Aritra Mukherjee
Chapter 1:
It was a sultry April morning in Kolkata, the kind where the air feels heavy enough to drown in, thick with humidity, sweat, and the dull weight of unspoken things. The city, always loud and unapologetically alive, had barely opened its sleepy eyes when the scream echoed along the concrete ribs of Howrah Bridge, bouncing off the iron like a banshee’s call, scattering a flock of pigeons into the early light. The chaiwalas had just begun their first boil, the fishermen were dragging their nets near the Hooghly’s edge, and fruit vendors were still unpacking their bananas and papayas when the cry of horror came from a college student jogging along the riverbank. By the time the police arrived, led by Inspector Abhishek Roy of the Kolkata Police Crime Branch, the body was already drawing a crowd of curious onlookers who craned their necks over one another as if trying to peek into a scandal that had slipped through the city’s ornate cracks. Abhishek had been halfway through his first sip of tea in a broken terracotta kulhar when his mobile buzzed, a curt tone that always meant urgency, always meant death. “Dead body found. Hooghly riverbank. Under the bridge. Could be a murder,” the voice said, and then silence. Ten minutes later, his boots crunched on wet gravel as he stepped onto the embankment under the towering presence of Howrah Bridge, that steel skeleton that bore the weight of over a million footsteps daily and now bore witness to something darker. The corpse lay on its side, awkwardly twisted, the left arm stretched unnaturally as though it had been reaching for help—or clawing toward the light. The eyes, wide open, stared at nothing. His shirt was soaked with Hooghly sludge, but a faded maroon ink had spread across the cloth near the heart, unmistakable in color, impossible to mistake: blood. A rookie constable hovered nearby, unsure whether to gag or salute. Abhishek motioned to him. “Don’t touch anything. Where’s the forensic team?” “En route, Sir.” Abhishek knelt down, letting his eyes move over the scene the way a reader studies a crime novel’s first page—quiet, curious, methodical. Mud near the feet, no signs of dragged marks. Scratches on the neck. Bruised knuckles. And then something that didn’t belong: a card half-buried under a mossy stone, barely visible, the corner fluttering like a guilty whisper. He flicked it free with the end of a pen, holding it up to the dawn light. The print, though damp, was still readable: “Aniket Sen — Investigative Journalist. The Telegraph.” Abhishek frowned. Journalists didn’t just fall into rivers and wash up dead under bridges. Especially not ones with reputations like Aniket Sen—known in the newsroom circles as “the last honest bloodhound.” Aniket had teeth, and he bit hard. He’d cracked open rackets in the slums of Tollygunge, exposed bribery in medical colleges, even dug too close to a scandal involving an MP’s shady construction firm and a mysterious fire in Lake Town. But lately, he’d gone quiet—no full reports, just a couple of vague blog entries, titles that read more like riddles than journalism: “The Three-Faced Man of Bowbazar,” “Echoes from the Water,” and “Last Meeting with a Dead Woman.” Abhishek stood up slowly, his expression unreadable. He turned to the constable. “Secure the perimeter. No media, no pictures. And someone get me everything The Telegraph has published in the last six months under this man’s byline.” “Sir, the press is already here—ABP, Times Now, even Republic.” “Let them wait. The dead don’t answer cameras.” But Kolkata thrived on drama, and within thirty minutes, every television channel had a blurry image of the corpse, the location geo-tagged, the headline screaming across Bengali and English screens alike: “Journalist Found Dead Under Howrah Bridge: Foul Play Suspected.” The city, still nursing its morning tea, collectively raised an eyebrow and leaned forward. That evening, Abhishek sat in his small, dimly lit office at Lalbazar headquarters, the overhead fan making a tired circle, tired enough to match the man below it. Before him lay a manila folder labeled “Aniket Sen — Confidential,” though there was nothing confidential about the fact that the dead journalist had annoyed half of Kolkata’s elite. The file contained notes, clippings, a record of recent calls, and a few printouts from his blog. The last entry, posted three nights ago at 2:47 a.m., simply read: “If you follow the wrong truth long enough, you might find the right death. Bowbazar. 3 a.m. The statue watches.” There was no context. No comments. No likes. Just silence. Abhishek rubbed his temples. What had Sen been chasing? Who was he warning? And more importantly, who had caught him before he could shout loud enough? He needed more. He needed someone who had known Aniket personally, not professionally. A name had popped up twice in the file: Riju Banerjee, listed as “emergency contact” on Sen’s old press card and on his landlord’s rental agreement. A quick call led him to a cramped apartment near Rabindra Sarani, above a mithai shop, the kind of place where every wall echoed with sugar syrup and stale oil. Riju opened the door hesitantly, a bespectacled man with hunched shoulders and guilt in his eyes. “I—I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know…” “I’m not here to accuse you,” Abhishek said, stepping inside. “I need to know what he was working on.” Riju sat on the edge of a cane chair that creaked under his nervousness. “Aniket was… intense. Lately, more than usual. He said he was close to something huge. He wouldn’t tell me exactly what, said I should stay out of it. Said it wasn’t just one person—said it was a system, a chain of masks. Last week he left at midnight and told me, ‘If I disappear, check under the shadow of the bridge, not in the light.’ I—I thought he was being poetic.” “Did he say any names?” “Only one. He mentioned ‘B. Bose’ in passing. Said he was like a ghost in a khaki uniform.” Abhishek’s pulse quickened. The name sounded familiar. He returned to the file. There, among some handwritten notes scribbled in blue ink and underlined thrice: “B. Bose. Ex-CP. Buried secrets in plain sight.” Ex-Commissioner of Police Bireswar Bose, retired six years ago. An enigmatic figure, known for his zero-tolerance attitude and his love for vintage books and silence. Rumors had long whispered that some of the cases under his reign had been quietly closed, especially during the early 2000s—cases involving missing persons, especially women. Abhishek made a mental note. He would visit Bose, but not yet. First, he needed to see the river again, needed to stand where Aniket had died. That night, the city was a blur of headlights and honking, the smell of jhal muri mixing with the oily perfume of diesel and incense. Howrah Bridge loomed like a ribcage of some great iron beast, and under it, the river moved as if carrying whispers, unsaid confessions, blood diluted in water. He stood there, silent, long after the city had gone to bed. He looked at the ripples, imagined the last moments of a man who had perhaps realized too late that truth doesn’t save you—it marks you. And somewhere in that shadowed space between the bridge and the river, the story had just begun. Something older than murder, deeper than motive, had stirred. A ghost not of a man, but of a city’s conscience. Kolkata was awake again, not just in traffic and sweat, but in its memories—alive and bleeding, under a sky that had seen too much and forgotten too little. And so Abhishek Roy made a quiet vow beneath that bridge: whatever Aniket had died chasing, he would finish. Not for duty. Not even for justice. But because Kolkata’s ghosts deserved someone who still listened.
Chapter 2:
The city breathed in sighs and silence the morning after Aniket Sen’s death, the way Kolkata always did after losing one of its own to something it could not yet name, as if the Howrah Bridge itself had flinched under the weight of another secret dropped at its feet; Inspector Abhishek Roy sat alone in the records room at Lalbazar headquarters, the overhead fan doing little to ease the humidity crawling along the ceiling like an uninvited thought, the windows shuttered against the light as though the building wished to remain blind to the sins it held within—before him, the manila file was thick with the weight of a dead man’s shadow, labeled “Aniket Sen — Confidential,” though there was nothing confidential about death, especially not when it came wrapped in questions and dipped in scandal, and as Abhishek flipped through its pages, a strange sense of intimacy settled over him, as if he were intruding not just into a file but into a mind mid-thought, one filled with marginal scribbles, coffee stains, frayed corners and furious underlines that whispered of obsession and insomnia, of trails followed in the dark when the world slept and only those possessed by purpose dared to move; Aniket’s last few published articles had been unusually short, almost riddled in their composition—uncharacteristic of a man known for his detail and precision—with cryptic titles like “The Three-Faced Man of Bowbazar” and “A Lady in the Shadows,” and Abhishek, a man who prided himself on method, discipline, and the clean logic of investigation, felt an unfamiliar twinge of unease as he turned to Aniket’s private diary, a blue spiral-bound notebook recovered from the locked drawer in his apartment, the key hidden behind a loose tile under the sink—inside, the pages screamed of paranoia laced with pattern: page after page of fragmented thoughts, maps of neighborhoods with places circled in red ink, sketches of faces—some labeled, others crossed out violently—and a list titled “The Vanished,” where names of young women stretched across the paper like memorial stones, each with the year of disappearance, the location, and the last known association, which, disturbingly, in eight out of twelve entries, read: “Ujjiban – NGO”; Abhishek tapped the pen against his knuckle as he read the name over and over: Ujjiban—meaning “rebirth” in Bengali—an NGO that had operated in North Kolkata from 1999 to 2004, until it abruptly shut down after a fire gutted their Shyambazar office, supposedly an accident, though a single scrap of newsprint buried in Aniket’s journal claimed otherwise, quoting a now-defunct tabloid: “Founder of Women’s NGO Missing After Blaze—Police Rule Out Foul Play”; the name jumped out in bold ink: Nandita Ghosh, 38, social worker, activist, believed dead though her body was never recovered, her case labeled “Suicide – Presumed,” and dismissed by the police as the desperate act of a woman overwhelmed by financial and legal troubles—but Aniket, it seemed, had believed otherwise, and he had scribbled in large capital letters under the clipping: “NO SUICIDE. FOLLOW THE FUNERAL WITH NO BODY”; Abhishek leaned back and exhaled slowly, feeling the web begin to stretch, thin but unmistakable, between a two-decade-old cold case, a dead journalist, and names whispered under bridges at 3 a.m., and it was then he noticed something else tucked into the diary—a memory card, taped under the back cover, brittle with time but intact; plugging it into his laptop, he found a folder labeled “For If I Disappear,” and inside were three voice recordings and one video file—the first recording was Aniket’s voice, hoarse and whispering like a man trying not to wake the devils around him, timestamped three nights before his death: “If you’re listening, then I’ve either gone underground or I’m under something heavier—this is about more than girls going missing, it’s about power laundering innocence, about ghosts in uniform and clean-shaven monsters—start with Bose, he was the gatekeeper; but the real puppeteer lives deeper, behind the mask of charity and candlelight vigils; don’t trust anyone who tells you they care for the poor—they’re the ones selling them”; the second recording was of a woman, her voice distant and weary, possibly a phone conversation: “I told you already, I signed those papers because I was threatened—Nandita’s not dead, she fled, I helped her—if they know I’m talking to you, they’ll make me disappear too—don’t contact me again”; the third was corrupted, static swallowing half the audio, but the last thirty seconds were clear: a male voice, unidentifiable, saying, “Sen’s poking into the cemetery angle—deal with it—permanently,” followed by a click, and then silence; Abhishek stared at the screen, pulse accelerating, the air around him suddenly feeling too thin, the room too quiet, like a scene just before the orchestra crashes into chaos—he clicked on the video file, and the frame opened to grainy CCTV footage, timestamped 2:59 a.m., from a static camera outside Shyambazar Cemetery; at first, nothing moved except the wind, and then a silhouette appeared—tall, slow-moving, head bowed under a large hat—he looked around, then crouched near a statue of Kali Ma, and left something small at the base before vanishing again into the shadows; Abhishek paused, zoomed in, enhanced the frame—the object was a folded paper or cloth, possibly an ID, but impossible to confirm—and the time matched what Riju had told him: Aniket’s last known excursion, three nights ago; it was clear now that Aniket had known he was being hunted, that he had traced something no one else had dared pursue, and he had tried to leave a breadcrumb trail not to save himself but to ensure someone else would finish what he started—and Abhishek, unwilling as he might have been at first, was now neck-deep in a citywide mystery that reeked of rot older than his badge; he pulled up the old personnel files, searching for “B. Bose”—Bireswar Bose, ex-Commissioner of Police, served from 1999 to 2005, known for his rigid public discipline, awarded the President’s Medal, retired early due to “personal health reasons,” and now residing in a decaying heritage house near Sovabazar—a known recluse who had refused all interviews and reportedly spent most of his time with his rare book collection and garden orchids; Abhishek knew that to confront Bose directly now would risk spooking him, so he decided instead to examine the trail Aniket had followed—starting with the names listed under “The Vanished,” beginning with the most recent entry from 2004: Payel Dutta, 19, last seen attending a workshop at Ujjiban, case marked “Eloped” with zero follow-up investigation; he cross-checked the names through police archives and found that at least five of them had been linked to missing-persons reports that were dismissed within 72 hours, some even closed the same day citing “lack of evidence,” and a deeper look into the investigating officers revealed a pattern—many had served under Bose’s command at the time, and some were now posted far from the city in obscure posts, possibly rewards or strategic removals; what struck Abhishek most was not just the disappearances, but the eerie uniformity of the files: missing girls aged 17 to 22, all involved in Ujjiban’s “Women’s Reclaiming Identity” program, all gone without witnesses, without CCTV footage, without even a whisper of protest, as though they had dissolved into the air itself; he pulled out an old article Aniket had clipped, titled “The Girls Without Graves,” which quoted a mother from Jorasanko: “They said she ran away with a boy. My daughter didn’t even own a phone. She was scared of the dark. But they told me not to make noise, not to embarrass the family—so I waited. It’s been eighteen years”; Abhishek felt the city’s weight in his chest, the way it settled in like dust inside lungs, how stories like these existed around every corner if only one dared to ask the right question in the wrong place—and Aniket had dared, and now Aniket was gone; the next step was clear: visit the Ujjiban office ruins in Shyambazar, now locked behind rusted gates and rumor, said to be haunted, ignored by even the bravest squatters; that night, under the veil of shadows, Abhishek went alone, armed not with a gun but with the weight of questions and the strength of someone else’s unfinished work, and as he stood before the fire-scorched building, moonlight pooling like liquid memory around the debris, he swore he heard a woman’s voice singing faintly in the dark, a lullaby too ancient to place, and then—silence, again, thick and knowing; he stepped over a fallen beam, into the belly of what once was a place of hope and now smelled of ash and forgotten names; he ran his torch over the burnt wall and paused—there, written in faded chalk, barely visible, was a line in Bengali: “কেউ কেউ আলোয় হারিয়ে যায়, আর কেউ অন্ধকারে বেঁচে থাকে”—some are lost in the light, and some survive in darkness; it was clear now that this was no ordinary crime, not even a string of murders—this was a narrative of systemic silence, an engineered vanishing of voices, and if Bose was the gatekeeper, then someone else had been writing the script; Abhishek walked out of the ruins with the dust of the dead in his lungs and Aniket’s voice in his head, and with it came a single certainty: Kolkata was hiding something bigger than a few bodies—it was hiding an era, a wound stitched over with rituals and respectability, and to reopen it would bleed history itself.
Chapter 3:
The sun rose over Kolkata with a kind of reluctant golden haze, the kind that trickled lazily across the tramlines and rooftops and struggled to make its way through the dense fog of diesel smoke and past sins that wrapped the city like an old, damp shawl, and Inspector Abhishek Roy found himself walking down a cobbled lane in Sovabazar that smelled of jasmine and mildew, his leather shoes clicking softly against stone as he approached the old colonial bungalow of Bireswar Bose, a name that had once commanded the reverence of constables and the silence of criminals, now reduced to a whisper in bureaucratic corners and a ghost among living officers who remembered him only with either fear or forced amnesia; the gates of the house were wrought iron vines covered in real ones, with creepers hanging like the veins of time itself, and a brass plate still bore the initials “B.B.” though the shine had long since been eaten away by rain and rust, and as Abhishek reached out to push the gate open, he noted the peculiar chill in the air, not from the weather but from that quiet energy old places held—where death had brushed against life but hadn’t fully left, only receded into corners; he was let in by an old caretaker named Nimai, whose milky eyes and trembling hands spoke of a man who had once run but now merely existed, and who led him without words through a garden overgrown yet strangely tended, a jungle masquerading as elegance, where orchids bloomed between weeds, and fallen frangipani petals lay scattered like unfinished stories at a writer’s feet—“Saheb is in the green room,” the man croaked, and vanished as swiftly as he had emerged, as if eager to avoid whatever conversation was about to unfold; Bose’s sitting room, more a conservatory, was filled with plants and books and dust motes floating in shafts of light that gave the illusion of peace, but Abhishek’s trained eyes saw more—the subtle security camera in the corner, the discolored rug concealing marks of something once dragged, the faint scent of phenyl clinging to the air like a curtain meant to hide blood—and at the center of it all sat the man himself, Bireswar Bose, now a relic of power dressed in an impeccably white kurta, his silver hair combed back, his eyes as sharp and unreadable as the edge of an old weapon, sipping Darjeeling tea with the grace of someone who had seen too much and regretted too little, and when he looked up, it was not surprise or warmth that greeted Abhishek but an almost amused disdain, like a lion too old to hunt yet too proud to flinch; “Ah, the new generation arrives,” he said, voice smooth but dry, like wind over old bones, “And what has the esteemed Crime Branch sent you for, Inspector Roy? Nostalgia? Tea? Or ghosts?” Abhishek did not sit immediately, instead letting the silence linger like a threat not yet spoken, before finally replying, “Ghosts don’t trouble me, sir. But secrets do. Especially ones that kill journalists and make girls vanish into fire.” Bose chuckled, a low gravelly sound that echoed against the marble, and gestured to the chair opposite him, “You talk like Aniket Sen. Passionate. Reckless. Dead.” The name hung in the air like incense smoke, curling into corners, and Abhishek leaned forward, his eyes locked on the older man’s, “Sen died because he found something you buried—something at Ujjiban, something in those girls’ files you ordered closed in 2003. You covered tracks that were never yours to cover.” Bose didn’t blink, only took another sip of his tea and set the cup down with surgical precision, “Inspector, you mistake closure for conspiracy. Those girls? They were troubled, runaways, victims of their own illusions. Ujjiban was a crumbling house with a leaking roof and louder ideals. I simply kept the city from panicking. From wasting resources. From going blind chasing shadows.” Abhishek stood, walked toward the shelf lined with yellowed files and first-edition Tagores, his fingers trailing the spines, “Is that what you called it—shadows? Payel Dutta. Rina Soren. Nabamita Roy. All gone within five months. No witnesses. No follow-up. Your signature closed those reports.” Bose looked away briefly, and for a flicker of a second, Abhishek thought he saw something human—regret, maybe, or just the exhaustion of remembering—but then it was gone, replaced by the cold smirk of a man who had long since given up on asking permission, “Sometimes to save a city, you must lose a few of its children.” “You didn’t save anyone,” Abhishek said, voice steady but low, “You created a silence so wide it swallowed the truth whole. What was Ujjiban really, sir? What was happening behind that charity?” Bose stood now, slower than before, but with the presence of someone who had once commanded entire battalions with a glance, and walked over to the glass window that looked out onto his garden, “Aniket asked me that once. Right here. Sat where you sit. He thought there was a network—a trafficking ring. Thought I was at its center. But he was wrong.” “Then who was at the center?” Abhishek pressed, stepping closer. Bose turned, his expression unreadable, “Do you know what happens when you chase a shadow, Inspector? You end up facing your own. Sometimes evil wears no face, no uniform. It hides in clean ledgers and tax-free donations. It smiles from podiums at award ceremonies. Ujjiban was started with good intentions. But it was hijacked—subtly, brilliantly—by someone far more powerful than me.” “Who?” Bose looked at him for a long time, then said one word: “Mitra.” Abhishek frowned, “Mitra who?” “Chandan Mitra,” Bose said slowly, “Industrialist. Philanthropist. Runs half the city’s development projects now. Back then, he funded Ujjiban through a dummy trust. I found out too late. Girls began disappearing. But we had no proof, and when I threatened to open an inquiry, the fire happened. And the witnesses vanished. I was told to back off.” “Told by whom?” Bose didn’t answer. Instead, he walked to a locked drawer and pulled out a sealed envelope, yellow with age. He handed it to Abhishek. Inside were photocopies—an old ledger from Ujjiban with coded entries, one check signed by “C. Mitra,” and a typed letter with no official seal, only a line: “Terminate inquiries. Your health is fragile.” Abhishek studied it all, his heartbeat pounding like a drum in a funeral march. “Why didn’t you go public?” “I tried,” Bose said, sitting down again, “But the system eats its own whistleblowers. My pension was threatened. My family followed. My son was in St. Xavier’s. I chose silence.” “And now?” Bose looked older suddenly, his shoulders sagging under invisible weights, “Now I garden. And wait for people like you to be braver than I was.” Abhishek stood, holding the envelope, “This isn’t bravery. This is unfinished work. I need to talk to Mitra.” “Be careful,” Bose said, eyes sharp again, “Mitra doesn’t kill. He erases. There’s a difference.” Later that night, Abhishek sat in his car outside Mitra Group’s office near Salt Lake Sector V, a sleek black building that glittered with glass and money, a symbol of new Kolkata built on old shadows, and he watched as Chandan Mitra exited with two bodyguards, climbed into a black BMW, and sped off into the night—Abhishek didn’t follow, not yet, because he knew now he was dealing with a man who had made the city his mask, whose philanthropy dripped with the perfume of rot, and who had built his empire on the backs of the voiceless—and somewhere in that empire, Aniket Sen had stumbled into a corner too dark, and never come back out; the inspector closed his eyes and whispered into the stillness of the car, “Next step: the graveyard. The statue. The offering. What did Aniket leave behind?” and with that, the night swallowed him again, the lights of the city blinking like half-remembered warnings, as a single thought burned bright in his mind: Bose might’ve buried the truth once, but now it was clawing its way back up, and this time, it wouldn’t go down alone.
Chapter 4:
The rains came hard over Kolkata that night, not in the sudden downpour of monsoon fury, but with the slow, relentless intensity of a confession long withheld, and as Inspector Abhishek Roy stood under the broken archway of the cemetery near Shibpur, the same one Aniket Sen had last visited before his death, he felt the water soak through his coat and into his skin, like the city itself was trying to baptize him in grief and mud and forgotten prayers, and in the flickering beam of his flashlight he saw the moss-covered gravestones tilt at odd angles, like tired sentinels too weary to stand straight anymore, their names blurred by time and the indifference of the living; there was something unnatural about the silence here—not peaceful but watchful, like the earth remembered too much, and the air held the weight of unspoken things, and somewhere beyond the fence a stray dog barked once, then fell silent again, swallowed by the same dread that pressed against Abhishek’s chest as he followed the path Aniket had taken before his disappearance, past the row of unnamed graves and the broken angel statue whose stone eyes stared skyward in eternal disbelief, until he reached the corner with the oldest tombs, the ones no one visited anymore, where time had curled like a dead leaf and secrets slept in the soil; he paused before the statue Aniket had mentioned in his final voice note—the weeping woman holding a shattered urn, her face cracked in half but her gesture still intact, arms stretched toward the earth as if surrendering something precious—and Abhishek knelt beside it, brushing away layers of mud and leaves from the pedestal, his fingers trembling not from the cold but from that creeping certainty that what he’d find here would not be just symbolic but damning; beneath the base, hidden within a loose stone, was a rusted tin box no bigger than a diary, and he pulled it free with effort, the stone groaning as if protesting the unearthing, and in the weak light of his torch he opened it to find a collection of items that felt like offerings left by someone who knew he wouldn’t return—a cassette tape, a blood-stained handkerchief with the initials “P.D.” embroidered in fading pink thread, a photocopy of a photograph showing a group of girls in white uniforms standing outside Ujjiban in 2002, with one girl circled in red ink and a note beside it: She knew too much. They made her disappear, and at the bottom, in Aniket’s slanted handwriting, a name he hadn’t seen before—“Mrinalini Lahiri,” followed by an address scratched out so violently the paper had torn through; Abhishek took it all in, the weight of each piece building inside him like a pressure in his ribs, and he whispered to himself, “You knew they’d silence you. This is your last scream,” and without hesitation he pocketed the items, replaced the stone, and stood just as a clap of thunder split the sky in two and the graveyard felt suddenly smaller, tighter, as if the air itself had closed in around him, and the moment he turned to leave, he saw her—or thought he did—a girl in a soaked school uniform, standing among the graves, her hair plastered to her face, eyes wide and filled with a kind of desperate knowing, and before he could say anything, she stepped back into the shadows and was gone, as if the rain had created her and then taken her back, and Abhishek ran after her but found nothing, no footprints in the mud, no sound but his own breathing and the ceaseless hiss of rain on stone, and he stood still for a long moment, catching his breath, wondering if this was madness or a message, and when he finally returned to his car, soaked to the bone, he played the cassette on the old Walkman Bose had lent him from his shelf of retro gear, and the tape crackled into life with Aniket’s voice—unsteady, hoarse, whispering, “If you’re hearing this, I’ve failed. Or I’m dead. But Payel didn’t run away. She was taken. And Mrinalini—she tried to help. She worked at Ujjiban under a false name. She kept records. She told me about the man who came at night. Who picked the girls himself. He called them ‘gifts.’ The girls never came back after his visits. The man… he’s in the photograph. But his name was erased. Check the funders. Check the temple donations. The Goddess knows. She watches everything,” and the tape ended with static that sounded almost like breathing, slow and irregular, as if Aniket had recorded this while being watched, while knowing this would be the last thing he left behind, and as Abhishek rewound the tape in silence, he felt the beginnings of dread in the pit of his stomach—not fear of the killer but fear of what the system had allowed to fester for decades; the next morning he was at the address listed in the archives as the last known location of Mrinalini Lahiri—an old boarding house near Kalighat, now converted into a spice store, and the owner, a woman in her fifties with thick glasses and stained hands, recognized the name with a startled blink, “Lahiri madam? Yes, she lived here long ago. Quiet woman. Read a lot. Left one night and never came back. We assumed she married or moved abroad. That’s what the police said when they came looking after the fire.” “Did she leave anything behind?” Abhishek asked. The woman nodded, disappearing into a back room and returning with a biscuit tin full of papers, letters, and a worn diary with pressed jasmine flowers between the pages, and he sat right there on the floor, flipping through it, his eyes catching phrases like “They come for them at night” and “The one in white—the driver is just a mask. He doesn’t speak. The man in the back gives the orders,” and a final line that froze him in place: He wears a tiger-eye ring and smells of tobacco and sandalwood. His real name isn’t in any file. But he is Chandan Mitra’s younger brother. Abhishek felt the ground shift under him—not just because this was the first direct link to Mitra’s family, but because until now, the younger Mitra had never even appeared in public records; digging deeper, he found an old photograph of the Lahiri family at some public event, and standing near the back was a man in a Nehru jacket with a tiger-eye ring catching the light, partially obscured—but the face matched a figure he’d seen in the photograph Aniket had buried, the one from Ujjiban, the one whose identity had been violently scratched out; the man had been hiding in plain sight, never the face of the Mitra Group, always the one behind the curtains, running operations under false names, laundering intentions through charities and cultural programs, and Abhishek knew then this wasn’t just about trafficking—it was a ritual, a pattern, something older and darker that used the machinery of the modern world to feed its rot; he brought the evidence back to headquarters, but even his closest colleagues began to shift uncomfortably when he mentioned the Mitras—some claimed they had no jurisdiction, others warned him about invisible lines he was about to cross, and one officer even muttered, “People who dig too deep in this city, Roy-da, don’t get buried. They disappear,” but Abhishek didn’t stop, because now it wasn’t just about Payel or Aniket or Mrinalini—it was about the city itself, and how many corners it had let rot in silence, and how many more girls would vanish if no one spoke for them; that night he returned to the cemetery with a camera and a recorder, determined to document every corner, every piece of the puzzle left behind, but the gate was open this time, swinging slowly in the wind, and inside, the statue had been defaced—its arms broken, the urn smashed to pieces, and a single line scrawled in red across the pedestal: Stop remembering them. Or join them, and Abhishek felt the chill of a thousand eyes on his back, but he didn’t run, didn’t turn away, only whispered into the recorder, “They tried to silence the dead. But the dead scream louder,” and in that moment, far away in a luxurious apartment in Alipore, Chandan Mitra sat in silence as his younger brother entered the room, poured himself a drink, and said, “Roy is getting close. We should move the offerings to a new site,” to which Chandan only nodded, watching the rain smear the window like melted faces, and replied, “Then let the city bleed a little more. Sometimes noise is the best way to hide a scream.”
Chapter 5:
The city never truly sleeps, but on certain nights it forgets how to breathe, and as Abhishek Roy found himself walking through the narrow lanes of Kumartuli, where artisans sculpted gods by day and shadows sculpted silence by night, he felt that strange vacuum settle around him, the one that existed between facts and faith, between the ticking of a police clock and the rhythm of an ancient curse buried in the soil of Bengal, and the whispers that had begun to surface about Chandan Mitra’s younger brother had led him here, not to corporate towers or backroom dealings, but to a forgotten red-windowed house along the river, a place that once masqueraded as a cultural retreat but whose real name had been lost in police reports sealed by “orders from above,” and it was here that a retired crime journalist named Kabir Sen had lived in exile, drinking chai and painting portraits of dead women—except the eyes in his paintings always stared a little too long, always carried a fear they hadn’t had in life, as if he’d painted not from memory but from their last, desperate glimpses into something no one else could see; Kabir opened the door slowly when Abhishek knocked, a gaunt figure with nicotine-stained fingers and eyes like dying lanterns, and said only one thing before letting him in: “I knew Aniket would send someone,” and the room smelled of turpentine and regret, canvases leaned against every surface, some torn, others covered with sheets, but one stood bare and unfinished—a woman in a school uniform, looking over her shoulder at something just beyond the frame, her mouth open mid-scream but silent, and Kabir said nothing for a while, just poured them both tea, the sound of the rain outside rising like a tide as they sat under the red window whose colored glass cast blood-colored patterns over everything it touched; “He came here,” Kabir said, breaking the silence, “The younger one. Not Chandan. The one who calls himself Samar now. But back then, he had another name—Arunava. Always in white, always with a smile. He bought this building through a trust, turned it into an art school for underprivileged girls. Said he wanted to ‘inspire the sacred feminine.’ That’s what he called it. Sacred. But the girls who came here… some of them never went home,” and Abhishek’s hands curled slightly around the teacup, his skin crawling with the image that formed—a predator hiding behind words like culture and spirituality, using devotion as camouflage for destruction, and Kabir continued, his voice lower now, “I started noticing patterns. Certain girls were singled out—ones with no parents, no relatives, no one to ask questions. They were taken on ‘special retreats’ to a temple near Barrackpore. After that, they were never seen again. The others were told they’d transferred. I tried to warn people. Wrote anonymous columns. But no one listened. Then, one morning, I found this outside my door,” and he handed Abhishek a photograph—blurry, printed on cheap paper, showing a body hanging from a banyan tree, face disfigured, school uniform soaked in blood, with a note taped across her chest that read: Keep watching, old man. You’ll see your own daughter next, and Abhishek felt a jolt run through him, not just at the horror but at the cruelty, the deliberate art of fear, and he asked quietly, “Did they ever come for her?” and Kabir nodded slowly, “She was gone by winter. Her name was Tushi. I’ve painted her ever since. I think she wants to be remembered,” and he gestured toward the unfinished canvas, where her eyes seemed to glimmer faintly in the red light of the window, and suddenly Abhishek realized the house was a mausoleum, not just of bodies but of memories, and Kabir Sen was its sole priest, tending to the altars of girls the world had forgotten; “Where is this temple?” he asked, and Kabir stood, went to a locked drawer, and handed him a faded, water-damaged map with a red circle drawn near the edge, beyond the city limits, along the Hooghly—“It’s not marked anymore. They renamed it. But the villagers still call it ‘Rokto-Mandir.’ Blood Temple. No puja is held there. Only silence. And sometimes, a car with tinted windows and no license plate,” and with that, Abhishek left, promising Kabir nothing except that he would remember Tushi, and as he drove through the winding roads out of the city, past fields and shrinking ponds and mango orchards where children no longer played, he felt the city’s breath lessen, the buildings thin out, and the sky grow wider and darker, like he was leaving the jurisdiction of law and entering the dominion of something much older, much crueller, something that had seen kings fall and daughters vanish, and when he finally reached the village closest to the red circle on the map, he found it silent, windows shuttered, smoke rising from low chimneys, and when he showed the villagers his badge, they looked away, mumbled excuses, and an old woman finally muttered, “They come for the mute girls. The ones who don’t scream. They call them the ‘quiet brides.’ Don’t go there, babu. Even the wind forgets them,” but Abhishek pressed on, guided only by the faint path through the woods and the growing sound of a drumbeat—not celebratory, not festive, but slow, ritualistic, as if counting down time instead of marking it, and when the temple came into view, half-swallowed by vines and time, its red sandstone walls cracked but unbroken, he felt his pulse quicken—not from fear but from the absolute certainty that this was the place Aniket had tried to reach, the place Bose had been warned never to name, the place where Mrinalini had likely vanished and from which Tushi had never returned; he entered through a side door, flashlight sweeping over stone carvings too worn to decipher, but the imagery was unmistakable—figures kneeling, offering girls to a figure with multiple arms, not divine but monstrous, its eyes carved deep with what looked like real bone fragments embedded in the sockets, and deeper in the inner sanctum, the scent of incense turned sour, mixed with iron and dampness, and he found the underground chamber, sealed behind a wooden door freshly painted with vermillion—he broke it open with one solid kick and descended into a room lit only by candlelight and the blinking red light of a security camera, and what he saw made him stop mid-breath: rows of mannequins dressed in school uniforms, sitting cross-legged on the floor as if in a class, each with a name tag, each with a garland, and in the center, a single chair with fresh blood smeared across the seat, and above it, scrawled in Sanskrit, the words: The Goddess accepts only silence, and Abhishek turned to find a hidden camera blinking, streaming, and he knew then he wasn’t alone, that whoever ran this place still watched it, still conducted rituals not with fire but with files, not with priests but with businessmen in silk and gold, and before he could leave, a voice echoed from a speaker in the wall—calm, male, too familiar: “You’ve come far, Inspector. But you haven’t seen the whole design. Some flowers only bloom in the dark. Step carefully. Or you’ll become one of our exhibits,” and the voice cut off, laughter trailing into static, and Abhishek ran, not from fear but from fury, and when he emerged into the night, he called Bose first, then Kabir, and then a judge he knew in the High Court who still believed in justice over protocol, and by dawn, he had enough to file an official case, but as he stood at Lalbazar that morning, file in hand, he noticed a man leaning against a lamppost across the street—white kurta, cigarette in hand, tiger-eye ring glinting—and their eyes met for just one second before the man slipped into a cab and vanished into traffic like a ghost who knew he’d been seen but didn’t care, and Abhishek knew the real game had now begun, not one of bullets or sirens but of erasures, of power that didn’t need guns because it had silence as a weapon, and yet, standing beneath the slowly brightening Kolkata sky, as trams began to rattle awake and tea stalls stirred to life, Abhishek smiled—not because he was confident, but because for the first time in years, the city had remembered its dead, and once the city remembered, it could never forget again.
Chapter 7:
The moment the first article dropped, with blurry photos of the temple’s blood-washed sanctum and the anonymous accounts of girls who had vanished into myth, the city did not erupt in outrage—it inhaled deeply, almost cautiously, like a beast that had been sleeping too long and was unsure if waking meant salvation or war, and Inspector Abhishek Roy stood amidst it all like the lone conductor of a disjointed orchestra, watching the chaos unfold as if he had pressed a key on a piano wired to a thousand hidden bombs, each report detonating another illusion, and still there were no arrests, no official statements, only silence, thick and toxic, coiling around the corridors of power while ministers, corporate patrons, and even respected cultural figures issued vague denials and feigned ignorance, but Abhishek had expected this, and he had prepared, for his next move would not be about evidence or legal traps but something older and more brutal: exposure through truth too terrifying to bury, and that chance came not through a journalist or a judge, but through the arrival of a girl at the police station gate at midnight, her face gaunt, her eyes red and swollen, but her voice calm—“My name is Tiyasha Saha. I was one of them. And I remember everything,” and Abhishek took her inside carefully, offering tea and a blanket, and as she sat across from him under the flickering tube light, she began her story, and what she said felt less like testimony and more like a curse unraveling: how she had been chosen from her orphanage at thirteen, how she had been taken to a “retreat” in Shantiniketan, blindfolded during the trip, and made to bathe in turmeric water before being dressed in white and fed only honey and neem leaves, and how on the second night the music had begun—not from speakers but from old gramophones that played the same broken Tagore verse over and over until it burrowed into her bones, and then the man they called “Acharya Samar” entered the room, not touching, not shouting, but whispering instructions like a teacher instructing children on posture and poise: “Sit straight. Close your mouth. Let the song fill your throat. Do not resist. Resistance is dissonance. Dissonance is decay,” and how one by one, the girls were taken into a chamber where a red light never flickered and the sound of soft humming never stopped, and though she never saw what happened beyond that door, she heard it—choked singing, sobs, sometimes silence broken only by a single final note—and then, they returned pale, quiet, obedient, never speaking again, not because they were dead but because something inside them had been cauterized with melody and fear, and when it had been her turn, she had fought, bitten, screamed until her voice gave way and her mouth bled, and for that she had been punished, kept in a dark cellar for seven days where the song played from speakers above until she forgot her own name and began to hum it in her sleep, and then, one night, the police had come for an unrelated tip-off—about illegal land usage—and the compound had been hurriedly evacuated, and she had managed to slip out with the chaos, wearing a stolen maid’s sari and walking barefoot through the forest for four days until a bus driver had picked her up near Chandannagar and dropped her at the gates of a woman’s shelter who didn’t ask questions, and there she had stayed, silent, until she saw the online report about Payel, and she remembered the girl who used to braid her hair and whisper jokes in the darkness before being taken away and never returning, and that remembrance was stronger than fear, stronger even than the nausea that gripped her when she heard the name Samar, and so she had come here, and as Abhishek listened, noting every detail, every tremble in her voice, he knew she had given him not just a weapon but a wound he had no choice but to expose, and the next day, with her consent, her full deposition was recorded, her photograph published alongside the story titled “I Survived The Choir”—One Girl’s Escape From Bengal’s Cult of Silence, and this time the silence did not hold, for it cracked at the edges with the sound of protests outside Mitra Group’s headquarters, with a hundred candles lit outside the Howrah Court, with survivors stepping forward anonymously, their stories dripping through the media like blood from reopened scars, and Samar Mitra, the man behind the curtain, finally emerged—not in handcuffs, not hiding, but at a carefully staged press conference in a five-star hotel where he wore a white Nehru jacket and spoke in a calm, rehearsed voice about “spiritual misunderstandings,” “fabricated stories,” and “a targeted attack on Bengali heritage,” his smile never faltering, even as Abhishek watched the live telecast from Lalbazar and whispered, “You made a mistake, Samar. You stepped into the light,” and the next night, Abhishek got a message—no number, no signature, just an address in Tollygunge and a phrase: Bring the tape. Come alone. and against every rule and instinct, he did, with a mic on his collar and Bose waiting three streets away, and the address turned out to be a crumbling movie studio, one of the many forgotten by time, its soundstage hollow and echoing, and inside, beneath a single spotlight, stood Samar Mitra, still in white, his tiger-eye ring gleaming, and he smiled as Abhishek approached, saying, “I knew it would be you. The one who doesn’t shut the book even when the ending is dangerous,” and Abhishek held out the tape, the one with the distorted song, and asked, “Is this your truth, then? Breaking children to compose a symphony of silence?” and Samar chuckled, almost kindly, “No, Inspector. This is the hymn of control. Of purity. You see horror. I see order. You see victims. I see vessels,” and then, stepping forward, he added, “But I knew this day would come. So I composed one last movement,” and before Abhishek could react, the lights flared, and behind him, a projector began playing footage—dozens of girls, silent, expressionless, kneeling in rows as Samar’s voice played over them in chants, their mouths stitched digitally into non-motion, the entire screen a kaleidoscope of obedience, and then the building shook—not from metaphor but from a timed explosion at the rear, and smoke poured in as Samar vanished into it, leaving only the echo of a line—“You cannot silence a silence that sings”—and by the time Abhishek fought through the smoke and reached the street, Samar was gone, disappeared into a city that now hummed with unrest, his press team claiming he had gone to seek “spiritual asylum abroad,” and Abhishek knew they were being outpaced again, outmaneuvered, but not outwilled, because for the first time, Kolkata’s ghosts were awake, not moaning but marching, their names spoken in protests, their faces held up on posters, their stories turned into poems, and he knew that even if Samar fled, even if the case wound through a hundred courts and appealed to a thousand loopholes, the sound would never die, because the choir had found a new conductor—not one who silenced, but one who remembered—and in a small studio in North Kolkata, Kabir Sen painted again, this time a mural of every girl whose name was whispered to him, their eyes open, their mouths wide, not in scream but in song, and at the bottom he painted a lone policeman walking toward them, torch in hand, defying the night, and the title below in red: “The Haunting That Sang Back.”
Chapter 8:
It rained again the night the body was found, not heavy, not thunderous—just a thin persistent drizzle that soaked the old streets and made the Hooghly shimmer like a wound being slowly stitched shut by the cold fingers of dawn, and Inspector Abhishek Roy stood at the edge of the embankment just beneath the southeast pillar of Howrah Bridge, where an old fisherman had reported a sack caught against the rocks, leaking something too dark to be mud, and when the divers hauled it up, it tore in half, spilling not fish or garbage but what had once been a man’s body—burned beyond recognition, but the forensic pathologist would later say it wasn’t the fire that killed him, it was strangulation, slow and careful, with deliberate precision, and inside the remnants of the sack was a ring—melted but unmistakable: tiger-eye set in bronze, cracked at the edge, and the initials “S.M.” still faintly visible inside the band, and though it was not the confirmation anyone expected, it was enough to silence the theories, the denials, the cult-like defense that had begun to form around the public image of Samar Mitra, the spiritual philanthropist turned fugitive ghost, now officially declared dead, and as the news spread—TV anchors announcing it as if unsure whether to mourn or cheer—Abhishek stared at the charred ring resting in a transparent evidence bag and felt nothing like triumph, only a strange hollowness, because the real horror had never been Samar alone, it had been the silence that enabled him, the systems that protected him, the decades that devoured girls whole and called it “ritual,” and that silence had not died with him, it had only shivered, recoiled, waiting for the next mask to wear, and still the city wanted closure, wanted an ending, and so a memorial was held—not by the government or any official institution but by the mothers, sisters, and shelter wardens who had lost someone, who lit candles beneath the bridge and sang old Bengali lullabies as the river flowed beneath them like a thousand unheard voices, and Abhishek was there, in plain clothes, standing behind a wall of grief so raw it made his hands tremble, and beside him, Bose said softly, “You know this isn’t the end, right?” and Abhishek nodded, because he had already begun to see the next threads unraveling—documents tracing back to similar rituals reported in 1972 in a temple outside Jalpaiguri, whispers of a man named “Acharya Saubhagya” who wore rings like Samar and vanished during the Emergency, tales of a script used to transcribe pain into song, passed from one generation of zealots to the next, and he realized that what they had uncovered was not a single cult, but a legacy—a movement with no headquarters, no temple, no obvious name, only a pattern: find the vulnerable, dress the horror in sacred words, and erase the voices that resist, and that pattern had spread like a subterranean fungus beneath Bengal’s rich soil, feeding on silence, cloaked in incense and hymns, and now, with Samar’s death, one branch had withered, but the roots were still alive, and perhaps even angrier, for within two days of the cremation, a retired judge who had ruled against reopening old shelter abuse cases was found dead in his Lake Gardens home, slit wrists staged too perfectly, and a note beside him with a single word scrawled in Bengali: “Sheshgaan”—Final Song—and the following week, a fire broke out at Ujjiban Shelter, not large enough to kill but enough to destroy all paper records, and though arson wasn’t proven, the CCTV footage went missing, and the shelter’s warden resigned citing “spiritual unease,” and Abhishek found himself running out of pages in his notebook, running out of allies, and running out of time, because a new player had entered the game—someone using Samar’s death as an opening, and then one night, Tiyasha, the survivor, vanished from the safe house, her room found empty, her bed unslept, but her diary left behind with one final entry: “They sing to me again, this time sweetly. I don’t want to go back. But I feel myself walking anyway.” and Abhishek felt the old rage return—not hot and reckless, but cold, precise, the kind that makes a man start cutting his life into sacrifice, and so he went underground again, revisiting old informants, tracing new transfers of money from Mitra Trust accounts to obscure NGOs, one of which listed a director named “S.B.” in Murshidabad, and when he got there with Bose, what they found chilled them deeper than anything before—a school for mute girls, allegedly founded for “special education,” where not one girl could recall how she got there, and every evening, they were made to listen to an old harmonium tune while seated in silence, and the caretaker, an old man with glazed eyes, claimed he had once worked for “Acharya Saubhagya” and was now “serving the divine silence,” and Abhishek realized then that this wasn’t just Kolkata’s ghost—it was Bengal’s shadow, ancient and cunning, evolving with every decade, changing costumes but never mission, and when he returned to the city that night, exhausted and furious, he stood once more beneath Howrah Bridge, now empty of candles and mourners, only the river still speaking in murmurs, and he took the ring from his pocket—the tiger-eye once worn by Samar Mitra—and hurled it into the dark water, letting it sink back into the mouth it came from, and for the first time, he felt the weight lift—not of victory, but of knowing, because stories like this don’t end, they only surface, retreat, and surface again, and now he knew the pattern, knew the melody of the lie, and he would spend whatever days he had left chasing every last note of it down until the chorus was broken and the silence, finally, was out-sung.
Chapter 9:
Kolkata never forgets, it only learns to live around its wounds, builds tram tracks over graves, erects pandals where children once vanished, sells sweetmeats beside gates that once barred the broken, and Inspector Abhishek Roy knew this better than anyone now, for he had become part of the city’s darker memory, not etched in stone or sung in celebration, but whispered in tea stalls and scribbled in student poetry zines—“the cop who heard the dead sing,” and though the official file on Samar Mitra was closed with a seal and a shrug, and though the final press conference declared the investigation into “cultural ritual abuse” inconclusive, something had already shifted in the city’s marrow, not loud, not legislative, but irreversibly alive, like an ember refusing to die beneath damp ash, and in that fire sat Abhishek on his final day in service, his resignation letter folded neatly in his pocket, not out of defeat but transformation, for he had understood at last that some hauntings are not meant to be solved, only carried, like scars one does not hide but names, and he walked one last time through the corridors of Lalbazar, past young officers who looked at him with equal parts awe and unease, past a desk drawer that still held the photos of missing girls who had never been found, past Bose, who handed him a sealed envelope and said, “From Kabir Sen,” before embracing him without a word, and when he stepped outside into the heavy dusk, the city greeted him not with sirens or applause but with that same old slow breath of summer air soaked in rain and longing, and he took a taxi not home but to Kumartuli, where Kabir had reopened his studio in an abandoned godown, and when he entered, he saw what the envelope had been preparing him for—an installation, incomplete yet stunning, a series of sculptures made of melted wax and soot, shaped like the mouths of girls mid-song, each frozen in a moment of resistance, and behind them, painted in a deep red that seemed to move when one blinked, was a single line in Bengali script: “তোমরা যাদের চুপ করতে চেয়েছিলে, তারা এখন গাইছে”—“Those you tried to silence are singing now,” and Kabir turned, thinner than before, but eyes sharp, and said, “I’ve been waiting for you. They want to tell the full song. But it’s not mine to finish. It’s yours,” and so, over the next few weeks, Abhishek sat with him every evening, retelling the case not as evidence but as memory, letting it unfold not like a report but like a raga, imperfect, haunting, and utterly alive, and the two of them built an exhibit, part crime archive, part shrine, part scream, called The Sound Beneath, hosted not in a gallery but inside an old cinema hall that had once been rumored to be cursed, and on opening night, a line stretched from Shyambazar to Bagbazar, and among those who entered were girls from shelters, old reporters, taxi drivers, even former priests, each leaving something behind—notes, torn songbooks, bits of red cloth, broken bangles—as if offering to a god they were still learning how to name, and from that night onward, Kolkata began to shift—not drastically, not dramatically, but in small defiances: music teachers refused to use certain ragas once associated with “purification,” shelters began including voice therapy sessions, girls recited poetry instead of hymns, and a mural appeared under Howrah Bridge, unauthorized but untouched by the authorities, showing Samar’s ring drowning in the river while a hundred faces looked down from above, mouths open not in horror but in harmony, and Abhishek, now teaching part-time at a law college and working with survivors to archive forgotten abuse cases, would sometimes walk past that mural late at night, hands in pockets, the city humming its sleepless lullaby, and wonder whether the real haunting had ever been ghosts at all—or just the pain that no one had been allowed to name, until someone finally sang it loud enough for the world to stop and listen, and even now, in old houses in Howrah where the walls still remember screams, and in temples where rituals no longer echo with pride, and in alleyways where harmoniums sit silent in dust, something stirs when the wind is right, something that smells of rain and sounds almost like a girl humming, alone but unafraid, and Kolkata does not silence it anymore, it lets it ring, lets it ripple across rooftops and rickshaws, lets it haunt without horror, lets it remind, because sometimes a haunting is just the city’s way of remembering its daughters.
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