She touched it. Dry. Cool. It had the texture of sindoor — the vermillion powder that married Hindu women wear in the parting of their hair.
Nidhi stepped back. She photographed the handprint from three angles. She touched the wall around it — plain, dry, no other marks. She checked the window — closed, latched from inside. She checked the door — bolted from inside. She checked under the charpai, behind the table fan, in the small attached bathroom.
Empty. All of it. She was alone.
She sat on the charpai and looked at the sindoor handprint on her bedroom wall and did the mental arithmetic that every rational person does when confronted with something that shouldn't exist: either someone entered her locked room while she was sleeping and left a handprint, which was terrifying, or nobody entered and the handprint appeared on its own, which was impossible.
Terrifying or impossible. The two options she had.
She chose terrifying. Terrifying was at least human. Terrifying could be investigated, explained, resolved. Impossible was a door she wasn't ready to open.
She didn't sleep again that night. She sat with her camera, her recorder, and the alert, electric wakefulness of a woman who'd just realized that her documentary had become something else entirely.
At dawn, when the first light turned the fields from silver to gold and the roosters began their competition for the loudest and most unnecessary alarm clock in Mirzapur district, she went to the wall to photograph the handprint again in natural light.
It was gone.
The wall was white. Clean. As if no hand had ever touched it.
But in the centre of her charpai, on the folded sheet, placed with the care of someone leaving a gift, was a single red glass bangle. The kind a bride wears. Unbroken. Gleaming as if it had been made yesterday.
Nidhi picked it up. It was warm.
