Chapter 1: The Weight of Ink
The rain in Shimla didn't just fall; it mourned. It hammered against the rusted tin roof of the cottage with a rhythmic, hollow sound that echoed the emptiness in Kavir's chest. He sat at the small teakwood desk near the window, the same desk where Sana used to sit, her hair tied in a messy bun, her fingers permanently stained with the ink of her fountain pen.
He didn't turn on the lights. He didn't need to. He knew the geography of this room by heart: the stack of leather-bound journals she had left behind, the dried jasmine petals pressed into the pages of Ghalib's poetry, and the silence. The silence was the loudest thing in the house.
It had been exactly three years. One thousand and ninety-five days since the police found her car at the bottom of the ravine. One thousand and ninety-five days since they told him the current had been too strong to recover her body.
Kavir reached for the bottle of old rum on the floor, but his hand stopped. On the desk sat a white envelope.
It hadn't been there when he went to the kitchen ten minutes ago. The windows were locked. The door was bolted. Yet, there it was—stark, clinical, and terrifying.
His name was written on the front. Just Kavir. The 'K' had a specific flourish, a tiny loop at the top that Sana always added when she was in a hurry.
His heart didn't just beat; it thrashed. With trembling fingers, he tore the envelope open. There was no letter inside. Just a small, torn scrap of paper.
"The mountain is a secret the valley cannot keep," it read.
Kavir felt the air leave his lungs. He stumbled back, his chair clattering against the floorboards.
"No," he whispered, his voice cracking from months of disuse. "No, it's not possible."
That line. It was the opening of the poem she had started on their last morning together. She had read it aloud to him while he made tea, laughing because he told her it was too gloomy.
"What's the next line, Sana?" he had asked.
"You'll have to wait for the ending, Kavi," she had replied, kissing his cheek. "The best poems take a lifetime to finish."
He grabbed his flashlight and a coat, not even bothering to lace his boots. He sprinted out into the freezing rain. The path leading away from the cottage was a slurry of mud and pine needles. He didn't know where he was going, only that the ink was fresh. He had touched the paper, and a tiny smudge of blue had stayed on his thumb.
Ink doesn't stay wet for three years.
He reached the edge of the property, where the forest thickened into a wall of cedar and mist. "Sana!" he roared, his voice disappearing into the fog. "Sana, I know you're out here! Stop this!"
Only the wind answered him, whistling through the trees like a taunt.
He stayed out there for an hour, soaked to the bone, his lungs burning. When he finally retreated to the house, defeated and shivering, he found the front door ajar.
He froze on the threshold. He was a tall man, built with the rugged shoulders of someone who had spent his youth climbing these peaks, but in this moment, he felt small. Vulnerable.
He stepped inside. The scent hit him first.
It wasn't the smell of damp wood or old books. It was the smell of Sandalwood and Orange Peel. It was her perfume. The expensive one he had bought her for their first anniversary, the one she only wore when she was happy.
"Sana?" he breathed.
He walked into the bedroom. The bed, which he hadn't made in days, was perfectly neat. The sheets were pulled taut, the pillows fluffed. And there, lying in the center of the bed, was a single orange lily—her favorite flower.
Next to the flower was another scrap of paper.
"Step into the light, my love. The shadows are getting crowded."
Kavir didn't cry. He felt something much sharper than grief: a cold, piercing clarity. This wasn't a haunting. A ghost couldn't make a bed. A ghost couldn't buy a fresh lily in the middle of a Shimla monsoon.
Someone was playing a game with his soul.
He sat on the edge of the bed, clutching the flower. He looked at the window, seeing his own reflection in the glass—hollowed eyes, unshaven face, a man who had become a ghost before he was even dead.
"Who are you?" he whispered to the empty room.
As if in response, his phone buzzed on the nightstand. It was a private number. He picked it up on the first ring. He didn't say hello. He just listened.
Through the receiver, he heard a sound that made his blood turn to ice. It wasn't a voice.
It was the sound of a fountain pen scratching against paper. Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.
And then, a soft, melodic hum. A tune they both knew. A lullaby his mother used to sing, but only Sana knew the words he had added to it.
"I found the car, Sana," Kavir said, his voice shaking with a mixture of rage and hope. "I saw the blood on the rocks. I buried an empty casket. If you're alive, why did you let me die for three years?"
The humming stopped.
A voice, low and breathless, finally spoke. It sounded like her—the same lilt, the same warmth—but there was an edge to it now. A darkness.
"I didn't let you die, Kavir," she whispered. "I let you wake up. The man I loved was a prisoner of his own life. The man I need is the one who can find me."
"Where are you?"
"Follow the ink," she said. "But be careful, Kavi. My father's men are listening. And they don't like poetry."
The line went dead.
Kavir looked down at his hand. The blue ink smudge on his thumb was starting to fade in the damp air. He realized then that the poem wasn't just a message. It was a map.
He went back to the library and pulled out her last journal. He turned to the very back, where the unfinished poem sat like an open wound.
The mountain is a secret the valley cannot keep,
The mountain is a secret the valley cannot keep...
He realized she had written that line twice. But when he looked closer under the desk lamp, he saw that the second line was slightly different. The ink was a shade darker.
He grabbed a magnifying glass. Beneath the loops of the letters, she had microscopic numbers written.
31.2266° N, 77.3621° E.
Coordinates.
The "Last Line of Her Poem" wasn't a romantic ending. It was a location. A place deep in the forbidden zone near the border, a place his father-in-law, a powerful ex-General, had told him never to visit.
Kavir stood up, his eyes catching his reflection again. But this time, he didn't see a ghost. He saw a hunter.
He reached into the back of the closet and pulled out his old trekking bag. He packed a knife, a compass, and the stack of letters.
"I'm coming for the ending, Sana," he said to the darkness. "But God help you if this is a lie."
As he stepped out into the rain again, he didn't see the black SUV parked at the bend of the road, its headlights off, its engine idling. He didn't see the man inside with a signet ring on his finger, watching the house through binoculars.
The game had begun. And in this love story, the first casualty was the truth.