1807 A.N. — Vasanta Moon, Day 21 (dawn to deep night)
Sundara-Ghāṭ Ashram, Bangla Delta Mandal — continuing the story.
They kept him in the old store-room that had once held toddy jars and habits—mud-plastered walls, a ceiling blackened by kerosene seasons, and a single square of jute that made the daylight seem like a polite rumor. Rope lattices crossed the doorway like weaver's warp—no iron, no manacles, only fiber and intention. Piya had strung the knots herself and lined the floor with sand, so that any misstep would sound like honesty. Two boys sat in turns beyond the threshold with staffs across their knees, and a lamp burned in a niche with the stubborn authority of flame that has learned it is also law.
Anguli-Chhaya—finger-shadow—sat against the wall, hands in his lap, posture uncowed. His cotton was the color of varnished wood; his hair lay neat. His wrists bore no rope marks; the rope had no appetite for wrists that moved like that. On the ground beside him lay a folded strip of cloth that had once been a mask and now was a confession. He watched the doorway and the people inside it with an assassin's patience, which is to say he watched as if the room were a puzzle and his breath one of its pieces.
"How did you catch him?" Meghla had asked Piya at first light, when the girl had walked into the courtyard with dust on her ankles and a bruise on her forearm shaped like a comma.
"We didn't," Piya said. "He came to finish what he failed and stepped on a figure Āchārya had drawn by the ring. The ground argued with him, and in the argument he forgot to lie."
Kumkum's cane tapped once on the verandah stone—gratitude to the soil, or to the old pathways in her hand. "Anguli-Chhaya," she had said, the name not taste-tested first. "So that school's alley got directions to our roof."
Now Kumkum stood in the doorway, the cane's ferrule sunk into sand by a finger's depth, Janardan at her right, Meghla at her left. Bhadra—who had returned without remark and had slept, it seemed, with one eye open under the neem—leaned against the wall, a folded map pressed between elbow and ribs as if it were a spare lung. Rakhal stood where he could see the captive and the rope both and feel guilty about neither.
Kumkum did not circle. She asked the room permission to begin by letting silence measure the man. When she spoke, it was without hissing or drama.
"Your name in the house where you were born," she said.
The assassin's gaze clicked to her like a knife returning to a sheath. "Anguli-Chhaya will do."
"It will not," she said. "But we can wait."
He said nothing. His face held the expression of men who have practiced being nobody until the practice became a second face.
"Very well," Kumkum allowed. "Then we will discuss the names of your knives."
At that, a flicker: not fear, not pride, a technician's irritation that his tools would be poorly described by strangers. He settled again, but Meghla had noticed it, and when Meghla noticed something, the thing learned later that hiding was work.
"Vaidya-Khanjar," Bhadra said mildly, as if reading a harmless footnote. "The physician's dagger. Alley chapter of the Śastra schools. Not court-trained. House-trained. You were not hired from the Mandal barracks. You were borrowed from a family vault."
Anguli-Chhaya's jaw moved once, a small chew on regret. "You will find no vault," he said.
"I am not a finder," Bhadra said. "I am a reader of shapes. And you smell of clove oil and ash gourd, which your sort uses to keep sweat from writing letters."
Kumkum tipped her chin. "Is the Vaidya-Khanjar practicing with the Mandal's blessing, or are they merely clever in rooms the Mandal never sweeps?"
He said nothing. His hand shifted—just a fraction—and Piya's rope murmured under the movement; the lattice in the doorway hummed an answer. The man stilled.
Meghla did not step forward. She opened a window in her mind and let its breeze into the room. Citta, at the lowest Sequences, does not break anyone; it remembers how to open things that are already ajar. She thought of mornings before summer burned manners away: shutters lifted, the first breath of river air cool on forehead and lip, the simple clarity of tasks lining up all by themselves. She let that memory make a shape in the air and step down very gently on the captive's shoulders and then off again, like a mother making sure blankets cover the calves.
"Breathe," she murmured—no mantra, just the word air likes best. "Sit as you have been taught to sit when you are told to answer without telling on yourself."
He looked at her. Men like him do not often look at women in rooms like this; they look at their hands. His gaze acknowledged her as a maker of difficulties for his oath, and—faintly, annoyingly for him—as a kindness in the wrong house. He exhaled. The breath sounded like a notch filed in metal.
"Two questions," Kumkum said, as if reading from a ledger. "First: how many of you are in the Jomidar's shadow?"
"Enough," he said.
"Enough to rescue you?" Bhadra asked.
"Not enough to die for me," he replied without pride. "We are not poets. We report and are paid for keeping balances unbroken."
"'Unbroken'?" Janardan arched a brow. "You came to break a boy and call it an account."
"Accounts are math," the man said. "Bodies are numbers. Some numbers remove other numbers. It is the law by which houses keep stories from becoming laws."
Bhadra chuckled once, a sound with edges. "He speaks the alley's mathematics. They do not say 'murder' in their halls. They say 'corrective subtraction.'" He looked at Anguli-Chhaya and recited, as if to a student forced to listen to his own catechism: "Daily disciplines, ten steps, breath broken in fourths, stance arrays memorized until joints carry letters. Diet plain. Vows longer than comfort. Oaths to client, not to kingdom. First rule: leave no letter behind. Second: report failures only as corrections delayed. Third: never teach a house to be brave."
No muscle moved in the captive's face. "Your teacher writes a neat hand," he said.
"My teacher taught me to read the dirt under other men's fingernails," Bhadra said. "Yours taught you to leave none."
Kumkum's cane pressed another finger into sand. "Second question: Mandira Pal."
A blink. "Do not ask me to speak women's names in a house," he said.
Meghla tilted her head slightly. "We will, then, speak them ourselves," she said. "She filed the Guild complaint. She accompanies the survey. She brings silk as if it were writ. She will bring worse if she is allowed to learn what we are learning. Is she your direct patron?"
"No," he said. "She is the first line on the letter that buys my supper. Her steward is the hand that writes the numbers."
"Bharat Mitra," Rakhal said before he could stop himself. The name sounded like a rope tossed onto a river—hopeful, unhelpful. The assassin's eyes slid toward him and stayed, the way a compass needle asserts a preference for north while pretending to consider other directions.
"You," he said quietly. "The boy who teaches ground to misname itself."
"Anguli-Chhaya," Kumkum said, and the cane lifted and lowered, a gentle knock on the floorboards. "It is an ashram custom here to know the name of a guest. If you refuse, we will give you one. If you accept, we will decrease your discomfort and forget a handful of facts when it is time to write things down."
He considered the rope lattice, the sand, the woman whose mind had a window in it. He considered the old man whose humor made good knives. He considered, finally, the boy he had been sent to unname, who stood like a problem that had already mastered its first half-solution.
"I will not give you my house-name," he said. "I will give you the alley we use for this block: Vaidya-Khanjar, Anguli set, hall of the burnt dhotis."
Bhadra whistled softly. "Alley off Kaluapukur," he said. "Near the market where vegetable sellers keep four weights—one honest, three for fools. The burnt-dhoti hall is not poor. Someone feeds it with coin that does not sweat."
Kumkum inclined her head. "Useful. How many more like you in the Mandal's reach?"
"Five in this block," he said. "Two on water. One who works as a palace guard because he thinks his hands look good with iron. Others in the city. None want to be seen by a cane."
"And this… Vaidya-Khanjar," Janardan said, tasting the term. "Are they paid for loyalty, or do they pay themselves with a religion?"
"Neither," he said. "We are paid to be accurate. That is all."
"Even accuracy prefers a god," Janardan murmured, and fell silent.
Kumkum shifted the pressure of her cane, and the sand acknowledged that a question had been asked and a price had been paid. "There will be no beating," she said, as if declining a dish at a neighbor's wedding. "No breaking. We do not force windows. But we also do not permit thieves to return to the rooftops after we have seen their footprints. You will remain. You will eat. You will sleep as hands sleep when they are told the tool-rack is locked. And you will learn the grammar of our house, which is: speak when spoken to, and do not make mothers waste their anger."
"You will not hand me to the Mandal?" he asked. No fear. Interest; professionals prefer schedules.
"We will not feed your employer with the lie of bruises and the truth of your return," Kumkum said. "Your absence will be a sentence that certain men must read. Bhadra will write a note for your hall that says: 'Correction delayed. Alley compromised. Proceed to no roof where neem grows without counting to nine.'"
"That is an old warning," Bhadra said. "Their sort still obeys old warnings. It will buy us four nights."
"Who guards him?" Janardan asked.
"I do," Piya said from the doorway, as if tasked with testing a batch of ink. "With Hriday. He will sit with the rope on and learn boredom properly."
Meghla turned to the captive. "The window will open twice a day," she said. "Morning and dusk. You will breathe when I ask. You will be allowed to keep your mind. You will be made to forget the taste of running. That is all."
He nodded, once. The acceptance was less surrender than a craftsman's agreement to use a colleague's tool. "Then I will last," he said. "Men die when their minds are broken. You will not break mine with breezes."
"Good," she said. "Men who last tell better stories when they leave."
He frowned. "You intend to release me?"
"We intend to decide later," Kumkum said. "Which is the only honest intention. Eat."
Piya slid a bowl through the lattice: rice, a ladle of dal, a small, mean slice of fried fish that would keep a man's stomach humble. He picked up the bowl without hurry and ate like a man at work.
Rakhal stayed until Bhadra's map shifted under the man's arm and the cartographer pushed off from the wall. "If he tries the ropes," Bhadra told Piya, "touch the third knot from the top. It will tell the clay to act like it remembers being wet."
"You made this?" she asked.
"Rope made it," he said. "I petitioned."
He stepped into the courtyard, and Rakhal followed like a sentence to its clause. "What of Vaidya-Khanjar?" Rakhal asked.
"A private house within the city schools," Bhadra said. "Patrons buy students the way other men buy horses—polite ownership. They specialize in the grammar of removal without the ugliness of blood. The Anguli set uses intent at the finger joints—tight circuits from breath to wrist. Anguli-Chhaya—your guest—is trained to interrupt pulse at three points and speak to stance arrays without chalk. Here—" He mimed, lightly, in the air: a line from elbow to hip, a pivot at the ankle. "Your misnaming threw him off the rhythm. That will not work twice. He will learn your face."
"How does he report failure?" Rakhal asked.
"He does not," Bhadra said. "He disappears long enough for rumor to blame someone else. Or he dies. He will not die here because your house will not stain its steps for a nephew's mistress."
Rakhal grimaced. "Mandira will keep her silk," he said.
"For now," Bhadra said. "Silk frays. It does not armor."
He adjusted his map and looked toward the river as if the river were a line on the page and he was checking whether it had obeyed him. "You are going out tonight?"
Rakhal nodded. "Two pots," he said. "Tapan will pole. A bead will hum after the inspector goes home."
"Good," Bhadra said. "Remember the advice my teacher gave that was not printed because the ink was too expensive: do not let success talk in the boat. Boats are gossiping planks. They tell on you when you make them proud."
—
They prepared the pots after noon when the sun makes metal immodest. Jashodhara moved through the ink-house with the arrogant economy of a woman who has made color bow and expected thanks. Two earthen vessels were fetched, washed until the wash-water tasted only of itself, and filled with the public dye—the dull blue that would bore any clerk and pass any test that measured nothing that mattered. A third pot, smaller, received the bead—copper wound in nine, lacquer-skinned, wrapped in rag like a secret you do not want to lose to your own laugh.
Jashodhara wrote the instructions for the buyer on a strip of cloth with the ink itself, because treachery is allergic to the things it must betray.
Hum until it remembers.
Do not hum like a man who wants to be admired.
Hum like a woman cooking when she has too much to think.
Hold the bead near the cloth.
Do not let it touch unless the house is blind.
She rolled the cloth and stitched a grain of rice into the end of the thread. Anyone who tried to read the sentence without knowing how to undo that knot would tear their patience and the message with it.
"Shambhu Dey?" Rakhal asked, checking the name.
"Ratan Kahar's cousin-by-liquor," Tapan said from the doorway. "He sells oil to men who lie to their wives, but he pays on time, which is more than I can say for holy men with neat mustaches. We will meet him at the bend Bhadra marked."
"Who watches?" Jashodhara asked.
Tapan shrugged. "The river watches. And Hari of Nowpara watches on behalf of some palace that smells of copper. We will pretend not to notice him and ask the river to be bored."
They loaded the pots into the boat at second bell of night, when frogs begin their useless music and officials put on shawls to feel severe. Meghla stood at the ghāṭ with her hands folded against prayers; Janardan hummed a low Nāda under his breath, a maintenance tone for journeys he could not make. Kumkum pressed the ferrule of her cane to the boat's gunwale twice. "Return with two fewer questions," she said.
Rakhal climbed in and took the forward seat to feel the river like a pulse. Tapan pushed off. The oar bit softly. The ashram slid away. The banks closed in and then parted along the back channels only river-bred men remembered without drawing.
The night smelt of wet grass, iron from distant anchors, a sweetness underneath like molasses kept by addicts. Above them, cassia leaves stroked the air. Fireflies performed useful mimicry of stars.
Rakhal listened with the Citta-Yantra sense that had become a second hearing. Rails ran under the water—slow green lines where current and silt agreed to cooperate. Nodes glowed at the foot of mangroves where roots negotiated with stone. And there was, here and there, a thinner filament like a string sound: a human breath trained to be discreet. He closed his eyes and mapped three. One resolved as Tapan's own—the boatman's breath had its stance arrays now, disciplined by decades. Another drifted on the bank—Hari's patient little dot, trained, underfed, stubborn, paid. The third lay toward the outer channel, a body on a boat too small to matter and yet somehow paid attention to by rules that had hired men. That one worried him. Its rhythm did not match fisherman, ferryman, or gossip. It matched the kind of watcher who makes boredom a capital sin.
"Two shadows," he murmured.
"Two I saw," Tapan agreed, not asking for more. "And one who hides under a dead log that has learned to float longer than it deserved."
"What do we do?" Rakhal asked, wanting to say "fight" and knowing better.
"We row like men who know the river," Tapan said. "Watchers hate how ordinary men make them feel poor."
They poled through cut reeds that tickled the gunwale and the nerves. Rakhal kept the bead in its box and his mind in the rails. When they came to the bend Bhadra had marked, he whistled once—a note shaped by thumb and tongue that sounded like an unambitious bird.
A shadow unhooked itself from the other shadows and came down the bank with the manner of men who do not see the point of swagger.
"Shambhu Dey," the man said, pushing his headcloth back. His face had the calm of a fair-priced cheat. "You brought two only?"
"Two," Tapan said. "Enough to test marriage."
Shambhu grunted and indicated a patch of bank where boats could kiss without embarrassment. Two boys appeared from nowhere—Shambhu's nephews or sons or men he had promised money later. They lifted one pot, then the other, with the tenderness of thieves. Shambhu thumbed a little ink onto his fingertip and smelt it.
"Dull," he said, and his mouth smiled only on one side.
"At first," Tapan said. He handed over the lacquer box and the strip of cloth with the instructions. "Wake it properly. Not with the mouth of a singer; with the mouth of a wife."
Shambhu read the cloth, did not pretend to understand the rice knot, and asked no questions. He gestured. One boy brought a sack that clinked with iron; the other unfolded a cloth parcel that smelled of salt; Shambhu himself produced a small felt purse that had the respectable weight of silver that had never learned to be traced.
"For your mothers' kitchens," he said. "And for the sadness of men who like to fix boats. And for your school to pay a clerk to scold them in the right tone."
"Fair," Tapan said. "For a man who knows we are thirsty."
Shambhu's eyes cut toward the outer channel. "Patrols from the Mandal watch the social bends," he murmured. "They do not watch the bends where widows dry cloth. Trade on widow bends and everyone will pretend it is charity. Guild informers are sniffing the wind. They smell indigo and boredom and have not yet learned to tell delight from danger. You were not here tonight, and neither was I."
He pushed the packages across the plank. Tapan took them, measured their weights by old instinct, and stowed them under the seat with the kind of care that says "later we will survive because you did not drop this."
Shambhu tipped his head toward Rakhal for the first time. "You," he said. "Your breath hums like a coil."
Rakhal managed to nod without opening his mouth. Words were liabilities in boats.
Shambhu smiled without warmth. "You will do well if you do not become famous," he advised, turned, and melted back into the shrubs the way people do when they learned their childhood in places that hate to be named.
They pushed off. The bead in the box sat between Rakhal's feet like a domesticated star. The iron ingots under the seat had the moral weight of small victories. The salt's smell was a promise to food. The purse of silver chimed once, discreetly.
"Two fewer questions," Tapan said.
"One larger one," Rakhal said. "We were seen."
"Of course," Tapan said cheerfully. "If thieves did not see us, where would stories come from?"
They took a different back channel home, because a man who returns the same way is a man who has not learned anything. Rakhal listened the whole time. Hari's trained little filament followed for half a bend and then gave up, or was told to. The third rhythm—more dangerous—disappeared the way a good knife disappears when there is no cloth to cut.
—
Dawn found them in the courtyard with tired legs and a very awake kitchen. Meghla measured the salt into a jar and hid the silver under the shelf only children know about and adults pretend not to. Janardan turned the iron ingots in his hands like sentences to be diagrammed later. Kumkum accepted the cloth sample—a little clean strip awakened bright in the ink-house—and allowed herself one, quick, unlicensed smile.
"Now build the cache," she said.
Rakhal and his father took the true map to the low table and weighted its corners with stones that had themselves once been weights in someone else's account. The map showed the pit as angles and volumes. Rakhal laid another layer atop it in the only place layers belong: his mind. Rails—Pr̥thvī lines—ran under the ground like muscle under fat. Nodes—three, no, four—lit with a different warmth depending on depth and complaint. Rukmini's voice walked across the page: The third node resists before agreeing. Persuasion is learned, not forced. Bhadra's entered: draw the counter-currents first; they explain where the sand will build up later. He obeyed both.
He marked the "bleed" points on the paper with dots small enough to be insults. Janardan added thread-bits to the actual baskets—markers only he would ever parse. They decided, together, on a resonance that was less hum than held breath. Not a push. A suggestion. Less than one percent. No more than you forget when you tell a story twice in different kitchens.
"Cache point?" Janardan asked.
Rakhal looked under the ink-house, where the foundation stones had been laid by men who liked to sing together but disagreed about angles. One stone had a personality that made it stubborn. He chose that one. "Here," he said. "It understands refusal. It will keep secrets because it thinks gossip is a hymn sung off-key."
Janardan nodded. "Write the hum," he said.
Rakhal wrote it in the logbook and not on a wall. He numbered it like a method in a lab notebook: Clay Buffer: Bleed Protocol v0.1. He described in short, rude sentences—because politeness wastes ink—what the frequency would do to the clay and how the earth would be persuaded to carry the tiny gift along rails to the stone. He added a caution below the line: Do not repeat this on the same basket twice in one week. Overseers will not hear, but the ground will take offense.
That afternoon the Jomidar's men came again for the forty. The overseer had a new pen. The laborers had backaches wearing yesterday's coins. The cart wheels wore the same leather and the same oblivion.
Rakhal stood where men like him stand: near enough to help with buckets and far enough to be nearly invisible. As the fourth basket—one of Janardan's marked ones—came to the scale, Rakhal exhaled into his teeth, the way old flute players do when they taste a note before letting it out. His mind shaped the held-breath frequency and offered it like a question to the clay. Not his will—no misnaming—only a reminder: do you remember the stone under the ink-house? The clay did. A thread, finer than hair, left the basket and went into ground in a slant that Rukmini would have read with interest. It ran along the railed path and touched the stone and then vanished the way a secret vanishes only if you thank it.
The overseer blinked at a fly. The scribe added a line. No one saw the thread because it did not exist for eyes. It had never been a thing. It had been an agreement.
Rakhal trembled afterward, not from effort but from the delicate arrogance of having persuaded an old element to practice generosity in public and get away with it.
"How much?" Janardan asked in the shade later, when boys were sent to learn to be bored.
"A handful in a house of rice," Rakhal said. "But we will eat better for it, if we do not keep emptying the handful to admire it."
"Good," Janardan said. "We will not admire it, then. We will pretend we were always this lucky."
Rakhal wrote: Bleed v0.1 successful. Overseers unnoticing. Risk of arrogance high. Rukmini's note pinned to page.
That evening—bells, rope, the smell of toor dal—Meghla went to the store-room and opened the window. Anguli-Chhaya's breath had the rhythm of men who sleep with knives even when they do not have them. She asked him to breathe differently and he did. When he began to entertain the thought of breaking the rope lattice with his weight in the darkest hour, she allowed into his lungs the feeling of shutters opening on river air. Men who wish to break and run seldom prefer windows to breezes. He slept again, his mind held by the smell of morning.
Hriday sat beyond the threshold with the rope on his wrist and his guilt trained into watchfulness. Piya watched his watching and corrected the angles of his boredom. "Worse men than this will come," she said. "If you are not very dull when they do, they will teach you another sort of lesson."
"Āchārya saved me," he said.
"She saved the rope," Piya said. "You will save the rest by not telling yourself stories where you are the hero and then forgetting to be the guard."
—
In the room of indigo and copper, alone for the first time since sleep had been broken by years, Rakhal sat with the logbook and addressed a truth that had been tapping at his ribs. Not a breakthrough; he had not earned that shape yet. But something had shifted inward: the way the thought of misnaming the ground earlier had not been a gamble; it had been a practice disguised as panic. The day's gentle bleed had felt like a second, different practice—no misnaming, only aliasing: tagging a rail with a temporary name that the rail would obey before remembering itself.
He wrote: Anukalpa-Sūtra—alias-tag.
Sequence 20 → Step 5 (Nāḍī): channel established.
New capacity: write one "alias bit" into an existing flow for one breath without injury to order. Use to map, persuade, as-if. Do not layer twice. Do not use on people.
He closed his eyes and tested it in a much smaller place: a bowl of water. He put his finger in the bowl and told the surface, for one square breath, that it was a pond at dusk receiving a single drop after a long day of heat. The water accepted the alias, made a little ring, and then decided it had been a bowl all along. He exhaled and laughed very softly, alone, careful not to teach the house that pride was fashionable.
As he capped the ink, a faint scuff on the verandah stilled him. He listened, but the rail that noise lived on was not one he could read: leather on stone a long way off, then the whisper of a wing. He went to the threshold, looked up, and saw the gray dot that had become an emblem of his days.
Hari stood at the gate like a shade with pockets. He fed a pigeon a seed dusted with copper. The bird swallowed diligence and lifted, this time with a thread of grass tied to its braid—knotted in a way that would tell a reader how many pots had changed hands and whether song had been used. Hari did not look at the house. He looked instead at his own shadow, which had not been paid this month and wanted increase.
—
In a palace elsewhere, where the air came dressed like it intended to be remembered, the same pigeon settled on a stone lattice and relinquished its message into a brass bowl. The figure on the dais did not shift. The garment was indigo with a copper-sutured border; the rings on the fingers had moods; the chain at the throat wrote a script older than preference.
The message—grass knot, copper dust, a smear of dried blue—told its simple story to the mica sliver. The woman in the plain sari with the border of lozenges read it without letting her eyes reveal their opinion.
"Clandestine sale successful," she said. "Two pots. Bead used. Boy mapping clay. Bleed acts like a fainting memory. Watcher reports small advancement—boy can write an 'as-if' into water."
The figure on the dais touched the border of copper on the sleeve, then the key at the waist.
"Do not interrupt," a voice said that preferred shadows to echo. "Acquire a sample of the activated cloth—no, better, a rag wiped with the bead after work. Tell Hari to pay double to the first idiot who picks up a scrap without knowing it mattered. And ask our friend in the alley schools whether Chhāyā-Śastra will accept a fee for staying curious rather than loyal."
The woman bowed. "A friendly fee to ask a knife to dream," she said, pleased by the task because tasks were the only pleasures that were not taxed in that house.
"Also," the voice added, "send a pigeon without a braid to Mandira Pal with nothing tied to its leg. Sometimes silence is the brightest poison."
The woman smiled once, quick, and left.
The figure—man, woman, prince, clerk, story—sat and looked at the mica sliver and saw a boy at a river teaching earth to admit that it loved persuasion more than force. The figure did not smile. The figure lifted a finger and a servant lit another lamp and the court was satisfied that its master preferred light to accuracy.
—
Back at Sundara-Ghāṭ, night stacked itself properly. The rope lattice held. The window opened and closed on a captive's breath. Boys slept with ropes itching and did not scratch. Meghla labeled jars of salt and not-yet-power with a hand that was usually kinder and tonight preferred clarity. Janardan tucked the silver into the ledgers the way a man with a careful heart tucks a small joy where no one can waste it. Jashodhara hid the bead in two places, because she had learned early that thieves have cousins.
Kumkum sat on the ring with her cane across her knees and drew a figure on the dust that did not call itself a ward because wards introduce themselves; it called itself teaching. In the store-room, Anguli-Chhaya stared at the rope until the rope taught him something about patience he resented. He slept because minds trained to report on time also sleep on time. Piya did not sleep. She watched the third knot with half her gaze and the boy Hriday with the other half, and thus used all of it.
Rakhal lay on his pallet and felt the alias-tag itch to be used like a new word a child wants to force into grown-up conversations. He breathed square and told it to wait. It waited. He smiled at that and put his palm on the logbook just to feel its weight like a promise.
Tomorrow there would be another tithe, another dull pot for the inspectors and a bright one for kitchens. Tomorrow Anguli-Chhaya would say nothing useful and yet Bhadra would glean something from the nothing, because readers are parasites and proud of it. Tomorrow Hari would wear a different shawl so the pigeon would not learn to distrust his wardrobe. Tomorrow Mandira would think of a new way to be honored and would invent a phrase for it that tasted like milk. Tomorrow, perhaps, Adept Rukmini would lean over a desk in a hall in Navadvīpa-pura and annotate a map with a frown that was not anger.
But tonight, for the first time since the survey had decided to call clay strategic and grief by its old name, the house slept with a plan inside it and a new small power sitting up like a child who had refused to nap and was finally proud of itself for being tired.
"Begin," Kumkum had said last night.
Tonight, quietly, careful not to wake the wrong gods, Sundara-Ghāṭ began.