Lalit Kumar Tripathi The summer sun scorched the land with a vengeance, its fiery rays baking the cracked soil until it seemed the earth itself was thirsty. The dam that once brimmed with monsoon-fed waters now lay half-empty, its shoreline retreating day by day to expose what had been hidden for decades beneath its depths. From the muddy floor emerged strange, skeletal shapes—walls leaning against time, stones half-swallowed by silt, and the tilted shadow of a bell tower that once belonged to a village no one had seen in a generation. Fishermen, their nets dragging in shallow waters, muttered darkly…
