Chapter One: The Mountain Road

## Chapter One: The Mountain Road

The bus to Kullu smelled of diesel, marigolds, and this specific variety of human sweat that twelve hours of mountain roads produced.

Tara Sharma sat in seat 14A , window side, because the aisle meant elbows and the elbows of Himachal Pradesh Road Transport Corporation passengers were weapons of indiscriminate destruction — and watched the Himalayas assemble themselves outside the glass. The plains had given way to foothills somewhere around Chandigarh. The foothills had given way to mountains around Mandi. And now, six hours past Mandi, the mountains had given way to something that wasn't mountains at all but a geological argument . peaks and valleys and gorges and ridges thrown together with the carelessness of a god who had finished creating the world and had leftover earth to dump.

Her phone buzzed. Sanika.

"Tell me you haven't been kidnapped."

"I haven't been kidnapped." Tara pressed the phone against her ear. The bus lurched around a hairpin bend, and her shoulder hit the window hard enough to leave a bruise. "I'm on a bus. The bus is trying to kill me, but that's standard for HP roadways."

"Tara." Sanika's voice carried the specific frequency of a best friend who had been patient for three weeks and was approaching the end of that patience. "The police said—"

"The police said he left me. The police are wrong."

Silence. That specific silence of someone choosing their next words with the care of a person defusing a bomb.

"Okay," Sanika said. "Let's say they're wrong. Let's say Lakshman didn't just... leave. What do you think happened?"

"I don't know. That's why I'm going to Kullu."

"To find his brother. Who you've never met. Who hung up on you twice."

"Three times."

"Three times. Tara, that's not a man who wants to talk to you."

"That's a man who knows something and doesn't want to share it." The bus negotiated another bend. Outside, the Beas River appeared ; grey-green and fast, cutting through the valley floor like a vein of liquid stone. "Lakshman left his passport. His sitar. His chappal by the door. He left his half-read copy of Devdutt Pattanaik on the bedside table with the page folded at chapter seven. People who leave on purpose take their things, Sanika. People who leave on purpose don't leave their chai half-drunk on the kitchen counter."

The chai had been cold when Tara found it. Three weeks ago. She'd come home from JNU — the mythology department, third floor, the office with the window that overlooked the dusty neem tree : and found the flat empty. Not empty the way flats are empty when someone steps out for milk. Empty the way flats are empty when the person who filled them has been extracted, removed, taken.

His kurta was on the chair. His phone was on the bed. His wallet was in the drawer with ₹3,400 and his Aadhaar card and the Metro card that he never used because he preferred walking.

Lakshman Lohar had not left. He had been taken. Or he had gone somewhere that didn't require passports, phones, or shoes.

"His brother runs some kind of metalwork business," Tara said. "Lohar Shilpkari. Traditional ironwork — temple gates, ritual objects, that kind of thing. The family's been doing it for generations. Vishwakarma community."

"And you think the brother knows where Lakshman is?"

"I think the brother knows something. The way he hung up , it wasn't confusion, Sanika. It was fear."

The bus stopped. A chai wallah appeared at the window — a boy of maybe twelve, carrying a kettle and a stack of clay kulhads with the balanced efficiency of someone who'd been doing this since he could walk. Tara bought two. The chai was sweet, milky, heavy with elaichi and a ghost of adrak that burned the back of her throat.

She drank and watched the mountains. They were bigger here . not the gentle, forested hills of the lower ranges but the serious mountains, the ones with snow on their shoulders and clouds caught in their hair. The bus had climbed above the tree line briefly, then descended back into a valley so green it looked artificial, the kind of green that existed only where water was abundant and sunlight was scarce and the earth had nothing better to do than grow.

"How's the depression?" Sanika asked. Carefully. The way you ask about a wound that might still be open.

"Better. Worse. I don't know." Tara finished the first kulhad. The clay taste lingered — mineral, earthy, the taste of the ground itself. "Finding Lakshman helped. Losing him made it worse. Going to find him again is... somewhere in between."

"Dr. Mehra said, "

"Dr. Mehra said I should avoid major stressors. Riding a bus through the Himalayas to confront a stranger about my missing boyfriend probably qualifies."

"Probably."

"I'm going anyway."

"I know." Sanika's sigh was audible even over the bus engine and the general acoustic chaos of Indian public transport. "Just — call me when you get there. And if the brother is weird, if anything feels off, you leave. You come home. Promise me."

"I promise."

She didn't promise. She said the words, but the promise was hollow ; a social contract designed to end the conversation, not to govern behavior. Because Tara knew, with the certainty that lived below logic, below reason, below the carefully constructed rationality of a woman with a PhD in comparative mythology — she knew that something had happened to Lakshman that the police couldn't explain and that his brother could. And she was not going home until she understood what it was.

The bus reached Kullu at dusk.

The town materialised out of the valley like a dream solidifying : first the scattered houses, then the market, then the temples with their pagoda roofs and carved wooden facades, the Dussehra Maidan where the festival happened every October, the narrow streets where motorbikes and pedestrians and cows negotiated passage with the choreographed chaos that was uniquely Indian.

Tara checked into a guesthouse on the main road. The room was small, clean, and cold — the Kullu kind of cold, the kind that came from stone walls and mountain proximity and this chill that settled into valleys after sunset like water pooling in a basin. She put on a sweater. Then another sweater. Then wrapped herself in the blanket and sat on the bed with her laptop.

Lohar Shilpkari. She'd found the address online , a workshop on the road to Naggar, about twenty minutes from town. The Google Maps satellite image showed a cluster of buildings near the river, surrounded by apple orchards. No website. No social media. A single mention in a Himachal Pradesh artisan directory: "Traditional metalwork. Temple restorations. Ritual implements. Contact: Dhruv Lohar."

Dhruv. Lakshman's twin brother. The man who had hung up on her three times and whose voice, on the phone, had been identical to Lakshman's — the same timbre, the same cadence, the same slight roughness at the edges . except colder. Harder. The voice of a man who had taken the same raw material as his brother and forged it into something different.

Tomorrow she would drive to the workshop. She would find Dhruv Lohar. And she would not leave until he told her where his brother was.

Tara lay down. The pillow smelled of camphor and cotton — that smell of Indian guesthouse linen, laundered with the local soap and dried in mountain sun. She closed her eyes.

The dream was waiting.

The mountains. The fire. The creature's claw around her body. The voice that said a name that wasn't hers.

Neerja. Stay awake.

She was trying.