The laptop screen buzzed, a low electric hum Rupa felt in her molars. Its flickering glow didn't just paint her face ghostly blue; it seeped into the cracks of her cheap makeup, turning her skin spectral. Dominating the display was the stain – Colony Heights' infamous stairwell blotch caught mid-metamorphosis.
Oily purple tendrils pulsed against the grimy concrete like diseased veins. She'd captured it last night, crouched low on the second-floor landing, her phone's cheap lens pushed to its grainy, shuddering limit. It wasn't a spill anymore. It was a gaze. A dark, unblinking eye staring back from the depths of the building, daring her to look away.
"See?" Rupa hissed, not at the peeling Joba Mollick poster this time, but at the stain itself. Her voice scraped low, resonating strangely in her cramped room. "Cinematic. Not weeping Prem, not simpering brides." She jabbed a finger at the screen. The jagged edge of the stain seemed to ripple under her touch. "This… this bleeds truth.
The kind that stains." She leaned closer, ignoring the phantom itch crawling under the faint scale pattern on her healed palm – the souvenir from Joba's shattered glass. Her reflection flickered ghost-like in the dark screen border, eyes momentarily catching the light like polished amber. Gone. Normal brown. Mostly.
Her father's voice, thick with exhaustion and something sharper, sliced through the door. "Rupa! Sengupta's downstairs again! With more shagun!" He rattled the handle, a frantic percussion. "Says… says you mesmerized him! What did you do?"
Rupa didn't flinch. She kept her eyes locked on the stain's oily iris. "I gave him his audition," she murmured, her lips barely moving. A slow, unsettling smile, utterly devoid of Joba Mollick's practiced sweetness, spread across her face. It was the feral grin of a predator scenting weakness.
"Tell him…" Her voice dropped to a resonant hum, vibrating the laptop casing. "...the next scene requires proximity. Intimacy." She paused, savouring the silence from the hall, heavy with confusion and dread. "Tell him to come alone."
The footsteps retreated, heavy and uncertain. Rupa traced the jagged edge of the poster. Her reflection overlapped it. Tired eyes deepening into pools of liquid amber, the crimson bindi like a drop of fresh blood. She flexed her shimmering palm. Resilient. Like snakeskin.
Joba Mollick was the goddess on the screen, but Rupa Mollick… she was becoming the ritual. Every glance, every hissed word, every flicker in her reflection felt like a callback, a screen test for a role written in venom and shadow. The stain wasn't just cinematic; it was her co-star.
She scoffed, mimicking the cloying dialogue. "Real drama isn't in tears. It's in…" She jabbed a finger at the stain image. "This. The unseen. The stain beneath the skin."
Her thumb brushed her inner wrist. The skin felt smooth, unmarred. Yet she remembered. Three mornings ago, waking to a faint, raised line, a serpentine scratch thinner than a hair. No pain. No memory of catching it on anything. Just there. Like a signature etched in silence.
Just... there.
Like Amma's signature on her childhood lunchbox notes: "Study hard, my little scholar. Be brave." Amma, Dr. Indrani Roy, social worker, headmistress of Shanti Niketan Girls' School, who smelled of library dust and lemon soap. Who'd sit cross-legged on the floor with Rupa, dissecting algebra problems while humming a gentle, peaceful tune. Whose divorce papers landed like bricks on their dining table Twelve years ago.
"Sometimes courage is letting go, Rupa," she'd say, packing her steel trunk. "Even of love."
Amma hadn't cried. Not once. Even when the surgeons carved out her navel, the scar a puckered crater beneath her saree, after the tumor ate through her gut. "Umbilical remnants," the doctor mumbled. "No medical significance."
Meaning, worthless.
In Bengali society, a woman stripped of her womb's anchor point? Worse than barren. Just... incomplete. Her groom's family of Baranagar, sneered. "What use is a wife who can't tie her lineage to her body?" They returned her dowry gold, shoved her suitcase onto the pavement.
Amma rented a one-room flat near Howrah Bridge instead. Taught slum kids calculus by kerosene lamp. Independence tasted like cheap chaat and unresolved equations.
Rupa closed her eyes. Opened them. Closed them again. The darkness behind her lids pulsed with the stairwell stain's oily rhythm.
Silence from the hall. Then retreating footsteps, heavy with defeat. Rupa reopened the laptop, her gaze locking onto the stain photo. Her reflection overlapped it now. The faint scales on her palm seemed to pulse faintly in sync with the stain's remembered oily gleam. A slow, unsettling smile touched her lips. Maybe rejection was a gift. Maybe the real audition was just beginning.
Downstairs, Babin Hussain bounced on her toes, phone held high. "Okay, Azmon-bhaiya! You look terrified! Like you just saw… I dunno… a giant, silk-shredding cockroach wearing a Nagin costume!" She giggled, adjusting the angle. "This is gold for the vlog! 'Market Meltdown: Fabric King Fears the Fold!'"
Azmon Hussain wasn't laughing. He stood amidst the wreckage of his stall, bolts of once-pristine silk now reduced to tangled ribbons of vibrant colour crimson, emerald, gold, strewn like festive guts across the damp market alley floor. The elderly vendor's words echoed, "Nagins hate silk, it binds them". He kicked a shredded remnant of his finest Banarasi brocade. "Terrified? Try furious, Babin! This isn't a joke! My livelihood!" He snatched at her phone. "Delete that!"
Babin danced back, nimble as a sparrow, thumb hovering over 'upload'. "Relax, Bhaiya! Views pay bills too! Think of it—'Colony Heights Nagin Strikes Again: Fabric Fiasco!'" Her grin faltered as her gaze snagged on something beneath a sodden bolt of turquoise cotton. "Whoa. What's that?"
Azmon followed her stare. Half-buried in indigo-stained mud lay a scrap of paper, unnervingly dry despite the surrounding dye-flood. He snatched it up. The ink, thick and black like congealed blood, spelled out a jagged warning, "Leave the colony." The handwriting was unnervingly familiar too much like his own frantic notes on fabric orders. His blood chilled. "Not funny, Babin."
Babin peered closer, zooming her camera. "Didn't write it, Bhaiya. Look." She flipped to a grainy photo on her phone a page from a banned pamphlet titled "Serpent Lore of the Sundarbans", its margins crammed with dense Bengali script. "See the 'h'? That weird hook? Matches the pamphlet ink exactly. Found it scanned deep in a cryptid forum." Her playful tone vanished, replaced by a sharp curiosity. "Someone's playing a very dark game."
Upstairs, Rupa Mollick slammed her bedroom door hard enough to rattle Joba Mollick's eternally dancing form on the peeling poster. "Idiots!" she hissed, pacing like a caged mongoose. "They want simpering? Tears? They wouldn't recognize TRUTH if it spat venom in their tea!" She jabbed a finger at Joba's painted face. "You understand!
Power in the coil! Grace in the strike!" She spun, mimicking a serpent's sway, her movements unnervingly fluid. "Not 'Oh Prem, my heart!' but—" She froze mid-lunge. Joba Mollick's painted eyes weren't gazing downward anymore. They were staring directly at her. Not at the room.
At Rupa.
The pupils seemed darker, deeper, pools of liquid obsidian reflecting the frantic pulse in Rupa's throat. A cold prickle, like scales brushing her spine, crawled up her neck. Her own reflection in the poster's cheap glass frame flickered gone for a split second, replaced by swirling, iridescent shadows. Rupa stumbled back, breath catching. "Joba-di?" she whispered, the defiance leaching from her voice.