Ishaan Roychowdhury
1
It started on a Wednesday, just as the first rains of June swept across the city like a waking god shaking off centuries of sleep, drenching Alipore’s colonial bungalows and whispering down the serpentine lanes that remembered secrets better than people did. ACP Ira Basu stood beneath the broken awning of the old Watchtower Lane police outpost, watching as constables cordoned off the site of yet another murder—this one more grotesque than the last, the body splayed like a crude offering on the steps of a crumbling cemetery wall, the eyelids meticulously removed and placed on a folded piece of palm-leaf manuscript. The poem beside the corpse was in ancient Bengali, something about inverted moons and sleeping ink, but what chilled Ira was the smell—not of blood, not even the iron-thick stench of death, but the smell of old paper burning slowly in wet wind. The victim, a woman in her sixties, was identified as Rina Majumdar, a retired librarian and folklore archivist at Presidency College, living alone in an old flat on Harish Mukherjee Road, never married, no enemies, no assets worth killing for. And yet here she was, her blood washed into the gutter by monsoon runoff, while a killer with an unusual literary flair mocked them with a pen dipped in history and vengeance. The pathologist confirmed no signs of sexual assault, but found strange symbols etched into the skin using something sharp and fine—possibly a quill. The police photographer clicked away, his flash lighting up the cemetery gate’s ancient crosshatched ironwork that hadn’t been touched since the Raj. And then, as Ira turned to leave, she noticed something—the streetlamp directly above the body wasn’t flickering like the rest. It burned with a strange amber hue, steady, like a spotlight. “No power lines to this section since 2012,” muttered the lineman when questioned. Ira stared at the lamp as if it might blink back. That night, unable to sleep, she sat in her study reviewing old case files, and something pulled her to a folder she hadn’t touched in years—The Sen Disappearances, 1974, classified as missing persons from the Emergency era. Seven individuals gone without a trace. One of the files—thin, brittle, forgotten—was for Aghor Sen, a minor poet and underground publisher, believed to have distributed “seditious pamphlets” and vanished after a CBI raid. As Ira read his dossier, her eyes stopped on a phrase from his last known collection: “Time is a lie carved into graves / Let the rains fall backward and raise the names.” Her hand froze. Those were the same lines written on the palm-leaf beside Rina Majumdar’s corpse. Same punctuation. Same script. The connection was impossible—unless someone had access to Aghor Sen’s unpublished work. But all manuscripts were believed destroyed in the raid. All… except the ones never found. She called Devjit Pal, a journalist-turned-occult blogger with whom she’d collaborated on the Bansdroni Murders. He was unshaved, half-drunk, but wide awake as soon as she mentioned the lines. “That’s Aghor. No doubt. That meter—he called it ‘reverse time verse.’ Obsessed with time cycles, amavasya rituals, and blood-led justice,” Devjit rasped. He claimed Aghor Sen was rumored to be involved in a secret circle during the ’70s—poets, outcasts, occultists—who believed in invoking karmic realignment through literature. “They believed stories could curse,” Devjit said, his voice dropping. Ira, ever the realist, pushed aside the speculation and asked for locations. Devjit sent her a pin: a shuttered printing press in Alipore’s Judges Court Road, a structure swallowed by moss and time, believed to have been sealed since 1975. By morning, she was there, accompanied by two constables and the unrelenting rain. They forced open the rusted iron gate and entered the skeletal ruin, where old typesetting machines still stood like sentinels. In the back room, behind collapsed wooden shelves, Ira’s torch fell upon something chilling—a stack of ledgers wrapped in oilskin. Each one handwritten, with names, dates, and single-line poems. Flipping through, Ira felt time stretch and contract; the names in the early pages matched victims of past “accidents” and “disappearances” across decades, including some yet unsolved. The last few pages were blank—except for seven names, each with a date written ahead of time. The third name on the list was Rina Majumdar – 12 June 2025. It was correct down to the hour. Ira’s throat tightened. The next name: Prof. Udayan Palit – 18 June 2025 – “Let your bones remember where your guilt sleeps.” Ira knew that name. He was once a vocal opponent of anti-Emergency protests, later served in the Home Ministry, now a historian. She checked her watch. Four days. Four days to prevent a murder predicted fifty years ago by a man who should’ve been dead by now. That night, unable to shake the feeling of being watched, Ira returned to the station and requested records on Palit. While she waited, she received a brown envelope—no return address. Inside: a polaroid of Rina’s body taken from a high angle, as if from the streetlamp itself. On the back: “Page seventeen of the ledger has your grandfather’s name.” Her hand shook as she opened the ledger again and flipped to page seventeen. The name Anandamoy Basu stared back at her, underlined. Her grandfather, a school headmaster, had disappeared in the summer of 1976. No one had ever found his body. Her mother had refused to talk about it her whole life. Ira slammed the book shut. The line beneath the name read: “A whistle too loud for a silent state.” That was it. A poetic death sentence. The ledgers weren’t records. They were scripts. Rituals. Prophecies. She looked at the streetlamp in the corner of the courtyard—it flickered once, then glowed steadily again. Something was watching, listening. Someone was staging these murders like performances scripted long ago. The killer wasn’t random. They were executing a vision. Aghor Sen’s vision. The only question now was—was this revenge? Or resurrection?
2
The rain had stopped by the next morning, but Kolkata still dripped with the memory of it, puddles collecting old sky, and the air heavy with the scent of earth, smoke, and secrets; ACP Ira Basu stood at the window of her second-floor office in Lalbazar, watching the city resume its routine, unaware that a name written decades ago could still decide the hour of a man’s death, and that the past was no longer content to remain buried beneath concrete and denial. She had barely slept, haunted by the name on page seventeen—Anandamoy Basu—her grandfather, listed not as missing but as judged, sentenced, and erased with poetic finality, and for the first time in years, her stoic professionalism cracked as childhood images came flooding back: her grandfather’s laughter in their Ballygunge home, his smell of chalk and sandalwood, and the silence that filled the house after he never came back from school that day in June 1976. Now his name was in a ledger that had correctly predicted Rina Majumdar’s death, and worse, another man’s fate loomed just four days ahead. She pulled out every record she could on Professor Udayan Palit, once a bureaucrat during the Emergency who later reinvented himself as a post-colonial historian and cultural commentator, now living in a sprawling house in Southern Avenue surrounded by rare books, retired dogs, and a wife with advanced Alzheimer’s. She needed to warn him—without sounding mad—and she needed to do it before the killer did. Accompanied by constable Tapas Roy, she reached Palit’s bungalow just after 11 a.m., where the heavy wooden door creaked open to reveal a thin, elegant man in his late seventies, still sharp-eyed and dignified, his long fingers stained with ink and turmeric. When she showed him the photograph of Rina and the palm-leaf poem, he visibly flinched. “I know that style,” he whispered, eyes narrowing. “Only one man ever wrote like that—Aghor Sen. But he’s long dead, Inspector. They said he hung himself during a police raid.” Ira did not correct him. Instead, she asked what he knew. Palit hesitated, then gestured to a teakwood chair. “In 1974, I was tasked with identifying subversive intellectuals—people whose writings were seen as a threat to national unity. Aghor was one of them. But he wasn’t a revolutionary, not really. He was… what’s the word… an architect of chaos. He believed every nation’s truth was built on a lie and wanted to tear it down with metaphor and myth. The ‘Alipore Circle’ they called themselves—poets, mystics, old aristocrats playing God with forgotten texts. I helped have him arrested.” He paused. “But I also read his last work. The Ledger, he called it. I thought it was symbolic. Turns out, it wasn’t.” Ira placed the old ledger on his table, watching his face drain of color. “I’m next, aren’t I?” he asked quietly. She didn’t answer. “I tried to forget all this. But forgetting doesn’t save you when someone remembers for you.” That night, Ira requested constant police presence at Palit’s home, even installing motion sensors around the perimeter. Still, unease hung over her like a noose. She returned to the ledger’s final pages. There were seven names. Two were already marked with the Sanskrit symbol for complete. The remaining five included Palit—and a woman named Bijoya Lahiri, aged 81, who lived in a nursing home in Tollygunge and whose name triggered a faint bell in Ira’s memory. A little digging revealed the truth: Bijoya was once a state censor officer during the Emergency, and one of the signatories that had labeled Aghor Sen’s writings “perverse, anti-national, and mentally disturbing.” Her approval had directly led to the banning and confiscation of his manuscripts. Ira felt the pieces clicking together—not just revenge, but a purge of those responsible for the silencing. The ledger wasn’t just documenting death—it was enacting justice in the mind of someone who believed art could outlive flesh. Meanwhile, Palit began behaving strangely. His house staff reported him talking to shadows, speaking to a mirror in verse. Ira returned one night to check on him herself, and found him in his study, scribbling frantically on onion paper with a crow feather. “He visits me,” he whispered. “He stands where the lamplight breaks. He tells me I must write my confession… or the rain will fall again, inside my lungs.” Ira called for a psychologist, but even she felt the temperature dip. As she left, she noticed the streetlamp outside flicker, just once, before burning amber. The same hue. The same glow. She remembered the polaroid. The angle. The streetlamp. Someone—or something—was watching from there. The next day, despite all security, Professor Palit was found dead in his locked study, no sign of forced entry. A cloth soaked in ink was found inside his mouth. On his desk: a poem written in reverse, mirror-script Bengali, ending with the line: “Even truth must bleed when buried long enough.” Three names now bore the completion symbol. The fourth was Bijoya Lahiri. Ira drove to the nursing home that very afternoon, her chest heavy, dreading what she might find. But the old woman was alive, lucid, and remarkably alert. “I knew someone would come,” she said calmly. “I’ve been waiting forty years.” Ira stared. “Why?” Bijoya smiled thinly. “Because guilt is like an unpaid debt. Sooner or later, the collector knocks.” She handed Ira a sealed envelope. Inside was a brittle photograph—seven people, standing in front of the Alipore printing press, dated 1973. Aghor Sen stood at the center, wild-eyed, with a crimson scarf. The others—Rina, Palit, Bijoya, and three others Ira hadn’t identified—stood solemn. On the back: “We burned the verses. But not the voice.” Bijoya continued, “We tried to silence him. We didn’t know what we were dealing with. Aghor believed words had weight. That names written in ritual ink became fate.” She shivered. “He called it Kavya-Kaal—Time through Poetry.” That night, Bijoya too was found dead in her sleep. No signs of trauma. Only a dried ink circle around her pillow and a whisper recorded on her bedside Alexa: “And now your name is silence.” Ira stared at the growing list. Someone was fulfilling an old prophecy. Or becoming it. She contacted Devjit again. He arrived with three cups of black coffee and a stack of xeroxed articles about Bengali esoteric traditions. “I found something,” he said breathlessly. “There’s mention of a ritual called Jeevan-Lekha—The Writing of Life. Done by tantric poets who believed certain names, once written during a lunar alignment, could bind the soul’s passage even after death. If Aghor completed the ritual before vanishing, and if the ledger was part of it… then this isn’t just revenge. It’s a resurrection cycle.” Ira was silent for a long time. “What about the remaining names?” she asked. Devjit looked grim. “I’ve been trying to trace them. One of them is yours.” Ira blinked. “What?” He flipped the page. And there it was: Ira Basu – 7 July 2025 – “The ink that questions becomes the wound.” Her ears rang. “He didn’t just mark those who hurt him,” Devjit said. “He marked those who’d interfere with his return.” Outside, the streetlamp glowed amber again, as if agreeing.
3
The storm returned to Kolkata like a forgotten promise, roaring in from the Hooghly with sheets of horizontal rain and thunder that sounded like iron gates being torn from their hinges, and as lightning licked the crumbling domes of Kalighat and Howrah Bridge trembled in the wind, ACP Ira Basu sat in her office, staring at her own name in the ledger—written in that same sharp inked hand, dated barely three weeks away, and beside it the line “The ink that questions becomes the wound,” a line that felt like both threat and prophecy. Tapas Roy entered the room wordlessly, holding a plastic evidence sleeve containing a fresh polaroid left anonymously outside the South Division gate, wrapped in banana leaf, old ritual style. The photo showed a dimly lit stairwell—a basement Ira immediately recognized as the forbidden under-chamber beneath the Ghosh Bari, an ancestral house near Lansdowne that had been condemned since a fire in 1983. But in the photograph, the stairwell was intact, a flickering oil lamp resting on the bottom step, casting long shadows along the wall—and if she squinted, she could make out script scrawled in charcoal along the wall: “Where the dead waited, the poet woke.” That night, driven by instinct and dread, she and Devjit set out for Ghosh Bari under cover of the rain, bypassing rusted iron gates and warnings etched into the collapsed pillars. The house stood like a sleeping creature, its bones groaning under ivy and age, and as they entered through a side panel torn off by previous squatters, the scent of burnt books hit them like a memory. Devjit held his torch aloft while Ira descended the wet spiral stairs, boots squelching on moss-slicked stone. At the bottom, they found the wall from the polaroid—but it was now bare. No script. No lamp. Just a hollow silence. But in the far corner, behind a curtain of cobwebs, lay something that stopped Ira’s heart—a leather satchel bearing the faded monogram A.S., half-buried in mud. Inside, wrapped in oiled cloth, were three things: a cracked spectacles case, a fountain pen sealed in wax, and a brittle manuscript titled “Varnabhoomi – The Land of Letters.” The preface was signed: Aghor Sen, 1974. Ira began to read, heart pounding, as the manuscript described a vision—not of political upheaval or literary rebellion, but of reincarnation through ink, a belief that if one wrote their truth in the blood of silence and buried it under a lunar vow, their soul could return, inhabiting stories, bodies, or even lamplight. It was part memoir, part ritual manual, and within its pages were names, descriptions of rituals performed under the Kalighat ghat, and one recurring chant: “Sharir jaabe, shabdo thakbe”—“The body shall go, the word shall remain.” Devjit backed away. “He didn’t want revenge. He wanted continuity. Immortality. This isn’t a series of murders. It’s a ritual performance to complete the spell that was broken when he died before finishing the last page.” Ira’s blood ran cold. If true, the deaths weren’t the end—but the beginning of something worse. They returned to the station, sleepless, the manuscript sent for carbon dating, though Ira already knew the results wouldn’t matter. Something ancient was unfolding—something scripted long ago by a man who believed time could be bound to verse and death rewritten like a line of poetry. Meanwhile, the next name in the ledger—Rathin Bagchi, once a publisher who had refused to print Aghor’s final collection and reported him to authorities—was found dead in the North Kolkata riverbank, his tongue removed and replaced with a rolled parchment reading: “To silence a poet is to sew your own lips with fire.” The murders were accelerating. And the amber-glowing streetlamps were spreading—Tapas confirmed five such streetlights now burned near each victim’s home or death site, each controlled by no known electrical grid, untraceable. Ira stared at the city’s electricity maps like they were crime scene photos. Then came the most terrifying development yet: one of the remaining names disappeared from the ledger overnight. When she turned to the page again, the sixth name—someone listed only as S.N. Dutta—was gone. Not crossed out. Gone. Ink lifted. Paper smooth. As if it had never been written. Ira asked Devjit, who paled. “That means the cycle has begun feeding on its own. The ledger is no longer a document. It’s alive.” Then something even stranger happened. Ira received a phone call from her mother—a woman she rarely spoke to, who had never once mentioned Anandamoy Basu since his disappearance. Her voice on the phone was oddly calm. “Ira, your grandfather left something for you. I think it’s time you read it.” Shocked, Ira rushed to her childhood home in Ballygunge, where her mother produced an old wooden box wrapped in muslin, tucked in the attic crawlspace for decades. Inside was a single letter—written by Anandamoy in 1976—the day before he vanished. It was a cryptic, heartfelt note warning Ira’s mother to “protect the girl who comes after,” that “a man of words walks backwards through time,” and “if you see his face in the mirror, close your eyes and remember the red moon.” Ira sat frozen. Her own grandfather had known. He had been marked. She had inherited that mark. Aghor Sen wasn’t just seeking vengeance. He was selecting a successor. And the final line chilled her soul: “The ledger must be burned on the night of the red eclipse, or the poet becomes the god.” A quick search confirmed that a total lunar eclipse—a red moon—was due in just over three weeks. The same night as Ira’s marked death. The race wasn’t just to stop a killer now. It was to stop the transfiguration of Aghor Sen into something eternal, something written into the veins of the city itself. That night, she couldn’t sleep. And at exactly 3:03 a.m., her desk lamp flickered amber. When she looked up, the mirror on her wall—one she never used—seemed to breathe, and for a second, in its surface, she saw a man’s face—half-shadowed, eyes ink-black, lips forming words she couldn’t hear. She hurled the lamp at the mirror, shattering both. Her phone buzzed. A message from an unknown number: “Four names remain. You are the last page.” The city around her no longer felt alive with people. It felt alive with watchers. The dead were not resting. They were reciting.
4
The mirror had shattered but the face did not vanish from Ira’s memory—in fact, it seemed to have transferred from the glass into her mind, hovering like an afterimage behind every thought, and as she walked through the corridors of Lalbazar the next morning, flanked by officers who now eyed her with a mixture of awe and unease, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something had begun to mirror her from within, as if her breath came a fraction too late or her footsteps echoed before she took them. The street outside was choked with water and people, but time felt warped, as if the city had started mouthing a script it did not understand. The news of Rathin Bagchi’s death had made the front page of every Bengali daily, though none of them mentioned the parchment in his mouth, and Tapas had gone silent after viewing the footage from a traffic cam outside the nursing home where Bijoya Lahiri died—the feed showed no one entering for twelve hours before her death, but at 2:46 a.m., the amber streetlamp outside flared and then dimmed, and at that exact moment, the camera picked up a shimmer in the air—a ripple, like heat over asphalt—forming the faint shape of a man walking backward into the wall. Ira stood over Tapas as he looped the footage again and again, but each time, the moment felt more unreal, more metaphysical, like the killer was less man and more memory clawing its way into the present. Devjit called her from Jadavpur University that afternoon, breathless and terrified. “I found it. I found his voice.” He’d been digging through digitized audio tapes stored in the Folklore Department’s restricted section—old recordings from cultural sabhas, clandestine literary nights, even surveillance files from the 70s. “There’s a voice reading one of Aghor’s banned poems—but it’s layered with something else. Underneath the voice, there’s a hum—low, constant, rhythmic. It doesn’t match any machine from that era. I ran it through a frequency scan. Ira… it’s human. Multiple human voices, slowed to a crawl, repeating one line: ‘He writes us so we may breathe.’” Ira met him in the university’s audio lab an hour later, and as she listened through the headphones, she felt her skin crawl. The voice—Aghor’s—was unmistakably calm, meditative, but it was the undertone that froze her. The hum was like a buried choir, entombed in the tape, reciting in synchrony with a language that didn’t belong to the living. “It’s not just a spell,” Devjit said. “It’s a chorus. The ledger is the libretto. And if he completes the seventh death, the city itself becomes the stage.” Ira turned to him sharply. “Then we burn the damn ledger.” But when they returned to her office, the safe was open and the manuscript gone. Not stolen. Vanished. Tapas confirmed no entry, no breach, no alarm. Just absence. In its place was a single feather, dipped in ink. The same one they had found in Palit’s house. Devjit whispered, “He’s already inside your story.” That night, Ira revisited the final name in the photograph from Bijoya Lahiri’s attic—the last man whose face remained unidentified. After long hours cross-referencing missing persons, literary contributors, and former press workers from the 70s, she found him: Nalinikanta Dey, once a typesetter at the Alipore Press, known for hand-setting Aghor Sen’s experimental text, vanished in 1977 after a mysterious mental breakdown. Now, she learned, he was living under the name Niladri Dey in a half-abandoned building in Beniapukur, known to locals as “the man who types without ink.” She arrived there at dawn. The stairwell smelled of rust and turmeric, and the room at the top was filled with old Remington typewriters, none plugged, all facing mirrors. The man sat in the center, a frail wraith-like figure, typing on a machine with no paper. The rhythm was steady, unbroken. She stood before him for several minutes before he noticed her. “He is writing us again,” he said softly, eyes unfocused. “We will not be free until the recital ends.” Ira tried to speak, but he held up a hand. “Do not ask. Just listen. He reads every night from the other side of the mirror. That is where the ink lives now. We are reflections, Inspector. We died when we silenced him. Now we must be silenced.” He reached behind him and pulled out a mirror—not a regular one, but a round shard framed with brass, etched with Sanskrit symbols. “This is where he waits. If you wish to stop him, you must face him within. Only then can the ledger be rewritten.” She took it cautiously, and as she looked into it, she saw a flicker—her grandfather, Anandamoy, sitting at a desk, weeping silently as red pages flew around him like moths. She dropped it. It didn’t shatter. Nothing ever did anymore. That night, she dreamt of the recital. A darkened theatre. A stage lit by a single amber lamp. Seven chairs. Six occupied by familiar corpses. The seventh, empty, beckoning. A voice reading from behind a velvet curtain: “We return not to punish but to preserve. The word must outlive the mouth.” She woke with a start, blood on her pillow. No wounds. Just ink—dark red ink—trickling from her left ear. Devjit, now half-convinced they were living in a narrative that no longer obeyed causality, theorized that the only way to undo the ritual was to write over the original script. “A counter-poem,” he said, “one that nullifies the Kavya-Kaal. It has to be written in the same ink, at the same place, under the same moon.” The red eclipse was now ten days away. The only place that matched all those conditions: the abandoned Alipore Press, now crumbling behind locked gates and political silence. But to write the counter-poem, she would need the names. And the voice. That night, the mirror on her wall—newly replaced—did not reflect her. It showed the ledger’s final page, bleeding, the ink still wet. And her own reflection walked away from her, toward the amber light.
5
The night before the red moon rose over Kolkata, Ira Basu found herself standing before the rusted gates of the Alipore Press, a building that once printed manifestos, banned poems, love letters from revolutionaries, and the first whispers of freedom, now reduced to ivy-choked skeletons and the silence of paperless years, and as she looked up at its cracked sandstone façade, she wondered not whether she would survive the night, but whether her name would remain in history, or be absorbed by a book no living hand would ever turn again. Devjit waited in the car, a satchel beside him containing the counter-script—seven verses handwritten on red cloth using borrowed blood and ritual ink prepared by a Tantric scholar from Kalighat, who died minutes after mailing it with the words, “If you get there before the eclipse, speak only truth or not at all.” Tapas had refused to come. Something in the last death—Niladri Dey’s suicide by self-immolation before dawn—had broken him; all he said before resigning was, “He’s not just in mirrors now, Ira. He’s in the time between breath and word.” Ira pushed through the iron gate alone. The air smelled like burnt ink and vetiver. Inside, the great hall of the press yawned like the chest cavity of a beast—machines rusted into crucifix shapes, paper reels disintegrated into straw, and at the far end, beneath a skylight of soot-stained glass, stood the main printing dais, covered in dust but strangely cleared at its center, as if awaiting something. She took the satchel and began preparing the ritual—laying the red cloth at the dais’s heart, placing one lit diya at each of its four corners, and finally opening the brass-framed mirror given to her by Niladri. The moment it faced the cloth, a wind stirred—not from the doors or windows, but from within the machines, as if their gears were breathing, remembering, grinding the ghosts of ink long dried. Then came the voice—low, precise, intimate—spoken not into the air but into her very thoughts: “You came to unwrite me?” She did not answer aloud. The ritual demanded silence until the seventh verse. But the mirror glowed, and within its depths the face emerged again—Aghor Sen, as he must have been at thirty-five, calm-eyed, gaunt, his lips moving in time with her heartbeat. She picked up the ritual quill. The eclipse began—the skylight above darkening, the moon outside bleeding into shadow—and as the light turned red, Ira felt the walls tremble, and the typewriters began clicking on their own, keys pressing without touch, each one spelling out fragments of his poems, his curses, his dreams. “I will return through every silence,” they typed, “through every page you burn.” She wrote the first line of the counter-verse: “No name lives if it forgets mercy.” The diya at the northeast corner flared. The voice in the mirror hissed, “Your name is borrowed. Your blood, diluted. You cannot speak for us.” She ignored him. The second verse: “The word not spoken is the wound unmade.” The temperature dropped. Frost formed along the walls. Somewhere, behind the machines, a footstep echoed. She wrote the third: “We are not gods. Only echoes pretending to be thunder.” The mirror began to crack. His face twisted. “You were always meant to carry me forward. You are the final quill.” Ira’s hand trembled. She wrote the fourth: “The poet who kills his reader buries his own mouth.” A groan rippled through the press, like an old man waking after forty winters. The floor creaked. The machines began to type her name. Over and over: IRA IRA IRA IRA, as if trying to write her into existence—or obliterate her from it. The fifth verse: “No verse that demands blood shall be remembered in love.” The mirror shrieked. Glass cracked. Her reflection now stood apart from her, mouthing different words. She couldn’t stop. The sixth: “A city is not your body. Its shadows do not obey.” One diya blew out. The eastern one. Aghor’s voice thundered through the walls: “Then let them obey silence.” From the corners of the room, shadows rose—vague human forms, each resembling one of the dead. Bijoya, Palit, Rathin. Their mouths stitched with black thread. Their eyes locked on Ira. But they didn’t attack. They knelt. Waiting. For the last line. The seventh. Ira held the quill above the red cloth and closed her eyes. For a moment, she remembered her grandfather’s voice reading her Tagore under mango trees, remembered the warmth of syllables not yet weaponized. And then she wrote: “Let the ledger close by its own will, not by the hand of vengeance.” All four lamps blazed. The mirror cracked clean in half. The shadows let out a long, low breath. The machines halted. And the press went still. She looked into the split mirror. His face was gone. Replaced by her own. Just her. No afterimage. No watchers. Just silence. Clean. When she emerged at dawn, Devjit was gone. So was the car. But the sun rose red and gold behind the Victoria Memorial, and the birds returned to Alipore, singing the same forgotten morning song that once echoed through the city when typewriters still reigned and poets dared to speak softly. Back at Lalbazar, a courier waited at her desk. A small parcel. Inside: the original ledger, now bound in white cloth, every page blank. A note in Devjit’s handwriting: “It worked. But ink never dies. It only changes its pen.” She sat, lit a candle, and stared at the first page. Then, with calm fingers, wrote one line: “Chapter One: The Voice Beneath the Page.” Because stories never end. They only listen.
6
Kolkata had begun to breathe again, but Ira Basu couldn’t; not because the air was heavy with the humidity of a post-monsoon summer, but because silence had become a presence that watched her now—subtle, patient, not menacing but unnaturally attentive, like the brief moment between a question and an answer when even the city seems to hold its breath. It had been six days since the ritual at the Alipore Press, six days since the red eclipse and the final verse, and yet every time she tried to sleep, she awoke to find her pen uncapped, a fresh page opened on her desk, and ink blots forming in the shape of her initials—never threatening, always precise. Tapas had left the city entirely, refusing to take calls, and Devjit had sent a final voice note before disappearing—his voice calm, but almost too calm, like someone reading from a teleprompter: “You’ve won the stage, Ira, but remember: the audience was never alive.” Then the line went dead. She should have called in a psychological evaluator, maybe even handed in her badge, but instead, she began spending more time at the archive, combing through old, unclaimed manuscripts from the pre-Emergency era—specifically, works anonymously submitted to journals between 1972 and 1975 that never made it to publication. Something in her gut said that Aghor Sen had left seeds behind, verses that never needed to be read aloud but merely recognized. It was on the third day in the basement archive of the National Library that she found it: a manila folder without a title, filed under “Poetic Theory: Fragmented Contributions,” containing only one sheet of paper, thin as skin, with no ink visible—until she held it against light. And then the words appeared—not written, but etched into the paper with a burn mark, as if someone had written using fire. It read: “The Page That Listens is the child of breath. Say its name, and it remembers yours. Write upon it, and it will write you back.” The script was unmistakably Aghor’s, but softer, gentler, devoid of his usual venom. She rushed back to her apartment and laid the page on her desk. For two hours, it remained inert. Then, as the shadows lengthened and the city outside hushed into dusk, the paper began to warm, like skin under sunlight, and a single line emerged in a delicate red script: “Inspector Ira Basu—why do you continue?” She didn’t hesitate. She dipped her pen in black ink and wrote beneath it: “Because the city still echoes.” The reply came instantly: “Echoes are the language of absence.” She paused, the weight of that sentence pressing on her like the leaden bells of St. John’s Cathedral. Was she chasing phantoms or listening to truths too old to die? She wrote again: “Then what remains?” The page replied: “The unheard verse. The unwritten name.” That night, her dreams returned—not nightmares, but memories reframed—her childhood reading detective novels beside Anandamoy, his gentle voice telling her that truth was not what survived time, but what time couldn’t swallow. In the dream, he handed her a mirror—not like the ritual one, but small, circular, like a lady’s compact. When she opened it, she saw a girl—not herself—trapped behind glass, writing silently with bloodied fingers. When she awoke, the page had changed again. It now read: “You must find her. The First Reader.” She didn’t understand. She searched every database, every record on Aghor’s early publishers, typists, and fans. And then she remembered something from Bijoya Lahiri’s diary—half a sentence: “Before the poems were banned, they were whispered by Meera at the Sunday Adda.” She ran the name. Meera Choudhury. A poet in her teens, once part of the Alipore Poets’ Circle in 1971. No official records after 1974. Presumed dead. No body found. But someone, somewhere, had filed a police report in 1993, claiming they had heard a woman reciting “the poem that makes mirrors weep” at a temple in Baruipur. The case was dismissed as a hoax. But the name stuck: Meera Choudhury. Ira left for Baruipur at dawn. The temple was abandoned, half-devoured by banyan roots, and inside its moss-eaten sanctum lay a single bench carved with words: “Her voice remained after her body left.” Ira sat and opened the mirror compact she had taken from her grandfather’s old desk that morning. It belonged to her grandmother, who had died young, and inside it was an old photo—a woman in a cotton saree, standing beside a teenage girl with haunting eyes. On the back, in Anandamoy’s hand: “Meera and Soma—1971.” Her grandmother. And Meera. The First Reader was not dead. Merely… unseen. A page between pages. The mirror warmed in her hand. And then, inside its silver pool, Meera’s face appeared—not aged, not decayed, but perfectly still. And then, she blinked. Just once. And the page in Ira’s satchel replied: “Now you know. But do you remember?” Ira whispered: “Remember what?” The mirror shattered. No sound. Just light. And behind it, a new voice—her own, younger, frightened—reciting a poem she never remembered learning: “The poet hides inside the reader’s breath. And breath, once borrowed, cannot be returned.” She was the echo. She was the reader. Not the first—but the final. And Aghor Sen had chosen her not as an enemy. But as a pen.
7
The city had started whispering again—soft, almost apologetic murmurs at traffic lights, in tea stalls, from the mouths of sleeping beggars and wide-eyed children clutching empty notebooks—and everywhere Ira Basu turned, she felt the breath of ink on her neck, a presence not malevolent but insistently intimate, like a forgotten stanza begging to be read aloud one final time. After the mirror cracked and Meera’s gaze met hers, Ira hadn’t returned home; instead, she walked until her feet gave up near the Mullick Bazaar tram depot, where an old man selling secondhand books from a wooden cart looked at her and asked, “You’re the one he chose, aren’t you?” She didn’t reply. She didn’t need to. He handed her a yellowing paperback—no title, no author—and when she flipped it open, the first page bled. Not metaphorically. Actual blood oozed from the spine, staining the words: “The Blood Between Lines binds not the writer to the page, but the reader to the ink.” The old man vanished. The cart stood empty. The street smelled of kerosene and roses. Ira took the book home, wrapped in a cotton bag, and placed it on her desk. The blank ledger Devjit had left her still lay beside it, unchanged—pages untouched, white as moonlight, waiting. At midnight, when the air thickened like curdled smoke and the ceiling fan slowed inexplicably, the book began to hum. Not audibly, but vibrationally, like a singing bowl struck from within. She opened it again, this time finding not blood, but a poem—written in alternating fonts, some handwritten, some typewritten, some formed as if cut from newspapers and glued in place—verses whispering contradictions and dualities: “I am the poet and the murder. I am the silence that screams. I do not kill. I let words devour.” Beneath it, her name again: Ira Basu. She blinked. The ink moved. Shifted. Rearranged. Now the sentence read: “Ira Basu is the poet.” She shut the book. Too fast. Her lamp flickered. The door creaked, though no wind passed. The fridge hummed a chord it had never hummed before. Outside, a cat screamed, then went silent mid-cry. Ira realized that every place she had visited in the last few weeks—Lalbazar, the Alipore Press, the Baruipur temple—had been linked not just to Aghor Sen but to her grandfather, Anandamoy Basu. His case files from the 70s, long discarded, now whispered new truths when she rubbed lemon juice on the back pages—old-school invisible ink. In one such file, dated 1973, she found a scribbled note: “Meera is not missing. She is bound to the Reader’s Curse. Do not read her final verse aloud.” Below that, in a trembling scrawl that didn’t match his usual penmanship: “And if Ira ever finds this—tell her not to write.” It was too late. She had written. Many times. Across surfaces and mirrors and dying pages. She had entered the poem. No. Worse—she had become its continuity. The next day, an anonymous parcel arrived, no return address. Inside: an old microphone from the All India Radio Kolkata studio, wrapped in red velvet. A note tucked beneath it: “You’ve written enough. Now you must recite.” That evening, Ira visited the abandoned AIR studio near Esplanade, where her grandfather once read news bulletins during the Emergency. The building was sealed, but she knew the side entrance, rusted shut but always one push away from memory. Inside, the main studio still stood: soundproofed, decayed, but intact. The control panel blinked once as she entered, as if waking from an electric coma. She plugged the microphone into the old socket. It fit perfectly. She sat before it. Waited. Then the pages of the bloodbook turned on their own, landing on a chapter titled: “Recitation Rituals: To Reverse the Reader’s Curse.” The instructions were absurd. She had to read the poem backwards, from last stanza to first, at exactly 1:13 AM, while her blood touched the base of the microphone. She pricked her finger. The dot of blood pooled and touched brass. The mic glowed. She began to read. Her voice cracked, but she continued—each backward line unraveling not sense, but presence. Her apartment around her began to change. The walls blurred into trees. The ceiling became an ink-stained sky. She was no longer in Kolkata, but in the poem itself—a landscape of unfinished metaphors, fragmented architecture, and voices in hundreds of languages all repeating one name: Meera. And then, at the climax of her backward reading, a doorway appeared in the middle of nothing. She stepped through. Found herself in a room of mirrors. In each, a version of her wrote furiously. One of them was bleeding. Another laughed. One wept. Only one sat still. That one looked up. Spoke: “You are not the reader anymore. You are the ink.” Ira fell to her knees. The book reappeared in her lap. The final line glowed: “Blood remembers. But ink never forgets.” When she awoke, she was back at her apartment. The microphone gone. The pages blank again. But her hand—her writing hand—had changed. The veins now ran black. As if her blood had become ink. She stared at it for an hour. Then picked up her pen. And began to write a new poem. Her own. For the first time. Not Aghor’s. Not Meera’s. Not Anandamoy’s. Just hers. And the page listened.
8
The city had gone quieter, not in the way that invites sleep, but in the way one quiets down before a scream—tense, anticipatory, as if all of Kolkata had turned into an auditorium waiting for the final act to begin. Ira Basu, now uncertain of where her own body ended and where the ink began, walked the streets feeling as though every puddle reflected not her face, but echoes of someone else’s memory—versions of herself that had lived and died in sentences she had never written. Since the Recitation Ritual in the defunct AIR studio, time had begun to warp around her: minutes stuttered, conversations looped, and shadows moved seconds before the objects that cast them. Her left hand now tingled when near paper. Her right hand, the writer’s hand, would sometimes twitch with muscle memory as if trying to compose lines that didn’t belong to her thoughts. The book no longer bled, but it wept—ink tears that dripped only when she closed her eyes. The final stanza had vanished, replaced by a blank space that pulsed faintly like a heartbeat. It was then that the voices began. Not outside, not in dreams, but from within her skull—a whisper that emerged every time she was silent, every time she tried to think her own thoughts. It had no gender, no accent, no warmth. It was just… there. At first it repeated old verses from Aghor’s collections. Then it moved on to newer things. Words Ira had never heard but somehow already knew. Verses like, “You cannot unknow the name once it’s tasted your breath. And breath once shared becomes voice.” She began researching vocal possession cases in literature, folklore, and police archives—everything from tantric chants that split a man’s voicebox in Kalighat to séance notes recorded on wax cylinders by occultists during the 1930s. One entry, a dusty typescript in the Asiatic Society’s forbidden stack, described a ritual known as “Nāma-līna”—The Binding of the Name—where the voice of a murdered poet could embed itself within the reader who first understood the entirety of their work. The entry ended with a line scratched violently into the paper: “If the reader does not write their own name before the voice finds one, they are overwritten.” Ira had never feared being haunted. But now she feared becoming someone else, line by line. Her next step came unexpectedly, in the form of an old cassette tape left outside her apartment door, wrapped in a torn page of a 1974 Desh magazine. The tape had no label, only a sticker with a handwritten date: “18th November, 1971″—exactly one week after the last public reading by Aghor Sen. She borrowed a friend’s tape recorder from her college days, clicked it on, and sat alone in darkness as the hiss filled the room. Then came the voice. Not Aghor’s. Not Meera’s. Not Anandamoy’s. Her own. But younger. Like a teenage version of her reading a diary aloud. “This is the story of a girl who dreamt in ink, and the ink wrote her back.” She dropped the recorder. It kept playing. “She was born with a name, but the poem never asked. So she gave it none. And so it gave her its own.” Ira froze. This wasn’t a memory. This was a prediction. A voice had been speaking her life before she lived it. She found the original issue of Desh from which the wrapping page had been torn. It featured an article about the Alipore Poets’ Circle, and in the corner of the group photograph—next to Meera, next to Aghor—was a child. No name in the caption. But unmistakably: Ira. At five years old. The caption simply said: “Anandamoy’s niece.” Her breath caught. Her grandfather never had a sibling. The bloodline didn’t match. But the child did. Which meant the voice she heard now was not Meera. Not Aghor. Not even hers. It was a looped recording of a soul, passed down through ink, blood, and breath. It was the nameless voice—one that used faces and names to write itself into the world. And now, it had her. She knew what had to be done. She took the ledger. She dipped her pen. She walked to Prinsep Ghat, the place where Aghor’s ashes had been scattered anonymously. She knelt before the river, opened the final page, and wrote in her own blood: “Ira Basu—witness, reader, not poet. I return the voice.” The page burned. But her body didn’t. Instead, the voice laughed—not loud, not cruel, just amused. It spoke inside her: “You can return a poem, Ira. But not a name. And I have yours now.” The wind blew open the ledger to its first page. A new poem had appeared. Titled: “The Girl Who Tried to Leave.” Authored by: Ira Basu. Only she hadn’t written it. Not consciously. Not willingly. But it bore her rhythm. Her syntax. Her fears. Her truth. She was no longer just reading a killer’s verses. She had become part of the poem that never ends, the ink that survives the author, the voice without a name that finds new names to borrow. As the river lapped gently at the banks, she whispered to no one: “I didn’t solve the case. I became its punctuation.”
9
It was raining over Kolkata—not the monsoon downpour that cleanses, nor the drizzle that comforts, but a strange, whispering rain that seemed to fall sideways, as if trying to evade time, soaking walls but never the street, falling on windows but not rooftops, as though the city itself was being rewritten, its margins redrawn. Ira Basu sat on the rusted balcony of her grandfather’s deserted flat in Alipore, where everything began—or perhaps where everything was always meant to return. She hadn’t slept in days. Not truly. In her dreams, she heard footsteps behind punctuation marks, and in every comma, a breath not hers. The voice had grown quieter but heavier, like a stone placed gently on her chest. It didn’t speak in full sentences anymore; it only echoed fragments: “Not a reader now… inked… retold… again.” And still, the ledger refused to close. Every time she tried, it flipped itself open to a blank page that bled faint static through her fingertips. It wanted her to write something final. Something irreversible. But Ira, who had once believed in stories as escape, now knew the brutal truth: the most dangerous stories were the ones you couldn’t end. The serial murders across the city had stopped, yes—there were no new victims, no poems nailed to alley walls, no blooded stanzas left behind in schoolyards or metro tunnels—but that brought no peace, only a foreboding calm. The deaths had never been random. They had been verses in a larger poem, and the last verse was unfinished. It waited, patient and silent. Until Ira gave it voice. She traced the pattern again: the victims were all readers, yes, but more importantly—they were all listeners, people who had once sat in rooms where Aghor Sen had spoken, where Meera had performed, where Anandamoy had read aloud during those doomed poetry salons of the 70s. The final victim hadn’t yet died, because the poem hadn’t been performed—not aloud. And Ira… Ira was the only one left who had both voice and ink. It was her, or the poem would find another city. Another ledger. Another mouth. That night, under the electric silence of the Howrah Bridge lights, Ira walked to the abandoned auditorium in New Alipore, the one that had once hosted “The Final Verses” poetry conclave before a fire had sealed it in 1980. But the building had never truly burned. That was the story. The truth was different. It had folded into itself—walls still intact, roof collapsed, but acoustics preserved. Inside, it smelled of burnt paper and jasmine. Someone—or something—had cleaned the stage. A microphone stood, its cord embedded in the cracked marble like a root. And in the front row, on a velvet-draped seat, lay the ledger. Open. Waiting. No audience. No claps. Only echoes. She stepped onto the stage. No spotlight needed. The voice inside her hummed. Not sinister. Not warm. Simply ready. And then Ira spoke—not from memory, but from within. She recited every poem that had haunted the killings, backwards and forwards, binding each line to the last, until the air itself vibrated with syllables that had once belonged to others. Blood seeped from her nose. Her eyes burned with ink. Her voice cracked, reformed, deepened. The auditorium pulsed with a strange applause—none human, none heard, but undeniably felt. Then came the final line. The line that had never been written. The voice asked: “Shall I write it, Ira?” She hesitated. And whispered, “No. I will.” With her last ounce of will, she wrote not on the page—but into the air itself, carving it through sound: “I end this with my name. I reclaim my verse.” And with that, the ledger burst into flame—not fire, but light. Pages didn’t burn. They disintegrated into silence. The voice screamed—not in rage, but in disappointment. Not loud. But heartbreakingly soft, like a child told there would be no story tonight. And then—it was gone. Ira collapsed. When she awoke, it was morning. Real, golden, humid Kolkata morning. The auditorium had crumbled around her. There was no microphone. No blood. No echo. Only a single line scrawled on the concrete where she had stood: “The final poem is the silence that remains.” She left Alipore that day. No farewells. No notes. The murders were quietly forgotten by a city skilled in forgetting. The police filed it as solved. An unnamed suspect. Case closed. Some called it urban legend. Others whispered of a cursed poet who’d been silenced. But those who truly knew—those who had once read verse with trembling lips—they never spoke of Ira Basu again. They only referred to her by another name. The Listener Who Refused the Ending. And somewhere, in some corner bookstore of the city, if you are silent long enough near a blank journal, you might hear a breath. Not yours. Waiting.
THE END
