Ananya Dhar
It was not on any map, and yet Netarhat had a railway station — a rusted signboard leaning sideways, with “NETARHAT” painted in half-faded red on flaking wood. Arohi Sen stepped off the narrow-gauge train with a dull ache in her temples, the kind that came from climbing too high, too fast. The cold air smelled of damp moss, like an old library buried in a forest. A single porter looked at her curiously, then turned away without offering help. She was used to that look — a mix of surprise and dismissal — as if a woman traveling alone with two canvas bags and a recorder couldn’t possibly be headed anywhere important.
She was here on invitation. Or at least, she had been.
Three weeks ago, an email had arrived — from a man named Harendra Baske, an obscure tribal folklorist who’d published barely anything except one translated Baangla song in a forgotten academic journal. The subject had read: “Songs That Remember.” The message was short and strange:
“Come to Netarhat. Before the stone sings again. Before the forest forgets.”
And now, standing in the chill of the dying afternoon, Arohi felt a strange pull in her chest. Not fear exactly, but not comfort either. The road ahead twisted upward like a coiled root. No taxis, no hotel signs. Just a single jeep parked near a tea shack, its engine silent.
She approached the shack, where an old woman sat pouring tea into steel cups. “Excuse me,” Arohi said. “Do you know where I can find Mr. Harendra Baske?”
The woman didn’t answer. Instead, she poured another cup and slid it toward her. “Drink first,” she said. “You’ve come far.”
Arohi hesitated, then took it. The tea was smoky, slightly bitter, and oddly soothing. When she looked up, the woman was already walking toward the jeep.
“He sent no word,” she said at last. “Three days gone now.”
“Gone where?” Arohi asked.
The woman shrugged. “Forest. Stone.” Then she added, “You were expected.”
That night, Arohi slept in a guest room above the tea shack. The bed was too small, the mattress too stiff, but sleep came fast and deep. At 2:13 AM, she awoke with a start.
There was no sound. Not even crickets. But she was sure—absolutely sure—that someone had whispered her name.
She sat up, breathing fast. Her recorder, on the nightstand, was on. The red light blinked slowly. That was impossible. She hadn’t touched it since arriving.
She pressed playback.
A burst of static.
Then her own voice.
“Arohi… do you remember the stone?”
She dropped it instantly, the recorder clattering to the wooden floor. Her heart thundered. That was not her voice — not really. It was like someone had copied her tone, her rhythm. But it was off. Hollow. Too slow. Like something pretending.
She didn’t sleep again.
At sunrise, she asked the old woman for directions to Harendra Baske’s home. Arohi’s instincts, sharpened by fieldwork across northeast tribal villages, told her not to push — so she accepted the tea, nodded politely, and left on foot.
The path was steep, overgrown with ferns, and the mist curled like smoke along the trail. After an hour of climbing, she found the house — a crumbling stone cottage half-swallowed by trees. Ivy gripped the windows. A windchime made of rusted keys tinkled from the awning, though there was no wind.
The door was ajar.
Inside, the house smelled of damp pages and woodsmoke. Books were piled high — local legends, handwritten glossaries, cassette tapes labeled with tribal clan names. On the desk was a half-written letter, ink smudged:
“She is coming. The one who listens. The forest remembers her already. The Bari Pathor hums louder each night…”
Arohi’s breath caught.
“Bari Pathor.” The term was unfamiliar, but the root word ‘Pathor’ meant stone.
She scanned the shelves and found a slim leather notebook marked “BP Archives.” Inside: drawings of a large boulder, covered in moss. Beneath each sketch were dates, some as recent as last week. Next to the last entry, Harendra had written:
“Night echoes. Footsteps in loops. I walked alone. I heard myself follow.”
Suddenly, she felt watched.
She turned. No one.
Yet the back window stood open.
She stepped out into the clearing behind the house. It was silent again — unnaturally so. Even the birds refused to sing.
To the far left, she noticed a dirt path leading into the woods. A thin red string tied to a post fluttered weakly in the breeze. Curiosity, or perhaps compulsion, drew her forward.
She walked. Past twisted trees, past ferns that seemed to lean away from her. The forest grew thicker, darker.
And then, she saw it.
The stone.
It rose from the earth like the back of a sleeping giant — smooth and black, taller than a man, hunched slightly. Covered in moss, carved with symbols eroded by rain and time. But it was not the shape that made her freeze.
It was the sound.
Her own footsteps. Repeating. Echoing.
Even when she stood still.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
Like she was being followed — by herself.
She took a step back.
Tap.
She turned around.
No one.
And yet, from the trees behind the rock, a soft hum began — not musical, not human. It vibrated in her bones. Her hands shook. Her breath came in gasps.
The rock… was singing.
And in the hum, she thought she heard a voice.
Her own.
Calling out from inside.
“Do you remember the stone?”
She ran.
Tripping, gasping, tumbling back down the trail. The forest seemed to twist behind her. Trees blurred. And yet the echo followed. All the way to the clearing.
Only when she slammed the cottage door shut and collapsed to the floor did the sound finally stop.
Her recorder, in her bag, was blinking again.
This time, when she played it, the voice said:
“You have returned, Arohi. But do you remember why you left?”
She didn’t.
She didn’t remember ever being here before.
But something — deep in her bones — told her the voice was right.
She had been here.
Long ago.
And now, the stone remembered.
Arohi didn’t leave the cottage for two days. She sat by the dusty window, watching the forest’s edge through smeared glass. Nothing moved. Not birds, not squirrels. Even the wind seemed afraid to pass too close. On the second night, she read every page of Harendra Baske’s diary, combing through his ink-scrawled madness for meaning.
He had called the Bari Pathor a “recording stone.” A kind of geological echo chamber, sacred to the local tribe, the Raidu, who believed the stone could store memories — not just sounds, but intentions. It didn’t just remember voices. It remembered choices.
One passage chilled her:
“The Bari Pathor punishes those who lie to it. It echoes only what the soul hides. It sings when someone who has forgotten returns. The more you forget, the louder it hums.”
Another page was stained with what looked like rainwater — or tears. Under it, one shaky line:
“I walked near it. It called me by my childhood name.”
Arohi pressed the recorder’s rewind button and replayed the last eerie message — “But do you remember why you left?”
She had never been here before.
She was sure of it.
Except… there was a photo in Harendra’s file cabinet. A black-and-white image, faded and curled at the edges. A young girl standing next to a much younger Harendra Baske. Behind them, unmistakably, was the Bari Pathor.
The girl looked exactly like her.
Same hair. Same eyes. Same tiny mole beneath the lower lip.
But the photo was dated: 1997.
She would’ve been four years old.
Impossible.
Yet her fingers trembled.
Back in Kolkata, her childhood memories were always murky before age six. Her parents often said she’d had a fever that “took her words away” for a while. No photos, no stories. Just one red diary her mother used to hide — a diary Arohi had once opened to find a pressed leaf inside, labeled Netarhat, ’96.
She thought it had been a typo.
That night, the cottage lights blinked out. For a moment, complete darkness. When the generator kicked back in, her voice came again — not from the recorder this time, but from the open radio on Harendra’s desk.
“You forgot me, Arohi. But I didn’t forget you.”
She screamed and flung the radio against the wall.
The old woman from the tea shack came running, lantern in hand. “You shouldn’t stay here anymore,” she said firmly. “This house… remembers.”
“What does that mean?” Arohi shouted, losing patience. “Why does the stone… mimic me? What does it want?”
The woman looked straight into her eyes and said, “It doesn’t mimic. It reveals.”
She left before Arohi could ask more.
At dawn, with sleep a distant memory, Arohi took her recorder, notebook, and a flashlight. She needed answers. She needed someone who knew the Raidu legends firsthand. The forest wasn’t giving her dreams — it was giving her back pieces of herself. And she wanted to know what she’d lost.
She went down to the village square, where men gathered by firepits and women cleaned vegetables near stone huts. Children watched her with wide, suspicious eyes.
“Is there someone here who knows the old stories?” she asked a wrinkled man near a well. “The real ones — about the stone?”
He stared, chewing slowly on tobacco, then jerked his head toward a shed behind the square. “Ask old Boro Dida,” he muttered. “She’s the last.”
Inside, the hut smelled of cow dung and camphor. A single oil lamp burned beside an old woman in a red shawl, her eyes nearly white with cataracts. She sat unmoving, humming something low and tuneless.
Arohi bent down. “Are you Boro Dida?”
The humming stopped.
“You carry the song,” she whispered. “But your mind has sealed it.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Then listen.”
The woman took a dry leaf from her bundle and crushed it between her fingers. A pungent scent filled the air. “Close your eyes.”
Arohi obeyed.
What followed was not a vision. Not a hallucination.
It was a memory.
She was small, maybe four or five. Running through a forest. A man — her father? — called from behind. She giggled. Then suddenly, the world turned cold. The trees hushed. A voice, deep and slow, sang her name. From a rock.
She had approached it. Laid her hand on its surface.
And then everything went black.
When Arohi opened her eyes, her cheeks were wet with tears.
“You were brought here once,” Boro Dida said, “because you stopped speaking. You wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t sleep. Your mother came with a priest. They begged the forest to take the sorrow away.”
“What sorrow?” Arohi gasped.
But Boro Dida only said, “The stone took the sadness. But it also took the memory. It does not give freely.”
Shaken, Arohi stumbled back through the village. Her chest ached like her body was rejecting some part of itself. The recorder in her pocket buzzed — even though it wasn’t on.
When she checked the file list, a new recording had appeared.
Unnamed. Timestamp: just now.
She hit play.
A child’s voice. Hers.
“I’m sorry, baba. I didn’t mean to follow the humming.”
Arohi collapsed onto a tree root, mouth trembling.
That night, she didn’t return to the cottage. She slept on the floor of the tea shack, clutching the recorder to her chest like a child holding onto a secret.
But at exactly 3:03 AM, the earth gave a long sigh.
A vibration.
The Bari Pathor was humming again.
This time, not as a call.
But a summons.
And the sound was no longer hers alone.
Voices.
Multiple.
All calling her name.
Whispering from beneath the stone.
And one voice — deep, male, aching with loss — that whispered:
“Come back, my daughter.”
Arohi didn’t know if she was walking or being led. The trees swayed as if they were breathing. The ground pulsed beneath her feet. The path to the Bari Pathor had changed — longer, narrower, coiled like a spiral of memory pulling her inward. Her flashlight flickered, the beam dancing across leaves that looked too still, too symmetrical, like they were part of a stage set.
She wasn’t alone. Not entirely.
The voices still whispered.
Some were echoes of her own childhood. Giggles. Footsteps. That tiny sing-song hum she used to hum while drawing. Others were unfamiliar — older, deeper, weathered by time. One sounded like a woman reciting a prayer. Another like someone weeping underwater.
Then came the male voice again.
“Arohi. The forest waits. The stone remembers. So must you.”
She turned suddenly, breath caught in her throat.
No one.
Only trees watching her silently, the wind curling around her neck like a cold hand.
She reached the clearing.
The Bari Pathor loomed ahead — glistening with dew, though the sky had been dry for hours. This time, it looked different. Taller, blacker, its edges no longer rounded but jagged, like something had been clawing from within. Strange markings crisscrossed its surface. Some looked like letters. Others like wounds.
The hum began again.
But this time, it wasn’t sound.
It was memory.
Arohi felt her body vibrate as if her bones were tuning forks. The recorder in her pocket turned itself on. She didn’t touch it. Didn’t need to.
The stone spoke.
Not with words, but with presence.
Suddenly, she saw it.
Not with her eyes, but behind them.
A memory that wasn’t just hers. A collective one.
A man. Mid-thirties. Short beard. A tribal shawl wrapped tightly around his frame.
Harendra Baske.
He stands by the stone, barefoot, murmuring into the moss. He presses his palm against its surface and sings in the old Raidu dialect — a song of longing, of forgetting, of return.
The forest shudders.
The stone pulses.
He doesn’t stop.
From the trees behind him, shadows form.
Not ghosts.
Remnants.
People who had vanished from the village — the old man from the well, the child who stopped speaking, the woman who drew eyes on every wall. They hadn’t died. They had been remembered too deeply.
By the stone.
Harendra’s voice breaks. “I didn’t mean to stay. I only wanted to understand.”
The stone sings back — a low, resonant note that cracks the air like thunder.
And Harendra… dissolves.
Flesh peels into mist. Bones into bark. His final breath becomes part of the song.
—
Arohi gasped and stumbled back.
She clutched her recorder as if it could anchor her to this world. Her hands trembled violently. Her knees buckled. The stone loomed larger.
Then, her name again. Soft. Familiar.
“Arohi…”
She looked toward the source.
A girl.
Five years old.
Standing barefoot on the rock’s edge.
The same mole beneath the lip. The same scar on the right elbow.
Her.
But… from before.
The child stared at her with blank eyes. Not empty — but sealed. As if everything she had once seen had been locked away inside.
The child pointed at the stone.
Arohi shook her head. “No. I don’t want to remember. I’m not ready.”
But the child didn’t lower her hand.
Behind the rock, shapes began to form — silhouettes of people frozen mid-step. A woman with long plaits. A man with one slipper. A child clutching a cracked doll. None moved. They simply watched.
Then, one of them stepped forward.
A man. Late thirties. Dark hair. Thin frame. Eyes wide with emotion.
“Baba,” Arohi whispered.
The word escaped her before she could stop it.
She hadn’t said it in decades.
He smiled. And wept. “You followed the humming. You always followed sound.”
“I thought you were dead.”
“I was lost. Just like you. The stone takes those who forget too deeply.”
He extended a hand. “Touch it, Arohi. It will hurt. But you must remember.”
She took a step forward. Another. Her heart raced. Every instinct screamed to run. But she had run once before. As a child. And that’s what made the stone hum louder — the forgetting.
With a trembling hand, she placed her palm on the stone.
It was warm.
And alive.
A jolt surged through her — not electricity, but memory. Raw, undiluted.
A rainy day. Her father shouting on the phone. Her mother crying in the next room.
A train journey with whispered warnings.
The forest.
A fight.
She runs, chasing a tune only she hears.
The Bari Pathor.
Her hand on the stone.
A blinding light.
And then… darkness.
She hadn’t fallen ill from fever. She had touched the stone, and it had taken the pain. In return, it had taken everything tied to that pain — her voice, her memories, her father.
Arohi screamed.
Not in terror.
In recognition.
The stone pulsed once more. Then went still.
The forest sighed.
The child version of her stepped backward and vanished.
Her father smiled through tears. “Now you remember. And so I can go.”
“Go where?”
“Where remembered souls go when they are finally released.”
He faded, like smoke in sunlight.
And for the first time since her arrival, the clearing grew quiet.
No humming.
No footsteps.
Just wind.
Real, natural wind.
The kind that forgets.
Arohi returned to the tea shack at dawn.
The old woman smiled faintly. “You touched it.”
“I had to.”
“Will you stay?”
“No,” Arohi said. “But I’ll write it down. The forest may forget. But the story won’t.”
She left Netarhat that afternoon.
But she took a stone with her — small, moss-covered, silent.
And once a year, on the same date, it hums faintly on her desk.
A soft, living memory.
Waiting to be remembered.
Arohi didn’t sleep for days after she left Netarhat.
Back in Kolkata, the city felt louder than ever—horns honking, radios blaring, hawkers yelling—but to her, it all felt strangely hollow, like someone playing life on a speaker just out of sync. The trees didn’t rustle the same way. The wind no longer whispered her name. The stone had marked her, not with a scar, but with silence.
She moved into her old flat in Lake Gardens. Dust coated the bookshelves and the kitchen smelled faintly of turmeric and solitude. Her phone had over thirty unread messages, all blinking with concern or confusion: Where are you? Are you safe? You just disappeared!
She answered none of them.
Instead, she sat down and opened a blank document titled:
“The Stone That Remembers: An Ethnographic Account of Netarhat’s Oral Hauntings.”
But no words came.
Each time she began, the stone’s hum came back—not in sound, but in sensation. Her fingers would tremble. Her ears would ring. And more terrifyingly, her reflection in the computer screen sometimes… blinked before she did.
On the fifth night, the phone rang. An unknown number.
She picked up, already numb.
No one spoke on the other end. Just static.
Then, a voice—deep, wet, distant.
“Why did you leave me behind?”
She slammed the phone down.
Later, she checked her recorder. It had switched on by itself.
The latest file was timestamped 3:03 AM.
The voice on the recording was her own.
“He didn’t go. I lied. I lied to myself.”
The next morning, she woke up screaming.
The stone she had brought with her from Netarhat lay cracked on her desk, the moss around it now dried and blackened. But that wasn’t the worst part.
On her wall, someone—or something—had written in chalk:
“You only remembered part of the truth.”
She stared at the words for a long time.
Then packed her bag again.
Netarhat was colder this time. The trees darker. The skies more indifferent. Even the porter at the station didn’t bother to look at her. As if he’d already seen her arrive before. As if she never left.
The tea shack was empty.
No old woman. No steaming cups. Just ashes in a cracked stove and a spoon that stirred nothing.
She found the trail again. The forest swallowed her without protest.
This time, the Bari Pathor wasn’t waiting.
It had retreated.
Further in. Deeper into the jungle. As if testing whether she really remembered. Or merely pretended.
She followed its pull.
Every step echoed louder than the last.
The trees began to blur, bending subtly, unnaturally. The air grew heavy, sweet with decay. A single crow watched her from a high branch, its eyes too knowing, too human.
She reached the new clearing by nightfall.
The stone now stood twice as tall. It was no longer smooth, but cracked, veined with something glowing dimly beneath the surface. And surrounding it were more stones—dozens—arranged in a wide circle, like a congregation of silent listeners.
She wasn’t alone.
A figure stood in the center.
Tall. Slender. Dressed in Raidu ceremonial garb.
A painted mask obscured the face.
“Who are you?” Arohi asked, breathless.
The figure turned slightly. “You called me here.”
“No,” she whispered. “I remembered you. That’s different.”
The figure chuckled. “Memory is not passive. It summons. It opens doors.”
“Are you Harendra?” she asked.
He shook his head. “He was taken. You, too, were supposed to be. Years ago.”
“I was a child. I didn’t know.”
“Exactly. That’s why the forest let you go. But the forgetting left cracks. And now they’ve widened.”
Arohi stepped closer, her recorder in hand.
The figure’s head tilted. “Still clinging to the machine?”
“This is how I listen. This is how I prove.”
The figure raised a hand.
The recorder flew from her grasp, landing on the stone.
It began to play.
But not just voices.
Screams. Laughter. Chanting. The sound of bones snapping. A lullaby in Raidu tongue. A baby crying. A bell tolling thirteen times. And then—
Silence.
Followed by one final sound.
Arohi’s childhood voice.
“I didn’t forget. I chose to forget.”
The stone cracked fully down the middle with a sound like a sigh.
The forest went black.
She couldn’t see. Couldn’t move. Could only feel.
The presence surrounded her. Not one spirit. Not many.
But something older.
Not evil.
Not good.
Just hungry.
It had fed on grief, memory, longing for centuries.
She heard the voice again.
“You came to remember. Now you must witness.”
And then—suddenly—she saw.
A timeline stretched before her. Villagers over centuries. British missionaries. A missing botanist. A schoolteacher who vanished mid-lesson. A tribal priest who burned himself before the rock. And her own father, whispering to her baby self in the dark:
“You followed the song, Arohi. Now the song follows you.”
Her body collapsed to the ground.
The figure walked up and placed something in her hand.
It was her old recorder.
Cracked.
Empty.
No files.
Just one line scratched on the screen:
“The stone no longer remembers. You do.”
When Arohi woke again, it was morning.
She lay in the clearing. Alone.
The Bari Pathor was gone.
So were the smaller stones.
Only a circle of burnt leaves remained.
She walked back to the village. The tea shack was open again.
The old woman poured her tea silently.
“I thought I had remembered everything,” Arohi said.
The woman looked at her. “You only remembered your story. Not theirs.”
Arohi nodded.
Then smiled, weakly. “But I brought it back.”
She placed the recorder on the table.
This time, she pressed record.
And began to speak.
“I’m recording this,” Arohi said, her voice steady despite the tremor in her hands, “not as proof. Not anymore. But as memory. So it lives outside me. So the forgetting cannot begin again.”
The old woman at the tea shack watched her with the quiet of someone who had heard too many stories but still waited for the one that would explain everything. The cup of tea between them sat untouched, steam rising like whispers.
Arohi pressed the red button.
“This is the story of the stone that remembers. And those it refuses to forget.”
She left Netarhat before the sun dipped behind the hills. The road was strangely smooth, the trees no longer heavy with watching. The air, for once, didn’t feel like it carried someone else’s breath. She didn’t take the broken recorder this time. She left it buried in the ashes at the foot of the vanished Bari Pathor. A burial, not of evidence, but of bondage.
Back in Kolkata, Arohi didn’t return to her flat immediately. Instead, she checked into a small guesthouse near Shobhabazar. Quiet. No Wi-Fi. No visitors. Just her, a laptop, and a fresh notebook with soft cream pages.
But when she opened the notebook to write, she found something on the first page.
A symbol.
Not drawn.
Etched.
Like the paper itself had grown it.
A jagged spiral. The same one carved into the stone.
Arohi stared.
Then turned the page.
And began.
Weeks passed. She wrote as if possessed—not in horror, but in completion. Words poured from her like blood from an opened vein. Names of villagers long gone. Songs once thought extinct. Descriptions of a forest that bent time, bent grief, bent the very spine of memory until it hummed.
She titled it The Stone That Remembers, but the book had no chapters. Just stories. Each one told by a voice that no longer had a mouth. A fisherman’s wife. A colonial surveyor. A tribal girl who carved songs into bark. A priest who hid his own madness in chants. And her father.
He appeared on page 72.
Arohi hadn’t meant to write him there. But one night, her pen moved before her hand decided, and there he was—speaking to her as if he never left.
“Memory, Arohi, is the last kind of love.”
She wept for the first time since Netarhat.
Not in fear.
But in relief.
The manuscript was finished on the thirty-third day.
She printed three copies.
One she left at the Kalighat temple, tucked under a stone near the ghat.
One she couriered to an address in Santiniketan, to a retired linguist who once told her, “Words that disappear become ghosts.”
And the third, she handed to the publisher who had first laughed at her thesis on haunted topographies.
This time, he didn’t laugh.
He read it in one night.
The next morning, he called her, voice shaken.
“Where is Netarhat exactly?” he asked.
She gave him the coordinates.
He called back the next day.
“There’s no such place,” he said. “The map shows forest. No town. No roads. Just… blank.”
“I know,” she replied. “It forgets itself.”
But the story didn’t end.
Because on the first night of the book’s release, Arohi received a parcel.
No note.
Just an envelope.
Inside: a photo.
Black and white. Faded.
It was of her—older, maybe fifty—standing beside a child near a large stone.
The same stone.
The child had her eyes.
Arohi flipped the photo.
On the back, in shaky ink: “It remembers her too.”
She didn’t tell anyone.
She didn’t need to.
The stone had started whispering again.
Not in the forest.
But in her dreams.
And this time, it wasn’t humming.
It was singing.
A lullaby.
The same one she used to hum when she was four years old.
The one no one ever taught her.
The one she had heard beneath the rock.
The one now sung by her unborn daughter—soft, endless, and already ancient.
The lullaby wouldn’t leave her.
It slipped into her mornings like breath, into her tea steam, into the rustling pages of old books. At first, Arohi tried to brush it off—a residual haunt, perhaps, a hangover from Netarhat. But when she caught herself humming it aloud while waiting for a cab, and the driver turned to her with wide, knowing eyes, she knew the song was no longer hers alone.
“You’ve been to the hills,” he said quietly.
Arohi froze. “What hills?”
The driver’s voice was low, barely above the sound of his diesel engine. “The ones that eat memory and give it back in different shapes.”
He said no more for the rest of the journey.
When she got off, he refused to take fare.
She avoided mirrors for a few days. There was something in her reflection she no longer trusted. The woman staring back felt too still, too rehearsed, like an actress waiting for a forgotten cue.
One night, she saw her lips moving in the mirror before she even spoke.
Arohi backed away.
But the reflection didn’t.
It smiled.
And whispered, “She’s coming.”
The dreams changed after that.
She wasn’t in the forest anymore.
She was under it.
Crawling through earth that pulsed with breath, brushing past roots that looked like veins. Above her, muffled laughter. Children’s voices. A bell chiming thirteen times. And always, always, the lullaby. Sung now by two voices. Hers. And another.
Higher. Lighter. Smaller.
She took a pregnancy test out of instinct, not logic.
It turned positive in under a minute.
Arohi sat on her bathroom floor for hours.
She hadn’t been with anyone in over a year.
But somehow, she already knew. Even before the test.
The forest had not taken.
It had given.
She visited a doctor out of obligation, not curiosity. Dr. Meenakshi Sinha, known for her discretion, her calm.
The scan showed what science could explain—a heartbeat. Ten fingers. Two eyes.
But then Meenakshi tilted her head. “There’s something strange.”
Arohi clenched.
“What?” she whispered.
“The fetus seems to be… vibrating. Just slightly. The heartbeat’s normal. But the image flickers. Like an echo.”
“An echo?”
The doctor frowned. “It’s probably nothing. Just a glitch in the machine.”
But Arohi saw it—on the screen.
A flicker. A shimmer.
And for one second, the shape curled in the womb wasn’t quite human.
Something older.
Then it passed.
She went home and tore the photograph into pieces.
The one of her older self and the child near the stone.
But the next morning, it was back on her desk.
Whole.
She burned it.
Same result.
The third time, she folded it and left it at the riverbank.
It returned that night—inside her pillowcase.
The lullaby grew louder.
She no longer needed to hum it.
It hummed through her.
One evening, while grocery shopping, a stranger tapped her shoulder.
A woman with cataracts and a milky smile.
“Careful, beti,” she said.
Arohi blinked. “I’m sorry?”
The woman leaned in.
“Children of the forest remember more than they’re supposed to.”
Then she turned and vanished into the crowd.
Arohi began to write again.
Not for publishers.
Not for research.
But for her unborn daughter.
Letters.
Dozens of them.
Each one beginning with: “If I forget again, please remember this.”
She described the Bari Pathor.
The voice beneath it.
The first touch.
The taste of moss in her mouth.
The feel of her father’s spirit, crumbling into ash as he smiled.
The chant of the Raidu priest who begged the stone to forget.
And her own blood.
Spilled in memory, not injury.
One night, she found herself sleepwalking.
When she woke, she was standing at Sealdah station.
Her hands were muddy.
Her feet bare.
In her pocket: a single train ticket.
To Netarhat.
Dated the next day.
Stamped, Return Reserved.
She didn’t go.
Not that time.
But she knew she would.
Eventually.
Because the song was changing again.
It now had words.
And her daughter, not yet born, was singing them in her dreams.
Not in any known language.
But in something older.
Something she remembered.
Something the stone had buried in her bones.
The night before the seventh month, the city cracked open.
Arohi stood on her balcony, watching the sky ripple like water disturbed from below. No one else seemed to notice. Down on the street, life hummed as usual—scooters buzzing, chaiwallahs calling out, lovers fighting over missed calls. But up above, clouds churned into spirals. The stars blinked in patterns.
And the lullaby played again.
Not from her.
From the sky.
The baby in her belly kicked once, then twice—rhythmic, like a drum answering a song it had known before it was conceived.
The next morning, she called her mother.
Not out of love.
Out of necessity.
The voice that answered was softer than she remembered. “Arohi… it’s been so long.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked.
A pause.
“I tried. You wouldn’t remember. The stone didn’t let you.”
“I saw the photograph. Of me and Baba. At Netarhat.”
Another pause.
This time longer.
Her mother sighed, the kind that seemed to lift years off her breath.
“You were very small. You heard the song when no one else did. We followed you into the forest. You stood near the stone and laughed. You touched it. And then…”
“I stopped speaking.”
“Yes. For weeks. Then Baba vanished. You were found beside the rock, crying in your sleep.”
“Why did we go there at all?”
Her mother hesitated. Then whispered: “To forget something else.”
That night, she dreamed of her father again.
But not as a memory.
He was younger.
Alive.
Wearing his blue sweater.
They sat under a large peepal tree near the stone, both holding red chalk.
“I wanted to tell you,” he said.
“What?”
“That you were not the first.”
Arohi frowned. “First what?”
“To carry the forest forward.”
She awoke with the word “forward” carved into her palm.
No blood. Just red chalk.
The child inside her stirred.
She reached for her pen.
And wrote her daughter another letter.
“If they ever make you forget, bite the inside of your cheek. Blood remembers.”
She began researching hill myths from beyond Netarhat. Jaintia Hills. Ajodhya Pahar. Even Cherrapunji. Again and again, the same fragments appeared: stories of “singing stones,” “memory eaters,” “echo children,” “songs that call before the mother knows she’s listening.”
In a remote paper from 1892, she found a quote from a British botanist:
“The tribes here speak of a black rock that births thought. They say those who listen too long to it will hear voices that know their future. I fear I am one of them.”
The paper ended abruptly.
With no author name.
Just the words: “This document was left beneath a banyan tree. No record of the man remains.”
On the morning of her seventh-month scan, the new doctor frowned.
“There’s… a second pulse.”
Arohi’s heart jumped. “Twins?”
“No. It’s not a heartbeat exactly. More like a hum. A resonance. The machine says it’s not possible, but the sound file shows a vibration pattern.”
“Pattern?”
The doctor turned the screen.
Waves. Harmonics. Rhythm.
It looked… familiar.
Like the lines carved into the Bari Pathor.
Like music etched into stone.
She left the clinic and walked straight to College Street.
There, in a forgotten lane of secondhand shops, she found it—a palm-sized Raidu prayer bell. Brass. Ancient. When she touched it, it trembled faintly.
The shopkeeper, a boy no older than twenty, stared at her and said, “The forest sent you back, didn’t it?”
She left without paying.
He didn’t ask.
At home, she rang the bell once.
The baby stopped moving.
Then kicked three times.
She whispered, “Do you remember already?”
The silence that followed was answer enough.
That night, her neighbor’s dog howled without pause from 3:03 to 3:13 AM.
When she opened her door in the morning, a box lay at her feet.
Inside:
- A red shawl.
- A cracked recorder.
- A note in childlike writing:
“She remembers. But do you?”
Arohi sat down on the threshold.
And cried.
She knew what the forest was saying.
The lullaby had never been about sleep.
It was about return.
Return to a time before forgetting.
Return to memory.
Return to the forest.
Where her daughter was already known.
Where the stone had already begun to hum again.
The train pulled into Netarhat station at exactly 3:13 AM.
There was no sound but the hiss of brakes and the low rattle of the metal tracks sighing to rest. Arohi stepped down alone. No coolies. No chai vendors. Just her, her swollen belly, and a canvas bag carrying little more than a recorder, a bundle of letters, and a brass prayer bell that hadn’t stopped vibrating since Kolkata.
The air smelled like rust and something floral. Not fresh flowers—dried ones. Like garlands left too long on stone.
She looked around.
The signboard was still there, crooked as ever. “NETARHAT,” the red paint now flaking like old skin. But something had changed. The forest looked closer, hungrier. The mist didn’t curl; it clung.
She began to walk.
No directions needed this time.
The stone was already singing again.
As she moved through the village, silence followed her like a shadow. People peered out from behind doorframes, eyes wide, heads bowed. No one dared call her name. But one child—barefoot, eyes unblinking—whispered something as she passed:
“She’s coming from the stone… and going back in.”
The tea shack was abandoned. The pot was still warm.
On the table sat a note.
Just one word: “Welcome.”
She didn’t stop at the old cottage. Didn’t look for the woman with cataracts or search for Boro Dida. There was no need. This journey wasn’t for answers anymore. It was for completion.
The forest parted like it recognized her steps.
The wind slowed.
Leaves stilled.
And then, the stone revealed itself again.
Only now, it had changed.
It was taller. Cracked through the center. Glowing faintly. The spiral symbols across its face now shimmered with damp light. Beneath it, a shallow pool of water had formed, perfectly circular, as if the earth had wept just enough to remember everything she had tried to forget.
And standing beside it—
The girl.
Herself.
Five years old.
Still barefoot.
Still silent.
Still watching.
Arohi stepped forward.
The lullaby hummed softly from the stone, no longer eerie but gentle. Like a welcome. Like a cradle waiting to be rocked.
“You remembered,” said the child.
Arohi nodded.
“Do you know why you came back?”
“I thought I did. But now…” she touched her belly. “I think I was always meant to.”
The child tilted her head. “Then you are ready.”
“For what?”
“To pass it on.”
The ground trembled faintly.
The pool rippled.
Arohi bent down and placed her hand on the cracked stone once more.
This time, there was no jolt. No memory flood. Only warmth. Like the forest was holding her palm with ancient fingers.
From the depths of the pool, a voice rose.
Not hers.
Not her father’s.
Her daughter’s.
“I am not new. I am returning.”
Arohi sank to her knees.
The forest shimmered.
The stone split further—revealing not an abyss, but light. Not blinding. Soft. The color of old moss and first tears. Shapes began to appear—faces of the remembered. The forgotten. The never-born. They did not speak.
They watched.
And they waited.
Arohi placed the recorder into the center of the pool.
It floated.
Then vanished.
She followed with the bundle of letters.
They dissolved on contact.
The brass bell she held last. She rang it once.
And the stone answered.
A single note.
Long.
Low.
Final.
Then, the child stepped forward and touched Arohi’s belly.
“She already knows the lullaby,” she said.
“I know,” Arohi whispered. “I just didn’t know it was for her.”
The child smiled.
Then turned.
And walked into the light.
She didn’t vanish.
She became the spiral.
Arohi lay down beside the stone.
Not in exhaustion.
In peace.
The sky above her turned gray, then gold.
Birds began to sing.
Real birds.
The forest exhaled.
And somewhere, deep beneath the ground, the stone stopped humming.
When the villagers found her the next morning, she was asleep.
Breathing softly.
Still.
Her baby born beside her, eyes open, wide, and impossibly knowing.
The child didn’t cry.
She hummed.
A lullaby.
Old as rain.
They took her in.
Mother and daughter.
The villagers said nothing.
But they knew.
The stone had chosen its new song.
And it would not forget again.
They named the child Keya, after the flower that blooms unseen, fragrant yet hidden, resilient among thorns. She grew up in Netarhat—barefoot, curious, and often seen whispering to trees or listening to stones as if they had mouths. The villagers watched her with a mix of reverence and fear. No one touched her without asking. No one spoke her name in the dark.
By the time she was two, she could mimic the call of every bird in the forest. By three, she drew spirals on walls, in mud, on banana leaves—never taught, never corrected. The Bari Pathor, though dormant, remained near, partially buried in green. Children were forbidden to go near it. But Keya sat by it often, singing songs no one had taught her, the lullabies of bone and time.
Arohi, once a researcher, once an outsider, had become the quiet woman by the hill. Some thought she had gone mad, others said she had simply crossed over. She no longer wrote, no longer recorded. She lived in a hut near the banyan tree, tending to plants and cooking for those who came asking questions they didn’t know how to phrase.
One monsoon afternoon, a boy from Kolkata arrived—soaked, nervous, carrying a copy of Arohi’s long-out-of-print book, The Stone That Remembers. He said he was writing a thesis on “Indigenous Memory Systems in Eastern India.” He had followed the spiral symbol from Santiniketan to a secondhand store in Kalimpong, then finally here.
He found Arohi in the forest, plucking mushrooms.
“You’re her,” he said. “Dr. Sen.”
She didn’t deny it.
“I read everything. But the end… it’s missing.”
“Is it?”
“There’s no conclusion. Just blank pages after the chapter ‘Return.’”
Arohi smiled. “Because some things are still happening.”
“Can I see the stone?”
“No.”
“Please.”
“It’s asleep. And some sleep must not be disturbed.”
“But you wrote about it. You gave it a voice.”
“I only translated.”
He hesitated. “The child… Keya. Is she…”
“She’s listening,” Arohi said softly.
“What does that mean?”
Arohi didn’t answer.
Behind them, Keya stood by the old shrine, barefoot, face turned toward the clouds. She was humming. Her voice carried low and deep, older than any child should sound. Birds stopped mid-flight. The boy turned, mouth parted in awe.
“What is she singing?”
“Something she hasn’t yet remembered,” Arohi replied. “But the stone has.”
That night, the wind changed.
It brought the smell of burned paper and wet stone.
The Bari Pathor, still cracked and moss-covered, began to shimmer faintly. Not loud like before. Not commanding. Just… whispering.
To Keya.
In her dreams, she saw shadows dancing around the spiral.
Figures without faces.
Voices that spoke in unison.
“We are the remembered. You are the remembering.”
She woke up without fear.
Only with knowing.
By her fourth birthday, Keya had disappeared once.
Only for an hour.
The villagers searched in panic, but found her calmly seated beside the Bari Pathor, tracing the spiral with her toe. Around her lay leaves arranged in the shape of ears.
She looked up at Arohi and said, “The stone doesn’t speak. It listens. It listens through me.”
That night, Arohi cried again.
Not in sorrow.
In understanding.
She hadn’t birthed a daughter.
She had birthed an archive.
Months passed.
Seasons folded into each other.
Keya grew silent, but never distant. She watched everything. Not with the curiosity of a child, but the stillness of a historian.
Then one day, the stone split again.
Clean.
Deliberate.
And inside, not light.
But a staircase.
Leading down.
Made of stone.
Pulsing faintly.
Waiting.
Arohi stood before it.
Her hands trembling.
Not with fear.
With decision.
Keya looked at her and said, “I will go. But not yet.”
“Why?”
“You must come too. This story needs its beginning before I become the next page.”
Arohi held her daughter’s hand.
And for the first time in years, whispered, “Tell me again the lullaby.”
Keya smiled.
And sang.
The spiral hummed in response.
The staircase glowed.
And the forest exhaled.
The staircase descended not into darkness but into memory.
Each step down was a layer peeled—of Arohi’s mind, of Keya’s soul, of the forest’s voice. The walls breathed. Not literally, but with sensation. The cool stone pulsed like veins just beneath skin. Symbols glowed as they passed, flickering and fading as though shy.
They did not speak as they descended.
There was no need.
The stone was already listening.
The final step opened into a wide, circular chamber—a womb carved into the belly of the hill. At its center stood a low, flat rock surrounded by seven tall pillars, each carved with spirals, eyes, and open mouths. Around the rock, in precise circles, lay objects: bells, feathers, teeth, shreds of cloth, beads worn smooth by centuries of palms.
Arohi felt her knees give way.
“I’ve been here before,” she whispered.
Keya nodded. “Not in body. In grief.”
Arohi touched the edge of the flat stone. It was warm.
Then a sound rose—not a voice, not a song.
A breath.
Drawn inward.
The chamber inhaled.
And Arohi saw.
She was six. Running through the forest, chasing the hum she thought was her father’s flute. Her parents calling behind. The rock—still whole then, no cracks—rose before her like a throne. She reached for it, touched it.
And time dissolved.
She saw her mother’s tears, her father’s sacrifice. His voice offered to the stone. Take me, not her. And the stone had listened.
Arohi had been let go.
But her father had been remembered.
Too deeply.
The vision passed.
Keya stood across the circle, barefoot on the glowing floor.
“She remembers him too,” the chamber whispered.
Not in words.
In pulses.
A hum from the stone.
A hum that turned to light.
The low rock shimmered.
And from it rose the shape of a man.
Not solid.
Not smoke.
Just presence.
Arohi stared.
“Baba.”
He looked at her. Soft-eyed. Gentle-smiled.
“You came back,” he said.
“I had to.”
He looked at Keya. “You brought the memory.”
She stepped forward. “I was never born to be new. Only to complete.”
The figure nodded.
Then looked to Arohi.
“It’s time.”
“For what?”
“To un-remember. So others may remember again.”
The pillars around them began to hum.
The spiral patterns lifted from stone, floated mid-air like ink in water.
Arohi’s body trembled.
Not from fear.
From release.
She understood now.
The Bari Pathor didn’t store memories.
It recycled them.
Echoes passed down, generation to generation, until someone brave enough walked back into the spiral, not to listen, but to let go.
To let memory become language again.
To let pain become story.
To let silence become song.
She stepped to the center of the stone.
The pillars pulsed once.
Her father smiled.
Then placed his hand over her heart.
“You carried me far,” he said. “Now let me rest.”
Arohi closed her eyes.
And remembered… everything.
Then, like smoke in wind, he vanished.
A soft note echoed across the chamber.
Keya took her mother’s hand.
And together, they sang.
When they emerged from the spiral chamber, it was dawn.
The forest glowed golden.
The wind was real again.
Birds flew, crickets chirped, the village breathed.
The Bari Pathor was no longer cracked.
It was whole.
And sleeping.
Back in the village, the people gathered.
No one asked what had happened.
They already knew.
Children would now draw spirals again.
Old women would teach songs they had never sung before.
The forest would hum only when needed.
And the stone—
The stone would wait.
Years later, Keya would become the first oral historian of the Raidu people.
She never used a recorder.
She only listened.
And when asked where her stories came from, she’d smile and point to her chest.
“From the stone that remembers.”
And always, before each story, she’d ring a small brass bell.
Soft.
Clear.
Final.
END
