The Guard Who Came Back

Meher did not follow the woman in the red odhni. She did something she had never done in three years of night shoots: she ran.

She ran the wrong way — not up toward the palace, not down toward the folded, impossible gate, but sideways, into the black mouth of a roofless shop, dragging Kabir behind her. They fell over a stone counter and landed in a heap of dust and cloth that had not been there an hour ago. A tray of bangles went over with a sound like a thousand tiny bells.

The footsteps outside stopped.

"She'll find us," Kabir breathed.

"Shh."

Through a crack in the wall, Meher could see the street. The woman in the red odhni stood exactly where they had left her, head tilted, as patient as stone. The lamps were still going out, one by one, coming closer.

Then, from the direction of the gate, came a sound so ordinary that Meher almost wept. A whistle. The flat, bored, government whistle of the old guard.

He came up the bazaar with his lathi and his thick sweater and a torch with a yellow beam. He walked straight through the dark where the lamps had gone out, and the darkness parted around him like water around a stone. When he reached the woman in the red odhni, he did not stop. He did not even look at her. He simply said, in the tired voice of a man who has said the same thing every night for thirty years:

"Chalo, beti. Time ho gaya. Ghar jao."

Come on, child. It's time. Go home.

And the woman in the red odhni lowered her eyes, like a girl scolded by an uncle, and stepped back into the shadow of a doorway, and was gone.

The guard swung his torch into the shop. The beam found Meher and Kabir in the dust.

"Tum log," he said, without surprise. You people. "Every month. Every month one of you." He sighed. "Your friend is on the palace steps. He is asleep. He will wake up in the car and remember nothing, and you will tell him it was a bad dream. Understood?"

Meher nodded. She could not speak.

"Good." He turned to go, then paused. "Don't come back," he said. "She remembers faces. And next time—"

He looked at the dark palace on the hill, and for a moment his old face was not tired at all. It was afraid.

"Next time, I may not be the one who is on duty."

(A different path through the same night. What was the guard hiding — and why has he been on duty at Bhangarh for thirty years without ever growing older? Continue this path.)