Three full days after the tremor beneath the temple had finally faded into memory, Lohaghat made a valiant, collective effort to return to something resembling its ordinary rhythms.
Shopkeepers rolled up their shutters at the usual early hour.
The market filled once again with its familiar chorus of bargaining voices and clattering utensils.
Even Vihaan’s grandmother, who had spent the days immediately following the tremor moving through the house with visible, unspoken tension, seemed to fold her fear carefully back beneath the surface of ordinary domestic routine, as though sheer determination alone could convince the mountain to forget what had just been woken beneath it.
It was Aanya, predictably, who first noticed that something remained genuinely wrong — though notably, it wasn’t the bells themselves that alerted her this time.
It was the absence of a boy.
“Kanhaiya,” she said slowly, frowning at the empty patch of pavement outside the tea stall where a scrawny, perpetually cheerful twelve-year-old boy usually spent his mornings sorting empty glass bottles in exchange for a handful of coins.
“He’s always here by this time of day.
Every single morning, for as long as I can actually remember.” “Maybe he’s simply unwell,” Vihaan offered, though even as he said it, something in his own memory snagged uncomfortably on the boy’s absence too.
“Let’s go ask, then.” They approached the tea-stall owner together, a heavyset man who had, until this exact moment, always struck Vihaan as entirely unremarkable — precisely the kind of ordinary background presence a place like this market accumulated by the dozen.
He looked up at their question with an expression of polite, entirely genuine confusion.
“Kanhaiya?
Who exactly is Kanhaiya?” “The boy who sorts your empty bottles,” Aanya said, slower now, more deliberate, watching his face carefully for any flicker of recognition.
“You pay him five rupees a day for it and then complain constantly about how much that’s costing you.” The man laughed at that — not unkindly, but with the easy, dismissive laugh of someone humoring a joke he genuinely didn’t understand the punchline to.
“Beta, I don’t employ any boy here.
I sort my own bottles myself, always have.” “Uncle, you told me just last week that your knees hurt too badly now to keep bending down for those bottles.” The man’s confusion, if anything, only deepened at that, his expression settling into the particular blankness of someone being told something that felt, to him, entirely and demonstrably untrue.
There was no hesitation in his denial, no flicker of a carefully maintained lie, nothing that suggested performance of any kind.
Just honest, complete, untroubled blankness.
Vihaan watched Aanya’s face carefully throughout the exchange, and for the very first time since he’d met her, he saw something genuinely rattle the easy, unshakeable confidence she normally carried through every strange encounter this valley had thrown at them.
“This isn’t right,” she murmured, once they’d stepped away from the stall, out of the tea-seller’s earshot.
“That wasn’t a man lying to us, Vihaan.
That was a man who genuinely, completely doesn’t remember a boy he’s employed for years.”