He didn't answer. He just walked toward the pradhan's house, smoke trailing behind him like a signal that something, somewhere, was burning.
Nidhi looked back at the Pandey house. The jharokha windows on the upper floor were shuttered — carved wood, dark with age, closed tight against the afternoon sun. But one window, on the far right, was slightly ajar. Not open — ajar. A gap of maybe three inches between the shutters. Dark inside. No movement.
She raised her camera on instinct and zoomed in. Through the viewfinder, she could see the gap clearly. Darkness behind it. And then — just for a moment, so brief she'd later wonder if she'd imagined it — something pale moved behind the shutter. A shape. Quick, smooth, like a hand drawing a curtain.
She lowered the camera.
The shutter was closed now. Completely. No gap.
Nidhi stood in the village path, in the October sun, and felt the first needle of something she didn't recognize, because she'd never felt it before in her twenty-seven years of confident, rational, Google-Maps-navigated life.
Dread.
Not fear — dread. The slow kind. The kind that doesn't spike your heart rate but settles into your bones like monsoon damp, quiet and patient and absolutely certain that it has all the time in the world.
