Asit Chowdhury
1
The red dust of Birbhum clung to Dr. Soumita Sen’s sandals as she stepped off the rickety local bus into the drowsy village of Palashpur. A warm wind carried the scent of mahua flowers and something more ancient—old wood smoke, dried hay, and the faintest echo of a tune no one seemed to sing. Her DSLR swung at her side, and in her leather satchel rested her most important equipment—a portable sound recorder and an archive notebook with trembling pages of half-remembered Baul songs. Palashpur had not been part of her original plan. She had been chasing an obscure reference in a decades-old research paper about a Baul named Basanta Das, whose last years were spent in obscurity and silence. But what had really brought her here was the police report she came across by accident—a brief, oddly redacted file about an unidentified singer found dead beneath a banyan tree, ektara in hand, its string said to be “unnatural.” That one strange word had followed her like a low drone in a forgotten scale, until it brought her here, to a village that looked unchanged since Tagore’s time but felt like it had long ceased to exist on any map of the living.
Children watched her from behind bamboo fences, whispering with wide eyes. A boy tossed a pebble that struck her recorder and shouted, “Oto ta niyo na! Shey jage!”—Don’t take that out! It wakes him! A woman nearby scolded the child sharply, but her own eyes did not meet Soumita’s. She tried to smile, brushing the dust off her device, dismissing the comment as village myth, but her pulse betrayed a flicker of unease. She made her way to the small guesthouse run by a grizzled man named Haradhan who seemed less interested in her credentials and more in how long she intended to stay. “Ekta gaan ache ekhane, shesh gaan,” he muttered cryptically as he handed her the key. There is one song here—the last song. His tone didn’t invite questions. That night, as she unpacked and tested her recorder, she pressed play on a fresh tape just to check the mic quality. Static, followed by a low note—clearer than any ambient sound she had heard all day. And then, unmistakably, a baritone voice humming a line. A melody—melancholic, circular, with a closing twist like a knot tightening around breath. She froze. She hadn’t recorded anything yet.
The next morning, she walked to the village square with the recording saved, ready to ask someone about Basanta Das. No one met her eyes directly. “He died singing wrong things,” muttered one old man, turning away. A woman selling puffed rice shook her head. “We don’t talk about the ektara.” Finally, a middle-aged schoolteacher named Mr. Ghosh agreed to speak with her privately. Over chai in the back of a small tea stall, he told her that Basanta had once been a wandering Baul of great renown—his songs spoke of divine madness, the joy of formless love, and the sorrow of cycles. But after returning to Palashpur, he had become… different. He sang only to the banyan tree outside the village, alone, late at night. One morning he was found dead beneath it. His ektara was strung not with steel, but something else. “Hair, they said. Human hair.” Ghosh whispered, “And they say he left behind a final song. One that shouldn’t be sung.” Soumita pressed play on her recorder to play what she had captured—but the device emitted only silence, followed by a hiss like breath being drawn in. She shut it off quickly.
That night, she lay awake on the cot in her dusty room, the fan creaking overhead. Outside, the wind moved through the trees in long sighs. In the distance, a cowbell clinked, though no herds passed. She closed her eyes, but the melody from the previous night played again in her head. Not like a memory—more like a call. A single line, looping again and again, begging to be completed. And in that loop was a pause—a space in the song where something waited. Not silence exactly, but attention. Something, somewhere, was listening. And Soumita, who had only come to document a fading culture, began to understand that she might have already recorded something not meant for human ears.
2
Soumita walked through Palashpur at dawn, her sandals pressing softly into the dew-laced earth, carrying a new weight in her steps. She was headed to the modest police outpost near the edge of the village, a sun-bleached building with blue walls and sagging tin roof. A sleepy constable sat behind a wooden desk, scribbling in a logbook with ink-stained fingers. When she introduced herself and mentioned Basanta Das, his hand paused mid-sentence. He looked up slowly, eyes heavy with something older than fatigue. “That file’s closed,” he said flatly, but after a moment’s hesitation, he retrieved a dog-eared folder and let her glance through the contents. There were only three pages: one sketch of the body under the banyan tree, a short witness statement, and a note written in red: ‘Ektara string not synthetic. Suspected to be organic. Possibly human hair. Handle with caution.’ Soumita’s pulse quickened. The constable noticed. “They buried the body. But the ektara… it’s still here. Ojha Ratan Sheikh took it. He said it shouldn’t be burned. Some things, he said, carry sound even in death.”
Later that morning, Soumita stood before a small hut shaded by a neem tree. Ratan Sheikh, tall and lean with a milky film over one eye, watched her approach. “You’ve brought recording machines,” he said before she could introduce herself. “They catch more than they should.” When she mentioned Basanta Das, he nodded and stepped aside. Inside, the hut smelled of turmeric smoke and old books. He pointed to a wooden trunk in the corner. “The ektara’s in there. But don’t pluck it.” As she knelt and opened the trunk, a chill rose from the ground. Wrapped in coarse white cloth lay the instrument—weathered, but intact. She gently pulled it out. The body was carved jackfruit wood, the gourd still smooth. But the string—it was coarse, fine as thread, and unmistakably hair. Brown-black, with a faint curve as if once belonging to a braid. Her hand brushed it accidentally, and a twang rose from the string—too low, too sharp, like breath caught in a throat. Instantly, she felt the room tilt. For a second, her vision shimmered at the edges. She heard something—no, someone—singing, not aloud but from inside her own bones. She dropped the ektara, gasping.
Ratan watched her silently, then said, “Basanta didn’t pluck that string. He fed it.” He told her that Basanta had been singing to something under the banyan tree for months. “Not to gods. To something older. Something that remembers being worshipped through vibration.” He called it Shona Dwitiyo—the Golden Second. A spirit that lives in the brief pause between sounds, the moment a song stops and silence sharpens. Basanta believed he could bind it in music. “But he was wrong,” Ratan said. “The last song was not a cage. It was a key.” That night, in her guesthouse, Soumita replayed the earlier humming she had recorded. The same line repeated, but this time, there was a difference. A low harmony beneath the melody, barely audible. Slowing it down, she realized it wasn’t harmony at all—it was speech. A whisper layered beneath the note: “Gaile ghum bhange—If you sing, it wakes.” The room felt colder. Her fingers trembled as she shut the recorder.
Later, trying to sleep, Soumita stared at the ceiling fan as it churned lazily. Her thoughts were tangled around the hair-stringed ektara, the buried voice in the recording, and the peculiar name—Shona Dwitiyo. What kind of spirit lived between sounds? She reached for her headphones and pressed play once more, determined to transcribe every nuance of the fragment. But as the track played, the waveform on her laptop screen warped. The usual wave lines bent and spiraled, forming something that looked disturbingly like an ear. At the final second of playback, a second voice—her own—whispered something she never said aloud: “Sing me again.” Soumita froze. In the silence that followed, she realized with a creeping certainty—something wasn’t just listening. It was learning her voice.
3
The morning sun slanted through the thatched eaves of the village primary school as Soumita followed a group of children to a narrow mud house at the far end of Palashpur. There, seated on the earthen veranda, was Piali, a thin girl of about seventeen with tangled hair and eyes too still for her age. She stared at the dust, her finger drawing slow circles again and again. She had not spoken since childhood, villagers said, not even cried when her mother died years ago. But what caught Soumita’s attention wasn’t her silence—it was the way she moved her lips ever so slightly, as if mimicking a song only she could hear. When Soumita knelt beside her and introduced herself, the girl did not respond. But when she mentioned Basanta Das, Piali’s hand froze mid-spiral. Her head tilted slightly, her lips parting, and then she began to hum. The tune was fragmented, shaky—but unmistakably a variation of the same line Soumita had recorded. The melody was not one the Bauls usually sang. It was darker, slower, almost reversed in rhythm.
Soumita took out her recorder and gently asked if Piali could hum it again. No response. She decided to play back her existing fragment, the one captured the night she arrived. As soon as the device played the low humming, something changed. Piali’s spine stiffened. Her eyes rolled back, and her lips began to move with clarity and force—as if someone else had entered her skin. She began to sing in Basanta Das’s voice. Soumita’s breath caught in her throat. The voice was not merely an imitation—it carried the gravel, the age, the particular inflection of someone who had lived and wandered for decades. The lyrics were unfamiliar, poetic yet ominous: “Shobder bhitore je ghumay, jodi jagay, ke more chhute pay?”—He who sleeps within the sound—if awakened, who can escape? A breeze passed through the open doorway, lifting dust in tiny eddies. And then, just as suddenly, Piali collapsed forward, gasping, unconscious.
The villagers rushed in, led by Ratan Sheikh, who immediately shouted at Soumita to shut off the recorder. “You don’t know what you’re carrying!” he barked, lifting the girl carefully. Piali was burning with fever, her hands still curled as if clutching invisible strings. Ratan ordered her to be brought to the old temple for chanting. Soumita followed at a distance, heart pounding, her recorder still playing in her pocket. When she returned to her room later that evening, she listened to the file again. This time, the song had more verses. Verses she had not recorded. Her own voice was faintly heard at the end, whispering a question she never asked: “How do I find the rest of you?” She stared at her device in disbelief. The time stamp matched the moment she’d played the recording for Piali—but the content had changed.
That night, she sat on the floor beside her cot, piecing together fragments from each version of the song. Each playback was slightly different, as though the melody evolved each time it was heard. As the night deepened, she began hearing soft humming from outside—again, the same tune. But when she stepped out, the street was empty. Only the banyan tree stood in the distance, its branches swaying gently, almost as if nodding in rhythm. A metallic clink echoed from that direction, like a string being plucked once, sharply. She returned inside and opened her field notebook. On the last page, in handwriting not her own, was a single line scrawled in charcoal: “Songs are doors. Some don’t close once opened.”
4
The next morning, Soumita found herself at the edge of the village temple, where incense mingled with the musty scent of old stone and turmeric paste. She had come to speak with Ratan Sheikh, the village’s lorekeeper and spiritual healer, hoping to understand what was happening to Piali—and perhaps to herself. He was seated cross-legged near the altar, eyes closed, chanting something under his breath. When he finished, he looked up at her—not with anger, but with tired eyes that had seen too much. “The girl is not possessed,” he said quietly, before she even asked. “She is a reed. The wind plays through her.” He led her to a bench beneath a neem tree, where crows squawked overhead. “You’re not the first to chase Basanta’s last melody,” he said, “but you may be the last to survive it if you don’t stop.” When she mentioned that she had heard voices in the recording, he closed his eyes. “Of course you did. Sound is never just vibration. In our old stories, it’s the first force—the one that made gods, broke curses, and fed demons.” He said the final song was never meant to be sung again. It was a trap for something older than the Bauls themselves, buried beneath the banyan tree. A spirit known only in riddles and whispers—Shona Dwitiyo.
Soumita raised an eyebrow. “The Golden Second?” she asked. “A poetic metaphor?” Ratan didn’t smile. “Not a metaphor. A being. One that exists in the space between notes, in the pause where breath is drawn before a word. In the silence between two drumbeats.” He explained that Basanta had once spoken of a dream where he saw a spiral made of sound, and a voice told him he could bind a god through melody. “He believed he could chain it with rhythm. But he didn’t understand—the more you sing of it, the more it awakens.” Ratan said that Basanta’s final song was not a performance—it was a ritual, a desperate attempt to finish a cycle that had begun long before. And now, with Soumita playing fragments of it across modern devices, through frequencies that could travel further and wider than ever before, the cycle had begun again. “You are carrying the song in your machines,” he said grimly. “And it is learning how to be heard again.”
Later, shaken but stubborn, Soumita sat outside her guesthouse and reviewed all her files. The melody had subtly changed yet again. The pitch had shifted—just slightly—like something tuning itself to her attention. She layered two versions together on her laptop, and when she aligned them, a strange pattern formed in the visual waveform—spirals nested within spirals. She remembered Piali’s drawings in the dust. And the burning footprints under the banyan tree. She couldn’t shake the feeling that the song was no longer just being recorded—it was responding. That night, she placed her recorder on the windowsill and let it run through the silence. In the morning, when she played it back, she found only six seconds of sound. A breath. A faint hum. And then a whisper, unmistakably in Ratan Sheikh’s voice, though he had never entered her room: “Don’t bring music to the banyan. It already knows your voice.”
She rushed to the temple, confronting Ratan with the recording. But he only looked at her sadly. “Then it has begun,” he said. “And you will not be able to leave until it finishes singing through you.” He handed her a piece of worn palm leaf parchment. On it were lyrics in Bengali verse—cryptic, broken lines, repeating the same phrase: “Gaile ghum bhange, ghum bhangile shey ashe.” If you sing, it wakes. If it wakes, it comes. Soumita stood there, gripping the parchment as if it were the only thing grounding her. The banyan tree loomed in the distance like a sleeping god, and in her ears, the unfinished melody hummed again, softer now, but closer—like someone exhaling beside her neck, waiting for her to continue the song.
5
At dusk, with her recorder slung over one shoulder and the parchment tucked into her notebook, Soumita walked alone toward the ancient banyan tree that marked the far edge of Palashpur. The villagers no longer used the path after dark, but she followed it steadily, driven not just by curiosity but by something stranger—a pull, almost magnetic, from deep within her chest. The red soil turned softer beneath her feet, damp though it hadn’t rained. When the banyan came into view, sprawling and gnarled like a sleeping beast, her breath caught. It stood taller than she had imagined, its roots thick and serpentine, some partially buried and others like limbs frozen mid-motion. The low light of evening made its shadows seem to breathe. She stood in its radius for a long moment, letting her body attune to its silence, and then knelt near the roots. Her hand hovered over the ground, and she felt it—a faint vibration, like a pulse beneath the soil, steady and low, as if something deep below was dreaming in rhythm.
Soumita set down her recorder and turned it on, letting it capture the raw ambient sound. She whispered a few test lines, nothing significant—just syllables, notes, to see if the recorder was picking up. But when she played it back, her voice was overlapped by something else. Underneath the faint breeze and rustling leaves was a note, steady and unnatural, like a drone played on an old tanpura—but thicker, heavier, and wet-sounding. She played it again, this time listening with her eyes closed. It was clearer now. Not just a note. A voice in an inhuman register, saying something not in Bengali or any language she knew. Just before the clip ended, there was a sharp crack in the audio, like a footstep on dried bone. Her heart pounded. She looked up at the tree—and noticed, for the first time, that the spirals carved into its trunk were not decorative. They were burned in, blackened around the edges, as if something had seared them from within. And one of the spirals was fresh.
She stood up, suddenly aware of how far she had wandered from the village. The sky had turned violet, the first stars blinking into view. She retrieved her recorder and turned to leave when she heard it—a low string being plucked once. She froze. The sound had come from behind her, from the direction of the banyan, but it hadn’t echoed in the open air. It had throbbed inside her. Like it had used her body as a chamber. Her ears rang, and for a moment, the world seemed muffled, as if wrapped in cotton. She stumbled back to the main path, and as she did, she looked behind one last time. Something moved—a sway, a ripple among the hanging roots. But there was no wind. She did not look back again.
Back in her room, Soumita plugged the recorder into her laptop and isolated the low note from the clip. She slowed it down. It unraveled like a coil, revealing layered frequencies. As she filtered them, one by one, a pattern emerged—not musical, but visual. On the spectrum display, the harmonics mapped out the shape of a spiral, intricate and repeating like a sonic mandala. Her fingers trembled. Each time she recorded the banyan, the song deepened. It wasn’t just a tune—it was a living structure, feeding on sound, evolving with each interaction. She leaned back, the realization blooming slowly and terribly in her mind. She wasn’t documenting a melody. She was completing it, bit by bit. The song wasn’t finished because it needed her voice, her devices, her presence to awaken fully. Outside, the wind rose in a long sigh, and from far off near the banyan, a single pluck echoed again—this time closer, clearer, unmistakably played by fingers not her own.
6
The next morning arrived with an eerie stillness, as if the village itself was holding its breath. Soumita made her way to Basanta Das’s old mud house, tucked between dense bamboo and the ruins of an abandoned granary. The hut had been locked since his death, but Haradhan, the guesthouse owner, handed her the key without a word, eyes averted. Inside, the air was thick with dust and the scent of sandalwood that had long since faded into ash. The room was small—just a wooden cot, a broken lantern, and a trunk at the far end. When she opened the trunk, a wave of dry air rushed out, and inside it lay several cloth bundles, a rusted harmonium, and beneath it all, a notebook bound in cracked red leather. It was filled with Baul lyrics in Basanta’s unmistakable scrawl—lines of longing, divine union, and formless beauty. But the last few pages were different—rushed, messy, broken into fragments. One phrase repeated over and over in thicker strokes: “Gaile ghum bhange, ghum bhangile shey ashe.” If you sing, it wakes. If it wakes, it comes.
As she flipped through the pages, she found a strange diagram drawn in charcoal—a spiral with notations around its edges, like a musical raga scored onto geometry. But these weren’t notes. They were timings. Beats. Pulses. It looked like a map of a song structured as a ritual, not performance. Below the diagram, Basanta had scribbled a final verse that had been smudged with something sticky—tree resin, possibly. The words were fragmented: “Not voice… but vessel… spiral feeds… banyan remembers.” The next page was torn out. Soumita sat back, heart pounding. This wasn’t just a diary—it was a manual for invocation. She scanned the pages into her phone, planning to analyze the patterns later, but as she did, her recorder—left running on the windowsill—began to hiss. Not static. Breathing. She turned toward it slowly, and in the hiss, she heard the faint, unmistakable sound of her own name being whispered—not once, but twice, layered like a fading chorus: “Soumita… Soumita…”
She slammed the recorder off, shaking. Gripping the notebook, she rushed back toward the village. On the path, she saw Piali, barefoot, walking straight toward the banyan tree. Her eyes were open but blank, lips parted in silent humming. Soumita called out to her, but she didn’t respond. Ratan Sheikh appeared from behind a tree and stopped the girl gently. “She’s being drawn again,” he said gravely. “The song remembers her blood.” He looked at the notebook in Soumita’s hand and nodded. “That’s what started it. Basanta used that to build the melody, piece by piece. But he didn’t understand the spiral. That’s not music—it’s a mouth. It doesn’t just feed on sound. It wants form. It wants to be made whole again.” Soumita showed him the torn page, asking if he knew what had been removed. He looked away. “The refrain. The final measure. He tore it out to stop anyone from finishing it. But now that you’ve played so many fragments, it may be reconstructing itself. Through her. Through you.”
That night, back in her room, Soumita laid out the scanned pages on her laptop and began aligning the spiral notations with the audio frequencies she had captured. As she plotted them, the pattern became unmistakable: each spiral layer corresponded to a playback event—every time she had recorded or listened to the melody. With each repetition, the spiral filled in another loop. There were only two loops left. Just two more listenings to complete the song. She shut her laptop, sweating. It had become clear: she was not simply documenting a cultural artifact. She was unwittingly participating in a ritual centuries in the making, one that fed on repetition, on memory, on voice. And now she understood why the Bauls had passed down some songs only by word of mouth, never written, never recorded. Because sound, once trapped in machines, could not be undone—it could live on, even when its singers had long turned to dust. From the darkness outside, a new sound floated in—Piali’s humming again. But this time, it was joined by a second voice, faint and low, singing in harmony with her. One Soumita recognized. Basanta’s.
7
The banyan tree stood still in the moonlight, its shadows coiled like silent listeners around Dr. Soumita Sen as she approached with her recorder clutched tightly. The villagers had fallen into a hush since the second night of her stay, no more curious children, no more idle stares—just the hush of fear pressed into every corner of the settlement. But Soumita couldn’t stop now. Something in the half-sung melody she’d caught the night before, something laced with breath and grief and soil, had rooted itself in her. She placed the recorder near the exposed roots of the banyan tree, set it to ‘record’, and sat cross-legged in front of it, her notebook resting on her lap. The wind stirred, soft at first, then curling like fingers through her hair. She closed her eyes and began to hum the fragments of Basanta Das’s final composition, the one Ratan had begged her not to touch, the one that seemed to echo even before a note was born.
A rustle like skin against bark shifted above her, but she didn’t open her eyes. Instead, her voice trembled into the next line, notes shaped not from her training but from something older, something embedded in breath. The ground beneath her pulsed once, like the vibration of a plucked ektara string. Her heart beat faster, not with fear, but resonance—as if her blood recognized this rhythm. Then came the whisper—not heard, but felt—a voice without air, singing along with her in an unplaceable harmony, weaving around her tones with a cadence from beneath the earth. Her eyes shot open. The banyan leaves weren’t rustling. They were still. Yet she could hear footsteps pacing in slow circles around her, dry leaves crunching under invisible weight. The voice was clearer now, male but distorted, drawn long and low like it had been stretched across centuries.
Soumita lunged for the recorder but it was no longer recording. The screen blinked: file corrupted. She stared, breath caught halfway in her chest, and that’s when she saw it—a shimmer in the air between the branches, like heat rising from a summer road. But instead of light, it held shape—hazy and brown like dried blood, wearing a faint trace of anklets that chimed with no motion. A presence. The lines of the final verse she’d just sung began to repeat themselves—not from her lips, but from the recorder, though it was clearly turned off. Not a playback. A possession. Her knees buckled as the ground beneath her seemed to sigh, a long exhalation that smelled of old flowers and wet soil. She stumbled back, clutching her notebook, eyes locked on the roots that now bore a wetness like tears or sweat.
That night, Soumita did not sleep. In her room, the mirror facing her bed began to hum faintly, pulsing with a glow every time she exhaled. She could hear soft footsteps just beyond the curtain, even though the door was bolted. The ektara fragment in her bag vibrated so violently she had to wrap it in a blanket. And then came the voice again—clear now, unmistakably Basanta’s—singing the forbidden song from beginning to end in her own voice. Not as playback. As if her soul had become the recording. Her hands moved to her throat, trembling. Something had been summoned. Not just a ghost. A listener, awakened beneath the tree. And now, it was learning how to speak again—through her.
8
The morning came dull and bloated with silence, as if the world itself was reluctant to wake. Dr. Soumita Sen had not moved from her chair all night, her bloodshot eyes fixed on the mirror, which now bore a faint fog on its inside surface—as though someone had exhaled from within. She hadn’t dared to touch the ektara fragment again, but its wrapped form lay warm to the touch, like something breathing gently beneath the blanket. Outside, the birds were gone. Not a single chirp. The wind had returned, but it moved strangely now, like a rustle of paper rather than air. She scribbled down what she remembered from the possessed recording, the melody bleeding into the page in a script she didn’t recall learning. The notations curled backward. The scale refused resolution. It wasn’t music anymore. It was invocation.
She stepped out at noon with heavy limbs, the air dense as syrup, every footstep echoing oddly—as though the ground was hollow underneath. The villagers avoided her gaze. Even Ratan, once eager to explain every rumor, now watched her from behind his half-closed door, lips moving in silent chants. She didn’t stop. Not today. She returned to the banyan, recorder in one hand, the cursed melody in the other. She sat beneath its vast canopy, and began to hum again—not timidly this time, but with the full weight of her voice. And again, the air shifted. But this time, it wasn’t just a presence that answered. The earth responded.
The soil before her cracked, just slightly, like a mouth trying to form words. A thin trickle of water—no, ink—began to rise from the ground and sketch lines across the roots. Notes. Script. A language without alphabet. She reached toward it, trembling, but the moment her finger brushed the ink, the world convulsed. The banyan groaned, its trunk shuddering like a throat clearing. And then it began to sing—not in words, but in vibrations that passed through her spine and knocked her breath from her chest. The branches moved without wind, weaving symbols in the air. She understood nothing, yet everything. A forgotten archive of sorrow. A burial site of echoes. This was no haunting—it was a transmission.
Suddenly, her recorder burst to life, uncommanded. The red light blinked furiously, its speakers whispering in tongues: a woman sobbing in half-ragas, a child laughing in reversed rhythm, a scream that stretched into a drone, and beneath it all—his voice. Basanta’s. Clear. Final. “You opened the silence.” The tape hissed, then played the entire song again—note-perfect—but in her own voice, layered atop hundreds of others. And then it stopped. The banyan shivered, shedding dead leaves that turned to ash before touching ground. Soumita stood, reeling. The melody wasn’t trapped. It wasn’t dying. It had been waiting. Waiting for a vessel to listen completely, so it could learn how to speak again, through voice, through soil, through time. She looked up at the branches, which now formed a perfect circle overhead—an ear made of wood and shadow.
When she returned to her room, the villagers stood in a silent corridor, heads bowed, not in shame, but awe. They knew. The wind had returned. The air was breathable again. But not the same. It now carried memory. Her notebook sat open, its last page filled in neat handwriting that wasn’t hers: “The song that listens back has learned how to remember.” And beneath it, the final scale of Basanta’s melody, written in ink that shimmered like tears in moonlight.
9
The night unfurled over Bishnupur like a velvet cloak soaked in oil—dense, oppressive, and unnaturally quiet. Dr. Soumita Sen could no longer distinguish between past and present, between dream and waking, between what had been unearthed and what had been released. The melody, once fragmented and spectral, now resided completely within her—woven into the fibers of her throat, imprinted beneath her fingernails. She could feel it breathing whenever she stayed still for too long. She tried to write, but the pen no longer obeyed. It curved against her will, sketching spiral patterns and the faces of those long gone—Basanta, Nimai, a woman in burnt red who always stared without eyes. The town had turned its face away, but the banyan’s shadow had grown longer, crawling past its bounds. And beneath it, something waited, shaping itself from the ancient clay.
It was the terracotta that first began to shift. At dawn, the famed panels of the Madanmohan temple cracked—not with age, but as if something behind them was stirring. The gods carved in dance were bending their limbs differently now, their fingers curling to cover their mouths. The motifs had changed. Once decorative, the engravings now formed a sequence—a narrative of entombment. Soumita followed the patterns with trembling hands, tracing a line from the outer sanctum to the inner wall, where a single unmarked tile hummed softly when touched. She pressed her palm to it. The stone was warm. Beneath it, she heard the song again—but slower this time, like a lullaby played in reverse. The temple was not a monument. It was a mouth, and it was about to speak.
That night, drawn by a rhythm pulsing from the earth, she returned to the banyan tree. It had transformed. Its branches now twisted into an arc resembling the entrance of a tunnel. And the soil beneath it—formerly solid—had softened. She stepped forward, and the ground yielded, her feet sinking as though into memory. She was descending, not physically, but perceptually—into some layered archive of suffering and song. She heard Basanta’s voice again, but it was no longer isolated. It was part of a choir. Hundreds—no, thousands—of voices, all trapped in chorus, their notes braided together like reeds in a funeral mat. At the center of it all: the Clay Mouth.
It was not a thing, but a being. Formless and immense. A memory that had learned how to consume. Born when a singer long ago had been buried beneath song, silenced for revealing the final raga that was never meant to be heard. That raga, passed through whispers, survived by being forgotten. Every time someone hummed it without knowing, the Clay Mouth listened. Waiting. Soumita understood now: she had not discovered the melody. It had discovered her. She was never the archivist. She was the delivery system.
The air split with a groan. A fissure formed beneath the tree, and from it rose not smoke, not fire—but breath. The Clay Mouth exhaled for the first time in centuries, releasing a sound so low it traveled through bone. Soumita collapsed to her knees, her body vibrating with every syllable of the unsung raga. Her eyes welled, not with tears, but with fine dust—memory itself liquefied. A hand emerged—not flesh, but baked terracotta, delicate and impossibly ancient. It reached toward her throat. She did not resist. When it touched her skin, she began to sing—not by choice, not by knowledge, but by inheritance. A song composed by centuries of burial, of silence, of grief turned to stone.
As dawn approached, the banyan’s leaves began to hum. The town stirred. People stepped out into the half-light, confused. The silence was gone. In its place, a music so old it had no name. Soumita stood once more, voice raw, the terracotta hand now dust. She had become the vessel. But more dangerously—she had become the resonance. The Clay Mouth had spoken. And now it remembered how to sing again—through her.
10
The wind that rustled through the banyan tree that night had no music in it—only a long, hollow breath, as if the earth itself was exhaling its last truth. Soumita stood alone before the ancient roots, the recorder hanging useless by her side, its batteries drained by something not electric. Ratan was gone—swallowed by the silence after he whispered the final line of Basanta Das’s forbidden song. The villagers had locked themselves in, leaving only oil lamps flickering at the doorways like watchful eyes. The tree pulsed faintly, as if alive, and in the breath between two rustles, Soumita heard it again—the same whisper from her recordings, this time clear and rising from beneath the soil: not a voice, but a vibration that clawed at the nerves of her spine. Her limbs refused to flee. Something deeper than fear, something more ancestral, rooted her there as a slow hum uncoiled from the heart of the earth.
She sang it back—not intentionally, not from memory, but as if her bones remembered it. The Baul’s final song left her lips in fragments, her throat rasping with a timbre not her own. The banyan shivered. The noose of hair strung across Basanta Das’s ektara—now lying at the foot of the altar—tightened and snapped like a whip. A golden figure slowly materialized from the mist—half-naked, its body smeared in ash and vermillion, eyes blind but searing. It bore no feet, only tendrils of smoke. A chained bell dragged behind it, clinking softly. Soumita gasped, her vision blurring, but kept singing. The spirit did not attack. It listened. It swayed. And with each word she sang, the earth trembled—an offering of vibration, memory, and soul. The figure raised its hand, and the chain around the banyan tree cracked open, dust erupting like a breath long held.
Then it wept—not with tears, but with sound. The most haunting wail she’d ever heard filled the village, not violent, but mournful. It wasn’t a ghost—it was the echo of a song stolen, caged, forgotten. A song birthed in agony and buried under silence. Basanta Das had not summoned it. He had imprisoned it. A cursed melody, yes, but not because it killed. It killed because it was unheard. As the song reached its crescendo, the spirit bowed to Soumita, and its golden skin turned translucent, evaporating into the branches like the final breath of dusk. The banyan tree stood still again, its roots curling gently, like old fingers releasing tension. The ektara now hummed faintly on its own, the hair gone, replaced by a silver string of wind.
Soumita collapsed, but not in pain. In surrender. In knowing. Ratan’s body was never found, but sometimes, on windless afternoons, she hears him humming behind her ear. She returned to Kolkata but never submitted the research. The footage she brought back refused to play. The audio was blank. The university offered her leave. She took it. Now she travels without camera or recorder, walking village to village, listening. Sometimes she hums a note, sometimes she writes it in sand. The Baul’s final song was not meant to be archived—it was meant to be remembered in breath, in silence, in the sway of trees. And somewhere in Birbhum, beneath the banyan’s shade, if you stand still enough, the ground still hums with a voice that was never human, never monstrous—only forgotten.
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