1807 A.N. — Vasanta Moon, Day 22 (pre-dawn to moonrise)
Sundara-Ghāṭ Ashram, Bangla Delta Mandal — continuing the story.
The sound came again—light as a beetle's thought—scritch… scritch… scritch—along the outer mud-plaster of the ink-house.
Piya was first to the door. She lifted the Bishu-rope on her wrist to her lips, breathed into its braid, and the rope mellowed to its patient weight. "Not a rat," she said. "Rats complain. This one asks questions."
Bhadra, who had slept like a map folded small and tight in a pocket, was already stooped at the threshold stone. He touched two knuckles to the lintel, listened, then smiled without comfort. "Alley school craft," he murmured. "Chhaya-Śastra's listening needle. Thin reed, knotted hair, resin tip—set to chatter against plaster and tell a practiced ear which rooms are awake and how many breaths live inside them."
"Will it mark our wards?" Kumkum's voice was low, eyes on the ring she had drawn at dusk and refreshed at lamp-lighting.
"It will sketch their outline," Bhadra said. "Not their grammar. But a clever clerk could compare tonight's song with last week's and see what we're ashamed of."
Janardan's fingers went to the shelf where, between the mortar and the ink-stones, a small conch slept. He did not take it. Instead he stepped to the center of the room and shaped a note with the back of his tongue—one you feel in your teeth more than in your ear. Nāda, but humbled: not a strike to shatter pots, a hush to salt water. The walls seemed, for a moment, to breathe easier.
Kumkum laid her cane across the earthen sill and tapped twice, then drew her palm slowly up the jamb as if raising a curtain. "White noise," she said, dry as old rice. "Janardan, keep the hum low. Piya, count seven and loosen the third knot on the window cord. Bhadra—"
"Already there," he said. He had a fist of powdered husk and mica grit; he blew it lightly into the seam between frame and wall. "Let them listen," he murmured. "Let them hear a house too tired for secrets."
The scritching grew tentative, wandered, stuttered, and ceased. Farther along the outer wall, another faint probe tested a different seam. Janardan let the hum lean that way, not louder—broader, as if the house remembered being larger. In Rakhal's inner ear, rails lit: lines of resonance spreading across plaster; the wards' loops; the little hisses where age and weather negotiated their treaty.
He caught himself smiling despite the danger. "Nāda covers Citta's cloth better than mud," he whispered in his logbook, writing on his knee by moon-oil. "Note: defensive overlay does not jam listening; it introduces unsynchronizable noise. Mark this: People Buffer entry—'make enemies hear our fatigue, not our fear.'"
The silence that followed was not peace. It was a listener's retreat, and retreat is a verb that promises return. Still, the room exhaled; the lamps steadied.
"Sleep in relays," Kumkum ordered. "The white noise will last till sunrise. Piya, take first watch. Hriday sits with you, learns to be bored. Bhadra—"
"I will wander," he said. "Maps improve themselves at night."
"Do not improve my students," she said, but there was small fondness in it.
He made a neat bow and threaded into the courtyard's shade.
Rakhal did not sleep. He sat with his back against the ink-house wall and doodled the needle's path in the margin, a thin dotted curve arrowing away toward the west fence. He labeled it with a question mark. In his mind, a new little icon added itself to the inner schematic he'd been sketching of this place: not a gate or a lock, but a pair of listening ears on a stick.
When the sky paled, the river remembered to be silver again. A fox barked somewhere on the far bank; a ferryman answered in sleep.
By first bell, the hum had faded to the world's natural tone. The ashram returned to the day's theater: jars bashed friendly against each other; a ladle asked permission of a pot; the whetstone tutted against a sickle.
Tapan came in from the back channel with a boat that smelled of honest work and a grin with edges. He did not walk straight to the store-room. He walked a patient circle, greeted the neem, asked Janardan about last week's songs, and only when the courtyard had reminded itself how to be did he reach under the forward seat and bring out the bundle.
Salt, oil, two iron ingots, and a felt purse of silver: he laid them on the veranda in a row quickened by relief. Meghla's hands moved to take; her eyes moved to count; her mouth moved to pray; she did none of these and chose, instead, to stand still long enough to be certain the seeing would not make the having smaller.
"Shambhu Dey says the cloth woke like a sleepy bride," Tapan said. "The weaver who tested it cried into his moustache and said old songs came back into his warp. Then Shambhu hid the joy in his pocket and warned: patrols thick along the wide bends. He will use widow bends and blind creeks. He also says someone paces the water as if measuring it with a guilt-stick."
"Guild informers," Janardan muttered.
"And Mandal men with good boots," Tapan added. "And one watcher who wears his silence like a jacket that fits."
Hari of Nowpara, Rakhal thought, not unkindly: a little dot on the map always exactly where it chose to be—and paid for.
Meghla swept the salt up with ceremony and the iron with practical gratitude. The silver she placed on the interrupted ledger with a palm on top: not hiding it, baptizing it. "Goods in," she said simply. "Learn to breathe with that again."
Jashodhara hovered at the ink-house threshold, trying not to care about silver and failing. She had barely slept—twice she had risen to stand over the lacquer bead as if it were a child—and now her eyes shone with exhaustion and a new arrogance she had not auditioned for and could not deny.
"It worked," she said to Rakhal when they were briefly alone by the shelves, voice low so the walls would not preen. "The dull woke like a scolded god."
"We don't have gods," he said, smiling despite himself.
"Good," she said. "Let's not invent any while we're short of copper."
He told her about the listening needle. She listened with her hands, which is to say her fingers tapped the shelf to test the story, and she nodded once, brisk. "Then we layer dullness on the outer walls in the mornings—three days in five," she said. "A listening man should hear our boredom and leave."
He wrote: Ink Buffer validated by market test. Constraint: patrol density ↑. New risk: listening probes. Counter: Nāda hush + choreographed dullness.
By mid-morning, Anguli-Chhaya had woken to bread, dal, and a rope he'd stopped resenting because it understood its work. Hriday sat with him in the doorway, a staff across his knees and the Bishu-rope snug. He did not fidget. Piya had scolded the fidget out of him with the deepest insult the Bishu school possessed: "You are interesting."
Rakhal brought the second bowl in and set it on the sand just within the lattice. The assassin considered him with the amused malice artisans reserve for those who can see their hands.
"You live," the captive said. "That is two failures for me. Such accounts make men polite."
"You came back to complete your work," Rakhal said. He kept his palms open and far from the knots.
"I came back to observe a correction," Anguli said. "Someone else arranged knots for me. It was… instructive." He picked a crumb from the bowl's lip and flicked it to the floor, a gesture that looked like disdain until you noticed the neatness.
"You used a listening needle," Rakhal said.
"I did," Anguli agreed, unconcerned by the confession. "Your house hummed like a pot. It is difficult to map simmer."
"Doors or windows?" Rakhal asked.
"Windows first," Anguli said, as if correcting a pupil's arithmetic. "Doors are arguments. Windows are invitations someone forgot to withdraw. Your house writes invitations. If I had come back with knives instead of ears, I would have come over the eastern sill near the old store jars."
Hriday twitched, arrested the impulse, and then could not prevent the tiny glance toward that sill. Anguli saw the glance and smiled with a surgeon's pity for a man who has not yet learned where his organs live.
"Thank you," Rakhal said simply.
The assassin shrugged. "I am bored. Boredom asks for students."
"People Buffer," Rakhal wrote later, logbook open on his thigh: Use the bored to tutor us. Preferred entry: windows. Fix the eastern sill. He nearly added "teach Hriday to wear his eyes like a proper liar" and then crossed the line out as unkind to the boy and kind to the enemy.
"Another question," Anguli said. He pushed the empty bowl back with his fingertips, as if he and clay had a code. "When you misnamed ground at the survey pit," the words came evenly, professionally, "did it obey you politely, or did it pretend to and then file a complaint?"
Rakhal opened his mouth and closed it again. The man's phrasing was precise enough to be almost Citta. "It agreed," he said at last. "Reluctantly. I did not coerce. I asked in a grammar it had no habit of denying."
"Ah," Anguli said. "So you are not a forceful liar. You are an engineer." The word came out like the name of an animal he didn't trust. "Engineers are more dangerous than liars. A liar's knife ends at the skin. An engineer's knife tries the bone." He leaned back and looked at the rope. "Teach your rope to be bored more slowly," he advised Hriday. "It does its job with too much art."
By noon, the tithe carts trundled in and Rakhal performed the Bleed v0.1 again—once, no more. A thread as fine as self-respect left a marked basket and wandered down into the listening ground. No one noticed; no one would, unless they were listening with something other than doctrine.
He wrote on the ledger's back in tiny script: Cache gain ≈ 0.6 handfuls since yesterday. Overseers unnoticing because energy transfer is non-physical; detectable only by specialized senses (Citta/Nāda/Pr̥thvī at Adept). Continue. He underlined non-physical because the paranoia in him needed reminding: secrets caught by eyes are different from secrets tripped by ears.
In the afternoon heat, the ink-house's eaves dripped old glues. Rakhal and Jashodhara sat cross-legged under the beam where spiders had their own guild. Between them: off-cuts of hardwood planed thin; a cloth pouch of sifted copper filings; a bowl of resin; the logbook turned to a blank diagram that wanted to become a door.
"Frame-Ring v1," Rakhal wrote at the top, and then: Purpose: detune Chhaya-Śastra intent at thresholds. Design principle: disrupt stance arrays, not feet. He sketched the ring as a palindrome: thin strips laid into the jamb, each piece of wood etched with a tiny zig that was neither pretty nor random. Copper filings seeded along the grain in three rows; resin to seal. No sigils. No chanting. Passive, humble, sleeping until intent tried to cross like a drawn blade.
"Why copper there?" Jashodhara asked, tapping the third row.
"Because their edge carries a trace of direction," he said, not stopping the pencil. "The copper eats direction like certain women eat flattery—politely, with small bites, leaving the talker unsure whether his point is intact."
She snorted, smearing a thumb through resin. "And activation?"
"Ambient prāṇa. Whisper threshold," he said. "The ring isn't a wall. It's a bad song sung under a good song. A stance array needs clean integers to resolve. Give it stammer, and the body will hesitate for a breath. One breath is enough for rope, staff, or a shout."
"Materials?" she challenged, as teachers do when the student has only remembered to be brilliant.
"Common," he said. "Hardwood. Copper filings from the smithy sweepings. Resin from the banyan. No prāṇa beads, no crystals. The point is it looks like a carpenter's vanity."
She looked at him sidelong. "We have no spare copper filings."
"We have iron," he said. "Iron flirts with earth and magnets. Copper flirts with order. If we lack copper, we cheat—ash rubbed with salt, tiny thinings from an old plate—"
She raised a brow. "Which old plate?"
He grinned despite heat. "The one we never use because it makes rotis taste like priests."
She laughed in open defiance of gods no one here had invited.
They worked till the light turned patient. Jashodhara cut the strips; Rakhal embedded filings with a needle and set resin with a humming that was not a spell and not not a spell. When the ring was laid and cured and quiet, he leaned back and felt it with his inner ear. A faint burr lived in the jamb now, the sonic equivalent of roughened cloth. He stood, stepped out through the frame, then back in. Nothing. He settled his intent, the way Anguli had taught him to think about how one steps when one steps meaningfully, and tried again. A fractional stutter caught his heel. He did not stumble. His weight paused. His breath did something unbeautiful and true. He smiled. The ring had noticed.
He wrote: Frame-Ring v1.0 installed (ink-house). Subtle detune works at 'edged' intent. False-casual passes clean. Risk: resource trickle; maintenance weekly. He added a note: Later: learn to teach ring to listen for specific men. He nearly added Anguli's name and stopped himself, as if names were copper too and he had little.
Toward evening, with the sun walking down the far mangroves on long legs, a palanquin arrived not at the gate but at the river step where merchants usually negotiated taxes with the water. The palanquin was modest and well-kept; the bearers were the kind who don't look at houses; the umbrella was black, which is arrogance in a land that loves colors.
Out of it stepped a man whose nose had decided all the other features should fall in line. Not handsome. Arresting. He wore no rings. His kurta was dyed with something that tried to be indigo and failed gracefully, landing on a twilight only richer cloths can afford. Behind him came two boys with covered baskets and a woman with a ledger who looked bored because the world had exhausted her with its variety.
Bhadra, who had been tracing the shadow of a half-remembered shrine in the yard dust, stilled. For the first time since Rakhal had known him, he looked—if not surprised—then briefly deprived of a sentence.
"Nalin," he said at last, the name coming out like a fishbone he'd thought he had swallowed years ago.
The man bowed the exact length of their shared youth. "Dāda," he said. "You still read dirt. I read the air."
"Half-brother," Bhadra said to Kumkum without moving his eyes. "We share a father. We do not share definitions."
"Welcome to Sundara-Ghāṭ," Kumkum said, with the lethal hospitality of small houses. "If you have papers, we will read them carefully. If you have food, we will buy none of it. If you have advice, we will boil it first."
Nalin smiled, appreciating the grammar even as he dismissed the speaker. His eyes had already found Rakhal. He did not ogle. He evaluated. "So," he said softly. "The boy who writes alias into water."
"Too many ears," Bhadra warned.
"Then let us start a rumor," Nalin said cheerfully, and gestured. The two boys lifted the basket covers. Inside: small stoppered vials of thick amber liquid and wands wrapped in waxed cloth.
"Chandana?" Jashodhara guessed. Sandal distillate.
"Mixed with musk and a hint of spikenard, but that is the garnish," Nalin said. He raised the wand to his nose and breathed, not like a man sniffing perfume but like an adept sampling a current. "Gandha-Mārga," he said, casual as if introducing a cousin—the Path of Scent. "Not Rasa," he added, forestalling the obvious. "Not alchemy. We do not change the thing. We change how the thing speaks to the nose. We braid breath with memory and lay tracks in men's heads. A soldier forgets to see because a smell has told him he is a child again. A clerk signs the wrong line because the ink reminds him of rain."
Kumkum's face did not change. "An unlisted path," she said.
"Unlisted things exist," Nalin said happily. "Indeed, the list is the entertainment of small men. Consider this a demonstration, not an imposition."
He turned to the open yard where three novices were walking stances—Ānanda, Piplu, and little Suman with the serious mouth. "Boys!" he called, the tone a good teacher's counterfeit. "Walk toward me with eyes open and thoughts clear."
"Do not—" Bhadra began.
"Let them," Kumkum said, cane quiet. "We do not learn by clutching our anklets."
Nalin cracked the wax, touched the wand to his pulse, and exhaled a thin thread of breath toward the boys. It was not a cloud. It was not visible. It was only the sense of old mango wood warmed by afternoon and a courtyard in a different house where a different aunt had told a story and the story had made someone laugh. Rakhal felt it as a tug in the brain where smells live long and rent-free.
The boys stumbled—only a step. Ānanda blinked as if wind had put grit in his eye. Piplu's left foot forgot to be brave. Little Suman… smiled, a child's half-sleep smile, and walked three steps that belonged not to a stance pattern but to a remembered game of chase around a pillar. Then he stopped and flushed, ashamed at nothing he could name.
"Harmless," Nalin said, holding up the wand. "I could have used burnt hair and winter mustard and made them angry at the wrong man. Or I could have used lamp-soot and widow's oil and made them weep. Gandha laughs at your rings and your ears. Gandha asks your bones who they used to be."
"Enough," Kumkum said.
Nalin bowed, satisfied. "A mere party trick," he said. "Unless someone were designing… thresholds." His eyes flicked, without telegraph, to the ink-house jamb, and his smile sharpened by a delicate and deliberate degree. "Ah," he said. "How curious."
Rakhal felt his face do nothing, because he had been trained by today not to let it. "May I see?" he asked, stepping forward like a polite fool. If he offered the frame, it remained his.
"Of course," Nalin said. He approached the jamb, stopped just short, and breathed again, a different braid this time: indigo vats after heavy rain, a cut finger wiped on cotton, old stone warmed by sun. The ring in the wood murmured its quiet ugliness. Nalin's foot hesitated: a pause anyone else would have missed except the three most dangerous listeners in the yard—Kumkum, Bhadra, Rakhal.
"Stammer," Nalin said, cheerful. "I do love stammer." He stepped through anyway. The ring did not stop him. It never would. It made the edge of his will blink, and the blink was not long enough to be a defeat.
Nalin turned in the doorway, letting his gaze enjoy Jashodhara's braid and Meghla's stillness and Janardan's silence. "You have enemies," he said, smiling as if discussing guavas. "You have patrons with excellent taste in rumor. You have a boy who is an unlicensed grammar. You have also"—he tapped the wand—"a problem. Most defenses consider what men see, hear, touch. You must now learn to defend what they remember. Else a smell will walk through your gate wearing your mother's sari."
"State your errand," Kumkum said. "Then sit or go."
Nalin's eyes danced. "I bring congratulations from a certain patron. I bring trade gossip with clean handles. I bring an offer to teach scent-blind knots to one door and one only."
"For a price?" Jashodhara asked.
"Always," he said. "The price is that the boy answers one question he should not."
"No," Bhadra said at once.
"Yes," Kumkum said at once, in the tone of a woman who knows debts cannot always be refused, only chosen carefully. "We will hear the question. We will not promise the answer."
Nalin inclined his head, accepting the rules as a graceful man accepts an insult he cannot afford to notice. He turned back to Rakhal, this time with a curiosity that felt less like a knife. "When you wrote alias into water last night," he said softly, "what part of you decided it was true? Your eye? Your ear? Your teeth? Your skin?"
Rakhal thought. The courtyard waited with him and the silence became a good silence—the kind that holds out a plate rather than a fist.
"My teeth," he said finally, surprising himself with the shape of the truth. "The jaw that holds breath in squares. The mind made the picture, yes, but the picture wasn't accepted until something in the head said 'bite here,' and the water obeyed that bite."
"Teeth," Nalin repeated delightedly. "Engineer's teeth. Bhāī, you have found a new doorway into men. It will terrify priests." He clapped once, genuine pleasure, then put the wand away and the demonstration smile returned. "I will return in three days," he said lightly. "If your rope still purrs and your boys still walk like boys, I will tie your gate one scent-blind knot and leave you a riddle to untie. If not—" He shrugged. "If not, someone else will teach you by burning your kitchen. I prefer not to waste pans."
"Why?" Bhadra asked, a simple word that carried sand in it.
"Because," Nalin said with a flash of something unguarded, "when we were small and you stole mangoes for both of us, you insisted the tree be thanked. You remain my most inconvenient memory. Be grateful that I am in a generous mood." The unguarded closed; the business resumed. "Also, someone richer than both of us will pay me to stand near your boy and breathe. It is nice to be paid for breathing."
He bowed then—lower than necessary, exactly as much as would irritate Bhadra—and left with his palanquin humming discretion.
"New path," Kumkum said, after the dust settled, her voice as flat as a ledger. "Gandha. We will not indulge it today. We will not forget it tomorrow."
Rakhal exhaled. Jashodhara touched the jamb and hissed a little as resin scraped skin. "Frame-Ring v1.1," she said, practical again. "Teach it to be suspicious of smells."
"Later," Kumkum said. "Now: water, and a boy's logbook."
—
Upriver, in a palace where mirrors overruled windows, the rag arrived. The woman in the lozenge-bordered sari unpacked it with receipts in her fingers: copper dust, dried blue, a faint after-scent of indigo that refuses synonyms.
Adept Rāsinī—the palace's Rasa-trained examiner—held the cloth and did not pretend reverence. She scraped a sliver, crushed it with salt, added three drops of law-water, and watched. The color deepened and then did not. She clicked her tongue. "Requires a companion frequency," she said. "Bead. Hummed intent. Not proximity. Not heat. Rhythm." She tried five rhythms: temple bell; hand-loom slap; marching foot; laugh; a child's skip. The indigo flickered at the child's skip and then sulked.
"Citta-led activation," the woman murmured to the figure on the dais.
"Not pure," Rāsinī said. "Some other grammar stitched to it. It is a—" She searched for a secular word and found none, settled for theft. "—a theft done politely. They request the color to remember itself. It does."
"Replicable?" the voice asked, even, never hopeful.
"Not with this," Rāsinī said. "We need the bead or the boy."
"Take neither," the voice said. "We are not kidnappers. Not yet. Send two watchers. One that talks like a scribe and one that counts boats. If Bhadra is available, tighten his knots; if not, find another reader. We will acquire not the boy but his schedule."
"And the alley schools?" the woman asked.
"Pay one to be curious about a different house," the voice said. "Curiosity is cheaper than loyalty."
The woman bowed, added a white thread to the messenger pigeon's leg—a sign in that court that meant "watch"—and the bird took the air like an informed rumor.
—
At Sundara-Ghāṭ, the sun stepped down into river-glare and the day breathed a little easier. The first bell of evening chores scattered boys to brooms and girls to pots and the old to chairs where memories rebraided themselves into warnings useful to the young. Rakhal and Janardan sat with the map again, revising the bleed points. "Third node still resists before agreeing," Rakhal said, almost fond. "Rukmini was right."
"She often is," Janardan said. "Which is why I resented her at first."
Meghla brought a tray of watered curd and rice, set it between them, and poured without asking if they were hungry. She gestured to Rakhal's wrist. "Thread still holds?"
He lifted his hand. The saffron strand looked humbler for the day's work. "Holds," he said.
She nodded and left them to eat.
Rakhal turned the logbook to a clean page and drew a square. At the top he wrote: Project: Buffer—Frame-Ring v1.1 (Detuner + Scent). He wrote materials and quantities like a man making do: hardwood strips (6), copper filings (two pinches), resin, ash + salt blend (for scent-burr), micro-grooves (etch 9). He wrote activation logic: ambient prāṇa + trigger: edged intent OR braided scent that matches 'warm childhood' pattern. Response: localized dissonance field (½ square breath). He underlined ½ three times. Half a breath was the size of a world if you used it correctly.
He stared at the square until the white on the page suggested a door. Then he felt it—the quiet, new capacity he had named in the night—Anukalpa-Sūtra—itch at his jaw. He touched his teeth with his tongue and smiled. "Later," he told it. "We have enough metaphors awake."
Anguli-Chhaya watched from the doorway, rope breathing on the wall behind him, Hriday blinking at nothing on purpose. "You plan to make a door that refuses to be remembered correctly," the assassin observed. "It will anger men like me. We are vain about our edges."
"It is not a refusal," Rakhal said. "It is a stammer. A polite one."
"A polite stammer," Anguli repeated, amused. "Your house will be famous for its manners."
"Not if we can help it," Janardan said, and drank the last of the watered curd like a man grateful for a small enough luxury that it might pass under tax.
A runner arrived from Tapan with a scrap of palm-leaf: Shambhu says ink sold twice along widow bend. Patrol count ↑. Guild nose sniffing. Shipwright cousin says Mandal clerk eats at Jomidar's table three nights in five. It was the kind of message that tastes like power while delivering none. Even so, it stiffened spines.
Kumkum came onto the veranda, cane tapping once—attention—twice—kindness. "We will install one ring at the main hall tonight," she said. "We will sleep in shifts. We will learn to be dull in the mornings." She looked down at Anguli. "You will be allowed to walk to the tree at second bell with Piya on your left and Hriday on your right. You will not touch the rope. If you test your breathwork, Meghla will open a window in your head and you will forget the name of your first knife."
"I would miss that," he said, and somehow made it a compliment.
"Good," she said. "Miss it from inside our house. And remember: we are teaching you too."
"Teaching me what?" he asked.
"How to stop," she said.
Night came again, full of listening. The new frame at the hall stuttered kindly under a senior's deliberate, edged step; Piya smiled like a woman who had let a pot boil exactly the right length. The Bishu-rope ritual at dusk looked less like grief today and more like a habit, which is to say less visible and more powerful. Boys hummed under their breath with their wrists wrapped, and fear learned to sing in key.
In the last hour before the moon cleared its throat behind cloud, Rakhal returned alone to the ink-house jamb, placed his palm flat to the resin, and let the Citta-Yantra lens slide into place. Somewhere not far upriver, a pigeon beat south with a message tied too carefully for casual eyes. Somewhere not far in the city, a woman in a lozenge border sari counted the water jars in her master's hall and worried about their symmetry. Somewhere in a nameless alley, a man with knives listened to the rope on his own wrist because an old woman had ordered him to wear it while he cooked and he obeyed without realizing why.
He leaned his teeth gently together and made a small bite against the air—testing the alias-tag not on water now but on wood, on resin, on the tiny copper that had learned to accept orders if the orders were polite.
For half a breath, the jamb believed itself to be older—temple teak—and less hospitable. Then the alias exhaled, and the house remembered it was a house.
"Half a breath," he whispered, delighted and a little humbled. "Half will do."
He closed the logbook, set it under the bead's box, and blew out the lamp. The white noise of earlier lingered in the walls like the way a lullaby haunts the kitchen after a child has slept.
From the neem's shadow, Bhadra's half-brother watched a while longer, pinched a grain of resin from the jamb when no one could see, and palmed it like a tariff he intended to pay to a different city. He smiled, not unkindly, at the boy's back.
"Teeth," Nalin murmured to the night. "He bites the world and it agrees not to bleed."
Then he was gone, air closing over him as if scent had never been invented.
Above the river, a pale smear of cloud opened and the moon peered at Sundara-Ghāṭ with its permanent and useless sympathy. The ashram breathed together. Somewhere in the old store-room, Anguli-Chhaya slept with his hands open on his knees like a man in a temple who has forgotten what to ask for. Somewhere in the main hall, the new frame did not remember how to be anything other than stubborn and harmless at the same time.
And outside the west wall, a listening needle, broken at its tip by mica grit, lay in the sand and decided not to write a report.
The night echo went on, no longer a threat, not yet a friend.