Chapter 1 – The Shop That Shouldn't Exist
On a street that appears only when it rains sideways, there is a narrow shop with no signboard. People call it "Number 17½" because the buildings on either side are clearly numbered 17 and 18.
Inside lives an old brass lantern. Not a magic lamp with a genie — this one has no master, no wishes, no smoke. It simply remembers.
Every person who ever touched its handle between 1873 and 2024 left a small piece of their final happy memory pressed into the warm metal like a fingerprint made of light. The lantern keeps them all. It has never once forgotten.
Until the night Mira found it.
Chapter 2 – The Girl Who Borrowed Sorrow
Mira was twenty-six and already tired of carrying other people's sadness. She worked night shifts at a suicide-prevention helpline. She listened, she stayed calm, she said the right things. And every morning she came home heavier.
That night the rain fell like someone had overturned a planet-sized bucket. She ducked into the only open door she saw — Number 17½.
The shop smelled of hot metal and old birthday cake.
She lifted the lantern without thinking. The moment her fingers closed around the handle, something strange happened:
The lantern flinched.
For the first time in one hundred and fifty-one years, it forgot one memory.
Not a big one. Just seventeen seconds of a woman in 1954 laughing so hard at her husband's terrible joke that tea came out of her nose. That tiny joyful fragment vanished the instant Mira touched it.
The lantern dimmed — almost imperceptibly.
Mira felt it too. A sudden hollow place behind her ribs, like someone had borrowed a piece of her own future happiness without asking.
She put the lantern down quickly and left.
Chapter 3 – Things That Leak
For the next eleven days Mira kept finding small holes in her days.
She forgot the smell of her mother's coriander tempering.
The song that used to make her cry at weddings now sounded like background noise.
When her best friend sent a silly voice note, Mira laughed… but the laugh felt borrowed.
She started writing lists of things she still remembered, afraid the list would get shorter every night.
On the twelfth day she went back to the shop.
The lantern was still there, but noticeably darker — like a phone screen at 8% battery.
This time she spoke to it.
"Why are you stealing from me?"
The lantern didn't have a voice. Instead the flame inside tilted toward her, and for a moment she saw — really saw — hundreds of thousands of tiny glowing fingerprints covering every inch of brass.
Most were still bright.
Some had gone out.
A few were flickering, very close to dying.
Mira understood then: the lantern wasn't stealing.
It was bleeding.
Every time someone touched it now, it lost one more memory — because the world had become so full of people who only touched things to take, never to give back.
Chapter 4 – The Opposite of Wishing
Mira made a decision that felt insane even as she was making it.
She would stay.
Every night after her shift she came to the shop at 3:17 a.m., sat on the dusty floor, and held the lantern — not to take anything, but to give.
She gave it the memory of:
the first time she braided her little sister's hair perfectly
standing under a banyan tree in drizzle and feeling briefly infinite
the exact taste of mango pickle her grandmother made in 2012
the sound of her own heartbeat when someone said "I'm proud of you" and meant it
They were small memories. Unimportant to anyone else.
To the lantern they were oxygen.
Each time she gave one, a new tiny flame appeared somewhere on the brass — faint, newborn, trembling.
The lantern slowly stopped leaking.
Chapter 5 – The Address That Disappears Again
On the morning of the thirty-third day the rain finally stopped being sideways.
Mira arrived at 3:17 a.m. like always.
The shop was gone.
Where Number 17½ had stood was now clean brick wall between 17 and 18, as if it had never existed.
In her coat pocket she found only one thing: a small circle of warm brass, no bigger than a coin. On it was pressed — in perfect clarity — the memory of the very first night she had held the lantern, when it flinched, and she felt that sudden hollow place.
Except now the hollow place was filled again, edged with faint gold light.
She understood.
The lantern had not vanished.
It had simply become small enough to carry.
Mira walked home under a sky that was learning how to be quiet again.
She didn't need to light it.
She already knew it would remember — as long as she did.
.
Chapter 6 – The Coin Becomes a Compass
Mira kept the small brass disc in her left pocket for three weeks before she noticed it was always slightly warmer on one side. When she turned in that direction—east-northeast—the warmth spread to her fingertips. She began walking.
Kolkata swallowed her footsteps. Past the salt lakes, past the unfinished flyovers, past shrines no bigger than suitcases. The coin led her to people who were quietly unraveling: a college student forgetting his own poems, an elderly tailor losing the smell of his dead wife's jasmine oil, a street violinist whose fingers no longer remembered joy.
Each time she pressed the disc against their palm for three heartbeats, something small returned to them—and a new, faint fingerprint appeared on the brass.
Chapter 7 – The First Echo
After the seventeenth stranger, Mira heard it: a soft metallic sigh inside her own chest whenever she exhaled at night. The lantern hadn't just become small. It had moved house.
She started dreaming in other people's happiest seconds—seventeen-second fragments that weren't hers. A child's first taste of rasgulla in 1981. A man in 2003 watching his daughter ride a bicycle without training wheels. A woman in 1996 realizing the person she loved loved her back at exactly 4:42 p.m.
She woke crying and laughing at the same time.
Chapter 8 – The Weight of Returned Things
Mira realized the coin was not giving memories back for free.
Every time she passed one on, she lost a sliver of her own future: the shape of a laugh she might have had in 2034, the smell of rain on a balcony she would never stand on, the exact shade of blue her child's eyes might have been.
She began keeping two notebooks.
One listed what she gave away.
The other listed what she would never have.
Chapter 9 – The Woman Who Sold Rain
Her name was Keya. She sold monsoon water in old medicine bottles on Park Street—claimed it still held the electricity of 1974 thunder. Most people laughed. Mira didn't.
When Keya touched the coin she saw her own mother dancing alone in a kitchen in 1969. Then she saw the dance stop forever three years later.
Keya cried for seventeen minutes without speaking.
Afterward she gave Mira her entire stock of bottled rain for free.
"Keep it," she said. "You're going to need to cry properly soon."
Chapter 10 – Seventeen Seconds of Silence
Mira stopped answering her phone.
The helpline kept calling. Her sister kept calling. Even the stray dog outside her building seemed to bark with concern.
She sat in the dark holding the coin and asked it the only question that mattered now:
"Will there be anything left of me when you're full again?"
The brass grew so hot it blistered her thumb.
That was answer enough.
Chapter 11 – The Address Reappears (Briefly)
On a night when the Hooghly smelled like iron and grief, Number 17½ flickered back into existence for exactly seventeen minutes.
Mira ran.
Inside, the shop looked smaller, poorer. No lanterns on shelves. Just dust and one empty brass hook on the wall.
She pressed her coin into the hook.
The entire room sighed—like an old man finally allowed to sit down after standing for a century.
Then the shop folded itself away again.
But this time it left behind the smell of hot metal and birthday cake in her hair for three days.
Chapter 12 – The Chain of Borrowers
Word spread quietly.
Not on WhatsApp groups or Instagram reels—only mouth to ear, palm to palm.
People began finding Mira at odd hours: 3:17 a.m. at Sealdah station, noon on the Howrah Bridge, dusk beside the Kali temple.
She never asked questions. She simply held their hand for seventeen seconds.
Some came back weeks later to tell her the memory had grown roots. Others never returned—but she would find new fingerprints on the coin anyway.
Chapter 13 – The Lantern Dreams
Mira began to dream the lantern's own memories.
Not human ones. Older.
A blacksmith in 1872 hammering the brass while singing a song about rivers that never dry.
A ship's lantern swaying above the Indian Ocean in 1899, watching sailors cry for home.
A child in 1921 hiding it under her pillow so British soldiers wouldn't take it.
The lantern wasn't just a container.
It was a witness that had learned how to feel.
Chapter 14 – The Day the Coin Went Cold
On February 2, 2026, the brass turned ice-cold for the first time.
Mira panicked. She walked every street the coin had once guided her through. Nothing.
Then she understood.
It wasn't broken.
It was finished being small.
She sat on the steps of Victoria Memorial at 3:17 a.m. and waited.
Chapter 15 – The Return
At exactly 3:34 a.m. the air shimmered like heat above tarmac.
Number 17½ reappeared—larger this time, almost a proper shopfront.
Inside stood the original lantern, blazing so brightly it hurt to look at.
Every fingerprint glowed like tiny suns.
Mira stepped forward.
The lantern tilted its flame toward her like a nod.
Chapter 16 – The Trade
The lantern offered no words, only light.
It showed Mira a single clear image: herself at eighty-one, sitting on the same steps, holding an empty brass disc, smiling because the weight was finally gone.
Then it showed her the alternative: herself at thirty-two, hollowed out, still giving until nothing remained.
Mira understood the bargain.
Give it back.
Let it keep carrying what it was always meant to carry.
She placed the coin against the lantern's base.
It sank in like a drop of water into a sponge.
The lantern flared once—blinding—and then settled to a gentle, steady amber.
Chapter 17 – After the Light
The shop vanished again.
This time Mira felt no hollow place.
Instead she felt… ordinary.
Wonderfully, painfully ordinary.
She went home and slept for seventeen hours straight.
Chapter 18 – Small Returns
Over the next months Mira noticed tiny things coming back to her:
The exact rhythm of her grandmother's laugh.
The smell of mango pickle in July.
The feeling of being proud of herself for no particular reason.
They weren't dramatic homecomings.
They were quiet—like mail that had been lost for years finally arriving.
Chapter 19 – The Last Fingerprint
One evening in late 2026 Mira found a new mark on her own palm: a faint, warm oval the exact size of the old coin.
She pressed it against her heart and felt seventeen seconds of pure, borrowed joy—not hers, not anyone's in particular, just joy that had nowhere else to go.
She smiled.
The lantern had left her one last small gift: the memory of remembering.
Chapter 20 – The Lantern That Still Remembers
Somewhere, on a street that only appears when rain falls sideways, a brass lantern sits on a shelf again.
It is full now.
Not one fingerprint is missing.
Not one is dim.
And every so often—when the city is very quiet—it tilts its flame slightly, as if listening for the next person who needs to borrow seventeen seconds of light.
It waits.
It has always waited.