Banaras – Three Nights After the Flame
Devika hadn't slept in three days.
Not in the way sleep was supposed to come — dark, soft, silent. Her nights now were alive with motion. She closed her eyes, and the world breathed around her.
Not dreams.Reenactments.
Hands that weren't hers stroking rose-oil into the curve of another woman's spine. A whisper in Tamil. A ritual bell in a forest of neem. The scrape of bark as someone wrote mantras not with ink, but with blood from a bitten tongue.
The visions never came with warnings. They began in the middle of sensation — and always ended with a voice:
"You must return to where it was first spoken."
She didn't know what "it" was.
But she knew where.
Location: Devika's Ancestral Haveli – Daryaganj, Old Delhi
The building smelled of mothballs, silence, and secrets.
She hadn't returned here in a decade. The last time was for a shraddha ritual after her mother's passing. No one had opened the top floor since then.
Now, barefoot, her dupatta tied around her waist for ease, she stood at the base of the stairwell her mother had warned her never to climb.
Her fingers trembled against the wrought-iron banister. The fourth crescent still glowed faintly beneath her wrist.
She ascended.
Each step felt like a heartbeat dropped into the past.
Upstairs, the hallway was narrow. At the end stood a door painted black. It was slightly ajar.
Inside, a room choked with trunks, shawls, wooden idols, bundles of fabric.
And in the center: a locked teak cabinet painted with the symbol — three crescents, and now, unmistakably, a fourth — inked in dried sindoor.
She touched the handle.The lock clicked open.
Inside lay a bundle of cloth. Beneath it, a folio tied with a black cord. And on top of it all — a necklace.
Simple. A chain of smooth red seeds and one heavy gold pendant etched with Ka, Ra, and Na — Sanskrit syllables for sound, flow, and command.
The moment she touched it, everything shifted.
Flashback – Tamilakam, 3rd Century BCE
She knelt in a river shrine, her body anointed with turmeric and crushed sandalwood.
Her hair had been braided with hibiscus and rosewater.Three women circled her, chanting not mantras, but codes — syllables paired with breath patterns.
One cupped her chin. "Do not speak until the burning begins."
Another traced her collarbone with ink. "When your body starts to remember, the fire will answer."
She wasn't Devika.
She was someone else.
Younger. Taut with readiness. Unafraid.
Then the voice entered her again — the one that never aged.
"You are the verse, Kankali. You are the Grantha, made flesh. The fourth flame is not learned. It is survived."
The necklace was around her neck then, too.
But that time, it was taken off her.By a man whose name she never spoke.
Only his symbol — a glyph shaped like a thorn curling into a spiral.
Back to Present – Daryaganj
Devika fell backward, gasping.
The necklace glowed faintly, pulsing with heat. She clutched the folio beneath it — still tied in the black cord — and fled the room.
Elsewhere – Kalighat Temple, Kolkata
He lit the final lamp.
Each was placed in a spiral around the offering dish: sandalwood ash, hibiscus pollen, and a single drop of blood drawn from his own tongue.
He unwrapped a parchment coated in beeswax. On it, four symbols — the same ones Devika had begun to bear — were inked by hand.
Then, with slow deliberation, he spoke her name aloud.
"Kankali.Come back to me.This time, I won't let you burn alone."