Chapter 1:
It was the sort of evening that wrapped Mumbai in a damp silence—one of those monsoon nights when the rain doesn’t roar, but hisses steadily, like a whisper of secrets meant to be hidden. The streetlights near Colaba Causeway flickered through the drizzle, casting shimmering reflections across the wet tarmac. Viraj Mehta, the 42-year-old diamond merchant with a reputation as clean as the stones he traded, checked his Rolex for the fourth time as he exited his office building. He had ended his day like any other: signing off ledger sheets, taking calls from Dubai, and checking shipments through Antwerp. But beneath the surface, something was different—his gait had a nervous tension, his jaw slightly clenched. The building’s lobby camera caught him walking alone, holding his black leather briefcase in his left hand, an umbrella in his right, sharply dressed in a charcoal grey suit with silver cufflinks. He nodded a perfunctory goodbye to the receptionist, who later testified there was nothing unusual in his demeanor. At 7:13 PM, he stepped into the basement parking area—and that was the last time anyone saw Viraj Mehta alive.
The disappearance wasn’t noticed until almost midnight. His wife, Ira Mehta, a classical music teacher, grew anxious after receiving no reply to her calls or texts. By 9:45 PM, she had called his driver, his office assistant, and even checked his GPS tracking app, which simply read: “Last location unknown.” Ira filed a missing person report at Colaba Police Station at 11:06 PM, trembling, soaked, and wearing a mismatched shawl she’d hastily thrown over her nightclothes. Inspector Abhay Kulkarni, a tall, sharp-eyed veteran of Mumbai Police’s Crime Division, was on duty when the report landed on his desk. Known for his old-school grit and modern instincts, Kulkarni took one look at the name and straightened in his chair. Viraj Mehta wasn’t a man who simply vanished—he was known for his precision, for attending boardroom meetings down to the second, for maintaining punctual tea breaks in between diamond assessments. The inspector personally accompanied two constables to the Mehta residence in Cuffe Parade that night. There were no signs of forced entry, ransom notes, or threats. Nothing in the house was disturbed. A quick scan of his office CCTV showed him entering the basement—but not leaving. The Mercedes SUV registered in his name was still in its parking spot. Locked. Untouched. It was as if the man had walked into the concrete shadows and been swallowed whole.
The next morning, the case was upgraded to a “high-profile disappearance” and Kulkarni took full charge. He started with the digital footprint: bank statements, calls, GPS, office logs. One thing struck him immediately—Viraj had withdrawn ₹50 lakhs in cash from his business account just five days prior. The withdrawal had been made in two parts, both personally signed for at different branches, with no staff involved. According to Ira, Viraj had told her it was for a “short-term offshore investment”—a vague explanation, considering how detailed he usually was with money. Kulkarni also discovered that Viraj had been receiving frequent encrypted calls over Signal, and one last call at 6:52 PM—twenty-one minutes before he vanished—had lasted exactly 11 seconds. The number was untraceable. None of his employees had seen anything suspicious, except for the janitor, who recalled hearing “soft footsteps and a short clank of metal” around 7:20 PM in the basement. But no one could explain why Viraj’s briefcase was missing. His phone was also gone, and security logs showed no exit activity after 7:13 PM—suggesting he hadn’t taken the stairwell, elevator, or parking gate. Kulkarni began to suspect one of three things: either Viraj had staged his own disappearance with near-impossible precision, someone had helped him vanish, or someone had made him disappear.
Two days into the investigation, the first unusual clue surfaced. One of the building’s rear exit cameras, overlooked during the initial sweep, captured a silhouette exiting through the service staircase at 7:19 PM. The footage was dark and blurry, but the figure appeared to be carrying something—perhaps a briefcase. The person wore a grey hoodie, the hood tightly pulled, walking briskly with their head down. Kulkarni froze the frame and zoomed in, his instincts tingling. Though the figure’s face was obscured, the build and height were nearly identical to Viraj’s. Forensics confirmed the possibility that it was him, though not conclusively. But what was even more telling was what the figure left behind—no footprints, no fingerprints, and no trace of the briefcase, phone, or even the umbrella. It was as if the man had walked out of one life and into another. The media caught wind of the story by the third day. “DIAMOND KING MISSING IN COLABA” screamed the Times of India. As television anchors speculated everything from kidnapping to suicide, Inspector Kulkarni kept staring at that last frame of footage, over and over, thinking: If this was Viraj Mehta, then why did he leave everything behind—his business, his wife, his life—and what exactly was he running from?
Chapter 2:
Inspector Abhay Kulkarni arrived at the Mehta residence on the third evening since the disappearance, this time with a search warrant. The Cuffe Parade apartment was perched on the 17th floor of a luxury tower overlooking the sea—glass, chrome, and silence. Ira Mehta, dressed in a pale green saree and looking ten years older than she did in her press photos, opened the door herself. There were no tears, just a dazed quietness as if her brain had stopped processing time. She cooperated calmly, almost mechanically, answering Kulkarni’s questions about their routines, recent conversations, financial habits. She insisted Viraj had never hinted at any trouble—no debts, no enemies, no infidelity. They had returned from a short holiday in Goa just two weeks prior. Kulkarni’s team began their systematic sweep: bedroom, bathroom, wardrobes, drawers. Most of the house was too pristine, too curated—as if curated to look like nothing was ever out of place. But when they reached the study, a small wood-paneled room facing the Arabian Sea, something finally whispered secrets. Hidden beneath a shelf of design catalogues, behind a set of meaningless framed certificates, was a narrow panel in the desk drawer that clicked softly when pressed. Inside it lay a black leather Moleskine notebook, wrapped in wax paper and sealed with an old brass clasp.
The notebook was filled with neat cursive handwriting in blue ink. At first glance, it seemed to be a ledger of sorts, but there were no financial figures—just initials, dates, codes, and locations. Kulkarni recognized the pattern instantly: it was a contact log, possibly for meetings or transactions. Each line was cryptic. “A.K. – SEEPZ – 04/11 – R”; “D.K. – CG Rd – 13/02 – B”; “‘Swan’ – ECIL – 29/08 – T”. Kulkarni flagged a dozen entries and sent them to the cybercrime team. The results returned faster than expected. Four of the initials matched names of individuals on the Enforcement Directorate’s watchlist—people involved in hawala transfers, illegal gemstone imports, and untraceable foreign remittances. Some had been interrogated in the past but never charged. Others were suspected to be using front companies in Singapore and Mauritius. The abbreviation “T” appeared in five places, often beside the name “Swan,” and once next to “Shantiniketan.” This last one struck a chord. When Kulkarni scanned Viraj’s laptop, which had so far yielded nothing but official correspondence and invoice PDFs, he found a locked folder titled “SHANTINIKETAN” buried under a nested subdirectory named “Family_GoaTrip2019.” With the help of the forensics team, they cracked the password: OMR5!Mehta#.
Inside the folder was a set of encrypted files and scanned documents detailing a shell company registered in Andhra Pradesh under the name Shantiniketan Exports LLP. On paper, the company imported fabric from Vietnam. But transaction records hinted at multiple third-party transfers, offshore links, and one warehouse lease in a remote corner of Navi Mumbai—an industrial estate with low foot traffic and minimal surveillance. There were also drone images of the warehouse roof and loading dock, suggesting premeditated visits. A timestamped image file showed a man resembling Viraj standing near the dock at dusk, wearing casual clothes, holding what appeared to be the same black briefcase. The image was dated five days before the disappearance. Kulkarni’s team, already stretched thin, scrambled to obtain permissions and coordinate with local units to secure the site. Meanwhile, Ira remained composed but detached. She claimed she had never heard of Shantiniketan Exports or seen the black notebook before. When shown the ledger, her expression didn’t change. “Viraj never let me into his business affairs,” she said quietly. “He said it was safer for both of us.” Kulkarni wrote it down, even as a gnawing discomfort settled in his gut. Safer from whom?
The next day, as police sealed off the warehouse, another piece of the puzzle fell into place. The notebook had a torn page at the back, and infrared scans revealed faded pencil impressions: a phone number, a name—“Taimur”—and a date scribbled in haste. The number traced back to a deactivated prepaid SIM from a roadside vendor in Thane, registered under a false identity. “Taimur” was a name that resonated with whispers in intelligence circles—an alleged fixer with no photo, no known location, but suspected involvement in four high-profile disappearances across Maharashtra and Gujarat. Kulkarni didn’t believe in coincidences. A diamond merchant withdrawing ₹50 lakhs in cash, contacting a known fixer, hiding ledgers with links to financial criminals, and then vanishing into the rain? This wasn’t an impulsive disappearance. This was an exit strategy. And possibly, a last-ditch act of survival. Kulkarni stood in the Mehta study for a long while after Ira went to bed, staring out at the sea. Somewhere beyond the waves, a man with everything to lose had tried to bury his past under codes, warehouses, and silence. But silence, Kulkarni knew, always leaves a footprint—it just takes time to find.
Chapter 3:
The warehouse was a drab, windowless structure on the edge of Navi Mumbai’s industrial zone, surrounded by rusted fencing and wild overgrowth. It was one of those buildings that had no real reason to be remembered—unremarkable and ghostly by design. Inspector Kulkarni arrived with his team before sunrise, flanked by two vehicles from the forensic unit. As the sun struggled through thick clouds, the compound came into sharper view. The warehouse bore the faded signage “Shantiniketan Exports LLP,” painted once in bright blue, now nearly washed away by neglect. The lock on the main rolling shutter was broken, hanging at an awkward angle, but there were no signs of forced entry. The entire interior was hollow except for one dusty metal table, a burnt-out ceiling bulb swinging from a half-loosened fixture, and—strangely—a heavy industrial tarp rolled into the far-left corner, covering what turned out to be a stack of empty briefcases. All of them were black. All of them had the same dimensions. All of them had the initials “V.M.” stenciled faintly inside, in gold marker. Kulkarni’s breath caught for just a second. “He came here to swap something,” he muttered. “Or to deliver something.”
The forensic team began sweeping for prints and biological traces. Underneath the table, they discovered a half-burnt envelope, its corner scorched by what appeared to be industrial acid. What remained of the label read “To: Taim—” before the damage rendered the rest unreadable. Inside, there was a strip of photographic film—the kind used in security cameras from a decade ago—and a silver coin, not of Indian mint. The film, when developed hours later, showed four frames of a meeting inside the warehouse: two men, faces mostly in shadow, exchanging a briefcase. Viraj was one of them. The second man wore a baseball cap pulled low, standing in profile, holding what looked like a phone and gesturing with his left hand. He was slim, unremarkable—yet somehow more unsettling in how little his body language betrayed. Kulkarni had seen hundreds of surveillance stills in his career. This one was different. It felt staged. Too perfect. The lighting, the angle—it was almost as if someone wanted this exchange recorded, but never meant for it to be found. And yet, here it was, preserved in film like a relic. The coin, identified by a numismatics expert, was an obsolete Omani rial dated 1973—often used in smuggling circles to tag international consignments.
Tracing the warehouse lease led to another dead end. It was rented under the alias “Yusuf Aman,” with Aadhaar and PAN details that matched a man who died two years ago in Nagaland. The payment trail, however, wasn’t as clean. A series of small deposits totaling ₹18 lakhs had been made in cash over the previous eight months to maintain the lease. The deposits were made from various ATMs across Pune, Nasik, and Vasai—each under ₹50,000 to avoid suspicion, all from dormant cooperative banks. Someone had taken meticulous care to fund the site without drawing attention. More curiously, none of the neighbors or security guards ever saw trucks or employees at the warehouse. One chaiwallah nearby recalled seeing “a man in a white kurta, sometimes in a grey hoodie,” visit occasionally at night. “Never stayed long,” he added. “Always carried a bag.” Kulkarni didn’t need a sketch to know who it was. The briefcase was the common thread now. Viraj had one when he left. It vanished. In the film, he had another. Here were several more, identical and unused. What was inside them? What was exchanged in this place where everything echoed and nothing remained?
Back in his office that evening, Kulkarni pinned the warehouse photos on his investigation board. One wall now held the Mehta case—CCTV images, notes, photographs, maps, timelines—all converging like veins on a dying leaf. His eyes kept drifting to the envelope’s singed edges and the word “Taimur.” The fixer had remained a ghost for years—no image, no audio recordings, no fingerprints. The Intelligence Bureau called him “a myth who leaves real consequences.” But Kulkarni believed otherwise. Taimur didn’t deal in physical violence—he dealt in disappearance. He arranged clean breaks for people too valuable to die but too dangerous to stay. Ex-MLAs, corporate turncoats, rogue arms dealers—all vanished with Taimur’s help. And now, it seemed, Viraj Mehta had tried to hire him. But if so, why did Viraj still end up missing? Had the deal gone wrong? Was this meeting inside the warehouse the start of a vanishing act or the end of it? Kulkarni decided he needed to go beyond protocol. He summoned a name from his past—Rishi Khanna, a low-rung criminal informant with vague ties to Mumbai’s fixer network, a man who owed him a life. “Find me Taimur,” Kulkarni whispered into the burner phone. “Or at least, find me his shadow.” Outside the window, the rain started again, soft and unceasing. Somewhere, Kulkarni knew, a man who once held diamonds like power was being buried by silence—and the truth was trying to claw its way through concrete.
Chapter 4:
Rishi Khanna didn’t return Kulkarni’s call for two days. When he finally did, it wasn’t through a phone call but by leaving a blue envelope at the front desk of the Mumbai Crime Branch headquarters—unsigned, unmarked, and carried by a tea vendor who claimed, “Ek bhai ne diya, bola Inspector Kulkarni ko de dena.” Inside the envelope was a folded ticket stub from a Konkan Railway train dated four days ago—Mumbai CST to Ratnagiri, 11:45 PM. The passenger name was “Ishaan Bhosale,” seat A-23, coach S2. The reverse side of the stub had a handwritten note in red ink: “Watch CCTV from Khed station. He boarded late.” Kulkarni had seen this kind of message before. It was how ghosts whispered in the world of fixers—half-hints and riddles. He wasted no time. By midday, he had obtained footage from Khed’s railway station, one of the few mid-route stops where trains halt briefly and without security scrutiny. At 3:22 AM on the night in question, the grainy camera feed showed a man in a hoodie boarding coach S2. His face was obscured, but his walk—the deliberate pace, the briefcase in his left hand—was unmistakable. “Viraj Mehta,” Kulkarni breathed. But what stunned him even more was the fact that Viraj wasn’t alone. Ten seconds later, another man followed—a shorter figure, wiry, with a large duffel bag and a slight limp in his left leg. The two exchanged no words, no glances. They just boarded silently, one after the other, like actors in an unspoken pact.
Kulkarni pulled the train’s manifest. “Ishaan Bhosale” was registered with a now-defunct Aadhaar number and had booked his ticket using cash at CST hours before departure. His phone number bounced back as unregistered. There were no CCTV images of either man exiting at Ratnagiri or any subsequent stations. It was as if they had vanished somewhere between the tunnels and forests of the Konkan coast. Kulkarni dispatched officers to check each rural halt and nearby lodges but found nothing. But Ratnagiri railway records did reveal one anomaly: a third-class local guard had reported a “foul chemical smell” emanating from coach S2 during early morning hours. His note had been ignored at the time. Forensics re-examined the coach and discovered faint traces of a compound used in industrial photographic developing fluid—the same used on the film strip from the warehouse. Kulkarni now saw the connections as strands of a net tightening around something larger. Viraj was moving. Not hiding. He had a destination, a companion, and a plan. But there was no sign of phones, no purchases, no digital trail. Whoever he was with knew how to disappear.
Back in Mumbai, Ira Mehta’s behavior shifted subtly. She began declining all media requests, refused to speak to reporters camped outside her building, and canceled all her music classes. She rarely left the house, except once—caught by a news camera as she stepped into a silver Honda City outside her residence. The man driving the car had his face covered. When questioned, Ira claimed it was her cousin, but later, her cousin denied being in Mumbai that week. Kulkarni confronted her, pressing gently. “If Viraj reached out to you,” he said, “I need to know. It could mean he’s alive.” Ira didn’t deny it. But she didn’t admit it either. She simply stared at Kulkarni with tired eyes and asked, “If your wife disappeared, Inspector, would you tell the police everything?” It was a moment of quiet standoff, and Kulkarni understood. People don’t betray those they love—even when they vanish into darkness. Still, he pressed on, reviewing financial statements again, this time with deeper scrutiny. One new detail emerged: Ira had recently wired ₹2.5 lakhs to an account in Panaji, Goa, under the name “Saad Mulla.” When traced, the account was revealed to be dormant. But “Saad Mulla” had once been listed as a business partner in an export firm deregistered after a major customs raid… the same raid where the name “Taimur” first appeared in whispers.
With no option left, Kulkarni did what most officers avoided—he reached out to the Intelligence Bureau’s Western Division in Pune. After two days of bureaucracy and half-sincere cooperation, he was allowed a supervised meeting with a man who simply went by “Anwar.” Anwar had been chasing Taimur’s network for six years. He confirmed that “Saad Mulla” was likely one of Taimur’s aliases. “He uses a lattice of identities,” Anwar said. “Each name is a vessel. Each vessel carries just enough to float until it sinks.” Kulkarni shared the warehouse photos, the train footage, and the coin. Anwar leaned in when he saw the coin. “This… this is a signature,” he said. “Whenever Taimur pulls someone out of one life into another, he marks it. That’s his seal.” Kulkarni pressed him: “So, is Viraj Mehta dead?” Anwar smiled grimly. “If he paid in full and followed instructions, he’s probably living under a new name in a place even I can’t find. But if he broke the deal—or tried to run midway—then he’s not just gone. He’s erased.” Kulkarni sat back, watching the rain pound against the glass of the Pune safehouse. One thing was now certain: Viraj hadn’t just disappeared. He’d entered a world where names were lies, briefcases carried more than money, and the truth was a ghost wearing someone else’s shoes.
Chapter 5:
The monsoon thundered across Mumbai like a war drum the night Kulkarni received the anonymous parcel. No return address, no sender’s name—just his own, neatly handwritten in permanent marker, and left with the building’s security desk. Inside, wrapped in coarse brown paper, was an old wooden photo frame, ornate but chipped at one corner. The glass had cracked slightly, but the black-and-white photograph beneath remained intact. Kulkarni stared at it for a full minute before moving. The image showed two men standing outside what looked like a colonial-style house with wrought iron balconies. One was unmistakably Viraj Mehta, younger, clean-shaven, his expression unreadable. The second was the man from the warehouse film—the one with the cap and the duffel bag. And for the first time, Kulkarni had a clear view of the face. Sharp chin, high cheekbones, thick eyebrows, and a scar on the neck like an old blade had just missed an artery. He wasn’t listed on any records Kulkarni had seen. The photo’s background revealed a nameplate just barely in frame—“Padinjare House, Kochi.” Written in old Malayalam lettering. That gave the Inspector his next step.
Kulkarni landed in Kochi two days later, using leave as a cover, accompanied only by his most trusted officer, Sub-Inspector Madhav. Padinjare House, as it turned out, was a dilapidated villa near Fort Kochi’s backstreets, mostly concealed by overgrown vines and the weight of its own history. Neighbors said it hadn’t been lived in for years. One woman—a retired librarian named Jayanthi Amma—recalled that a pair of brothers used to visit once a year. “Always quietly, and always after dark,” she said. “The tall one had Mumbai plates. The shorter one… I think he was Tamil. Or maybe Kashmiri.” Inside the abandoned house, mildew had conquered every corner, but in what must have once been a study, Kulkarni’s team found remnants: a torn rug covering a trapdoor, a rusted safe with no handle, and a photograph tucked behind a broken mirror. It was the same two men—Viraj and the mystery partner—but this time with a third person. A woman, standing between them, wearing dark glasses and a scarf, face mostly concealed. The date scrawled behind the photo read “13 Nov 2018 – The Last Visit.” On a hunch, Kulkarni called the property registry. The house had been transferred in 2017 to “Rukhsar T. Yousuf.” Another ghost in the machine.
The name “Rukhsar T. Yousuf” lit up alarms across inter-agency systems. She was flagged in an IB red file from 2020—a suspected courier for illicit document transfer across Gulf trade routes, operating under deep cover. No photograph existed. Just a handful of aliases and movement patterns: Kochi, Dubai, Calicut, Muscat. It was now clear that Viraj Mehta’s web of associates extended far beyond Mumbai or diamonds. Kulkarni traced phone tower dumps from Kochi during the week of November 2018 and narrowed down a cluster of four recurring numbers. One belonged to a now-defunct SIM active for only three days. The others led to shell identities—one had last pinged near the Indo-Nepal border just six weeks prior to Viraj’s disappearance. But the key came from a broken piece of furniture in the Padinjare House bedroom: hidden within the wooden frame of the bedpost was a flash drive sealed inside wax paper. Its contents were heavily encrypted, but one unprotected file played like a message from a dying man. Viraj Mehta’s voice crackled through old audio: “If you are hearing this, I am either dead or have ceased to be Viraj. The man you knew is gone. I leave this breadcrumb not as a confession, but as insurance. Whoever finds it, find the girl. She knows everything. Her name is Mehr.” There was a pause. Then the recording clicked off.
Kulkarni replayed the message twice more. No last name. No location. Just a name: Mehr. He sent the file to forensic voice analysts, who confirmed the audio was recorded approximately five to seven days before Viraj’s disappearance. Kulkarni felt the case shifting under his feet—this wasn’t about business rivals or embezzlement anymore. This was about escape, about erasure, about survival in a world where the rules weren’t governed by law but by code, silence, and shadow. Who was Mehr? The name hadn’t come up in any financial document, call log, or property deed. Yet Viraj trusted her enough to name her as the final witness to his truth. Kulkarni stared long into the Padinjare photo, tracing the outline of the veiled woman, her hand resting lightly on Viraj’s elbow. He made a decision. The net wasn’t wide enough. If this went beyond Indian borders—and it clearly did—then he would need to go off-book. “Madhav,” he said quietly, “trace everything connected to the name ‘Mehr.’ I don’t care if it’s a preschool record or a customs entry. She’s real. And she’s the axis of this whole storm.” Outside the cracked villa window, a flock of crows screamed into the sea wind.
Chapter 6:
The name Mehr was not uncommon, and Mumbai’s sprawling identity databases churned out hundreds of leads—school records, Aadhaar-linked accounts, job applications, SIM card registrations—but none of them matched any known associate of Viraj Mehta. Yet, Kulkarni wasn’t looking for a normal record. He was looking for a woman like a vapor trail—someone who existed briefly, moved quietly, and then was gone. Sub-Inspector Madhav, after forty-eight hours of sleepless search, landed on something promising: a customs intelligence memo from December 2017 detailing the detention of an undocumented woman found aboard a cargo vessel from Dubai, hiding between steel containers marked for Kochi. She carried no passport, no ID, and refused to speak. All she had was a locket bearing the initials “M.S.” and a child’s drawing folded in her pocket. Officials eventually released her after a quiet intervention by a private legal firm. Her name, as entered in the report, was “Mehr S.” No last name. No address. Kulkarni followed the paper trail and discovered the lawyer handling her case had once represented none other than Nalin Shah—Viraj Mehta’s uncle and the now-dead godfather of Bombay’s diamond syndicate. The dots connected. Someone had protected this woman. And they had done so using the same legal shields that had once hidden smuggled diamonds, laundered accounts, and now, apparently, people.
Kulkarni flew back to Mumbai with a silent certainty. He’d found her—at least, the ghost of her. But she had vanished again. So he turned to the one person who might still have access to the shadow world: Rishi Khanna. After three ignored messages, Khanna finally replied via a voicemail: “You’re digging into something very old, Kulkarni. People like Mehr don’t live on maps. She’s a courier, yes—but not for diamonds. She carries memory. You know what that means in this business?” There was a pause. “Don’t follow her. Not unless you’re willing to forget who you are.” It was cryptic, even by Khanna’s standards. But it gave Kulkarni a new lens. Mehr wasn’t simply a witness. She was a vessel for something—information, evidence, secrets. And someone had gone to great lengths to bury her. Still, buried things can be found. Kulkarni began hunting the paper shadows—rental agreements with no ID, hospital visits paid in cash, library records with no matching voter IDs. Finally, in the archives of a private Mumbai dispensary in Kurla, he found a medical intake form from late 2019. The patient: “Mehr Syed.” No Aadhaar. But the signature was smooth, deliberate. And listed under emergency contact? “V. Mehta.”
He visited the clinic personally. The staff was hesitant at first, but after some coaxing, an elderly nurse recalled the girl. “Pretty, quiet. Had a faint accent… maybe Persian? She came in with chest pains, mild fever. But she refused any follow-up treatment. Paid in cash.” Kulkarni obtained the CCTV footage from that week, and though the images were low resolution, it was her. Same scarf, same watch on her left wrist, same wariness in her eyes. But what chilled Kulkarni wasn’t her presence—it was the man who came in two days later, looking nervous, demanding her test results. He wore a cap. And he had the same scar on his neck—the man from the warehouse photo. Kulkarni now had proof that this scarred man and Mehr were linked. And if they were in Mumbai in 2019, they were probably preparing for something. A disappearance. A final trade. Or worse—an execution. Kulkarni started suspecting that Viraj hadn’t vanished by force. He may have orchestrated it, yes—but there was something else. Something beneath. Why leave behind just enough clues to be found? Unless… unless he wanted someone specific to find them. Not the police. Not the press. Someone personal.
It was during one sleepless night in August that Kulkarni realized the message in the audio file hadn’t been for the police—it was for Ira Mehta. He drove straight to her house at dawn, bypassing protocol. She looked older now, like she’d lived multiple lifetimes in a few months. He didn’t ask permission. He played the audio again. “Listen to his tone,” he told her. “It’s not fear. It’s guilt. He left to protect something.” Ira remained silent, tears sliding down without sound. And then, for the first time, she spoke freely. “He asked me not to search for him,” she whispered. “But I’ve been getting postcards. Random places—Latur, Agartala, Diu. Always unsigned. Always empty. Just photographs. And on one of them… there was a smudge of blood.” She opened a drawer and showed them to Kulkarni. Nine in total. All taken on analog film. All places where no digital trail exists. One postcard had a cracked red building in the corner with a tiny sign: “Hotel Indira Palace – Junagadh.” That was their next lead. Kulkarni left without a word, mind racing. Viraj wasn’t just fleeing something. He was circling back. Leaving a breadcrumb trail. Maybe for Ira. Maybe for Mehr. Or maybe for the man who had once chased smugglers across salt plains and now found himself hunting ghosts on borrowed time.
Chapter 7:
The drive to Junagadh was slow and choked with the remnants of the retreating monsoon, the Saurashtra roads still soaked and fractured. Kulkarni hadn’t told his superiors. He told no one, in fact—not even Madhav. This part of the investigation didn’t belong in files. It belonged to the realm of instinct. Hotel Indira Palace stood at the corner of an abandoned marketplace, its three-storey façade a fading relic of princely Gujarat. The paint peeled like sunburnt skin, and the signboard had a rusted bullet hole right through the “d.” Inside, the lobby smelled of incense and mildew. A weary clerk peered up from behind an outdated register, squinting through spectacles too thick for comfort. “No one by that name stayed here,” he said flatly when Kulkarni asked about Viraj Mehta or any aliases. But when shown the postcard, the man hesitated. “Room 209,” he finally muttered. “Two years ago. Man and woman. Paid cash. She coughed a lot.” Kulkarni made his way upstairs. Room 209 was padlocked, unused for months. Inside, it was a time capsule—two tea cups on the table, a faded scarf hanging on the chair, and a cigarette stub in the ashtray with a lipstick mark that hadn’t aged. But it was what lay beneath the bed that struck gold: a half-burned notebook in Farsi, its spine split and pages water-stained. Hidden among the writings were sketches—of a hand, of a safe, of a scarred man’s face. And between the last two pages, a photograph: Mehr, leaning on a balcony rail, eyes tired, smile faint, as if she knew the world behind the lens was doomed to forget her.
Kulkarni sent the notebook to a translator in Ahmedabad. It turned out to be a hybrid of journal entries and instructions—half diary, half survival guide. And it didn’t belong to Viraj or Mehr. It belonged to Rukhsar T. Yousuf. She spoke of ferrying secrets across countries in “memory packets,” of swallowing coded microfilm, of coughing up plastic capsules in hotel bathrooms to avoid customs scanners. The entries were dated from 2016 to 2020, spanning Istanbul, Muscat, and Diu. But one entry, marked “May 2021 – Mumbai,” mentioned something explosive: “V’s memory is now inside M. It’s the only way. He forgets everything else.” Kulkarni reread that sentence ten times. V meant Viraj. And if he’d chosen to deliberately erase parts of his own memory—using psychological conditioning, hypnosis, or worse—then Mehr wasn’t just carrying his secrets. She was carrying him. A human vault. But why? Kulkarni turned the photo over. Scribbled in English: “If I don’t come back by full moon, open the red envelope. It will end everything.” But there was no red envelope in the room. Either someone had taken it, or it was still waiting somewhere. And with that single missing object, the puzzle remained half-finished.
Back in Mumbai, he confronted Ira again. This time, she didn’t cry. She handed him something wrapped in velvet: the red envelope. “He left it for me,” she said. “Said I should only give it to the one who follows the trail willingly.” Inside were five old negatives, heavily scratched, wrapped in wax paper. Kulkarni had them developed in a private darkroom. The photos revealed a series of staged images: Viraj, blindfolded; Viraj, holding a revolver pointed at a mirror; Viraj and Mehr kneeling in a field with a hand-drawn map between them. The final photo showed a tattoo being inked onto Viraj’s back: a twelve-digit number that resembled a Swiss account key. It wasn’t just art or paranoia. It was an encoded story—one they were documenting intentionally. Kulkarni ran the number through every finance server he could access. No hits in India. But a darknet tracker picked up a ping: the number was linked to a private blockchain vault in Liechtenstein, one used by arms traffickers and intelligence defectors. Viraj wasn’t hiding from justice. He was hiding from annihilation. And Mehr wasn’t just protecting his memory—she was safeguarding leverage that could destroy international criminal syndicates. Whoever found her could name their price. Whoever killed her would bury a kingdom.
The next breakthrough came from the least expected place: a priest. Father Paul Dias from a small Goan chapel emailed Kulkarni after seeing a leaked news mention of the case. He said a woman had sought sanctuary in his church weeks earlier—thin, quiet, and trembling. She carried no name, only a drawing of a scarred man and a list of numbers. She stayed in silence, scribbled furiously into an old Bible, and left one morning before sunrise. She signed the donation box: “M.” Kulkarni took the first flight out. The chapel was empty, surrounded by banyan trees and coastal fog. Father Dias handed over the Bible. Inside, Mehr had drawn over the Psalms—diagrams, timelines, a list of airports, and one final line circled in red ink: “He forgets, I remember. They erase, I resist.” Kulkarni sat down in the chapel pew, the morning sun bleeding through stained glass. He felt it then—not victory, not progress—but dread. Because now, he wasn’t just a cop chasing a fugitive. He was part of something vast and invisible. And for the first time, he wondered whether following this thread to the end would illuminate the truth… or end him like the rest who had dared to hold memory against a world that feeds on forgetting.
Chapter 8:
Kulkarni did not return to Mumbai. After the chapel visit, he drove south through the Konkan coast, alone, restless, hunting a silence he could no longer afford. The lines Mehr had drawn in the Bible—symbols, coordinates, even half-sketched faces—haunted his thoughts. He’d seen fear in the eyes of witnesses before, but Mehr’s scribbled warnings had the clarity of someone who had already died once and come back carrying a burden too heavy for this world. Two nights later, at a coastal inn near Karwar, he received a phone call from an unknown number. A woman’s voice, soft and cracking with static: “Stop. They’re watching you. They followed you from the church.” He froze. “Who is this?” he asked. A pause. Then: “Don’t look for me. Just go to 76 East Road, Banaswadi, Bangalore. There’s a child there who draws monsters with names. One of them is yours.” The line went dead. Kulkarni stood in the moonlit corridor, phone still pressed to his ear, knowing the voice had to be Mehr’s. Or what was left of her. He changed directions at dawn, headed inland toward Bangalore, where the city’s glittering skyline could not hide its growing underbelly of faceless men and unmarked safe houses.
In Banaswadi, 76 East Road was not a home—it was a halfway shelter for children rescued from trafficking rings. Kulkarni didn’t need his badge to get in; he used his instinct, his politeness, and a little cash. Inside, he met Sister Aloma, who managed the shelter with the gentleness of someone who’d buried more children than she could count. When he asked about a child who drew monsters, she immediately led him to a boy named Zaid. He was six, mute, and had been rescued from a shipping container in Chennai six months ago. Kulkarni sat beside him as the boy pulled out a sketchbook. What he saw inside chilled him. Childish drawings, yes—but within them, symbols identical to those in Rukhsar’s notebook. A bird with no eyes. A burning door. A face without a mouth, stitched shut. And beneath it, in shaky block letters: “The Man Who Forgot.” Kulkarni flipped the page. There was another drawing: a woman holding the hand of a man with a scar on his neck. Beside them, a red envelope, floating above a lake. He showed the picture to Sister Aloma, who confirmed that a woman had brought Zaid to the shelter, claiming to be his aunt. She refused to sign any forms, left a leather satchel of cash, and disappeared. Kulkarni took Zaid’s sketchbook and sat in his car for over an hour, staring at the pages as if they were sacred texts. He no longer doubted that Mehr was watching. Guiding. Or maybe warning.
He returned to Mumbai in disguise, using his childhood friend’s cab company ID. The force had started murmuring—Kulkarni’s unofficial travels were now a concern for the department. His name was flagged internally. But he couldn’t stop now. He reopened old security footage from the Kurla clinic, zooming into the timestamp of the scarred man’s appearance. There, in the corner reflection of the glass door, a second figure—female, wearing a hood, head turned away. But her reflection revealed a tattoo on the back of her neck: a Persian symbol he’d seen in the Bible margins. She had been there. Watching. Or perhaps orchestrating. Kulkarni cross-referenced every guest log from Mumbai hotels in the same week. Nothing. But one boarding pass from a minor airline listed a “Mehrun N. Syed” departing to Kutch under a false passport, the week after the clinic visit. The trail led him to the salt deserts of the Rann, where smugglers often vanished without trace. There, in a hidden border town called Rapar, Kulkarni found a burnt guesthouse. And in its ashes, a box of undeveloped film rolls, buried in sand and charred cloth. When processed, the film revealed Viraj in a desert tent, his eyes unfocused—being shown pictures. Trained. Or reprogrammed. In the final frame, Mehr stood beside him, pressing a finger to his lips. A silent command: forget everything.
Kulkarni knew what he was chasing now. Not a crime. Not a murder. But a deliberate self-erasure. Viraj Mehta had orchestrated his own vanishing. Not for escape—but for burial of information too dangerous to let live. The network that supported him—Mehr, Rukhsar, even Zaid’s unnamed connection—wasn’t a cartel or a gang. It was something older. A preservation chain. People who passed memory like contraband, smuggled truth across borders, and sometimes paid with identity, love, even sanity. Kulkarni sat by the Rann one evening, watching the salt flats shimmer like the face of a drowned god. He no longer asked where Viraj was. The real question was—who was he now? Was he walking the streets under a new name, unaware of his past? Was he dead, buried under a code name? Or worse, reprogrammed as a pawn by those he once tried to outwit? Kulkarni stood in the fading light, clutching Zaid’s sketchbook, and realized the final chapters weren’t going to be written in police stations or courtrooms. They would be drawn in secret, buried in codes, and remembered by children who never learned to speak—but always knew how to see.
Chapter 9:
The address came in a letter, unsigned, folded into the pages of Zaid’s sketchbook that Kulkarni had never noticed before. It was written in neat, angular handwriting, in blue ink, in the margin beside a drawing of a faceless man sitting at a chessboard. The address read simply: “Floor -3, Tardeo Station. Ask for Room 117. Knock thrice. Do not bring light.” Kulkarni had lived his whole life in Mumbai, but he had never known there were three basement levels in the old, abandoned Tardeo Metro project that had been mothballed a decade ago. He dressed plainly, left his weapon behind, and entered the station under the cover of pre-dawn stillness, climbing over rusted barricades and wading through decades of stagnant water and political failure. Floor -1 was a skeletal hall of concrete and mildew. Floor -2 was half-flooded and home to rats the size of dogs. But Floor -3—sealed behind a steel hatch—opened with a soft push, as though someone had oiled it in recent memory. Inside, the air was cold. Not natural cold. Artificial. And silent. The kind of silence that presses against your bones like water pressure. Room 117 was at the end of a corridor painted with hand-drawn lines—spirals, countdowns, tally marks. Kulkarni knocked three times. The door opened without a sound.
Inside sat a woman in a white sari, head shaved, eyes like candle wicks burning low. She looked up as if she had been waiting not just hours but years. “You’re late,” she said softly. “Viraj left you a gift. But first—do you remember the room with the cracked mirror?” Kulkarni frowned. “Which mirror?” The woman did not answer. She gestured to a metal chair. “Sit. And do not speak until I finish.” The next hour was unlike anything Kulkarni had ever experienced—not interrogation, not confession, but a transfer. She spoke of a network called “Viraasat,” a decades-old system of memory couriers across South Asia—men and women who stored sensitive truths inside people, not machines. When data couldn’t be encrypted digitally, it was encoded in fragments across human minds—through images, smells, trauma, repetition. Mehr, she said, was one of the last known keepers. “Viraj was dying,” she explained. “But not his body. His mind. He wanted to preserve what he knew, not for profit—but for protection. So he fragmented his memories into three vessels—one went with Mehr. One with Zaid. And the third…” She looked directly into Kulkarni’s eyes. “…is you.”
He staggered back. “What the hell are you saying?” The woman rose, walked to a locked drawer, and pulled out a vial. Inside it was a single strip of developed film, no more than two inches long. “You were part of the final transfer. You just don’t remember.” She injected him before he could resist—something cold rushed into his arm. Images exploded behind his eyelids. Viraj, laughing. A room with red curtains. A hand with six fingers. Codes. Names. A vault in Geneva. An explosion in Vapi. A phone number written in blood on bathroom tiles. Kulkarni screamed. The memories weren’t his—but they were inside him. And slowly, they began to cohere. When he came to, the woman was gone. The room was empty. The vial lay shattered on the floor. But in his pocket, someone had slipped a slip of paper: “Find the white door in Istanbul. After that—choose memory or death.” Kulkarni stumbled out of the station, dawn breaking through the clouds like cracked porcelain. The city no longer felt like home. His body was his—but his mind was now shared real estate. He was no longer an investigator. He was a carrier. And the world wanted what was inside him.
By the time he reached his apartment, someone had already been there. His walls were stripped, files burnt in the sink, his laptop smashed with precision. Someone knew. And they wanted him silenced. But Kulkarni didn’t run. He called Ira. She answered on the first ring. “I need to know everything,” he said. She hesitated, then told him to come to Alibaug. She had something Viraj had left behind—a cassette. Old. Analog. And encrypted through audio frequency modulation. “He said no one should hear this unless they shared the dream.” Kulkarni understood now. The postcards, the sketches, the fractured memory—none of this was for the public. It was a final will. Not of a man—but of truth trying to outlive its makers. He left the city behind that evening, watching the skyline shrink into twilight. Behind him, the world of police reports, gun licenses, and jurisdiction faded like mist. Ahead, in the forgotten corners of the world, were the last echoes of Viraj Mehta. Not a fugitive. Not a criminal. But a messenger. And Kulkarni, now unwillingly drafted, was the last remaining courier in a dying network of truth-carriers. And someone—somewhere—was coming to erase them all.
Chapter 10:
Istanbul was colder than he expected. The Bosphorus shimmered under a bitter winter sun, and Kulkarni, wrapped in a second-hand trench coat from a Kadıköy bazaar, looked like a man both hunted and haunting. The address scrawled on the back of the cassette case led him to a crumbling Armenian quarter, tucked behind a mosque and two closed tea stalls. He had memorized the phrase: “The white door.” But the building had no colors left—everything was dust, shadow, forgotten tiles. He walked past it thrice before noticing the door—a flaking slab of wood, once painted white, now grey with time. He knocked. Three times. The door opened with a groan, revealing a dim hallway lit by gas lanterns and oil paintings of people with blurred faces. An old woman with jade rings and blind eyes motioned him inside. “He said you’d come,” she whispered. “They always do, just before it ends.” She handed him a key. “Downstairs. Room 304.” The stairs wound like a helix into the earth, each step colder than the last. At the end of the third descent, he opened the room.
Inside sat a reel-to-reel recorder, a desk, and three envelopes. Each marked with initials: M, Z, and K. His hands trembled as he opened the one with K. Inside was a note in Viraj’s unmistakable cursive:
“If you’re reading this, then you’ve survived the erasure. You are the failsafe. I’m sorry.”
What followed were pages of confessions—not of crimes, but of betrayals: of friends sacrificed for intelligence, of governments misled, of data buried in children. Viraj had not vanished. He had split himself into three. One copy in Mehr, one in Zaid, and the third encoded in visual triggers inside Kulkarni—implanted during a shared hypnosis session staged as a psychiatric consultation in 2021. “I could no longer trust servers, nor people. Only memory. And even memory can be hunted. So I became a fugitive of my own mind,” Viraj wrote. The tape was labeled The End. Kulkarni pressed play. Static, then Viraj’s voice, tired but clear: “If this is heard by anyone else, it means we failed. If it’s you, Kulkarni… you’re the last honest man I ever knew. That’s why I chose you. You don’t believe in heroes. You only believe in the truth. That’s all we ever needed.”
The final two minutes of the tape played a series of frequencies—sharp, uneven tones that felt like nothing. Until the images started. Kulkarni didn’t see them with his eyes. He saw them in memory. A flood of moments returned: Mehr reading by candlelight in a train compartment; Viraj vomiting after each memory cycle; a hand slipping Zaid through a fence during a blackout riot in Muscat; a vault in Geneva that only opened if three retinal scans matched—one of which belonged to Kulkarni himself. He staggered back, sweating. He had never been there. But the memory was real. Implanted. Transferable. And that meant everything the governments feared about neural memory transference was true. And they’d stop at nothing to shut it down. As he stared at the flickering bulb in the room, the door creaked behind him. A man entered. Tall, black coat, gloves. No name. No greeting. “You’ve heard it, haven’t you?” he asked. Kulkarni nodded. The man sighed. “Then I’m afraid you’re now classified as a transmitter.” A silenced gun appeared. “And transmitters don’t get to go home.”
Kulkarni moved faster than he thought he could. The chair hit the man’s legs. The gun went off, grazing the side wall. They wrestled—flesh, memory, violence all blurred. Kulkarni stabbed him with the key. He didn’t wait to see if the man was dead. He grabbed the envelopes, the reel, and fled through the basement passage. He didn’t stop running till he reached the wharf, where a trawler was leaving for Odessa. On that boat, he sat in a storage room, staring at the black sea. He knew what he had to do. He had to vanish. Not as a man—but as a message. Kulkarni erased every trace of himself, scattered the fragments of the reel, mailed copies to journalists who might never open them. In Kolkata, Zaid was moved to a monastery under a false name. Mehr, last seen in Tirana, left a blood-stained coat and nothing else. And in the hidden vaults of Geneva, the truth still waited—encrypted in retinal scars and memories Kulkarni no longer dared unlock. He wasn’t a policeman anymore. He was a ghost. But one carrying the weight of Viraj Mehta, of memory that refused to die, of a vanishing that was never disappearance, but design.
—
Years later, in a quiet bookstore in Sarajevo, a young woman found a package hidden between two forgotten volumes of Balkan war poetry. Inside was a cassette tape, brittle with time, labeled only with a red circle and the letter K. Curious, she played it on an old deck her grandfather had once used to record folk songs. Static. Then a voice. Calm. Heavy. Weighted with distance and wariness. “If you’re hearing this, then memory has survived. My name was once Kulkarni. I was a police officer. Then a vessel. Then a fugitive. This isn’t a message. It’s a relay. Because the truth—like a virus—needs only one host to live. And now, it may be you.” The woman didn’t understand. Not yet. But as she listened, her eyes widened. Images began to rise in her mind—of cities she had never seen, names she had never spoken, and a man with silver eyes whispering secrets in a language not her own. She reached for a pencil. Without knowing why, she began to draw. A bird with no eyes. A door that bled light. A man named Viraj, smiling faintly as he disappeared into fog. And in that moment, in that quiet room thousands of miles from Mumbai, the vanishing began again.
-End-
