"Yatra jāyate smṛtiḥ, tatra jvalati satyam.""Where memory is born, truth ignites."
The hearing had ended. But silence followed Devika like a second skin.
They had not declared her guilty. But neither had they spared her.
The courtyard of the Sanskrit university lay soaked in the after-rain—puddles reflecting broken mandalas chalked into the sandstone. She walked alone, clutching the manuscript now bound in red cotton. Not hers anymore. Not entirely.
A camera flash went off behind a pillar. Another. She didn't turn. She knew they would swarm—journalists, scholars, disbelievers, gatekeepers of a tradition that had buried its womb in salt and shame.
She descended the ghat steps, barefoot.
Each stone remembered.
By the sixth step, her ankle began to throb. A sensation like an anklet being tightened. But she hadn't worn any. Not since that night in the inner sanctum at Kamakhya. Not since her body had remembered the way it used to be worshipped—not with eyes, but with mantras whispered into her skin.
"Devika!"
A voice. Too familiar.
She turned.
He was standing two levels above, the river wind lifting his shawl—Professor Jatin Misra, once her mentor. Now her accuser.
"You should burn that book."
She didn't speak. Only met his gaze.
"It doesn't belong in the hands of a woman."
Devika smiled. It was not a kind smile.
"Then it never belonged to the sages either."
She walked away before he could answer.
At the edge of the ghat, the Ganga lapped gently against the boats tied with fraying ropes. An old man sat rolling incense beside a Shiva lingam half-submerged in algae and mud. He did not look up as she passed. But he said, softly:
"The river keeps no secrets. Only remembers what the land forgets."
She paused.
"Do you know what this is?" she asked, unfolding the manuscript slightly.
He glanced, just once.
"Ananga."
The name slid out of his mouth like a forbidden song.
"You've seen it before?"
"Not seen," he said. "Heard. Dreamt. Like the rishis before me. Like the apsaras who wept when they lost their womb to curse."
Devika knelt.
"Tell me what it means."
He tapped the page.
"Not just a scripture. A remembrance. You don't read it, child. It reads you."
A wind picked up.
And just then, the water shifted—whirled in a small spiral around the submerged lingam.
In its center, something shimmered.
Devika leaned forward—and saw it.
A symbol.
Three crescent moons circling a flame.
It was identical to the mark that had once appeared on her shoulder. The mark that vanished. The mark that returned in dreams.
She returned to her rented quarters by twilight.
A blackout.
The ceiling fan had stilled. The bulbs were dead.
But her body was lit from within.
She sat cross-legged before the manuscript, its red cotton wrap now trembling as if something inside stirred awake.
Devika placed her palms on the cover.
Whispered: "Smara. Smara. Smara."
The cloth unraveled on its own.
Inside, new lines had appeared.
They weren't there this morning.
"To the bodiless one, we surrender skin.To the eternal flame, we offer forgetting.Let the tongue remember what the soul has buried."
Her lips moved.
The script was not ink anymore. It was pulse.
That night, she dreamt of Varuna.
Not the elemental god as described in Upanishads, but as a man.
He stood waist-deep in dark water, his eyes lined with kohl, his lips blue with longing.
"You came back," he said.
"I didn't know I left."
"You chose the dry land. But your body remembers the tide."
He reached for her wrist.
The water licked up her thigh like a lover's mouth.
And then—
The riverbed cracked open.
A temple beneath the Ganga.
She was pulled in.
She woke gasping.
The bed was drenched, but not in sweat.
Her clothes were soaked in river water.
And the manuscript on the floor glowed faintly in the dark.
At its edge, a single lotus petal had appeared.
Fresh.
Fragrant.
As if plucked from the dream.