"A list is a promise the hand makes to time;
erase the strokes and the promise becomes a hunger."
The day after the split felt like a bruise—dull, aching, and impossible to ignore. The small finds from each pair lay on the table in the haveli's main room like evidence on a mortuary slab: the ledger from the market, the child's locket from the field, the photographs with spirals over smiling faces, Meghna's torn page from the temple ledger. Each object hummed in the quiet as if it carried a small, private complaint.
They started by laying everything out and trying to speak like people who believed language could still bind reality.
Yashpal methodically set the items in lines, his need for order a thin comfort. "If we cross-reference dates and photos, we can make a timeline. It'll either be human-made or it'll be nonsense." He paused, scanning faces. "But there's pattern here. Spirals. Names. Repetition."
Priya thumbed through her images until her fingers cramped. "There's overlap we didn't notice. Same background pattern in three frames. Same splinter marks on window ledges." She swallowed. "It's like the village is copying itself."
Kabir ran a hand over the ledger's cover. It felt warm under his palm as if it had just been handled. He looked at the group. "We either burn it, or we understand it. I don't like burning unknown things."
Rohit snorted. "And I don't like being catalogued like someone else's museum piece." He shoved a chair back. "If this is alive, it will fight back. I say we get out."
Meghna closed her eyes. "If we leave, we take nothing but what we remember. And memory here is already mistrustful."
Diya didn't say much. She watched everyone, then reached for a small notebook someone had kept—just a cheap, softbound thing they'd used to note injuries and who had what scratch. They had joked about making a "reality ledger" of their own: names, wounds, a baseline of what truly belonged to them. Now the joke was a plan.
They agreed to make the notebook their record—a small map of themselves to check what the village altered.
One by one they wrote:
Kabir — cut forehead (left temple), bruised shoulder, limp right wrist.
Saanvi — sprained ankle (right), two scratches on shin.
Rohit — rib contusion, split lip.
Yashpal — forehead bruise, minor concussion symptoms.
Meghna — wrist sprain, dust in lungs.
Priya — temple cut, hair with glass flecks.
Diya — nothing visible, small nausea at night.
Abhay — no cuts, no bruises.
Abhay wrote his entry himself, precise and calm.
They signed and dated the page, a brittle ritual of ownership. This was their truth, they said aloud, clumsy and fragile. They placed the notebook on the table, under the lamp, and each took turns guarding it through the day. If anything changed on that page, they agreed, then something had crossed the line into their possessions.
Evening pressed down with a merciless clarity. The village's small kindnesses—water, cooked dal, a bowl of rice—felt like offerings placed before an altar whose rules they could not parse. At dusk the houses seemed to lean inward, listening. The laughter of children came and went in patches, sometimes behind the walls, sometimes down a laneway and then impossibly close again.
They made a second plan: stay together that night, no splitting, all eyes open. Everyone would take turns awake in pairs, two keeping watch while the rest tried to sleep in the main room. The ledger and the notebook would remain under constant sight. A camera was placed to photograph the notebook page every hour. A second camera, set on a tripod, trained on the ledger.
They tried to make themselves science.
Night arrived like a held breath. The first hours passed with small terror and brittle humor—Rohit telling a joke that died in the dark, Kabir counting loudly, Priya trying to fold a blanket with calm fingers. Abhay sat still a long time, staring at the tripod as if its presence were an accusation. Diya kept close to the notebook, fingers drumming a steady rhythm on the cover.
Near midnight, when the guards changed, a sound started in the walls. It was faint at first: a low, sucking breath that might have been the house settling. Then it became deliberate—like someone walking slowly within the plaster, toeing the beams. It moved around the room, a measured step now near the kitchen, now behind the bedroom panel. The walls seemed to breathe.
Saanvi, on watch with Yashpal, stood and placed her palm flat against the nearest beam. It felt warm, then cooler, as if something rolled beneath the grain. The hair along her arm rose.
"Not natural," Yashpal whispered. He lifted the hour-list photo from the camera and studied the timestamp. The image showed the notebook, the page clear and written, with the time exactly marked. They both exhaled with a small, vicious relief—until they compared it to how the page looked now.
By one in the morning, Rohit on the next shift, checking the camera feed, realized a picture had been taken between the hourly shots. The image showed the notebook—but the ink near the middle had changed. A line that had been a name was fainter, the letters thinner, as if someone had stolen the ink one letter at a time.
Panic flared. They dug the notebook out under the lamp and passed it around in silence.
Everything on the page was there—except one thing. The scrawl that had marked Diya's entry was the only one crisp and unbothered. Other names looked blurred at the edges; some smears that hadn't been there before puddled like water stains. A light halo of shadow ringed the page as if heat had kissed it. The signatures were still legible—except where blotches had smoothed into blank paper.
"No," Meghna breathed. "We wrote this. We signed it." Her finger trembled as she pointed. "We were awake while we signed, right?"
They had been. They had watched each other sign. Yashpal checked the timestamps on the camera. The photos confirmed: the signatures had been made, documented, and photographed.
But between the photos and the live page, something had erased.
They stared until the night seemed to push against their eyes. The hum in the walls turned into a thin laugh that could have been wind or could have been teeth.
At dawn they compared again, under merciless light. The same result: the notebook showed only one name with clarity. Everything else had been reduced to smears and pale ghosts—pages that used to say Kabir, Saanvi, Rohit, Yashpal, Meghna, Priya, Abhay—were now smudged and unreadable. The only name that remained crisp, ink dark and certain, was Diya.
Diya's name gleamed on the sheet like a coin left when the purse had been emptied.
For a long moment no one spoke. The lamp guttered and a single moth banged against its glass, frantic. Kabir finally swallowed and said the only thing that seemed to stand on its own in that heavy morning: "We recorded ourselves. We tried to keep a truth. The village chose what it remembers."
Diya's hands went cold where they lay on the table. She did not smile. She did not shout. She only touched the name as if to see whether it would smudge under her palm.
It did not.
Outside, the well that never echoed seemed to hum once, low and satisfied.
"One name outlasts the night;
the rest dissolve like wet ash.
When the book forgets a life,
the silence begins to laugh."