Sanjana Iyer
1
The rain had settled into a soft, rhythmic patter against the windowpanes of Vidya Ranganathan’s rented flat in Bandra when the doorbell rang—a sound far too sudden for a Sunday morning steeped in the smell of filter coffee and undone to-do lists. She opened the door to find no one, only a brown-paper-wrapped parcel resting on the doormat, slightly damp, addressed in old-fashioned cursive to “Vidya Ranganathan, Editor (Retired), Mumbai.” No sender, no postage. Inside was a manuscript—pages browned and curling at the edges, parts of it scorched as if rescued from a fire. The title etched across the top page, in spidery ink, read: The Seven Silences by Adrien Rousseau. Her fingers paused on the name. It struck something—an echo from a forgotten seminar, an abandoned poetry anthology. Adrien Rousseau. Half-French, half-Indian, Pondicherry-based poet who had vanished without a trace in the mid-80s after a mysterious villa fire that no newspaper had properly followed up. Vidya’s breath stilled. She hadn’t heard that name in years, and never in this context—never in connection to death.
The manuscript was brittle but alive. Even from the first few pages, Vidya could feel it breathing between the lines—cryptic stanzas, prose layered with metaphors about ash, breath, and vanishing footsteps. One passage stood out: “She lit a candle with her truth, but the wind knew whom to serve.” It wasn’t just poetry. It was a warning wrapped in rhythm. The edges of the pages had been burned deliberately, stopping just short of destroying the meaning—like someone wanted it preserved, but obscured. The date at the bottom of one torn section read August 14, 1985, in the same ink as the author’s name. But it was the phrase underneath that date, hastily scrawled in a different pen, that jolted her upright: “She didn’t die by accident. They closed the file. I never could.” Her heart thudded uncomfortably. Who was she? Why was this sent to her, decades later? And most disturbingly, who knew where to find her—who knew she would care enough to open it?
Vidya had not edited anything of significance in over a year. Since leaving her position at a mid-tier publishing house in Lower Parel following a bitter fallout with the board—over her refusal to greenlight a political memoir she found repugnant—she had quietly slipped into freelancing, ghost-editing cookbooks, and writing listicles under pseudonyms. Her career had flatlined into anonymity. But as she turned page after page of The Seven Silences, her editorial instincts flared up—alongside something deeper: obsession. The manuscript wasn’t just stylistically haunting; it read like a coded confession. Mentions of “a villa cloaked in eucalyptus,” “a girl with inked fingers,” “the ninth verse hidden in stone”—they weren’t literary devices. They were coordinates. The manuscript was pointing to something real, and Rousseau’s vanishing wasn’t poetic myth—it was the surface of a deeper, untouched truth. This wasn’t just a literary mystery. It was a trail. And someone, somewhere, had chosen her to walk it.
That night, Vidya lay awake in bed with the manuscript on her chest, the faint scent of old paper mixing with the jasmine oil she always rubbed behind her ears before sleeping. She thought about Adrien Rousseau: the poet who vanished in the year she was born, the half-French recluse with a penchant for blending Tamil folklore with existential despair. How many stories like his had been lost to time, buried under bureaucracy and silence? And how many like her—editors, readers, truth-seekers—had stopped digging when the words ran out? Vidya felt a strange electricity humming through her fingertips. The manuscript wasn’t complete. It ended mid-sentence on a half-burned page. But it wasn’t over. It was inviting her to finish the silence. And if the truth had waited this long, it could wait one more train ride. She booked her ticket to Pondicherry before dawn, packed the manuscript in a waterproof folder, and told no one where she was going.
2
The train pulled into Puducherry station just as the sky bloomed into a pale orange, brushing the tops of coconut trees with liquid fire. Vidya stepped out, the salty air tugging at her cotton dupatta like an impatient whisper. The city hadn’t changed much since her last visit a decade ago—still a tangle of French colonial architecture, Tamil street chatter, bougainvillea-covered walls, and an almost theatrical sense of stillness. But something about her purpose this time made every sound sharper, every shadow deeper. She clutched the manila folder under her arm, feeling the weight of the half-burned manuscript as if it had absorbed not just ink and soot, but memory itself. An autorickshaw driver tried to call out to her, but she waved him off. She wanted to walk. Her destination was White Town, near the Promenade—an area where Rousseau had reportedly lived, written, and vanished.
The colonial villa wasn’t marked on any current map. It took three conversations, one bribe to an old municipal clerk, and a Google Earth satellite image from 2013 to locate it: a crumbling two-story structure obscured behind a line of gnarled eucalyptus trees near Rue Surcouf. Its iron gate was rusted, hanging open as though exhausted by years of neglect. Vines had claimed most of the façade, but through the lattice of green, Vidya could still make out the faded French signage above the door: Maison des Brumes—House of Mists. She hesitated before stepping in. The front door hung loosely on one hinge, the wood blackened as though scorched. Inside, the air was thick with mildew and something else—something acrid, like memory refusing to rot. The walls bore faded graffiti in both English and Tamil: snatches of poetry, names, dates, and one chilling line scrawled in red paint: “I waited for silence, but she screamed.”
Exploring deeper into the house, Vidya found what looked like the remnants of a study: broken bookshelves, an overturned desk, and beneath it, a floorboard that seemed slightly raised. She pried it loose with the edge of her umbrella and found, hidden beneath, an inscription scratched into the wood: “Verse IX. Stone. Bell.” Three words, no context. She scribbled them into her notebook, heart pounding. It was the first tangible clue linking the manuscript to the real world—proof that The Seven Silences wasn’t entirely fictional. Perhaps Rousseau had intended this house as a puzzle box, each room a stanza, each hidden message a line waiting to be uncovered. Vidya stood up slowly, her knees dusty and aching, but her mind alight. The fire-damaged walls, the graffiti, the inscription—this was the birthplace of the silence. But she wasn’t the first to find it. In the far corner, she noticed melted candle wax on the windowsill—fresh. Someone else had been here. Recently.
Shaken but determined, she left the villa and walked toward the Promenade, seeking normalcy and a coffee that didn’t taste like damp history. She ducked into a small street-side café that doubled as a lending library. The smell of old books mingled with cinnamon and sea breeze. It was here she met Jaya, a young woman manning a mobile book cart painted with quotes in chalk. Vidya asked, casually at first, if she’d ever heard of Adrien Rousseau. The girl’s smile faltered. “We don’t speak of him anymore,” Jaya said, adjusting her glasses. “Not since the fire. People say the villa’s cursed. That words spoken inside it find their way into dreams. And not good ones.” Intrigued, Vidya pressed on. Jaya lowered her voice. “He wasn’t just a poet. He was a witness. And witnesses… they either write or disappear.” She handed Vidya a thin, out-of-print poetry collection—Ashes in the Margin—with Rousseau’s name on the inside flap. “If you’re chasing ghosts,” Jaya warned, “make sure you’re not made of glass.” The sun was setting by the time Vidya returned to her guesthouse, the manuscript on one side of her bed, and the new book on the other. The ghosts were real. And she had just shaken their cage.
3
Back in her modest guesthouse room, Vidya laid out the fragile pages of The Seven Silences across the bed like tarot cards awaiting divination. The light from the small desk lamp cast long shadows over the browned paper, and the words seemed to breathe beneath it. She began reading in slow, deliberate movements, tracing each stanza as if it held the key to a door half-remembered in a dream. The manuscript was divided into numbered sections—seven, as the title promised—but the narrative wasn’t linear. Each section was a haunting blend of prose and poetry, and each seemed to revolve around a different unnamed figure: a woman who drowned in whispers, a boy who was locked inside his own name, a man who stopped speaking after a fire. These weren’t metaphors; they were obituaries hidden in verse. Vidya’s editor instincts burned with clarity—this wasn’t a story, it was a ledger. A ledger of those who had been silenced, not by chance but by design. She opened her notebook and began to transcribe what she could, underlining passages that hinted at place, identity, or cause. One line gave her particular pause: “The third silence bore the scent of smoke and sanctity. He held the truth, and chose the hymns instead.”
The line brought her back to the cathedral—a place she had passed more than once during her wanderings through White Town, its white façade peeling but proud, its blue doors always slightly ajar. Eglise Notre-Dame des Anges. Vidya decided not to wait. The afternoon sun threw latticed shadows through the stained-glass windows as she entered the silent nave. It smelled of beeswax and dust and something older, something like remembrance. At the far end, seated in the pews, was a tall man in plain robes, silver hair brushed neatly to one side, his hands clasped in still prayer. She introduced herself softly, unsure of how much to say. “I’m researching Adrien Rousseau,” she said. “The poet who used to live near the Promenade. I believe he came here often.” Father Dominic Savio looked up slowly, his expression unreadable. “Many poets find solace in silence,” he said. “Fewer return it.” His voice was even, but there was a flicker of something—a shadow behind the eyes—that made Vidya sit down beside him.
She asked him if he knew Rousseau. He smiled faintly, then shook his head. “Names mean little in the house of God. Only intentions endure.” But Vidya noticed the tightening of his fingers, the subtle drop of his gaze. “There’s a passage,” she pressed on, “about a man who traded truth for hymns. Was that you, Father?” For a moment, he said nothing. Then he whispered, “There was a night with no stars. The sea had swallowed the horizon. And in the house of mists, a girl who never left lit a flame she could not contain.” His words weren’t answers—they were riddles, spoken like prayers. But she could feel the weight in them, the reverberation of memory. “They said it was a fire,” he continued. “But fire is only ever a symptom, never the cause. You’re looking for the cause, Miss Ranganathan. Be careful. Some causes demand silence in return.” Then he stood, offering no blessing, no farewell, and walked toward the altar like a man vanishing into smoke.
Vidya left the church with the uncomfortable sense that she had touched a thread tied to something enormous and fragile, like pulling a knot in an ancient tapestry. She replayed the priest’s words as she walked back through the cobbled streets: a girl who never left, a night with no stars, the sea swallowing the horizon. All of it pointed back to that August night in 1985, the one hinted at in the manuscript and shrouded in half-truths. She wondered if Adrien had confessed something to the priest—something that had been buried under rites and rituals, something the Church preferred forgotten. The manuscript, the villa, the graffiti, the inscription beneath the floorboard—everything circled the fire, like moths unwilling to admit the danger of their fascination. As the sun dipped low over the Bay of Bengal, Vidya sat at a bench on the Promenade, her notebook open, her pen poised. She sketched a simple diagram: seven silences, seven souls, each with a clue, a symbol, a death. Somewhere in the quiet, she could hear Adrien’s voice. Or maybe it was her own, slowly unraveling in the pursuit of a truth long buried beneath verse, ash, and a silence too heavy for one poet to carry alone.
4
The morning haze hung low over the city as Vidya sat cross-legged on the guesthouse floor, sifting through the contents of a file she’d assembled in the past few days—photos of the villa, transcribed verses from the manuscript, notes from her encounter with Father Dominic. But one question remained stubbornly unanswered: Who was she? The girl who “never left,” the one spoken of in whispers and riddles. Returning to the villa once more, Vidya combed through the back room, searching for anything she may have missed. In a charred cabinet drawer, she found a crumbling envelope with the corner barely legible. Beneath layers of soot, the name revealed itself in delicate cursive: Amélie D’Souza. It was a whisper from the past that instantly deepened the shadows of everything she had uncovered. The name resonated—there was intimacy to it, sadness laced in its syllables. Vidya knew without doubt that Amélie was the girl who died in the fire. She rushed back to town and tried searching for public records: death certificates, property claims, police reports. But there was nothing—no official trace of Amélie D’Souza, as if she had been erased.
Determined, Vidya made her way to Pondicherry University, hoping the archives of the literature department might hold some hidden clue. Inside the dusty reading room, she found yellowing bulletins and defunct literary journals from the 80s, many of which had published Rousseau’s early work. One article referenced a “young muse of mixed Goan and Tamil heritage,” known only as “A.D.” A footnote mentioned she had worked on translations with Rousseau during the summer of 1985. Finally, a lead. With this thread in hand, Vidya sought out the faculty member listed as editor of those journals—Dr. Revathi Nair, now a semi-retired historian and visiting professor known for her controversial essays on colonial censorship in literature. Revathi agreed to meet, but only reluctantly, in a sunlit courtyard framed by neem trees and faded murals. She was a thin woman in her fifties with silver-streaked hair, dressed in a cotton sari and guarded eyes. When Vidya mentioned Adrien Rousseau and Amélie D’Souza, Revathi’s face grew still.
“You’re poking into dangerous soil,” she said after a long pause. “Adrien and Amélie were… fire and ether. Too close, too quick, too volatile for their time.” Vidya pressed her gently, and Revathi finally relented, her voice low. “Amélie was brilliant. She spoke French, Portuguese, Tamil—fluent in them all. She translated Rousseau’s works into Tamil and was preparing a bilingual volume of poems that challenged more than just literary norms. They were political—pointed. They named names. That’s why they were stopped.” Vidya’s heart sank as Revathi continued. “You won’t find her in any public record. Her death was written off as an accident. But she was silenced. And Adrien… he blamed himself. He went into hiding, or maybe worse.” Vidya asked if she believed Adrien had written The Seven Silences as a confession. Revathi hesitated, then nodded. “I’ve seen parts of that manuscript before. He gave Amélie a copy. Her version never surfaced after the fire—until now, it seems.” Vidya revealed that someone had mailed her the charred pages anonymously. Revathi sighed. “Then you’ve already been noticed.”
The warning echoed in Vidya’s mind as she stepped out of the university and into the burning afternoon sun. The story had transformed from a literary curiosity into a shadow war, with names erased, memories buried, and survivors scattered or silenced. She walked slowly back toward the Promenade, wondering how many people in this sleepy town still remembered Amélie—how many dared to say her name aloud. Perhaps the real silence wasn’t just in the manuscript. It was in the city itself, a collective hush built around shame and fear. Vidya now understood that the manuscript had not simply chronicled seven metaphorical silences—it had documented seven real people, seven erased truths. And Amélie was the first. Her name, pulled from ashes and near-oblivion, was a spark Vidya couldn’t afford to let go cold. Back in her room, she added Amélie D’Souza to the top of her notes and drew a line straight down to a single, defiant word beneath: murdered. The page trembled slightly in her hands—not from fear, but from the electric knowledge that the silence was cracking.
5
The air was thick with coastal humidity as Vidya wound her way through the narrow bylanes of the old Tamil quarter, past ochre-stained walls and drooping bougainvillea, searching for a house with a faded green gate. It was the last known address of a woman referred to only as “Ammachi” in a decades-old letter she’d found among university records—once the housekeeper at Rousseau’s villa. The gate creaked open into a modest compound dotted with potted tulsi and jasmine, where time moved slower and every breeze carried the scent of old stone and memory. A neighbor directed Vidya to the shaded verandah, where a small, wiry woman sat in a low cane chair, wrapped in a cream shawl despite the heat. Her eyes were clouded by age but still sharp, and when Vidya introduced herself, Ammachi responded with a murmur of recognition—as if she had been waiting for someone to come and ask about that night. It took coaxing, soft questions layered with silence, before the dam of memory began to leak.
Ammachi spoke in Tamil and halting English, her voice heavy with pauses. “She had a laugh like a silver bell,” she said, as if describing a ghost still seated by the hearth. “Amélie kutty… always reading, always writing. That room, the study—only she and sir would go inside.” Vidya leaned in as Ammachi recalled the strange visitors who would arrive after dusk—some in long coats, speaking French, some in uniforms without badges. They never stayed long, and they never smiled. Ammachi said she was told to prepare tea but not to ask names. “That house… after dark, it was no longer a home. It was like church during a storm. You pray, but nothing feels holy.” Her eyes welled with unshed tears. She spoke of Amélie reciting her poems in a whisper to herself, sitting cross-legged by the fireplace, her voice carrying into the quiet of the corridor. Sometimes Rousseau would scold her, telling her not to speak those words out loud. “But she would smile and say, ‘What is poetry if not a rebellion that breathes?’” Ammachi looked at Vidya then, as if to see if she understood what that meant.
Vidya asked about the night of the fire—August 14th, 1985. Ammachi grew quiet for a long time, her gaze fixed on the floor. Then, without a word, she got up slowly and disappeared into the back of the house, returning minutes later with a weathered biscuit tin wrapped in a silk cloth. She placed it in Vidya’s hands. Inside were faded receipts from an old Pondicherry grocer, a torn bus ticket, yellowed envelopes, and brittle pages of handwritten notes—many with Amélie’s looping script. One envelope was scorched at the edges, as if pulled from flames. Among the papers was a single church flyer, partially burned, but legible: Eglise Notre-Dame – Night Vigil for the Feast of Assumption, August 14, 1985. A time was printed: 8:30 PM. Ammachi looked at it, then at Vidya. “That night, she didn’t go. Said she had things to finish.” Rousseau had left earlier, claiming he had a meeting. Ammachi herself had gone to stay with her sister that evening—an unexpected illness in the family. She hadn’t been there when the fire began. But she was there when the ashes settled.
Vidya carefully sifted through the tin’s contents, documenting every item, every handwritten line. Each one was a breadcrumb leading back to the truth someone had tried hard to bury. “They said it was the kerosene lamp. That she must’ve fallen asleep with it burning,” Ammachi said, her voice trembling. “But that night, she had electricity. The meter had been fixed only the week before. I remember because she was so happy—she danced around the kitchen.” Ammachi’s eyes met Vidya’s, and in them was the ache of decades of silence. “Child, they lied.” The box, small as it was, felt heavier than anything Vidya had carried so far—not in weight, but in consequence. As she thanked Ammachi and turned to leave, the old woman reached for her hand. “You ask about her because you want justice,” she said softly. “But justice has a cost. Be sure you are willing to pay it.” Vidya nodded, unsure of what the cost might be, but more certain than ever that this story—Amélie’s story—was not done speaking. Not yet. Not until all seven silences found their voice.
6
Rain drummed steadily against the stained-glass windows of the cathedral as Vidya stepped inside, the flyer box clutched tightly under her arm. The grand arches above her seemed to echo with ghosts, the scent of incense thick in the air like memory refusing to fade. The box had yielded a final surprise: a cassette tape tucked between brittle letters, unlabelled save for the faint imprint of a date — 13 August 1985. That evening, back in her hostel, she had stared at it for hours before finally slipping it into an old Walkman borrowed from the university archive room. The sound that emerged was jagged and warped, static eating at the edges, but in the center, like a voice submerged in water, someone was speaking — no, whispering — into the void. Now, inside the cathedral where Amélie once prayed and perhaps even confessed, Vidya sought answers that only echoes could provide.
She sat alone in the last pew, the Walkman’s foam-covered headphones pressed against her ears, her breath caught between fear and awe. The voice was unmistakably male, cultured, fluent in English but tinged with the French cadence she’d come to associate with Adrien Rousseau. “Forgive me, Father… she wouldn’t let it go,” the voice murmured. “She knew too much. Not just about me, but about the others. About the real reason we met, what the study was truly for.” Static cut across the tape like a blade. Then: “She said she would publish it. That it was her duty to speak the truth.” There was a long pause, filled only with the distant hum of the recording equipment and what might have been a sob. “I didn’t start the fire. I swear I didn’t. But I let it happen. I walked away.” Vidya froze. Her fingers trembled against the rewind button, playing it again and again until the voice etched itself into her bones.
The walls of the cathedral felt closer now, as though drawing in with each revelation. Vidya stared ahead at the crucifix, wondering if it had witnessed this same confession, if the silent priest on the other side of the curtain had understood what he was hearing all those years ago. She turned to the confessional booth, its wood darkened with age, its latticework as intricate as the secrets it had swallowed. Could it be that the priest’s silence — the same one who refused to speak to her the first time — was not due to forgetfulness or fear, but something deeper? Oath-bound silence, yes, but perhaps also guilt? Complicity? “She wanted to call it The Seven Silences,” the tape continued, softer now, fragile. “A book. A poetry cycle, she said. But it was more than poetry. It was code. Names, dates, events—disguised, but clear to those who knew what to look for.” The tape clicked at the end, the abrupt sound shattering the sanctity of the moment. Vidya took off the headphones and sat back, her mind racing.
If The Seven Silences was not just a literary manuscript but a veiled indictment, then Amélie had written it knowing someone might try to silence her. It was her shield, her truth sealed in verse. Vidya recalled the priest’s refusal to engage with her during her last visit, his carefully measured words and quiet withdrawal. Was he protecting Adrien? Or Amélie’s memory? Or was he still weighing the consequences of what he had heard in that booth? Rising slowly, Vidya walked down the aisle, toward the sanctuary where votive candles flickered like fractured stars. She knelt and lit one, not out of piety but respect—for Amélie, for her courage, and perhaps for the burden of knowing a truth no one had dared to name for decades. The church was empty save for her and the priest who stood at the far end, his back turned, as if guarding a silence that could break the very foundation of the stone beneath them. Vidya made a silent vow: she would read the poems again, line by line, and she would find the names hidden inside. Because the real fire hadn’t started in the villa—it had begun with a woman’s words. Words they had tried to silence with ash.
7
The road to the convent was narrow and unmarked, winding like an afterthought through fields silvered with dust. Vidya rode in the back of a borrowed auto, the flyer box beside her, the note from Ammachi tucked into her notebook: “Ask for St. Agnes, past the mango grove. Someone saw him there… five years ago.” That “him” haunted her now—Adrien Rousseau, the supposed martyr-poet, who had perhaps never died in the fire that consumed the villa and Amélie D’Souza. The revelation turned everything on its head. If Adrien had survived, if he had walked away from the ashes and cloaked himself in a false name and sacred walls, then his guilt — or his fear — ran deeper than she imagined. The air shifted as the convent emerged from the trees, pale stone cloisters wrapped in silence. Vidya felt her pulse quicken, not with certainty, but with a terrible need to believe that the past could speak again.
The gate creaked open, revealing a nun with sharp eyes and an expression carved from habit and suspicion. “We don’t take visitors without appointment,” she said crisply, but Vidya showed her the university ID and mumbled something about researching local religious history. She was ushered into a shaded parlour where the walls smelled of lemon polish and old wood. The Mother Superior entered, tall and composed, her hands folded over her rosary like a verdict waiting to be spoken. When Vidya mentioned Adrien Rousseau—though she spoke the name with careful neutrality, pretending it came from a student thesis—she saw the woman’s pupils shift, just for a second. “We have had many people pass through these walls. Pain brings them here. They come with other names,” the Mother said, her voice cool. “But none of them belonged to a poet.” The conversation ended with forced tea and a promise to write back “if anything turns up.” Vidya knew it was a dismissal.
She was nearly at the gate when she heard the soft whisper behind her. A girl, barely eighteen, stood by the stone pillar — skin dusky, eyes wide with the kind of curiosity that convent life tried hard to suppress. “You’re looking for someone,” she said without introduction. Vidya hesitated. The girl continued, “He used to sit under the tamarind tree, humming lines I never understood. But once, he gave me something when he left. Said it was ‘just paper, not proof.’” She pulled a folded page from inside her habit and pressed it into Vidya’s palm before vanishing down a side path, her presence swallowed by the silence. Vidya opened it right there beneath the shadow of the gate. The handwriting was unmistakable — sharp, slanted, European. It began mid-thought: They warned me never to write again. But silence has a memory too. She thought words could save her, but words were my poison. I gave her words, but they burned her voice. The paper trembled in her hands. It was Adrien. Alive, or at least once alive — and racked by the weight of what his poems had done.
Back at the hostel, Vidya laid the note next to the manuscript of The Seven Silences, and the alignment was eerie. Certain metaphors echoed between the two—cinders, confession, shadows wrapped in silk. She flipped back to the poem “Silence Five: The Study” and saw it anew: the room wasn’t just a place; it was a vault. She read the letters in the lamplight, her voice honey over fire, the poem had said. Now she knew what it meant — Amélie had found something damning, and Adrien had let her believe that poetry could hide the truth in plain sight. But the truth wanted air. And someone had extinguished her voice before it reached the world. The note proved Adrien’s survival, but it also suggested torment. Hiding in a convent was not just escape; it was penance. And yet, something still didn’t fit. If Adrien had run, who had declared him dead? Why was the fire ruled accidental when so many fragments pointed to cover-up? And who, even now, wanted silence more than truth? Vidya knew she had to return to the source — the villa, the fire, the poetry — because somewhere between the verses and the ashes lay the name of the real arsonist, and Adrien Rousseau, living or not, was no longer the final mystery.
8
It was a grey, heavy afternoon when Inspector Arul Dev came knocking. Vidya had just finished annotating a page from Adrien’s manuscript when the firm rapping on her guesthouse door startled her from the silence. Arul stood there, hat in hand, his eyes not unkind but sharp with a practiced scrutiny that unnerved her. “Ms. Rao,” he began, stepping into the room without waiting for an invitation, “I’ve been hearing things. Cathedral archives, the old librarian, a very curious itinerary for a tourist.” He walked slowly, his gaze sweeping the desk, pausing for a beat too long on the scattered papers and photocopies of Amélie’s diary. “You’re digging into things better left buried.” His tone was soft, but the menace was unmistakable. “You’re not from here. You don’t know what threads you’re pulling.” Vidya straightened, meeting his gaze. “I’m just trying to understand what happened to Amélie.” Arul smiled, a tight, tired expression. “And I’m telling you — understanding won’t keep you safe. Some stories were never sanctioned to begin with. Let them rot in peace.”
As soon as he left, a storm of doubt and adrenaline churned in Vidya’s chest. She paced the room, trying to recall every encounter, every name Amélie had jotted in her notes, and why Arul, of all people, seemed invested in keeping the story quiet. She reached out to Jaya, the archivist, who’d helped her once before. That evening, under the pretense of returning a borrowed book, Vidya met Jaya behind the library’s service entrance. “There’s a room at the station,” Jaya whispered, voice trembling. “Used for cold cases, internal files. There’s a keycard in the evidence desk drawer, bottom shelf. They don’t check often.” That night, cloaked in the humid silence of midnight, Vidya slipped into the local police station through the rear gate. Her heart thudded like a drum as she crept past silent corridors. The evidence room was a relic of bureaucratic neglect — dusty, chaotic, and dark. She found the drawer, retrieved the keycard, and located the locked file room, which buzzed open after a moment’s hesitation from the worn scanner.
Inside, the room was stacked with old boxes, folders yellowed with age, and shelves humming faintly under the weight of suppressed truths. She found the file labeled Amélie Beauchamp – Closed Investigation pushed behind a stack marked Unresolved 2001–2003. As she opened it, a cold chill passed through her. The autopsy report was heavily redacted — cause of death scribbled out, witness testimonies missing, the timeline truncated. Stapled to the back was a folded note in fragile cursive, unsigned. She wanted it all exposed. I warned her to stop. I never meant for it to end this way. The confession was more emotional than factual — more of a tortured admittance than a legal document. Still, it proved one thing: someone had confessed, unofficially, and it had been hidden. She photographed every page, careful to leave the file as she’d found it. But as she turned to leave, a sudden sound — a footstep, deliberate and slow — made her freeze. Through the fogged window of the door, she saw a shadow pass. Someone else was here.
Vidya’s pulse roared in her ears as she slid out the door, choosing not the corridor she came from but an adjacent hallway that led to a rear service exit. Her breath came in shallow gulps as she ducked behind a cabinet, waiting for the footfalls to fade. When she finally slipped outside, the night had grown thick with mist. She didn’t look back, not immediately. It was only when she reached the main road, walking fast and without stopping, that she became certain — someone was following her. A dark figure, fifty yards behind, keeping distance but never losing pace. She turned sharply onto a side street, ducked into an alley, waited — and the figure passed. Not a local, not a passerby. Intentional. She waited until the coast cleared, then doubled back through a broken fence that led to her guesthouse’s rear courtyard. Safe, for now. But her hands trembled as she locked the door behind her. The truth about Amélie had become more than a literary footnote — it was an active threat. And someone, perhaps more than one, was making sure the truth never surfaced.
9
The morning sun filtered weakly through the gauzy curtains of Vidya’s room, but her mind was already ablaze with clarity. Scattered across the bed were pages of Adrien’s verses, the unsigned confession, Amélie’s diary excerpts, and the redacted police file. One line from Adrien’s manuscript looped in her mind — “Words are the only exile I was granted.” It was all there, woven into his poetry, his guilt encrypted in metaphor. Amélie hadn’t simply stumbled upon dangerous knowledge — she had planned to publish it. Her notes revealed a connection between a series of misappropriated cultural funds and a literary patron who wielded enormous influence over government bodies. Adrien, once close to this patron, had fed Amélie the information through veiled stanzas and elliptical footnotes. But something had gone wrong. Someone had discovered their plan. The manuscript titled The Seven Silences was not just poetic lament — it was Adrien’s cry for absolution, his coded confession, disguised in literary elegance. And someone powerful had ensured that both the poet and the journalist disappeared from public memory.
But Adrien hadn’t died. That line — “He still writes. But never speaks.” — from the anonymous cassette recording gnawed at her. Adrien had been smuggled out, not buried. The unsigned confession wasn’t Adrien’s alone — it was a mosaic of guilt shared by others. The police file had been doctored, the priest had gone silent, and Arul had warned her off not to protect the law, but to protect a man in hiding. Everything pointed to a calculated cover-up. The only way to be certain was to confront the last keeper of this buried secret: Father Dominic. That afternoon, Vidya returned to the cathedral, the manuscript tucked under her arm like a weapon. The church was empty except for the priest seated at the rear pew, his back straight, hands clasped in an almost statuesque stillness. She sat beside him quietly, letting the silence stretch until he spoke first. “You found it all, then?” he asked, not turning. His voice, always measured, now carried a tremor — not of fear, but of weariness.
“I know what happened to Amélie,” Vidya said gently. “I know Adrien helped her. I know you and Arul helped him disappear.” At the name, Father Dominic finally looked at her. His eyes were rimmed with red, not from tears, but years of holding them back. “We were trying to prevent a lynching,” he said. “Adrien… he was fragile. He wrote with fire and believed it would purify everything. But once the article drafts were leaked, once they suspected him of being the source…” He sighed, his voice barely audible. “They came for him. Not with bullets, but with discredit, threats. They’d call him a foreign provocateur. A madman. Or worse — a traitor.” Vidya listened in stunned silence as the priest went on. “Amélie refused to back down. Adrien wanted to protect her, but he was already being followed. That night… she went to the press alone. She never made it.” He closed his eyes. “We found Adrien the next morning, trying to turn himself in. But he was broken. Arul helped us get him out, to a monastery in the hills. He hasn’t spoken since.”
Vidya felt the air thicken with the weight of that confession. “And The Seven Silences?” she asked. Father Dominic smiled sadly. “He wrote it after. Every silence… one for each day he spent waiting for news of her. Each silence was a grief, a scream he couldn’t release.” Vidya opened the manuscript beside him. “The world deserves to know. This wasn’t madness. It was a monument to truth.” The priest nodded slowly. “But truth buried becomes myth. And myth, when exposed, can burn.” His warning hung in the air like incense. Yet Vidya knew her path was set. She would publish not just the verses, but the full story — not for glory, not for vengeance, but because silence, once named, loses its power. As she rose to leave, Father Dominic added one final whisper: “If you must find him, go east. Past the pine valley, near the monastery of Saint Irenaeus. He still writes. But never speaks.” And with that, the final silence began to lift.
10
The path to the monastery was unmarked, hidden behind thickets of wild tulsi and creepers that tangled like secrets left too long in the dark. Vidya’s sandals stirred the red earth as she walked beneath a sky heavy with the scent of salt and sandalwood, the coast not far behind her. The monastery on the edge of Auroville seemed less a building than an idea — low, whitewashed walls curling around an ancient banyan tree whose roots spilled like veins across the courtyard. A silence more profound than emptiness hung in the air, not hollow but alive, as though the wind itself had paused to listen. Her heartbeat picked up as she spotted the figure under the banyan. Dressed in ochre robes, a man sat cross-legged, a reed pen gliding across parchment with the slow care of someone translating thought into form. His face was older, his beard touched with silver, but there was no mistaking the high cheekbones, the ink-stained fingers, the soft intensity that pulsed even in stillness. Adrien Rousseau.
He didn’t look up when she approached, not right away. Vidya stood a few feet away, unsure whether to speak. But then he lifted his head, and their eyes met. No shock, no surprise — just the calm recognition of someone who’d known this moment would come. He nodded once, not with resignation but with quiet gratitude. She didn’t speak either. Words would feel like vandalism here. Instead, she sat down beside him on the stone ledge and opened her satchel. From it, she withdrew the manuscript: The Seven Silences, now complete, restored with the missing pages, contextual notes, and even Amélie’s annotations. It was no longer just Adrien’s cryptic work of art — it was a story. Their story. Slowly, she placed it in his lap. Adrien looked at the manuscript without touching it for a long time, as if reading its aura first, not its ink. Then, with reverence, he closed his sketchbook, set it aside, and cradled the manuscript like one might hold a returned memory.
He turned the first page, his eyes moving across the text, pausing briefly at the names, at the verses that had once been his private anguish. There was a flicker of emotion — the smallest tremor in the corner of his mouth, the ghost of something between pain and peace. Still, he said nothing. Not a syllable. But he looked at Vidya again, longer this time, and nodded once more. It was enough. She knew then that her journey was complete — not in the way she’d imagined with a headline, a published exposé, or a dramatic reckoning — but in the soft, sacred acknowledgment that truth had been seen. That it could now rest. Adrien returned to his parchment, but now he drew not figures, but glyphs, symbols perhaps only he understood. She didn’t need to know their meaning. She stood, brushed the red dust from her hands, and turned away without another word. Her steps were slower now, not from hesitation, but from reverence.
As she walked down the winding path from the monastery, Vidya felt the manuscript’s final line echo in her mind like a whispered benediction: “Sometimes silence is not absence. It is protection.” And she understood at last. The story wasn’t meant to be published. Not now. Perhaps not ever. It was meant to be remembered, not weaponized. She had been chasing a ghost only to find a sanctuary. Instead of a book, she would write her own account — not for the world, but for herself. Not to expose, but to preserve. To honour Adrien, Amélie, Father Dominic, and even Arul — all guardians of an unspoken truth. In her quiet flat that night, she opened a blank journal and titled it The Last Manuscript. And for the first time in years, she didn’t write with urgency. She wrote with understanding. With silence, not as a void, but as a voice.
End
