Tanima Basak
Chapter 1 – Tide at Dusk
The sea was already pulling back when Inspector Arjun Sen reached Chandipur. It was late evening, and the tide had begun its quiet retreat across the flat beach, leaving behind long glistening stretches of sand that shone like dark mirrors in the fading light. Fishing nets lay sprawled across wooden boats like the skins of dead creatures, their salt-stiff ropes twisting under the weak lanterns that dotted the shore. A smell of brine and rotting kelp hung in the air, sharp enough to make his throat sting. The police jeep jolted over the uneven track, a thin strip that cut between casuarina trees swaying against the wind. He had been to coastal towns before, but Chandipur already seemed different—its silence carried a density that made him feel like he had stepped into a story half-told, one where every villager watched from behind doorways yet refused to speak.
The constable beside him kept glancing nervously at the inspector, as though wondering why a CBI officer had been sent down for a case the local police could handle. But Arjun was not here for the murder; at least, not initially. He had been on temporary deputation, looking into corruption complaints linked to a stalled port project. The death of Esha Mukherjee had forced his presence in a direction he had not planned, a sudden shift in assignment that his superiors had not bothered to explain. Perhaps, he thought, the two matters were not entirely separate.
The jeep stopped before a crumbling mansion standing half-buried in darkness, its walls a patchwork of flaking lime and moss. Once a proud house built by a zamindar family, it now leaned against the sea winds like an exhausted sentinel. Lanterns burned outside, casting uneven halos of yellow across the verandah pillars. Villagers crowded near the bamboo fencing, their voices low and murmurous, the way people speak at funerals. The constable pushed them aside as Arjun climbed out, his shoes crunching against the gravel path that led to the main door.
Inside, the air was stale, tinged with incense that had failed to disguise the metallic sting of blood. Esha Mukherjee lay on the floor of her bedchamber, her body still in its cream-colored cotton sari, the pleats spread awkwardly where she had fallen. Her silver hair had come undone, strands clinging to her cheeks as if the sea wind had followed her indoors. Her throat bore a clean, precise cut, almost surgical in its symmetry. Arjun crouched beside her, noting the absence of struggle around the room. The brass lamp on the bedside table still burned steadily; nothing seemed disturbed. Whoever had done this had come with certainty, finished the act, and left with silence.
The local sub-inspector, a weary man with sweat beading on his forehead despite the fan overhead, began listing details. “We found her maid, Sir. She raised the alarm. The back door was unlatched. No signs of forced entry. Neighbours say she had no enemies. She was… respected.” His voice faltered slightly, as though the word carried doubts he dared not speak aloud.
Arjun said nothing, his eyes drifting across the room. The walls carried framed photographs—Esha with her late husband, Dr. Prabir Mukherjee, both stern-faced before a shuttered clinic; another with a group of women from the town, sari-clad, clutching certificates from some charity program she had run. On a lower shelf rested an old harmonium, its keys yellow with dust, alongside a brass idol of Durga that seemed to watch the room with quiet judgment.
He walked to the wooden writing desk by the window. Papers lay neatly stacked, envelopes tied with a ribbon, a fountain pen capped beside a blotting pad. Orderly, precise. But something tugged at him—a faint unevenness in the wooden floor near the desk, as if the planks did not sit flush. He pressed his shoe lightly, felt the hollow thud. Bending down, he ran his hand along the seam.
“Sir?” The sub-inspector looked puzzled as Arjun motioned for a crowbar. When the plank was pried loose, the smell of old leather rose faintly. From the cavity, Arjun lifted a book—thick, bound in cracked brown leather, its edges frayed by years of concealment. He brushed away the dust and opened it under the lantern light.
Names. Columns of them. Written in a slanted, careful hand—some in Bengali, others in English. Beside each name were dates, stretching back as far as 1985. And strange symbols: circles, crosses, small sketches of knives. The ink had faded unevenly, but the entries had been kept with obsessive care.
Arjun flipped through, his pulse tightening. He recognized at least one name from the corruption files linked to the port project—a fisheries officer who had died in a “boating accident” years ago. Another was the retired police sub-inspector he had seen standing outside among the crowd. This was no mere diary. It was a record. A ledger of lives.
He shut the book carefully, as though the weight of it could shift the balance of the room. The maid had begun sobbing softly in the corner, repeating the same words: She was a good woman, Sir. She gave food, medicines. Who could do this?
Arjun glanced at the body again, then at the ledger in his hand. The cut on her throat replayed in his mind—the precision of it, the confidence. Not rage. Not panic. A punishment, perhaps. Or a debt settled after years.
He stepped onto the verandah, where the villagers’ whispers swelled as they saw the book in his grip. Faces turned away, some in fear, others in recognition. The casuarina trees hissed under the sea wind, and in the distance, the tide continued its slow retreat, leaving the beach emptier by the minute. Chandipur seemed to exhale around him, the kind of exhalation that carries both relief and dread, as though the town itself had been waiting for this moment.
Arjun Sen, accustomed to cities and their brutal crimes, felt a heaviness he could not explain. This was not just a murder. It was the surfacing of something buried for decades, something the sea had kept secret and the widow had recorded.
And as the night deepened, he knew the tide would return. It always did. The question was not whether, but what it would bring back with it.
Chapter 2 – The Hidden Ledger
The ledger sat on the desk like a relic exhumed from beneath the earth, its cracked leather cover carrying the faint mustiness of damp rooms and forgotten trunks. Inspector Arjun Sen turned its pages under the wavering lantern light, and with each name, the silence of the room seemed to thicken. The entries were arranged with a meticulousness that belonged less to an old widow and more to a clerk of destinies. Dates in neat columns, sometimes with annotations in Bengali—“শূন্যে মিশে গেল” (vanished into nothing), “ঋণ শোধ” (debt repaid)—sometimes in English, a terse word like “Paid” or “Silenced.”
The symbols troubled him most. A circle here, a cross there, and the recurring sharp sketch of a knife. The marks were not decorative—they were a code. Someone had recorded lives with the cold abstraction of an accountant. And the widow, Esha Mukherjee, had hidden this carefully under her floorboards as though knowing one day someone would look for it.
Arjun’s fingers paused on a name from 1993: Satyajit Sahu. The surname jolted him. Outside, in the lantern-lit crowd, he had seen a retired policeman named Haripada Sahu. His younger brother, the villagers had muttered, had gone missing decades ago during a fishermen’s protest. Here it was—his name in Esha’s ledger, marked with a knife symbol and the date August 12, 1993. Arjun felt the stirrings of an old wound in the town, one that had never closed.
He closed the book slowly. The maid, still weeping softly near the doorway, looked at him with red-rimmed eyes. “Saheb, did Didi know she would die? She was reading something yesterday, then she told me to close the back door. But the door was open again when I came.”
Arjun studied her face. “Did she receive visitors often?”
“Not many. Sometimes the Father from the church. Sometimes a retired babu from the town. She never liked outsiders. She always said, Chandipur is full of thieves with polite faces.”
The sub-inspector shifted uneasily. “Sir, the villagers will spread rumors. Already they are saying the old lady kept files of everyone’s sins. You know how small towns are. They make ghosts out of shadows.”
Arjun looked out at the gathered faces beyond the verandah railing. Their eyes gleamed in the lantern glow, full of both curiosity and unease. He thought of the tide again, how it receded only to return. Perhaps this ledger was the town’s tide—names written when the water was low, waiting to crash back when the sea reclaimed its reach.
He ordered the body to be sent for post-mortem, the crime scene to be sealed, and the ledger to be carried in his custody. But as he stepped outside, the weight of the book seemed heavier than any case file he had ever held. It was not evidence alone—it was a mirror. Each villager who caught a glimpse of its brown leather cover turned pale, as if afraid their reflection might show up inside.
The police jeep rattled back towards the thana, the constable driving in silence. Arjun sat in the rear seat with the ledger on his lap. The night air smelled of salt and dried fish, carrying the faint sound of conch shells from distant houses. Chandipur at night was not a sleeping town but a waiting one, its alleys still buzzing with fishermen mending nets, women drawing water, children chasing shadows with lanterns. Yet everyone seemed aware that something had cracked tonight—the death of the widow had opened a vault of stories better left unsaid.
At the station, Arjun spread the ledger on the wooden table. The fan overhead groaned as it turned, blowing warm air. He began copying the names into his notebook. Some were familiar from old government documents: fisheries officers, port contractors, revenue inspectors. Others were ordinary townsfolk—boatmen, traders, even a few women. The dates spanned nearly four decades, each entry precise as though the widow had spent her life as a chronicler.
When he reached the pages of the late 1990s, he paused again. There, among the circles and crosses, was the name Father Dominic—the parish priest whose church bells still ruled Chandipur’s dawn and dusk. His name appeared not once but five times, with alternating symbols: a circle, a cross, then again a circle. What debt had the priest owed the widow?
Arjun leaned back, closing his eyes. The widow had not been merely a recorder—she had been a participant. Each symbol suggested knowledge, leverage, power. This was not a diary of remembrance but a weapon, sharpened word by word.
The next morning, Chandipur wore its grief like a thin shawl. Women carried baskets of flowers to the Mukherjee house, muttering prayers as they placed marigold garlands by the gate. Men discussed the murder in hushed voices over clay cups of tea, their words thick with speculation. Some insisted it was thieves. Others claimed it was revenge from old enemies. But none dared deny that the widow’s ledger was real. Rumor had already spread that the police had found a book of sins.
Arjun walked the narrow lanes alone, ledger tucked in his satchel, observing the faces that turned away as he passed. A fisherman’s wife whispered to another, “If my husband’s name is inside, we are finished.” A shopkeeper froze when Arjun asked casually about Esha, then stammered something about her being generous, always paying bills on time. The fear was palpable, not of the murder itself but of exposure.
By afternoon, he visited the parish. The church stood whitewashed and solemn under casuarina trees, its bell tower casting a long shadow over the sand. Father Dominic, a broad-shouldered man with thinning hair, greeted him with polite unease.
“Inspector, tragic news,” the priest said, clasping his hands. “Sister Esha was a pillar of our community. Her death is a wound.”
Arjun studied his eyes. “You visited her often?”
“Only to offer prayers. She was lonely, after Dr. Mukherjee passed. I encouraged her to join church activities, but she preferred solitude.”
Arjun nodded slowly, then slid the ledger across the table between them. The priest stiffened. His hands twitched before he folded them carefully. “What is this?”
“You tell me, Father. Your name appears here. More than once. Circles, crosses. Do they mean money? Secrets? Sins?”
A flush rose under Dominic’s skin. “Inspector, people write many things. The widow was… peculiar. Sometimes she imagined she knew more than she did.”
Arjun leaned forward. “And sometimes she knew enough to destroy reputations. Did she know yours, Father?”
The silence stretched, broken only by the sound of the sea wind rattling the church shutters. The priest finally exhaled. “She helped me once. Years ago. When I was young, foolish. A mistake I never wished to be revealed. She promised silence. But silence comes at a cost.”
“What cost?”
“Occasional donations. Favors. A word here, a document there. She never asked for much, just enough to remind me she could ask for more.”
Arjun noted this carefully. The ledger was not just a record—it was a chain, each name bound to the widow by a thread of obligation or guilt. Someone must have wanted those threads cut permanently.
That night, as Arjun returned to his quarters near the station, he opened the ledger once more. He traced the pages where the ink had smeared faintly, perhaps from the widow’s trembling hands in her later years. He imagined her sitting at that desk night after night, recording names as the tide receded outside, listening to the silence of her house. What had compelled her? Fear? Power? Revenge? Or had it become simply a habit, the only order in a life hollowed by secrets?
The fan rattled overhead. Outside, the tide was returning, carrying its whispering roar across the sand. Arjun closed the book and locked it in the drawer. He knew the next days would peel Chandipur open, layer by layer, until its carefully preserved innocence lay in ruins.
But for now, he allowed himself to sit in the heavy silence, aware that the widow’s voice still lingered in the ledger’s pages, speaking in ink that refused to fade.
And somewhere in the town, someone else knew the book had been found. Someone who had already killed once. Someone who might kill again.
Chapter 3 – The Doctor’s Ghost
Morning in Chandipur did not come with the blaze of sunlight but with a pale grey spread, the kind of light that softened the outlines of boats on the horizon and turned the sea into a vast sheet of dull silver. Inspector Arjun Sen stood at the edge of the beach, watching fishermen push their vessels out into the receding tide. They shouted to one another in voices roughened by salt and age, their bare feet sinking into wet sand, their nets heavy with last night’s catch. The smell of drying fish carried across the air, sharp and earthy, making him think of wounds that never truly healed.
He had not slept well. The ledger lay locked in his drawer, but its pages seemed to murmur to him all night, whispering names in a chorus that refused to die down. What disturbed him most was not just the list of vanished men, but the recurring presence of the widow’s late husband, Dr. Prabir Mukherjee, behind those whispers.
Arjun had grown up hearing of the man. In Calcutta’s medical circles, Mukherjee had once been a celebrated surgeon, posted at Cuttack Medical College before he abruptly resigned in the mid-1980s. His reasons were never explained. Soon after, he had moved to Chandipur, setting up a small private clinic in the front wing of his seaside mansion. Locals remembered him as a stern, aloof figure, more interested in his patients’ money than their gratitude. Some said he saved lives that district hospitals would have abandoned; others muttered he chose his cases too carefully, preferring those who could not afford to speak later.
Dr. Mukherjee died in a train accident in 2001—so the record said. A derailment on the Howrah-Puri line, his body one among dozens charred beyond recognition. Yet there were villagers who swore they had seen him alive afterwards, walking near the beach at dusk, his white coat fluttering against the salt wind. The doctor’s ghost, they called him, half in fear, half in conviction.
Arjun began his morning with a visit to the oldest tea stall in the bazaar. The stall owner, Babulal, had served three generations of Chandipur men, his memory sharper than his scalding brew. When Arjun asked about the doctor, the man’s eyes narrowed.
“Doctor babu? Haan, we all went to him once. Even me, when my boy cut his leg. He stitched it up neat, no scar today. But…”—he lowered his voice—“sometimes men went in and never came out. Fishermen, union wallahs, even a contractor or two. Their families would wait outside all night, then one day the clinic shut its doors and the doctor said, ‘No such patient here.’ Who would argue with him? He had friends in Bhubaneswar, in the police also. And Esha-didi, she stood by him like a shadow.”
Arjun sipped the tea, letting the burn settle on his tongue. “Did anyone ever file a complaint?”
Babulal gave a short laugh. “Who would dare? Those who asked too many questions… their nets tore, their boats sank, their sons vanished. Better to keep the mouth shut, sahib. That’s Chandipur’s rule.”
Later, Arjun walked to the ruins of the clinic wing. The front verandah was locked, its wooden shutters eaten by salt, hinges rusted stiff. Peeling paint revealed faint lettering once stenciled in English: Dr. P. Mukherjee, MBBS, MS (Surgery). Inside, through gaps in the shutters, he saw a skeletal iron bed, a cracked enamel tray, glass bottles clouded with residue. Dust lay thick as gauze.
But what struck him most was the smell—faint, metallic, like iodine and something darker that lingered even after decades. He tried the side door and found it loosely chained. A constable forced it open, and the air that rushed out carried the stale breath of abandoned lives.
In the main chamber, Arjun found stacks of files gnawed by termites, yet some papers still legible. Operation notes, written in the doctor’s neat hand, describing appendectomies, hernia repairs, gall bladder removals. But mixed among them were stranger entries: “Exploratory procedure—no record.” “Foreign object removal—confidential.” Entire sheets had been torn out.
A locked cabinet yielded to a hammer. Inside were vials of morphine, syringes still capped, surgical instruments wrapped in yellowed gauze. And in a hidden drawer at the bottom, Arjun found a bundle of photographs. Black-and-white images, patients on beds, their faces partly obscured. Some bore stitched scars across their abdomens, others across their throats.
His breath slowed as he realized one photograph showed a man he recognized from the ledger—Satyajit Sahu, the missing union leader. His eyes in the picture were closed, his body draped in a hospital sheet, a dark line running across his chest. On the back of the photo was written a single word: Handled.
Arjun felt the weight of the room pressing down on him. This was not a clinic—it had been a theatre for silence, where inconvenient men were cut open and erased. The widow, Esha, had not only known—she had preserved every name in her ledger.
By afternoon, Arjun summoned a retired nurse who had once worked under Dr. Mukherjee. Kalyani Behera, now a bent old woman living in a hut near the bazaar, trembled when she saw the inspector.
“I will not talk, sahib. That man’s spirit still walks. Esha-didi told me never to open my mouth.”
Arjun softened his tone. “He cannot harm you now. He is dead.”
“Dead?” She gave a bitter smile. “Then why does the sea cry every night like someone’s cutting flesh? Why do lamps go out in my hut when I speak his name?”
He pressed gently. “Tell me what you saw.”
Her eyes filled. “He was a great doctor, yes. But sometimes, at night, men would be brought in by jeep, unconscious. The doctor would send me away. When I came back, the beds would be empty, sheets washed clean. Once, I saw him burying something behind the casuarina grove. He looked at me, and I knew if I spoke, I would lie in that sand myself.”
“Did Esha know?”
“She knew everything. She kept records. She said it was for protection. She told me, Men think women are weak. They forget we remember longer than they live.”
Arjun felt a chill. The widow had not merely been complicit—she had turned memory into power, her ledger a fortress no one could breach.
That evening, the sea rolled back in with unusual force, waves crashing higher than usual against the embankment. Villagers lit kerosene lamps as darkness settled. In the police station, Arjun studied the ledger again under the weak bulb. Now, each knife symbol seemed more sinister. They were not metaphors—they were verdicts. Men had been literally cut away.
The doctor was long dead, yet his presence filled every page. His ghost lived in the ledger, in the clinic’s ruins, in the whispers of the town. And through Esha Mukherjee, his shadow had lingered long after his body had gone.
As Arjun closed the book, a thought surfaced that unsettled him: if the widow had been murdered now, after decades of silence, perhaps it was not only for revenge. Perhaps someone feared that the ghost of the doctor—preserved in ink and memory—was about to rise again.
And in Chandipur, where the sea erased footprints each evening, ghosts did not need bodies to return. They needed only names.
Chapter 4 – Whispers of the Bazaar
By the fourth morning after the murder, Chandipur’s bazaar was swollen with a restless hush. It was not silence in the literal sense—rickety handcarts creaked under baskets of fish, men called out prices of prawns and hilsa, women argued over the weight of rice in brass scales, and goats bleated impatiently near the grain shops. Yet beneath the usual rhythm of commerce ran a current of unease, as though the entire town had tuned itself to a single invisible pulse. People spoke with lowered voices, eyes darting, conversations broken mid-sentence whenever Inspector Arjun Sen passed. The widow’s death was no longer news; it was myth in the making.
Arjun entered the bazaar with the ledger wrapped in brown paper under his arm. He did not need to show it. The mere rumor of its existence had already shaken Chandipur. Faces stiffened at his presence, and whispers thickened like smoke curling under a closed door. He could almost hear the town breathe through its fear.
At the tea stall, he stopped again, ordering a clay cup. Babulal poured the steaming liquid with hands that trembled more than usual. “Sahib, you must be careful. These people… they are like fish in a net. Pull too hard, they will thrash until the water turns red.”
Arjun sipped. “And who cast this net, Babulal? The widow?”
The old man looked around before leaning closer. “She was not cruel. She only remembered. Too much remembering is dangerous in a place like this. Here, forgetfulness is survival.”
Arjun left the stall and wandered deeper into the bazaar. He stopped before a fish-seller, an old woman with bangles stacked up her arms, her sari edge tucked high as she gutted a bhetki with brutal efficiency. “Ma, did you know Esha Mukherjee?” he asked.
The woman did not lift her eyes. “Everyone knew her. She gave rice during cyclones, medicines when fevers came. But she also asked questions no one dared answer. Men feared her silence more than her words.” She slit the fish open with a single stroke. “Now she is gone. The sea has taken her account book back.”
He thought of the ledger pressed against his ribs. “Did she ever speak of your family?”
The woman’s knife paused. She spat to the side. “She once wrote down my son’s name. After that, he was never the same. He drank, gambled, lost his boat. When he died in the tide, people said it was his own fault. But I know—when a name enters her book, the end begins.”
Moving from stall to stall, Arjun gathered fragments of stories. A grain merchant swore Esha had prevented his land from being seized by a port developer, but demanded yearly “donations” in return. A spice seller claimed his brother had borrowed money from her during the floods, only to die in a brawl that no one ever fully explained. Each tale carried two threads: gratitude tangled with dread.
At the paan shop, Arjun overheard two young men whispering.
“Dada, my uncle’s name is in that book, I am sure. He went to her house the week before she died.”
“Then keep your mouth shut. If the police find his name, our family will be ruined. Better the book burns.”
The words hit Arjun like a slap. The ledger was not just evidence; it was a bomb. Each page threatened to explode in households where reputations were built on secrecy. Whoever had killed Esha might not have done it for revenge alone—they might have done it for erasure.
By noon, the bazaar had grown stifling under the sun. Arjun retreated to a shaded lane behind the shops, where fishermen mended nets in silence. He sat beside one, a wiry man named Gobinda, whose fingers moved with mechanical patience through the tangles.
“Gobinda,” Arjun said gently, “you knew the widow well?”
The man’s hands did not pause. “I knew enough.”
“She helped many of you, didn’t she?”
Gobinda nodded. “Yes. During the cyclone of ’99, she gave us food when the government forgot us. But she also kept notes. She wrote who came, how much they took, who failed to return favors. Like a shopkeeper tallying debts. Some paid with money. Others with silence.”
“And those who didn’t?”
Gobinda finally looked up. His eyes were red-veined from years of sun and salt. “They vanished, Inspector. Into the tide, into the doctor’s hands, into nothingness. My own cousin… his name is in that book, I have no doubt. One night he was taken for ‘treatment.’ We buried an empty cot the next day.”
In the evening, Arjun returned to the station. He spread the ledger open on the table and pinned a fresh sheet beside it. He began matching names from the bazaar whispers with entries in the book. The patterns grew clearer. The circle seemed linked to money borrowed or favors exchanged. The cross, to moral lapses or secrets—illicit affairs, concealed scandals. The knife, to disappearance, often after open defiance.
But something else struck him. Many names marked with knives belonged to men connected to the fishermen’s union of the 1990s, when the state government had pushed for the port project. These were not random vanishings. They were eliminations, methodical and selective. And the doctor, with his clinic and scalpel, had been the executioner.
The widow had kept the record not as a mourner but as a gatekeeper. Every time someone wanted to forget, she wrote it down. The bazaar, with its stalls and gossip, had whispered fragments for years. Esha’s ledger had given those fragments spine and bone.
That night, Chandipur’s lanes glowed with oil lamps as the power faltered. Arjun walked again through the bazaar, now emptied of commerce, filled only with the hush of families eating behind shuttered doors. The air smelled of fried fish and kerosene. Somewhere a harmonium played a bhajan. Yet the unease had not lifted.
He paused at a corner where children played with marbles. One boy looked up and asked innocently, “Sahib, is it true the book knows who will die next?”
Arjun crouched. “Who told you that?”
“My father. He said if Inspector-sahib opens the book too much, Chandipur will drown.”
The boy rolled his marbles again, unconcerned. Arjun stood, the words settling like lead in his chest. Fear had become folklore. In Chandipur, the widow’s ledger was no longer just a hidden diary—it was a prophecy.
As he returned to his quarters, the tide roared faintly in the distance, louder than usual, as if the sea itself wanted to speak. Arjun locked the ledger in his drawer once more, but his hands lingered on the leather cover.
Whispers filled the bazaar by day. At night, it was the sea that whispered. And in both, the ghost of the doctor and the shadow of the widow walked together, hand in hand, binding Chandipur in a silence older than law.
Arjun lay awake long after midnight, knowing tomorrow he would need to pierce that silence. But he also knew—every question he asked might awaken something the town had buried with both fear and devotion.
And when the tide returned again, as it always did, it would not come alone.
Chapter 5 – The Priest’s Burden
The church at Chandipur stood like a bleached skeleton at the edge of the casuarina grove, its plaster cracked by salt winds, its bell tower leaning slightly as if the sea had tugged it toward itself over the decades. On Sunday mornings the place thrummed with life—villagers in their best saris and shirts, children reciting prayers in sing-song voices, the bell summoning even the reluctant. But on weekdays, when the doors stood open to silence, the church seemed less like a house of God and more like a confessional for the town’s sins.
Inspector Arjun Sen arrived in the mid-morning heat, ledger tucked inside his satchel. A few fishermen lingered at the entrance, heads bowed more in curiosity than devotion. They greeted him cautiously before slipping away, muttering among themselves. The scent of candle wax and damp wood filled the nave. The only sound was the shuffle of a broom—an altar boy sweeping near the pews, his eyes flickering nervously at Arjun’s uniform.
“Father Dominic?” Arjun asked.
The boy pointed toward the vestry.
Inside, Father Dominic sat hunched over a desk, spectacles sliding down his nose, hands clasped over a sheaf of papers. His hair was thinning, his cassock patched at the elbows, but his bearing carried an old authority, the kind that had once made villagers believe every word he spoke was law. He looked up slowly, as though he had already been expecting this visit.
“Inspector,” he said, his voice gravelly. “Come to question me about Sister Esha again?”
Arjun took the chair opposite. “I came because your name appears in her ledger. More than once.”
The priest’s jaw tightened, though he forced a smile. “Ledger? People say many things. Rumors grow like weeds in a town that has too much time.”
Arjun unwrapped the brown paper and slid the book across the desk. He opened it to a page where Father Dominic was written in a neat hand, the dates circling from 1989 to 2007. Beside them, alternating symbols: a circle, a cross, another circle.
Dominic’s fingers twitched before he clasped them tighter. The silence stretched until it pressed against the walls.
“What do these symbols mean, Father?” Arjun asked softly.
The priest’s eyes shifted toward the crucifix above the desk, as if appealing for strength. When he finally spoke, his words were slow, weighted. “You already suspect, Inspector. Why ask me to confess?”
“Because confessions matter. And because your silence is no longer protection—it’s suspicion.”
Dominic exhaled, shoulders sagging. “Very well. Esha Mukherjee… she was not a simple woman. She remembered too much. Yes, she kept my secrets. Secrets I would have taken to my grave.”
“Tell me.”
The priest rubbed his forehead. “When I was a younger man, before priesthood tempered me, I faltered. A woman came into my life—brief, foolish, but it left a child. If the church had known, I would have been cast out. Esha discovered it. She helped conceal the matter, arranged for the child to be adopted quietly by a family in Balasore. In return, she kept a rope around my neck for years.”
Arjun leaned forward. “The circles, the crosses?”
“She demanded donations for her charities—those were the circles. Sometimes she asked me to intercede with parishioners, to persuade them to give up land, or to stay silent about certain disputes—those were the crosses. Nothing overtly criminal perhaps, but always a reminder that she could expose me if I refused.” His voice cracked. “And I obeyed. Because shame can be sharper than any knife.”
Arjun studied the priest’s lined face. “Did you resent her?”
Dominic gave a bitter laugh. “Resentment is too small a word. I hated her, Inspector. But I also owed her. Without her, I would have lost everything. She carried my ruin in her palm like a grain of sand. Sometimes I thought killing her would be the only way to free myself. But I am not a murderer.”
“Are you certain?” Arjun asked quietly.
The priest’s eyes flashed, then dulled. “I have killed many times, Inspector. With words, with silence. That is a priest’s curse. But with a blade? No. That is not my hand.”
Arjun left the vestry with more weight than when he had entered. The ledger had transformed again in his mind—it was not only a book of debts but a crucifix of sins, binding people through fear of exposure. The widow had wielded it not as vengeance but as leverage. She was less executioner than puppeteer, tugging invisible strings while the town danced in forced gratitude.
He walked back through the nave, the altar boy watching him with wide eyes. Outside, the bazaar’s noise reached faintly through the casuarina grove—women bargaining, men shouting, goats bleating. Yet beneath it all, Chandipur seemed quieter than before, as though the town itself had overheard the priest’s confession.
That afternoon, Arjun summoned his notes. Three names marked with crosses had already confessed to secrets: the priest with his child, a grain merchant with a hidden debt, a spice seller with a brother’s scandal. The widow had turned their shame into her currency.
But what of the knife symbols? Those men could no longer speak. The doctor had seen to that.
The question that haunted Arjun was simple: who now feared the ledger enough to kill its keeper?
Evening brought a sharp wind, rattling the shutters of the police station. Arjun spread the ledger open under the weak lamp. He traced Father Dominic’s entries again, the alternating symbols like a heartbeat. Resentment, dependency, fear—all woven into neat ink.
He imagined Esha writing by candlelight, the tide retreating outside her window, her pen scratching names like a priest writing prayers. Perhaps she saw herself as more than a widow—perhaps she believed she was Chandipur’s true historian, the only one unwilling to let the town bury its sins under salt and sand.
But history is dangerous when written by one person. It becomes weapon, scripture, prophecy. And now that prophecy had spilled into murder.
That night, Arjun dreamed of the widow sitting at her desk, ledger open, her silver hair undone. She looked up at him and whispered, Secrets never die, Inspector. They only change hands.
When he woke, the sound of the sea was louder than ever, crashing against Chandipur’s shore as though the tide itself wanted to enter the town and wash every hidden name into the open.
Chapter 6 – Vanished Fishermen
The morning tide had gone far out, farther than usual, leaving Chandipur’s beach stretched like a wet silver plain where crabs scuttled in nervous diagonals. Inspector Arjun Sen walked along the sand, his shoes sinking slightly, each step accompanied by the hollow sound of water retreating through rivulets. In the distance, fishermen bent over their nets, their silhouettes against the haze resembling bent crosses stuck in the earth.
He carried the ledger inside his satchel, though its weight felt heavier each day—as if every vanished name pressed on the leather spine. Last night, after hours of reading, he had begun to see a pattern: the knife symbols clustered around the mid-1990s, the years when the state government had pushed for an ambitious port expansion. The fishermen’s union had resisted, citing loss of livelihood, destruction of mangroves, the swallowing of their ancestral beach. Protests had been crushed. Official records claimed only “scuffles” and “arrests.” But the ledger told another story: men erased cleanly, their names sealed with a blade.
Arjun’s first stop was a low mud-walled house near the edge of the casuarina grove. The woman who opened the door had hair streaked white, her palms raw from endless scrubbing of fishing baskets. She looked at the inspector with a guarded stillness.
“You are Leela Sahu?” Arjun asked gently.
Her eyes flickered. “I am.”
He produced a page from his notebook. “Your husband’s name—Satyajit Sahu—it appears here. August 1993. Marked with a knife.”
Her lips trembled before she pressed them into a thin line. “I knew you would come one day. They all said I should forget. That he drowned. But I know my Satyajit did not drown. He was taken.”
She motioned him inside, where a brass lamp flickered before a framed photograph of a young man with sharp cheekbones and eyes full of fire. Garlanded marigolds drooped around the frame.
“He was a leader,” Leela whispered, fingers tracing the glass. “The men trusted him. When the government officers came, when contractors bribed the panchayat, he stood firm. He said the sea was our mother, and no man sells his mother. They threatened him. One night he went to meet Dr. Mukherjee at his clinic—he thought perhaps he could negotiate for the fishermen’s health camp. He never returned. Next morning, the doctor’s wife told me he had never come. But his slippers lay outside their gate. I kept one, to remember.”
She reached under the cot and produced a cracked rubber slipper, brittle with age. Arjun stared at it in silence.
“They silenced him,” she said, voice breaking. “And Esha-didi—she knew. She wrote everything down, but she never gave it to us. She said keeping records was the only way to protect us. Protect us? What protection is silence?”
Arjun closed his notebook. He had no answer.
By noon he had visited two more widows. Each story was the same: a fisherman active in the protests, a sudden disappearance, a body never recovered. One widow spoke of a government jeep seen near the doctor’s clinic at midnight. Another remembered seeing Esha standing at her verandah that night, holding a lantern, watching the tide.
Each account burned like salt on an open wound. The town had carried these absences for decades, burying them beneath survival. The ledger had preserved them like pressed flowers, their colors faded but their outlines intact.
At the bazaar, Arjun stopped at a stall where an old fisherman, Gobinda, sat weaving rope. The man looked up with eyes that had grown opaque with cataracts, but his voice was still sharp.
“You dig too deep, sahib. The sea covers what it wants covered.”
“Then why do you still speak of your cousin who vanished?” Arjun asked quietly.
Gobinda’s fingers paused. “Because forgetting is easier in the mouth, not in the heart. My cousin’s name—Harun—it was in that book too. I saw it once, when Esha dropped it by mistake. Knife mark, same as the rest. I begged her to tell me what it meant. She said, Some debts are paid with silence. Then she shut the book.”
Arjun felt the words settle like stones in his chest. Silence had been currency in Chandipur, and the widow its banker.
That evening, he returned to the police station and spread the ledger open under the flickering lamp. He began charting the knife-marked names against government records. One by one, the vanished fishermen aligned with union rolls from the 1990s. Their absences had been explained away by authorities as “migration,” “drunken accidents,” “lost at sea.” But the ledger’s knives told the truth: elimination.
Arjun leaned back, exhausted. Outside, the tide had begun its return, the roar faint but insistent. He imagined the fishermen’s ghosts rising with it, walking across the wet sand, carrying their nets of unspoken stories.
Near midnight, a knock rattled the station door. Arjun opened it to find a frail boy, no more than fourteen, eyes wide with fear.
“My grandmother sent me,” he whispered. “She says she saw you with the book. She says you should know where the bodies lie.”
Arjun’s pulse quickened. “Who is your grandmother?”
“Parbati, from the southern huts. She was the doctor’s maid once. She says she saw him bury men near the mangroves.”
The boy thrust a folded scrap of paper into Arjun’s hand and ran before he could ask more.
Unfolding it, Arjun read the scrawled words: Behind the third casuarina grove, where the tide never reaches. Dig there.
He stared at the note, the sea’s roar filling the night like a drumbeat. The ledger had given him names. Now perhaps it would give him bodies.
He sat long into the night, the scrap and the ledger side by side on the desk. The pages seemed to breathe, the knife symbols glinting like small blades under the lamplight. The widow was dead, the doctor long gone, but their ledger of silence was pulling the town back into its own past.
Arjun knew that if he followed the trail to the mangroves, he would not just uncover evidence—he would exhume ghosts. And ghosts, once released, never went back to sleep.
Chapter 7 – The Niece from Kolkata
The train from Howrah arrived at Balasore just before dawn, coughing smoke into the pale sky. From there, a white SUV brought Madhurima Chatterjee down the coastal road to Chandipur. By the time she stepped out before her late aunt’s mansion, the tide was still half-asleep, the beach a stretch of wet glass scattered with shells. She carried herself with the tired grace of a corporate lawyer used to boardrooms and courtrooms, her black sunglasses masking her exhaustion, her white kurta and jeans out of place among the saris of mourning women who had gathered at the gate.
Inspector Arjun Sen watched her approach. She was in her mid-thirties, tall, sharp-boned, her hair pulled back severely, her lips set in the kind of line that belonged to someone accustomed to winning arguments. Behind her came a man carrying a sleek leather bag, perhaps a junior associate or a family driver.
“Madhurima Chatterjee?” Arjun asked.
She removed her glasses, revealing eyes that were rimmed with sleeplessness but glittered with calculation. “Yes. You must be the inspector handling my aunt’s case.”
“I am. I’m sorry for your loss.”
She gave a dry smile. “Loss implies presence. Esha-mashi was a presence in her own way, but she was also an absence. We were not close.”
Arjun gestured toward the verandah. “You may want to sit. There are formalities.”
Inside, incense coiled in the air as neighbors recited prayers. Madhurima listened politely, her gaze drifting around the crumbling mansion. She ran her fingers along the cracked plaster of the wall, the old photographs, the antique furniture. For a moment, Arjun saw something soften in her expression—perhaps memory, perhaps guilt. Then it was gone.
“The property passes to you,” Arjun said. “Were you aware?”
“Yes. Mashi had no children. My mother—her younger sister—died years ago. That leaves me the sole heir.”
“Did you and your aunt speak often?”
Madhurima laughed without humor. “We spoke rarely. When we did, it was usually arguments. She clung to this decaying house like it was a crown jewel. I suggested selling it. Developers have been circling for years. She refused. She called me greedy, said I didn’t understand Chandipur.”
Arjun studied her. “You visited recently?”
Her eyes flickered, then steadied. “Two months ago. I came to persuade her again. We fought. I left. And now…” She spread her hands. “Now she is gone.”
Arjun excused himself for a moment and returned with the ledger, wrapped carefully. He placed it on the low table between them.
“Do you recognize this?”
Madhurima’s eyes sharpened. “Mashi’s handwriting. Yes. She wrote obsessively, even letters she never posted. But this…” She leafed through, and her expression shifted. “Names. Dates. Symbols. God.”
“Did she ever tell you about it?”
“No. But I’m not surprised. She believed in the weight of memory. She said forgetting was a luxury for the guilty. She was never guilty—so she remembered for everyone else.”
Arjun leaned forward. “Your name doesn’t appear here. Why do you think that is?”
Madhurima’s laugh was brittle. “Because I never gave her power over me. That is why she hated me most. She couldn’t write me into her account book.”
By afternoon, the funeral rites began. Villagers thronged the courtyard, whispering, throwing glances at the niece from Kolkata who stood apart with folded arms. Some pitied her, others eyed her suspiciously. A few muttered that city people always came for land, never for blood.
When the pyre was lit, Madhurima’s eyes glistened despite her composure. She whispered a single line in Bengali: Ei shesh noy, mashi. (This is not the end, aunt.) Then she turned away quickly, as though unwilling to show weakness before strangers.
Arjun watched closely. Grief? Or performance?
That evening, he invited her to the police station. The ledger lay open under the lamp. “Your aunt was murdered with precision,” he said. “Not rage, not theft. Someone settled a score.”
“And you think I came all the way from Kolkata to slit her throat?” Her voice was cool, but her fingers tapped the table restlessly. “I gain the property anyway, Inspector. Why would I risk prison?”
“Sometimes inheritance is not just money,” Arjun replied. “Sometimes it is the erasure of a shadow.”
Her lips tightened. “You think she blackmailed me too? No, Inspector. I was the one person she couldn’t control. That was my only crime in her eyes.”
After she left, Arjun sat alone with the ledger. Madhurima was right—her name was absent. Yet her presence in Chandipur now complicated everything. Property brought motive. Family brought resentment. And her sharp words about the widow’s obsession with memory echoed uncomfortably with his own suspicions.
He closed the book. Outside, the tide roared faintly. Tomorrow, he would need to test her story against the town’s whispers. Chandipur never forgot a quarrel, even if it pretended to.
That night, as Arjun walked back through the lanes, he overheard two women at a well.
“The niece came back, did you see? City woman, sunglasses and English tongue. She will sell the house now.”
“Maybe she killed the widow to get it faster.”
“No. The widow was too strong for city knives. Only Chandipur knives cut Chandipur flesh.”
Their voices carried under the starlight, mingling with the sea’s breath. Arjun felt the town closing around him again, like a net tightening. Everyone was both witness and suspect.
And now, a new thread had entered the weave—the niece from Kolkata, standing between inheritance and suspicion, memory and forgetting.
Chapter 8 – The Retired Sub-Inspector
The next morning was brittle with a faint chill, the kind that made even the casuarina trees stand stiff against the wind. Inspector Arjun Sen left the police station early, the ledger under his arm, and walked toward the southern lanes where tiled houses leaned into one another like old men trading secrets. He was on his way to meet Haripada Sahu, a name that had circled him since his arrival, a name that carried the ache of the 1990s protests and the bitterness of a brother lost.
Haripada’s house stood apart from the others, a square structure of red brick patched with moss. Its windows were curtained with newspaper sheets, its courtyard cluttered with rusting cycles and discarded boots. A rangoli faded by rain still marked the entrance, the only evidence of festivity that had long since drained away.
Arjun knocked. After a moment, the door opened to reveal a man stooped but still broad-shouldered, his hair iron-grey, his eyes sharp despite the rheum clouding their corners. Haripada had once been a sub-inspector in the local thana, a man in uniform who carried authority in his gait. Now, stripped of service, he carried authority in bitterness.
“Inspector,” he said, voice dry. “I wondered when you would come. Everyone else in Chandipur has whispered my name already.”
Arjun inclined his head. “May I come in?”
The older man stepped aside. The room smelled faintly of kerosene and old paper. Files were stacked in one corner, yellowed charge sheets tied with string, as though Haripada had carried the police station home with him when he retired. On the wall hung a framed photograph of a younger man in a dhoti, smiling with fierce eyes—Satyajit Sahu, the union leader who had vanished in 1993.
Arjun sat opposite while Haripada remained standing, hands behind his back like an officer reviewing a parade. “You were at the widow’s house the night she was killed,” Arjun began.
Haripada’s lips curved. “Of course. I have been near that house every week for thirty years. Waiting. Watching. Hoping one day she would open her mouth and tell me the truth.”
“And what truth is that?”
“That my brother was killed inside that house. That the doctor cut him open and buried him in the mangroves. That Esha Mukherjee wrote his name in her damned book like an accountant writing off a debt.” His voice cracked, but he straightened quickly. “Do not waste time with polite questions, Inspector. I know you have the ledger.”
Arjun placed it on the table between them, unwrapped from its brown paper. The old man’s eyes glistened as he leaned closer. “Show me his name.”
Arjun opened the page to August 1993. Satyajit Sahu. Knife symbol. The ink was still sharp, as if written yesterday.
Haripada’s hands shook as he traced the letters. For a long moment he was silent, the weight of decades settling on him. Then he said, “I was a police officer then. I believed in law. I filed a report. My superiors told me to close it. They said my brother had gone missing with a woman, or fled to another state. Lies. They told me to shut my mouth or lose my badge. I shut it. I kept my badge. And I lost my brother.”
His voice hardened. “Do you know what it means, Inspector, to wear a uniform and still be powerless? To salute men you know are murderers? To walk past your brother’s widow and not be able to promise her justice? That is what the doctor and his wife stole from me—not just my blood, but my belief.”
Arjun met his gaze. “And now? Do you still believe?”
Haripada laughed without mirth. “In what? In your law? In the tide that erases footprints every evening? No, Inspector. I believe only in debt. And debts must be settled.”
Arjun leaned forward. “Did you settle yours with a knife across the widow’s throat?”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. “If I had, would I tell you? Would I sit here sipping tea and reciting my pain? No. If I had killed her, I would have left her on the beach for the tide to drag away. That would have been fitting.”
“Then where were you the night of her death?”
“In my courtyard. Drinking country liquor with my ghosts. Ask my neighbor; she will confirm. I am too old to wield knives in the dark. But do not think I didn’t dream of it every day.”
Arjun noted the alibi but left unconvinced. As he walked back through the lanes, children followed at a distance, whispering. “Sahu-kaku will kill again,” one boy muttered. “He carries anger like a sickle.” Another hissed back, “No, the inspector will catch him before he does.” The town was a chorus of suspicion, every voice both witness and rumor.
At the station, Arjun reviewed Haripada’s file. His service record was spotless until 1993, after which he had been transferred repeatedly, finally retiring early. Each transfer coincided with protests, inquiries, disappearances. It was as though the system had kept him moving to smother his questions. His bitterness was justified—but bitterness could also sharpen into motive.
That evening, Arjun visited Leela Sahu again. She sat by the lamp, weaving a net she no longer used, her fingers moving automatically.
“Did your brother-in-law ever speak of confronting the widow?” Arjun asked.
Her eyes darkened. “Every day. He said one day he would drag the truth out of her, ledger or no ledger. But he also said—If I kill her, the sea will spit me out too. So he waited. Perhaps he still waits.”
“Do you think he could have done it?”
Leela sighed. “We are all capable, Inspector. But I think Chandipur itself killed her. Too many names in one book—eventually the book bursts.”
That night, the tide thundered louder than usual, as though the sea itself was restless. Arjun sat in his quarters, the ledger open before him. He traced the knife beside Satyajit Sahu’s name, imagining the young union leader’s last breath, the brother who wore a uniform but swallowed silence, the widow who held the pen.
He felt Chandipur closing in around him, every alley a trap of old loyalties, every face a mask. Haripada Sahu might not have killed Esha Mukherjee with his own hand, but his life was bound to hers like a knot of rope that refused to loosen.
And knots, Arjun thought, are strangest when they appear loose but choke tighter the more you pull.
Chapter 9 – The Vicar’s Secret
The church bell tolled at dusk, a single iron tongue calling through the casuarina grove. Its sound carried down to the beach where the tide had already begun to creep back, filling the hollows it had left in the morning. To Chandipur, the bell meant routine: prayer, forgiveness, the illusion of order. But to Inspector Arjun Sen, walking up the gravel path, the bell was a reminder that the priest’s name had appeared in the widow’s ledger five times. Not once, not twice—five. That was not accident; that was entanglement.
Father Dominic greeted him with practiced calm, though his shoulders betrayed a nervous tremor. The nave was empty, candles sputtering near the altar, the air thick with incense that only partly masked the smell of damp stone. “Inspector,” Dominic said, voice careful, “you come often. Have you not already heard my confession?”
“Confession is never once,” Arjun replied. He unwrapped the ledger and placed it on the wooden pew between them. He turned to the pages bearing Dominic’s name, the neat hand of the widow marking circle, cross, circle, cross, circle—like a drumbeat echoing across two decades.
“You told me of the child you fathered,” Arjun said. “That was one secret. But five entries suggest more than one sin. Which others did she hold?”
The priest’s lips tightened. He clasped his rosary as if gripping a lifeline. “Inspector, you must understand—Esha was relentless. She collected sins as one collects seashells. She did not care if they were sharp or broken. She kept them all.”
“Then tell me the rest.”
Dominic’s eyes moved to the crucifix above the altar, as though he sought permission. “There was money,” he whispered. “Church land sold quietly to contractors. I signed papers at her urging. She said it would fund the school, but most went elsewhere. A circle for money—that was her code.”
“And the crosses?”
Dominic’s face flushed. “I persuaded women to surrender land to her charity trust. Widows, childless mothers—they believed my words. Esha took their plots, promised them protection, then rented them to businessmen. The women gained nothing. She told me it was for the greater good. But I knew. I knew.” His voice broke. “Each cross is a betrayal I cannot wash from my hands.”
Arjun studied him. “You hated her for it. Did you finally free yourself with a knife?”
The priest’s fingers tightened around the rosary until his knuckles whitened. “No. I wished it many times, yes. But I could not. Killing her would not free me—it would only brand me with another cross. And I already carry too many.”
Later, Arjun walked through the graveyard behind the church. The air was heavy with the smell of wet earth and frangipani. Wooden crosses leaned crookedly, names fading from stone. Here lay Chandipur’s forgotten, he thought—fishermen lost to the tide, women erased by silence, children swallowed before their first cry. And here, too, lay the priest’s unspoken guilt, buried under incense and prayer.
He paused at a grave marked only with the word Infant, 1989. A small cross tilted above it. Was this the child Father Dominic had tried to erase? If so, the widow had preserved not only the secret but the memory, making sure it never vanished completely.
Arjun felt a tightening in his chest. The ledger was not simply an account book—it was a parallel graveyard, each symbol a headstone.
Back at the station, he compared the priest’s entries to government land records. Sure enough, in the early 1990s, several church plots had been transferred to a trust managed by the widow. Later, those plots were leased to companies linked to the port project. Dominic had signed the deeds. The widow had orchestrated it. And when protests erupted, fishermen like Satyajit Sahu had vanished.
The web grew clearer, but also darker. Each secret in the ledger was a thread, and together they wove a net that bound Chandipur in complicity.
That evening, Arjun visited Father Dominic again. The priest was lighting candles at the altar. “Inspector,” he said quietly, “I know you think I killed her. But believe me, I carry enough sins without adding murder. My burden is different. Do you know what it means to hear confessions for thirty years? To hold the town’s filth in your ears while pretending to absolve them? Esha was my mirror. She reminded me that forgiveness is a lie. No one forgets. Not truly.”
Arjun watched the flame flicker across the priest’s worn face. “If she was your mirror, perhaps killing her was the only way to shatter it.”
Dominic shook his head. “No. You mistake me. I wanted her alive. Because as long as she lived, my sins stayed buried with hers. Dead, she frees them. And now they will rise.”
His words lingered in Arjun’s mind as he walked back. The priest had not killed Esha—at least, he believed his fear more than his guilt. But the widow’s death had unleashed a storm. Each person she held in her book now stood naked before the town. And naked men are dangerous.
That night, as Arjun locked the ledger away, he noticed something he had overlooked: beside the priest’s last entry in 2007, a faint pencil note in Bengali, half-erased—আরো বড়ো পাপ লুকোনো আছে (“A greater sin is still hidden”).
His heart quickened. What greater sin? Whose?
The ledger had not just recorded the past. It had left hints of futures yet to unravel.
Outside, the sea roared against Chandipur’s shore, restless, insistent, as though it too waited for that greater sin to surface.
Chapter 10 – The Surgeon’s Work
The clinic stood silent, its shutters rattling against the morning wind. Inspector Arjun Sen pushed open the side door with a constable’s help, the hinges shrieking as if the building itself resisted intrusion. Dust swirled in the slanted light. The air smelled of iodine, rust, and something deeper—a sweetness gone sour, the lingering trace of blood long scrubbed but never erased.
For years, villagers had crossed this threshold seeking healing. Some left stitched and scarred, others never walked out again. Now it was a mausoleum of silence, and Arjun was here to exhume its ghosts.
The constable muttered nervously. “Sir, people say this place is cursed. They hear sounds at night—metal scraping, water dripping, footsteps on empty floors.”
Arjun silenced him with a glance. He set his satchel down, opened the ledger, and turned to the pages marked with knife symbols. Twenty-seven names. Twenty-seven vanishings. Each marked with dates that aligned with the protests, the land disputes, the government’s hunger for Chandipur’s coast. If the doctor had been executioner, the clinic was his theatre.
He began in the main chamber. An iron cot stood against the wall, its frame rusted but sturdy, as though it had endured years of weight. A cracked enamel basin lay overturned, its bottom stained dark. On a side shelf, glass jars with cloudy residue waited like witnesses. Arjun bent, lifted one. A faint odor of formalin escaped. He placed it down carefully.
Then he noticed the floor. Beneath the dust lay faint scratches, not random but deliberate: rectangular outlines, as though heavy trunks or boxes had once stood here. He crouched, running his fingers along the grooves. They formed neat squares—storage, perhaps, for medical equipment… or for bodies waiting to be disposed of.
His pulse quickened. He ordered the constable to fetch a spade. Together they probed the floor near the outlines. The cement was thin, patched unevenly. When they pried it up, beneath lay packed earth, damp and dark. Arjun inhaled sharply. The smell rising was unmistakable—decay, faint but lingering.
“Call forensics,” he said, his voice steady despite the chill in his spine. “We dig.”
By afternoon, a forensic team from Cuttack arrived, their equipment breaking the clinic’s silence. Masks, gloves, cameras—the clinical sterility of science against the damp rot of hidden crime. They began excavating the earth beneath the chamber.
It didn’t take long. From less than three feet down, the first fragments appeared: bones, brittle and stained. A rib. A femur. Then a skull, jaw gaping in eternal protest. The room filled with the muted sound of tools scraping soil, punctuated by gasps from constables who turned away retching.
Arjun stood still, notebook in hand, recording. One body. Two. Three. The count rose as more bones surfaced. Not intact skeletons, but fragments, mixed as though the pit had been used repeatedly. Some bore clean cuts along bone edges—scalpel work, precise and deliberate. The surgeon’s hand had not healed here; it had silenced.
The forensic officer approached, sweat beading his brow despite the mask. “These aren’t accidental burials, sir. Clean dissections, then disposal. Whoever did this knew anatomy.”
Arjun nodded grimly. “Dr. Prabir Mukherjee.”
News spread like fire through Chandipur. By evening, the bazaar buzzed with rumor: the doctor’s clinic had vomited bones, the widow’s ledger had predicted them, the inspector had unearthed what the sea had hidden. Women lit lamps for the nameless dead, men muttered prayers. Some cursed the widow for protecting the secret so long, others claimed she had been guardian, not accomplice.
Arjun walked through the lanes, the weight of eyes following him. Old men shook their heads. Young men spat in anger. Children asked, “Will the ghosts come home now?”
The tide roared louder that night, crashing against the shore as if echoing the town’s unrest.
Back at the station, Arjun spread photographs of the bones beside the ledger. He matched dates: August 1993, knife symbol—Satyajit Sahu. September 1994, knife symbol—Harun. December 1996—three union men, all vanished on the same date. The ledger had not lied. The widow had recorded what her husband buried.
But another question sharpened: why had she kept the record? If she had been accomplice, why preserve evidence? Unless… the ledger was her protection. A hostage note to the town itself: I know. I remember. If you touch me, the truth survives.
And yet, someone had touched her. Someone had risked everything to silence her at last.
That night, Arjun returned alone to the clinic. He walked among the empty rooms, his lantern casting trembling shadows across peeling walls. He imagined the doctor standing at the cot, scalpel flashing, his wife standing outside the door with her ledger, writing down names like a scribe of death. Husband and wife, surgeon and archivist, bound by silence.
A gust rattled the shutters. For a moment, Arjun thought he heard metal clink, a scalpel falling. He forced himself to steady. Ghosts don’t leave evidence. Men do.
Still, as he closed the door, he felt the ledger heavier than before. Each knife-marked name was no longer just ink—it was bone, skull, rib. It was proof that Chandipur’s past had been cut open, and its stench would not vanish easily.
Before dawn, a messenger arrived from the forensic team: more bodies had been found in the mangrove pit Parbati had pointed out. Shallow graves, bones tangled with roots. The sea had spared them, the trees had guarded them.
Arjun held the ledger close. It had guided him to graves, yes—but it had also marked him. Each discovery drew him deeper, binding him to the widow’s memory. She was dead, but she had chosen him as executor of her terrible account.
And executors rarely walk away clean.
