"The air was still, the lamps were lit,
But truth walked quiet, never fit.
Two wandered where the echoes hum,
To places where the lost ones come.
They searched with eyes, but not with sight
For not all wrong is seen in light."
The morning in Bhairavpur tried very hard to be ordinary.
Sunlight poured over tiled roofs and smoked chimneys like a warm hand across skin. Dust motes hung in the light and turned slowly as if reluctant to fall. Somewhere a goat bleated and a rooster decided, belatedly, to join the day. Clay lamps winked under low verandas; a boy's laugh—bright and quick—faded down a lane and was swallowed by the houses. Even the breeze seemed courteous, carrying smells of frying spices and wet soil.
It was the kind of morning that begged for photographs and captions. It was the kind of morning that made people remember what mornings were supposed to feel like.
Kabir woke from a shallow, jagged sleep. He had expected stiffness, the dull ache of injured muscles, but for the first few seconds he could not place the small, persistent wrongness at the edges of his awareness—only the memory of trees slamming into metal and the smell of petrol. He had slept fitfully, eyes snapping open at imagined sounds, then closing again because everyone else slept in the same shared room, breathing like evidence that the world continued in orderly fashion.
He had told himself he'd slept poorly because of the accident, not because the room had been watched.
He could not say when those small suspicions had become opinions, then worries. When he drew the curtain back, he saw nothing more than fog and the crooked branch of a neem tree—yet the sense of someone having been there remained sticky on the skin.
"Feeling poetic, Kabir?" Priya teased as she tied her hair. Her voice had the practiced brightness of someone who took pictures first and thought later.
He attempted to smile. It did not reach his mouth. "Just tired," he lied.
The group split, as planned. Yashpal and Rohit wanted the fields—"For science and the inevitable drone shots," Yashpal said; Rohit wanted nothing but a story to narrate later with bravado. Meghna and Saanvi went toward the temple. Diya hovered near the doorway like a small, nervous lighthouse, watching Abhay who had kept to himself since they arrived.
Abhay sat on an overturned crate by the schoolyard, small notepad in hand, pen poised though nothing came out of it. He watched people the way someone listens through a door—attentive, cautious. Diya drifted to his side and leaned in without asking. She had always been the friend who asked the quiet question when others celebrated the loud ones.
"You okay?" she asked, casual. There was no prying; only a check-in.
Abhay blinked, as if surfacing. "I'm fine," he said. The words were automatic, practiced. His face told a slightly different story—there was a distance there, like a film over an otherwise ordinary gaze. Diya caught that flicker and—because she was the kind person who tended to small alarms—she offered him her thermal flask.
He accepted it with two fingers, thumb brushing her knuckles. He gave no smile.
"Don't try to be mysterious," Diya said softly. "Weird people are boring."
He allowed a tiny, reluctant grin. It lasted no longer than a breath.
Kabir found Priya at the schoolhouse, fingers tracing the chalk-ghost letters on the slate that no one yet understood. The spirals—childlike grooves carved into desks and the undersides of window sills—had made him uneasy. They were repeated, obsessive, like someone practicing a secret signature.
Inside the classroom the dust lay thin and suspiciously even. The blackboard still had erased marks that read like half-remembered sentences. There were no cobwebs in corners you would expect them to be—only an immaculate dryness, an order that did not belong to an abandoned place.
"This place is staged," Priya whispered, "like someone cleaned it yesterday."
"Like someone wanted it to look lived in without leaving fingerprints," Kabir added. He crouched and ran a finger over a spiral; it was warm to the touch, not with human heat but as if it had retained the day's sun. He felt, briefly, that the carvings were not meant to be read—they were meant to be seen by something that recognizes shapes rather than words.
They moved on. The well waited at the village's edge, old bricks blackened by rain and time. A crude board read: Closed. Unsafe. The pulley hung, broken in half.
"What's with wells and ominous signs?" Rohit joked as he joined them, hobbling a little where his ribs protested. He put on a grin for the camera Priya had already raised.
Kabir peered down into the black ring. He held a pebble at the edge and dropped it, listening for the splash. There was no splash. Instead, a thin metallic hum rose from the shaft—too consistent to be echo, too deep to be wind.
Priya frowned. "That's not normal," she said, voice small.
An old woman appeared as if conjured by the sound itself. She stood a few paces away, hands folded. Her sari was a faded green, threadbare at the hem. A rust-colored mole marked the curve beneath her left eye. She did not blink when Kabir greeted her.
"Don't go down," she said to them in a voice like a dry reed. "It never gives back what it takes."
"Sorry?" Kabir started, half-laughing at the theatricality. For a moment they all expected a hammy local to break character.
But the woman turned and walked away without a rustle of her sari against leaves. No trail of footprints. No sound of feet. She simply dissolved into the lane like a page being turned.
The thing about Bhairavpur was that small, ordinary transactions between people—childhood banter, a shopkeeper's negotiation, someone lending a ladder—had the lightness of ritual. Villagers smiled, fixed their gaze politely, offered water. Someone pointed them toward a schoolroom where travelers stayed; a man in a turban gave directions in a tone that assumed they belonged. The group accepted the kindness like a balm.
But the kindness was always just a fraction behind the moment, as if catching up to itself. A greeting would arrive a heartbeat late. When they asked a question, the answer sat on the lips of the speaker for a second too long before being offered, like a delayed act. Children laughed and then paused mid-laugh as if remembering something more important. Someone would pass a cup and their fingers would brush the other's hand for an almost imperceptible length of time—then retract as though surprised to have touched skin.
Small misalignments collected into a larger unease—a clock with its hands stopped, a rooster that crowed when no one expected it, a dog that watched and did not bark. Priya tried to take a photograph and found the image on her screen slightly blurred at the edges, as though the village refused to be framed cleanly.
That evening the group reconvened at the common courtyard near the shrine. The villagers had prepared rice and lentils—simple, generous. They ate together, the group's small injuries bandaged with the casual competence of people who help each other out of habit. Conversations flickered between practical checks—"Can you lift that?"—and the safer things people said to cover fear: jokes, plans for morning, even goofy bets about who would be brave enough to climb the old banyan tree.
When the flames of the communal lamp guttered low, Kabir drifted toward Abhay who had been watching the shadows grow long and strange.
"You sure you're okay?" Kabir asked again, softer this time.
Abhay's reply was a single, quiet sentence: "I remember the sound of my house burning. For months I smelled something and thought someone would come and say it was a dream." He said it like one name among many.
Diya, who was standing beside him, heard and reached out to put a hand on his shoulder. She didn't ask for details. She simply held it there—steady and small and human—while the others laughed too loud at a joke about ghost snacks.
The lamp's light moved across their faces and washes of shadow pooled where the walls met. The air, which had been warm and welcoming at noon, felt less so now—cloying, like the sweetness of a fruit that begins to rot from the inside.
They were comfortable enough to think themselves safe.
They were comfortable enough, even, to sleep.
And while they did, the village listened.
"Some places pretend to rest.
Some eyes do not blink.
And some wells do not give echoes
Because they are already too full."