Shyamal Roy
1
The monsoon evening wrapped Bhowanipore in a damp silence, the kind that made the air feel heavy with memory. Trisha Dutta stood alone in her grandmother’s crumbling study, the scent of old paper and camphor oil curling into her nostrils. Dust motes floated like silent watchers in the fading light as she lifted the marble lion from the bookshelf, more out of habit than intention. Its weight surprised her—denser than it looked, colder too. Beneath it, tucked neatly in a groove in the wood, was a yellowed envelope sealed with wax that had long since cracked. Her fingers trembled slightly as she pulled it free. The paper was brittle, but the ink was startlingly sharp: “To be read by blood alone. 1943.” No signature. No name. Only a strange symbol at the bottom—an open eye pierced by a quill. A chill ran down her spine, not from fear, but from the sudden sense that she had disturbed something meant to stay asleep.
Later that night, the rain drummed against the iron window grill as Trisha sat cross-legged on her mattress, the letter unfolded in front of her, her tea gone cold. The words were written in crisp, cursive English, with short phrases in Bengali interspersed as if in code: “The fifth flame was snuffed… silence bleeds… only the whisperer remains.” It mentioned a group—Shabdachinha—and referenced four names, one of which, shockingly, was her grandfather’s. She had never known much about him; her father seldom spoke of the man who had supposedly died in a tram accident before Trisha was born. But the letter hinted otherwise. It suggested he was part of something clandestine, something that involved ciphers, symbols, and consequences. Her heart raced as she scrolled through her grandfather’s old diary on the desk, hoping for a clue, a mention, anything that could confirm what she was beginning to suspect.
By midnight, the power cut out with a groan from the ceiling fan, plunging the room into a dim hush. She lit a candle and stared at the letter again. There, in the wax seal remnant, was a faint imprint of a red lotus. It wasn’t printed—it looked smeared, almost fresh. Trisha’s breath caught. Had someone tampered with it before she found it? Or was it something else? Just then, her phone buzzed. No number. Only a message: “You’ve opened the eye. Close it before it sees too much.” Her skin prickled. She looked out through the grilled window at the deserted street. Only the reflection of her own candle stared back. Somewhere far off, the howl of a street dog echoed across the neighborhood, swallowed by the rain.
The next morning, she found another envelope on the threshold of the front door. No address, no sender. Inside was a torn page from a Bengali book, circled in red ink: “Those who whisper to the past must be ready to bleed for the future.” Her mind reeled. This wasn’t coincidence. Someone was watching, someone who knew exactly what she had found. And if the letter from 1943 was real—then someone, perhaps The Whisperer, had never stopped listening.
The corridors of the National Library loomed like silent cathedrals, their damp-smelling air thick with forgotten knowledge. Trisha flashed her research pass at the sleepy clerk and made her way to the restricted archives wing, her shoes clicking softly against the checkered tiles. The letter from her grandfather had mentioned a book—Pratibandhir Golpo, a rare anthology banned during the British Raj, believed to be laced with subversive symbols. As she requested it, the archivist, an old man with cataract-misted eyes and a voice like torn silk, squinted at her. “That one hasn’t been touched in decades. Strange request, miss.” He handed her a tattered file. Trisha sat at the far desk under the flickering tube light, heart pounding. But when she opened the file, her chest sank—pages had been torn out cleanly. Not aged or crumbling, but recent. Someone else had been looking, and they had gotten there first.
She flipped to the inside cover and found a scribbled footnote: “Those who find the fifth name will find the next flame.” It was the same voice as the letter’s—haunting, deliberate. Before she could study more, the lights buzzed and dimmed. A sudden cold crept into the room. The old archivist appeared at her side as if from nowhere, his eyes sharper now. “You shouldn’t read that book alone,” he said. “You know, there were deaths tied to it during the 1940s. Professors, revolutionaries, even a priest. All died mysteriously. They called it coincidence. But the staff here know better. We still find red lotus petals in the old periodical shelves.” He paused, studying her expression. “Some say The Whisperer still leaves messages in the footnotes no one reads.” Then, as quickly as he’d come, he vanished behind the musty curtains of shelves.
Trisha copied the remaining excerpts into her journal, her fingers barely able to grip the pen. The content was bizarre—parables ending with code-like poetry, images of blindfolded statues and empty ink bottles. At the bottom of one page, circled in faded ink, was an address: Kalikrishna Tagore Street, Room 3, Top Floor. The building’s name had been blacked out, but she could just make out the letters “RAJ—”. She packed up, unease crawling over her like a second skin. As she stepped out of the reading hall, her phone vibrated again. This time, it wasn’t a message. It was a voice memo. A whisper. A male voice reading a Tagore poem backwards. Her breath hitched. There was no sender ID.
Outside, the sky had turned a sullen grey, and a drizzle slicked the library steps. Trisha hurried into a cab, constantly checking the rearview mirror. Just before turning into Elgin Road, she saw a man in a navy raincoat standing under the rusting gates of the cemetery—his gaze locked with hers even as the cab sped past. He held a red umbrella. On it, barely visible against the fabric, was the same eye-and-quill symbol from the letter. She didn’t know how, but she was certain of it. The past wasn’t buried. It was circling her, watching her, waiting for her to make the next move.
3
The rain had eased to a whisper by the time Trisha reached Kalikrishna Tagore Street, but the narrow lanes still glistened like forgotten mirrors, reflecting the flickering neon signs of paan shops and shuttered tea stalls. The address led her to a crumbling colonial building sandwiched between a printing press and a defunct tailoring school. The plaque near the gate had been rubbed blank by time and neglect, but Room 3, top floor, was unmistakable—a faded red door with a brass lion knocker and the scent of dust thick as grief. She hesitated, then pushed it open. Bells chimed softly above her, and the warm scent of old paper enveloped her instantly. The bookshop was dimly lit, a single yellow bulb hanging from the ceiling like a tired sun. A maze of shelves formed a silent forest, and at the center sat an old man hunched over a ledger, writing with an ink pen so dry it made no sound.
He looked up slowly, his face weathered like leather parchment. “Trisha Dutta,” he said without surprise, as if reading from a script already written. “You’ve come looking for the words that shouldn’t be remembered.” She opened her mouth, but no words came. “Your grandfather brought that marble lion to me once,” he continued, standing with effort. “He said it would guard the truth. But it failed, didn’t it?” She nodded, finally finding her voice. “What was Shabdachinha?” The old man’s eyes flickered. “A society of shadows. Writers, scholars, dissenters. They believed ink was deadlier than any bullet. They used symbols, not slogans. Their weapons were poems, newspapers, footnotes… each a trigger.” He motioned toward a dusty cabinet and pulled out a slim, brittle book bound in twine. On the cover: Roktolekha — The Blood Script.
Trisha opened it carefully, eyes scanning the contents. The last page was gone. Torn, like the others. But this one bore a scrawled note: “The fourth died in sleep. The fifth will speak through fire.” The old man’s hands trembled as he lit a candle. “The Whisperer was their messenger. But the original one died in 1944. Or so we believed. If messages are still arriving, someone has revived the name.” Trisha felt the pulse in her neck quicken. “Why?” she asked. “To continue what was unfinished,” he whispered. “To remove those marked by the past. Your family is entangled, Trisha. You’re not researching the story—you’re inside it.” She stepped back, the room suddenly colder.
Just as she turned to leave, a gust of wind blew open the narrow window behind her. The candle flickered wildly before extinguishing. In the silence that followed, a red lotus petal drifted down from the rafters, landing on the open book. Trisha stared at it, frozen. The old man had gone completely still. A second later, a soft mechanical whirr came from the street—someone taking a photo with an old shutter camera. She rushed to the balcony, but the street below was empty except for a red umbrella left open on the cobblestone, its surface marked faintly with drying ink. The Whisperer had followed her here.
4
South Park Street Cemetery breathed a strange, solemn air—where gravestones leaned like weary sentinels and the scent of moss clung to every brick. Trisha walked past the archway just before dusk, clutching her grandfather’s old diary and the torn pages from Roktolekha. The cipher hidden in the margins pointed here, to “a grave where names end but whispers remain.” The cemetery stretched before her like a forgotten chapter, and she wove through the paths until she reached a cracked tomb with no inscription, only a sculpted quill embedded in the stone. It was unmistakable. As she knelt to inspect it, her fingers brushed against a shallow groove at its base. Inside, wrapped in oiled cloth, was a scroll. She unfurled it cautiously. The paper was brittle, the ink rust-colored, and the message brief: “If the fifth lives, the eye watches still. Seek the hour where ink froze—clocktower, Shyambazar.”
Trisha stood abruptly, heart thudding. Somewhere beyond the walls, traffic moaned and dogs barked, but inside the cemetery it was all hush and breathlessness. As she turned to leave, a figure stepped into her path—tall, lean, face hidden behind a surgical mask and a cap. He said nothing, just held up a page torn from Roktolekha, identical to hers, then dropped it into a puddle at her feet before walking away. She followed, instinct overriding fear, but he vanished behind the thick veil of trees and tombs. When she returned to the grave, the scroll was gone. Her pulse raced. Someone had shadowed her every step. This wasn’t about research anymore—this was a game of proximity, of cat and mouse, where she didn’t know if she was the bait or the hunter.
Later that night, she stood at the edge of Shyambazar’s tram junction, eyes tracing the outline of the old clocktower half-swallowed by new buildings and neglect. The time on the rusted dial was eternally frozen at 7:11. She remembered her grandfather’s diary entry: “At 7:11, silence rang louder than the bells.” Climbing the narrow metal staircase inside, every creak sounded like a warning. The tower’s chamber was cramped, littered with pigeon feathers, broken glass, and discarded flyers from another decade. But in the hollow behind the bell casing, she found a leather satchel. Inside it was a faded photograph—five men seated in a circle, one of them unmistakably her grandfather. On the back, a message: “The fourth died in sleep. You are the fifth. If you read this, you are already seen.”
As she descended, the street lights flickered, and a shadow crossed the alley below. She froze, watching the figure—short, limping, holding something under his arm. A bundle? A camera? He looked up suddenly, and Trisha ducked. When she peeked again, he was gone, but her satchel was unzipped. Her phone had been taken. Panic gripped her chest. She scrambled down, but the man was nowhere. Her journal was still with her—but it was damp, smeared with ink in places she didn’t remember writing. A single line had appeared across the last page: “Do not look for The Whisperer. Let The Whisperer find you.”
5
The morning air hung thick over the banks of the Hooghly, where the city stirred slowly from its sleep. But the serenity shattered when a body was discovered near the ghat—an elderly professor from Presidency University, his throat slit cleanly, his hand clutching a page torn from a book of Bengali revolutionary poetry. Trisha watched from behind the yellow police barricade, heart pounding, as the officers moved with reluctant precision. At the center of the victim’s chest, drawn in precise crimson ink, was the symbol she feared—the red lotus. Inspector Arjun Sen stood near the body, face unreadable, his eyes scanning the crowd until they found hers. A moment passed before he approached. “We need to talk,” he said, his voice low and gravelled. “And no more secrets, Miss Dutta. This isn’t just about history. This is a pattern repeating itself, and you’re already in too deep.”
At the station, she laid out everything—her grandfather’s letter, the cipher in the cemetery, the encounter at the bookshop, the photograph from the clocktower. Sen listened without interrupting, occasionally jotting notes in a battered diary. “I’ve been tracking similar murders since last year,” he finally said. “Scholars, historians, mostly with ties to colonial records or radical literature. All killed quietly, with symbolic signatures—lotus petals, eye marks, lines from obscure poems. It wasn’t clear until now that it was connected to the past. But this Whisperer of yours—he’s not just copying. He’s continuing something.” He paused, then slid a photograph across the table. It showed five men, seated formally—exactly like the one Trisha had found. “We recovered this from Ashoke Bose’s personal files two months ago. You recognize him?” She nodded slowly. “That’s my grandfather. And Bose… he was his best friend.”
Sen exhaled. “Ashoke Bose vanished two weeks ago. No signs of struggle. No farewell. Just gone.” Trisha’s voice trembled as she asked, “What if he’s not missing? What if he’s hiding?” Sen nodded grimly. “Or being hunted.” Trisha recalled the coded lines—The fourth died in sleep. You are the fifth. The fifth. She had always assumed it meant the fifth member. But what if it meant the fifth victim? She was being drawn into something methodical, something ritualistic. “These aren’t just murders,” she whispered. “They’re executions—like erasing a chapter line by line.” Sen nodded. “And it seems you’re on the last page.”
That night, Trisha returned home to find her front door ajar. She stepped inside slowly, each floorboard groaning like a warning. The house was dark, but a faint light flickered from her study. On her desk lay her journal, now soaked at the corners. A fresh page had been added—typed neatly, not handwritten. It read: “You’ve inherited more than blood, Trisha Dutta. You’ve inherited unfinished ink. We were five. Four have faded. You will decide whether the truth is preserved… or purged.” Beneath the message was a lotus pressed in wax. Trisha backed away slowly, locking eyes with her own reflection in the darkened glass. In it, she could see movement—someone standing just beyond the hallway, watching. And this time, the Whisperer didn’t hide.
6
The streets of North Kolkata wore the weariness of too many secrets—rickety balconies groaned under years of soot, and time-worn tramlines curved like veins through a city that refused to forget. Trisha walked beside Inspector Arjun Sen through a rusted gate behind an abandoned printing press on Bidhan Sarani, led by a map she’d pieced together from the photograph, the cipher, and the red-inked diary entry that had appeared in her study the night before. “This was the route,” she said, voice steady despite the tremor beneath. “The Shabdachinha circle met below this building, in the tunnel that connected to a forgotten British safehouse.” Arjun shone his flashlight ahead as they descended a flight of stone steps hidden behind a broken bookshelf. The air grew damp, the walls marked with faded symbols—eyes, quills, lotuses—drawn over older colonial engravings, as though rebellion had overwritten rule.
The passage opened into a wide underground chamber lined with shelves, locked trunks, and tattered scrolls. At its center, a rusted pedestal held what looked like an oversized ledger sealed with red ribbon. Trisha’s breath caught as she opened it—it wasn’t just a journal. It was a death registry. Each name bore a mark beside it: an ink drop, a feather, or a slash. Four names had been crossed out. The fifth, Amitabha Dutta—her grandfather—was underlined twice, the only one marked with a red lotus. Below the final entry was a blank space, waiting. Arjun examined the back wall, where a mural depicted five hooded figures seated in a circle, each holding a different symbol: a candle, a book, a blade, a lotus, and an inkpot. “This wasn’t just a literary group,” he muttered. “This was a judiciary. They passed judgment. Silently. Permanently.”
In the adjacent room, they found scattered manuscripts and documents—minutes of secret meetings, banned pamphlets, letters written in invisible ink. But one stood out: a sealed letter addressed to Ashoke Bose, dated just weeks before his disappearance. It read: “The fifth has awakened. If she walks the path, history must be completed. The ink cannot remain unfinished.” Trisha stared at it, her throat tightening. She wasn’t being warned—she was being summoned. “They want me to finish what they started,” she whispered. “But I don’t know what that means.” Arjun pointed to a map on the wall, marked with red dots across Kolkata—each location a site of historical significance. One of them circled in heavy ink: The Writers’ Building. “They were planning something,” he said. “A final act. And it was never carried out. Until now.”
As they exited the tunnel, night had settled over the city like a velvet shroud. The tramlines sparked as a tram rumbled past, empty and ghostlike. Trisha turned to Arjun. “What if someone believes I’m the heir to their cause? What if the Whisperer isn’t trying to kill me—but crown me?” Arjun didn’t respond immediately. Then he said quietly, “Power doesn’t always announce itself. Sometimes, it arrives with silence—and waits for you to pick up the pen.” Behind them, the tunnel door creaked slowly shut, as if sealing away a courtroom long buried, and a verdict that was still being written.
7
The Durga Puja crowds surged like waves across College Square, drums pounding and lights flickering in synchronized bursts. Amidst the chaos of devotion, Trisha weaved her way past pandals and processions, heart hammering beneath her silk shawl. Inspector Arjun Sen trailed a few feet behind, keeping a watchful eye. A cryptic voice note had lured them here—received an hour ago from an untraceable number: “The final lotus blooms tonight. Between the ink and the idol, you will meet the mirror.” Trisha suspected it meant the central pandal, where a massive Durga idol stood beneath a canopy of hanging scrolls, each bearing verses from Tagore, Bankim, and Derozio—words transformed into veils of meaning. As she stepped into the glow of the idol’s gaze, her eyes locked on a man standing near the base, hidden in the shadows of a script-covered pillar. She recognized him instantly. Ashoke Bose.
Her pulse faltered as she approached. The man who had vanished. The man who was supposed to be dead. His eyes—once kind and crinkled with thought—now bore a stern, almost ritualistic calm. “You weren’t meant to find the letters so soon,” he said. “But perhaps fate doesn’t wait anymore.” Arjun reached for his holster, but Ashoke raised his hand. “No weapons. Not here. Not where we once prayed for freedom with ink-stained hands.” He turned to Trisha. “You’ve read enough to know what we were. What we still are. The Whisperer isn’t a person, Trisha. It’s a vow. A legacy passed like fire from one to the next, waiting for the fifth to reignite it.” Her voice quivered. “Why me?” Ashoke’s gaze softened. “Because you carry his words. Your grandfather’s ink didn’t dry. It slept.” He stepped aside to reveal a box wrapped in red cloth. Inside lay a pen, an old one, engraved with the same eye-quill symbol. And beside it—a list. Ten names. Eight crossed out. One of them was hers.
Arjun stepped forward, demanding answers. “You’ve orchestrated all of this? The murders? The symbols?” Ashoke shook his head. “No. I was the fourth Whisperer. I passed the vow on. But I never expected the fifth to be… so close.” His voice cracked, grief flickering through. “I warned them to stop. But the new Whisperer is impatient. Impulsive. Obsessed with completion.” Trisha’s blood ran cold. “Then who is it?” Ashoke’s silence stretched too long. Finally, he whispered, “Someone you’ve already let in. Someone who’s always been watching.” Just then, a scream rose from the edge of the crowd. A man collapsed near the water tanks, red ink blooming across his white kurta. In his hand—another torn page from Roktolekha. Arjun bolted toward the scene. Trisha turned to Ashoke, but he was already gone, vanished into the crowd as if swallowed by the very verses he once worshipped.
The chaos around her blurred as the crowd surged and drums grew louder, frenzied. In the spinning madness of lights and motion, Trisha’s mind flashed through every conversation, every message, every face. Someone close. Someone silent. She turned slowly, scanning the faces around her. Then she saw it—standing at the edge of the pandal, cloaked in calm, watching her not with fear or guilt, but expectation. The figure raised a hand in a gesture she now knew well—the lotus palm. And in that moment, she realized: the Whisperer wasn’t hunting her. The Whisperer was waiting for her to decide.
8
The storm that had hovered over Kolkata for days finally broke loose the night Trisha and Arjun followed the final set of coordinates to the decaying printing press near Shyambazar. The rain lashed down with a fury that felt almost ceremonial, like the city itself had been holding its breath and had now decided to weep. Inside the press, the walls were lined with dust-choked shelves, metal typefaces rusting in forgotten trays, and papers that crumbled at touch. It was here that The Whisperer had summoned them—not through another riddle, but a blunt email marked simply: “If you want the truth, come tonight. Bring the letter. Come alone.” Arjun had protested, but Trisha wouldn’t be deterred. She knew this was the end. She had worn her grandfather’s old fountain pen clipped to her collar as a talisman, and in her bag was the original 1943 letter—the first breadcrumb in a trail that had now circled back to its beginning.
They found the final inscription on a printing plate covered in black ink and dried blood, pressed into the wall behind a false partition. Etched into the metal were names—of all the people who had died in the past two months, including Professor Lahiri, Saira, even the old publisher who’d helped her. But at the bottom was a name that made Trisha’s hands go cold: Trisha Dutta. Next to it, the date—Today. Arjun stepped closer, flashlight trembling. “It’s a death list,” he whispered. “But how did they know you’d be here?” That was when the door slammed shut, locking them inside. A projector flickered to life from the ceiling, whirring loudly. On screen appeared grainy footage of Trisha’s grandfather, Sudhanshu Dutta, from the 1940s—standing beside the same marble lion, reciting verses from Sukumar Ray, and handing out printed pamphlets to masked men. Arjun looked at her in disbelief. “Your grandfather wasn’t just documenting Shabdachinha… he was leading them.”
A hidden door creaked open behind the press, revealing a candle-lit room and a figure seated at a desk, draped in a shawl. It was the old caretaker of the Bhowanipore library—Mrs. Basu, whom Trisha had always thought half-mad. “You were never meant to read that letter,” she rasped. “Your grandfather wrote it to silence Shabdachinha, not revive them. But when you disturbed the lion, you started the fire again.” The entire cat-and-mouse game had been orchestrated by Mrs. Basu, the last surviving member of the society, desperate to finish what Sudhanshu couldn’t—by eliminating the remaining names, and herself. But she had waited for Trisha, the bloodline, to arrive before ending the cycle. “You must choose,” she said, placing a final manuscript before her. “Publish this, and the truth comes out—but so does the chaos. Or burn it, and let Kolkata sleep.”
Trisha stared at the manuscript, heart thudding. It held the true story of Shabdachinha—its crimes, ideals, betrayals. Arjun stepped back, giving her the silence she needed. The rain howled outside, wind rattling the shutters like ancestral voices demanding justice. In that moment, Trisha understood that some truths were heavy, and carrying them meant becoming their prisoner. But hiding them would only delay the reckoning. She took out her grandfather’s fountain pen, uncapped it slowly, and signed the manuscript. The press machine coughed, roared, and began to print.
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