Aarushi Trivedi
One
The monsoon had just withdrawn from the land, leaving behind a scent of damp earth and ancient memories as Dr. Meera Rao stepped off the dusty jeep that brought her to Shulgaon—a quiet riverside village wrapped in dense sal groves and secrets. From the banks of the Narmada, the landscape stretched out with a deceptive serenity, the river gliding past like a sentient observer. Meera adjusted the scarf around her neck, shielding herself from the lingering heat, her eyes already scanning the site marked by flags and canvas tarps. It was an unassuming mound just fifty meters from the river’s edge, but the satellite imaging—anomalies in magnetic fields and sonar shadows—told a different story. Her team had been here for three days preparing the groundwork, but progress had slowed to a crawl. Villagers hired for the dig had begun to murmur of “bad signs.” A snake found curled around the tools. The sudden death of a laborer’s cow. Whispers of “jal ki neend todna,” disturbing the river’s sleep, floated through the air like drifting ash. Meera, a seasoned archaeologist with a rationalist’s spine, dismissed these with practiced ease.
Still, something about the site unnerved her—not in a spectral way, but in a geologic one. The mound felt wrong. It wasn’t shaped by erosion or natural deposition; it rose deliberately, shaped by hands long lost to history. She had spent her life studying the Indus and post-Vedic civilizations, but this—this was older. Proto-Brahmi symbols on a few scattered fragments nearby dated the structure to pre-Mauryan times, and yet there were faint inscriptions that resembled a language no one had yet deciphered. That contradiction gnawed at her. “There’s something under here, something untouched,” she said aloud to her assistant Rafiq, as if saying it might bring the truth closer. He nodded, distracted, watching the laborers down their tools yet again. One elder had refused to even approach the site, claiming he heard whispering from the earth itself when he stood too close. Meera called the local contractor, demanded fresh workers from a nearby town, and insisted on lighting flood lamps overnight to speed up work. She wasn’t about to let myth derail discovery.
By the end of the third evening, the dig took a turn. Just as the sun dipped below the trees, a low clang echoed from one of the deeper trenches. Rafiq called her over, his voice unusually tight. There, half-submerged in clay and silt, was a large stone slab—nearly four feet wide and smooth as glass. It bore no carvings at first glance, but under directed lamplight, faint lines emerged—etched into the surface with a precision that modern instruments might envy. Proto-Brahmi script, but twisted, older, incomplete. As Meera brushed the sediment away, her hands paused at a line that seemed freshly gouged despite the artifact’s age: “Let the sleeper sleep, lest the river remember.” Her breath caught in her throat, not from fear, but fascination. It was the first inscription of its kind she had ever seen linking a natural body—the river—with a sentient act of remembrance. Could this be a symbolic metaphor? Or did it reflect an actual cultural belief in the river as a repository of memory, of guilt?
Ignoring the laborers’ growing resistance, Meera ordered the stone lifted. Beneath it, the soil gave way to a narrow descending shaft lined with slabs of basalt and ancient bricks blackened with age. The entrance had been sealed intentionally—mud and lime packed between each stone, preserving the void within. It wasn’t just a buried room. It was a shrine. The deeper they dug, the colder the air became, despite the baking heat above. As she descended into the mouth of the hidden structure, torch in hand, she felt a strange pull—not of gravity, but of intuition—as though she had crossed into the belly of something waiting to exhale. A half-submerged door lay at the bottom of the shaft, slick with moss, and again etched with the same warning. The inscription shimmered briefly in her torchlight. For the first time, Meera felt the weight of something she couldn’t catalogue or carbon-date pressing against her logic. But she shook the sensation off. Myths be damned. Tomorrow, they would open it.
2
The evening light turned bronze as the last of the sun dipped behind the hills, and Meera sat cross-legged inside her canvas tent, tracing her finger along the inked copy of the inscription she had photographed earlier. The proto-Brahmi lines were deceptively simple, yet every stroke carried something archaic and ominous. Opposite her sat Pandit Shivnarayan Bhatt, a stooped scholar with saffron robes and a voice like brittle leaves, who had reluctantly agreed to assist in decoding the deeper mythological context. He tilted his head as he examined the script, then muttered, “This is not prayer. It is warning. The words are arranged like a seal—meant to bind, not bless.” Meera leaned forward, intrigued, asking for clarification. The old man continued in a low tone, “’Let the sleeper sleep’… In river-folk tales, the Narmada is said to flow over memory. What sleeps beneath her does not die, it waits—until remembered, or provoked.” Meera dismissed his dread with a gentle nod, but something in his expression unsettled her. He wasn’t interpreting the text academically; he was remembering it, as if from stories passed down in whispers.
That night, long after the makeshift dig site had quieted and the lanterns had cast their last flicker on the darkened walls of the trench, Meera found something placed carefully outside her tent. It was a clay bowl, weathered and hand-spun, filled with stagnant river water. Floating in it were pale lotus petals—red not from natural hue, but soaked through with blood. For a moment, Meera thought it was some symbolic offering, maybe part of the villagers’ disapproval. But beside it lay a scrap of cloth tied with jute string, and on it, in charcoal smears, was a single line in Devanagari: “The river remembers more than the dead.” Her breath caught. She scanned the darkness outside and caught the fleeting shape of a woman in a tattered red shawl—Tara Bhoyar, the village’s so-called madwoman. Tara had long been shunned for her cryptic utterances and nocturnal rituals, but Meera had heard of her only in passing until now. Before Meera could call out, the figure disappeared into the trees, leaving behind only silence and that bowl of warnings floating under the moon.
Sleep did not come easily. When it did, it arrived in fractured segments, drawn across a tide of unease. Meera dreamt of water—thick and sluggish, curling around her ankles like sentient vines. In the dream, the excavation site had become a submerged temple, flooded from within. She walked its halls and found the basalt door open, revealing a vast chamber filled with drowned figures floating upright. Their skin was waxen, lips sealed in silence, and their eyes—missing entirely, leaving only dark, weeping hollows. As she moved closer to one, it turned slowly in the water, its empty sockets locking with her gaze. The next moment, she awoke gasping, drenched in sweat, her tent thick with the scent of river silt. The sensation of rising water lingered, phantom dampness clinging to her skin. Meera chalked it up to the intensity of the excavation and the psychological weight of the warning, but something deeper inside her stirred—a small, primal part that knew dreams could sometimes be messages.
The unease wasn’t hers alone. By morning, word had spread that Bela, a sixteen-year-old village girl often seen playing near the excavation site, had not returned home. Her mother had gone to the riverside looking for her and found only a set of sandals placed neatly on the bank, facing the water. Panic rippled through Shulgaon. Some said she had run away, others whispered that the sleeper had awakened hungry. Meera tried to intervene, asking for patience, insisting on logic, but her words felt weightless against the collective dread. Even Rafiq, normally stoic, seemed disturbed. “You should’ve seen the water this morning,” he told her in a low voice. “It rose without rain. Not much, but enough to reach the base of your trench.” Meera stared at him, unwilling to admit she’d seen the same thing—only in dreams. Tara appeared again that day, not speaking but watching from a distance, her eyes glazed yet focused. When Pandit Shivnarayan returned to review the script, he seemed distracted, muttering to himself as he stared at the etched basalt door. “Some things aren’t uncovered,” he whispered, “they awaken.”
3
The morning was still, heavy with the weight of unspoken tension, as Meera stood before the basalt door that had haunted her dreams for two nights. Her team, hesitant and restless, stood behind her with tools in hand. She gave no speech, no symbolic gesture—only a short nod to the technician operating the portable sonic drill. The humming began, vibrating through the stone with a deep, throat-like resonance. Birds flew off in alarm, and even the wind seemed to pause as cracks began forming across the door’s surface. It splintered without shattering—no dramatic burst, only the quiet parting of stone that had remained sealed for centuries. As the pieces fell inward, a gust of air pushed outward, so cold and stale it burned the skin. The passage revealed a sloped tunnel descending into blackness, lined with water-streaked stone. Meera descended first, torchlight bouncing erratically off the wet walls, her breath clouding in the sudden chill. At the tunnel’s end, the passage opened into a domed chamber where a pool of water sat silently in the center, and within it, half-submerged, was a figure—stone, human-like, faceless. Draped in calcified robes and adorned with unfamiliar symbols, it sat in lotus posture as if meditating. The water around it was stagnant but glass-clear, and something about it made the air feel dense with unseen thought.
The figure’s face was smooth, as if erased, worn by more than time. The carvings surrounding it were different from the proto-Brahmi script—more fluid, resembling waves or serpents twisting around the dome’s circumference. Meera approached the pool cautiously, the beam of her torch refracting strangely on the water’s surface. As she neared the figure, the temperature dropped further, and the torch flickered without wind. Rafiq, just behind her, whispered, “It’s like it’s breathing.” And in that moment, Meera too felt it—something pulsing beneath the surface, not quite sound, not quite motion, but present. She bent down to record the symbols, her camera fogging up repeatedly despite its anti-condensation casing. Her notes were shaky, but she couldn’t stop. The room seemed to press in with a strange gravity, and though the shrine was utterly still, it radiated a feeling of awareness. After an hour inside, they exited, the light of day feeling artificial after that subterranean stillness. That night, the door was sealed again—not out of fear, Meera told herself, but to protect the integrity of the chamber. But the sensation followed her like a cold film over the skin.
What began as subtle disturbances grew louder with each passing hour. That night, the village schoolteacher burst into the panchayat meeting room, shouting about a boy he had beaten years ago—something no one else knew. His confession was raw, gasping, and ended with him collapsing into silence. By morning, another man—a shopkeeper—walked into the river and didn’t return. His clothes were found folded on a rock. The next day, a woman showed up screaming outside the temple, accusing herself of a long-buried affair that led to a suicide two decades prior. Before anyone could process this wave of disclosures, another tragedy struck: one of the laborers was found hanging from a tree near the excavation site, his skin pale and cold as if drowned, though there was no water around. Meera, rattled but determined to maintain control, began cataloguing the events, trying to establish a psychological explanation. Mass hysteria. Shared guilt. Superstitious contagion. But deep inside, she felt the truth was older than psychology.
By the third day, the local authorities dispatched Inspector Raghav Solanki, a hard-jawed, sharp-eyed officer recently posted in the district. Raghav arrived with the weariness of a man who had seen too much to believe in ghosts but too little to deny them. He questioned the villagers, each account more fragmented than the last—some swore they saw eyes beneath the water, others claimed to hear chants in unknown tongues at night. One child woke up with mud in his mouth and drawings of faceless figures scrawled across his schoolbooks. Raghav met with Meera that evening, demanding answers. She gave him facts, diagrams, images from the chamber—but her voice lacked certainty. “Something was sealed here for a reason,” she finally admitted. “And I broke it.” Raghav, unconvinced, told her to keep the site closed. “No more digging,” he ordered. But even as he left her tent, his gaze lingered on a puddle forming in the dirt, fed by no rain, perfectly still, and reflecting not his face—but a shadow behind him that wasn’t there.
4
The arrival of Acharya Rudrapal was as unceremonious as it was sudden. He came just after dawn, draped in tattered ochre robes and leaning heavily on a neem-wood staff, his face creased by both time and restraint. For decades he had lived reclusively in the old temple’s attic, rarely seen in daylight, spoken of only in hushed tones as “the keeper of what should not be remembered.” But now, summoned by a force that bypassed logic and summoned something older than fear, he stepped into Meera’s tent uninvited, his eyes sharp beneath the cataracts. “You’ve opened the mouth of silence,” he said, without greeting or introduction. Meera, caught off guard but too intrigued to object, gestured for him to sit. Rudrapal did not sit. Instead, he stood near the table where she had placed her notes and images from the chamber and placed a small bundle of waxed cloth before her. “You won’t find this in your carbon dating. This is not a thing meant to be measured, but remembered.” He unwrapped the bundle, revealing an old sliver of copper—bent, darkened, and etched with a script that shimmered faintly under her lamp.
The script was neither fully proto-Brahmi nor wholly unknown—it was transitional, a bridge between speech and secrecy. Meera leaned forward, decoding slowly as Rudrapal began to speak in a voice that wavered like water disturbed. He told her the tale of a time when the village had nearly perished under three years of sun-cracked drought. In desperation, the ancestors had gone to the river—not to pray, but to bargain. They had summoned something older than gods, something that lived beneath the river’s flow and fed on silence and sin. A pact had been made. Blood was spilled—not as sacrifice, but as signature. In return, the river returned, flooding the fields with life. But the pact had conditions: that the people forget the ritual, that no one ever speak of the sleeper, and that no water be drawn from the river after sundown. “We are not the only ones who remember,” Rudrapal said, his voice now trembling. “The river remembers too. It stores every broken promise like a wound that festers. And you, Dr. Rao, have reopened it.” Meera, though skeptical, felt her throat tighten. The scroll she had uncovered days earlier and now matched with Rudrapal’s fragment used the same term: “Nadja-shayana”—The River’s Sleeper.
The temperature in the tent seemed to drop once more as Meera studied the copper’s symbols. One line repeated several times—“Through stillness, it dreams. Through sin, it wakes.” Rudrapal warned her: if the seal had been broken and the sleeper had stirred, the river would begin collecting again—not bodies, but memories. The guilt of the living, the silence of the complicit, all would become tributaries to its mind. That evening, as the sun dipped and villagers lit small diyas by their doorways, a scream rang out from the old mango grove near the school. Raghav and Meera rushed to find Suraj, the boy last seen with Bela, curled in the fetal position under the roots of a massive tree. His eyes were open but unseeing, his body drenched in water though the ground was dry. His breath came in short, rasping sobs, and his arms were covered in muddy symbols—crudely drawn spirals and eyes, as if scratched in a trance. When Meera leaned closer, Suraj whispered just one word, over and over again: “She’s watching.”
As night fell, the river’s flow seemed to grow louder, though no rain had touched the land in weeks. Acharya Rudrapal remained near the excavation site, sitting cross-legged and chanting something under his breath, beads slipping through his fingers like drops of time. Tara Bhoyar watched him from the shadows, her expression unreadable. Meera stood at the edge of the trench, staring down into the blackness that now seemed not like an absence of light, but a presence of something awake. She replayed Rudrapal’s words in her mind, the copper scroll’s chilling poetry still etched behind her eyes. This was no archaeological discovery. This was a fracture in the pact—forgotten by man, remembered by water. And the sleeper, now partially roused, was beginning to drink.
5
It began with whispers in the market square—old Bhanu confessing, eyes wild and glistening, that he had set fire to his brother’s harvest out of envy twenty years ago. He wept as if the act had just occurred, clutching the hem of his kurta and crying out for forgiveness. Others watched, frozen, as though they too heard something beyond Bhanu’s voice, something in the wind or in the sloshing of distant water. The very next day, Shanta Devi, respected and revered for her piety, collapsed outside the village temple murmuring of a newborn buried under neem leaves decades ago—a child she had delivered in secret and left for the jackals. What made it worse was not the horror of her story, but the tone of her voice: dazed, relieved, as if some long-clenched knot had finally come undone. Meera recorded what she could, each confession more disturbing, and each separated by fewer hours. The villagers no longer needed provocation. Their secrets poured out unasked, like water bursting through cracked stone. And for those who resisted, the river seemed to find its own way in.
One morning, two brothers were found by the edge of the village well, their mouths hanging open, their eyes fixed on the still water below. Neither spoke, nor blinked, nor moved until one of them began retching violently—bringing up brackish water in heavy, choking spasms. When questioned, he simply said, “I can’t lie anymore.” Then he sobbed and whispered a truth about a theft no one had known about, his voice hoarse and broken. It was as though the village had been turned inside out—its sins no longer buried in the soil, but floating on the surface like oil slicks. Pandit Shivnarayan, once calm and scholarly, had become visibly frayed. He spent hours poring over the scattered copper scroll fragments and old palm-leaf texts, muttering to himself, lips twitching, eyes red with lack of sleep. One night, in the dim light of the temple courtyard, he stood before the idol of Shiva and began chanting a verse in a language few recognized. It was rhythmical, guttural, not Sanskrit, but older, primal. As he chanted, his voice faltered, and then broke into screams. He clawed at his face and collapsed in the temple pool, whispering, “She’s not sleeping. She’s listening.” The villagers carried him home, but he never spoke again—his eyes staring endlessly at the ceiling as if seeing a river only he could perceive.
Meera herself was not untouched. Her dreams turned to liquid. Night after night, she stood on the riverbank in her sleep, watching a younger version of herself—maybe eight years old—kneeling near the reeds. The child held something in cupped hands, something wrapped in cloth and dripping with blood. In the dreams, Meera wanted to scream, to ask what it was, but her voice would not rise. The child version of her would look up and smile faintly, eyes dark with secrets, before vanishing into the tall grass. In waking hours, the lines between sleep and reality began to blur. On more than one occasion, Meera found herself walking toward the excavation site without realizing how she got there, her hands clutching her scarf as though trying to remember something vital she had forgotten. Rafiq noticed it first—how she sometimes answered questions that hadn’t been asked, or stared too long into buckets of river water meant for cleaning tools. She dismissed it as stress, as exhaustion, but her notes grew erratic, her handwriting unfamiliar even to her.
The village, once skeptical of curses and spirits, had fallen into a kind of hush—less out of reverence and more out of terror. People avoided looking into mirrors, into wells, into pots of water. Children were forbidden from playing near the river after dusk. Even the birds seemed quieter, and the Narmada itself, once a song in motion, had turned sluggish and sullen. Meera knew the center of this unraveling lay behind that basalt door, inside that submerged shrine, where the faceless figure sat and watched without eyes. Whatever pact had once held the sleeper in slumber had been severed—not with violence, but with ignorance. Now, the village was bleeding not from its throat, but from its memories, and the river remembered everything they had tried to forget.
6
The air in Nilgarh had grown thicker, not with heat, but with a presence—something watching, listening, remembering. Tara, silent for days, finally broke her quiet in the middle of a rainless afternoon. She called Meera and Raghav into her room, where bowls of river water sat untouched, placed there by her grandmother as part of some forgotten ritual. Tara sat cross-legged, her eyes rimmed with dark shadows, her voice oddly steady. “It’s not water,” she said, gesturing to the bowl. “It’s memory. Every drop remembers everything it’s ever touched.” Meera leaned in, unsure whether to comfort or question her, but Tara’s gaze held hers like iron. “The river saw the first lie,” she continued. “It saw the pact. It watched it break. It knows who forgot.” Her visions had become clearer, sharper since the seal broke. She spoke of the spirit not as a demon, but as something older—neither good nor evil. A fluid deity, once revered, whose only hunger was truth. When truth was withheld, the spirit grew restless, shapeless rage twisting into consequence. “It’s not punishing,” she added softly. “It’s remembering out loud.”
That night, Raghav Solanki found himself unable to sleep. The confessions in the village were no longer isolated; they had turned into processions. People walked to the riverbanks as if drawn by invisible strings, whispering to the current, dropping tokens from their past—lockets, torn letters, broken bangles. And in every whispered release, Raghav heard the echo of his own silence. He walked alone toward the excavation site, where the shrine stood submerged. The wind didn’t move, but the air seemed to ripple around him. At the edge of the muddy water, Meera waited. She’d sensed he was coming, perhaps not with foresight but through some thread now binding them. Raghav sat beside her, his jaw clenched, his eyes focused on the trembling surface. “She didn’t slip,” he said. “I let her go.” His wife, Anjali—long presumed to have drowned in an accident during a trek years ago—had not fallen by mistake. In a moment of fury, jealousy, and weakness, Raghav had stepped back when he could have pulled her in. He had never spoken of it, had rebuilt his life with stone-faced denial. But now, sitting beside Meera and the murmuring river, the truth pulled itself from his chest like a splinter rotting too long beneath the skin.
Meera didn’t speak for a long time. Her expression didn’t shift in judgment or pity, but there was something deeper in her silence—recognition, perhaps. They both stared into the black water, which lapped gently at the stone shrine. A breeze stirred, though no leaves rustled. Raghav leaned forward to wash his face, hoping cold water would clear the weight behind his eyes. But as he dipped his hands into the stream, he saw something move beneath the surface. A face. Meera’s face. Only, it was not Meera. The eyes blinked slowly, and the lips moved—but the voice that echoed in his mind was Anjali’s. “You remember now,” it whispered. “So do I.” Raghav stumbled back, his breath catching, heart thudding like thunder trapped in his ribs. Meera looked at him sharply. “What did you see?” she asked. He could barely speak. “Her… but not her. It was… me seeing myself through her. Through the river.” The lines between perception and memory were crumbling. It wasn’t just confessions. The river was beginning to show people what they buried—even from themselves.
Later, Raghav sat alone in the temple corridor, drenched in sweat, unable to shake the image of Anjali’s voice coming from Meera’s mouth, from water, from everywhere. He felt not haunted, but exposed. There was no mercy in the river—only reflection. Meera stood nearby, writing frantically in her notebook, her dreams and reality now bleeding into one continuous narrative. She understood now what Tara had tried to say. The spirit was not punishing them. It was fulfilling its design. It had always been memory incarnate—truth with a current. The blood pact hadn’t summoned the spirit; it had only acknowledged its power, and begged it to guard their silence. But they had broken that silence. Lied to the river. And now it remembered. Not with vengeance, but with unrelenting fidelity. Every drop a witness. Every ripple a retelling. And the worst part wasn’t the river’s memory—it was how much the villagers had forgotten on purpose.
7
At first, it was only the walls of the underground shrine that seemed to shift—slick with moisture, pulsing faintly like a breathing lung buried beneath the village. But by the seventh day after the first confession, the chamber had undeniably changed. The stone floor had grown warm beneath Meera’s feet. Stalactites, not there before, hung wet and glistening. And in the center, the submerged idol, once only partially visible through the muddy water, had begun to rise. Not by human hand. It emerged inch by inch, shedding rivulets of water and a moss-like film that smelled of rust and riverweed. Meera stood on the ledge, heart racing. The statue’s eyes, half-lidded and oddly serene, seemed to follow her. She reached out instinctively, not to worship but to understand—and the moment her fingers grazed the stone, the chamber tilted on its axis.
In that blink of contact, her mind was no longer her own. She was yanked into a torrent of visions that came without mercy—flashes of firelight and chanting, of blood spilled into carved basins, of women dancing with their hair unbound and mouths red with betel. A priest in white robes stepped calmly into a stone pool, shackled to a weight, and descended like an offering. The shrine echoed with the sound of bells—not temple bells, but ones worn on ankles, a hundred of them, rising in a rhythm that was not celebratory but sacrificial. The priest had not screamed. He had smiled. Meera saw the moment of submersion through his eyes, felt the cool weight of the water as death and devotion interwove. Then the voice came—not booming or wrathful, but threaded with ancient calm: “Your blood remembers.” Meera stumbled backward, gasping, her hand trembling. Around her, the shrine dripped with something more than water—something darker, almost viscous. The pact had not been made in desperation. It had been a sacred covenant of choice, ritual, and surrender. And what had been sealed could not be denied without consequence.
Above ground, the village began to fester. Strange growths bloomed along the damp edges of walls and rooftops—pale blue and spongy, pulsing like fungal gills. Livestock disappeared overnight; goats, chickens, even a tethered cow vanished without a trace. People began falling ill, not with fever or cough, but with strange symptoms: a thickening of the tongue, dreams they couldn’t remember yet woke up from in tears, and the compulsion to dig near the riverbanks. Children murmured lullabies in languages no one had taught them. The shrine’s presence had begun to leak outward, not like a flood, but like breath—slow, humid, intimate. Tara refused to leave her room, drawing endless spirals in the dust with her finger. Raghav walked the village with a distant look, as if listening to a song no one else could hear. At the temple, water collected in the stone grooves of the courtyard, though no rain had fallen in days. It was as if the village had become a lung too, breathing in sync with something older, something awakened.
Meera, shaken by her vision, returned to the shrine the next evening, alone. The entrance had grown smaller, narrower, as though the ground itself wished to seal it again. But she slipped through, candle in hand, stepping into the living dark. The idol now sat fully exposed above the waterline, slick and strange, bearing no clear face but exuding familiarity. She knelt before it—not in prayer, but in confrontation. “Who are you?” she whispered. But she already knew. This was not a god of land or sky, but of time and truth. Not worshipped for miracles, but feared for memory. The villagers hadn’t buried this shrine out of shame. They had buried it because they had failed it. Meera touched the idol again, bracing herself, and again the voice came: “The blood that was offered still sings. It cannot forget.” Her breath caught. She realized then that the village wasn’t being punished. It was being called back. And she, with the blood of Nilgarh in her veins, was part of the original promise—one that demanded remembering. One that, if broken again, would drown not just their history, but their future.
8
They began vanishing without sound or struggle. One by one, homes were found eerily quiet in the morning — doors ajar, beds still warm, but no trace of the person who’d slept in them. Only water marked their absence: puddles near thresholds, wet footprints trailing into empty rooms, and in one instance, a nightgown folded neatly beside a well. No one heard screams. No one saw shadows. Mothers clutched their remaining children, husbands took to sleeping in shifts, and still, by sunrise, more were gone. The village seemed to shrink, its edges softening under an invisible tide. Even the birds had stopped singing. The silence grew too large to ignore, and finally, desperate and trembling, the remaining villagers turned to the last remnant of faith they had — Acharya Rudrapal, the blind priest whose silence had lasted longer than most of their memories. It was said he once held back a flood with only a copper bell and a prayer that cracked the night in two. Now, he prepared the binding ritual, one whispered down through generations, meant to tether a restless force to stone and chant.
The villagers gathered in the old temple courtyard, now wet with dew and something older. Rudrapal’s voice, frail but resolute, began weaving the ancient phrases into the air. Meera watched from behind the crowd, Tara gripping her hand so tightly her knuckles paled. As the Acharya circled the sacred fire, sprinkling ash and water, his body seemed to falter, his steps unsteady, breath uneven. But he pressed on. His chant rose, layered in a tongue older than any language spoken now. Then, mid-syllable, he stopped. Not from forgetfulness — but as if struck. His mouth opened, and water began to spill forth — not droplets, but torrents, as though a dam within had cracked. He collapsed, hands still clutched in a half-mudra, and the crowd gasped as his body convulsed, choking not on air, but on river. When it was over, his robes were soaked, and his lifeless eyes stared toward the sky as if he had finally seen what he spent decades preparing for. The ritual had failed. Or perhaps, it had only been meant to reveal who still carried the debt.
That night, as panic swelled like storm clouds over Nilgarh, a figure arrived at Meera’s door — one she hadn’t seen in years. Kavita, her sister, older by five years and wearing the same stubborn expression she’d always had, stepped into the candlelight with a damp shawl and eyes hollowed by travel and truth. “You remember nothing,” she said without greeting, “but I do.” Meera, overwhelmed by grief and guilt, could only nod. Over hot, bitter tea, Kavita unfurled the memory Meera had buried so long ago that even her dreams had stopped knocking. Their father, a gentle man who rarely raised his voice, had taken them to the river once. It had been evening, the water gold and thick with monsoon silt. He had made them wait on the bank as he waded in — chanting softly, holding a wrapped bundle. Kavita remembered asking if it was a fish; their father had only smiled, whispered something to the water, and lowered the bundle. Meera had cried. Not from fear, but because she recognized the lullaby he was humming — the one their grandmother used to sing when lightning cracked the sky. After that day, he’d stopped speaking. Two weeks later, he was found drowned, eyes open, mouth full of silt, fingers clutched to his own throat. The village had called it a tragedy. Kavita now knew better. It had been a ritual.
As the memory returned like floodwaters breaching an old dam, Meera felt the shift deep within her bones. The strange pull she’d always felt toward the river, the way her dreams often began with water lapping at her feet, the voice that had spoken to her in the shrine — it wasn’t new. It was old. Ancient. Inherited. Her father hadn’t just been part of the pact — he had been its vessel. The bloodline that once sealed the agreement hadn’t vanished. It had simply dwindled down to one: her. That was why the visions came to her and not others. Why the shrine responded to her touch. Why the river had waited, silently watching. She was not just a witness. She was a key. As the last of the chosen, she alone could remember what must not be forgotten — and choose what must come next. The villagers could no longer run from the past. The pact was no longer asking to be remembered. It was demanding to be fulfilled. And Meera, heart pounding like ritual drums, knew that if she did not act, Nilgarh would vanish entirely — not into legend, but into the mouth of the river that had always known the truth.
9
The sky above Nilgarh remained eerily clear, stars cold and watching, as the Narmada began to rise. It did not creep or surge with the rhythm of natural flood — it devoured. With no warning and no rainfall, the river swelled past its banks, roaring with an ancient hunger. Water snaked through alleyways, rushed beneath thresholds, and broke apart walls like rotted bark. The shrine was the first to go — swallowed whole in a matter of minutes, its spire vanishing beneath the churning black water as though yanked down by unseen hands. Villagers screamed, some clambering to rooftops, others wading chest-deep with children hoisted above their heads. But the flood had a mind of its own, bypassing some entirely while collapsing entire houses with a single surge. The earth beneath Nilgarh softened, shuddered, and moaned as half the village drowned not in water, but in memory. And through it all, Meera stood motionless, the river parting around her like it remembered her footsteps.
With soaked robes clinging to her limbs and Tara sobbing somewhere behind her, Meera walked toward the waterlogged temple entrance — or what remained of it. Where once stone steps led into an underground sanctum, now there was only a hole where water churned in spirals, whispering in voices not its own. The current resisted no one but her. Each step deeper into the shrine felt like a descent through layers of time itself. Water lapped at her waist, her chest, her shoulders. When it reached her chin, it stilled. Candles once lit in memory floated past her, their flames inexplicably burning beneath the surface. The eyes came next — not imagined, but real. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, suspended in the water, unblinking, watching. Men, women, children — the vanished villagers. Their gaze did not accuse; it waited. And then, from within the drowned temple, a voice rose. But it was not a single voice. It was every voice. Speaking in perfect synchrony, from every direction, as though the water itself were singing.
“Do you remember?” it asked. “Do you see what was done in your name?” Meera opened her mouth but no air came — only understanding. She did not see the spirit. She felt it, all around her, in her bloodstream, in her pulse, in the weight pressing against her ribs. Visions unfurled within her mind — generations past, men and women kneeling before the river, not praying but pleading. A pact had been made to seal something in, to bury something older than language beneath bells and ritual and blood. It had worked for a time, but then they forgot. Greed grew. The river was dammed, the shrines desecrated, and the bloodline — the human vessel — was diluted. Until only she remained. “Atonement,” the voices whispered. “Reckoning.” And then, quieter, “Rebinding.” Meera raised her hands and surrendered. Not with fear, but with purpose. She offered herself — her blood, her memory, her body — as the vessel once again. She would rebind the pact. She would carry the silence the others abandoned. The river paused, pulsed, considered.
But the river does not forget.
The moment stretched. The water shimmered, thickened, and the temperature dropped until Meera’s breath froze in her lungs. She felt herself lift — not swimming, but rising — held by unseen limbs made of prayer and mourning. The shrine responded not with bells, but with the heartbeat of the drowned. And then, pain — not physical, but ancestral. Every broken promise, every silence chosen over truth, every generation that turned its back on the pact, roared through her like lightning. “You offer yourself,” the river whispered through teeth of stone, “but your blood carries too much forgetting.” Meera screamed silently as the shrine’s walls began to collapse inward, stone cracking, eyes closing. The last thing she saw was her own reflection in the water — splitting into many. She wasn’t alone. She had never been. But she was the last to remember, and it wasn’t enough. As the river took her, the voices ceased. The shrine vanished beneath a final swirl. By dawn, the flood had receded. The village was a ruin. And Meera was gone — not drowned, but kept. The river, ever watchful, returned to stillness. But the pact, once broken, was no longer willing to sleep.
10
When the sun finally broke through the mist over Nilgarh, it did not bring warmth. The village lay in shambles — thatched roofs in tatters, homes half-submerged in silt, and silence where there had once been morning bells. Only a handful of survivors remained, huddled on higher ground, their eyes hollow with disbelief. Among them stood Tara, barefoot and mud-streaked, her face bearing the quiet grief of someone who had watched the world crumble and live to remember it. The floodwaters had retreated as swiftly and mysteriously as they had come, leaving behind no trace of Meera, no body, no clothing — only an absence that pulsed heavier than any corpse. The shrine was gone too, erased as if the river had grown tired of humanity’s memory. In its place stood a wide basin of wet earth, pockmarked with reeds and bits of broken stone. The villagers whispered that it was Meera who had calmed the river, who had paid a debt too old for them to comprehend. But no one spoke it aloud. Tara, however, knew. She had seen the reflection ripple, had heard the river speak.
In the days that followed, something peculiar began to occur. The children — those too young to remember the flood clearly — began gathering by the riverbanks, their fingers stained with mud. They did not play or chatter. Instead, they drew. Faces. The same face, again and again, etched into the silt with eerie precision. A woman with wide, sorrowful eyes and a braid over her shoulder — Meera, unmistakably. They drew her emerging from the water, sometimes with her hands outstretched, sometimes with her mouth slightly parted, as if whispering a warning. When asked, the children only said, “She told us.” The villagers grew uneasy, many choosing to leave Nilgarh entirely, abandoning their drowned fields and crumbled homes. But Tara stayed. She moved into the ruins of the schoolhouse, converting one of its dry rooms into a small sanctum where she kept the only surviving copy of the binding chants. Each dawn, she would walk barefoot to the edge of the river, kneel in the same patch of silt, and whisper the verses her sister had once feared to remember. She spoke not to ask for protection, but to acknowledge the pact that had been reforged in blood, memory, and sacrifice.
Tara had become the keeper now — not of tradition, but of remembrance. She did not dress in ceremonial garb or seek priesthood; she simply watched. She taught no doctrine, only told stories — the real ones — to the children, ensuring they would not grow up believing the river was only water. Some evenings, she would find new drawings in the mud, even though no children had been nearby. Once, she found one etched deep into the clay, so deep it seemed to hum. Meera’s face, but older, wiser, her eyes now closed. Tara wept then — not in grief, but in reverence. Nilgarh slowly grew quiet again, not because life had returned to normal, but because it had adjusted to a new order. Crops were replanted, goats bleated in the hills, and a makeshift bridge was built across the narrow bend in the river. Still, each day began with Tara’s voice and ended with the hush of watchful water. Nothing disturbed the riverbank where the shrine once stood. Even the animals avoided it.
And then, one morning years later, a tourist arrived — drawn by some travel blog post that claimed Nilgarh was “a hidden gem untouched by modernity.” The man was cheerful, sunburnt, and wholly unaware. He posed near the edge of the river, just a few feet from the old basin now overgrown with reeds and moss. He extended his phone, grinned, and snapped a selfie with the lazy current behind him. Tara, standing beneath a banyan tree nearby, saw it happen. She did not scream or rush forward. She simply stopped chanting. In the frame of the photograph — which would later go viral for reasons the man could never explain — a ripple had formed in the water just behind his shoulder. Not a fish. Not a breeze. A perfectly circular ripple. And at its center, a dark shape. Subtle. Intentional. The shape of an open eye. Watching. Alive. The river, once bound, was still listening. And now, it remembered faces.
End
