A woman. In a red lehnga. The kind of lehnga that brides wore in the 1960s — heavy, embroidered, with a pallu draped over the head. The woman's face was visible in the moonlight — pale, smooth, ageless. Not old, not young. The face of someone who had stopped aging sixty years ago and existed now in a permanent state of bridal readiness.
She was looking directly at Nidhi.
And she was smiling. That same smile — the one Nidhi had glimpsed through the camera, the smile that had nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with patience, the smile of someone who has been waiting for exactly this moment for longer than most people live.
Satish grabbed Nidhi's arm. His grip was iron. "Chalo. Abhi chalo." Let's go. Now.
They went. Fast. Not running — neither of them ran, because running would mean admitting that what they'd seen was something to run from — but walking with the urgent, stiff-legged pace of people who are very much running in every way except technically.
In the pradhan's guest room, door bolted, Nidhi sat on the charpai and tried to control her breathing. Satish paced. He lit a cigarette inside the room, a violation of his own rules, and smoked it in four drags.
"Woh Chandrakanta thi," he said.
"We don't know that."
"Woh ek aurat thi jo ek kamre mein khadi thi jo saath saal se band hai. Kya aur evidence chahiye?"
"A rational explanation. Someone could be living in the house — a squatter, a sadhu, someone the village doesn't know about."
"Red lehnga mein? Moonlight mein? Teesri manzil ki khidki mein?"
Nidhi didn't respond. Because he was right, and they both knew it, and the only thing keeping her functional was the refusal to say it out loud.
Satish left at midnight. He was sleeping at the pradhan's main house — he'd refused to stay in the guest room after what they'd seen, and Nidhi didn't blame him. She bolted the door, checked the windows, and sat on the charpai with every light on, her camera in her lap, her recorder on the table, and her phone — useless for calls, but functional as a clock — showing 12:07 AM.
At 3:17 AM, the singing came.
This time, it wasn't from the wall. It wasn't from the Pandey house. It was from everywhere — the ceiling, the floor, the air itself. As if the entire room had become a speaker and the singer was using the architecture of the building as an instrument.
The melody was the same — that strange, raga-less series of notes that felt more like language than music. But tonight, there were words. Not just "aaiye." Full sentences, sung in a Hindi so old it was almost Sanskrit, with pronunciations that hadn't been used in living memory.
