Aparna Thakur
Chapter 1 – Blood on the Hills
The storm came down like a curse upon the hills, lightning tearing jagged lines across the charcoal sky as the wind screamed through the cedar trees of Dharamshala’s outskirts. Rain lashed against the windows of an old guesthouse nestled precariously on a rocky slope, its pale stone façade flickering in the electric light like something pulled from a fevered dream. Inside, the air smelled of damp wood, old secrets, and the faintest trace of blood. At the top of the narrow staircase, in Room 5, Dev Rana’s body lay sprawled across the faded carpet, his throat cut deep and clean. A broken ceramic lamp lay shattered near his head, as though he’d reached for it in a final, panicked gesture. The police were summoned by the housekeeper—an old Nepali woman with trembling hands and eyes wide with horror. She had heard only muffled footsteps above the thunder and then silence, unnatural and thick.
Within an hour, the local inspector, Bhairav Chauhan, had arrived, his khaki uniform soaked and boots caked in red mud. The storm made forensics nearly impossible; rain had already washed away any footprints outside, and the electricity flickered with unnerving regularity. What complicated matters more was the only potential witness—if he could even be called that—had no voice. Ishaan Thapa, the mute tattoo artist from Lower Kotwali Bazaar, was seen leaving the guesthouse minutes before the discovery. A guest on the lower floor, through a crack in their door, had glimpsed his silhouette descending the staircase, his coat collar pulled high and eyes unreadable. They didn’t hear anything—just the soft sound of retreating steps. By the time the police found Ishaan, he was back at his studio, alone, the faint hum of his tattoo machine rising like an insect drone above the rain’s rhythm.
To the townsfolk, Ishaan had always been an enigma. He had arrived years ago, scarred and silent, carrying nothing but a duffel bag and a rusting tattoo kit. They whispered that his muteness wasn’t born of injury, but of a curse—that he had seen something too horrifying to speak of, and the silence had taken root in his soul. Children dared one another to run past his studio, its windows painted black, its door adorned with strange symbols. Still, his skill was undeniable. Tourists flocked to him, unaware of the lore that haunted his name. His tattoos were otherworldly—geometric, surreal, often said to leave the wearer with uneasy dreams. But after Dev Rana’s death, something shifted. Ishaan stopped taking clients. He closed the shutters, bolted the door, and stayed inside. Neighbors reported the constant buzz of his tattoo gun late into the night. Some said they heard him humming, low and trembling, though they knew that couldn’t be true.
Inside that dim studio, Ishaan worked like a man possessed. His walls became a gallery of cryptic ink designs—fractal skulls, bleeding eyes, temples split by lightning, snakes coiled around hollowed-out hearts. He inked them on sheets of thick parchment, hanging them from the ceiling and across the floor like drying skins. His own arms, once bare, now bore a tangle of fresh tattoos—symbols no one recognized, some etched so deep that they bled for days. He never left, never ate in public, and spoke to no one. But his eyes, when visible behind the small frosted windowpane, were wide with a knowing terror, as though he had glimpsed something in that guesthouse—something that refused to let him go. The locals, already uneasy, now crossed the road when they passed his shop. Even the police, frustrated by the lack of evidence, began to avoid his name in conversation, as though it might summon something unwanted.
Inspector Chauhan returned once more, knocking on Ishaan’s door under the guise of routine questioning. He brought with him a notepad, gesturing gently, trying to coax any detail, any sketch that might illuminate what Ishaan had seen—or done. Ishaan looked at him, unblinking, and slowly turned over a sheet of paper. On it was a tattoo design unlike the others—a face half-burnt, half-shadowed, eyes hollow, mouth sewn shut. In the background, lightning forked over a hilltop building with five narrow windows. It was the guesthouse. Chauhan paled. There was no way Ishaan could have seen that perspective unless he’d been standing outside, watching… or remembering. But he said nothing. Only turned back to his work as if some invisible clock was ticking, and his ink was the only way to hold the darkness at bay. Behind the closed door, the needle buzzed on. The storm had passed—but in the hills of Dharamshala, something far more ancient had been stirred.
Chapter 2 – The Profiler Arrives
The air in Dharamshala had grown colder since the murder, as if the hills themselves had recoiled from the blood spilled on their slopes. Mist clung low in the mornings, muffling sound and swallowing vision, and the guesthouse remained sealed under police orders, its windows dark like watching eyes. Into this fog-bound mystery came Shalini Rawat—a profiler with the Central Bureau of Investigation, dispatched from Delhi after local police reports described the suspect as “mentally disturbed, possibly traumatized, and displaying post-crime compulsive artistic behavior.” Shalini was not new to cases with shadowy psychology. Her reputation had been forged in the crucible of the most brutal and inexplicable murders in the northern belt. Calm, composed, and sharply intuitive, she did not believe in easy conclusions. She arrived in a quiet black SUV, dressed in a simple overcoat and boots, her short-cropped hair barely brushing her collar, eyes already scanning every wall and alley as if the hills might whisper clues if she just stood still long enough.
Her first briefing with Inspector Bhairav Chauhan was short and unsatisfying. He summarized what little they had: a well-known hotelier, Dev Rana, murdered during a thunderstorm with no signs of forced entry, no fingerprints, no blood trails beyond the victim’s own. The only person even remotely connected—if at all—was Ishaan Thapa, the mute tattoo artist, seen leaving the scene just before discovery. “But he won’t speak,” Chauhan had muttered, exasperated. “Won’t write. All he does is draw strange damn tattoos. He’s either guilty or insane.” Shalini said nothing in response, only tapping her pen slowly against her notebook. The details didn’t add up—people capable of murder usually left behind more than silence and crows. She needed to see the man. Not question him, exactly, but observe. She believed in the language of behavior, and she had learned long ago that trauma often found a way to speak—even through ink.
Ishaan’s studio was a narrow, weather-stained building wedged between a closed momo shop and a Tibetan bookstore. Its windows were still blacked out with thick paint, the door marked by runes and spirals that made little sense to the ordinary eye. Shalini stepped in with soft authority, and Ishaan looked up. He sat on a stool in the middle of the room, his tattoo machine buzzing in his hand, the scent of antiseptic and burnt metal curling through the air. He did not stand. Did not offer a gesture. His eyes flicked over her like a camera shutter, recording, then dismissing. But just as she turned her gaze away, she saw it—on the stretch of his left forearm, freshly inked, still angry and red. A crow. Its feathers detailed in almost surgical precision, wings partially spread, and a single bead of blood trailing from its beak. The imagery was brutal but deliberate. A predator in stillness, not in flight. Watching, perhaps remembering.
She didn’t speak for a long while. Instead, she walked the perimeter of his studio, slowly examining the hanging sketches and incomplete tattoos clipped on wire like photographs in a darkroom. Some showed temples with broken spires, others revealed mouths sewn shut, bleeding hands, or figures with no faces at all. “You’re trying to tell me something,” she said finally, not expecting a reply. “And I think you’ve been trying for days.” Ishaan’s hands trembled slightly as he continued working on a new design. His face gave nothing away, but his eyes—sharp, dark, and impossibly tired—lingered on her for half a second longer than they should have. That was all the invitation she needed. She opened her notebook and began cataloguing each tattoo with time, location, and possible symbolism. To anyone else, it might have looked like madness. To Shalini, it was language. And she intended to learn it.
That night in her lodge, surrounded by the buzz of crickets and the low thunder still grumbling across the distant mountains, Shalini pinned photocopies of Ishaan’s tattoos on the wall of her room. She lit a cigarette, something she rarely did, and stared at them like puzzle pieces. The crow was central—she placed it at the heart. Around it, the other designs seemed to orbit like memories. The stitched lips. The cracked temple. The hollowed eyes. Symbols of silence, broken sanctity, and seeing what should not be seen. These were not merely art—they were confessions, perhaps even warnings. Ishaan wasn’t escaping reality through these designs. He was documenting it. Mapping it. Communicating in the only language he had left. Shalini took a deep breath and wrote a single line under the crow’s image: “The witness cannot speak. But the ink remembers everything.”
Chapter 3 – Inked Clues
The early morning fog clung to the hills like a veil, refusing to lift even as the sun made a reluctant appearance over Dharamshala’s jagged skyline. Inside her temporary room at the guest lodge, Shalini Rawat had transformed one wall into a collage of pain and prophecy. Photographs of Ishaan’s tattoos were pinned like crime scene evidence, each one accompanied by notes scribbled in her precise handwriting—interpretations, emotional tone, recurring elements. She was beginning to see a pattern. The burning house: perhaps a symbol of destruction, either literal or psychological. The disfigured tree with twisted branches: corrupted roots, maybe a family secret or a betrayal. The falling clock—a moment lost in time, perhaps the murder night. These weren’t random. Ishaan wasn’t an artist lost in trauma. He was chronicling a narrative, in pieces too dangerous to speak aloud. She circled three motifs that kept repeating: fire, silence, and distortion. Each tattoo etched on his own skin bore the deepest pain, and this morning, a fresh one had appeared.
Ravi Bhalla’s name had come up in the initial reports almost casually—guesthouse owner, first on the scene, called the police. But something about the way he had been sidelined in every conversation irked Shalini. People who blend too easily into the background often have something to hide. She arrived at the guesthouse unannounced, clipboard in hand, and found Ravi polishing brass doorknobs with unnecessary vigor. His eyes darted to her badge before settling into a mask of tired hospitality. He was in his late fifties, dressed in an old shawl and kurta, and wore the expression of a man trying to outrun bad news. “Ma’am, I already told the inspector everything,” he said quickly. “I found Mr. Rana upstairs. Ishaan was just there, standing… doing nothing.” Shalini narrowed her eyes. “Doing nothing? Did he look surprised? Afraid? Guilty?” Ravi hesitated. “Just still. Like he wasn’t even breathing.” She noted the tremor in his voice, the way his eyes kept shifting, not meeting hers.
“You didn’t try to talk to him?” she pressed. “Did he gesture anything? Point?” Ravi licked his lips. “He… he looked at the body, then at me. Then he left. That’s all.” But Shalini’s instincts flared. There was too much control in his response, too much precision. People recalling trauma didn’t speak like this. They stumbled, flailed, tried to make sense of the chaos. Ravi’s version was rehearsed, polished like the brass on his doorknobs. “And you’ve known Ishaan long?” she asked, casually. “Of course, it’s a small town. He keeps to himself.” That last part came too fast. Shalini marked it down: defensive. Possibly coached. There was something more going on here—a silence larger than Ishaan’s, possibly woven through the very foundation of the guesthouse.
Back at the studio, Ishaan sat shirtless before the mirror, his eyes fixed not on his face but on his chest, where the fresh tattoo was being inked—slow, methodical, painful. A spine made of barbed wire now snaked from his collarbone to his sternum, each barb inked with jagged precision, as though tearing flesh in slow motion. The symbolism struck Shalini the moment she saw it later that evening—restraint, agony, imprisonment not of the body but of memory. This was no performance. This was a man trying to contain a scream with steel and ink. She stood behind him quietly, not wanting to startle him. He didn’t turn, didn’t pause. Just kept working on his own body like it was a canvas he couldn’t abandon. On the floor, scattered like fallen leaves, were sketches of the same image repeated again and again—a dark figure standing in a burning doorway, arms raised, mouth open. Always faceless. Always on fire.
That night, as the winds howled down from the ridges and the pine trees groaned in protest, Shalini stared once more at her growing wall of clues. The barbed wire spine joined the center, and with it, a suspicion began to root deeper in her mind: someone in the guesthouse had seen the murder before it happened. Or had known it would happen. The question was whether Ishaan was warning her or warning them. The tattoos weren’t just a post-traumatic ritual. They were a map of suppressed truths. And in that dark tangle of memory and myth, Shalini sensed she wasn’t just chasing a killer—she was decoding a buried event, one that had seared itself into a man who had no words left to describe it. The real question now wasn’t who killed Dev Rana. It was—why is everyone so afraid to remember?
Chapter 4 – The Guesthouse and the Girl
Shalini returned to the guesthouse under the pretext of reviewing the crime scene once more, but this time she brought a forensic technician from the local unit—a quiet man named Faizan who specialized in digital surveillance recovery. What she hadn’t told Inspector Chauhan was that she’d found a faint adhesive outline near the corridor ceiling—a square imprint like something had once been mounted there. Security cameras, perhaps. When she confronted Ravi Bhalla, he shrugged, claiming the guesthouse never had such devices. But Faizan confirmed otherwise within minutes. Hidden beneath the wall panels of Room 3, behind the wardrobe, he found a dusty, disconnected DVR unit with its hard drive gutted—professionally. “No signs of panic,” he muttered, examining the cut cables. “Whoever did this knew what they were doing.” Shalini felt the knot in her chest tighten. Someone had gone to great lengths to erase a visual record of that stormy night. This wasn’t random violence. It was a message scrubbed clean.
Later that afternoon, Shalini sat at a makeshift desk in the lodge, piecing together information on Dev Rana’s last known activities. It turned out he wasn’t merely a hotelier as most assumed. Dev had recently pivoted into independent journalism, focusing on environmental crimes in Himachal Pradesh. According to a Delhi contact, he’d been digging into a land mafia racket—names of powerful contractors, illegal felling of protected forest, and suspicious political linkages. His phone records, retrieved through official CBI channels, revealed repeated calls to a Delhi editor and a local activist—both of whom had gone silent in the last week. The pieces were beginning to form an unsettling shape. If Dev had been on the verge of exposing something dangerous, then his murder wasn’t personal. It was surgical. Shalini circled three names in her notebook—contractor Chawla, MLA Nandan Suri, and a shell company registered in Kangra that had purchased vast tracts of forest edge land. All linked through financial trails she would need official warrants to follow. But the silence surrounding them already felt like an answer.
That evening, a soft knock came at Shalini’s door. Tara Mehta stood there in a hoodie and jeans, visibly tense, her fingers fidgeting with a silver ring. She introduced herself as one of Ishaan’s oldest friends, someone who had grown up with him in the nearby village of Ghera. “I saw him yesterday,” she said, eyes darting nervously. “He’s… not okay. He tattooed something new on his shoulder. I think you should see it.” Tara brought out a phone, showing Shalini a photograph. It was a design of an eye—sharp, almost reptilian—with jagged thorns encircling it like a crown of punishment. The skin around it was still inflamed. “He didn’t draw this like the others,” she whispered. “He carved it. Like he wanted it to hurt.” Shalini studied the image carefully. The eye looked like it was watching through the thorns, not trapped by them. “Did he explain what it meant?” she asked. Tara shook her head. “He doesn’t explain anything anymore. But I saw this symbol once before. Years ago. Behind our school. Painted on a wall. The next day, the wall was whitewashed. Nobody ever talked about it.”
Shalini offered her a seat, but Tara hesitated. “I came because I thought I could help. I can understand some of his symbols, but that one…” Her voice faltered. “It made me feel like I’d remembered something I wasn’t supposed to. Does that make sense?” Shalini nodded. “More than you think.” But before she could ask further, Tara stood up abruptly. “I shouldn’t be here. Just… tell him to stop tattooing it into himself. It’s not helping.” She left in a rush, not even waiting for Shalini to respond. Watching her disappear into the growing dusk, Shalini made another note in her book: Tara knows more than she’s saying. Symbol connected to local memory suppression. It wasn’t paranoia. It was a town that had learned to forget—and punish those who remembered.
Alone again, Shalini pinned the photo of the thorned eye on her growing wall of madness. This one was different. It wasn’t about trauma, but vigilance—someone watching or being watched. If the burning house had been the act, and the barbed wire the consequence, then the eye was the aftermath. Who was the observer? And what was being kept hidden behind those thorns? Ishaan’s tattoos weren’t just reflections of inner torment. They were fragments of a greater truth, one everyone else had buried. The murder of Dev Rana might have simply been the tremor. What Shalini now sensed pulsing underneath these hills was something far older, deeper—and far more dangerous.
Chapter 5 – The Silent War
The attack came without warning, like a shadow slashing through the mist. It was just past midnight when the screamless scuffle unfolded outside Ishaan’s studio—no alarm, no cries for help, just the muffled thud of fists and boots against flesh. A neighbor, drawn by the sudden crash of a metal trash bin, saw a figure fleeing into the alley, leaving behind a trail of smeared blood and a body curled defensively against the studio’s locked door. Ishaan. Bruised, barely conscious, but alive. By the time Shalini arrived, called in by Inspector Chauhan in the early hours of the morning, Ishaan had been moved inside, where he sat in silence, shirtless and bloodied, refusing medical attention beyond basic cleaning. His eyes didn’t blink when she entered. They just stared, the unspoken pain layered beneath an old, familiar defiance. Someone wanted him silenced permanently now—and it wasn’t just fear driving that violence. It was desperation.
The attack marked a turning point. Shalini had suspected Ishaan’s tattoos were more than psychological exorcisms—they were coded records. But now it was undeniable. He had become dangerous not because of what he might say, but because of what he already knew. As she gently helped him sit, her eyes fell on a fresh bruise near his upper thigh, and below it, something new. A tattoo, half-finished, raw and scabbed—a broken typewriter, its keys scattered like teeth, ink ribbons torn, as if silenced mid-sentence. It was unlike his usual surrealism; this was literal, pointed, a clue. Shalini’s mind raced. Typewriters, articles, language suppressed. Could it be a reference to Dev Rana’s unpublished work? A trace of an idea flared. She excused herself and began digging. A call to Dev’s former editor in Delhi led nowhere. “He kept most of his drafts offline,” the man said flatly. “Paranoid as hell after some threats. Said he was being followed.” But Shalini had heard enough. Offline didn’t mean inaccessible. It just meant hidden.
Back at her lodge, she searched through Dev Rana’s recovered devices. His phone was clean, wiped probably after the murder, but his tablet—carelessly overlooked—contained a secure cloud sync. With help from the CBI’s digital division, she cracked the encryption and unearthed the last folder Dev had uploaded. Inside it was a single, unfinished article titled The Forests Are Dying Louder Than We Are. It was more than exposé—it was a war cry. Names were named. MLA Nandan Suri. The Chawla Builders Group. A powerful legacy family known as the Duggals—local royalty with roots in colonial land ownership and current hands deep in every civic body from Shimla to Delhi. Dev had traced financial records, illegal permits, anonymous land transfers, and even death threats issued to activists. But the final paragraphs were missing, cut off mid-sentence as if something—or someone—had stopped him just before he could send it live. The typewriter tattoo suddenly made sense. Ishaan had known about this article. He’d witnessed something the night Dev died—something that broke the story before the words ever did.
Shalini printed the article, highlighting names, sketching connections. If Ishaan was trying to guide her, she was finally catching up. His silence wasn’t only born of trauma. It was an armor, forged in fear and possibly loyalty. But to whom? Was he protecting someone close—Tara, perhaps? Or himself, because he knew that speaking would mean death? The attack proved the enemy wasn’t abstract anymore. They were watching. Acting. And somewhere in the gaps of Dev’s story was a thread that connected all the quiet people in this town—those who remembered but didn’t speak, those who hid symbols behind shutters and painted over old walls. Ishaan wasn’t just surviving. He was resisting, the only way he could. Through ink. Through pain. Through the stubborn refusal to forget.
That night, Shalini visited him again. He didn’t move as she entered, but his eyes flicked to the printout she carried. She laid it on the table beside his sketchbook and whispered, “I’ve seen the broken typewriter.” For the first time, his fingers twitched. A slow, subtle gesture. Not quite relief, not quite surrender. But something in between. She sat beside him in silence, understanding now that the war they were in wasn’t just against the killers of Dev Rana—it was against a network of power that relied on silence as its deadliest weapon. Ishaan had chosen not to speak, not because he couldn’t, but because the truth had already cost too much. And if it came out now, it would burn everything. Including him.
Chapter 6 – Voices from the Past
The monastery sat high on a mist-draped ridge above Dharamshala, nestled among ancient pines and prayer flags fluttering like fragile whispers in the wind. Its stone steps were worn smooth by decades of barefoot passage, its silence deeper than even the forests that surrounded it. Shalini climbed slowly, breathing in the chill of altitude and old memories, her instincts heavy with the sense that answers lay buried here—not just about Dev Rana’s murder, but about the haunted silence that lived within Ishaan Thapa. The monastery had once sheltered war orphans, fire survivors, and broken children scraped off the margins of forgotten villages. Ishaan had been one of them. After his family perished in a mysterious fire that consumed their village home nearly twenty years ago, he was found—alive, unburnt, but mute, clinging to a half-charred sketchpad. The monks took him in. What they didn’t know, or couldn’t explain, was why the boy never uttered a single word from that day forward.
Shalini was greeted by an elderly monk named Tenzin Dorje, his eyes crinkled with kindness and sorrow both. He remembered Ishaan well. “The quiet one,” he said softly as they walked the shaded courtyard. “But his hands… they spoke always. He drew things no child should see.” He led her to a storage room beneath the prayer hall, where relics and forgotten donations gathered dust. Among them, tucked beneath layers of linen, was a leather-bound sketchbook faded with time. Tenzin handed it to her with reverence, as if it were a scripture. Inside were drawings—raw, urgent, and terrifying. Nightmares in graphite. Shalini turned the pages slowly. A forest on fire. Limbless figures crawling through smoke. A man with no mouth and eyes wide with terror. Many resembled Ishaan’s current tattoos, as though the boy had been repeating a cycle of visual memory all his life. Then she froze.
One sketch stood out. A face. Half of it was disfigured—burned skin, a hollow eye socket—but the other half smiled. Not a child’s innocent doodle, but a chilling, knowing grin. Beneath it, in scratchy block letters, was one word: “Remember.” Shalini felt her stomach twist. This wasn’t imagined. It was a recollection. The face was real—someone Ishaan had seen in the fire. Someone alive during the tragedy. Possibly someone responsible for it. Could it be that the trauma of that night had imprinted itself so violently that Ishaan’s entire life since had been an effort to draw it out, to confront it, even as others tried to erase it? She turned to Tenzin, who lowered his eyes. “He drew that face again and again. After a while, we took the sketchbook away. We thought it was feeding his pain. But maybe… maybe we silenced something sacred.”
The pieces began to fall into place in Shalini’s mind. Ishaan had seen more than one death. He had survived two silences—the fire that took his family, and now, the murder of Dev Rana. What if they were connected? What if the people responsible for Dev’s death were tied to that long-ago blaze? The symbols began to rearrange themselves in her head—the burning house, the eye with thorns, the barbed spine. They weren’t just fragments of individual trauma. They were chapters in a continuous narrative. A buried truth rising through art like a ghost refusing rest. Ishaan hadn’t just chosen tattoos to cope; he had chosen them because they lasted. Because the skin remembers when the tongue cannot. And maybe, just maybe, he had begun tattooing his own body because even paper had once betrayed him.
As she descended the monastery steps, sketchbook in hand, the wind picked up, flinging the smell of incense and old pine through the air. The monks resumed their chanting behind her, but Shalini felt only the hush of something long buried coming back to life. If Ishaan had carried this memory for so long—alone, unspoken, unseen—then his silence wasn’t just a wound. It was a defense. A code. A refusal to forget what everyone else had. That face in the sketchbook—half-burned, smiling—was now etched into her mind. She didn’t know who it belonged to yet, but she knew this: whoever that man was, he hadn’t vanished in the fire. He had survived. And if her instincts were right, he was here now. Watching. Waiting. Maybe even orchestrating the present, just as he had scarred the past. And Ishaan, mute but relentless, was finally fighting back—with every line, every needle, every drop of ink.
Chapter 7 – The Hidden Canvas
The storm had returned to Dharamshala, as if nature itself was tracing the emotional crescendos building in Shalini’s investigation. Wind howled through the ridges and rain lashed the cobblestones outside the police station where she waited for word on Ravi Bhalla. The guesthouse owner had vanished overnight—no calls, no notes, no sightings. His mobile rang unanswered until it went dead entirely. Ravi’s absence wasn’t just suspicious—it was damning. Shalini’s gut told her he hadn’t fled out of fear, but because someone—or something—had caught up to him first. Hours later, his car was discovered parked on a forest road half a kilometer from the guesthouse, door ajar, engine cold. The glovebox had been left open. Inside it, tucked between crumpled receipts and a faded tourist map, was a drawing on rice paper: Ishaan’s unmistakable style. A lantern, half-buried in mud, its flame weak, but still glowing.
The image haunted Shalini as she stood once again in the rain-soaked foyer of the guesthouse. A lantern buried underground—it wasn’t just symbolic. It was directional. Ishaan’s clues had always layered metaphor with tangible truth. She spent the next hour scouring the layout of the building, measuring hall dimensions, counting steps that didn’t match floor plans. And then, in the storage room under the kitchen, behind a stack of rusted oil tins and rotting linen, she found it—a wooden hatch in the floor, sealed with age and cobwebs. The cellar beneath was cramped, stifling, lit only by the beam of her torch. The air smelled of mildew and something darker—something coppery and old. Blood. Shalini’s light swept across the space, illuminating a pile of clothes stained in faded crimson, a stack of Polaroids showing Dev Rana at various protest sites, and a collection of labeled cassette tapes—interviews Dev had recorded in secret. As she reached for the nearest one, her hand trembled. This wasn’t a guesthouse cellar. This was an evidence locker. A forgotten vault of truths someone had tried to bury for good.
But that wasn’t the end. In the far corner of the cellar, the torchlight caught something faint, something scrubbed and scarred. An old wall. She brushed her fingers over it and felt the texture change—coarse strokes of dried paint beneath a newer, hasty coat. Layers peeled back with effort, revealing hints of color, of form. Years ago, someone had painted a mural here. Not a decorative one, but personal. The monks had said Ishaan never spoke—but always drew. What if, long before the tattoos, long before the trauma hardened into silence, he had told the truth on this wall? Shalini pulled out her phone, searching records, and found it: a grainy photo taken by a traveler three years ago, back when the guesthouse had briefly hosted an artist residency. The picture showed the original mural in full—a crowd of faceless figures standing in fire, a crow flying overhead, and in the center, a girl looking back at the viewer. A single, unmistakable birthmark under her left eye.
Shalini’s breath caught. She pulled out the guest list from the night Dev Rana was murdered—cross-referencing names, checking bookings, and questioning staff reports. No one recalled a girl with a birthmark. No photographs, no ID, nothing. Yet the mural proved she had been here once—perhaps more than once. Perhaps that very night. Someone had taken great pains to erase her, to make her forgettable, invisible. But Ishaan had remembered. And he had immortalized her before the memory could be wiped. Why? Who was she? A friend? A witness? Or something more damning—an accomplice? The implications sent a chill through Shalini that even the damp cellar couldn’t explain. If Ravi had known about her, if he had seen her that night, then his disappearance wasn’t a flight—it was a silencing.
Back in her room, the rain still slashing the windows like nails, Shalini spread the photo of the mural beside the guest list, highlighting overlaps, inconsistencies, anomalies. She called Tara Mehta, but the call went unanswered. Outside, a crow cried in the distance—a sound now too layered with meaning to ignore. Ishaan’s art had led her beneath the surface, into the hidden bones of the town’s truths. What else had been scrubbed clean while everyone watched the storm? Who was the girl with the birthmark—and why had she been erased? Shalini no longer believed this case was just about a single murder. It was about the architecture of silence built across decades. The cellar was not the bottom. It was the threshold. And on the other side waited a truth someone would kill again to protect.
Chapter 8 – A Girl Who Never Existed
The pieces were falling into place like leaves swept by a violent gust—disjointed, spiraling, but converging. Shalini had spent the night sifting through property records, old protest archives, and identity registries, all triggered by the realization that the girl with the birthmark never officially existed. The guesthouse had no digital or handwritten record of her arrival, stay, or departure. CCTV footage from that night had one blind spot—conveniently at the rear gate, where a shadow slipped in and out during the time frame of Dev Rana’s murder. Shalini fed a blurry still from the mural into an old database meant for facial recognition in missing persons cases. A partial match came up—not for a missing woman, but for a young intern who once worked at a state minister’s office, before resigning quietly. That intern’s name: Tara Rajvanshi—now known as Tara Mehta.
The betrayal landed like a punch to the gut. Tara, the composed and sharp-tongued lawyer who had offered coffee and comfort, who had warned Shalini to tread carefully, wasn’t just involved—she was embedded. The new identity, the relocation, the job with the activist collective—it was a disguise, perfectly worn, perfectly placed. Shalini confronted her at the co-working space near the market, the sound of rain against the glass a quiet witness to their unraveling. Tara didn’t deny it for long. Her defiance cracked like old paint. Yes, her real name was Rajvanshi. Yes, she had once been close to the very politician Dev had tried to expose. And yes—Dev had been more than a colleague. “We were in love,” she said, eyes unblinking. “But he became obsessed. With the truth, with exposure, with the idea that he could burn the whole rot down.” Her voice turned quiet. “That’s when I knew it would end badly. For him. For all of us.”
But when Shalini asked about that night, about the unregistered presence at the guesthouse, Tara faltered. “I left before midnight. He was alive when I did,” she whispered, voice tight, rehearsed. “You have to believe me—I didn’t kill him.” But belief had grown slippery. That night, back at the studio, Ishaan sat in his usual silence, and this time Shalini didn’t try to pull the words out of him. Instead, she waited, patient, as he picked up the ink gun and pressed needle to skin. When he was done, she saw it: a fox, twisting through a nest of knotted roots, its eyes sly, its limbs caught, yet its grin intact. It was a symbol older than language—cunning and entrapment. A predator, caught in its own snare. Ishaan hadn’t heard the confrontation. But he had known. As if Tara’s secrets echoed in his bones. Or as if she was part of the past he had never truly left.
The tattoo unsettled her more than the confession. Because it wasn’t just an accusation—it was a mirror. Shalini began wondering if Ishaan’s trauma wasn’t just rooted in witnessing something horrific, but in feeling responsible for it. Survivors carried many burdens, but guilt had a distinct shape. What if Ishaan hadn’t just seen someone die, years ago, but believed—rightly or wrongly—that he had caused it? What if his silence wasn’t just self-preservation, but penance? The mural, the sketchbook, the cryptic tattoos—all of it pointed to someone who didn’t just document truth, but buried it deep inside until it scarred. And perhaps Tara had touched something in him—someone else who had lived under a false name, with a truth too heavy to carry. They were mirrors to each other. That made her dangerous.
Shalini walked back through the town’s winding lanes that evening, the sky dimming into hues of iron and ash. The fox tattoo burned in her mind—deception tangled with consequence. Tara’s motive was clear now. If Dev had exposed her past, her political ties, her secrets, she would have been destroyed professionally. But did that mean she had silenced him? Or had someone else used her guilt, her affair, to frame her? More questions piled onto the brittle foundation of everything Shalini thought she knew. Ishaan had seen it all, known it all—and still chosen ink over words. Maybe that was his punishment. Or maybe his only way of speaking. But the fear now clung like fog: what else was he hiding? And if the final truth involved guilt more than grief—whose guilt was it really? Shalini wasn’t sure anymore. Only that they were all walking on a floor made of cracked glass. And something beneath it was waiting to shatter.
Chapter 9 – The Memory That Screams
The rain had stopped, but the town still carried the hush of a place caught in recollection. Shalini stood at the threshold of Ishaan’s studio, not as a journalist or an investigator, but as something closer to a confidante. He didn’t say a word as he unlocked the side door and gestured for her to follow. The air inside was heavier, older—an alcove walled with dust-covered frames, ink-stained drop cloths, and canvases hidden under plastic sheeting. This was his vault—not of secrets, but of screams. Without a word, Ishaan began peeling back the layers. One by one, the canvases emerged—not traditional art, but skin-like cloth where he’d tattooed memories in silence. They weren’t sketches; they were haunted relics. And each told a story louder than any scream could.
Shalini moved slowly, reverently, through the gallery of trauma. One canvas showed a man in silhouette, watching a building engulfed in flames from behind a gate. The detail was chilling: the man’s hands were clasped behind his back, calm, almost satisfied. Another canvas was more violent—blotched red ink forming a child standing in the foreground of the same fire, a knife hanging from one hand, smoke curling around his head like a crown. The child wasn’t running. He wasn’t crying. He was simply… still. Shalini’s breath caught. This wasn’t the image of a victim or even a witness. It was something far more complex. The stillness, the resolve on the child’s face—it spoke of guilt. Of consequence. Of a memory too old to confess aloud, yet too loud to forget.
The pieces clattered into place like falling glass. Ishaan had been there the night the fire took his family. But more than that, he had believed—whether rightly or not—that he had caused it. Maybe not by lighting the match, but by failing to stop what came after. Maybe the man watching had been the true monster, but the child had frozen, gripped by fear or confusion, and in his young mind, that stillness had become a sin. Shalini looked at Ishaan then—not the tattooist or the orphan, but the man who had been shaped by that fire like molten iron. His silence wasn’t just grief. It was judgment. A lifetime of it. And yet, the canvas told more than guilt—it hinted at protection. One image, set apart from the others, showed the child shielding another figure, drawn only as a shadow, behind him. A protective stance, defiant against the flames.
That detail changed everything. Ishaan wasn’t merely mourning his past—he had spent years trying to redeem it. His silence had not just buried memories but guarded someone else’s truth. And suddenly, Dev Rana’s murder took on a different hue. The night of the murder, the tension in Ishaan hadn’t been fear—it had been recognition. Whoever killed Dev, Ishaan had known them. Maybe he hadn’t pulled the trigger, but he had stepped into the fire again, willingly, to protect someone. Who? Shalini traced the threads back—Tara Mehta, with her broken past and political ghosts. Ravi Bhalla, who’d disappeared after poking too hard. Or someone else entirely, connected to the first fire, not the second. Ishaan’s tattoos didn’t accuse—they absolved. Which meant he had seen the murderer. And chosen silence, again.
As Shalini stepped back from the final canvas, she felt the weight of two decades of pain pressing into her chest. Ishaan sat cross-legged by the window, staring out at the grey-blue sky, the ghost of a child flickering across his face. She understood now. The tattoos were his confessions—but they weren’t his pleas for forgiveness. They were warnings. Reminders of what silence costs, and what it protects. “The truth is buried,” she said quietly, mostly to herself, “but not forgotten.” Ishaan didn’t turn. But he nodded—once. A movement so small it might have been a trick of the light. And in that moment, Shalini understood the final piece: the story wasn’t about who killed Dev Rana. It was about what Ishaan was willing to become so someone else wouldn’t have to carry what he did. The truth was out there. But it had been inked into skin, sealed behind silence—and guarded by a man who remembered everything, even the memory that screamed.
Chapter 10 – The Last Ink
The morning in Dharamshala broke unusually still, as if the town itself was holding its breath. Shalini stood outside the police outpost, the Himalayan fog curling around her ankles like silent witnesses. Everything had led to this moment: the tapes, the hidden mural, the missing guest, the tattooed memories. But the final truth, the sharpest shard, had only come into focus when she noticed Ishaan’s newest canvas—an unfinished design of a tiger crouching low, one paw bleeding into the earth. The image lingered with her, not as art, but as confession. Ishaan hadn’t just known who killed Dev Rana—he had seen it happen. And he had chosen ink over words, again. Not to hide the truth, but to present it in a language few could corrupt.
Shalini returned to Ishaan’s studio without knocking. The door creaked open on its own, as if it had been waiting for her. Ishaan stood at his workbench, the final strokes of the tiger’s eye taking shape under his needle. It stared back with fury—and sorrow. “Tell me,” Shalini said, not expecting an answer. Ishaan didn’t turn. Instead, he reached into an old trunk and produced a weathered sketchbook. Inside, he had drawn that night at the guesthouse from memory: Dev Rana by the fireplace, the storm brewing outside, and most telling of all—a figure entering through the back, gun half-concealed under a raincoat. The face was blurred but distinct enough. A badge on the belt. The angular chin. The high collar. It was Inspector Aman Negi.
The realization thundered through Shalini like an avalanche. All this time, the man who had led the investigation had been diverting it. Tara Mehta had secrets, yes—but she hadn’t pulled the trigger. Negi had ties to the land mafia Dev was investigating, and when Dev found a direct link between illegal land grabs and official police corruption, Negi’s mask had slipped. Ishaan, hidden in the shadows of the guesthouse that night, had seen it all. But he hadn’t spoken because he feared it would end the same way it always did—innocents burnt, and the guilty untouchable. Until now. With Shalini’s media reach, and the power of visual truth, a story could be told that no press conference could erase. They didn’t need a statement. They had the tiger, and the bleeding paw.
The arrest came quietly but decisively. Shalini presented her story to a retired judge in the region known for his integrity, along with Ishaan’s visual testimony, corroborated by forensic evidence from the guesthouse tapes and Ravi Bhalla’s recovered notes. The tiger tattoo became a symbol overnight—printed on protest signs, shared across social media, and splashed across national news with the caption: “Justice may bleed, but it roars still.” Aman Negi was taken into custody in the early hours, silent and stone-faced, his own badge sealing his guilt more than absolving it. Ishaan didn’t attend the arrest. He didn’t need to. He had already spoken, in the only way he knew how. Through the ink that told no lies.
When Shalini left Dharamshala, it wasn’t just a departure from a town. It was a shedding of skin. She had come searching for a murder and found something far more complex: a story of silence, memory, guilt, and the long road to healing. At the edge of the mountain road, she paused to glance back. Ishaan stood by the studio door, arms crossed, his eyes not following her, but resting somewhere in the horizon. She knew he would remain—tattooing not for beauty, but for truth. A quiet archivist of pain and resilience. His silence was no longer a prison. It was a choice. A language. And in that final ink, the tiger with the bleeding paw, Shalini saw not just the cost of justice—but its endurance. The fire had not won. The past had not buried them. And the ink, once whispered, now screamed for all who chose to see.
End
