They searched the terrace with their phone torches, calling his name until their throats hurt. The palace swallowed the sound. Every doorway looked the same: a black mouth, a smell of bats and old stone, a floor covered in the soft dust of four hundred years.
"He's messing with us," Kabir kept saying. "Dev does this. Remember Goa? He hid in the hotel laundry for two hours."
"This isn't Goa," Meher said.
Her phone showed one bar of signal, then none. The time on the screen said 7:19. She was sure it had been 7:19 when the lights went out. She watched it. It did not change.
They went down toward the bazaar because it was the only place with light.
Up close, the diyas were real. Clay, hand-pressed, still wet in places as if they had been shaped that afternoon. The ghee in them was fresh and yellow. Kabir knelt and held his palm over one. "It's warm," he said, and for the first time since Meher had known him, he sounded like a boy.
The shops were no longer empty.
Meher did not see it happen. She was looking at the lamp in Kabir's hand, and when she looked up, there were things on the counters. A brass lota. Bolts of cloth folded in bright squares, turmeric-yellow and indigo. A tray of bangles that caught the lamplight like water. In one shop, a set of weighing scales, the pans swinging gently, as if someone had just lifted a hand from them.
There were no people. There was only everything the people had left behind, set out neatly, waiting.
"Don't touch anything," Meher said.
"I wasn't going to."
They walked. It was the only thing to do. The line of lamps led down the bazaar toward the gate, and the gate meant the car, and the car meant the highway and the dhaba at Ajabgarh with its tube lights and its terrible Maggi. Meher held that picture in her head like a rope.
Halfway down the street, the bazaar began to make sounds.
It started with the clink of bangles. Then the rustle of cloth being shaken out. Then a man's voice, bargaining, too far away to catch the words, and a woman answering him, and a child crying, and the creak of a bullock cart. The sounds came from every direction and from nowhere. They rose around Meher and Kabir like a tide until the whole empty street was roaring with a market she could not see.
Kabir had his hands over his ears. Meher grabbed his wrist and pulled.
They reached the gate.
It was open. Wide open. And beyond it there was no car park, no road, no Scorpio with its cracked windscreen and Dev's empty chai cup still on the bonnet. Beyond the gate was the bazaar again — the same street, the same lamps, the same palace on the hill at the end of it — as if the fort had been folded over onto itself like a letter.
Kabir made a sound Meher would remember for the rest of her life.
The market noise stopped all at once.
In the silence, footsteps came up the street behind them. Unhurried. The chime of anklets with every step.
The woman who stopped in front of them was young, perhaps their age. She wore a red odhni pulled over her head, embroidered at the edges with tiny mirrors that held two hundred tiny flames. Her feet were bare and very clean. Her face was calm, and beautiful, and it did not move the way a face should move. When she blinked, she blinked slowly, like someone remembering how.
"Tumhe kisne bulaya?" she said.
Meher's mouth was dry. She thought of all the videos she had edited, all the times she had cut the moment where Kabir said something foolish to a ghost. You never answer, she thought. In every story, you never answer.
Kabir answered.
"Nobody," he said. "Nobody called us. We came for a video. We'll go. We'll delete everything. Please. Our friend — our friend is missing, Dev, he's tall, he has a black jacket—"
The woman tilted her head.
"Nobody comes to Bhangarh without being called," she said. "The shepherd boy was called. The guard was called. Singhia was called, a long time ago, and he did not understand it either." She looked at the camera still hanging from Kabir's neck. "What did you come to take?"
"Nothing. Just — pictures."
"Pictures," she repeated, as if tasting a word from a foreign language. She reached out one hand, and Meher saw that her fingers were stained dark red at the tips, the colour of mehendi a day before a wedding. She did not touch Kabir. She touched the camera.
The little screen on the back of it lit up by itself.
It was playing footage. Meher leaned in despite herself. The video showed the palace terrace, the three LED panels, Kabir whispering his introduction. Then the lights went out, and the camera, which had been on its tripod, turned slowly on its own to face the doorway of the palace.
In the doorway stood Dev.
He was looking straight into the lens. His lips were moving. There was no sound, but Meher had spent three years reading Dev's lips across noisy rooms, and she could read them now.
Don't let her take you to the palace.
Don't let her take you to the palace.
Don't—
The screen went black.
The woman in the red odhni smiled for the first time. It was the smile of a host whose guests have finally arrived.
"Come," she said. "Ratnavati is waiting. The wedding has been waiting for four hundred years."
Behind her, all the way up the bazaar, the diyas began to go out, one by one, from the gate toward the palace — as if something was walking the street toward them, blowing out every lamp it passed.
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