The city had not changed.
But its breath had.
Banaras, with its restless ghats and narrow lanes, still hummed with incense, diesel, sweat, and shrill bells at dawn. But something beneath the familiar surface now pressed against Devika's skin — like silk wrapped too tightly around a fresh wound.
She walked through Tulsi Ghat just after sunrise, the manuscript wrapped and pressed against her spine, hidden by a cotton shawl. But people stared.
Not with recognition.
With hunger.
Not sexual.
Scriptural.
It was an old woman, bent at the edge of the ghat, grinding turmeric on a black stone, who spoke first.
"You walk like someone who's been read," she said without looking up. "Not with eyes. With hands."
Devika stopped.
"You know of the Grantha?"
The old woman spat into the Ganga.
"I knew the last one. Before the British dragged her out in chains and burned her verses in front of the Maharaja's stables."
She paused.
"Your walk says you've remembered more than she ever dared."
Devika said nothing.
The woman continued grinding.
"Careful, beti. The city watches. And some don't want the Grantha remembered. They want it bound again. In another name. Another language. Another man."
By the time she reached Vaidya's chambers, the morning had bloomed into full heat. He opened the door slowly, as if expecting someone else.
When he saw her, his face went still.
"You've changed," he said.
She removed the shawl. The glyph just above her pelvis shimmered faintly through the white cotton of her kurta.
"I carry a flame that never existed in your books," she said. "A sixth syllable. A hidden stanza. Given not through legacy. Through touch."
He looked both frightened and… envious.
"The scripture is no longer text," she said. "It's not even voice. It's movement. It's skin."
He turned away.
"I know," he said.
She froze.
He walked toward his desk and retrieved something wrapped in crimson cloth.
Another manuscript.
Older. Torn. But unmistakable.
He unwrapped it.
And there, pressed between two broken wooden tablets—
A second Grantha.
Not written.
Tattooed. On slivers of human skin.
Female.
"Where did you get this?" Devika asked, her voice hollow.
"From a man who died in 1952," Vaidya said. "He claimed he had peeled it from a living priestess during the final days of Partition. Said she cried not in pain — but in rage."
Devika touched the skin.
It trembled.
Alive.
But not hers.
Another woman.
Another bearer.
Another unfinished verse.
"The verse spreads," she murmured.
Vaidya nodded. "The Grantha is not loyal."
"No," she said, eyes narrowing. "It's ancestral. It doesn't choose. It returns."
He sat down slowly. "You are not its keeper, Devika. You are its threshold."
She met his gaze.
"And thresholds must be crossed."
That night, as she lay on the cot he offered, she didn't sleep.
The glyph on her pelvis burned softly.
And then she heard it — faint, through the stone walls of the Vaidya's home.
A chant.
Coming not from the streets.
From beneath.
From a basement she hadn't known existed.
She rose. Barefoot. Silent.
Traced the stone steps by memory.
Descended.
What she saw stopped her breath.
A woman.
Bound at the wrists.
Eyes open.
Mouth gagged.
But from her skin, verses glowed.
Not etched. Not painted.
Branded.
By someone who did not love the Grantha.
By someone trying to extract it.
A man stood before her.
Young. Smiling.
Holding a stylus made of sharpened copper.
"Ah," he said calmly. "The true bearer returns."
Devika stepped back.
He bowed, mockingly.
"I am the scribe," he said. "But this time, I do not write in ink."
He turned to the woman.
"I write through flesh."
Devika's glyph blazed.
He saw it.
And smiled wider.
"Ah," he whispered."So the sixth has chosen a tongue."