late G.S. Her stomach sank. The initials. The dates. She flipped the page, scanning faster. A retired constable had once noted that RJ grew up in a Dharavi orphanage, sponsored for years by an anonymous donor traced to a smuggler’s old widow. Tanya’s pulse quickened. Could RJ be his son? Could this entire spiral—Guru’s reappearance, his murder, RJ’s sudden rise—be part of a buried legacy being unearthed piece by piece? She stared at RJ’s photo from a recent CCTV capture—sharp cheekbones, intense eyes, smirk like a blade. And for the first time since this case began, Tanya felt the weight of something more than duty. This wasn’t just about a gangland ghost or a long-dead crime. This was about blood. And if her suspicions were right, she might not be chasing a criminal—she might be chasing a brother.
4
It was nearly midnight when Tanya Naik first saw her—a figure crouched between the tracks near Matunga Road station, rummaging through a blue plastic sack as a local train thundered past barely a meter away. A few uniformed officers had picked up a whisper about someone who’d been “shadowing” Guru Satam days before his death. The girl’s name was Farzana Qureshi, but on the street, she was known as Ferry—because she appeared and disappeared like one. Ragged hoodie, tight jeans, and eyes that had seen too much, Ferry had lived her life between compartments, over rooftops, inside signal cabins, and under pedestrian bridges. Tanya approached slowly, badge visible, hand near her holster. Ferry didn’t flinch. She looked up and smirked. “Tujhe Dadar ka bhoot chahiye na? Guru? He used to sit right there—Platform 2’s end, under the rusted footbridge. Like he was waiting for something. Or someone.”
Back at the station canteen over lukewarm cutting chai, Ferry talked in quick bursts—half street slang, half instinct. She remembered Guru coming by late at night, whispering to a man named “Baba Vikhroli,” someone who knew the old underground routes used for gold and weapons. “Laal Paanda people don’t die,” she said with a shrug, “they hide in the train lines.” Ferry wasn’t just a source—she was a ghost of the railway city, ferrying stories, secrets, and surveillance between neighborhoods that police maps didn’t even mark. Tanya sensed something volatile in her—too clever to be dismissed, too unstable to be trusted. But Ferry knew where the cops couldn’t reach, and she seemed oddly invested in the Guru mystery. “You want answers?” she said, leaning in. “Then you need to go where the cops don’t go after dark. Mahim’s Red Zone. They say even ghosts pay hafta there.”
Following Ferry’s tip, Tanya disguised herself in plainclothes and ventured into a cluster of crumbling chawls behind a defunct textile mill in Mahim—where feral dogs outnumbered streetlights and where Laal Paanda’s legend still carried currency. Inside a dusty one-room barbershop, she found an old informant who confirmed something chilling: Guru Satam had been digging in the last month—searching for a specific drain tunnel that led under the train tracks, lost since 1993. Something about missing Dubai gold, a stash that had never resurfaced after the riots. The informant paused, eyes darting. “And now that he’s dead,” he whispered, “someone else is picking up where he left off. Red shoes. Always red.” Tanya didn’t need a name. She already knew. RJ. The city’s buried veins were starting to vibrate again, and Tanya could feel the story shifting from crime to prophecy. If Guru came back to retrieve the past, RJ was here to inherit it. And she? She was caught between them—cop, daughter, maybe even sister. Mumbai’s bylanes were no longer just alleys. They were mirrors. And in their reflection, Tanya was beginning to see herself split.
5
The morning air at Shivaji Park was thick with dew and memory. Tanya walked across the silent field where children once played cricket, old men still gathered for politics, and couples shared borrowed hours of privacy. But beneath its breezy calm lay the echoes of violence, secrecy, and betrayal—especially for someone like Guru Satam, who once lived two blocks down in a corner flat of Rajgruha Housing Society. Tanya stood in front of the crumbling building, staring up at the third floor, flat number 302, where Guru had supposedly spent the last weeks of his hidden life. The flat was sealed now, but with a quiet push and the help of a janitor she bribed with Vadapav and a wink of her badge, she stepped inside. The air was stale, the corners dusty, but what caught her eye was a half-burned incense stick in front of a framed photograph—Guru with a child. Tanya moved closer. The child’s face had been scratched out. Behind the frame, she found an old cigarette tin, inside which lay a torn diary page. The handwriting was shaky, the ink smudged by age and emotion: “Naik is safe. She doesn’t know. Better that way.” Her hands trembled.
Tanya didn’t speak for hours after that. She took the diary fragment and walked to Shivaji Park Beach, sat on a bench facing the grey Arabian Sea, and smoked a cigarette in silence—something she hadn’t done in a year. The bitter drag burned her throat but steadied her nerves. Could it be possible? That Guru Satam, the gangster, the ghost, was her father? That all the years her mother had refused to speak of the man she called a “bad decision” were actually years of careful protection? The timing fit. The name Naik scribbled in a gangster’s final days? Her mother’s sudden move to Goa in 1996? Tanya had chased murders before, but this… this was a murder chasing her. She pulled out her phone and called her mother in Panaji. No answer. The second time, her mother picked up but said only two words before disconnecting: “Don’t dig.” Tanya sat there long after the call ended, the waves licking the shore, the city breathing behind her like a beast half-asleep.
By nightfall, Tanya was back in Mahim, this time walking alone along Cadell Road, where the streetlights flickered like dying stars. She passed the place where Guru’s old bar, Zam Zam, had once stood—now a dingy hardware store. But an old beggar at the corner, whose memory hadn’t dulled with age, muttered something as she passed: “He came back to die where he began. Said his sins were waiting here.” That sealed it. Guru Satam had not returned to reclaim lost gold or threaten RJ’s empire. He had come to bury himself where it all began—and to warn someone. Maybe Tanya. Maybe RJ. Maybe both. She realized now that this wasn’t about stopping a crime—it was about understanding its bloodline. About how a city, a gang, and a family had all tried to erase one man, and failed. And as she lit a second cigarette, the taste bitterer than the first, Tanya finally understood what Shivaji Park was whispering to her in the wind: ghosts don’t haunt places. They haunt names. And sometimes, they wear your face.
6
The fire was still smoldering when Tanya arrived at the corner goldsmith’s shop in Ghatkopar West—a single-story structure nestled between a mithai store and a shuttered DVD rental booth. The glass display cases were shattered, the ceiling blackened with soot, and a pungent metallic smell filled the air. Inside, the forensics team worked around the charred remains of a wooden stool and a bloodied trail leading to the backroom. The victim, 72-year-old Madhavlal Soni, had run the shop for decades, quietly fixing chains and resetting stones. That morning, he had been found with his tongue severed, the wound packed with gold shavings—another grotesque signature, this time not of a gang’s rebirth but its reckoning. A partially burnt map was recovered from beneath a loose tile—an old municipal drainage layout from 1993, marked in red ink. Tanya recognized the pattern immediately. Mahim. Dadar. The same areas referenced in the Laal Paanda smuggling routes. The gold wasn’t a rumor. It had always been real. Hidden. Buried. And now, finally, someone was killing for it.
Later that night, Tanya sat across from Ferry in an abandoned ticket booth at Vidyavihar station, where the girl had chosen to meet under the safety of passing trains. Ferry was jittery, lighting a beedi with one hand and clutching a tattered schoolbag with the other. “Soni knew where the gold was supposed to land,” she whispered. “Not where it was buried—but who hid it. He made the mold that carried the gold through customs. ‘Guru ka design tha,’ he told me.” She paused. “He said someone else was digging now. Some laal joota wala kutta—red-shoed dog. RJ. I think he’s close.” Ferry unzipped her bag and handed Tanya a piece of crumpled newspaper—an old article from 1995 about a derailment in Mahim during the riots, and the chaos that followed. “Guru used the panic to vanish a truckload of Dubai gold. Then he vanished too.” Tanya’s fingers tightened around the paper. The derailment. The missing convoy. It all made sense. The body wasn’t dumped for drama—it was a signal. Someone wanted the whole city to know: the past had unfinished business.
Two hours later, Tanya walked into a sealed drain entrance behind a textile warehouse in Wadala, flashlight in hand, boots crunching on broken glass and rat droppings. She had traced the layout from Soni’s map—an unused tunnel system that had once connected cargo routes under the British railway lines. She crouched low, following markings on the brick—red chalk symbols, almost like bread crumbs. At the end of the tunnel, she found something worse than corpses: tools. Fresh dirt. Discarded gloves. A dropped cigarette stub. Someone had been here—recently. Not a myth. Not a ghost. RJ was digging. Not just through Mumbai’s soil, but through its history. And if the gold was recovered, the city wouldn’t see another gang war. It would see a gang resurrection. Tanya emerged into the humid night, her breath short and mind racing. The deeper she followed Guru’s ghost, the closer she got to RJ’s shadow. One man had returned to settle his past. The other, to inherit it. And she—caught between legacy and law—was beginning to realize the line between them was more personal than she was ready to admit.
7
The bungalow on Nathalal Parekh Marg near Ruia College looked like it hadn’t been touched since the 70s. Creaking gates, pale green walls flaking in the humidity, and bougainvillea vines tangled like veins across its facade. Tanya entered cautiously, the letter from an anonymous sender still folded in her coat pocket—an address scribbled on yellowed stationery marked “From someone who knew Guru before he was God.” Inside, the air was musty with incense and abandonment. Every corner told stories frozen in time: an old Murphy radio crackling static, a framed photo of a Ganpati pandal from 1992, and an ashtray full of clove cigarettes. Then she heard it—soft breathing from the backroom. Drawing her service weapon, she pushed open the door slowly. An old man sat cross-legged in the center, eyes clouded with cataract but burning with memory. “You’re not the first to come looking,” he said in a whispery Marathi. “But you might be the last to understand.”
The man called himself Satish Mama, and he claimed he was once Guru’s closest friend—his handler during the 90s gang alliances. “Guru never wanted blood,” he said. “But he understood something the others didn’t: fear isn’t currency—memory is. You scare someone today, they fight tomorrow. You remind them of who they were? They’ll bury themselves for you.” Satish handed Tanya a small cassette—labeled “R-Train Reversal 95”—recorded surveillance from the fateful derailment in Mahim. “The train was never the plan,” Satish rasped. “It was a mask. The real drop was on the 13:45 Wadala Goods Line. That’s where Guru made his gold disappear.” He tapped his temple. “Not in the soil. In minds. He gave every handler one piece—like a puzzle. They all disappeared after ’96. But one came back. RJ. Red shoes. Red smoke. Red rage.” He coughed violently and leaned back. “RJ’s not just digging up gold. He’s digging up Guru’s memory. And that… that’s a city’s fault line.”
By the time Tanya left, the sky had turned a dirty orange, and Dadar’s lanes were alive with monsoon thunder. She called Santosh and told him to gather all files on train records from 1995, especially freight logs and off-manifest cargo. “We’re not chasing gold,” she said flatly. “We’re chasing belief. RJ believes he’s Guru’s heir. And every murder? It’s his application for the throne.” Just as she reached Tilak Bridge, her phone buzzed—a blurry CCTV image sent from Santosh. A man in a crimson raincoat, black gloves, and red sneakers—walking calmly through the Matunga underpass. Time-stamped: 3:17 AM. Tanya stared at the image. Something about his walk, his shoulders, even his silence—it was as if he knew she was watching. Not hiding. Waiting. Her breath hitched. RJ wasn’t ahead. He was circling her. Slowly. Patiently. And when he struck next, it wouldn’t be a message in gold. It would be a memory soaked in blood.
8
Just before sunrise, Dadar’s Kabutarkhana echoed with devotional chants, the kind that mixed ghee-soaked faith with Mumbai’s cracked pavements. Tanya and Santosh stood near the Hanuman temple behind the kabutar-stand, where someone had sent a fresh clue: a box wrapped in red silk, left beneath the idol’s feet. Inside was a rudraksha mala soaked in dried blood and a scribbled note: “Bhasma only reveals the truth when burned with memory.” Beneath it, a torn newspaper clipping from 1995—a bhajan mandali’s performance at Shivaji Park attended by Guru himself, long before his fall from the public eye. That same night, the singer leading the bhajans had disappeared. “Look beyond the chorus,” it read. Tanya felt the chill run down her spine. If RJ was replicating Guru’s forgotten past, each clue was a reenactment—a warped nostalgia meant to revive not just fear, but an entire belief system where crime and devotion weren’t at odds but in rhythm.
They traced the last known member of the 1995 mandali to a hospice near Elphinstone Road. An old tabla player named Kaka Jagdale, now mute from a stroke, but with eyes like polished obsidian—watching, absorbing. As they entered his room, Tanya noticed a mural on his wall. It wasn’t painted—it was scorched. A burnt imprint of a man dancing, smeared with ash. “Bhasma Man,” whispered a nurse. “He draws it in charcoal every time someone new visits. Then he sets it on fire.” Santosh found tucked beneath Kaka’s bed an old tape, marked with a single word: “Moksha.” They played it. The bhajan started slow, with familiar tabla beats and harmonium hums, but then came a voice—not Guru’s, not Kaka’s—but RJ’s, layered with audio splicing. “The city sinned. Guru forgave. The city forgot. I remember.” Then static. Then silence. Tanya stared at the recorder, then at Kaka, whose eyes were moist. He wasn’t mute from illness. He was silenced by memory.
Leaving the hospice, Tanya felt the weight of the past tighten like a noose. At every turn, RJ was weaponizing nostalgia—transforming bhajans into dirges, idols into tombstones. This wasn’t just about gold anymore; it was about a warped resurrection. They returned to the Dadar police station only to find a parcel waiting for Tanya—another red box. Inside it was ash. Pure grey bhasma, finely ground. With it, a message etched on black paper: “Next: Where fire and track met, where souls left the steel.” Tanya froze. It was the site of the 1995 Wadala derailment, where flames devoured carriages and 31 people died—including Guru’s brother, a loss the city forgot but RJ clearly hadn’t. She grabbed her coat. “We’re heading to Wadala Yard,” she said sharply. “RJ’s next symphony will be fire and steel.” Santosh nodded, eyes dark. The city’s past wasn’t just alive—it was chanting. And the next verse promised smoke, vengeance, and blood on iron.
9
The Wadala Yard, usually humming with the industrial heartbeat of Mumbai’s train network, stood unusually still under the pale afternoon sun. Tanya and Santosh arrived with ACP Pradhan and a team of railway police, following the blood-inked prophecy left by RJ. At the far edge of the yard, near the derelict signal post where the 1995 derailment had occurred, they found it: a newly dug pit still warm from fire. In its center was a half-melted harmonium and fragments of burnt robes—red and orange, the kind Guru used to wear in his spiritual sessions. The ashes smelled faintly of camphor and diesel. A steel rod planted beside the pit bore an inscription etched by blowtorch: “He who betrayed fire must die in fire.” It wasn’t just symbolism. The body count was rising, and RJ’s obsession with Guru’s past was now visibly intertwining with ritualistic purification. Tanya knelt beside the ashes, sifting through them with gloved fingers, and found a single rail token from 1995, its edges scorched but legible. “This isn’t murder,” she murmured. “It’s a rite.”
Back at the control room, Pradhan ordered a complete shutdown of yard access, fearing an explosive device. But Tanya’s mind was elsewhere—on the tracks, literally. She followed an intuition to platform 13, an abandoned freight line unused since 1995. There, she noticed a series of railway spikes hammered in a perfect spiral, forming a mandala pattern visible only from above. At its center: a blood-smeared wooden stool and an old cassette player still playing a warped recording of Guru’s 1994 discourse. Suddenly, the loudspeakers in the nearby junked coaches came to life, and RJ’s distorted voice filled the air: “Thirty-one forgotten, one forgiven. Let memory burn where wheels once wept.” It wasn’t just revenge—it was a resurrection ritual. Tanya realized RJ wasn’t targeting the living—he was summoning the dead. Or at least, the memory of them. Santosh picked up a rail map pinned with crimson thumbtacks—all of them pointed to previous derailments involving Guru’s spiritual retreats. Each marked date corresponded with a new murder or clue in their ongoing case. RJ was recreating a death calendar.
As dusk fell over Wadala, a sudden explosion rocked the far end of the yard—an old brake van engulfed in flames. By the time they reached, a figure in saffron robes was fleeing into the adjacent scrapyard. Tanya chased him alone, weaving between rusting bogies and oil drums. When she finally cornered the figure, he turned—and it wasn’t RJ. It was Yug Sharma, one of Guru’s original disciples long thought to be missing. He was delirious, burned across the face, muttering chants in Prakrit and Sanskrit, eyes wild with devotion and guilt. “RJ showed me the truth,” he gasped. “Guru traded souls for salvation. RJ is the reckoning.” He collapsed, clutching a charred photograph of the original bhajan mandali—all eleven of them. Tanya counted—three were dead, two missing, one in hospice, and now Yug. That left five. “He’s finishing what Guru began,” she muttered. “Only this time, no one is meant to survive.” They needed to protect the remaining mandali members. RJ’s next move would be a finale—a public spectacle. And in the dark belly of Mumbai’s rail corridors, the echo of metal wheels and forgotten mantras had just begun to roar again.
10
Rain lashed against the city as if Mumbai itself wanted to wash away the sins of its past. Tanya stood atop the Prabhadevi Flyover, eyes fixed on the towering spire of the abandoned All India Radio transmitter just across the tracks—an obsolete relic slated for demolition, now glowing with flickering lights like an awakened deity. Every clue, every scream from the bylanes, every corpse left behind had led them here. Inside, RJ prepared his final act—a live transmission, broadcasting across pirate frequencies, not just to Mumbai but to the entire subcontinent. It wasn’t just about revenge anymore. RJ wanted confession, judgment, and deliverance. ACP Pradhan coordinated the tactical team as the transmitter loomed ahead, its iron staircase spiraling into a nightmare of echoing chants and static-laced music. Tanya, breath tight in her chest, pressed forward with a grim resolve. She could already hear RJ’s voice from the open speaker at the top: “The city has forgotten. The gods have not.”
Inside the rusting broadcast hall, cables hung like nooses from the ceiling, red bulbs flickering in rhythmic intervals. In the center stood RJ—face masked in vermillion paint, eyes blazing with prophetic madness. Bound to the walls were the last surviving members of Guru’s mandali, gagged and doused in kerosene, their names scrawled in lipstick across old reel canisters. RJ held a lit torch in one hand and a microphone in the other. “For every life stolen in the name of peace, I offer a verse. For every lie spoken over sacred songs, I offer flame.” Tanya raised her gun, hands trembling. But RJ turned, smiling, and pressed play on a cassette deck. It was the original 1995 bhajan—a forbidden track recorded on the night of the train tragedy. Layered beneath the chants was the sound of children screaming, metal collapsing, and a whispered plea in Marathi: “Save us, Baba, the train is burning.” Guru had used the accident to manipulate spiritual hysteria, claiming divine intervention when in truth, it was human negligence and manipulation.
As Tanya stepped closer, RJ hurled the torch toward the mandali. Without pause, Santosh dove and knocked the kerosene drum over, extinguishing most of the flame with a smothering blanket. In the chaos, Tanya tackled RJ, both tumbling into the debris-strewn broadcast booth. He fought with wild strength, screaming, “He made us ghosts in our own bodies! This is their rebirth!” A brutal scuffle ended with a single gunshot. RJ lay bleeding over the mixing board, eyes still wide, voice whispering into the live mic: “Forgive me, Prabhu… Let Mumbai hear the truth.” The fire was controlled, the mandali rescued. As sirens wailed and the rain continued its furious descent, Tanya sat quietly on the floor of the transmitter room, soaked in sweat and ash, listening to the crackling remnants of the final broadcast.
In the days that followed, the media storm was relentless. Guru’s legacy collapsed overnight as former disciples came forward, revealing decades of manipulation, exploitation, and staged miracles. The story rocked the foundations of spiritual faith in the city. Tanya and Santosh submitted their final report—meticulously detailed but haunted in tone. ACP Pradhan handed them both letters of commendation, but none of it mattered. The city had changed. In the final scene, Tanya walked through the same bylane in Dadar where it all began, passing a wall that still bore RJ’s first message: “Truth lives in cracks.” She paused, lit a cigarette with shaking fingers, and stared into the rain-slicked mirror of a shuttered tea stall. Her reflection was fractured by a bullet hole in the glass—one of many left behind in a case that had peeled back the skin of Mumbai, exposing its nerves, its ghosts, and its hunger for redemption. The fire had burned out, but the ashes would linger forever.
End
