Kabir was looking at the old woman with the careful attention of someone reassembling meaning from partial information. "She said something like: 'The beehad remembers. He teaches it to remember.'"
"Who's he?"
"I don't know." But Kabir's voice had a quality that suggested he had a developing theory and was not yet ready to share it.
They transferred Vikram into the son's care — the man was going to Morena, had been planning to go tomorrow, would go tonight instead, and this was stated not as a great favour but as a simple rearrangement of logistics, the quiet helpfulness of people who live in marginal places and understand that crises require practical responses rather than emotional ones.
"Come with us," Priya said. To Aryan, privately. "All of us. We go to Morena. We file a police report. We go to a hotel."
"Yes," Aryan said.
He had already been saying yes in his head for the past twenty minutes. The shoot was over. The content was irrelevant. Vikram was hurt and there was someone in the ravines who had knocked him out and tied him with hundred-year-old rope, and the professional part of Aryan — the part that thought in thumbnails and click-through rates — had gone offline and something more fundamental had come up in its place.
"Yes," he said again. "We go."
He went to the Innova to get their bags.
The bags were not in the Innova.
He stood at the open rear door and stared at the empty boot space and tried to remember loading them that morning, because maybe he hadn't — maybe they had left them at the guesthouse in Gwalior — but no, he had loaded the bags, he had specifically checked each one because this was his pre-shoot ritual. Four bags in the boot when they had left Gwalior. Now the boot was empty.
Priya's camera was in the front footwell where she had left it when they were carrying Vikram. That was there. The small recording equipment on the back seat was there. But the personal bags — with their phones' charging cables, with the emergency cash Aryan had brought, with Kabir's entire physical archive of Chambal notes — were gone.
He stood at the open boot and understood what this meant. He went through the logic of it carefully, because he did not want to accept the conclusion and wanted to be certain he was reaching it correctly.
Someone had come to the vehicle after they had left it in the clearing. Someone had taken the bags. And that same someone — or someone working with them — had hit Vikram and tied him and then, inexplicably, left him alive on the side of the road where they would find him.
Not inexplicably. He was already understanding the logic of it. He just wasn't ready to say it yet.
