1
The rain hadn’t stopped in twelve hours.
It came down in long, dirty sheets, soaking the streets of Mumbai in a miserable, sticky silence. Neon signs flickered through misty glass. Puddles pooled over cracked footpaths. And somewhere between the dripping lamp-posts of Andheri East and the rust-red gates of Lokhandwala, a yellow-black Premier Padmini taxi came to a halt—and never moved again.
That was the only fact the police could agree on.
They found the taxi parked awkwardly on a side street near DN Nagar Metro Station. The driver’s side door was ajar, rain pooling in the footwell. The windshield wipers still danced to a rhythm only they knew, squeaking over the glass. Inside: the leather seat was soaked, the dashboard ticking faintly as it cooled. But there was no driver. No signs of struggle. No witnesses.
Just a faint whiff of cigarette smoke and the strange silence of something abandoned too quickly.
Rehaan Joshi first heard about it on Twitter.
He was still in bed, nursing a cold and an even colder heartbreak. Journalism, he’d realized in his two years at CrimeBeat Weekly, was less about justice and more about clicks. He wrote about petty thefts, political scams, and sensational murders—but the kind that lost meaning after the 50th article. Nothing stuck. No one remembered the victims. Even he barely remembered their names.
But the tweet was odd.
@MumbaiLostVoices:
“Yellow Padmini. Driver missing. Engine running. No blood. No body. Just rain. Just silence. #LastRide”
He clicked on the image.
It showed the taxi under a flickering sodium light. The timestamp read 3:12 AM. Rehaan frowned. The photo wasn’t taken by police or press. This account—“MumbaiLostVoices”—had been posting cryptic images for months. Photos of back alleys, closed doors, bloodstains in lifts, old phone booths. Urban decay mixed with poetry. Most people thought it was an art project.
But this post felt different. Too real.
Rehaan sat up.
By 10 AM, he was standing beside the same taxi, now cordoned off by police tape. An officer sipped chai nearby, his plastic poncho squeaking with every move.
“Media?” the constable asked without looking up.
“Sort of,” Rehaan replied, flashing his press ID.
“No one’s allowed near. CID has taken the case. High alert.”
“Is it true the cab was found still running?”
The constable raised an eyebrow. “Who told you that?”
“I have sources.”
The constable snorted. “It was idling, yes. Driver was an old man. Everyone called him ‘Nana.’ No family. Rented the taxi off a garage in Goregaon. Last seen around midnight near Saki Naka. Picked up a passenger—male, tall, wearing a white kurta. That’s all we know.”
“No CCTV?”
“Malfunctioning. Or someone made sure it was.”
Rehaan jotted that down.
“And you’re sure the car was left at 3:12 AM?”
“We didn’t say that.”
He paused. “Where’d you get that number?”
Rehaan didn’t answer. Instead, he peered inside the taxi. Something glinted on the passenger seat. He took a photo through the glass. A small silver matchbox. Old-fashioned, engraved with a spiral symbol. Not something you’d expect in a city drowning in lighters.
“Where is the car now?” Rehaan asked.
“Being moved to the yard. You won’t get access unless you’ve got a CID pass or know the right people.”
Rehaan did know someone. But she wasn’t talking to him.
Not after what he wrote last month.
By noon, he was in Lower Parel, tapping on a frosted-glass office door that read:
Inspector Anaya Deshmukh
Crime Branch, Mumbai Division
The door opened slowly.
“Rehaan,” she said. “You have five seconds.”
“Anaya—”
“Four.”
“It’s about the missing taxi driver.”
She paused.
“Keep talking.”
“I think it’s connected to a pattern. That Twitter account, MumbaiLostVoices? They posted the photo of the taxi before police arrived. How did they know? There’s something here. Something bigger.”
She sighed and motioned him inside.
The office was sparse. Whiteboards lined one wall, scrawled with messy timelines and photos. Coffee-stained folders sat stacked on the desk. Rehaan noticed a map of Mumbai with pins clustered around the western suburbs.
“You think it’s connected to the Vanishing Zone cases?” Rehaan asked, pointing to the board.
Anaya frowned. “Don’t say that term. The media made it up. There’s no such thing.”
“Then why are there four pins between Versova and Goregaon? All missing persons. No ransom, no body.”
“Coincidence.”
Rehaan sat. “What if someone is choosing their victims carefully? Taxi drivers. Night-shift workers. People who won’t be missed. And what if someone is watching the crime scenes—posting them as ‘art’?”
Anaya didn’t answer.
Instead, she pulled out a file. Inside was a photo of the silver matchbox. Rehaan leaned forward.
“We found it in the taxi,” she said. “No fingerprints. The symbol on it—we’ve seen it before.”
She flipped another page.
Rehaan stared. It was a photo from 1997. A murder scene. An old house, blood smeared on the walls, and on the floor—another matchbox with the same spiral. The case file read: “Victim: Raghu Pradhan. Age: 46.
Crime Scene: Shivaji Park, Dadar.
Status: Cold Case.”
“What is this?”
“An unsolved murder. Victim was a theatre director. Was working on a banned play called The Spiral Room before he died. We found the same symbol at the crime scene. Now, twenty-seven years later, it shows up again in a missing person’s case.”
Rehaan felt the back of his neck prickle.
“I need that matchbox.”
“No.”
“Let me photograph it.”
“No.”
“Then tell me more about the passenger Nana picked up.”
Anaya’s jaw clenched.
“The last GPS ping shows the cab stopped for thirty seconds near a place called Purani Gali, just before it reached DN Nagar. No footage. But we did get one blurry shot from a traffic cam.”
She turned her screen. A grainy photo appeared.
A man in white, stepping into the cab. But his face… it was obscured by the reflection of a streetlight. Just a faint outline.
But something about him—his height, his posture—looked strangely familiar to Rehaan.
“Where is this Purani Gali?”
“Technically, it doesn’t exist on official maps anymore. The entire lane was cleared ten years ago for metro work. But one house remains.”
She handed him a paper.
“Don’t go there alone,” she said.
Rehaan smiled. “That’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
By sunset, he stood outside the lone remaining bungalow on Purani Gali.
The house looked like it had grown from the ground—moss-covered, hunched over, as if the years had made it tired. Rusted gates hung half open. A broken nameplate read: “R. Pradhan.”
Rehaan’s pulse quickened.
Raghu Pradhan—the murdered director.
He climbed the steps. Each creaked under his weight. The door was unlocked.
Inside, dust blanketed every surface. Books with curled pages lined the walls. On a far shelf, a faded theatre mask stared at him.
And then—he heard it.
A faint sound. Like someone humming.
He turned.
In the corner of the room stood a figure. Tall. Wearing a white kurta. Face shadowed.
“Who are you?” Rehaan asked.
The figure didn’t speak.
Instead, he dropped something on the floor.
Another matchbox.
Then he disappeared into the shadows—through a door that slammed shut behind him.
Rehaan rushed forward, but the door led only to a wall.
He picked up the matchbox.
Same spiral.
Inside—was a small folded paper. It read:
“He wasn’t the first.
He won’t be the last.
Ride ends when the city remembers.”
Rehaan staggered back.
He didn’t notice the camera flash behind him. Or the soft click of a photo being posted online, seconds later.
2
The rain had turned to a fine mist by the time Rehaan left the bungalow at Purani Gali. But inside his chest, a storm brewed — every breath felt heavier, as if the spiral drawn on that silver matchbox had lodged itself inside him. He walked quickly through the lane, now deserted, its only audience the half-drowned street dogs and flickering sodium lights. His phone buzzed once. A new tweet from @MumbaiLostVoices had just gone up.
“And the journalist meets the spiral too. He thinks he found a clue. But what if it found him first?” #LastPassenger #RaghuReturns
Attached was a photo. It showed Rehaan inside the Pradhan bungalow, matchbox in hand. His back was turned, but it was unmistakably him. The timestamp was barely three minutes old. He hadn’t seen or heard anyone. No footsteps. No camera click.
He froze mid-step, heart hammering. Someone was watching him. From where?
He scanned the street. Just shadows, broken fences, and the rattling call of a hawker pushing a cart somewhere far off. His journalistic instincts — dull from months of chasing mundane crimes — were now electric. He wasn’t just covering a story anymore. He was inside it. And someone — maybe the passenger in white, maybe the ghost of a twenty-seven-year-old murder — had just marked him as the next piece on the board.
By the time he reached his apartment in Bandra, it was past 8 PM. The power had just returned, and the blinking router lights gave the room a sickly green glow. Rehaan poured himself a drink — cheap whiskey and rainwater from his damp coat sleeves — and sat staring at the matchbox. He opened it again. The note was gone.
Impossible.
He’d tucked it into his wallet, zipped it inside his jacket, and yet — only the box remained. No paper. No spiral note. Just a faint burnt smell, as if someone had lit a match inside without opening it.
His phone buzzed again. This time, it was Anaya.
“Where are you?” she snapped, no hello.
“Home. Why?”
“You went to Pradhan’s house.”
“So?”
“So you need to leave Mumbai. Now.”
He laughed. “Why? Ghosts can’t kill me, Inspector.”
“This isn’t a joke, Rehaan. You have no idea what you’ve stepped into. That house? It’s been sealed by Crime Branch twice. Every officer who went inside filed for transfer within a month. Two of them—”
“What?”
“Dead. Suicide. Or what looked like suicide.”
A chill crawled up Rehaan’s spine.
“Someone’s watching me. The photo from inside that house—it’s online.”
“I know. That account’s not just a lurker. We think it’s him.”
“Who?”
She hesitated. “The Passenger.”
“That’s not a name. It’s a myth.”
“No. It’s a signature. Every missing person connected to these cases? Last seen with a tall man in a white kurta. But here’s the twist — he doesn’t appear on CCTV. He doesn’t talk to anyone. He never pays the fare. He just… appears. Then the driver disappears.”
Rehaan’s voice was low. “You’ve seen him?”
“No. But my father did. Back in ’97. He was the first officer on the Raghu Pradhan scene. He said a man was watching from the alley. Tall. White kurta. Didn’t blink. When he turned to question him — gone.”
“And you believed him?”
“I didn’t. Until last year, when a woman in Borivali went missing. Her rickshaw driver claimed she vanished mid-ride. Left only her sandals behind. Said a man in white had flagged the auto, then waved him off, saying, ‘She won’t return now.’”
Silence hung heavy between them.
Finally, Rehaan spoke. “I think this goes deeper. That matchbox — the spiral symbol — I saw something like it years ago. In my grandfather’s trunk. He used to run a small theatre group in Byculla. They staged a banned play. Something about spirals. I never thought much of it. But now…”
“You think your family is connected?”
“I don’t know. But I think I need to find out.”
Anaya exhaled. “Then meet me tomorrow. 9 AM. CST Archive Room. There’s something you should see.”
Rehaan hardly slept.
His dreams were filled with taxi horns, spinning matchbox spirals, and a man with a face made of static. He woke in sweat, mouth dry, and decided he needed to visit someone before the sun came up.
His grandfather.
The old age home in Byculla had not changed in a decade. It still smelled of turmeric, medicine, and forgotten birthdays. Room 204 was where Gopal Joshi lived — or rather, waited. The once-celebrated stage director had grown thin and forgetful. His eyes held stories that his mouth refused to share.
“Dadu,” Rehaan said softly, kneeling beside him.
The old man blinked slowly.
“I need to ask about the Spiral Room.”
Gopal Joshi’s fingers trembled. His mouth opened slightly, then shut. He looked past Rehaan, towards a corner of the room.
“He’s come again, hasn’t he?” the old man rasped.
Rehaan stiffened.
“Who?”
“The man in white. He watches. From doorways. From puddles. From mirrors. He watched Raghu too. We told him not to stage that play. But he wouldn’t listen.”
“Raghu Pradhan?”
“Yes.” Gopal’s voice cracked. “Raghu found the box. Same as you. Thought it was art. Theatre. He said the spiral was a metaphor for memory. He didn’t know it was a map.”
“A map to what?”
Gopal’s eyes turned glassy. “To where the city forgets. And where the forgotten wait.”
Rehaan felt a tremor in his hands.
“Dadu, do you remember the play? The script? Anything?”
“Burnt,” the old man whispered. “We burnt every copy after Raghu died. But the city still remembers the words. They echo in empty houses.”
Rehaan pressed gently, “What about the matchbox? Where did Raghu get it?”
Gopal’s lips twitched. “He said a man gave it to him outside the theatre. Said it was his story now. That the box would open doors.”
Then, his eyes rolled upward. “You’ve opened one too, haven’t you? Rehaan… don’t follow the spiral. It only leads to absence.”
By the time Rehaan reached CST Archives, his mind felt like it was peeling in layers. Anaya met him at the iron door to the basement records room. Her face was pale.
“Someone broke into the evidence locker last night,” she said. “The matchbox you saw? Gone.”
Rehaan felt his throat dry.
She led him down the narrow corridor. At the end was a folder marked CODE: SP-17.
Inside were clippings — yellowed newsprint, photos, diary entries. They told the story of a string of murders across two decades. All with one common thread: the spiral symbol.
And then, a journal page. Handwritten, dated July 1979.
“The man came again today. Always in white. Always without a voice. He leaves behind boxes. Small, silver, perfect. Inside — nothing. But once you’ve opened it, you start hearing things. Doors closing. Whispers in lifts. A song with no melody.
I think he collects absence. People not just gone, but erased.”
Anaya looked at him. “This journal belonged to a psychiatrist who treated Raghu. She went missing in 1980. The entry above was her last.”
Rehaan whispered, “Why didn’t anyone follow this trail?”
“Because everyone who did… disappeared. Or went mad. Including her.”
Just then, her phone buzzed.
She checked the screen and turned pale.
“What is it?” he asked.
She turned the screen to him.
@MumbaiLostVoices:
“Two found the door. One will walk through. The other will vanish. #NextStop”
Attached was a live location pin.
“Where is this?” Rehaan asked.
She zoomed in. “Marine Lines. The old tram depot.”
Rehaan didn’t hesitate.
The depot was a ruin from the 1940s. Crumbling red brick walls, rusted tracks, and silence. The kind of silence that felt designed. Anaya parked a few feet from the gate.
“Let’s stay together,” she warned.
They stepped into the depot.
Inside, graffiti covered the walls. Strange symbols. Spirals drawn in charcoal. And in the center — a taxi. Yellow-black. Headlights off. Windows fogged.
Rehaan moved closer.
There was someone in the driver’s seat.
He knocked gently.
No response.
He opened the door.
It was Nana.
The missing driver.
Eyes open, staring ahead. Not dead, not alive. Frozen in place, lips parted slightly, breath shallow.
Rehaan touched his arm. Ice cold.
“Call for medical,” he whispered.
Anaya stepped aside, dialing. And that’s when Rehaan noticed it — in the passenger seat, another matchbox.
He picked it up, hesitating.
Inside — a mirror shard. Tiny. And etched on the glass — his own name.
Rehaan Joshi.
His blood turned to ice.
He looked up.
In the depot mirror ahead — a faint figure stood behind him.
Tall. White kurta.
But when he spun around — there was nothing there.
Only silence.
3
Rehaan didn’t scream.
He wanted to — when he saw the reflection in the depot mirror, when he turned and found nothing but emptiness behind him — but something inside him had already accepted the impossible. Somewhere between the abandoned bungalow, the silver matchbox, and the lifeless man in the taxi, he had crossed a line. He was no longer chasing the story. The story was now chasing him.
He slipped the mirror shard back into the box and closed it gently. His name was etched onto the glass, as if it had always been there — not written, not carved, but fused. A premonition? A warning?
Anaya returned, phone still in hand. “Ambulance is en route. I told them Nana is in a catatonic state.”
Rehaan nodded slowly. “He’s not the only thing frozen here. Look at this place. Nothing’s moved. There’s no wind. No dust. It’s like this entire depot is held in suspension.”
He turned again to the mirror — the one where he had seen the figure — but it was cracked now, the reflection warped. The man in white was gone. But Rehaan could still feel him in the air, like static on skin.
“I found this in the cab,” Rehaan said, handing her the matchbox.
Anaya opened it, frowned. “Nothing inside.”
“What? No, there was a mirror piece — with my name—”
She shook her head. “It’s empty, Rehaan.”
He snatched it back, flipped it open. Empty.
His voice dropped. “He’s playing with perception.”
She looked at him. “Who?”
Rehaan didn’t answer. His eyes were drawn to something on the wall just behind the taxi. A mural — graffiti, but older, partially scrubbed. It was a series of spirals. Not painted in haste, but methodically, perfectly concentric, like someone had traced it again and again.
He stepped closer and ran his fingers along it.
There were words under the spiral.
“The Spiral Room is never closed. It just forgets you.”
Anaya joined him. “You know what that is, don’t you?”
He nodded. “Raghu Pradhan’s banned play. My grandfather said they destroyed every script. But the name… keeps showing up.”
“Why would a play connect to a string of disappearances?”
Rehaan looked at her. “What if the play wasn’t fiction? What if it was based on real events? And someone — this ‘Passenger’ — didn’t want the truth staged?”
Anaya hesitated. “Do you remember what your grandfather told you about the play?”
“Just that Raghu called it ‘a theatre of forgetting.’ He said actors began losing memories during rehearsals. One of them ended up in a mental facility. He called it cursed.”
“And now the curse is writing your name on glass,” she murmured.
They both turned as the sound of the ambulance siren pierced the dead air. Rehaan turned back to the mural and took a photo. Just in case it too, like everything else in this mystery, decided to vanish the moment he turned away.
That night, Rehaan did something he hadn’t done in years.
He rewatched his grandfather’s final recorded play — The Forgotten Stage — staged in 1989, just before he retired. The VHS had been digitized long ago and sat deep within his hard drive, unnamed, unlabeled. As the grainy footage played, Rehaan sat in darkness, watching familiar faces in unfamiliar ways.
Something odd caught his attention in the final act.
A masked actor — tall, white costume, face hidden — enters the stage. He doesn’t speak. He just circles the main character three times, drops a silver object, and exits.
Rehaan paused the frame.
The object?
A silver matchbox.
He zoomed in, cleaned the image, and enhanced the contrast. There it was. The same spiral. The same impossible symbol from the taxi. From the depot. From Purani Gali.
The man in white had been written into the play.
Or had he written himself into it?
Rehaan replayed the segment.
This wasn’t acting. The other performers seemed genuinely disturbed by the masked man’s presence. They looked off-stage, confused. It was as if they hadn’t expected him.
He checked the cast credits.
No name matched the figure in white.
His grandfather’s voice echoed from memory: “He’s come again, hasn’t he?”
Rehaan didn’t sleep that night. The mirror above his bathroom sink remained covered. He no longer trusted his own reflection.
The next morning, Rehaan returned to the Pradhan bungalow — not out of recklessness, but because the spiral demanded answers. If the origins lay anywhere, it was there.
But this time, he wasn’t alone.
He had brought someone with him. Nikita, a theatre researcher and archivist from NCPA, and an old classmate. They hadn’t spoken in two years — not since she accused him of turning tragedy into headlines.
She stood in front of the house now, arms folded.
“You dragged me out here at 6 AM for what?”
“To prove the Spiral Room existed,” Rehaan said.
She raised an eyebrow. “You sound like your grandfather now.”
“Just come in.”
They entered the house. The air smelled of rust and memory. Dust motes danced in the morning light. The same theatre mask stared from the shelf. But something had changed.
The corridor at the back, which had once led to a blank wall — was now open.
A new hallway had revealed itself.
Nikita paused. “This wasn’t here last time?”
“I swear it was a wall.”
They stepped in. The corridor was narrow, covered in peeling wallpaper. It smelled of mold and old paper. At the end — a wooden door. Black. No handle.
Engraved in the center was the spiral.
Without hesitation, Rehaan pushed.
The door swung open soundlessly.
Inside was a small room. Bare walls. A stage, slightly elevated, no more than ten feet across. Three rows of empty wooden chairs faced it. And on the stage — a chair, a spotlight, and a single silver matchbox placed center stage.
Nikita gasped. “This… this is the Spiral Room.”
Rehaan walked slowly to the stage.
He picked up the matchbox.
Inside — a burnt matchstick and a scrap of paper. This time, no trick. He unfolded the note.
“Each performance removes one memory.
Each spiral turns time.
Step into the light, and you won’t return whole.”
Nikita was staring at the walls now. Faded photographs had begun to reveal themselves — faces of actors, rehearsals, scripts. All marked with the spiral. All wearing hollow expressions.
“Rehaan,” she whispered. “These people… they’re the missing. They’ve been erased not from life, but from memory.”
The idea hit him like a wave.
The Passenger didn’t kill. He didn’t kidnap.
He removed.
Like scenes cut from a film. Like stories untold. Like actors who had played roles and then were simply… forgotten.
He looked back at the matchbox.
A line of text on the bottom:
“Your act begins now.”
Suddenly, the door slammed shut.
Nikita screamed, rushing to pull it open, but it wouldn’t budge.
From somewhere above, a voice echoed — not spoken, but remembered.
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Spiral Room.”
Lights flared.
On the stage, the spotlight moved — away from Rehaan, to the empty chair.
And slowly — impossibly — someone began to materialize in that seat.
White kurta.
Face blurred.
Hands folded.
Watching.
Waiting.
Rehaan stepped back, heart pounding.
The man in white was here.
Not in flesh, but in presence.
The Spiral Room had reopened.
And its audience was ready.
4
The man in white sat perfectly still under the spotlight, his blurred face pulsing slightly — as if made not of flesh, but static. Every time Rehaan tried to focus, it slipped, like a dream remembered wrong. His white kurta shimmered faintly in the stage light, absorbing every sound, every breath.
Nikita backed away from the front row of chairs, her eyes fixed on the seated figure. “What is that? A projection?”
“No,” Rehaan whispered. “It’s him. The Passenger.”
The room smelled faintly of match smoke. Somewhere, an old gramophone had started playing. Not music, but something stranger — a recording of people whispering different lines at once. Bits of dialogue, incomplete thoughts, as if a hundred plays were being performed atop one another.
“He came without a ticket—” “Don’t answer the door—” “There’s no seat left but yours—” “He waits until you’re empty—” “The memory is a lie—”
And then, silence.
The spotlight flickered. And the man in white vanished.
But in his place — on the chair — sat a tape recorder. Rehaan climbed the stage cautiously, picked it up, and pressed play.
A voice, soft and slow, filled the room.
“Absence is a language. One you’ve already begun to learn. Do you feel it? That hollow where something once was? Names you can’t remember? Faces that never belonged to you?
This city sheds memory like skin. And I am its archivist.”
The tape stopped.
Nikita looked pale. “I… I forgot my own phone number just now.”
“What?”
“I swear,” she said, trembling. “For five seconds, it was just… gone. Like it had never existed.”
Rehaan’s stomach turned.
The Spiral Room didn’t just display absence.
It generated it.
Each step within was a transaction — memory for revelation. Insight for forgetting. He realized, with horror, that he hadn’t asked Nikita the one question he should have: Why had she agreed to come after so long?
And now… he wasn’t sure he remembered how he knew her at all.
They managed to push the door open after a few minutes of pressure — as if the room had finally decided to let them go. The corridor behind was silent again. No voices. No shifting walls. Just the echo of the gramophone in their bones.
Rehaan checked his phone.
Battery: 13%.
Signal: None.
Date: Blank.
He powered it off.
Outside, the world hadn’t changed — yet something was undeniably different. The birds in the trees were quiet. The lane was empty. Not abandoned, but unnaturally paused.
Nikita gripped his sleeve. “I think we need to see your grandfather again.”
Rehaan nodded. If anyone had ever escaped the Spiral, it was him.
Room 204, Byculla Old Age Home.
Gopal Joshi sat staring out the window. When they entered, he turned, slowly. His eyes were not those of a tired old man anymore — they were clear, sharp, and scared.
“You went to the room,” he said. “Didn’t you?”
Rehaan sat beside him. “Yes. And he was there.”
Gopal closed his eyes. “I told Raghu not to write the play. Told him to burn the script. But he thought it was art. He thought he had invented the Spiral. He didn’t know he was just echoing it.”
“Who is the Passenger?” Rehaan asked.
“The city’s witness,” Gopal replied. “A collector of all that’s been erased. You know how Mumbai forgets? How places vanish overnight, people disappear, identities dissolve in the crowd? That isn’t decay. It’s curation. He is the one who archives absence.”
Rehaan frowned. “But why the matchboxes?”
“A key. The matchbox contains absence. It marks those ready to be unwritten.”
Nikita asked, “What happens if you open too many?”
“You don’t vanish all at once,” Gopal said softly. “You fade. Memory by memory. Scene by scene. Until you are no longer in your own story.”
Rehaan felt a sudden pressure behind his eyes.
“What if… what if I’m already missing something?”
His grandfather nodded. “You are. You think the story began with Raghu. But you forgot something before that. Before journalism. Before the play.”
“What?”
“You and Raghu—” Gopal hesitated, then looked down. “—you were once on the same stage.”
Rehaan’s breath caught. “I never acted.”
Gopal looked at him. “Exactly. And yet… here you are, being watched.”
That night, Rehaan locked his apartment and covered every mirror.
He opened his grandfather’s old trunk again, searching for something — anything — that could confirm the link.
At the very bottom, tucked beneath dust-covered scripts, he found it.
A cast photograph.
Dated: May 1997.
Venue: NCPA Experimental Theatre.
He scanned the faces.
There, to his shock — was himself.
Nine years old.
Standing next to a smiling Raghu Pradhan.
The name scrawled beneath the photo read: Spiral Room (Workshop Performance)
He stared, unable to breathe. His eyes blurred.
He had been in the play.
He had forgotten an entire performance.
A week. Maybe more.
Erased.
Not just by trauma.
But by design.
The Passenger had chosen him long ago.
The phone vibrated.
A text.
Unknown number:
“Your final scene approaches. CST. Midnight. One audience. No applause.”
He arrived at Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus a few minutes before midnight.
The station was not empty, but the people felt… wrong. Staring into space. No announcements. No trains. Just flickering lights.
As he walked, he saw spirals etched into the tiles.
Subtle. Faint.
A hidden stage, beneath the real.
Then he saw her.
Anaya.
Standing by platform 9.
But her eyes were glassy. She didn’t react when he called her name.
He reached her, shook her shoulders. “Anaya!”
She blinked. “Who are you?”
His heart sank. “It’s me. Rehaan.”
“I don’t remember you.”
She stepped back.
Disappeared into the crowd.
Or rather — the crowd moved through her.
She was a memory now. Or becoming one.
And then, he saw the train.
No lights. No markings. Just a slow, silent arrival at the far end.
Door open.
No driver.
No passengers.
Only one seat, visible through the window.
A matchbox sat on it.
Rehaan walked to it, as if compelled.
Boarded.
Sat.
Picked up the matchbox.
Opened it.
Inside — a photo.
Not of him.
But of younger him.
Standing center stage.
Microphone in hand.
A spotlight on his face.
The note beneath read:
“You always belonged to the Spiral Room.
It never forgot.
It just waited for your next act.”
The train door closed.
The lights outside flickered.
And the city exhaled.
5
The train moved without sound, cutting through the night like a whisper too faint to remember. Inside the compartment, everything felt muted—no engine hum, no flickering bulbs, not even the creak of the rails beneath. Rehaan sat alone, gripping the matchbox, the photo of his younger self folded neatly back inside. Outside the windows, the city passed in strange, fragmented glimpses—snippets of Mumbai that didn’t exist anymore: the old Irani café near Grant Road that had shut down in 2004; the colonial clock tower near Mazgaon, demolished for metro expansion; even the giant banyan tree from his school courtyard that he hadn’t thought of in twenty years. But none of these were memories—they were presences, like the city was being reassembled by someone who remembered it differently. Then, slowly, he began to notice the signs: shopfronts with names he didn’t recognize but felt familiar; people on the streets whose faces triggered emotions but no names; a sense that he was still in Mumbai, but one version removed, one layer down—a version of the city that remembered everything he had forgotten. When the train stopped, there was no announcement. The doors slid open, and he stepped out into CST station—but not the one he knew. This was silent Mumbai, the ghost layer, where all those erased things lived on. The station’s digital clock read 12:00 AM, but the hands on the antique wall clock pointed to 3:17, frozen in contradiction. The place was empty save for a single figure standing beneath a spiral sign: a woman in a pale blue sari, hair loose over her shoulders, holding a mirror. Rehaan approached slowly, and she turned—it was his mother. But not as he remembered her from the accident twenty years ago. She was young here, vibrant, and yet not surprised to see him. “You’re late,” she said gently. “He doesn’t like delays.” Rehaan froze. “You… you died.” She tilted her head. “I was removed. There’s a difference.” He stepped closer. “How is this possible?” She smiled sadly. “Every memory you bury becomes part of his stage. He collects the unspoken, the hidden, the painful. That’s how he grows stronger. And you, my son—you gave him everything.” Rehaan’s breath shook. “I didn’t choose to forget you.” “But you did,” she whispered, touching his cheek. “Not in guilt, but in survival. You left the Spiral once. You tried to live. But the room doesn’t let its actors go—not forever.” Around them, CST shimmered with a dreamlike light. Spirals formed in the marble, curled into the ironwork above. Rehaan felt his knees weaken. “What happens now?” She stepped back, and her form began to fade, becoming transparent like the reflection of a reflection. “Now, your act begins.” As she vanished, her mirror dropped and shattered at his feet—but in the reflection of each shard, he saw a different self: one who never left theatre, one who married Anaya, one who died young, one who never spoke again. Fragments of possibilities. And then, footsteps echoed behind him. Rehaan turned. The man in white had returned. No longer blurred, his face was now clear—and horrifyingly familiar. It was Rehaan himself, older, eyes hollow, mouth slightly open as if mid-sentence. The Passenger smiled and lifted a hand. Rehaan staggered back. “No. I won’t fade. I won’t be part of your performance.” But his twin self only tilted his head and spoke—not aloud, but into Rehaan’s mind, using the language of absence, a whisper that shaped itself in thought: “You already are. You’ve been narrating your vanishing since the first word.” Rehaan tried to scream, but no sound came out. Around him, the station lights dimmed, and all sound drained away. The walls of CST peeled like theatre backdrops, revealing a black void beyond, filled with floating matchboxes, each turning slowly in the dark, each labeled with a name—and he recognized them all. Nikita. Anaya. Raghu. Gopal. His childhood best friend. A teacher he’d once loved. Faces. Names. Whole lives. Forgotten. Each one burned faintly from within, like lanterns. One final matchbox drifted toward him, larger than the others, glowing silver. His name was etched into its lid: Rehaan Joshi – Final Scene Pending. He reached out and touched it. Instantly, he was no longer standing—but seated in a theatre, back in the Spiral Room. But this time, the seats were full. Hundreds of audience members stared at him with empty eyes. He looked down. He was holding a script. The title read The Last Passenger. The first line: “He walks into a city that remembers nothing, not even itself.” The lights above him blazed, and a voice boomed across the ceiling—not his, not anyone’s, but the room itself speaking: “Act Five. Scene One. The City Without Rehaan.” He stood up. The crowd did not blink. The lights dimmed again. The spiral on the floor beneath him began to rotate slowly—not in motion, but in perception, as if time itself was folding around its shape. And Rehaan, still gripping the matchbox, opened his mouth to speak the next line. But he had forgotten it. Completely. Utterly. And as the spotlight grew brighter, a tear ran down his cheek—not out of fear, but because in that moment, he finally understood what the Passenger was: not death, not evil, not madness—but the quiet erosion of being remembered. A stage where those who vanished were not mourned, but rewritten. And he, Rehaan Joshi, was already a ghost in someone else’s story.
6
Rehaan stood in the center of the Spiral Room, though it no longer looked like the makeshift theatre above the printing press—it had grown into something far older, more ancient than brick and wood, as if it had been constructed not by architects but by memory itself. The walls pulsated with soft breathing, the red curtains no longer cloth but skin, warm and yielding. Rows of seats stretched infinitely into darkness, each one occupied by watchers whose faces refused to resolve, blurred into a spectral audience of forgotten voices. He clutched the silver matchbox with his name on it, feeling its weight shift subtly with every heartbeat, as though it were measuring his presence, preparing to subtract him syllable by syllable. The script still lay at his feet, the title glowing faintly: The Last Passenger. Its pages turned by themselves, flipping through blank spaces where dialogue should have been, erasures where scenes once stood. A spotlight narrowed onto Rehaan’s face, and an invisible bell rang thrice—clear, hollow, final. He felt his body begin to move, not of his own accord, but with the mechanical precision of someone reciting steps he had never learned, guided by strings that had no puppeteer. As he moved to center stage, the lights dimmed and a door appeared at the back of the theatre—not a prop, but real, old, carved with spirals that bled red in the flickering light. It opened, and out walked his former self—young, clean-shaven, eyes wide with ambition and the illusion of free will. The younger Rehaan took a seat in the front row and nodded at the stage. The message was clear: Perform yourself. The theatre began to shift and shimmer, sets rising out of the ground like bones from an unmarked grave. Suddenly, he was in his old school classroom, standing at the front while a chalkboard behind him filled with words he didn’t write: “You were here. But you were also erased.” Then it melted into his first newsroom job, the smell of ink and desperation thick in the air. His editor loomed behind him, faceless, repeating, “Don’t dig too deep. Truth is a rehearsal too.” Then again, the scenery bled away, turning into the hospital corridor where Anaya had last held his hand, her eyes red, her lips mouthing goodbye—but her mouth didn’t move now, just trembled like a glitching projection. Scene after scene unfolded—not memories, but repetitions, distorted rehearsals of moments he thought were real, now revealed as lines from a script written without his consent. He tried to stop. To scream. To break the fourth wall. But his lips moved with unnatural rhythm, reciting lines he didn’t recognize: “Absence must be practiced. Presence is only convincing when performed beside void.” The audience clapped—not hands, but a sound like paper tearing, like pages being ripped from a book. His younger self smiled. Another door opened stage left, and Gopal Joshi, his grandfather, walked out, mouth sewn shut, eyes pleading. He held out a small slip of paper. Rehaan leapt forward and took it. A matchbox label. Not his. Not Gopal’s. It read: Nikita Sharma – Understudy. The spotlight snapped to the left wing, where Nikita now stood, disoriented, her hands trembling as she was shoved onto the stage by shadows dressed like stagehands. She stumbled forward, looked at him, and whispered, “I don’t remember the lines. I don’t know who I am anymore.” Rehaan stepped toward her, arms outstretched, but his hands passed through her, like mist. She looked at him with deep sadness. “I think this is your play now. I was only meant to watch you disappear.” Her form dissolved into paper, scattering like confetti across the stage. The script at his feet caught fire, word by word vanishing until only the title remained. The theatre’s ceiling peeled away to reveal a black sky full of glowing matchboxes instead of stars, each spinning slowly, casting spiral-shaped shadows across the walls. From the darkness above, a giant face emerged—not monstrous, but mundane, unfinished, like a sketch never completed. It spoke in every voice he had ever heard: his father’s, his lover’s, his editor’s, even his own. “Do you see now? You rehearsed your vanishing every day. Every lie, every forgotten name, every moment you stood still while the world moved on. We merely preserved what you left behind.” Rehaan fell to his knees, the stage floor softening into sand. “Then what am I now?” he shouted. The face did not blink. “You are the scene that never ends. The rehearsal that repeats because the actor cannot learn his truth.” The lights surged. The audience stood as one, clapping without sound, their forms blurring into spirals of light and ash. The matchbox in his hand opened by itself. Inside: nothing. Not even fire. Just a slip of paper. He unfolded it. The only word written: “Rewrite.” At that moment, a door appeared behind him, glowing faintly blue. One final exit. The lights dimmed. The audience vanished. The theatre crumbled. And Rehaan, clutching the blank paper and the burnt matchbox, stepped through, into whatever came next—unscripted, unwritten, and utterly alone.
7
The light beyond the blue door was not blinding but empty—an absence of color, of form, of logic. Rehaan stepped into it expecting either salvation or annihilation, but what he found was a strange quiet—a liminal space suspended between breath and silence. No walls, no floor, no horizon, and yet he stood, he moved, he remembered. The paper in his hand still bore the word “Rewrite,” though now the ink glowed faintly, as if pulsing to a heartbeat not his own. Then, from the nothingness, a desk emerged. Old, massive, and wooden, with drawers that bled ink. Behind it sat a figure hunched over a typewriter—bald, bespectacled, wearing a white shirt stained with decades of edits. The sound of keys tapping filled the void, rhythmically exact. Rehaan approached, hesitant. The man did not look up, but spoke in a voice both bureaucratic and divine. “Rehaan Joshi. Serial number: 0915-RJ-1979. Status: In revision.” Rehaan swallowed. “Where am I?” The man finally looked up. His eyes were ink-black, pupils shaped like question marks. “You’re in the Department of Narrative Erasure. My office, to be precise. I am the Editor.” Rehaan blinked. “Of…?” “Everything that is unremembered. Every person who disappeared from a memory, every word you meant to say but didn’t, every dream half-recalled and discarded. We file them. We sort them. We redact.” He gestured to a wall that wasn’t there a moment ago—floor-to-ceiling filing cabinets with labels like ‘Unfinished Promises,’ ‘Forgotten Birthdays,’ ‘Lost Children,’ and ‘Voicemails Deleted Without Listening.’ “You’ve been archived several times, Mr. Joshi,” the Editor said, tapping his typewriter again. “But you’re a persistent anomaly.” Rehaan stepped closer, shaking now. “I never asked for any of this. I just wanted answers.” The Editor leaned back, considering him like a difficult paragraph. “And yet you became a question. That’s the problem. People prefer answers. The world only allows questions if they can be eventually resolved, fit into acts and arcs and epilogues. But you? You are a dangling thread.” With a metallic clack, he pulled a lever beneath his desk. A screen descended from above, displaying reels of Rehaan’s life—childhood birthdays with missing guests, news segments never aired, plays cancelled the night before opening, photos where faces had been scribbled out. “Your memories were edited not by us, but by you. You fed the Spiral willingly. Every time you lied, evaded, ignored, you gifted a scene to the Passenger.” Rehaan collapsed into a chair that appeared just as his legs gave out. “Is there no way out?” The Editor smiled faintly. “There is always a way out. But not a way back. You can rewrite, as the note said. But it comes at a cost.” “What cost?” The Editor reached into a drawer and pulled out a fresh manuscript. The title: The Last Passenger – Revised Edition. “In this version, you don’t forget Nikita. You tell the truth about Gopal’s death. You leave Anaya before the illness, instead of making promises you’ll never keep. But in return, this version of you must end. You must consent to erasure of the draft you are now.” Rehaan stared at the manuscript, the weight of it settling in his hands like a choice that had always been waiting. “So I can live… but only if I die?” The Editor chuckled. “Oh no. Not death. Just deletion. You’ll become the version of yourself that should have been—unedited. But this you, the one who’s walked the Spiral, who saw the theatre crack, who heard his mother’s reflection speak? This one vanishes.” Rehaan held the manuscript closer. “And what about the Passenger?” “He will lose a narrator. But he feeds on echoes. He always will. The Spiral never closes. It just waits.” Rehaan thought of Nikita’s dissolving form, the silent applause, the train that whispered Mumbai’s forgotten alleys. He thought of the matchbox and the face above the stage. Slowly, he opened the first page of the manuscript. Blank. “I have to write it?” “No,” the Editor said. “You just have to choose it. The words will come. They always do. But the moment you sign—” He handed Rehaan a pen shaped like a bone. “—you cease to be this draft.” Rehaan’s hand trembled. “And if I don’t?” The typewriter began typing on its own again. A fresh page appeared in the void beside them. It read: Scene continues. Rehaan wanders. Rehaan forgets. Rehaan becomes one more passenger among many. And beneath it, a line in red: Unresolved characters feed the Spiral best. He looked at the pen. Then at the Editor. Then at the manuscript. A moment stretched into forever. Then Rehaan pressed the pen to the page and signed his name. Instantly, the void fractured like cracked glass. The manuscript burst into light. The desk collapsed. The Editor nodded solemnly as he faded, whispering, “Farewell, Draft Seventeen.” The world went white. Then dark. Then gone.
8
Light returned not as a blaze but as a gentle unfolding, like fog lifting from a stage before the curtain rises. Rehaan awoke not with a start, but with the slow calm of someone emerging from deep anesthesia—his body intact, breath steady, but his memory reshaped like paper soaked and redried. He sat up to find himself not in the Spiral Room, not in the Department of Erasure, but on a park bench under a flame tree in full bloom, petals like smoldering fragments falling all around him. The air smelled of earth after rain and roasted peanuts from a vendor nearby. Children ran by with paper kites, laughing in the pink dusk. Mumbai. Real Mumbai. Or at least, one that felt whole. His hand instinctively reached for his pocket, but there was no matchbox—just a folded piece of newspaper with a headline circled in blue ink: Missing Journalist Rehaan Joshi Found After Two Weeks; Memory Loss Suspected. A photograph showed him, dazed, in front of an ambulance, with Nikita standing beside him, hand on his shoulder. He blinked. Nikita. He looked up—and there she was. Not dissolving, not spectral, but alive, walking toward him with two cups of tea in paper cups. “You okay?” she asked, sitting beside him. Her voice was warm, real, not filtered through dream or spiral. “You looked far away.” Rehaan nodded slowly. “I… had a strange dream.” She smiled. “You’ve been saying that for three days. But the doctor said your scans are clear. No trauma. Just some… dissociation, maybe.” He took the tea and sipped it. It was sweet, strong, grounding. “Where was I?” She exhaled. “No one knows. You went to interview someone for that theatre piece. You didn’t come back. Then, twelve days later, you turned up on a local train near Churchgate, repeating your name like a mantra.” He looked down at his hands. Clean. No ink. No script. “Was I different?” he asked. She looked at him gently. “You seem lighter. Like you let go of something heavy.” They sat in silence as the sun dipped lower, turning the sky lavender. But something tugged at him—a fragment. A door. A bell. A stage. “Nikita… was there ever a Spiral Theatre?” She raised an eyebrow. “That old basement above the stationery market? It burned down years ago. Never reopened. Why?” He shook his head. “No reason. I think… I just read about it somewhere.” He reached into his coat pocket and found something new—an envelope, cream-colored, sealed in wax. No stamp. No address. He hesitated. “Did you put this in my pocket?” “Nope,” she said, curious. “Open it.” Inside was a single sheet of old parchment. In elegant black lettering, it read:
Scene One – Again.
A man wakes in a city that has forgotten how to remember.
He remembers too much.
Act begins. Audience waits.
Curtain rises.
– The Editor
His heart skipped. The wind blew a soft spiral of flame tree petals at their feet. He stood, unsure whether to laugh or run. But before he could say anything, a faint sound echoed from somewhere nearby—a bell. Three slow chimes. Nikita looked up. “Did you hear that?” she asked. “Sounded like… a theatre cue?” Rehaan smiled faintly. “Yeah. Just a noise.” But he knew it wasn’t just that. Somewhere, somehow, the Spiral still turned, quietly, patiently. Waiting for the next actor to forget their lines. Waiting for the next scene. And as the wind lifted the last petal from the bench, he whispered to himself, “I remember.” Then he walked on.
End
