Nidhi couldn't sleep.
This was unusual. She was a Delhi girl who'd slept through construction noise, Diwali crackers, and the specific 4 AM call-to-prayer from the mosque near her Jamia Nagar apartment that could wake the professionally dead. She could sleep anywhere, in any position, under any conditions. It was her superpower, and she was proud of it.
But the room in the pradhan's house — clean, whitewashed, with a charpai, a table fan, and a window that looked east toward the fields — refused to let her sleep. Not because of noise. Because of silence.
The silence of Dohariya at night was not the absence of sound. It was the presence of a different kind of sound — the kind that exists below the threshold of hearing, felt rather than heard. The kind that makes you aware of your own heartbeat, your own breathing, the particular frequency of your own blood moving through your veins. In Delhi, the city's noise was a blanket. In Dohariya, the silence was a room, and she was locked in it with her own thoughts.
She lay on the charpai, staring at the ceiling, and thought about the face in the window.
She'd reviewed the photographs on her camera. Nothing. The gap in the shutter was visible in two shots, but the interior was too dark for the sensor to capture any detail. Whatever she'd seen — or thought she'd seen — existed only in her memory, and memory, as any documentary filmmaker knew, was the least reliable camera of all.
At some point, she drifted into a half-sleep — the shallow kind where you're aware you're sleeping, where dreams and waking thoughts merge into a single stream of consciousness that follows no logic and respects no boundaries.
In this half-sleep, she heard singing.
Faint. Far away. A woman's voice — high, clear, carrying a melody that Nidhi didn't recognize. Not a film song, not a folk song, not a bhajan. Something older. Something that predated melody as she understood it — a series of notes that didn't follow any raga or scale she knew, rising and falling in patterns that felt less like music and more like speech translated into sound.
She sat up. The singing continued — distant but distinct, drifting through the window on the still October air. She checked her phone. 3:17 AM.
She went to the window. The village was dark — no streetlights in Dohariya, just the moon, three-quarters full, casting the kind of light that makes familiar things look unfamiliar and unfamiliar things look alive. The fields were silver. The houses were shadows. The Pandey house — visible from her window as a dark mass against the northeastern sky — was a silhouette with no distinguishing features.
