Arjun Verma heard about it the next morning, standing in the school corridor with his bag over one shoulder and half eaten sandwich in his hand.
"They said it was the curse", said his classmate Deepak, eyes wide, voice low. "Roshan said I love you and then both of them just - died there. On the Ghat"
Arjun Took a bit of his sandwich.
"That's not how death works."
"People don't die from saying words. Words are vibrations in air. There are no mechanisms by which a sentence kills a person."
"Then what do you think happened?" Deepak asked
"Two teenagers died of a real, physical cause that nobody bothered to investigate properly because this town is more comfortable with the word "curse" than this words "cardiac arrest".
Deepak walked away. He always walked away from Arjun eventually. Most people did.
Except Meera.
She was waiting at the classroom door; she always was with her hair in a single long braid and a look on her face that meant she had something to say.
"I heard what you told to Deepak."
"Good. Someone Should" Arjun Interrupted.
"Arjun. They died at the same time. Both. No explanation. "
"No explanation yet"
"You can't logic away everything."
"Watch me."
She sighed - the specific she reserved for Arjun alone, the one that meant I disagree with you completely, but I am too fond of you to fight right now - and went to her seat.
Arjun looked out the window in the morning sky.
He felt something. Not Fear, he would not call it that. Something more like the sensation of the door being pushed open that he had not known was there.
He ignored it He was Good at ignoring things.
But not for a long time
Three weeks later
He was sitting in the school library doing geometry homework.
Suddenly he realised he was somewhere else.
Not dreaming. Not sleeping. Fully awake - but in a different place entirely. He was standing in the town's old cricket ground at dusk, watching two people recognised.
Lakshit Rao and Pooja Sharma. Both are Fifteen. In the same grade as Arjun's neighbour. They were sitting on the boundary wall with two packs of chips between them, laughing about something Arjun could not hear clearly.
Then Lakshit put down his chips and turned to her, and even in the vision, even with the strange film quality of it, slightly too saturated, slightly too slow, Arjun could see that this was the moment. The tilted - World moment that happens when someone is about to change everything.
Arjun gradually approaches them with excitement.
"Pooja. I know we say everything as a joke. I know I make everything into a bit. But I am not joking now. I have been trying to say for eight months, and I keep laughing it off and I am sick of laughing it off. I like you not as a friend. I like you like, I cannot think about anyone else like this. Like you are the person I want to tell everything to every stupid small thing. I like you, Pooja."
Pooja looked at him for a long moment. And her face did something complicated and beautiful.
"You are an absolute idiot. I've liked you since seventh grade."
They laughed. Even in the vision Arjun heard it - real and bright unguarded. And then...
Something moved in the above. Not visible exactly - more like a drop in temperature, a darkening of the light. Like a cloud that was also an intention.
Arjun tried to shout. No sound came.
Lakshit went first. Then pooja, reaching out to catch him, eyes wide - not with fear but with something worse than fear. With incomprehensible. With why
"Why, why, why "
Arjun feels an enormous aura surrounding the entire cricket ground, a chilled aura staring at Arjun.
Arjun snapped back into the library. His geometry book in front of him.
He sat there for an exceptionally long time.
Then he picked up his pencil and in the margin of his textbook, wrote:
"Cricket ground. Lakshit. Pooja. check"
He went to the cricket ground the next morning.
He found the chips packets in the ground and police tape.
Lakshit and Pooja had been found the previous evening. Dead. No. Explanation.
Something on the boundary wall caught his eye - small marking in chalk. Not a police issue. A circle with a single line through it, clean and deliberate, like someone had left the signature.
Someone had been here before the police. Someone who already knew what had happened and why. The chalk symbol was not random. It was a marker. A record.
Something was counting.
Arjun went home. He locked his door and he sat on his bedroom floor and stared at the wall until the light changed. Then he opened a new notebook, he wrote:
"The curse is real. The deaths are real. I saw it happen before it happened. Start from the beginning. Find out everything. I must tell Meera."