The only sound in the room was the tiny, rhythmic breath of her newborn. Preesha sat propped up on the hospital bed. She was so tired she could feel it in her teeth.
Warmth traced a path down her cheek. She swiped it away. She looked at the perfect, sleeping face in the crib and saw only the one who was missing.
From her handbag, she drew the relic: a newspaper clipping, soft at the creases from too much handling.
Plane Hijack. Nineteen Dead. Passenger-Led Revolt. Heroic Passenger. Koushik Anand. “It’s three hundred vs five. Let’s fight these bastards.”
Her eyes snagged on the same phrases again and again until they lost all meaning. The words were no longer news; they were a ghost, whispering the same story on an endless loop.
“Let’s fight these bastards.”
This was the last she would ever hear from him. Koushik would never speak to her again. Or so she had thought two weeks ago, when the news had arrived on the Sunday morning, detailing the horrendous events of the previous night.
How five terrorists had seized control of the plane shortly after its scheduled halt at Karachi. How Koushik had become an overnight hero, the first to take charge and strike back, neutralizing the first threat on his own. And how the last words anyone ever heard from him were now immortalized in the papers.
Preesha clung to those words as her haven for two days, until Koushik returned home in a coffin, wounded and still. As familiar as she was with his surprises, he had found one final way to shock her. In the bag containing his possessions lay a letter.
“I’ll bring you back a present,” he had said. He was a man of his word.
Preesha had it with her in the hospital. The newspaper clipping slipped from her hand as she searched her handbag for her husband’s last words, written just for her. A thin strip of paper, torn hastily from a notebook, its edges uneven and stained by the blood marks. She pressed it to her lips. Those stains were sacred.
“Baabumoshaiii! I hate tears
moonpie sorry for this pain
I couldn’t even keep my promise
Forever ends here then?
I love you Preesha I miss you
this life is ours to live right
so why doesn’t it let us
why does it keep hurting us?
you must know the answer
you always seemed to know
how did you know this — hijack?
I’ve always felt you carried some secret
I kept asking if there was anything you wanted to tell me
if there were more of you I could hold
but you stayed quiet
I wanted to know you
Preesha more of you, maybe all of you.
I want to be with you, I really do
I’ll do whatever I can to be near you
And Preeshu
if we have a daughter
you’ll name her Saanvi won’t you?
raise her like yourself
there can’t be a more beautiful person than you, love”
The letter blurred. Heat pressed behind her eyes, but she swallowed it back until her jaw ached. There was no shoulder to lean into now, no Koushik to absorb her grief.
Koushik had been invited to the Authors’ Summit in London. He was ecstatic. After all these years, his work, “An Unmapped Coast,” was to be read alongside other renowned authors.
She remembered his excitement—the way he waved the printed email like a victory flag. And she remembered the cold dread that had pooled in her stomach when he said “Karachi.” She had tried to joke, ‘Don’t they have bad weather there this time of year?’
He’d just laughed and kissed her forehead. ‘You’re my superpower, Preesha. Nothing will happen.’ Every word had felt like a nail in a coffin she alone could see.
‘Why can’t you just take a direct flight from Mumbai to London? It need not be a connecting flight,’ she had pressed. ‘You know how it is with… India–Pakistan.’
Koushik had laughed. ‘See? You’re getting all political now. It’s fine, it’s just a four-hour halt. No war’s going to happen because of it.’
Her throat had tightened. It wasn't the war she feared. It was the silence on the other end of a file she wasn’t allowed to question. Preesha had resigned. How could she argue without ripping the curtain apart?
Now, as she sat on the hospital bed, her tears called her a coward. She didn’t want them on her cheeks. She could’ve spoken about her fears. She didn’t. Her silence was no longer a shield, but a weapon.
Even after he’s gone, his question lingered.
“How did you know this — hijack?”
She had to be truthful. But she couldn’t; she had promised. The only answer was a story, laced with just enough truth to hide the unreal.
She opened her mouth. The first words were ash.
‘I was eight.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. A bloody smear. ‘Lahaul-Spiti. You’d have laughed. I was so restless…’
She stopped, her breath catching. She had to get the sequence right. The tale had a sequence.
‘My parents were meditating… and I wandered… I found a man. A monk. He was big as a mountain. He asked what I desired.’
The memory surfaced, clean and sharp. The gray room. The flag. The man, asking the very same question.
‘I told him I wanted to see the future. To stop disasters.’ To save people.
‘The monk laughed. Said, “Knowing the future doesn’t mean you can change it.”’ The man had said the same thing, word for word.
‘He gave me a… a token. A pyramid.’
She could almost feel Koushik smiling. “A pyramid?”
‘It was gone when my parents found me. They said I dreamed it. For eight years, I didn’t dream. At all.’
The silence in the hospital room was absolute.
‘At sixteen… the world cracked open. I saw… a report.’
No.
‘I saw fire. My parents. A bad photograph.’ The dossier photo, blurred from low resolution.
She was losing the thread, the plot fraying at the edges.
‘I called them. They were fine. But the news came… their plane had gone down…’
She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes.
‘...in the ocean. That’s when I knew. My visions… they were truths wearing masks.’
I took the oath. In the gray room. He said my life was no longer my own. He said the safety of thousands outweighs the life of one. That’s when I died personally—
NO.
‘That’s when I died… after my parents… internally.’
She was losing control. She had to return to the story.
‘Then, at twenty-seven, I had a vision of you. The one that didn’t hurt. You were… laughing. The sun was soft that day. I didn’t know your name, but I knew your face.’
A work trip to the library... and there was my favourite poet.
‘I met you a couple of months later. It was exactly like the vision. You were that happy. It was contagious. I tried to push you away, but you just stood there, solid. And the girl who had died at sixteen… she started breathing again.’
“You were so quiet,” she imagined him saying. The voice in her head shifted, cold. “Were you lying? Even then.”
‘I wanted to marry you. I married you. Your world had color. Mine was shades of gray.’
“And my flight?” The question, direct and sharp, as if he were truly there.
‘A week before… it was there. Not a dream. An… assessment.’ The professional jargon was a leak she couldn’t plug. ‘A high-probability scenario. I saw the manifest… the routing… the vision… I saw you, Koushik. I saw the hijack. I saw you survive.’
‘I was told you would live.’ The final, damning truth, spoken aloud.
‘But I was wrong. I am a compass that only points to tragedy. I never know how to read the map. Please… forgive me, Koushik. I don’t want to know the future anymore. For once… Please…’
At that moment, Saanvi, Preesha’s newborn, who had been named the instant the letter arrived, stirred in her small crib and began to cry. The sound of her daughter’s need cut through the fog. Maybe it was Koushik’s way of saying, “I can’t forgive you.”
Tears streamed down her face. She rose, lifted the crying Saanvi, and rocked her, a frantic, desperate rhythm, the meter of her own panic. She looked at that tiny face, now scrunched with her own tears. Preesha pressed her face into the blanket, breathing in her daughter’s warmth.
‘I’m so sorry, baby. We could have been different. Oh, Koushik, how I miss you.’
She cradled Saanvi to her shoulder, her sobs syncing with her daughter’s. Saanvi drifted back to sleep, but the questions of identity kept Preesha awake long into the night.
The next afternoon, she was discharged. She stepped out into a world that hadn’t stopped turning, the letter clasped in one hand, her daughter in the other. The journey home was a silent pilgrimage. And when she crossed the threshold, the silence deepened, hollowing out the space where a welcome should have been. There was no Koushik waiting.
Her piano stood quietly in the gazebo in the front yard. She hadn’t been there for weeks. She stepped onto the gazebo, Saanvi in her pram resting under the shade of the mango tree whose branches reached into the open space.
Preesha sat at the piano. The afternoon sun, low in the sky, warmed her cheeks. After sitting there in silence for long minutes, she finally pressed a key. The note hung in the air, a solitary question.
Koushik loved it when she played Beethoven. But today, Preesha’s fingers couldn’t find the right keys. She closed the lid over them and rested her head against the wood.
Later that evening, Preesha sat in her living room, a single lamp pooling warm light around her. Saanvi slept beside her, swaddled in the bassinet. Preesha turned the pages of an old album — a girl in a sunflower dress at a school function; smiling with her parents beneath the white peaks of Lahaul-Spiti; planting trees; helping at a camp in Shimla. Then came the wedding; Koushik, awkward and shy; herself, radiant, almost unrecognisable with happiness.
She didn’t hear the faint click of the front door, only sensed a shift in the air. When she reached the doorway, a man in his fifties was already inside, calm and deliberate.
‘You changed the locks,’ he stated. He held up the new key, met her eyes, and slipped it into his pocket. ‘A pointless expense.’
‘Get out.’
He ignored her. His gaze swept past her to the living room — to the open photo album on the sofa-table. ‘We have matters to discuss,’ he said and walked past her. He lowered himself onto the very spot she had just vacated, his eyes scanning the scattered pictures.
‘I was calling you for the last two weeks,’ she said from the doorway.
He didn’t look up. He poured himself a glass of water from the carafe on the side table—her water, from her glass—his movements economical. He did not offer her one. ‘Your distress was logged. It was not a priority.’
‘You failed. Koushik is dead.’
He sat back, his gaze a physical weight. It flicked once toward the bassinet. He closed the album and gave it a slight push with his finger.
‘What did you tell your husband?’
The shift was so abrupt it stole her breath. ‘Nothing.’
He placed the photocopied letter on the table between them. Koushik’s script, the printed bloodstain. A violation.
‘Where did you get this? You didn’t read this.’ She felt utterly, professionally naked. ‘No, you don’t have the right to invade my life.’
‘The question is what you told him. “How did you know?”’ Pratul quoted, his voice flat. ‘Explain the breach.’
‘There was no breach.’
‘He knew.’
‘He guessed! Because I was afraid. Because for the first time in my life, I had something that was mine. Something that wasn’t a cover story. He was the only person who made me feel like a person… not a tool.’ The words scraped raw against her throat. ‘And you knew I would try to save that. You used that against me, too. I warned him through riddles — the weather, politics, anything I could.’
Pratul studied her. ‘The Preesha I recruited understood. The nation is the only story. Everything else is a subplot.’ His eyes flicked to the bassinet. In two strides, he was beside it. He didn't lift Saanvi, but rested a hand on the edge. ‘You were our sharpest scalpel. He made you a shield. A tool blunted by the sentiment—’
‘Get away from her.’
‘Your emotional state is a liability. This letter,’ he tapped the photocopy, ‘is a signed confession. It’s a weapon you handed to him that could have destroyed PSF. You compromised the agency. The media wouldn’t parse “probability scenarios.” They would see a government that let a plane full of citizens fly into a known threat. You wouldn't just leak a secret; you would hand them a narrative of criminal negligence. You’d have turned a national tragedy into a global disgrace.’
Preesha stared, hollow. ‘That letter was for me. And your intelligence failed, not mine.’
She let the silence hang, her voice dropping into a cold, analytical register. The agent was reawakening.
‘The evidence was on your table. If you had been brave enough to suspend the flights, we could have stopped this disaster. But you couldn't convince the officials. For god’s sake, you didn’t even try.’
She stepped closer, the accusation a precision strike.
‘You signed off on the body count. Math won’t wash off blood. Don't hide behind patriotism now.’
For a fraction of a second, the mask of detachment on Pratul's face slipped, revealing pure ice beneath. Then he erupted. He took a single, sharp step forward, invading her space, both hands in his pockets.
‘Don’t you DARE lecture me about murder,’ he hissed, the words a venomous spray. ‘Your husband’s hands are painted red. What did he think? That he could stare down bloody terrorists with years of training… with a damn PEN?’
Preesha tried to speak, to say He just wanted to come home to me, but her voice shattered in her throat, producing only a fractured breath.
Pratul overpowered her. ‘Then he gave a speech! A bloody pep talk that got my men killed! Yes, I had my officers in that plane. In every plane. The whole operation was planned, but he led them straight into a crossfire. I told you not to marry him. A writer. A romantic fool who thought heroism was a feeling and not a tactic. And you know the real joke?’
He leaned in, his face inches from hers.
‘The “hero” in the papers? That was our narrative. The first man to strike is the simplest story to sell. We couldn’t name the trained officers who actually contained the situation and died doing it. So yes. We built a myth around your foolish, dead husband. We used his corpse for the cover story. Now tell me, Agent, whose hands are dirty?’
It was as if he had thrown a bucket of ice water over the last ember of her grief. The words found their mark, and something in her simply… switched off.
Preesha stepped back. She looked at him, then at her child. She poured herself a glass of water, drank, and stood.
The silence stretched. The personal rage was gone from Pratul’s face, erased as if it had never been there. What remained was the cold architecture of his will.
‘The grief phase was accounted for. It is now concluded.’ he said, his voice a low, definitive hum. ‘The knowledge of your work was leaked to a civilian. But the breach died with him. An enquiry is likely, but it will be handled. Your function, however, remains. You are being re-assigned.’
His gaze pinned her.
‘You will accept that your life as Preesha Anand is a closed file. You will take the desk, the new name, and the purpose we design. You will be transferred from Mumbai. You will leave this place. You will forget your past. The child will be integrated and protected. Your grief will be archived.’
Preesha stepped within a foot of him. She met his gaze, her own utterly flat.
‘No,’ she said. Her voice was not loud, but it cut the air like glass.
A faint, cold smile touched his lips. ‘You misunderstand. This was not an offer to resign. It was a statement of fact.’ His tone did not change. ‘Should you resist, the outcome will be the same, but the process will be… corrosive. Your resistance will be documented as instability. Your child’s future will become a maze of administrative hurdles. You will learn that the agency’s care and its indifference are two sides of the same coin. You will do the work, but you will have nothing left. The tool will be used.’
‘The tool,’ she said, her voice less than a whisper, ‘is broken. You’ll have my resignation on your desk first thing tomorrow.’
Pratul went very still.
‘If you force that,’ he said quietly, ‘the break will be permanent. And it will not be yours alone to bear.’ His eyes flicked toward the bassinet.
‘Then kill me,’ she whispered. ‘Do it here. In front of her. Prove I’m just equipment. Because I am not… coming back. Ever.’
He froze. He wouldn’t kill her. She was a decorated officer; he was not a murderer. But she was a vault of classified secrets, walking out the door. The agency would decide her fate—a quiet accident, a permanent reassignment to a foreign country. The calculus would be done back at the PSF.
‘Keep your mouth shut,’ he said, the words cold and flat. ‘Remember your pledge. No one can ever know what you are. If you breathe any word of it— the agency, the hijack, our conversation,’ his eyes flicked to the bassinet, ‘we’ll have a different conversation, with your daughter’s—what did Koushik name her—Saanvi’s future.’
Preesha didn’t answer. She held his gaze, and in her eyes was a final, absolute dismissal. Then she turned, opened the front door, and stood beside it, her gaze fixed on some distant point.
Pratul walked to the threshold and paused. ‘There’s no coming back from this,’ he warned.
She gave no sign she had heard him.
He left. She closed the door, turned the lock, and stood there until the sound of his car was swallowed by the night. And then, silence. The only sound was the tiny, rhythmic breath of her newborn.