Whispers of the Shyambazar House

Anirban Sen

The tram rattled past Bagbazar and screeched towards Shyambazar, its iron wheels sparking against the stubborn tracks as dusk settled over North Kolkata. The air smelled of roasted peanuts, incense smoke, and an old kind of weariness that clung to the city’s bones. Ananya adjusted her satchel against her shoulder and stepped off at the crossing where five roads tangled together like restless veins. She had been summoned by the trustees of an old zamindari estate, tasked with sorting through a century’s worth of brittle manuscripts and letters that had been abandoned in the crumbling mansion known simply as the Shyambazar House. She had heard the name before, in whispers exchanged by rickshaw-pullers, sweetshop owners, and old women who sat by the roadside shelling peas. They said the house had eaten people. That it never forgave trespassers. That its windows breathed when the night was windless.

Ananya was not superstitious. She had trained as an archivist, studied paper decay and ink corrosion at university, and spent years in cramped libraries where silence pressed against the ears. But something about the first glimpse of the Shyambazar House unsettled her in a way she could not explain. It rose like a forgotten sentinel behind iron gates laced with rust, its verandahs sagging, its walls mottled with fungus. Pigeons scattered as she approached. A large neem tree spread its arms over the roof, as if shielding the building from eyes that still remembered it.

Inside, a caretaker awaited her—a bent man in a frayed dhoti who introduced himself only as Haran. His eyes were pale, like water left too long in a brass pot. He did not smile, but his voice was low, respectful, as though words themselves should not be loud inside these walls. He led her through echoing corridors where portraits stared from cracked frames, their painted eyes glistening in the dying light. The smell of damp paper and mildew greeted her like a familiar enemy.

“This wing,” Haran said, gesturing towards a heavy teak door that groaned as it opened, “has the records. Zamindarbabu kept diaries. Too many diaries. And letters. Some say he wrote more than he spoke. They want you to arrange, list, maybe decide what survives.”

Ananya nodded, her professional instincts overtaking her unease. She set her satchel on a long table layered with dust, pulling out cotton gloves and a small brush. Haran left without another word, his footsteps fading into the belly of the house. The silence that followed was thick, the kind of silence where even one’s own breath felt like trespass.

She lit the desk lamp she had brought with her, its glow carving a circle of clarity in the gloom. Piles of leather-bound volumes leaned against each other like drunks. Some had been gnawed by termites, others swollen by rain. She lifted the first diary carefully, brushing away a film of dust. The cover read: 1892.

The handwriting inside was neat, almost obsessive. Each page carried dates, observations of household affairs, and strange entries about the “restlessness of servants” and the “eyes at the windows that do not belong.” Ananya frowned. It was unusual, but not shocking. Old zamindars were often paranoid, eccentric. She turned more pages and came across a passage that stiffened her fingers.

March 17, 1892. Ramesh, the stable boy, did not return from the courtyard last evening. He was seen walking towards the well. His body was never found. Yet his footsteps continue in the east corridor.

Ananya’s lips parted, but she forced a laugh at herself. It was nothing but an old man’s superstitions. She read further.

April 2, 1892. A guest, Mr. Bhattacharya, vanished after dinner. He left his umbrella behind. His voice echoes in the verandah past midnight. The others pretend not to hear.

A chill spread across her skin. She glanced at the corridor beyond the door, its shadows stretching like claws. The air seemed heavier now, the silence too deliberate.

She closed the diary and moved to the next. 1893. The ink had faded, but the entries followed the same pattern—records of disappearances, sometimes servants, sometimes guests, each annotated with a note about their lingering presence. Some were said to hum near the prayer room, others to weep in the gardens.

Hours slipped by. The lamp hummed faintly. From outside, the tram bells clanged as night deepened over the city. Ananya rubbed her temples. She should leave for the evening, return in the morning when light would soften these words. She packed her gloves and brush, but just as she reached for her satchel, her eyes caught a volume with a cracked spine resting separately from the others. It looked newer, less gnawed by time.

She pulled it close. The leather was smoother, the ink darker. The first entry was dated not in the 1800s but in 1920. She skimmed, expecting more of the same paranoid accounts. And indeed, the diary chronicled disappearances. But unlike the earlier volumes, these did not belong to a zamindar’s time. The handwriting shifted over years, but the accounts continued: a cook who vanished in 1935, a tenant in 1952, a caretaker in 1978. The diary’s entries stretched into the 1990s, each meticulous, each noting names, dates, and circumstances.

Her pulse quickened. Who had been maintaining these records? The zamindar had died decades ago. Trustees had changed, families scattered. Yet the diary had never stopped writing.

She flipped to the final page. Her breath caught. The entry was dated today’s date. And beneath the heading was her name: Ananya Roy. The words beneath were scrawled in a hurried, almost trembling hand.

She has entered the house. She will not leave.

The ink shimmered wetly under her lamp, as if written only moments ago.

A soft creak rose from the corridor behind her. She froze. The pages trembled in her hand. Slowly, she turned, her heart hammering. The doorway yawned open to a dark corridor. She thought she saw a shadow shift against the wall.

And then came the sound—bare footsteps, dragging, coming closer.

The footsteps were not hurried. They were measured, dragging slightly, as if whoever walked was testing the strength of the floor with each step. Ananya held the diary tight against her chest, her pulse thudding so loudly she thought it would echo in the corridor. The light from her desk lamp barely spilled past the threshold, leaving the hallway in an oil-thick darkness. She wanted to call out—perhaps it was Haran returning—but her throat locked. Then came a faint breath, not her own, a soft intake of air that lingered too long.

Her instincts as a rational woman fought to steady her. She told herself there were logical explanations. Old houses creaked. Rodents scampered. Maybe the caretaker had come back silently. Forcing her voice to emerge, she said, “Haran-babu?”

Silence. Then another step.

Ananya’s hand brushed her satchel. She fumbled out a small torch and switched it on, its beam piercing the gloom. The corridor revealed itself—peeling walls, a line of shuttered doors, dust thick on the floor. Empty. Yet the footsteps had been real. She knew it. She had not imagined the rhythm of them.

She gathered her things in haste, slipping the diary into her bag despite her training telling her to leave archives in place. Some force stronger than duty urged her to carry it out, as though leaving it behind would mean leaving part of herself trapped here. She walked quickly towards the main entrance, the torchlight jerking with her breath. Every corner of the mansion seemed alive now. Portraits glinted with eyes that had not been painted to follow her but did so anyway. The wind hissed against shutters though outside the night was still.

She found the caretaker by the gate, crouched near a lantern. He looked up, his face hollow in the light. “You’re leaving early,” he murmured.

“I’ll come back tomorrow,” she said, her voice sharper than she intended. She wanted him to challenge her, to tell her she was being foolish. But he only nodded.

The streets outside Shyambazar House were oddly muted. The vendors had closed their stalls, and the tramlines gleamed like ribs under the streetlamps. Ananya walked fast, heart still unsteady, until she reached the bustle of the main road. There, the ordinary noise of buses honking and men shouting prices at a fish market grounded her. She told herself again and again that she was tired, that dusk and damp walls had tricked her mind into hearing things. But when she reached her flat near Hedua, she could not resist pulling the diary from her satchel.

She placed it on her desk, fingers trembling. The page still bore her name. The ink had dried now, but its strokes were uneven, as though written by a hand that shook violently. She stared at the words, half hoping they would fade with time. They did not.

Sleep eluded her that night. She dreamed of footsteps echoing in her room, of windows that opened on their own. When dawn came, pale and reluctant, she rose with heavy eyes and told herself she would not be frightened away by some relic of superstition. Work was work. She had been chosen for this project because she was competent, rational, unswayed by old wives’ tales. She would return, catalogue the documents, finish her assignment.

The following afternoon, she stepped into Shyambazar House again. The gate creaked like a complaint. Haran appeared wordlessly, leading her back to the archive wing. His manner had not changed—still watchful, still subdued—but she thought she saw the faintest flicker of knowing in his eyes, as though he was waiting for her to mention what she had seen. She did not.

The air inside was heavier than the previous day, dampness wrapping her throat. She unpacked her gloves and brush again, determined to lose herself in routine. She arranged diaries by year, dusted spines, noted legible volumes in her ledger. Hours passed. Once, she thought she heard a sigh from the corridor, but when she turned, only stillness waited.

It was near dusk when her torch beam—she had kept it beside her despite the lamp—fell on a loose board at the bottom of the bookshelf. She tugged it free, and behind it lay another stack of notebooks, bound not in leather but in cloth, tied with string. They were different from the zamindar’s records, less formal, more frantic. She untied one and opened it.

The handwriting was jagged, hurried, nothing like the careful zamindari hand. The first page began: We are not meant to stay here after dark. The house chooses. I have seen it. It keeps its own ledger. It writes what it wants, and then it happens.

Ananya’s skin prickled. She turned the pages. The entries seemed written by different hands—servants perhaps, or caretakers over the decades. Each wrote of unease, of seeing figures at night, of names appearing in diaries. One entry stopped her cold: 1978. The caretaker, Haran, vanished near the staircase. His lantern was found burning. His name was written in the book a day before.

Her breath caught. Haran? The man she had spoken to—was he another, someone who carried the same name? Or was the entry suggesting something darker? She snapped the book shut. The lamp flickered as if disturbed by breath not her own.

She resolved to confront him before leaving. But as she walked through the corridor later, the house groaned under her steps. From the far end came a faint echo—her own name whispered in a voice that was not hers. She froze. The whisper came again, closer this time.

“Ananya…”

Her torch beam shook across the corridor. Shadows bent unnaturally, gathering at corners like liquid. She forced herself forward, each step a rebellion against instinct. When she reached the gate, Haran stood waiting once more, lantern in hand, his pale eyes unreadable.

She almost asked him about the diary, about the entry claiming a caretaker with his name had vanished decades ago. But his silence was thicker than any answer. She walked past him, out into the clamour of Shyambazar’s evening. Yet long after she reached the noise of people and traffic, she still heard it—the whisper of her name following from a corridor that should have been empty.

That night, she placed the cloth-bound notebook beside the first diary on her desk. Together they seemed like twin warnings. She traced the words again and again. Something inside the Shyambazar House was not merely recording the past—it was dictating the future.

And it had chosen her.

The morning air in Hedua was crisp with the smell of frying kochuris and wet earth. Ananya sipped her tea at the roadside stall, but her thoughts refused to unclench. The diaries sat in her satchel like twin weights, their words gnawing at her calm. The entry about the caretaker named Haran who had disappeared in 1978 repeated itself in her head. She had seen him, spoken to him, followed him through the halls. Could names repeat in families of caretakers, passed down like heirlooms? Or was the possibility darker—that the man she spoke to was a remnant of the house itself, neither living nor dead? She shivered despite the rising sun.

By mid-afternoon, she decided she needed context beyond crumbling paper. She walked to the North Kolkata Research Society, where records of old estates and zamindar families were kept. The archivist on duty, a plump man with round spectacles, greeted her with surprise when she requested details of the Shyambazar estate. “People rarely ask about that property,” he said, voice half-whisper. “They say it’s ill-fated.”

He fetched dusty files, brittle newspapers from decades past. Ananya leafed through reports of auctions, lawsuits, crumbling fortunes. Then a thin clipping caught her eye—dated April 1978. It read: Caretaker of Shyambazar House vanishes mysteriously. Lantern discovered still burning on the staircase. Police investigation yields no leads. The caretaker’s name: Haran Chatterjee.

Her throat dried. The article described him as a man in his fifties, reclusive, rarely seen outside the gates. No body was ever found. Police blamed local thugs, though no ransom was ever demanded.

But the house’s diaries had foretold it.

She pressed the clipping into her notebook, thanked the archivist, and hurried out. The tram rattled past, but she walked instead, each step pulling her closer to a decision she did not want to make. She needed to confront the man at the house—the man who wore Haran’s face.

That evening she returned to the gates. They loomed as before, iron eaten by rust, the neem tree casting its crooked shadow across the façade. The air inside felt thicker, as if the house exhaled when she entered. Haran appeared as though summoned, lantern in hand, his eyes pale and still.

“You,” Ananya said, forcing steadiness into her voice, “have you always been here? Since the seventies?”

He tilted his head, as if the question was in a language half-remembered. “I serve the house,” he said softly.

“Are you the same Haran who disappeared in 1978?”

Silence stretched. The lantern flame shivered though there was no breeze. Then he said, “Names do not matter. The house keeps what it wants.”

A chill raced down her spine. She wanted to demand more, but the house itself seemed to hush her. She turned away, heart hammering, and retreated to the archives.

That night she forced herself deeper into the diaries. She catalogued them mechanically, though her mind skidded over their content. Yet one volume—dated 1995—drew her in. The handwriting here was almost illegible, letters slanting into each other, as though written in haste or under duress.

October 5. The girl with the satchel entered today. She thinks she is reading us. But we are reading her.

The words blurred before her eyes. The date meant nothing—it was long past—but the description jolted her. A girl with a satchel? The ink was faint, but when she touched the page it smeared faintly, as if resisting her.

She closed the volume, fingers trembling. The house was not only recording events—it was anticipating them, stretching across time like a net.

For the first time, Ananya considered walking away. She could tell the trustees the task was beyond her. But the thought of leaving the diaries here, unexamined, unnerved her more than staying. They had chosen her. She felt it. And something about unfinished work gnawed at her discipline.

The following day she did something reckless. Instead of returning to the house directly, she sought out local residents, the old sweetshop owner near the crossing, a paan seller whose stall leaned against a broken wall. She asked them about Shyambazar House. Most muttered evasions, claimed ignorance. But one old woman, hunched with age, laughed dryly.

“The house remembers,” she said, eyes clouded with cataracts. “It doesn’t let go of those who step inside. Men, women, children—some leave their shadows there. You see a man today, tomorrow he is only his shadow. Haran is one of those.”

Ananya’s blood chilled. She thanked the woman and walked away, her mind buzzing. Shadow. Remnant. The words gnawed at her rationality.

That evening, the city seemed louder than usual—trams, horns, vendors calling prices. She carried it with her like a shield as she stepped back into the house. Inside, silence swallowed everything. Haran was not by the gate this time. She wondered if he would appear at all.

In the archives, the air was stale, heavy. She lit her lamp and continued with the diaries, determined to face them. Hours passed in brittle pages, strange entries piling on her ledger. At one point she heard a whisper again—her name, stretching like breath against glass. She snapped around, torch beam slicing shadows. Nothing.

Near midnight she decided to leave. But when she reached for her satchel, the diary she had placed inside slipped and fell open. She gasped. The final page had changed. Where yesterday’s ink had read She has entered the house. She will not leave, today another line had appeared beneath.

Tomorrow she will descend the staircase. She will hear the voices. She will choose whether to belong.

Her knees weakened. She had not written this. No one had touched her bag. Yet the ink was fresh, black and glistening under her lamp.

The corridor sighed. She looked up. At the far end, where darkness thickened, the staircase waited, its banister gleaming faintly like bone. For a moment she thought she saw figures there, blurred, indistinct, watching.

Her heart slammed against her ribs. The diary in her hands trembled. The house was not merely recording—it was commanding.

And tomorrow, she knew, it would demand her presence on the staircase.

The night passed in fractured sleep. Ananya dreamt of staircases spiraling downward, each step an echo of her name whispered by unseen mouths. When she woke, sweat clung to her back despite the cool morning air drifting in from the balcony. She told herself she would not return. She had every right to abandon the project. But by noon, her satchel was already packed, the diaries inside like anchors dragging her back. Curiosity, duty, something deeper—she could not untangle them.

The house seemed to anticipate her arrival. The iron gates yawned open at the gentlest push, the neem tree’s branches shivering though the street beyond was still. Haran was absent again, or perhaps hiding within. The silence of the courtyard pressed heavy, broken only by the scuttling of lizards on the mossy walls.

Inside, she lit her lamp. The archives loomed with their piles of mute witnesses, leather and cloth stitched with time. The diary’s prophecy pulsed in her mind: Tomorrow she will descend the staircase. She will hear the voices. She will choose whether to belong. She thought of tearing the page, of burning the book, but fear gripped her fingers. What if that act itself bound her further?

She resolved to face it. She would descend the staircase. She would listen. She would prove to herself that there was nothing but wood, dust, and the tricks of an overworked mind.

The corridor stretched long and narrow, its walls leaning as though they wished to close upon her. Each step echoed louder than it should have, as if the house itself was amplifying her presence. When she reached the staircase, she paused. The wooden banister gleamed faintly under her torch, pale and smooth, almost like skin. The first step groaned under her weight, a sound too close to a sigh.

As she descended, the air changed. It grew colder, heavier, laden with a dampness that did not belong to summer. Halfway down, she heard it: voices. Not loud, not distinct, but layered murmurs, overlapping whispers that curled into her ears. She froze, clutching the banister, her torch trembling.

At first the words were incomprehensible, like the muttering of a distant crowd. Then, slowly, they sharpened. Leave… belong… do not look back… the house remembers… The phrases slid over one another, some pleading, some commanding. Her skin erupted in gooseflesh. She tried to lift her torch to scatter the dark below, but its beam faltered, flickering as though smothered by unseen breath.

She forced herself to step down further. The voices grew clearer, and with them came shapes in the gloom. Shadows clung to the corners of the stairwell, some tall, some stooped, some shifting restlessly as if caught between movement and stillness. She thought she saw eyes glinting, faces half-formed, mouths opening without sound. But the whispers did not cease—they poured around her, into her, until she could no longer tell whether they came from outside or within her head.

“Ananya…” one voice rose above the others, low and deliberate, almost tender. She jerked her head, torch beam slicing the shadows. No one. Yet the whisper carried her name with such certainty she felt claimed.

At the base of the staircase lay a door she had never noticed before, small and iron-banded. The voices surged towards it, pressing at her skin, urging her closer. Her legs moved despite her trembling. She touched the handle. Cold shot through her arm, up to her heart. She pushed gently. The door groaned open.

The room beyond was small, windowless, lined with shelves. And upon those shelves lay dozens of lanterns. Some flickered with faint flames though no oil burned in them. Others glowed with a dim blue light. Ananya stepped inside, breath shallow. Each lantern bore a scrap of paper tied to its handle—names, written in fading ink. She moved closer, scanning them. Ramesh. Bhattacharya. Kamala. Haran.

Her stomach lurched. These were the vanished. These were the ones recorded in the diaries. And their voices filled the air still, spilling from the glowing lanterns like trapped breath.

She stumbled back, her torch beam falling on a lantern at the lowest shelf. The name tied to it was Ananya Roy.

The flame inside it flickered weakly, as if waiting.

“No,” she whispered, shaking her head. “No, I am alive.” Her voice cracked against the walls. The lantern pulsed, as though answering.

The murmurs rose louder now, no longer indistinct. Choose… belong… the house writes you now… The voices overlapped, pressing into her chest. She dropped her torch, its light rolling across the floor, casting warped shadows of the lanterns against the walls.

Desperation flared in her. She lunged towards the shelf, seized the slip of paper with her name, and tore it free. The lantern’s flame sputtered violently, then dimmed to nothing. The voices around her screamed—not in rage, but in anguish, a hundred whispers unraveling at once.

Darkness swelled. The air thickened. The shelves trembled as if struck by an unseen force. Ananya clutched the paper to her chest, heart hammering, and fled up the staircase, stumbling, almost falling. The voices clawed after her, calling her name in broken echoes.

When she burst into the corridor, the lamp on her desk flickered wildly, shadows snapping like whips across the walls. Haran stood at the end of the hall, his lantern steady, his face unreadable.

“You should not have touched it,” he said, voice low but clear.

She staggered back, clutching the torn paper. “It had my name.”

“The house does not forgive theft,” he said. “It does not like being defied.”

The walls groaned as if in agreement, dust falling from the ceiling. Haran’s pale eyes glowed faintly in the lamp’s flicker. For a heartbeat, Ananya thought his body wavered, like a shadow cast without a source.

She ran past him, past the groaning corridors, out into the night. The gate resisted her push this time, as if the house itself wished to hold her, but she forced it open and stumbled into the street. The ordinary chaos of Shyambazar—the clatter of rickshaws, the bell of a tram—greeted her like salvation. She did not stop until she reached her flat, breath ragged, the torn slip still clenched in her fist.

That night, she placed it on her desk beside the diaries. It looked innocuous, just her name scrawled in ink. But when she turned away, she swore she heard it rustle, as if trying to write itself back into place.

And in the silence of her room, far from the house, a whisper brushed her ear.

“You belong already.”

The slip of paper lay on Ananya’s desk like a small, sleeping animal. She had placed a glass paperweight over it, as if weight could tame ink, but the edges kept curling and uncurling the way leaves do before a storm. Through the window, Hedua’s afternoon wore its ordinary face—children dragging cricket bats, a hawker singing prices for guavas, tram bells dimming into distance—yet the room felt tuned to a frequency only she could hear, a low thrum that made the cups rattle faintly in their saucers. When she held her breath, the thrum aligned with her pulse, and for a moment she could swear the two were the same. She tried work to steady herself, transcribing catalogue notes from the previous day, but the nib of her pen kept snagging on the paper as if the page were skin resisting incision. Twice, her phone screen flashed to a black mirror and came back with her face a second late, the reflection lagging as though it had to travel from somewhere far away. On the third lag she saw a smear of light behind her, like a line of small flames, and when she turned there was only the blank wall and the faint scent of oil. It was the smell that broke her composure—the same mineral sweetness that had ghosted the lantern room under the stairs. She shoved the notebook aside, grabbed her bag, and fled to the street. The world snapped back into its noisy arrangement. She walked fast, letting Shyambazar’s muddle wash through her—street vendors arguing over change, a handcart stacked with tin trunks, a tea stall boiling milk into a caramel froth. At College Street she ducked into a secondhand shop whose shelves were stitched with dust and sun. The owner, a bearded man with ink-spotted fingers, looked up at her with the slow curiosity of someone who measures strangers like books. “Something specific?” he asked. “Old domestic manuals,” she said, the words surprising her as they came, “North Calcutta, rituals, lamps, anything that mentions memorial practice.” He smiled a little at the oddity but pointed her to a crate where pamphlets slept in elastic bands. She sat on the floor, elbows ash-white with dust, and read titles that sounded like abandoned recipes: Household Auspices for Ashwin, Lamp-Lit Shrines of the Old Quarters, Notes on Bhoot Chaturdashi. In a thin booklet printed in 1931 she found a paragraph that seized her. In several old households, a small chamber was kept for the “dip-kosh” or lamp-store, where wicks and oil were guarded against theft or drought. Some learned men believed these chambers to be repositories of memory: a “breath” might be held as a flame is held, to be guided or appeased. The line was more poetry than instruction, but it jolted her with recognition. A repository of breath. A breath held as flame. She bought the booklet and stepped back into the sun, feeling at once foolish and steadied by the shape of words that matched what she had seen. If there were practices, there were also people who had tended them—caretakers, trustees, clerks who wrote things down. And if there were trustees, there were records beyond the diaries. She went next to the trustees’ office, a peeling building off Beadon Street where a bored clerk read a newspaper at a desk greased with years of elbows. She introduced herself, cited her project, and asked to see contracts and staff rosters for the estate—especially caretakers. The clerk glanced at her badge, shrugged, and fetched a ledger with the sour patience of someone doing a favour he would later regret. The list of caretakers ran back unevenly—gaps of years, then a cluster of names—and beside each, in a column for “designation,” the word repeated until it became unseeable: Haran. Not a surname, not even a full given name in some entries, only that single word, followed by dates and signatures that looked taught by the same narrow hand. “It’s a title?” she asked. The clerk looked over the ledger and scratched his jaw. “My father said some posts in these old houses were like that,” he said. “Not a person. A role. Like gomashta, mashalchi. House likes the name. So the man who holds the lantern becomes Haran.” “Holds the lantern?” she said, too sharply. He shrugged again. “What else does a caretaker hold?” She copied dates until her fingers cramped. The list showed a long tenure ending in 1978 with the note “absent from duty.” After that, the entries grew erratic. Sometimes a Haran served for six months, sometimes a week. The last recorded one bore no end-date at all, only the words “present within grounds.” She closed the ledger, thanked the clerk, and walked out with the sensation of having stepped from a map into fog. If Haran was a role and not a man, then the figure she spoke to might be several men threaded through time, or a single duty that had taken on its own body. Perhaps both were true. She did not know which frightened her more. She needed a living witness, someone who had stood at the edge of the house and chosen away. At home she returned to the cloth notebooks and hunted for a voice that sounded like resistance. Near the middle of one, dated 1962 in a hand that bit the paper, she found a short sequence signed only “M.B.”: I heard them, as all hear them, but I did not answer. The trick is not to listen for words. The trick is to listen for the absences, the places where the house fails to remember. In that gap is your door. Another line three pages later: I left at dawn during Saraswati Puja when all lamps were already fed. My breath had other work to do. The initials clattered through her memory until they clicked against a name she had once filed in a footnote—Minati Bose, a daughter of the house’s branch family who had moved to Kumartuli and once donated clay to a school. It was a thin thread, but it was a thread. She found the address, crossed the mess of lanes where potters coaxed faces from mud, and climbed a narrow flight of stairs into a room hung with drying idols. An old woman sat on a charpai, hair the colour of ash, eyes sharp as glass under a cataract’s milk. “You carry the house on your shoulder,” she said without greeting, voice no louder than a brush on clay. “You smell of its oil.” Ananya sat without being asked. She told the truth in small pieces, leaving out only her midnight. Minati’s gaze neither soothed nor judged. “You pulled your name,” the old woman said when Ananya showed her the torn slip. “That is why everything is loose.” “Loose?” “The house is a miser,” Minati said. “It counts breath and step and shadow. Your lantern was its ledger line, a neat column. You tore the line. Now the sum is wrong. It will try to balance. It will write you again in walls and water and glass until you become tidy.” “How do I stay untidy?” The old woman’s laugh was a brittle thing. “By writing yourself first. Not with their ink. With yours. The diaries are not a record. They are a quill. Whoever writes there with the oil of their own lantern chooses the tense of their life. Past or future.” “But my lantern is dark,” Ananya whispered. “I tore my tag and the flame died.” “All flames are one flame when the house is hungry,” Minati said. “You will go at midnight, on a night that is not moon’s, and you will take back a drop of oil from the nearest lit name to yours. You will owe a debt to that breath, and you will pay it later with a labour it could not finish. Then you will write your line, not the house’s. And you will close the book before it closes you.” “And if I free them all?” The old woman’s eyes turned hard. “Do not free a river by breaking all its banks. It will drown the city that feeds you.” They were quiet a long time as the clay faces watched with their ready mouths. When Ananya rose to leave, Minati caught her wrist with surprising strength. “The house is not evil,” she said. “It is only exact. But those who serve it learn to enjoy the arithmetic. Do not let the keeper count you as profit.” The keeper. Haran. The role shaped like a man. Evening bruised the sky as she walked back. She meant to go home, to think, to draw a plan on clean paper, but the city tugged her feet towards the iron gates as a tide pulls to its own depth. The neem tree whispered. The gate gave. Inside, a damp wind slipped under her collar like a thief. He was waiting in the corridor, lantern steady, eyes pale and patient. For the first time she saw the lantern’s flame not as light but as a pinhole into something that moved behind it, a field of small, restless shadows. “You have been busy,” Haran said. She set her jaw. “So have you.” “You disturbed the books’ temper,” he said mildly. “They do not like being edited.” “I will write my own line,” she said. “With oil I choose.” For a moment his face was almost tender, like a teacher pleased with a difficult student. “Good,” he said. “Better than running. But your arithmetic is short by one. To take oil, you must step under. To step under, you must listen. And the listening is how the house keeps what it owns.” “And you?” she asked. “What do you keep?” The pale eyes gleamed. “Balance.” “You mean debt,” she said. “You mean profit.” He did not deny it. “Midnight,” he said instead. “Amavasya in two nights. The house will be attentive.” “And if I do not come?” “Then it will come,” he said, and for the first time his voice was almost gentle with pity. “It is learning your door.” She backed away from him, then past him, then out through the groaning gate. On Hedua Road a tram screamed and stopped because the driver swore someone stood on the tracks; people shouted, craned, cursed, but when Ananya looked there was only a thinning of air shaped like a girl with a satchel and it folded as she saw it, as if embarrassed to be caught. She went home with the sensation of being followed by her own outline. Night emptied the lanes. The slip of paper lay under the glass where she had left it. As she watched, the curled edge smoothed without touch, and a damp sheen spread over the letters of her name as though oil had been breathed upon it. The knock on her door was small and polite, a courtesy more frightening than force. She opened it to a corridor washed in weak light and the smell of neem. Haran stood at the threshold without crossing it, the lantern between them like a coin about to be turned. “Two nights,” he said. “Do not make the house do the asking.” And though she was the one inside and he was the one on the public hall, it felt to Ananya as if she were already standing at the top of the staircase, already descending, already hearing the voices shape the spaces where her breath might fit, and she knew with a clarity edged like glass that choosing was a thing that had to be done before the choosing happened, that she had one more day to remain untidy and then midnight would require her neatest handwriting.

The next day stretched thin, like cloth pulled too taut across a frame. Ananya moved through it in fragments—making tea, flipping through newspapers, pretending to read emails—while the slip of paper on her desk lay like a wound that refused to clot. The ink shimmered faintly when the sunbeam caught it, as though oil still pulsed beneath the strokes of her name. She thought of Minati Bose’s words: Write your own line before the house writes you. The thought tasted both dangerous and necessary.

By evening she forced herself to leave the flat. The noise of the city steadied her—children flying kites over Hedua’s park, a line of buses grumbling down Bidhan Sarani, men queuing for fish at the bazaar. She clung to the ordinariness, repeating names of streets like prayers. But beneath each sound hummed the rhythm of something waiting, measuring her footsteps, marking time until Amavasya.

She returned to Kumartuli, drawn again to Minati’s sharp eyes. The old woman sat before a half-painted clay idol, brush steady despite her tremor. “You came,” she said without surprise.

“I don’t understand how to take oil from another flame,” Ananya admitted. “How can I owe a debt to someone already gone?”

Minati’s laugh cracked like dry clay. “Gone? They are never gone. The house holds their breath as lanterns. To borrow from one is to agree to carry a fragment of their labour unfinished. Maybe a song unsung, a child unborn, a task abandoned. You will not know until it finds you.”

“And if I refuse?”

“Then the house will assign you a debt of its own choosing. And you will not like its arithmetic.”

Ananya felt the weight of inevitability settle. “And you, did you carry such a debt?”

Minati’s brush paused. “I did. I wove clay for a mother who died before finishing her idol. For years I shaped the same curve of jaw she had begun. Only when I could no longer lift my hands did I know I had paid her breath back.” Her eyes met Ananya’s, fierce despite age. “Do not imagine escape. Imagine bargain.”

When Ananya returned to her flat, dusk clung to the city like a bruise. She lit a lamp—not the house’s lantern, only her own brass diya—but even its small flame unsettled her. It wavered as though acknowledging a company she could not see. She turned the diaries open, staring at the empty space beneath the last entry. If she wrote her own line there, could she tilt the arithmetic? Could she name herself as belonging to the present, not the house?

Her pen hovered. But her hand froze at the thought of what Minati had warned—using the house’s books was like writing with its quill. If she mis-wrote even one word, she might chain herself more tightly. She shut the diary with a snap, chest heaving.

That night the dreams were worse. She walked endlessly down staircases that twisted into each other, each landing filled with lanterns bearing names. But one lantern bore not only her name but also her reflection inside its flame, lips moving though she could not hear the words. She woke gasping, the smell of oil thick in her nose.

The following day passed like a vigil. She did not eat much, did not speak to neighbours, only paced the rooms and tried to decide whether courage was returning or leaving. By evening she knew: she would go at midnight. Better to choose than to be chosen.

When the hour neared, she wrapped the diaries and slip of paper into her satchel and set out. The streets were unnaturally quiet for Amavasya, the sky moonless and heavy. Dogs slept in doorways. The tramlines gleamed but no bells rang. The gate of Shyambazar House opened without resistance this time, as if welcoming her back.

Haran waited at the base of the staircase, lantern steady. The flame inside it writhed faintly, as though aware of her. “You came,” he said.

“I’m here for the oil,” she replied, voice steadier than she felt.

He tilted his head. “The house will be generous tonight. Choose wisely.”

The descent was worse than before. Each step felt like sinking into a well of breath. The voices began faintly, then surged into a chorus, dozens speaking over each other, pleading, commanding, bargaining. Take mine… remember me… finish what I could not… The weight of them pressed on her skull until she thought her head would split.

At the bottom, the lantern chamber glowed brighter than before, each flame vivid against the dark. She scanned the tags, trembling. Some names were nearly erased by time. Others glared in fresh ink. Her own slip of paper had been returned to its lantern, as if her theft had been mended. The flame inside it fluttered hungrily.

She ignored it, forcing her gaze across the shelves until one name caught her: Kamala Dey, 1935. The flame within her lantern burned small but steady, almost patient. Ananya reached for it, fingers shaking. The moment her hand touched the glass, heat surged up her arm, filling her with a sudden vision—a woman grinding rice on a stone slab, song on her lips, cut short by a shadow falling across the courtyard. Then silence. Then nothing.

Ananya staggered, clutching her chest. The vision faded, but the echo of the song remained in her ears. She dipped her finger into the oil at the base of the lantern, the drop warm and slick, and quickly pressed it onto the slip with her name. The letters shimmered, and for a breathless moment she felt her name resist, then fuse with the oil.

The voices screamed, louder than before, but not all in anger. Some sounded like sighs of relief, some like laughter. Kamala’s flame pulsed brighter, as though thankful to be remembered.

Behind her, Haran’s lantern glowed steady. “Now you carry her,” he said. “Her labour unfinished is your debt.”

Ananya’s chest tightened. “And if I can’t find what it was?”

“You will,” he said simply. “The debt finds you.”

The chamber trembled. Dust rained from the ceiling. The lanterns flickered wildly, some guttering as though disturbed by a wind that was not there. Haran’s pale eyes fixed on her. “Leave now. The house has given you your line. Do not linger.”

She fled up the staircase, the voices chasing like waves. When she reached the corridor above, the walls pulsed with shadows, portraits grinning with stretched faces. She pushed past, clutching her satchel, heart pounding until the gate loomed before her once more.

The night air outside hit her like release. She staggered into the street, breath ragged. But even there, far from the house, she still heard it: a woman’s voice humming a half-finished tune, waiting for her to complete it.

Through the morning the tune followed her like a thread that snagged on everything—on kettle steam, on tram bells, on the slow scrape of a neighbour’s broom. It came as three notes and a pause, three notes and a longer pause, a little rise at the end, the way women keep breath spare while grinding rice. At first Ananya tried to drown it in the radio—film songs, an advertisement for a coaching centre, a cricket update that crackled with bad reception—but the humming slid underneath, patient and exact, and soon it was her mouth making the sound without permission. When she caught herself she tasted oil, the mineral sweetness Minati had named. She rinsed her mouth and it came back. She sat at the desk, lifted her pen to copy yesterday’s catalogue lines, and the nib traced the rhythm instead of the letters; when she looked down, the ink on the page had arranged itself into little crescents like wicks. She slammed the notebook shut and the slip with her name shivered beneath the paperweight, its sheen deepening as if the drop of oil she had pressed into it were waking. At the sink she ground mustard with a pestle to make lunch and the pestle’s circular scrape matched the tune perfectly, so perfectly that she felt another set of hands inside her hands, smaller, more practised, dragging time around the stone. She froze. The scrape continued a heartbeat after she lifted the pestle. The sound stopped only when she whispered, without knowing why, “Kamala, thak.” The room steadied as if a held note had been released. She ate nothing, only drank water and felt it settle inside her like a still lantern. Then she fled the flat with the diaries in her bag, walking quickly without direction until her feet found College Street. At a stall that sold music books and harmoniums the owner looked up from tuning a reed and grinned around a clamped matchstick. “You look like you’ve been chased by a raga,” he said. She asked for collections of folk work-songs, women’s grinding songs, anything from the thirties. He sighed at the specificity but began to rummage under the counter, producing thin booklets whose staples had bled rust through their spines. She hummed the three notes and the pause. He frowned, then hummed it back, slower, testing its bones. “Not quite bhatiyali,” he murmured. “Closer to a boli gaan, the house-songs they’d sing while preparing rice. North Calcutta had its own cadences, you know, less river-wide, more courtyard-small.” He found an out-of-print chapbook with a woodcut of mortar and pestle on the cover, Griho Sangeet: 1928. In the margins someone had pencilled variants of lyrics, women’s names next to dates like tiny private calendars. Midway through, Ananya saw a melody line that sat exactly where the tune had been tugging her breath, and beneath it, a scrap of lyric unfinished: “Stone turns white, hands turn red—” and then a blank, only the faint impression of letters erased. On the page’s bottom edge a name was written and scratched and written again as if the writer had been unsure whether to reveal it: K D. She felt the back of her neck prickle as if a match had been struck there. “Take it,” the owner said. “Fifteen rupees more for the drama in your eyes.” She paid, stepped into the sun with the booklet pressed to her chest, and almost ran into a man selling secondhand gramophone records from a satchel. He was singing snatches to advertise, switching keys like a juggler. When he caught her humming he grinned. “Aunty, you know that one? My dida used to sing it while beating rice. She called it the red-hand song. If the last line comes, the pestle stops by itself—old joke, old magic.” “Do you know the last line?” The man shrugged. “No one ever sang past the pause. They’d laugh and make one up. Why?” She walked away without answering, the city’s noise turning to a kind of static against which the little tune grew steadier, confident now that it had been named. By the time she reached Hedua she could hear words behind the notes, syllables pressing against her teeth like children crowding a door. She bought chalk from a stationery shop and on her desk she drew the mortar’s circle, then wrote the three notes in crude staff on it, then wrote the half-line beneath. When she placed the slip with her name on the circle’s centre, the chalk powder darkened as if damp had risen through the wood. The air cooled. Somewhere far off a conch blew for evening prayer. She waited. The next word arrived not as sound but as pressure in the mouth, the shape a tongue makes before a syllable—ja… She closed her eyes and let the old tune show her its teeth. “Stone turns white, hands turn red—ja—” She couldn’t find the rest. Frustration jolted through her body like a match in a dry room. She snatched up the diaries and the chapbook and went to Minati. Clay faces shone with thin sheen under a low bulb; the old woman was combing the idol’s hair with a paintbrush, coaxing line from line. Without preamble Ananya hummed. Minati’s eyes softened, then sharpened. “Ah,” she said. “A work that hung mid-air. She was taken between word and word.” “How do I finish it?” “You don’t,” Minati said, and at Ananya’s despairing look, added, “You let it finish through you. The last line isn’t a word; it’s an act. The song stops until the work is done. That’s why they left it blank. Blank means do it now.” “What work?” “Look at your hands.” Ananya looked. The ridges of her palms were pink as if scrubbed too hard, and a dusting of powder—chalk or rice—had settled in her nail beds although she had washed them. “Kamala ground rice for offerings,” Minati said. “Maybe she was grinding to make pithas for someone who would not come home. Maybe she was grinding for a goddess whose mouth never closes. Maybe she was grinding to hear her own breath make time. Your debt might be small as flour or large as a life.” “Small, please,” Ananya said, and hated the childishness in her voice. Minati smiled not unkindly. “Watch where the tune leads your feet.” Ananya left into a night that felt nailed down by the absence of moon. She did not intend to go to the house and yet each turn delivered her to its street. The neem tree’s leaves made their patient clatter. The iron gate held steady as if waiting to judge her touch. She did not touch it. Instead she walked past, to the lane behind where a side wall sagged like an old shoulder and a cracked window looked onto darkness. The humming grew brighter in her throat, the three notes burning like a wick. From inside the house came a single knock, not at a door but inside a wall. Then another, slow, measured, like pestle on stone. The window fogged and cleared as if something inside breathed on it. On the fog, a finger drew a circle. Ananya raised her chalk booklet against the grille and pressed the circle she had drawn to the circle drawn by breath. The two marks matched. She did not think; she acted. She went home at a half-run, pulled the mortar from below the sink, rinsed it and placed it on the floor over the chalk circle, poured rice into it until the grain gleamed like little teeth, and set her palms on the pestle. The tune steadied her grip, the rhythm turning her arms into a metronome. As she ground, heat gathered in her shoulders, a fatigue that was not her own pooling in her elbows. The pestle grew heavier with each turn until it felt like she was dragging a planet around a small sun. She ground through the first pause, through the second, until the air in the room thickened with the smell of wet starch and oil and a sweetness that was memory rather than sugar. The grain took the paste’s sheen; her hands reddened; the mortar’s rim wore a white line like chalk. The tune moved towards its last shape. “Stone turns white, hands turn red—” She waited, pestle hovering. The last word rose from somewhere below the floor. “—rise.” It was absurd and perfect; the paste would rise when steamed, the woman would rise from the floor, the breath would rise from the lantern. Ananya said it aloud and the pestle stopped as if a hand had caught it, and the room exhaled. From the balcony, a faint anklet-sound ran the length of the rail and stilled. She tasted relief as clearly as spice. On the desk, the slip of paper with her name absorbed its own sheen, drank it in, lay dull and ordinary as if the oil had gone somewhere it was meant to go. She looked around for Kamala and found only a slackening of air where a body might have leaned. Then the lights flickered and steadied and Haran’s knock—two small courtesy taps—came at her door. She opened it and he filled the threshold like a definition she had been avoiding. The lantern’s flame was low, a dot with breath. His eyes took in the mortar, the red of her palms, the stiff curve of her shoulders. He nodded once, the way bookkeepers nod when a column has balanced. “You paid a line,” he said. “Not the whole ledger.” “I will not let you keep the rest,” she said, surprising herself with the calm in her voice. “I will write my own.” “You already are,” he said. “Do you hear how the house has begun to hum in your walls?” She listened. From somewhere behind the paint came the faintest vibration, not threatening, not kind, only exact. “It is learning your address,” he said. “It is learning your hours, your pauses. When you come tomorrow, the staircase will ask more than a tune.” “What will it ask?” “Proof,” he said. “Of belonging or refusal. Our arithmetic is patient but not infinite.” “Whose arithmetic?” “The keeper’s,” he said, and for the first time she saw that the pronoun did not sit perfectly on him, that he wore it like a borrowed garment. The lantern’s dot flinched and brightened as if a draught had touched it from within, and for an instant the flame’s shape showed not light but a whorl of stacked names like grains of rice. She shut her eyes and saw Kamala’s hands rinse clean in a basin, saw the paste spread in thin circles, saw steam rising from cloth. When she opened them Haran was still there, lantern between them like a coin that had two heads and no tails. “When the house asks for proof,” she said, “does it ever accept a story?” His smile was brief and not unkind. “Sometimes a story is the only proof that moves its numbers.” He stepped back into the corridor, and the smell of neem followed him like a rule. “Tomorrow,” he said, “when the gate opens without your hand, do not thank it. It thinks in favors and returns.” When she closed the door the tune did not return. The mortar sat with its white rim like a moon that had learned to be small. She washed her hands and red bled into pink and then into her own colour. On the desk the diaries waited, and for the first time since she had entered the house she felt something that was not fear rise through her—an archivist’s stubborn joy at matching a fragment to a name. She opened to the blank beneath the last line and, with a pen that had no oil in it, wrote in a hand that belonged to neither the house nor Haran: “The debt of Kamala Dey—one song completed, one labour repaid. Ananya Roy remains uncounted.” The words shivered as if a small wind passed under them and then lay still. Somewhere across Shyambazar, a lantern went out so quietly no one would have believed it had been lit.

The following day began with a kind of taut stillness. The city bustled in its usual rhythm—trams scraping their rails, hawkers crying out the price of hilsa, children with schoolbags darting past—but for Ananya each sound carried a faint undertone, like a shadow harmony. The hum Minati had warned of seemed to have settled inside her walls, a quiet accounting that tallied her breath, her steps, even the pauses between her thoughts. She kept glancing at the diaries on her desk, half-expecting them to flip open of their own accord. They did not. But the slip of paper with her name remained dull, lifeless now, the drop of oil absorbed. Proof of one bargain settled. Proof of others yet to come.

She tried to resist the pull of the house that day, deliberately immersing herself in errands. She walked the length of College Street, buying cheap notebooks, listening to the booksellers’ chatter. She ate phuchkas at a stall, the sour tamarind water sharp enough to remind her of her body. She lingered in Hedua Park, watching boys bowl makeshift cricket balls that kept skipping into the pond. But every diversion frayed too quickly, and by late afternoon she found herself walking toward Shyambazar with the resigned certainty of someone answering an exam bell.

The house loomed unchanged. The neem tree’s leaves rattled although the air was still. This time the gate swung open by itself before she touched it. She remembered Haran’s words: When the gate opens without your hand, do not thank it. She did not. She stepped inside.

The corridor was darker than usual, the portraits’ eyes gleaming as though varnished anew. Her lamp flared once and steadied. Haran stood halfway down the hall, lantern at chest height. “The house has adjusted its numbers,” he said. “Kamala’s line has closed. Now it will seek proof.”

“Proof of what?”

“Whether you belong as record or as writer.”

Ananya tightened her grip on her satchel. “And if I prove I am the writer?”

His pale eyes reflected the flame. “Then you will have to keep writing. The house does not forget quills once dipped.”

He led her to the staircase again. The descent felt different this time—not like sinking, but like being watched by a ledger that clicked each step into its columns. The voices began earlier, not indistinct this time but sharper, clearer. She heard names—Ramesh, Bhattacharya, Haran, Kamala—each spoken as if summoned for attendance. Then came a pause, and her own name filled the air, not whispered but declared.

At the base, the lantern chamber glowed brighter than before. Flames leapt against the glass, oil shimmered in little bowls beneath. Ananya braced herself. This time she did not go to the shelves at once. She set her lamp on the floor, pulled the diaries from her bag, and opened to the page where she had written the night before. The words were still there: Ananya Roy remains uncounted. The ink looked ordinary, but the air trembled faintly above it.

The chamber reacted. Several lanterns flickered violently, their light spiking against the walls. Voices surged, a tide of protest. One wailed like a child, another roared like a man drowning. Haran’s lantern remained steady. He looked at her with something close to approval. “You have unsettled it. Good.”

“What proof does it want now?” she demanded.

“Your refusal must balance with a belonging. You denied its claim on you. So you must claim something of it in return.”

Her stomach twisted. “Claim what?”

Haran raised his lantern toward the shelves. “Choose a flame not of debt but of kin. Bind yourself to a line that makes you larger, not smaller. Or else the house will write you as subtraction.”

Ananya stared at the rows of names, each glowing, each waiting. She remembered Minati’s warning—do not free a river by breaking all its banks. To choose one was to inherit its story. To choose none was to risk being erased.

She stepped forward, scanning the slips. The voices crowded her ears, some pleading, some commanding. Then her gaze caught one: M.B., 1962. The initials she had seen in the cloth notebook. The one who had written, The trick is to listen for the absences. She reached for it.

The moment her fingers touched the lantern, silence fell. All other voices cut off, as if someone had slammed shut a hundred mouths. The flame inside flared once, then steadied into a thin, unwavering line. A presence slid into her chest—not a song this time, but a listening, a stillness that felt like standing in a room where every sound had been erased.

Haran nodded. “Minati Bose,” he said softly. “You have chosen well. She escaped by absence. Now her absence lives in you.”

Ananya’s pulse thudded. She whispered, “She is alive. I spoke to her.”

Haran’s mouth curved into something that was not quite a smile. “Did you? Or did you speak to what lingered after she left her lantern? The house allows echoes when it is amused.”

Ananya’s skin prickled. She thought of the clay faces in Kumartuli, of Minati’s fierce eyes. Could it be she had been speaking to a shadow, a debt still unfinished?

The lantern’s flame pulsed once in her hand, and the air pressed against her ears with a heavy silence. She realized this was the proof the house sought—not a word, not a tune, but the act of listening without being consumed.

She placed the lantern back, her hand shaking. The silence receded slightly, replaced by the faint murmur of the others. But the imprint of absence remained inside her, a hollow where her heartbeat echoed louder than it should.

Haran’s pale eyes studied her. “Now you are both debtor and keeper. The house will watch what you write.”

“I didn’t ask for this.”

“No one does,” he said. “But some lines write themselves.”

She turned, clutching her satchel, and fled up the staircase. The house did not resist her this time. The gate swung open as she approached, but she did not thank it.

On the street outside, the city had fallen unnaturally quiet, though it was not yet midnight. Shop shutters were drawn, stray dogs lay with their heads low, and the tramlines gleamed in stillness. The absence pressed around her, following her home, settling into her walls like a second skin.

When she finally sat at her desk, she found herself writing without thought: The debt of Minati Bose—absence carried, silence recorded. Ananya Roy remains uncounted.

The ink shimmered once, then lay still. But the silence in the room deepened, and she knew the house had not finished with her yet.

That night the silence would not let her sleep. It was not the absence of sound but a presence of stillness, a weight that pressed against her ears until the tick of the wall clock vanished, until the city’s hum fell away, until even her own breath seemed muffled by cloth. She lay in the dark, heart racing, and understood that this was Minati’s gift—her absence now lived inside Ananya, an inner hollow into which noise was swallowed. At first she feared it would drive her mad. But after hours of tossing she realized the silence had its edges. She could push against it. She could shape it.

She sat up, switched on her desk lamp, and held a glass of water. When she moved it deliberately across the table, the clink should have rung. Instead the sound died in the air, vanishing into her chest. She tried again, knocking the glass harder. The silence absorbed it, leaving only a faint vibration under her ribs. She pressed her hands together and clapped sharply. The silence swallowed it whole. She laughed—quietly, though even that fell inward. She could carry absence, direct it.

The next day she tested it on the street. As she walked across Hedua, children shouted around her game of cricket. She concentrated on the hollow inside her, and their voices dulled as though cotton had been pressed into her ears. When she loosened her focus, the noise returned in a rush. She repeated it with tram bells, vendor calls, even the squabble of crows over garbage. The silence obeyed her like a lens closing and opening. Power prickled at her skin, a dangerous satisfaction.

But by evening she felt the house stir in response. The slip of paper on her desk, long dull, now glistened faintly, as though oil was seeping back. Her entry—Ananya Roy remains uncounted—quivered on the page of the diary, the ink trembling as if rewritten by an invisible hand. She slammed the book shut. Too late. The house had noticed her testing its gifts.

She should have stayed home, but compulsion dragged her to the gates at dusk. They opened without her touch. Haran was waiting in the corridor, lantern steady. His pale eyes flickered as though they saw more than her outline.

“You’ve begun to use it,” he said.

“It was given to me.”

“Everything given is also owed.”

“I repaid Kamala’s debt.”

“And inherited Minati’s absence,” he said. “Do you imagine absence does not cost? To erase sound is to erase witness. To erase witness is to erase proof. Already the house is unsettled. It wants balance.”

Ananya gritted her teeth. “What balance?”

He lifted the lantern, flame shivering. “It will ask the proof of your story. If you silence too much, the house cannot write you. If it cannot write you, it will come in person to claim you.”

As if summoned, the corridor groaned. The portraits’ faces seemed to warp, mouths stretching silently, eyes widening with something like hunger. Ananya felt the silence inside her swell in self-defense, pulling the groan inward until the hall fell unnaturally still. The portraits froze. Dust hung motionless in the air. Even Haran’s lantern flame stilled, caught mid-flicker.

She gasped, clutching her chest. She had pulled silence over the house itself.

Haran’s voice broke the stillness, low but urgent. “Do not use it here. The house notices.”

But already the staircase stirred, its banister rattling, its steps trembling as if something immense was climbing upward. A pressure built, not sound but its shadow, the shape of a roar too large to be heard. Ananya stumbled back, silence breaking, and noise rushed into the hall again—wood groaning, glass rattling, voices crying from the lantern room below.

She fled out the gate, heart hammering, the hum of absence still clinging to her skin. That night she dreamt of the house walking on legs of neem, its windows opening like mouths, its lanterns swinging like eyes.

The following morning she sought Minati again, desperate for counsel. The old woman listened, brush poised over clay. “You are learning too fast,” she said. “Absence is not a tool. It is a space. If you fill it with power, it will collapse.”

“Then how do I use it?”

“Use it to refuse, not to control. Refuse what the house tells you. Refuse what it writes. That is the only arithmetic it cannot complete.”

“But Haran said the house will come in person.”

Minati’s gaze hardened. “Then you must decide before it arrives: will you be record, or writer? You cannot be both forever.”

Ananya returned home with the words echoing. By nightfall she knew she would not be allowed a choice of timing. The diaries rattled on her desk, covers opening, pages flipping without wind. Her entry blurred, the words Ananya Roy remains uncounted dissolving into smudges. From the corner of her eye she saw movement—a dark shape by the door, tall, shoulders brushing the frame.

She turned slowly. Haran stood there, lantern in hand. But his pale eyes glowed brighter than ever, almost fevered. “It comes tonight,” he said.

“What comes?”

“The house itself. Not whispers. Not lanterns. It will ask you directly. And I…” His voice faltered. For the first time he looked less like a keeper and more like a man cracking under weight. “…I may not protect you.”

The slip of paper on her desk curled upward, edges blackening as if touched by flame. The walls groaned. Somewhere far off, a chorus of voices rose—not whispers, not murmurs, but a single gathering shout.

Ananya clutched her satchel. The silence inside her stirred, ready to rise like a tide.

And the Shyambazar House began to arrive.

It arrived without footsteps, the way darkness arrives—by removing the alternative. The walls thickened; the paint learned how to breathe; the ceiling lowered until the fan’s shadow touched Ananya’s hair. Her flat’s door did not open, yet the corridor extended inward, bringing with it the smell of neem and old oil and a faint tang like wet brass. The diaries on her desk flicked themselves to the last page and held there, the words she had written trembling as if seen through heat. Haran stood inside the room now though she had not seen him cross the threshold, lantern cupped against his chest, pale eyes brightened to a feverish glaze. “It wants its answer,” he said, and the voice that followed his did not come from his mouth but from the room itself, from cloth, from wood, from water in the glass on the table—Belong or vanish. Record or refuse. We will not leave you uncounted. Ananya felt the new hollow in her chest—the absence she carried from Minati—rise to meet the demand like a muscle flexing. Noise collapsed; the hum of the city dissolved; even the flame in Haran’s lantern held perfectly still as if a photograph had trapped it. In that pocket of silence she heard her own heartbeat clearly and, behind it, the ghost-syllables of Kamala’s finished song, not tugging now but settled, like a curtain drawn over a window at dusk. “You were never meant to be a prison,” she said into the hush. “You were a dip-kosh, a house of flame to guard breath in famine and flood. Men who liked accounts twisted you into a ledger.” The room listened with the attention of a creditor. The silence wavered; sound began to leak back through its edges; the lantern’s flame twitched. Haran’s mouth tilted into an almost-smile. “Words are not arithmetic,” he murmured. “Tell a story if you want. But the columns stay.” “Sometimes a story is the only proof that moves numbers,” she said, and his eyes flinched as if a stone had grazed them. She slung her satchel over her shoulder, scooped up the diaries, and walked out—past the door that had not opened yet opened, down the staircase her building did not possess until it did, across a corridor that smelled of the house though it belonged to none, and then she was on Bidhan Sarani without crossing it, and then she was at the iron gates, and they parted before her like curtains that had been waiting for her hands. Inside, Shyambazar House had set its lights like teeth. Portrait eyes gleamed; boards flexed; the staircase seemed to lengthen in a slow drawing breath. She kept the silence inside her steady, not to crush the house but to hold her outline true against it, and descended. The lantern room burned brighter than any night she had seen. Names flamed; oil trembled; voices rose in braided threads that tightened as she stepped through them. Haran stood at her shoulder with his own flame held low, and for a moment she saw that what he carried was not one lantern but an illusion of unity: a hundred little mouths bound together into the shape of a single light, the keeper’s profit. “Balance,” he said softly, and in the word she heard its other name—control. The house’s voice gathered from rafters and shelves and the iron bands of the door: Be counted or be erased. She placed the diaries on the floor, opened the newest volume, and did the unadvised thing; she took out the small brass diya from her bag—the one she had lit in her own room—and pricked her fingertip with a paperclip until a bead of blood sat like red punctuation. She touched the wick with her blood, then with oil from the diya, and lit it. The flame that bloomed did not smell like the house’s oil; it smelled of mustard and cotton and her own skin warmed by fear. She dipped her pen in that light as though it were ink and bent to the page. The first line steadied her hand: A record that refuses is still a record. The voices surged in outrage. She wrote faster. This house will keep breath as remembrance, not as debt. Lanterns shall release when the labour named is completed, or when called by willing kin. Consent is the wick; without it no flame shall hold. The shelf nearest her rattled; glass chimed; a slip of paper caught fire and went dark and the voice tied to it sighed like sleep. Haran stepped forward, lantern lifted as if to snuff or strike. “You do not set rules,” he said, and for the first time his steadiness frayed. “Rules set you.” “No,” she said without looking up. “Men set you and called themselves rules.” She turned a page, blood warming the nib to a stubborn shine. The name Haran is a duty, not a person. Duty will not feed on those it counts. Ledger closed: April 1978. Lantern returned to sky: paid. The flame in his hand guttered violently, flared, guttered again, and in its pulse she saw a staircase, a lantern on a step, a man turning to answer a call that contained his own name like a hook. His face changed—not in feature but in depth, a shadow peeling away from a wall. For a second he looked smaller, younger, startled by the lightness in his fingers as a single wick winked out within the many. “Careful,” he whispered, and it was the first word he had spoken that sounded like pain. The house struck then. Not with wind or flame, but with memory itself. Images slammed into her—Kamala’s courtyard, Minati’s clay-slick hands, the pale line on the mortar’s rim, Ramesh’s bare feet on the east corridor—and each image tried to write her name under it as if to claim her as caption. The silence inside her buckled. She nearly dropped the pen. She remembered Minati’s instruction—use absence to refuse, not control—and let it open just enough to hollow the room around her, not denying what she saw but denying its ownership of her. The images dimmed to photographs; the captions lost their ink. She wrote on. A keeper may keep only what asks to be kept. All else is witness. I, Ananya Roy, am witness. I remain uncounted. I will write until the ledger forgets to hunger. The words shook so hard she thought the letters would leap from the page, but the flame of her own diya steadied, as if a thumb pressed it from behind. All at once the lanterns erupted: some went out in soft, astonished breaths; some blazed, bright for a heartbeat, then narrowed to fine needles of light and disappeared as if stitched into an invisible cloth; some held, patient, as if waiting for their labour to be named. The chorus of voices split into its elements—laughter, weeping, a prayer half-sung, a scolding mother’s hiss, the flatly polite tone of a clerk saying received—and then drew down and down until the room sounded like a throat learning how to swallow. Haran’s lantern dimmed to a thin ring of fire. In its circle she saw a hundred small ledgers closing like eyelids. He stared at her as if seeing a new arithmetic, and it made him weary. “If you write this,” he said, “you will have to stand here when others come. You will have to keep saying no to the house, and yes to the ones who want to be only remembered. That is the dullest heroism I know.” “I’m an archivist,” she said. “Dull is where we live.” She signed her name—not in the house’s ink, not under its columns, but along the lower margin like a note a reader leaves for a future reader. The flame of her diya leaned toward the page, kissed the signature, and then straightened. The room waited. The house, for the first time, felt like a building again—floors and walls and a stair that groaned because wood groans, not because memory pushes it. A breeze found the iron-banded door and made a sound like relief passing through teeth. She stood slowly, every muscle trembling now that the need to be steady had left her. One by one she walked the shelves. She did not wrench tags or smash glass. She simply touched the slips with her fingertip and spoke what lay unfinished when she could see it: Make the sweets, sing the line, write the letter, deliver the umbrella. Some flames rose and vanished as if rising were a word being completed; others held; a few refused to change at all, stubborn as old accounts. She left those for another day. When she turned, Haran was watching with a care that had no hunger in it. He held his lantern at waist height and looked smaller inside its circle, less carved from duty. “Ledger closed,” she said gently, and the thin ring in his lamp went out. For a moment he was only a man in a dark corridor with tired eyes. Then he bowed his head—a practical, almost shy gesture—and stepped back until the shadows took him like a tide that had finally found its gravity. She climbed to the corridor above, her own diya cupped in both hands. The portraits, relieved of their extra eyes, looked only like paint. The gate did not open for her; she pushed it, and it yielded with a human squeal. Dawn had threaded the lanes pink. A chai seller yawned; a conch blew for someone’s prayer; a tram bell rang like a spoon on a glass. She walked home through that softening noise and stopped at Kumartuli. Minati’s room stood open, clay faces catching the first light. On the charpai lay a shawl folded with a care that belonged to hands that wanted to leave order behind. A young man sweeping the floor said without looking up, as if continuing a story already begun, “Dida slept easy last night, like the idols after immersion.” Ananya touched the shawl and felt no echo, only cloth. At her desk she opened the diary once more. The page did not shiver. Under her last line she wrote: This house remembers by letting go. Then she slid the volume into her satchel, set her diya on the windowsill, and listened to the city take attendance of the living. The silence inside her did not vanish; it settled into a room she could visit when she needed to refuse. Evening would come, and with it other names, other small labours uncompleted, other flames that wanted witness more than shelter. She would go. She would write. She would not be counted. And when the gate opened without her hand, she would not thank it.

END