The chopper hadn't even cooled when the desert heat wrapped itself around the man like a challenge.
He stepped out—
Ryan Kapoor.
Sunglasses. Rolled sleeves. The whiff of foreign funding and five-star air conditioning clinging to him like a second skin.
His gait was more finance pitch than fieldwork.
Dust didn't dare touch him.
Snakes rolled their eyes.
He looked around like he'd already bought the place.
And maybe he had.
From beneath her sun-scorched scarf, Dr. Rasmika Sen watched, unblinking. Arms crossed, spine straight, eyebrows arched. Another suit in boots, she thought. Another polished man here to slap a corporate logo on a centuries-old wound and call it progress.
He extended a hand with a smile too rehearsed to be real.
"Dr. Sen, I presume?"
She took it. Briefly.
"Yes. You must be the CSR mascot they dropped from the sky."
His grin didn't flicker. The type of smile trained at networking events in hotel lobbies where nothing grows but ambition.
"Let's keep this professional."
"Then stop trying to sell heritage like bottled water."
They walked toward the ruins together, apart—his steps light, hers rooted like the dunes themselves were listening.
He glanced around, unimpressed. "This entire area could be a luxury retreat in three years. You know, if we cleared the superstitions and upgraded the plumbing."
Rasmika stopped mid-step.
"You think this is a joke?"
"I think it's a dig site haunted by wild theories, folklore, and… goats."
Her eyes narrowed, tone clipped like a scalpel.
"And I think you're a spoilt brat laundering your father's embezzled money through cultural whitewashing."
He smirked. "Ouch. Harvard didn't teach me how to handle village venom."
"And your accent won't protect you from local curses."
He turned, surveying the worn edges of Bhangarh's ruins with faint distaste. The sun cast long shadows behind crumbling stone. Somewhere, a chime rattled on a prayer tree—tied in red threads and half-said wishes.
"These people treat broken walls like gods," he muttered. "You call that faith. I call it historical laziness."
Rasmika's voice dropped, steady and low.
"These people have lived here for generations. Their bones are buried deeper than your cement contracts ever will be. So if you insult this village again—"
He cut her off, tone cool, like chilled glass.
"Dr. Sen, you're clearly too emotional to lead a real excavation."
And just like that, the air thickened. Not with heat. Not with dust.
But judgment.
The kind that doesn't raise its voice because it has never been told to listen.
Rasmika didn't speak.
She blinked once. Slowly. Like a door closing from the inside.
Somewhere between rage and recognition.
She had been called worse before—but never with such executive calm.
Too emotional.
They always said it like it was a spill. Something to mop up. Something inconvenient and feminine and unprofessional.
But she knew this earth.
Knew it not from textbooks or surveys, but from sitting with it until it trusted her back.
Her hands had trembled while uncovering children's teeth in shallow graves.
She had cried beside urns that smelled like ash and centuries.
She had held silence so complete, it echoed.
Ryan would never understand that kind of silence.
His world was grant approvals, satellite surveys, and polished PowerPoints.
He would not kneel beside bones unless they came with funding.
Yet still, his words echoed. Not because they were true.
But because they rang like a bruise already blooming.
Was care a weakness?
Was reverence slowing her down?
She hated that he'd found that tender place with surgical precision.
Just then, a cluster of villagers passed by, murmuring soft prayers. One old woman broke her stride, eyeing Ryan from beneath her veil. Her words came as a whisper, aimed at no one, sharp as a curse:
"Iska rang chamak raha hai... par andar se andhera hai."
(His skin shines, but inside, he's all darkness.)
Ryan blinked, confused. "What did she say?"
Rasmika smiled, but it didn't reach her eyes.
"She said you'll make a great statue once the ghosts are done with you."
He arrived in leather shoes.
Leather.
On sacred dirt that had not known the pressure of a single uninterrupted truth in centuries.
Ryan Kapoor.
Foreign-educated. Corporate-certified.
Polished like the glass buildings that overlook broken temples.
The kind of man who orders double espressos while cultures collapse in the background.
He didn't carry himself—he delivered himself, like a press release.
His luggage had wheels.
His voice had none—just a flat Western neutrality that made Rasmika's name sound like a stock code.
He spoke in timelines, KPIs, deliverables.
And when he said "excavation,"
he meant extraction.
Not remembrance.
Not reverence.
They reached the edge of the ruins.
Bhangarh stood like a wound trying to scab over—its stone sun-bleached, its history whispered, never written. The walls bent in odd angles, resisting modern geometry. The wind held breath. The air shimmered, not from heat—but memory.
Rasmika crouched near the threshold stone. Her fingers brushed faded engravings—a language older than scripture, curved like roots and ribs. A hush settled over her. Her eyes glazed, not from awe, but from something deeper.
A flicker.
From the corner of her vision—a glitch.
A static-blurred silhouette shimmered behind Ryan for just a second. Raahi.
Not dead. Not alive. Not exactly.
His lips moved, silent but unmistakable:
"Liabilities incoming."
He was gone before the wind returned.
Ryan didn't notice.
As Rasmika stood, the weight of everything—history, memory, resistance—settled on her shoulders.
She thought of the others like him.
Men who had tried to make the past profitable.
Who measured grief in scalability.
Who sold reverence like a product line.
And she thought of this place.
This place that had resisted blueprints, revolts, conquests.
This place that swallowed the unworthy not with teeth, but time.
Not with blood, but forgetting.
She exhaled.
"No," she said aloud, to herself, to the stone, to the ghosts.
"No. I didn't dig to conquer. I dig to remember."
And that takes a different kind of strength.
Not the kind that crushes.
But the kind that carries.
Later that evening, when the sun collapsed behind the dunes, casting the ruins into strange blues and purples, Ryan stood too close to a sacred boundary stone, mocking its worn glyphs.
The wind picked up.
The prayer tree rattled again.
A distant chant. Low. Untraceable.
He blinked. Rubbed his eyes.
A shadow moved through the archway. Another. And another.
Not people. Not entirely.
He laughed uneasily. "Did your crew stage this?"
But Rasmika wasn't there.
Only the earth.
Only the air.
Only the echo.
His skin shines... but inside...
Some truths are not unearthed. They unearth you.
And in Bhangarh,
the past never stays buried.
It watches.
It waits.
And sometimes—
it chooses who may remember.
And who must be forgotten.