[POV: Rajesh]
The silence in my penthouse after the ghat was absolute. Not peaceful. Aggressive. It was the silence of a server room after a total system failure. No hum. Just dead air.
I shrugged off my black funeral jacket, the one that now smelled permanently of sandalwood smoke and riverbank dust, and threw it over the back of a chair that cost more than Amit's first year of art supplies.
My phone buzzed. Dad.
Dad: Condolences conveyed. Board suggests a week of bereavement. Use it wisely. Liang merger docs need your eyes by Thursday.
I didn't reply. I opened a new note on my phone. Title: ANOMALIES.
Item 1: Text from "well-wisher."
Item 2: Vikram + Trust Fund questions.
Item 3: Amit's state of mind pre-death: LUMINOUS (per Dadi-ji). Excited. Not depressed.
I needed data. Hard data. The police had closed the case. File boxed, labeled "SUICIDE." I needed to reopen it. Without them knowing.
I found Constable Ravi at the same chai stall near the police station where Amit and I used to get overly sweet tea after football. Ravi looked young, tired, and like he wanted to be anywhere else.
"Constable Ravi? Rajesh Malhotra. We met at the… at St. Martin's."
Recognition, then immediate wariness flickered in his eyes. "Malhotra sir. My condolences."
"I have questions."
"The case is closed, sir."
"I'm not asking as a case. I'm asking as his brother." The word felt foreign but true. "Off the record. Over chai."
I slid a folded 2000-rupee note across the sticky table with my phone. He stared at it, then at the tea-stain ceiling, wrestling with his life choices.
"Five minutes," he muttered, pocketing the note with a magician's speed.
"The scene. You were first there, right?"
"Second. Old Gupta, the street sweeper, called it in. Saw him fall."
"Did Gupta see anyone else? On the roof? Running away?"
"He said no. Just the… the impact. Then he looked up. Empty roof."
"No one on the stairs? In the building?"
"Building's condemned, sir. No doors even. Stairs are open. Anyone could have been up there, come down, and vanished before we arrived. We searched. Found nothing. No bag, no note, no… nothing." He took a gulp of chai. "It was clean. Too clean."
"What does 'too clean' mean?"
He leaned in, lowering his voice. "Between us? Jumpers… they leave stuff. Notes in pockets. Phones nearby. Something. This guy? Wallet in his pocket. Phone smashed on impact but nearby. That fancy bracelet on his wrist. Like he just… walked off the edge with all his stuff on him. No preparation. It's… weird."
Weird. Not a police term. A human one.
"The autopsy report?"
"Closed fracture, internal bleeding. Consistent with a fall from that height. No other major injuries. No defensive wounds. No signs of a struggle on his body." He saw my face. "I'm sorry, sir. It all points to…"
"I know what it points to," I cut him off. "What about CCTV? That area has traffic cameras at the junction."
He laughed, a short, bitter sound. "Sir, that's the 'abandoned' part of abandoned industrial zone. The two cameras within 500 meters have been dead for two years. The one working private camera at the petrol pump a kilometer away showed nothing but a stray dog and a milk truck at that time."
A dead zone. Literally.
My phone buzzed again. Unknown number. A new text: Let the dead rest, Mr. Malhotra. For everyone's sake.
I showed the screen to Ravi. His face paled. "Delete that. And don't tell anyone you talked to me." He stood up, his chair screeching. "My advice? Grieve. Move on. This… this smells bad."
He hurried away, leaving me with two cold cups of tea and a confirmed suspicion: it smelled bad to a beat cop, too.
I went at dusk. The same sickly orange-pink light as the night we found him. My Mercedes looked obscenely shiny parked near the broken bricks. I changed out of my funeral clothes into black jeans and a dark hoodie—not to hide, but because it felt like mission gear.
The school was uglier in the fading light. Graffiti seemed to pulse. The empty windows were like blind eyes.
"No signs of a struggle."
I had to see.
The main staircase was a carcass of rusted rebar and collapsed concrete. I found the service stairs at the back—metal, rusted but intact. They groaned under my weight like a living thing in pain.
My phone flashlight was a pathetic spear in the overwhelming dark of the third-floor hallway. Classrooms with doors hanging off hinges, old textbooks rotting, the ghost-smell of chalk and mildew.
Then, the rooftop door. Ripped off its hinges, lying in the corridor. I stepped over it.
The rooftop was a vast, flat plain of cracked tar and bird shit. The city skyline glittered in the distance, a galaxy away. The wind up here was different—colder, sharper, carrying the echo of the highway.
I walked to the edge. The one facing the road where we'd stopped. The parapet was low, crumbling. Just a two-foot wall. Easy to climb. Easy to fall.
I looked down. My stomach swooped. I could see the exact spot, still faintly marked by stained asphalt. From up here, he was just a punctuation mark on the city's page.
"No signs of a struggle."
I played the cop's words in my head. If someone pushed him, there'd be a struggle. Scuff marks. Something.
I got on my hands and knees, ignoring the grime, and scanned the tar around the edge with my flashlight. Nothing but cracks, pebbles, and dried leaves.
Frustration boiled over. I slammed my fist on the ground. "Damn it, Amit! Give me something! A sign! A scratch! A thread!"
Silence. Just the wind.
I was about to get up when the light caught something. Not on the ground. On the side of the low parapet wall, on the inner face, about knee-high.
A tiny, faint scrape. A streak of grey on the dirty concrete. Fresh-ish. Not rust. It looked like… paint?
My heart hammered against my ribs. Not paint from the building. This was a specific, muted grey. Charcoal grey.
I pulled out my phone and took a dozen pictures, zooming in. The resolution was crap. I needed a sample.
Using my car key, I carefully scraped at the edge of the mark. A tiny flake, like a nail clipping of concrete with the grey substance on it, came loose. I folded it into a receipt from my wallet.
It could be nothing. Random. But Amit's tuxedo was midnight blue. Not grey.
Unless someone else was wearing grey.
Standing up, my eyes swept the rooftop again. A glint near the fallen door caught my eye. I walked over.
It was a small, twisted piece of metal, half-crushed by the fallen door. I picked it up. A buckle. From a strap. Not a bag. Thinner. Like from a… camera case? Or a laptop bag?
It was cheap, generic. But it wasn't ancient rust. It was newer.
My mind raced. No bag, no note, the cop said. But what if there was a bag? What if someone took it after?
I pocketed the buckle.
As I turned to leave, my flashlight beam swept the far corner of the roof. Something was stacked there. Old furniture? I walked over.
Not furniture. Canvases. Three of them, leaning against the wall, facing inward. Covered in a thick layer of dust and pigeon droppings.
My breath hitched. Amit's flat was his studio. But he sometimes painted outdoors for light… could he have been painting up here?
With a trembling hand, I wiped the grime from the top canvas.
It wasn't Amit's work.
The style was tight, controlled, architectural. A detailed, almost grim study of the crumbling school building itself. It was good. Technical. And nothing like Amit's wild, emotional bursts of color.
The signature in the bottom corner was a stylized, unreadable scribble.
But in the painting, in one of the broken windows, the artist had included a tiny, almost hidden detail: a silhouette. A person looking out.
The painting felt like a threat. A monument. A piece of the scene left behind.
I took photos of everything. The scrape, the buckle, the paintings.
My phone buzzed, making me jump. A call from Aunt Meera.
I answered, my voice rough. "Yes?"
"Rajesh." Her voice was tight, higher than usual. Panicked. "You need to come. Now. To the house. It's Divya. She's… she won't answer the door. She won't speak. I think… I think she's trying to…"
She didn't finish.
The investigation froze. The rooftop, the clue, the mystery—all of it blurred.
There was a more immediate fire to put out.
"I'm on my way," I said, already running for the stairs, the evidence in my pocket forgotten, the only thought in my head, Not her too.
Please, not her too.