Meher Aftab
Part 1: The Flag That Doesn’t Wave
The sun hung over the capital city of Ruvana like a bloated wound, casting a hazy orange over the skyline of glass ministries and concrete ghosts. Somewhere between the Parliament dome and the military cantonment, truth had gone missing. And Naveen Rahatkar, senior political correspondent for The Varshana Ledger, was beginning to smell its corpse.
He sat in the pressroom of the Central Secretariat, watching the white-and-saffron flag of the Republic of Varshana flutter on the giant LED screen. Outside, the real flag was limp, unmoving despite the breeze. Symbolic, he thought. Symbolism was all that was left now—symbols of democracy, justice, unity—used like cheap props in a third-rate play.
Minister of Internal Stability, Jibran Vyas, was about to address the press. That in itself was suspicious. Vyas rarely spoke to the media unless he had something to bury. Naveen leaned forward in his chair, fingers poised over his notebook—not his phone. He trusted paper more than pixels these days.
Vyas appeared, flanked by two guards in dark green paramilitary uniforms. His face, pale and polished, betrayed none of the tension Naveen felt in the room. “Good morning,” he said without smiling. “This morning, the government of Varshana has officially launched Operation Clearlight, a nationwide security campaign against insurgent threats and misinformation campaigns led by foreign-funded sleeper agents.”
The air thinned. Journalists exchanged glances, some scribbling, some live-tweeting. Naveen felt a slow burn in his throat. Clearlight wasn’t in any of the leaks. This was new. Or hidden too well.
“The operation will include digital surveillance, preemptive arrests, and coordination with the Department of Information Ethics,” Vyas continued, hands folded like a schoolmaster. “We will not allow external ideologies to fracture our soil.”
A young reporter raised her hand. “Sir, does this have anything to do with the disappearance of MP Iqbal D’Souza last week?”
Vyas blinked. “Mr. D’Souza is on a health break. Please respect the privacy of his family.”
Naveen scribbled one word: vanished.
By the time the conference ended, two things were clear. One: Operation Clearlight was not about external threats. It was about purging internal dissent. Two: Jibran Vyas had just declared war without using the word war.
Outside the Secretariat, Naveen lit a cigarette with shaking fingers. The boulevard was crowded with cameras, chatter, and traffic, but something felt eerie—as if the entire capital had tilted slightly to one side and no one noticed. Or cared.
His phone buzzed. A single message.
Sender: UNKNOWN
Text: Meet me at 9. The old archives basement. Come alone. Don’t bring your press badge. —S.A.
Naveen stared at the message. The initials jolted something loose in his memory. S.A.—the name he hadn’t heard in three years.
At 9:01 PM, Naveen slipped past the locked security gates of the Ruvana State Archives. He had borrowed a defunct cleaning crew ID and left his phone in his apartment. The guards at the gate barely glanced up. It wasn’t that hard. These days, people stopped seeing others unless they screamed or bled.
The basement smelled of iron, mildew, and old revolutions. The bulbs overhead flickered like anxious thoughts. Rows of forgotten documents lay in locked cabinets behind chicken-wire mesh. This was where Varshana’s pre-digital past was slowly decaying—handwritten speeches, banned manifestos, records from the monarchy days.
And then she appeared.
Saira Azlan stepped from behind a rusted shelf, draped in a navy trench coat. Her eyes were still the same—sharp, liquid, dangerous. Three years ago, she was a whistleblower inside the Ministry of Telecom, the first to leak evidence of state surveillance software. She had disappeared right before her arrest warrant was issued. Naveen had presumed she was dead.
“You look disappointed,” she said, arms crossed.
“I thought you were a ghost,” Naveen said.
“In this country, ghosts are safer than the living.”
He looked around. “Why here?”
“They don’t scan this floor. It’s outside the wireless grid. Dead zones have their uses.”
Naveen tried to keep his voice calm. “So what is this about? Operation Clearlight? I need evidence, not riddles.”
“You’ll get it. But you have to promise to publish it in one piece. Not as a series, not in bits. One shot. Or it gets buried.”
“What is it?”
She handed him a brown file. On the cover was a red triangle stamped with a military seal. Inside: classified memos, surveillance logs, lists of names. At the top was a header:
PROJECT NIGHTROOT: Strategic Consolidation Protocol — PHASE 2
Naveen skimmed through pages. Civilian leaders marked as hostile vectors. Financial links between the ruling National Progress Party and the privately-run surveillance grid VyomNet. Deepfake campaigns against opposition leaders. State-sponsored social media lynch mobs.
This wasn’t just political suppression.
It was regime engineering.
“You leak this,” she said, “and they’ll come for you within hours. But if you don’t… next month’s elections will be the last Varshana ever holds.”
He closed the file. His hands were trembling. “What do they want, Saira?”
“They want a nation without mirrors. A country that doesn’t reflect back its wounds. Just flags, songs, slogans. Like a theater set. And anyone who refuses to play along… disappears.”
She leaned close, her voice barely above a whisper. “They’re watching us right now. But they can’t hear us here. This place was built in the monarchy era—stone walls. They couldn’t infect it.”
Naveen looked at the shadows behind the shelves, suddenly unsure if they were really alone.
“What do I do next?” he asked.
“Print the truth. Or bury it. But if you choose to print it,” she said, “go to Bhargav Hill tomorrow. The old radio tower. There’s a man named Devdan who’ll give you what comes next.”
“And if I say no?”
She smiled faintly. “Then you get to live a little longer.”
Before he could reply, she vanished back into the stacks. By the time he followed her path, the room was empty again.
That night, Naveen returned to his apartment and locked the door thrice. He stared at the file for hours, trying to decide whether he was a journalist or a coward.
On his TV, the national broadcaster played the anthem. The flag waved perfectly on screen, as always.
But outside his window, in the real world, it hung limp and colorless.
Something had already begun.
Part 2: The Hill Where Truth Hides
The next morning, the streets of Ruvana felt hungover from silence. Buses ran late. Markets opened slowly. The city’s pulse, usually humming by eight, now beat with hesitation. Naveen Rahatkar noticed it as he rode toward Bhargav Hill in an old taxi with its meter stuck on zero. The driver didn’t speak once, didn’t even ask where Naveen worked—a rarity in a country where everyone wanted to know everything, especially about journalists.
Naveen kept the file under his jacket, zipped tight. He hadn’t slept. Every sound—a cough in the hallway, a door creaking open—had sounded like an arrest. He had put tape over the peephole and stuffed his phone in the rice jar in the kitchen, like some half-serious ritual of paranoia. He wasn’t sure what scared him more—that he was overreacting, or that he wasn’t.
Bhargav Hill used to be a weather station back when Varshana’s kings still ruled by decree. Now it was a crumbling tower surrounded by thorny shrubs and the occasional drunk poet. Nobody cared for it except perhaps the pigeons and ghosts. The climb wasn’t hard, but it was lonely. By the time Naveen reached the top, his shirt clung to his back and his mouth was dry.
The tower stood like a broken pen nib, jagged and rusted, pointing toward a sun that refused to burn through the fog.
A man in a grey shawl was waiting near the base. He didn’t speak when Naveen approached, just nodded once and gestured him into the ruined building. Inside, the air smelled like rust, moss, and long-abandoned plans.
“You Devdan?” Naveen asked.
The man turned. His beard was streaked with copper threads, eyes clouded but alert. “That’s what she calls me. You got the file?”
Naveen hesitated, then took it out. Devdan didn’t touch it.
“They can track files now,” Devdan said. “Even paper. Microdust. Fiberglass fibers that carry RFID tags. You need to start thinking like they do.”
“You mean paranoid?”
“I mean logical.”
Devdan picked up a small box from behind a brick and set it on a broken window sill. He opened it. Inside were more documents—older than Saira’s file. A map. A list of registered voters. An internal memo from the Election Commission dated six months ago.
“What is this?” Naveen asked.
“Proof that the next elections are already decided. The voting machines were replaced last monsoon. Quietly. Contracts given to a shell company called MivaTek.”
Naveen frowned. “Never heard of it.”
“Exactly. On paper, it makes agricultural sensors. In reality? It’s a front for VyomNet.”
The same company named in the Nightroot documents.
Devdan leaned forward. “Each machine is designed to learn patterns—how a region votes, who it prefers, what speech rhythms work best on local voters. Then it skews results by a margin too small to raise alarms. Four percent. Seven. But enough to ensure victory.”
Naveen’s head spun. “How do you know all this?”
“I built the first prototype. Back when I still believed we were trying to save democracy.”
There was a long silence. Outside, the wind whistled through the tower’s cracked stones.
“They’re going to round up dissenters next,” Devdan continued. “Activists, writers, teachers. Anyone who can still teach people how to think. Saira thinks you can stop it.”
“I’m a journalist,” Naveen said. “I write articles. I don’t start revolutions.”
“You might not have a choice. Sometimes, truth becomes a weapon whether you want it to or not.”
Naveen’s phone buzzed.
He froze.
He had left it in the rice jar.
So who was calling?
He pulled it out from his jacket pocket anyway—his burner. One message.
Sender: UNKNOWN
Text: They know. Leave now. Don’t go home. Don’t trust anyone. —S.A.
He looked at Devdan. “We’re compromised.”
Devdan nodded as if he had expected it. “Then let’s do this properly.”
He handed Naveen a tiny black chip.
“What’s this?”
“Everything you need to take them down. It has a backdoor key into MivaTek’s internal cloud. Emails, machine logs, code commits. It’s encrypted, but your friend in the press syndicate, Farida Malik, knows how to break it.”
Naveen stared at the chip. It looked harmless. Like a broken SIM card. But it probably held the fate of a country.
Devdan pointed toward a back exit. “There’s a bike under the slope. Take it. Head west. Avoid cameras. Don’t use roads. Don’t stop. Not until you find Farida.”
“And you?”
“I’ll slow them down.”
Before Naveen could protest, Devdan picked up a flare gun and tossed a packet of old election posters into a barrel. With one click, the barrel burst into flame.
Outside, sirens began to wail.
“GO!” Devdan shouted.
Naveen bolted through the side path, leaves slashing at his legs, boots pounding the earth. At the bottom of the slope, half-hidden under dry grass, was an old motorbike. The key was already in the ignition. He jumped on, heart hammering, the black chip clenched in his fist like a piece of nuclear material.
As the engine roared to life, he looked back once.
Flames licked the tower. Smoke spiraled into the sky.
And three black jeeps tore up the hill, too late.
An hour later, Naveen pulled into a dusty mechanic shop behind the Ruvana Rail Yards. It was Farida Malik’s safehouse. She used to work with Naveen at The Ledger, before she vanished during the last student protest crackdown. Now she ran a ghost press network—the Free Syndicate—from basements and broken warehouses.
She stood by the open garage door, wiping oil from her fingers with a stained rag. “You look like hell,” she said.
“I’m worse inside.”
He handed her the chip.
Farida squinted. “Devdan’s work?”
“Yep.”
She didn’t ask questions. Just nodded. “Come inside. We’ve got three hours before their drones start sniffing.”
Inside, monitors blinked, fans whirred, and three other people—young, masked, focused—were typing furiously.
“You think it’s too late?” Naveen asked her as she inserted the chip.
She paused, looked up. “No.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’re still whispering. If it were too late, we’d be silent.”
As the data decrypted, lines of code and emails began appearing on the screen.
Names. Times. Orders. Protocols.
A blueprint for authoritarianism, coded in syntax and silence.
And now, Naveen thought, they had a voice again.
Part 3: Voices in the Static
The warehouse trembled with electricity, not from wires but from fear that had finally found shape—lines of glowing text spreading across six screens like veins of fire. Names pulsed on the display: cabinet ministers, software engineers, fake journalists, and the faceless executives of MivaTek. Farida’s fingers flew across the keyboard while her team worked in perfect, silent rhythm, as if they had been rehearsing this moment for years.
Naveen watched from the corner, wiping sweat from his neck with an oil-stained cloth. His legs ached from the ride, his mind buzzed with adrenaline and dread. The decrypted data revealed more than he had imagined—direct communication between Vyas’s office and MivaTek, code-switch commands that could reprogram thousands of voting machines remotely, lists of “influence nodes” marked for digital blacklisting or real-world elimination.
“What’s Project Q-17?” he asked, pointing at a line of text on one of the monitors.
Farida leaned in. “Looks like… controlled public panic. Fake blasts. Cyber-attacks on water supply systems. Create chaos, then offer a solution. Classic Problem-Reaction-Solution model.”
“Manufactured terror?”
“Exactly.”
“And the cure is more control.”
Farida didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. They both knew what was coming.
Outside, the wind howled across the railyard. An old clock tower struck eleven. One of Farida’s crew, a boy barely out of college, suddenly jerked his head toward the ceiling. “Drone noise,” he whispered.
Everyone froze.
Farida yanked the blinds shut and flipped a switch on the control board. Instantly, the lights dimmed, and the screens shifted to blackout mode. The only sound now was the low hum of the cooling fans and the faint buzz of surveillance blades above.
Naveen’s heart pounded.
“What if they find us?” he whispered.
“They won’t,” Farida said. “Not yet. This place has EM shielding. But we’ve got maybe two hours, tops. After that, we burn it all.”
“But what about the evidence?”
Farida handed him a flash drive the size of a cigarette butt. “This holds a mirrored copy. Triple encrypted. You get this to someone loud enough, brave enough, and still foolish enough to care.”
“Like who?”
She smirked. “You, for starters.”
He stared at the drive. It felt heavier than a weapon. More dangerous too.
“I can’t do this alone.”
“You won’t. There’s someone in New Nareen—an old judge. Leena Vasavda. She was on the Constitutional Review Panel before they shut it down and called her a ‘moral extremist’. She’s gone underground, but she still has contacts in the International Justice Network.”
“She’ll trust me?”
“She’ll recognize that drive. Devdan designed the encryption. Only she has the decryption keys.”
Naveen pocketed the drive. “Then I’ll find her.”
“You’ll have to go tonight. Trains are being scanned. Roads too. But the river’s still open.”
“The river?”
Farida led him to a trapdoor at the back of the warehouse. It opened to a tunnel sloping downward into blackness.
“Old smuggler routes. This one leads to the Nalvi riverbank. There’s a boat waiting.”
Naveen paused. “What about you?”
Farida smiled, wearier now. “I’ve got backup nodes. I’ll disappear for a while. Like smoke. You just focus on staying alive.”
They embraced briefly—no drama, no promises, just gratitude. And then he was gone, descending into the dark.
The tunnel felt alive. Water dripped from the walls. Rat shadows flickered past his boots. Somewhere ahead, the muffled roar of the Nalvi River beckoned like the end of a confession.
After nearly an hour, he emerged behind a collapsed boathouse. The river was wide here, moonlight fractured on its surface like broken glass. A small wooden boat waited, engine sputtering softly, manned by an old fisherman who said nothing but nodded when Naveen climbed aboard.
As they drifted out into the current, Naveen stared at the black sky and wondered if anyone else knew what he now carried. He felt like a courier of plague and truth rolled into one.
Halfway across, a flicker of red appeared in the sky. Then another. Then the telltale green blink of a drone.
The old man saw it too. “Down,” he hissed.
Naveen ducked under a tarp soaked in diesel. The boatman cut the engine and let the river take them. Above, the drone hovered. Then moved on.
When Naveen finally climbed onto the opposite shore, he felt reborn—wet, shivering, and furious.
New Nareen was two kilometers uphill. He walked.
By dawn, he reached a dilapidated guesthouse on the city’s edge. Inside, a woman in a khadi saree was serving tea to a table of silent men. Her hair was silver. Her back straight. Her eyes sharp as broken glass.
“Judge Vasavda?” Naveen asked.
She turned. “I know you. You write for the Ledger.”
“Not anymore,” he said.
He handed her the flash drive.
She closed her hand around it and nodded. “It begins again, then.”
“You still have contacts?”
“In Geneva, Nairobi, London. Enough people who still remember what accountability tastes like.”
“But how long before they find you?”
“They won’t.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Because they think I’m dead. And sometimes, being a ghost is the best way to haunt power.”
She smiled grimly and motioned him to sit. He obeyed.
She plugged the drive into a secure laptop surrounded by copper shielding. The files opened—dozens of them, sprawling like roots.
“This… this will shake them,” she said. “If we leak it properly. Not just to the media. But to citizens. To tribunals. To students. Truth is viral when it’s human.”
Outside, the sun broke through thick clouds. In the distance, sirens wailed again.
But for the first time in days, Naveen felt something crack inside him. Not fear.
Hope.
But just as Judge Vasavda began forwarding the first packet of files to her encrypted global server, her laptop screen flickered. Then went black.
“What happened?” Naveen asked.
She tried typing. Nothing.
And then a message appeared in red:
YOU WERE WARNED.
The laptop sparked. Smoke rose. Vasavda yanked the plug.
Naveen’s breath caught in his throat. “What was that?”
“They’re already inside the grid.”
A beat of silence. Then Vasavda said, “You need to run again.”
“But the data—”
She held up the still-cool flash drive. “This one was a decoy. The real one’s with someone else. And they’re already en route to the Republic Broadcasting Network. If it airs on the national feed, it can’t be contained.”
“Who?”
“You’ll find out soon. But for now—get out of here. The hunters are close.”
Naveen turned toward the door, eyes wide.
A red dot glowed briefly on the wall.
Sniper scope.
Judge Vasavda whispered, “Go.”
And Naveen ran, heart in his throat, one word repeating in his mind like static—
Broadcast.
Part 4: The Tower and the Trigger
Rain fell in sheets, turning the streets of New Nareen into oil-slick mirrors. Naveen ran without direction, only instinct. Behind him, the crack of a rifle echoed, swallowed by thunder. Judge Vasavda’s silhouette had collapsed before he turned. He didn’t see the bullet land. He didn’t have to.
He ducked into an alley where electric lights flickered like failing memories. The city loomed around him, indifferent, towering—glass towers of ministries, twisted highways patrolled by drone swarms, and the singular antenna of the Republic Broadcasting Network rising like a needle into the storm. RBN, the last surviving state-run news service, ironically built to unify, now filtered by censors and military scripts. But if one thing still mattered, it was airtime.
He had to reach it.
The real drive wasn’t with him. He knew that now. It was with someone else—someone Vasavda trusted. But who? Another courier? A former rebel? A rogue editor?
And then it clicked: Saira.
She had said he wouldn’t be alone. That truth needed multiple routes. He was the decoy. The public runner. And the signal to the nation would only go out once he lit the match.
He pushed open a rusted grate near an old canal lock and dropped into the sewer. The water was ankle-deep, warm, and foul, but the tunnels were the only way to reach RBN’s base without passing thermal cameras. Farida had once told him these pipes used to carry waste from the old royal palace. Now they carried hope and rot alike.
As he crawled, he pulled out his burner phone. One bar. Just enough.
He messaged a single contact:
TO: Unknown
Message: Approaching RBN. Going loud. Light it when I do. —N
No reply.
Didn’t matter.
By the time he emerged behind RBN’s broadcasting annex, the sun had risen—but pale and filtered, as if uncertain of its own existence. Guards milled about the main gate, their rifles visible even in casual posture. He couldn’t go through the front.
Instead, he scaled a supply pipe on the eastern wall, boots slipping, fingers torn. Rain helped mask the sound. So did the city’s constant hum. He reached the second floor’s ventilation duct, cracked it open, and slid in. Inside, the station buzzed with broadcast preparations.
Through the grate, he saw anchors rehearsing lines, cameramen adjusting focus. Every face was calm, professional—unaware, or pretending. Somewhere above him, the transmission tower pulsed quietly, connected to satellites, the final thread between state and citizen.
Naveen dropped down into a maintenance corridor. No one saw him. He moved fast. He knew the layout. Years ago, he had interviewed a RBN director here. The building hadn’t changed.
Then he saw her.
Saira stood at the far end of the corridor, dressed in a janitor’s uniform, mop in hand. She caught his eye and jerked her head. He followed.
They met inside a backup editing suite behind the master control room.
“You’re late,” she said.
“You’re alive,” he replied, breathless.
She grinned. “Barely. We lost Vasavda?”
He nodded, jaw tight.
“She knew the risk,” Saira said quietly. “We all do.”
“Do you have the real drive?”
“No. I already uploaded it to the backup cloud node Farida owns. But we need to broadcast a verification key from here. Once that goes out, anyone in the world can download and decrypt it.”
“And how do we do that?”
She pointed to a terminal. “Insert this. It triggers a hardcoded override. Cuts to emergency feed. Sixty seconds of broadcast, no censorship.”
She held up a plastic dongle the size of a cigarette filter. Naveen took it.
“Once you plug it in, the entire tower will light up like a firecracker,” she said. “They’ll know.”
“Let them.”
“We only get one shot.”
He nodded.
They moved to the hallway just behind the control room. Inside, an operator was half-asleep, scrolling through feeds. Naveen reached for the fire alarm. Saira stopped him.
“Too slow. Let me.”
She stepped forward and pulled open the breaker panel. Two wires. She snapped them together.
The lights flickered. Alarms blared.
Panic exploded.
The operator leapt up and ran to the stairwell. Perfect.
Saira opened the control room door. “Go.”
Naveen entered, sat at the master console, and inserted the dongle.
The screen blinked. Then went blue.
EMERGENCY SIGNAL — NATIONAL PRIORITY TRANSMISSION — CODE 17-DELTA
Saira was already pulling up the file overlay. A pre-recorded message began playing—Vasavda’s voice, crisp and full of fire.
“Citizens of Varshana. What you are about to see is not fiction, not fear-mongering, but fact. Your elections have been stolen. Your voices silenced. The names you trusted—Jibran Vyas, Vikram Narul, MivaTek executives—have engineered a synthetic republic…”
Images flashed on screen: scanned memos, surveillance camera screenshots, code blueprints.
Naveen watched as every screen in the control room mirrored the feed.
He looked up. Through the glass window of the broadcast suite, the sky over Ruvana shifted—every billboard, TV, and public screen now flickered with Vasavda’s message.
They had done it.
But then came the crash.
Doors burst open. Armed guards swarmed in. One shouted, “Step away from the console!”
Saira raised her hands slowly. “You’re too late. It’s out.”
But Naveen didn’t move.
He turned the chair to face the guards.
“I hope you’re recording this too,” he said.
A rifle butt slammed into his face.
Darkness.
When he awoke, his wrists were cuffed to a metal chair. A single bulb swung above him. Cold room. Concrete walls. The smell of sweat and bleach.
Vyas sat opposite him, calm, immaculate.
“You could’ve been something,” Vyas said. “A columnist, a foreign correspondent. A decorated loyalist.”
Naveen spat blood.
“I don’t need decoration,” he said. “I need truth.”
Vyas smiled.
“Well then, Mr. Rahatkar. Welcome to your truth.”
He stood and nodded to a soldier.
The door opened.
And in stepped someone Naveen hadn’t seen in ten years.
His brother.
Aryan Rahatkar.
Wearing the uniform of the Internal Stability Corps.
Part 5: The Brother in Uniform
The cell seemed to shrink the moment Aryan Rahatkar stepped into it. He had grown broader since Naveen last saw him—clean-shaven jaw, stiff posture, the sharp glint of a man who believed in rules more than relationships. The grey-green uniform he wore bore the emblem of the Internal Stability Corps: a tiger’s claw over a flame.
Naveen’s breath caught.
“Aryan?” His voice cracked, half from exhaustion, half from disbelief.
Aryan didn’t speak right away. He pulled the steel chair across from Naveen, sat down with the precision of a soldier, and placed a black file on the table between them.
“You’re thinner,” Aryan said, finally.
“And you’re dressed like a regime,” Naveen replied.
A muscle twitched near Aryan’s jaw. “You made this choice.”
“I didn’t choose sides. I chose truth.”
“And that’s exactly the problem.”
They stared at each other. Two brothers, raised on the same soil, taught by the same parents to question power—and now, one sat in cuffs while the other held the key.
Naveen laughed, bitter and low. “What happened to you, Aryan? You were the one who protested the Emergency Orders in college. You were the one who stood on rooftops with a loudspeaker yelling for free speech.”
“And I was also the one who watched our mother get evicted because your articles made our neighborhood ‘unstable’,” Aryan snapped.
Naveen froze.
“She died in a one-room tenement in Nalpur,” Aryan said. “And you couldn’t even come to the funeral. You were too busy chasing conspiracies.”
“I didn’t know,” Naveen whispered.
“You didn’t want to know. Truth is your drug, Naveen. You’re so high on it, you don’t see who gets crushed beneath your headlines.”
Naveen wanted to scream. But the rage twisted inward. Guilt wrapped itself around his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. And meant it.
Aryan exhaled and pushed the black file forward. “You’ve caused chaos. Half the country watched that broadcast. There’s unrest in seven provinces. Riots. Police stations burned down. People are calling for Vyas’s resignation.”
Naveen straightened. “Then it’s working.”
Aryan slammed his palm on the table. “It’s anarchy, not revolution!”
“No,” Naveen replied, “it’s the sound of people waking up.”
Aryan leaned closer, voice low. “I can make this disappear. They’ve given me the authority. You sign a statement admitting fabrication, say it was an international smear plot, and I can get you out. Clean. New identity. New city. Even a passport.”
Naveen stared.
“You’re serious?”
“I’m trying to save you,” Aryan said. “You don’t understand what’s coming. Vyas is just the front. Behind him, there’s General Ramesh Nandha. He’s not interested in half-measures. He wants martial law. And he’ll get it if the unrest continues. You think you’ve won something by exposing this? You’ve just handed them the perfect excuse to lock this country down forever.”
Silence dropped between them like a gavel.
“I can’t lie,” Naveen said.
Aryan’s voice dropped. “Then you’ll die in this room.”
A loud buzz cut through the air.
An intercom clicked. “Commander Rahatkar. You’re needed in Hall C. Urgent.”
Aryan sighed and stood. “Think about what I said.”
“I already have,” Naveen said.
Aryan didn’t look back as he exited. The door clanged shut.
Naveen sat alone, wrists burning from the cuffs, every muscle aching. He tried to steady his breath. His head throbbed from the rifle blow earlier. And yet, somewhere beneath the pain and betrayal, was a sliver of clarity.
If the regime was panicking, it meant something had worked.
He tilted his head back against the cold wall. “Let them come.”
And they did.
Ten minutes later, two soldiers in riot armor entered and dragged him through a maze of fluorescent corridors. He passed rooms full of crying protestors, bloodied journalists, and silent students staring into space. This was the new democracy: discipline without discourse.
They stopped in front of a white door.
Inside was Jibran Vyas.
Alone.
He stood beside a long conference table. On it: a pen, a prepared statement, and a camera.
“You know why you’re here,” Vyas said, smoothing the crease of his kurta.
“I assume it’s not for a commendation.”
Vyas chuckled. “Still charming. Even in chains.”
Naveen said nothing.
Vyas circled him. “You’re clever. You layered the file across three international servers. We’ve managed to block two. The third one is still live. But that doesn’t matter.”
“Why?”
“Because people forget,” Vyas said. “They get bored. The fire burns fast, then dies. What matters is the headline after the chaos. And I want that headline to say: Whistleblower Confesses to Conspiracy.”
Naveen looked at the camera.
“Lie to the people who just started believing again?”
“Or disappear forever.”
Vyas placed a document in front of him. “Sign it. Record the confession. Walk away.”
“And if I refuse?”
Vyas didn’t blink. “You’ll be declared an enemy of the state. Your name wiped from records. Your writings buried. Your death attributed to pneumonia or suicide. Your family—well, your brother will keep his rank, but only if you cooperate.”
Something inside Naveen broke—not in fear, but in resolve.
He picked up the pen.
Vyas smiled.
Then Naveen threw the pen at his face.
Vyas recoiled, furious.
“Lock him up,” he snarled. “Tomorrow, we go with Plan B. Cut the net. Seal the borders. Full lockdown.”
But as the guards pulled Naveen back, he smiled.
Because somewhere out there, the real fire was spreading.
Not in files.
In people.
That night, across Varshana, graffiti bloomed on walls—quotes from Vasavda’s speech. In midnight classrooms, university students gathered in candlelight, decoding the redacted documents leaked in the broadcast. In factories, whispers grew louder. In temples and mosques, leaders met quietly, reading from printed transcripts.
And in the hills near Nalpur, a low-frequency transmitter came online, operated by two anonymous voices.
They read:
“We were told to fear shadows. But it turns out, shadows are cast by light. This is only the beginning.”
Part 6: Broadcast Underground
Beneath the temple ruins of Old Nalpur, in a disused wine cellar converted into a tech den, the signal crackled to life.
“Check the frequency again,” said the girl with the buzzcut, adjusting the copper wiring looped through a cracked brass deity’s hand. “I’m still getting ghost tones from the northern relay.”
The boy beside her, lanky and hollow-eyed, rotated the analog tuner by half a click. The audio stabilized. A slow, low hum emerged—the sound of a sleeping nation being stirred.
She smiled. “There. Now let’s wake them up.”
Their voices were not their own. Both were masked using voice scramblers coded by a rebel programmer from the Free Syndicate. In this room, names were not exchanged. Not out of fear, but discipline.
The girl leaned into the mic.
“People of Varshana. This is not your official radio. This is not your government voice. We are not paid. We are not armed. But we are alive. And we have questions.”
The boy added, “Where is MP Iqbal D’Souza? Why did he vanish after voting against the Cyber Law Extension Bill?”
Another voice crackled in, prerecorded: “Why were only two companies awarded the voting machine tenders with no open bidding?”
And then another: “Why is the same algorithm used for your traffic cameras also used to flag dissent online?”
They broadcast for twenty-two minutes. No music. No slogans. Just questions, facts, and pieces of the leaked files spoken aloud so they couldn’t be censored or traced. Around Varshana, those tuned in via ham radios or old frequency kits huddled in bunk beds and attics, listening.
In a candlelit student hostel in Dehrav, the broadcast was transcribed by hand and passed around. In a mechanic’s garage in southern Ruvana, the audio was burned onto a dozen cheap CDs. In a mosque in Shikarpul, a cleric played it over loudspeakers at dawn.
Truth was leaking—slow, irregular, but real.
Inside his isolation cell, Naveen Rahatkar sat on a concrete slab, wrapped in a thermal blanket that smelled of bleach. He had been denied access to light, sound, or reading for twenty-four hours. The idea, he suspected, was not to torture, but to erase time.
It didn’t work.
He knew what time it was. He knew because at exactly 3:47 p.m., a sharp buzz echoed from the wall’s internal wiring.
A hidden transmitter.
A smuggled signal.
And then, faint but unmistakable, he heard the broadcast:
“…This is not your government voice…”
He smiled, eyes stinging with something that wasn’t tears.
The revolution was speaking. From underground.
Back in Ruvana, chaos bloomed like fungus in wet corners.
The transport workers’ union declared a “rolling blackout,” refusing to move government vehicles unless they received guarantees of election transparency. Teachers in two provinces wore black bands and refused to use government-issued lesson plans that included censorship clauses.
The regime struck back.
Dozens were arrested. Media houses were raided. One anchor was dragged off live air for questioning a minister’s offshore assets.
But it wasn’t enough.
A new hashtag exploded across Chatr, Varshana’s only remaining domestic social platform:
#WeAreTheTransmission
Users began to post snippets from the radio broadcast. Questions. Quotes. Some even read them aloud in public and were arrested on the spot.
The government, unable to stem the tide, took the ultimate step.
At 5:12 p.m. the next day, the National Information Grid went dark.
All mobile signals jammed.
Internet throttled.
Television feeds replaced with patriotic music and the Varshana flag waving on loop.
For the first time in twenty years, the republic had entered a full communication blackout.
But they had miscalculated.
Because silence only amplifies memory.
At the Free Syndicate’s mobile base—now hidden in a moving food truck that crossed districts every four hours—Farida Malik heard the blackout order minutes before it hit. She handed out hand-cranked radios to her crew and relayed their fallback plan.
“Time to go analog,” she said, grinning.
She opened a toolkit and removed three thick booklets—mimeographed newsletters stamped with “BULLETIN 17: PEOPLE’S COPY.” Inside were the full Nightroot documents in simplified language.
“Distribute to public toilets, ATM booths, train compartments,” she ordered. “Where they least expect resistance.”
The fight had returned to the street, to paper, to whispers.
Meanwhile, at the Internal Stability Complex, Aryan Rahatkar paced outside Naveen’s cell. He had reviewed the reports. Seen the hashtags. Watched the ministers snap like dry twigs under the weight of their own contradictions.
His brother had triggered this.
And yet, even now, he could not bring himself to hate him.
Aryan entered the cell.
Naveen looked up, weary but alert. “Come to offer exile again?”
“No,” Aryan said. “To tell you something strange.”
He sat.
“Vyas is panicking. The military isn’t fully aligned behind him. Half of them don’t like that the people are blaming the uniform for the ballot rigging. There’s talk of dissolving the Parliament. Martial law. Or a ‘stability transition’—a polite word for soft dictatorship.”
Naveen blinked. “And you?”
“I’m supposed to head the public operations team for the transition phase.”
“Congratulations.”
Aryan ignored the barb. “But they don’t know I’ve been listening to the underground radio. They don’t know I memorized all twenty-two minutes.”
Silence stretched between them.
Naveen whispered, “Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I think I’m done following orders I don’t believe in.”
Naveen leaned forward. “You can help us.”
“I know.”
“You have access to the central broadcast override?”
Aryan hesitated.
“Maybe,” he said. “It’s guarded. Only activated during wartime emergencies or major disasters.”
“Well,” Naveen said, “they’ve created a disaster. Time to call it what it is.”
Aryan stood. “Don’t say anything. Not even to me. Just wait.”
He turned and walked out.
But just before the door closed, he added, “Tomorrow night. If the alarms go off, get ready.”
Naveen exhaled slowly.
The brothers were no longer on opposite sides.
They were flanking the enemy.
And somewhere beyond Ruvana, in a crowded refugee camp where no one had voted in years, a teenage girl sat beside a broken speaker that now hummed with the faintest trace of a pirate signal.
She didn’t understand politics. Didn’t care for slogans.
But when she heard the line—“Shadows are cast by light”—she smiled.
And wrote it in chalk on the tin wall of her shelter.
The revolution had reached the edges.
Part 7: The Night of No Signals
At precisely 11:00 p.m., a silence deeper than sleep settled over Varshana. Not a natural silence—this was synthetic, strategic, deliberate. Radios hissed with static. Phones showed dead bars. GPS failed. Even the smart traffic lights blinked into confusion. It was the first time since the digital revolution that the entire nation found itself cut off from itself.
They called it The Night of No Signals.
In the Internal Stability Complex, Jibran Vyas stood before a digital war board that now showed only red dots. Each dot represented an information breach: flyers distributed near a school in Balipur, a protest recorded on a camcorder in Shikhar Junction, and an illegal broadcast from a hidden tower somewhere in the forests of north Nalpur.
“This isn’t containment,” he snapped at his staff. “This is hemorrhage. Who is leaking coordinates of our lockdown zones?”
The room stayed silent.
He turned to General Ramesh Nandha, a man with a face like a cliff edge and a voice never louder than a breath. “You said the Nightroot protocols would be airtight.”
Nandha spoke without looking at Vyas. “They were. Until someone on the inside cracked the encryption.”
“And who could do that?” Vyas demanded.
Nandha finally looked at him. “Your favorite soldier—Commander Aryan Rahatkar.”
Aryan stood inside the auxiliary broadcast chamber beneath Ruvana’s central administrative tower. The place was cold, silent, lit by one flickering bulb. Only a few knew of this room—it had been built decades ago, before satellites, to send emergency transmissions via long-range AM waves that could travel over hills and water bodies. It was forgotten, untouched by the modern firewalls and spyware that now ruled the country.
He stared at the console. His hands hovered over the knobs.
The key in his pocket was a coded trigger. Insert it, rotate the dial to 17-MOD, push the brass lever, and the Republic of Varshana would hear a sound it hadn’t in years:
An unfiltered broadcast.
The time was 11:43 p.m.
Farida Malik checked her watch from the back of a moving bus in Dehrav, posing as a vendor transporting jaggery. Her fingers clutched a transmitter no larger than a matchbox. If Aryan succeeded, she’d hear the test tone. One long beep. Then she would trigger the amplifiers hidden in tea stalls, mechanic shops, and library book returns across four districts.
A whisper across the country.
The new resistance had no center. It was dust, scattered and weightless—but together, it could choke an empire.
She looked at her team. Two students. A retired postal clerk. A man who used to sell lottery tickets. All of them now part of an operation codenamed Thunder Without Rain.
“What if he doesn’t do it?” one of the students asked.
Farida smiled grimly. “Then we find another frequency. And another brother.”
Inside his cell, Naveen Rahatkar lay wide awake on the floor, hands behind his head. He had not heard from Aryan again. He did not expect to.
But he had memorized his brother’s words.
“Tomorrow night. If the alarms go off, get ready.”
He watched the small vent in the ceiling. Air moved through it steadily, unbroken. Then, at 11:47 p.m., a sharp click echoed inside the duct.
The fans stopped.
For a moment, he thought the power had failed.
And then he heard it.
A tone.
Clear, metallic, unwavering.
One long beep.
The test tone.
It had begun.
At first, only a handful of people heard it. In a hill village where old transistor radios were still kept for weather alerts. In a fishing dock where a man had rewired his dead television to catch emergency band signals. In a women’s shelter where an old teacher had refused to discard her analog receiver.
But within five minutes, the beep gave way to words.
Aryan’s voice.
Modulated, disguised, but unmistakable.
“This is a message to the people of Varshana. I am a citizen. I am a soldier. I am a witness. What you have suspected is true. The elections have been compromised. The broadcasts censored. The protestors silenced not because they were wrong—but because they were right.”
Then came Naveen’s voice—recorded days ago, smuggled to Aryan through a hidden recorder inside a water bottle.
“If you hear this, I am no longer free. But you are. And you must decide what to do with that freedom. Use it. Don’t wait for perfect leaders. Don’t wait for orders. Truth is not a luxury—it’s a duty.”
And finally, a third voice.
Saira.
“This broadcast will repeat every thirty minutes. Memorize the names. Learn the numbers. Print the files. Speak the questions. Carry the message. You are now the signal.”
Then the music began. Not an anthem, not a slogan. Just a slow, soaring melody—an old folk tune called “Raat Jage Re”, once banned by the monarchy for its subversive lyrics:
The night stays awake for those who dream…
And burns the feet of those who run.
Jibran Vyas smashed a ceramic mug against the floor as the emergency board lit up with unknown frequencies and audio spikes.
“Shut it down!”
“We can’t,” his tech officer said, terrified. “It’s outside the grid.”
“Then jam it!”
“It’s not digital. It’s old signal tech. Spread across dozens of relays. We’d have to shut down all power lines to block it completely.”
“Then do it!”
“But sir… that would cripple the capital.”
Vyas turned to General Nandha. “Deploy Strike Protocol. Arrest everyone in the communications ministry. I want this transmission buried.”
Nandha didn’t move.
“What are you waiting for?”
The general looked at him. “You’ve already lost the narrative. Firing more bullets won’t win it back.”
Vyas’s face drained of color.
“You’re one of them?”
“No,” Nandha said. “I’m a realist. And the winds have shifted.”
At 12:19 a.m., a blackout swept the administrative zone of Ruvana.
But the voice kept playing.
On shortwave.
On rooftops.
In jail cells.
In schoolyards.
And in the hearts of thousands.
The Night of No Signals had become the Night of a Thousand Whispers.
A country silenced by wires had remembered how to speak without them.
Part 8: The Trial of the Unseen
At dawn, the capital woke not to official news but to uncertainty. Streets were flooded with citizens who had not slept. No one knew exactly what had happened—only that a voice had reached them in the dark, and that it had said what so many had feared for so long: the country they lived in was no longer their own.
The government did not issue a press release.
There was nothing left to control.
The media, disconnected from headquarters, filled the void with recycled archives and celebrity reruns. But no one watched. In the tea stalls and street corners, they repeated the radio words from memory. They quoted Saira’s message like scripture. Some even scratched the phrase “You are now the signal” onto walls, currency notes, even car windows. The silence had ruptured, and from within poured something deeper than outrage.
Conviction.
At the Internal Stability Complex, Naveen Rahatkar was no longer in a cell.
He had been transferred—unofficially—to a nondescript building within the administrative district. The guards had changed uniform. No more paramilitary black. These men wore white shirts, grey trousers. Civilian neutrality.
He sat in a sunlit room for the first time in days. Across from him was a microphone, a glass of water, and three chairs. Two were occupied. The third remained empty.
A woman in her sixties with silver hair tied in a bun nodded to him. “Mr. Rahatkar. My name is Aruna Kadam. This is Dr. Purab Jain. We’ve been appointed by the Interim Review Panel.”
“What’s that?” Naveen asked, voice rough.
“It’s not public yet,” said Dr. Jain. “But after last night’s broadcast, the Council of Governors invoked Clause 19-B. Emergency Ethical Inquiry.”
“Is this… a trial?”
Aruna smiled faintly. “A kind of reckoning. One we haven’t had in a long time.”
A third person entered the room then, holding a tablet. Naveen froze.
It was Aryan.
Out of uniform.
Wearing civilian clothes and a simple grey shawl. His face bore new lines, and his eyes looked older than they had the night before. He gave a small nod, not of apology, but of solidarity.
“Proceed,” Aruna said.
The recording light turned red.
For the next two hours, Naveen told them everything—from the leak that started with Saira, to the documents from Devdan, to the backchannel broadcast coordinated with Farida’s team. He gave them names, dates, motives, and methods. He even confessed to bypassing national security laws.
When he was done, Dr. Jain asked a single question. “Why risk your life?”
Naveen looked at the camera lens. “Because truth is a public asset. Not a private risk. And if we only speak it when it’s safe, then we don’t deserve to speak at all.”
Silence.
Then Aruna spoke: “Do you have any final statements?”
Naveen nodded.
“I don’t want a pardon. I want a platform. If this nation is truly changing, then let it start with honest voices, even the ones it tried to crush.”
The panel rose.
“We’ll convene in forty-eight hours,” said Aruna. “Until then, you are not under arrest. You are under witness protection. That includes your brother.”
Naveen turned to Aryan, stunned.
“You resigned?” he asked.
Aryan shrugged. “Technically, I disappeared.”
They shared a brief, awkward smile. Years of silence hadn’t vanished, but something stronger now replaced it—trust not in the past, but in what they could still build.
Farida Malik watched the trial stream on a cracked laptop inside a clinic in the district of Anvitpur. Around her sat twenty others—former teachers, welders, union workers, and a mother holding a child wrapped in a thermal shawl printed with a broken Varshana flag.
“This is history,” someone whispered.
“No,” Farida replied. “This is the prologue.”
The real trial, she knew, was not happening on screens. It was happening in minds. Could people believe again, after being lied to for years? Could they vote again, organize again, forgive again?
Could they rebuild a republic that had turned against them?
Across the country, small courts were re-opening under civic coalitions. In the town of Vibhur, a group of farmers held a “truth circle” outside a panchayat office, each person recounting what they had believed and what they had ignored. In the port city of Karkan, young engineers used white chalk to draw timelines of disinformation campaigns on bus stands. In the mountain district of Tanza, a soldier-turned-poet handed out pamphlets titled The People’s Verdict.
A phrase emerged across these gatherings:
“The Trial is Everywhere.”
It became a call, not for vengeance, but for visibility. Every citizen, once silenced, was now a witness. Every lie needed an audience, and now the audience was refusing to clap.
Jibran Vyas, meanwhile, was in hiding.
He had fled the capital the morning after the broadcast, allegedly for “security inspection” of eastern borders. But his convoy had never reached its destination. Rumors placed him in a foreign consulate. Others said he was still in Ruvana, guarded by mercenaries.
What mattered was that he was no longer in power.
The President of Varshana—long thought to be ceremonial—issued a formal directive declaring an Administrative Rethink Mandate. A full cabinet suspension. All ministries placed under provisional review. A constitutional reform body, headed by retired judges and selected civilians, was formed within the week.
And at its first meeting, they did something symbolic:
They removed the flag from every government office.
Not to erase it.
But to re-stitch it.
Every thread, re-woven with accountability.
Two nights later, Saira Azlan stood on the balcony of a reclaimed printing press in West Ruvana. Below her, thousands gathered in candlelight. No slogans. Just silence.
She spoke into a microphone.
“We were told that we had no choice. That security required secrecy. That dissent was dangerous. But they forgot one thing: this republic is not a fortress. It is a conversation.”
She paused.
“And we have just started talking again.”
In the crowd, Naveen watched her.
He didn’t cheer. Didn’t move.
He simply closed his eyes and let the wind carry her words back into the night.
The trial of the unseen was ending.
But justice had only just begun.
Part 9: The Republic Rewritten
Two weeks after the broadcast, a quiet revolution unfolded across Varshana—not with gunfire or speeches, but with meetings. Long, often frustrating meetings.
In auditoriums, courtrooms, classrooms, and bus stops, people gathered to talk about a word long buried beneath propaganda and cynicism:
Constitution.
Everywhere, copies of the 1974 Charter of the Republic resurfaced—tattered editions from school libraries, illegal reprints from university presses, annotated PDFs shared by rebel teachers. People read it aloud in mosques after prayer. Grandmothers recited clauses from memory over clay stoves. Children circled misspelled definitions of sovereignty in chalk on the backs of walls once used for campaign posters.
This wasn’t nostalgia. It was reclamation.
Naveen Rahatkar watched the country remember itself with awe and a kind of fear. He sat in a temporary media tribunal office, now repurposed inside the gutted remains of the National Press Syndicate building, which had been torched during the riots. From where he sat, the wall behind him still bore scorch marks—like fingerprints of the old regime refusing to fully let go.
Farida sat across from him, running a red pen across a draft titled “Protocol for Media Autonomy Post-Crisis.”
“You’ve got typos in the section about cross-verification,” she muttered.
“I’m a writer, not a lawyer,” Naveen replied.
“You’re both now,” she said, and smiled.
They were drafting not articles but frameworks. Guidelines for independent press councils. Whistleblower protection statutes. Language neutrality charters. Everything that had once felt like a college debate topic now felt urgent and unfinished.
Outside, in the courtyard, journalists argued over how to vet public submissions. A former news anchor from the state channel yelled at a blogger in flip-flops. A poet demanded that future op-eds must include a verified source. No one agreed. It was glorious.
This was what freedom looked like: chaotic, clumsy, and inconvenient.
And yet, everywhere—hope.
At the constitutional review center, a six-person panel sat in a glass chamber inside Ruvana University, protected by thousands of civilian volunteers. No guards. No generals. Just students, hawkers, ex-soldiers, and farmers taking shifts to ensure no one entered with force or bribes.
The panel consisted of two retired judges, one agricultural economist, a college dropout who had founded the underground archive network, a tribal elder from the hill provinces, and Leena Vasavda’s sister—who had returned from exile after hearing her sibling’s last message.
They debated every day for twelve hours, often with live audio feeds relayed into public listening centers.
People could press buttons to agree, disagree, or suggest revisions. Every evening, the panel received thousands of pages of reactions. Most were messy. Some were beautiful. A few were furious.
One child’s note simply read: “Make it safe for my father to come home again.”
Another said: “No more secret files. No more fake smiles.”
The public had become not just an audience, but an author.
And the charter was being rewritten.
Jibran Vyas was found in a farmhouse near the mountain border, guarded by three mercenaries and a former deputy minister. He was captured not by soldiers, but by a group of rural mail carriers who had been listening to shortwave broadcasts while mapping out unsent letters.
They tied him up with nylon rope, took photographs for transparency, and handed him over to the transitional justice committee.
He was offered a public trial. He declined.
Instead, he submitted a statement confessing to the structural elements of Project Nightroot, blaming “national anxiety” and “external pressures” for his actions. He expressed “regret,” but not guilt.
His statement was broadcast once. Then stored in the public archive with a note: “Preserved for memory. Not for redemption.”
Saira Azlan refused all government positions.
When offered a place in the media advisory board, she said, “My job was to break the window, not become the frame.” She returned to the archives, this time with a legal grant, and began digitizing all classified documents from the last 30 years. Every file opened came with a footnote: “The truth delayed is still the truth.”
She became a librarian of rebellion.
A custodian of scars.
And a favorite guest at classrooms where children asked, “What does encryption mean?” and she would smile and say, “Protection for the truth.”
Aryan Rahatkar kept his promise to disappear. After testifying before the Ethics Commission, he declined protection. His name was quietly removed from military rosters.
But every week, a different district reported seeing a man in plain clothes helping coordinate community defense groups—networks formed to protect civic spaces from future coups or foreign interference.
His work became myth. He became known only as “The Brother Who Stayed.”
And some nights, Naveen would think he saw him at a train station or in a mirror—always at a distance, always walking toward something else.
And what of Naveen?
He returned to writing. Not in newspapers. In pamphlets, notebooks, bulletins. His essays were broadcast on late-night underground radio and translated into 22 languages. He started a column called “The Republic Rewritten”, not under his name, but under a shared byline: “Citizen X.”
Every week, a new person would write it—a prisoner, a farmer, a grieving mother, a police cadet who defected. The truth didn’t need a single face anymore.
It needed a mirror that reflected all of Varshana.
One evening, Naveen stood outside the newly reopened Republic Museum. The flag of Varshana now flew beside a second flag—white cloth with seven concentric lines, representing transparency, accountability, and unity from the margins inward.
He looked up.
The original flag no longer seemed limp.
It waved—not from wind, but from will.
A child nearby tugged at his sleeve.
“Are you the man from the radio?” the girl asked.
“No,” he replied gently. “I’m the man who helped fix the radio.”
She nodded, satisfied, and returned to chalking shapes onto the sidewalk.
The trial was over.
But the republic was just beginning.
Part 10: A Constitution in Chalk
It began in a village schoolyard near the eastern coast of Varshana—three children, two sticks of pink chalk, and the last line of an old broadcast scratched unevenly on the ground:
“You are now the signal.”
No teacher told them to write it. No textbook printed it. They had heard it one night through a transistor their grandfather swore was broken. Something about the voice had stayed in their heads—not the words, but the feeling. The truth wasn’t in the message. It was in its permission.
By the following week, chalk messages had bloomed across water tanks in the west, bus depots in the north, under bridges and along hillsides. The phrases varied, but all shared one thing: voice.
“Ask better.”
“No secrets for the powerful.”
“Truth doesn’t need clearance.”
“We remember the silence.”
It became known as The Constitution in Chalk.
Not a single author.
No central movement.
But everywhere, the people wrote their own laws.
In the capital, a new monument was built—not in marble or bronze, but in recycled cement and sanded-down steel beams salvaged from protest barricades. They called it The Listening House. It was one story tall, open on all four sides, with a single chair at its center and a low hanging microphone above it. No guards. No stage. No banners.
Anyone could sit.
Anyone could speak.
Every Sunday, the speech of the week—chosen by a blind draw—was broadcast live across the newly restored public frequency, now free of censors. The speeches were rarely polished. A grandmother recalling when her son vanished. A garbage collector reciting a letter he never sent. A schoolboy describing the hunger of being unheard.
Naveen attended one such gathering in secret.
He sat at the back on the cement steps, unnoticed among farmers, artists, former prisoners, and teenagers who had only read about the “Night of No Signals” in their history modules.
A girl no older than ten stepped up that week.
She wore a faded yellow dress and held a paper she unfolded with trembling hands.
“My name is Mithi. I don’t know everything,” she said, “but I know I want a country that lets people make mistakes, and fix them, and not disappear.”
The crowd didn’t clap. They stood in silence.
Respectful.
Upright.
Listening.
Saira Azlan arrived in Ruvana a few months later to deliver the inaugural lecture at the new School of Memory & Democracy. The campus had once been a data-monitoring center. Now its servers stored oral histories, court transcripts, citizen essays, and archival footage from the months when the republic turned on itself—and then turned itself back.
She stood on a rooftop podium, looking out at a crowd that had stopped fearing itself.
“This is not the end of tyranny,” she said. “Only its interruption. Tyranny will try again—in another face, another name, another form. Our job is to stay louder than its silence.”
She paused.
“And to forgive ourselves for how long we were quiet.”
Afterward, students followed her through the hallways, asking questions not about revolution, but about patience. About doubt. About how to keep believing when truth feels heavier than hope.
Saira told them, “Don’t look for heroes. Build habits.”
Aryan Rahatkar was last seen crossing a mountain pass toward the northeast.
Some say he was helping tribal councils build signal-proof forums. Others claim he was leading a quiet effort to demilitarize former surveillance zones.
Naveen received a letter once—unsigned, but unmistakable.
It read:
“You taught me that silence is loyalty to the wrong thing. I’m learning to be disloyal now. And I’m proud of it.”
He kept the letter folded inside his notebook, next to a photo of their mother, a metro token from the day of the first protest, and a piece of the burned pen he had thrown at Vyas.
He didn’t need forgiveness anymore.
Only memory.
Jibran Vyas faded from history—not erased, not martyred, simply filed.
His trial, though never public, was recorded and stored in the National Truth Repository. Visitors could request to view it, but few did. The regime he had tried to construct had already been picked apart—not just in courtrooms, but in coffee shops, community halls, and in textbooks rewritten by teachers who had watched their students weep.
His name became a footnote.
His silence, louder than any verdict.
And the new republic?
It did not call itself “new.”
It called itself “awake.”
The rewritten constitution—ratified not in Parliament but in public forums—was passed on the first day of the monsoon, under a sky split by thunder and the smell of wet stone. It included clauses that would’ve once been unthinkable:
Every five years, citizens could trigger a Public Memory Audit—a national review of institutional transparency.
All surveillance software must include opt-out rights and open-source review.
Any government project over a certain budget must be presented in a citizen storyboard—plain language, clear risks, and expected outcomes.
National broadcasters would be managed by rotating civilian panels chosen by lottery from across professions.
And perhaps most astonishingly, it required every elected official to spend two unbroken days each year in The Listening House—not speaking, just listening.
No exceptions.
Not even the president.
On the one-year anniversary of the Night of No Signals, people across Varshana picked up chalk.
No campaign organized it.
No flyer advertised it.
But on temple floors, train walls, elevator buttons, and the edges of bread wrappers, messages began to appear.
“Still here.”
“Still awake.”
“Truth is louder than power.”
“We didn’t vanish. We remembered.”
Naveen walked through Ruvana with his notebook in one hand, a piece of chalk in the other. He saw his words, once whispered in cells and courtyards, now echoed on schoolbags and sandals.
He stopped in front of a government building—the Ministry of Public Ethics, once the Ministry of Internal Stability.
On the stone ledge, written in thin, determined script, was a line he hadn’t seen in years.
“The flag that doesn’t wave is still a flag.”
He smiled.
And beneath it, he added his own—
“But now, the wind belongs to us.”
The republic had been rewritten.
Not on paper.
But in people.
And that was what made it last.
THE END
