"Smṛti Jvalati Yatra Nāryaḥ, Tatra Dṛṣṭi Na Spṛṣṭavyā."(Where remembrance burns in women, vision itself must learn to look away.)
The ripple began at dawn.
Not in Kashi.
But in a rice field near Nadia.
A woman named Lakshmi, thirty-eight years old, mother of four, bent to gather a broken stalk — and suddenly stopped. Her thighs shivered. Her back arched. A line she had never read escaped her mouth:
"Sparśāt jātam… na śabdāt."Born from touch, not from sound.
She did not know where the words came from.
She only knew she meant them.
That same hour, in a tailoring shop in Tirunelveli, a girl of seventeen stitched a hem in silence — until her needle slipped, and the bead of blood on her finger pulsed like a syllable. She touched it to her lips. She sighed. And her teacher, watching from across the room, gasped.
She too had heard that syllable — decades ago, whispered in sleep by her own mother.
By the time Devika and Ahalya's daughter returned to Kashi, thirty-two women across the subcontinent had spoken fragments of the Seventh.
None of them knew why.
None had met each other.
But something inside them had turned.
As if the blood itself had grown a mouth.
The Vaidya met them at the ghats.
He held no manuscript this time.
Only a small, crude sculpture — a terracotta yoni with seven incised lines crossing it diagonally.
He looked at Devika with new eyes.
"I didn't believe you," he said.
"I didn't ask you to."
"But it's happening."
"Yes."
He looked away toward the river.
"They'll come for you now."
"Let them."
"No, Devika," he said softly. "Not priests. Not councils. Governments. Bureaucrats. Archaeologists. Custodians of nationalist myth. Men who will call this dangerous, impure, un-Indian. Who will say you are desecrating tradition."
Devika looked at the horizon.
"I am not desecrating anything," she said. "I am simply bleeding without apology."
That evening, she entered the Durga Kund temple alone.
No offerings.
No chants.
Only a single lit diya in her palm.
She stood before the Devi, who looked down with her lion-mouth smile and blade-tipped hands.
"Do you remember me?" Devika whispered.
The air moved.
A pigeon cooed.
And the flame in her palm flickered toward the goddess's lips.
Behind her, she heard shuffling.
Three women.
Elderly.
Clad in silence.
They did not speak.
They knelt.
Lifted the ends of their saris.
And each one bore a glyph.
Low.
Near the thigh.
Not new.
Old.
Sealed.
Forgotten.
Now awakened.
One of them whispered:"We were told never to speak of it. That it was madness. That we had imagined it."
Devika stepped down from the sanctum.
Took the woman's hand.
"You didn't imagine it," she said. "You inherited it."
By midnight, women gathered in alleyways and rooftop terraces, in unused mandirs, in courtyards with cracked stone and faded rangoli.
No organization.
No call.
Just a pulling.
An itch beneath the skin.A hum in the lower back.A verse remembered during sex.A syllable heard during childbirth.A touch recalled from a dream.
They didn't need books.
They had bodies.
And the Grantha had begun to travel through them.
In Assam, a widow began to sing again — and her song made four birds drop dead from the sky.
In Ajmer, a deaf girl wrote the same phrase seventeen times across a chalkboard until her palms bled. She didn't know the meaning.
In a tea shop outside Gwalior, a transgender woman placed her hand over her chest — and felt heat radiate in the shape of a flame.
She had never studied Tantra.
But her hips had swayed to the verse since she was a child.
Back in Kashi, Ahalya's daughter stood in the street near the cremation ghat, watching a body burn.
The priest chanted mechanically.
But the woman's face in the flames — it smiled.
And as the skull cracked in the heat, a whisper moved through the fire:
"Let the bones remember what the mind forgot."
She turned away, tears tracing down her cheeks.
"Too many of us were turned to ash," she said softly.
Devika, standing beside her, nodded.
"Then it's time to build temples with bone instead of stone."