Souradeep Dutta
1
Rain drummed steadily on the rusted iron roof of Subhro Dutta’s apartment in Shibpur, blurring the already smudged cityscape outside the window. The walls inside were yellowed with smoke, time, and neglect, just like him. He sat in his old cane chair, a half-filled glass of Old Monk dangling loosely from his hand, watching the flickering television news bulletin like a man watching ghosts dance. “Another body discovered in Howrah Maidan area,” the anchor was saying, tone flat, professional, unaffected. But what made Subhro sit up slightly wasn’t the death—it was the image that followed. A photograph of the crime scene leaked to the media: the victim, a middle-aged man in white kurta, was found sitting upright with his hands tied to invisible strings, a small blood-smeared puppet placed neatly on his lap, its wooden head tilted to one side, like it too had been murdered. There was a candle burning beside the puppet. The tableau was too precise to be random. Subhro’s fingers tensed slightly on the glass, and somewhere in the moth-bitten corners of his memory, something stirred—a long-forgotten whisper of jatra lights, wooden faces, and songs sung in minor keys.
Across the city, at Rabindra Bharati University, Mrittika Sen flipped through pages of a brittle manuscript under the glow of a desk lamp. The old Bengali script was barely legible in parts, eaten by mildew and age, but the title at the top was clear enough—“Roktomukhi Rupkatha”—“The Bloodstained Fairytale.” She had found it in her late grandmother’s trunk, buried beneath layers of torn saris and an unused harmonium. The script had no author, no official record, but every page sang with rhythm and darkness. It was more than a story—it was a stage play written like a ritual. Every scene ended in death. Every act concluded with a “moral cleansing.” She had chosen it as the subject of her final thesis on lost narratives of Bengali puppetry. But now, looking at her phone and the image of the crime scene making waves online, her chest tightened. The way the victim was posed—it mirrored Scene One of the manuscript exactly: “The False King will fall, hands tied to his throne of lies, while the Wooden Truth weeps beside him.” She hadn’t told anyone about her find. Not yet. How could someone else know?
That evening, the winds from the river turned colder than usual, crawling through the narrow lanes of Howrah like silent sentinels. Subhro lit a cigarette with the same lethargic hand that had once signed case files and autopsy reports. He hadn’t worn a badge in six years, not since the Ashu Bakshi case blew up in the press and he was made the scapegoat for the suicide of a suspect who had turned out to be innocent. Since then, he had become just another ghost wandering Kolkata’s forgotten alleys. But something about this puppet-murder poked at his instincts, cracked open his detachment. He reached into the old steel cupboard and pulled out a stack of case files—papers he wasn’t supposed to have kept. Death had a signature, a pattern. He had spent his life reading those patterns like prayers. And this one? It wasn’t random, it wasn’t rage, and it wasn’t gangland politics. It was theatre. Someone was directing this. And if Subhro’s instincts were right—and they usually were—this was only the opening act.
2
The old streets of Howrah bore the weight of memory like damp burlap—heavy, unshakable, and stubbornly mute. Subhro stood at the edge of the Maidan crime scene the next morning, his salt-and-pepper stubble bristling in the early humidity, watching a new generation of policemen trample over evidence with digital cameras and disposable gloves. A constable nodded politely, uncertain whether he should salute the retired officer or ignore him. Subhro didn’t care. His eyes were fixed on the chalk outline of the body, the dried patch of blood like a dull wound on the earth. He took a few slow steps around the spot, noting how the body had been posed—back straight, hands suspended upward as though pulled by strings. Nearby, on the cement bench where the puppet had been placed, the faint residue of wax still glistened. He picked up a small ash-stained matchstick from under the bench and rolled it between his fingers. A tiny circle of soot clung to the tip. Whoever did this wasn’t improvising—they were staging. With clinical precision. That’s when ACP Arindam Roy arrived, sunglasses perched on his nose, and offered Subhro a greeting somewhere between cordiality and warning. “You’re here early, Dutta-da,” he said. “Thought you’d sworn off blood and madness.” Subhro gave a dry smile. “Blood maybe. Madness?” He looked back at the puppet’s place like it had left behind a whisper. “That never left.”
Meanwhile, Mrittika sat in the quiet third-floor archives of the Theatre Studies department, a scarf tied tightly around her head as if it could block out the unease crawling under her skin. She had printed out the photo of the crime scene and laid it beside the page from Roktomukhi Rupkatha that described “The Fall of the False King.” The resemblance was uncanny—not just in pose, but in ambiance. The candles, the puppet, the expression of frozen serenity on the victim’s face. Her professor had dismissed the old script as theatrical superstition—an exaggerated morality tale best left buried. But Mrittika couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was using the script as a blueprint, not for art, but for execution. She tried reaching out to her father’s old acquaintances—names she’d found scribbled in fading ink behind the script—but most of them were either dead, unreachable, or unwilling to talk. One of them, an old puppeteer named Ratul Das, had reportedly gone mad and now lived alone in a shack near the river. She jotted down his address. The academic trail had turned into something else—something living, and possibly dangerous. She didn’t know why, but she felt like she was being watched through every curtain, every dusty stack of books, as if someone had already cast her in a role she hadn’t auditioned for.
Later that afternoon, Subhro walked into the Theatre Museum on Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose Road, the air inside thick with varnish, dust, and silence. Glass cases lined the walls—showcasing masks from jatra performances, faded playbills, and cracked wooden puppets with chipped eyes and frozen smiles. As he wandered past a display marked “Obscure Bengali Puppet Narratives (Banned, Lost, Forgotten),” a particular mask caught his eye—a white face with a long red tear painted down one cheek. A tag below it read: Unknown Origin – Recovered from Shibpur, 1981. Just then, he heard soft footsteps and turned. A young woman with thick glasses and a notepad was examining the same case from the other end. She looked up. Their eyes met for half a second. Subhro saw in her a spark of recognition—or maybe it was just his imagination. But then she turned away, scribbling something quickly. “Interesting collection,” she muttered. He didn’t reply. But as he left the museum, something gnawed at him. The woman looked familiar, but not from real life—from an old photograph. Maybe from a theatre troupe. Maybe from the past. Whatever the case, he felt it deep in his bones: the strings were tightening, and the play was moving forward.
3
The air in Domjur was thick with the scent of rain-drenched soil and stagnant ponds, the kind that stuck to your skin and wouldn’t let go. Subhro moved cautiously through the narrow lanes, tracing an address scribbled on a cigarette carton—an old contact from his days on the force had whispered it last night, after a few drinks and some hesitation. The house was more of a shack, half-swallowed by a banyan tree, its roots crawling across the tin roof like ancient veins. Inside, he found what he expected—poverty, mildew, and the heavy silence of a man long forgotten by the world. But Ratul “Pagla” Das was still alive. Eyes clouded by cataracts, fingers perpetually twitching like invisible strings were attached, Ratul sat cross-legged on the floor surrounded by wooden limbs, heads, and half-finished puppets. “They never understood,” Ratul mumbled when Subhro mentioned the murders. “The play was never fiction. It’s prophecy. The King dies first. Then the Liar. Then the Betrayer. The Director sees all. The Director restores balance.” Subhro leaned in. “Who is the Director, Ratul-da?” But the old man only giggled, then began singing an old jatra song in a cracked, broken voice. Subhro stood up, frustrated, but his eyes landed on something in the corner—an old black-and-white photo pinned on the wall, covered in soot. A group of men and women in costume, holding puppets. One face was circled in red ink. He took a photo of it. Ratul didn’t stop singing, not even when Subhro left.
Across the river in Kolkata, Mrittika’s heart raced as she dug through her late father’s belongings in the attic of her ancestral home. Old props, masks, notebooks—most smelled of disuse, but one diary was wrapped in red cloth and hidden beneath a layer of stage costumes. She opened it slowly, each page filled with detailed notes about Roktomukhi Rupkatha—entries that grew more erratic toward the end. “The play lives in the mind,” one line read. “Once heard, it demands performance. It infects.” The final page chilled her to the bone: “The Director does not kill. He restores the balance of story. Through blood, the ending is rewritten.” Her hands trembled. She had always believed her father left theatre after public backlash, but now she wondered if he had been running from something much darker. A quick search through theatre records revealed a performance in 1998 that was abruptly shut down after a backstage fire and the death of a child actor. Her father was the director. There were no official explanations, just whispers of curses and mental breakdowns. She stared at her own reflection in the dusty mirror nearby. Her father had kept her away from the stage since then, but had he been protecting her—or protecting others from her?
That night, a fourth murder shocked the city. The body of a tuition teacher was discovered in a school auditorium in Behala, hung by thin ropes from the stage ceiling like a puppet in mid-performance. The crime scene was littered with chalk drawings of theatre masks and one cryptic message in blood-red paint: “Scene Three: The Coward Dangles.” Subhro arrived before the official forensics team, waving off Roy’s annoyed glare. He walked around the victim’s hanging body and muttered, “They’re escalating. This one’s not just symbolic. It’s theatrical dominance.” He pulled out his phone and compared the crime scene with a sketch from Ratul’s wall—it matched perfectly. The Director wasn’t improvising anymore; they were following a specific script—possibly the very production Subhro remembered watching as a child, though he couldn’t yet place where or when. Back in her hostel, Mrittika stared at the same news photo and realized she had seen that pose before—not in the script, but in a blurry childhood drawing she had made. She dug it out from an old folder. It was titled “The Play with Red Faces.” In the center of the childish scrawl stood a puppet with eyes sewn shut—and a small girl watching from the corner of the stage.
4
A quiet unease clung to the walls of the Theatre Museum like old greasepaint—never fully washed away, only smeared by time. Mrittika walked its dimly lit halls alone, clutching the tattered manuscript of Roktomukhi Rupkatha close to her chest. Usha Dey, the museum’s archivist, stood in the storage annex, her sari draped carefully, her face as unreadable as the painted masks behind her. “You shouldn’t have brought that here,” she said, eyes fixed on the edges of the script poking out of Mrittika’s folder. “Some stories are meant to be forgotten, not revived.” Mrittika hesitated. “People are dying, ma’am. The murders match the play—scene by scene.” Usha sighed deeply and pulled out a wooden drawer marked “Unclassified – Restricted.” From within, she withdrew a single folder tied with black thread. “There was a time,” she murmured, “when this script was considered more than a folk tale. It was a spiritual performance… a karmic reenactment. The performers weren’t actors. They were vessels. And once the play began—there was no stopping the ending.” She handed Mrittika a brittle photograph—an old jatra group, circa 1998. Her father stood at the center. To his left, a younger Usha. “It was my final show before I left the stage,” she whispered. “I still hear the final monologue in my sleep.” Mrittika clutched the photo. “You were there the night it ended.” Usha nodded slowly. “And if someone’s reviving it now… you must be very careful. The Director doesn’t kill. He casts.”
Elsewhere in Kalighat, Subhro leaned against the peeling green walls of an ancient teashop, sipping thick, bitter tea and flipping through his phone’s gallery of crime scene images and historical records. The circled face from Ratul’s photograph finally clicked. It was Biswanath Ghosh, a local businessman who’d reinvented himself as a “cultural patron” and sat on the board of three prominent theatre foundations. Subhro remembered arresting him once for embezzlement tied to a theatre trust. The charges had vanished after political pressure. “A king pretending to be a priest,” Subhro muttered. “Scene One.” He jotted down a map of Ghosh’s known affiliations and noticed a pattern—each murder had occurred near sites once used by Ghosh’s defunct jatra troupe. All of them had performed Roktomukhi Rupkatha at some point. Subhro called Roy, who answered with irritation. “If you keep poking around unofficially, I’ll have no choice but to drag you in for interference.” Subhro’s voice dropped. “They’re not random victims. They were all part of the same stage company. All of them were cast once in this play.” There was a pause. Then Roy said, “Then you better find out what role you’re supposed to play before your cue comes.”
That evening, the city held its breath as another murder shocked the public—this time in broad daylight, during a small performance of Bhuter Raja Dilo Bor at a children’s theatre festival in Bagbazar. Amid applause and laughter, a stagehand was found in the wings, garrotted with a puppet’s control string, face painted in white kabuki-like smears. On the stage, someone had left behind a folded jatra curtain and a note pinned with a jute needle: “Scene Four: The Masked One Falls in Silence.” Mrittika saw the footage online and noticed the curtain’s unique design—it had once belonged to her father’s troupe. She recognized the hand-painted tiger in the corner. That night, unable to sleep, she opened the last few pages of her father’s diary and found a scrawled map marked with circles around theatres, ghats, and warehouses. At the bottom, a note: “The play is not finished. The Director waits. And I… I was only ever the narrator.” She stared at the word “narrator” for a long time. If her father had not been the Director, then who had been? And more importantly—had that role now been passed on to someone else?
5
The air along the riverfront was dense with the scent of old oil, rusted metal, and the stale perfume of forgotten grandeur. Subhro stood on the cracked pavement outside a crumbling jatra theatre in Shalimar—its once-bright signboard now faded to ghost letters. Inside, the remnants of a bygone stage life lingered: torn curtains, broken bamboo poles, and discarded props. But what caught his eye was the paint-smeared floor, marked with the same circular motif found at the previous murder sites—three concentric rings, drawn in red pigment. He crouched down, running his fingers lightly over the pattern. “A script without words,” he murmured, “just choreography of death.” In the corner lay a puppet box half-covered in dust. Opening it, he found four puppets—each crudely carved, painted with grotesque grins and staring eyes. One had its mouth sewn shut with red thread. Another was missing its limbs. Subhro clicked photos of each. As he stepped back into the daylight, his phone buzzed. It was a message from Mrittika: “I found my father’s annotated copy of the script. He wasn’t trying to stage it—he was trying to suppress it.” Attached was a photo of the last page, where her father had written in trembling ink: “The Director does not act alone. He returns when the child dreams again.”
In a deserted corner of her hostel room, Mrittika had cleared a space on the floor and arranged the pieces of her investigation like a detective rather than a student. Photographs, maps, her father’s diary, printouts of the crime scenes—all arranged around the original script of Roktomukhi Rupkatha. The structure was clear now: each murder echoed a scene. But what chilled her most wasn’t the staging—it was the symbolism. The victims weren’t just killed—they were punished, theatrically judged for sins corresponding to their character’s flaws. The “False King,” the “Coward,” the “Masked One.” Each tied to someone who had once performed in the original jatra. She pulled out an old VHS tape she had found among her father’s belongings—its label almost illegible, but she could make out the word “Rupkatha.” Hooking it up to her department’s outdated media player, she watched as grainy footage flickered to life. There, on a makeshift bamboo stage, the original production played out. Her father’s voice narrated the story. And there she was—a six-year-old Mrittika, cast as the innocent “Chhorachhori,” the child who witnesses all but never speaks. Her character had no lines, just wide eyes and silence. Her hands began to shake. Her earliest memories weren’t dreams. They were real. She had been inside the original play. She had seen the Director.
That night, the city awoke to sirens once more. A fire had broken out in an abandoned cultural centre near Tikiapara. Inside, authorities found the charred body of a retired theatre reviewer, slumped in a burnt wooden chair with a smoldering puppet melted to his lap. The investigators ruled it as an arson-murder, and a familiar note was pinned to the ashes: “Scene Five: The Unfaithful Critic Consumed by Fire.” Subhro arrived on-site, brushing past younger officers, and stared at the walls—blackened but not empty. They had been painted with puppets, strings dangling from unseen hands, all leading to one large eye at the center. “He’s not just reenacting a play,” Subhro said to himself. “He’s rebuilding it.” He called Mrittika immediately. “You were on that stage as a child, weren’t you?” Her silence confirmed it. “Then we don’t have time. He’s following the structure—act by act. And when he reaches the final scene, there won’t be any audience left to applaud or scream.” Mrittika clutched the diary tighter and whispered, “The last scene is called The Forgotten Daughter.” And in that moment, they both realized: the killer wasn’t just recreating a play. He was writing her into the climax.
6
Rain had washed the narrow lanes of Kumartuli clean, but a heaviness lingered in the air like a curtain waiting to be pulled. Alok Mitra stood under a rusting tin shed outside an abandoned puppet theatre that had once been the pride of North Kolkata’s artisan district. Its boarded windows, once vibrantly painted with mythological tales, now bore the scratches of time and fury. Saheli stood beside him, clutching an old playbill she’d found in the Rabindra Bharati archives, its ink smudged but still legible: “Chhaya Naatak Samity presents: Shesher Adalat – The Final Judgment.” The same title scrawled in red ink near the body at Princep Ghat. The coincidence was no longer a coincidence. Inside, the musty smell of wood rot, burnt oil, and old cloth seeped through their senses as they stepped in. Rows of dismantled puppets lay scattered like corpses in a battlefield. But one puppet still hung from its strings, eerily intact — a Yaksha figure, mouth stitched shut, eyes wide with horror. A single word was carved on its chest with something jagged: Nayak (Hero).
At the morgue, the forensic report had yielded a new clue. The Princep Ghat victim had markings on his shoulder blades — deep lacerations as though something had been attached there and violently removed. Saheli recalled an obscure passage from the puppet manuscript: “And when the Nayak fails in dharma, his strings are cut to release his blood for truth’s final act.” It had sounded metaphorical, but now it felt literal. The killer wasn’t just mimicking a script — they were directing it. Back in Saheli’s hostel room, they mapped the scenes of the five murders against the five acts of the lost play. Each death had symbolic purpose: betrayal, lust, corruption, cowardice, and hypocrisy. All characters condemned in the original script. “This isn’t just revenge,” Alok muttered, circling the date of the next new moon. “This is purification — theatre as ritual.” Saheli looked at him with quiet dread. “And there are two acts left.” Her fingers brushed the spine of her battered notebook, where she had drawn the puppeteer in charcoal — faceless, hands full of red strings.
That night, an anonymous envelope slid under Saheli’s door. Inside was a photo — grainy, time-stained. A group of men and boys surrounding a puppet stage. And there, unmistakably, a younger version of Alok Mitra, smiling stiffly, a puppet on his lap. The back read: 1987. Sutanuti Festival. Chhaya Naatak Samity. Her breath caught. Why hadn’t Alok mentioned he’d been part of the troupe? She confronted him the next morning, and he froze, the mask slipping for just a second before he turned away. “It was just one season,” he murmured. “A college thing. I left after… something went wrong.” Saheli’s voice trembled. “You’ve been chasing the killer of a play you once performed in.” Alok didn’t respond. Instead, he pulled out a dusty file from his drawer — old news clippings, reports, even scribbled notes in Bengali script. At the top was a name underlined in red: Ratan Lal Basu — writer of Shesher Adalat, disappeared in 1989. “I think he’s back,” Alok whispered, his voice cracking under years of regret. “Or someone who believes they’re finishing what he began.” And somewhere in the maze of puppets and shadows, the next scene waited — not just written, but rehearsed.
7
The storm had broken by the time Rangan and Mira arrived at the abandoned schoolhouse near Belgachia, a place whispered about in local circles for its long-forgotten association with shadow puppetry and forbidden rites. The redbrick building stood like a mausoleum to memory, its paint peeling, windows broken, and a faint, unnatural stillness gripping its air. Inside, everything was soaked in dust—floorboards creaked like groaning ghosts and graffiti marked the cracked walls, but the backroom revealed something else entirely: an old performance space. Faded curtains, hand-painted backdrops depicting mythological scenes, and broken wooden puppets were scattered about, some strung by their limbs to wooden bars like crucified saints. Mira’s hands trembled as she walked among them, touching the wooden faces, her lips silently reciting names from the manuscript she had studied. Then, from behind a false panel in the stage wall, they discovered a trapdoor leading to a storage cellar—unlit and thick with mildew. As Rangan forced it open with a crowbar, the rancid air that rushed out brought with it the scent of rot and something older, like dried blood and theatre makeup fused by time.
What lay beneath was a gallery of horror and reverence. The walls of the cellar were covered in drawings, some childlike, some disturbingly detailed—re-enactments of the same puppet scenes, but with human figures in place of dolls. Mira noticed that every victim so far had been illustrated here, their manner of death carefully rendered beside script notes in red ink. Amidst the clutter, they found a new puppet—uncarved, but already dressed. Rangan recognized the attire immediately. “It’s the constable,” he murmured. “Biswas.” A chill ran down Mira’s spine. The killer had already planned his next move. But what truly sent them both reeling was the crude charcoal sketch taped beside the puppet—a familiar face, Mira’s, with her mouth stitched shut, arms outstretched in a crucifixion pose. Written in delicate Bengali beneath it: “The Critic’s Tongue Must Be Silenced.” Mira staggered back, eyes wide, mind racing. Had she come too close? Was her very act of decoding the narrative drawing her into its deadly arc? Rangan, his hands shaking for the first time, gripped her shoulder. “You’re in it now,” he said, voice hoarse. “This is no longer about understanding the play. It’s about surviving it.”
They emerged from the cellar changed—silent, rattled, breathless. The rain had stopped, but the city felt altered, darker, as if something beneath it had stirred awake. On the drive back, Mira replayed the killer’s notes in her mind, their obsessive devotion to structure, metaphor, moral consequence. She recalled how the original puppet play had been banned not for its violence, but for the way it blurred art and reality, convincing audiences that gods moved through men’s actions. “He thinks he’s not the killer,” Mira whispered. “He thinks he’s the divine hand. The director.” Rangan didn’t respond. He just stared ahead into the mist curling over the Hooghly River. Somewhere across the water, another puppet awaited its stage. Somewhere in the shadows, the Puppeteer was already rehearsing the final act.
8
The next morning brought no light, only a greying Kolkata sky stained by storm residue and thickening dread. Mira awoke to find a note slid beneath her apartment door, handwritten in the same ink-dipped calligraphy as the earlier manuscript—no signature, no address, just a line: “To cut the strings, you must first see them.” Rangan arrived minutes later, pale and haggard, his phone in hand. Another murder. Biswas, the constable, was found hanging from the Howrah Bridge scaffolding, body twisted like a marionette mid-performance, wrists bruised by something akin to string burns. The medical report later would note how his jaw had been wired shut, his tongue removed and placed inside a wooden puppet box left beneath him. Mira knew then, without doubt—the Puppeteer was no longer reenacting the old play. He was rewriting it, casting living characters, choosing scenes with a personal twist. In the eerie quiet of her flat, she pulled out the original puppet script again and began mapping each murder to the moral arc of the old story. She realized the victims weren’t random; they were symbolic shadows of the play’s archetypes. The Critic. The Betrayer. The Blind Witness. The Corrupt King.
At Rangan’s insistence, they visited the archives of Rabindra Bharati University, hoping to locate an uncensored copy of the banned play, rumored to contain the final unreleased act. But the librarian—a shriveled, bespectacled man who seemed startled just by the name of the script—refused them access. “That play is cursed,” he hissed. “The last person who read the full version gouged out his own eyes during a student production in 1979.” Mira pressed him for more. After a long silence, he led them into a back vault of the library, unlocking a dusty cabinet with shaking fingers. Inside was a red-stitched journal wrapped in silk. Mira opened it. The final act was there, handwritten in fading ink, revealing a grim finale not just of murder, but transformation. The play didn’t end with the hero defeating the villain—it ended with the stage becoming real, the puppets breaking free, and the director disappearing into his own creation. A perfect cycle. A loop. “He’s not just killing,” Mira said, her voice hollow. “He’s trying to become the play.”
That evening, Rangan received a call from an anonymous number—just three words whispered in a child’s voice: “Final curtain soon.” When they traced the signal, it led not to a phone but to a broken speaker wired into the wall of the defunct Minerva Theatre—long abandoned, condemned, and due for demolition within a week. They drove there under the cover of night, Mira’s heart pounding like a drumbeat guiding them toward something inevitable. Inside the theatre, the seats had collapsed into rot, vines coiled over the pillars, and the air was thick with mildew and memory. But the stage had been cleaned, freshly painted with crimson and black, and a spotlight—somehow functional—lit a single chair at center stage. On it was a puppet with Mira’s face. Its eyes had been painted shut, but its mouth was wide open in a scream carved into the wood. A speaker on the ground crackled to life. Then came a voice—filtered, soft, theatrical: “You are no longer the audience, Mira. You are the script.”
Rangan grabbed her arm, but Mira stepped forward, something shifting in her. She had seen the strings now. They weren’t made of thread or wood, but of memory, trauma, history. The Puppeteer had chosen her not because she was smart—but because she remembered. Because, perhaps, at some point in her childhood, she too had watched the forbidden play, or sat beside someone who did. “He’s making me remember something I’ve buried,” she whispered. The lights dimmed. Somewhere beyond the broken theatre, a performance had already begun. And its final act would not be watched from the safety of a seat—it would be lived.
9
The morning sun filtered weakly through the soot-stained windows of the decrepit godown near Tikiapara, where Aranya stood amid a sea of rotting props, frayed costumes, and shattered puppets. It was as if the ghosts of the forgotten jatra plays haunted every corner. Shreya, pale and silent, sifted through a box of torn scripts that had once belonged to the Rupayan Puppetry Troupe, the same group whose lost performance Morjada Bishorjon had inspired the recent murders. The moldy air was thick with the perfume of damp wood, oil paint, and time. They found a bundle of diaries, yellowed and curling, inscribed with the name “Chinmoy Mukherjee”—a reclusive playwright and puppeteer who had vanished two decades ago. In one entry, he wrote about being dismissed by audiences who called his work ‘too morbid, too moralistic.’ The last few entries were increasingly erratic, speaking of a vision—a “moral stage” drenched in crimson, a return to “scripted justice.” Aranya read the pages aloud slowly, his voice cracking when he came to a line: “If the law is blind, then let the puppets dance. I will give them the music of fear.”
With a heavy heart and a sharper clarity, Shreya pieced together the mad devotion behind the murders. Every killing mirrored a scene from Morjada Bishorjon, and every victim fit a moral archetype from the original script—the corrupt landlord, the unfaithful wife, the dishonest priest. Whoever the killer was, they weren’t just murdering—they were ‘correcting’ the world through Chinmoy’s deluded lens. But Chinmoy was believed dead, or at the very least vanished. Was this a copycat, a fanatic, or Chinmoy himself returned from obscurity with puppeteer strings in bloodstained hands? Aranya didn’t speak for a long time, but his eyes were burning with a familiar intensity. He had seen this kind of madness before, when conviction and art and vengeance blurred into one monstrous purpose. The worst killers, he murmured, were not the ones who killed out of passion, but those who believed they were saving something greater than themselves.
That evening, a fresh body was found. It was Rajat Sanyal, a controversial art critic and former trustee of the Bengal Cultural Trust—stabbed through the chest and suspended like a marionette outside the gates of Rabindra Sadan, with crimson paint splattered around him forming the word “ABHIMAN”—pride. Police panicked, and Commissioner Pradyut Roy called Aranya personally, desperation overtaking formality. Aranya agreed to a meeting, but on his own terms. He and Shreya spent the rest of the night tracing the lineage of Chinmoy’s disciples, digging into performance school rosters and abandoned theater company archives. A name emerged repeatedly—Bikram Deb, a student obsessed with morality plays and symbolic puppetry, who had disappeared after being expelled from his conservatory for threatening a fellow student during a rehearsal. As Aranya stared at the grainy black-and-white photo of a young man with burning eyes and delicate hands, he whispered, almost to himself, “It’s not Chinmoy—it’s the role he left behind. Someone has picked up the strings.” And far away, in the shadows behind a stage curtain soaked in time and sweat, the killer sharpened his next blade and painted a new mask. The final act, it seemed, was near.
10
The room was drenched in the flickering glow of firelight as the final act unfolded at the decrepit Natmandir behind Howrah’s Shibpur temple, where the echoes of a bygone cultural era still lingered in the dust-choked rafters and moth-eaten drapes. Inspector Rono Mukherjee stood at the periphery of the performance, his pistol loosely in his hand, watching as the stage—set up by the killer in painstaking homage to the ancient Jatra form—came alive with marionettes mimicking death. In the middle of it stood Anirban, his theatre student eyes now hollow, locked on the figure moving with jerky grace behind the puppet curtain—Maya, their enigmatic playwright turned executioner, clad in the ceremonial garb of the Bengali folk puppet master, her face painted in pale ash and vermilion. With eerie calm, she recited the final verse of the lost puppet script, each word dripping with prophetic finality as her last victim, a corrupt property developer tied like a puppet, hung suspended over the stage. This wasn’t just theatre anymore; this was her morality play, her reckoning. As the lights dimmed and the last line echoed—“Pardon is a privilege of the gods, not the puppets”—Anirban took a step forward, and Rono aimed his weapon, the silence thick as myth.
But the shot never fired. Instead, Maya turned, her eyes meeting Rono’s in a moment of tired understanding. She whispered, “I just gave them what they wanted—a show,” and with a swift motion, brought the entire puppet rig crashing down. The structure collapsed in a flurry of wooden limbs and red silk, obscuring her form in smoke and shadow. By the time they pulled apart the wreckage, she was gone—vanished like the trickster heroine of an old folk tale, her final performance etched forever in the minds of those present. In the days that followed, the city would whisper about the Puppeteer of Howrah, half in fear, half in awe, the details already slipping into legend. Rono filed his last report with weary precision, knowing full well justice—true justice—had danced far beyond the reach of law. Anirban, meanwhile, found himself haunted by the rhythm of Maya’s voice, by the blood that never quite washed from the stage, and by the terrible beauty of a script fulfilled in crimson and silence.
Months later, the Puppet Archives in Rabindra Sadan received an anonymous package wrapped in yellowed newspaper. Inside was a complete script of the lost puppet play, inked in both Bengali and Sanskrit, annotated in a hand Anirban knew too well. Along with it came a single marionette: a goddess figure holding a broken sword and a balance scale. No name, no note—just the puppet and the script, like relics of a morality never meant for the living. Anirban took the artifacts into the small black-box theatre he’d begun restoring and placed them beneath the spotlight, unsure whether to burn them or bow. Outside, Howrah bustled on, its trains groaning like ancient beasts and its river hiding secrets in its churn. Somewhere in that moving mass of lives and shadows, a woman walked with ashes on her forehead and verses in her blood, already composing her next performance.
End
