CHAPTER FOUR

The road to Rathore House was a single-lane track carved into the mountainside, switching back on itself so many times that Meera lost count of the hairpin bends. It climbed out of Kullu town and into the upper valley, where the deodar forests thickened and the air turned cold enough to hurt her lungs.

She'd found a small café near her guesthouse that morning — not one of the tourist places with Wi-Fi and Instagram-worthy chai lattes, but a proper roadside shop with a steel counter and a man frying aloo parathas on a tawa that looked older than the town. She'd eaten two, burning the roof of her mouth on the filling because she was too nervous to wait for them to cool, and washed them down with cutting chai that was sixty percent sugar and forty percent regret.

Now her belly was fluttering from the idea of possibly seeing Arjun after six weeks of silence.

If he was really okay, what would she say to him?

What would he say to her?

Was she angry? Confused? Hurt?

She was all those things and a few more that didn't have names in any of the seven languages she'd studied. But mostly she was afraid.

The road widened on a curve, then narrowed over a bridge made of ancient stone, the kind of bridge that had been standing since before the British drew lines on a map and called them borders. The trees grew taller and the shade deeper. Morning sunlight broke through the clouds in thin gold columns that fell between the deodars like light through stained glass, the dappled pattern of green, gold, and shadow punctuated by flashes of red rhododendron and the occasional prayer flag strung between trees.

She came to a stone gateway flanked by two weathered pillars, each carved with a serpent that coiled around the stone — Naga motifs, she recognised, the same kind she'd seen on the Nag Devta temples along the road. The gate was open, a carved wooden sign hanging from a wrought-iron arm:

Rathore House — Ratnagiri Estate

"Okay. This is it."

The driveway wound through dense forest, gravel crunching under her tyres. The deeper she drove, the more the outside world fell away — no phone signal, no other cars, no sound but the engine and the distant percussion of a woodpecker. The forest pressed in from both sides, ancient deodars so tall their canopies disappeared into the mist.

Then the trees opened, and Meera stopped the car.

"Holy shit."

It wasn't a house. It was a haveli.

Built of grey mountain stone with carved wooden balconies that jutted out over a courtyard, the estate rose three stories high, its slate roof covered in moss and lichen that made it look like it had grown out of the earth rather than been built on it. Round stone towers anchored the corners — not decorative, but real towers with narrow windows that had once been used for defence. Carved wooden lattice screens covered the upper windows, and a massive wooden door with iron studs stood at the centre of the main building.

Behind the house, visible through a gap in the trees, a stone fort stood on the ridge above — ancient, crumbling, its walls dark against the sky. And above the fort, the mountain slope rose into a forest so dense and dark it looked like it went on forever.

Meera parked beside a dusty Mahindra Thar and an older Bolero that had seen better decades. She grabbed her bag and took a breath.

Her phone buzzed with a text from Noor.

Did you find the house? Is it murder-mansion vibes?

Meera looked at the haveli. It's more like if a Rajput fort and a Himachali cottage had a baby and that baby was raised by ghosts.

Noor: Please don't die. Bring apples.

She walked to the door, each step crunching on gravel that was laid over cobblestones so old the edges had worn smooth. Before she could knock, the door swung open, and a cheerful woman in a salwar kameez and a thick woollen cardigan smiled at her.

"You must be Meera-ji. Come in, come in — it's freezing out there." She pulled the door wider. "I'm Malti. My husband Ajay looks after the grounds. Vikram Sahab told me to expect you this morning."

"Thank you." Meera stepped over the threshold and into a stone-floored entrance hall that smelled of wood smoke, cedar, and something that might have been cinnamon. The cold was brutal — the stone walls held it like a miser holds coins — but a fire crackled somewhere deeper in the house, and the warmth found her like a promise.

"Please come through to the front room," Malti said. "I've got the fire going and chai on the stove. This house is magnificent, but it's an ice box from November to March." She laughed. "My mother-in-law used to say the ghosts keep it cold on purpose."

"Ghosts?"

"Every old house in the mountains has ghosts, Meera-ji." Malti's eyes twinkled. "But ours are mostly polite."

The front room was large, with stone walls warmed by tapestries — not the tourist kind but old weavings with patterns she didn't recognise, geometric and complex, worked in deep reds and golds. A fire burned in a massive stone hearth, and the mantelpiece held a collection of brass figurines — Nag Devtas, she realised, serpent deities in various poses of coiled power.

Swords hung on the wall. Real ones — not decorative replicas but working blades in leather-wrapped sheaths, their hilts dark with age and use. And between the swords, framed photographs of the Rathore family.

Meera drifted toward the photographs while Malti poured chai. Black-and-white shots of men in Rajput turbans and women in heavy silver jewellery. Faded colour photos of a boy — one boy — on a horse, with a dog, at a forge with an older man whose face she recognised in the set of the jaw and the width of the shoulders.

Vikram, she assumed. Or Arjun. It was impossible to tell in childhood photographs. But there was only ever one boy in the pictures.

Where was the other twin?

"Mary!"

The bellow came from the hallway, and Malti rolled her eyes with the affection of someone long accustomed to being roared at.

"Mary!"

"It's Malti," she muttered to Meera. "His mother was the only person who could say my name properly." She raised her voice. "In here, Sahab! And don't shout — the walls are thick enough without you trying to bring them down."

Vikram appeared in the doorway, his trousers caked in mud to the knees, his hair damp with mist. His eyes found Meera instantly, and something shifted in his expression — not softening, exactly, but a recalibration, like a man adjusting his grip on a tool he hadn't expected to use.

"Miss Sharma. Good morning." His voice held more formality than it had the day before. "Excuse the state of me. My groundskeeper had me helping drag his generator out of a ditch since dawn." He turned to Malti. "Get Meera some chai while I clean up. She and I need to talk. Privately." He lowered his voice. "About Arjun."

"Of course, Sahab."

So Malti knew about Arjun. Another person in this household who knew more than Meera did.

Malti poured chai — strong, dark, made with fresh ginger and cardamom that she could smell from across the room — and left. Meera sat by the fire, wrapping her hands around the steel tumbler, trying to digest what she'd seen.

Vikram was a thakur — the local equivalent of a laird, a landowner whose family had held this valley for generations. The estate, the forge, the photographs on the walls — it all pointed to a family with deep roots and the kind of quiet wealth that didn't need to announce itself.

Which likely meant Arjun was wealthy too. The "disgustingly wealthy prince" joke hadn't been a joke at all.

But the photographs. Every picture showed one boy. Never two.

The door opened and Vikram walked in, clean, his beard freshly trimmed, wearing a dark blue kurta that brought out the amber flecks in his eyes. The smell of him — sandalwood soap and forge smoke that never quite washed out — reached her before he did.

He didn't sit. He walked to the fire and stood with his back to it, arms crossed, looking at her with an expression she was beginning to recognise as his version of vulnerability.

"Thank you for coming."

"You invited me." She set down her chai. "Now tell me where Arjun is."

"I will. But first I need to ask you something." He held her gaze. "Can I convince you that Arjun is fine? That he's safe and healthy and not in any danger? And that it would be far, far better for you to leave him to his life and continue with yours?"

"Can I convince you that my next step is going to be the Kullu police station if I don't see him today?"

He closed his eyes. "Naagin ka fera," he muttered — a local saying she didn't recognise but that sounded like a man cursing fate. "I'll take you to Arjun. But this isn't simple."

"So he's not here?"

"No." His shoulders dropped, and for a moment he looked exhausted — not the physical exhaustion of a man who'd been hauling generators in the dark, but something deeper, something bone-level. "You're going to hate me. You don't think that now, but you will."

"What do I care if I hate you or not?"

"Just remember that I tried to talk you out of this," he said quietly, "when you start to hate me."

"Fine. I'll remember. Where is Arjun?"

He looked into her eyes, and the fire threw shadows across his face that made him look like one of the Rajput warriors in the photographs. "Do you believe in fairy tales?"

---

Meera looked up from the book in her hands into the eyes of a man she'd never seen before.

"Excuse me?"

"Do you believe in fairy tales?" He nodded at the book she was holding — an old copy of the Katha Sarit Sagara, its spine cracked, its pages foxed with age and smelling of sandalwood and someone else's years. "Fairy tales, yes or no?"

She was at Pagdandi bookstore in Koregaon Park, Pune. It was a Thursday afternoon. The light fell through the café windows in bars of gold that warmed the wooden tables and turned the dust motes into constellations. She could hear someone ordering a flat white, and the low murmur of a couple having the kind of conversation where both people lean forward.

"Do you believe in the sun?" She didn't know why she said it. The words came out before she could think, the way the best answers always did.

"Do I believe in the sun?" The man's brow furrowed. He had an accent she couldn't place — not quite Hindi, not quite English, something older underneath. "What kind of question is that?"

"Fairy tales are as real as the sun." She put the old volume in her basket. She liked the hand-stitched binding and the faint smell of incense that lived in the pages — someone had kept this book near a puja room for decades. "They exist. Folk stories and myths and legends are told in every culture on earth." She gestured at the shelves around them — the Jataka tales next to Grimm next to the Panchatantra next to Angela Carter. "Asking if I believe in fairy tales is like asking if I believe mathematics is real or if rain falls. Fairy tales just... are."

The man said nothing for a moment. Then he smiled.

And Meera realised that if she hadn't believed in the sun before — a reasonable doubt when you'd been living under the fog of depression for eight months and couldn't remember the last time warmth had reached the inside of her chest — then she believed in it now.

---

"Your brother asked me the same thing the first time we met," Meera said softly. "I was buying books and found an old copy of the Katha Sarit Sagara. He saw it and asked me if I believed in fairy tales."

Vikram's eyes didn't leave her face. "What did you tell him?"

"I asked him if he believed in the sun."

Vikram snorted — a short, sharp sound that might have been a laugh if you were generous about it. "And what did he say?"

"Nothing. He just smiled."

Something moved behind Vikram's eyes — an expression she couldn't parse. It was intent. Focused. Like a man looking at a puzzle piece that had just clicked into place but didn't like the picture it was making.

Then he stood and walked to the fire, bending to add wood, giving himself time to think.

"I'm a mythology professor," Meera said into the silence. "My father told me stories from the Mahabharata before I could speak. I learned to read from Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, and I was obsessed with Puranic tales of Nagas and Apsaras when other kids were watching cartoons."

"So that's a yes," Vikram muttered.

"I'm saying I study myth the way that other people study history. So yes — of course I believe in them." She looked out the window at the deodar forest that climbed the mountain behind the house, dark and dense and ancient. "Myths tell us about ourselves in ways that might make us uncomfortable, but that doesn't make them less true."

Vikram stared into the fire, and the silence stretched like a shadow at sundown. Then he spoke.

"I was seven years old when a boy with my own face walked out of that forest."

Meera felt her heart skip, but she said nothing.

Vikram's voice stayed low, his gaze fixed on the fire. "My grandmother was the superstitious kind. I grew up with rules — don't follow lights into the forest after dark, don't eat food offered by strangers in the wild, don't speak to anyone you meet between the deodar and the river, and never, never give your name to a face you don't know."

Meera's skin prickled. These weren't superstitions. These were fairy-tale rules — the same rules she'd catalogued across seventeen cultures in her doctoral thesis. Rules for surviving encounters with the otherworld.

"I need you to let me finish," Vikram said, and when he looked up, his eyes were raw. "And if you want to leave after and write me off as a madman, that would be better. That would be easier."

"I'm not leaving until you take me to Arjun."

He stared at her for a long moment, then shook his head.

"I saw him coming through the trees. Same face. Same height. Same everything — except his clothes were wrong and his accent was different, rounder, like someone speaking Hindi but from a place where the vowels had never been flattened by television." Vikram's hands clenched in his lap. "I ran, and the boy chased me, calling out in a voice that was my voice but brighter, like he'd never once been told to be quiet."

He paused. The fire popped.

"Eventually I stopped running. I was tired and... curious. And there was something about him." Vikram's jaw worked. "Something warm. He wanted to know me. And if you knew my father — or any of my family — you'd understand how rare that was."

Meera had already gathered that the Rathore household wasn't overflowing with affection. She kept her face neutral and waited.

"The boy said his name was Arjun. He said he'd never been in this forest before and he didn't want to get lost. He said his father was a raja and his mother was dead and he'd never had a friend." Vikram's voice had dropped to barely above a whisper. "I was a lonely seven-year-old boy with a cold father and no siblings I knew of. Presented with a playmate who looked like my reflection come to life..." He shrugged. "I didn't question it. We played all day. Explored the forest, the ruins, the streams. I stole food from the kitchen for us. And at sunset, he left. Walked back into the trees and vanished."

"And you missed him," Meera said.

Vikram looked at her sharply. "The moment he was out of sight, I felt like half of myself had gone with him."

"You'd only known him one day."

"Aye." He used the word like a man who'd learned English from multiple worlds. "One day. But the missing didn't stop. He came back the next summer, and the next, and the next. Until we were fourteen and he stopped coming. I didn't see him again for years."

"Where was he going? When he walked into the forest?"

Vikram stood and walked to the window. Outside, the deodar forest was a wall of dark trunks and layered branches, mist threading between the trees like smoke.

"There's another world behind that forest, Meera. A place that exists alongside ours — not beneath it, not above it. Beside it. The old stories call it Chhaya Lok. The Shadow Realm." He turned to face her. "You can reach it through certain gates — passages hidden in ancient groves, old temples, places where the boundary between worlds is thin."

He was watching her face, waiting for disbelief.

She gave him none. She'd studied too many cultures, read too many texts, heard too many versions of this exact story told by too many people across too many centuries to dismiss it outright.

"Go on."

"Arjun was born there. He grew up there. He's human — but he's not from our world." Vikram's voice was steady, the voice of a man who'd had decades to absorb the impossible. "In Chhaya Lok, every person is the twin of someone in our world — a Chhaya-Bandhu, a shadow-twin. Born at the same moment, wearing the same face, but living a different life on the other side of the forest."

"And Arjun is your Chhaya-Bandhu."

"My mirror self." Vikram's expression was bleak. "The wild, charming half that I've never been."

The fire crackled. The smell of cedar smoke filled the room. Outside, a bird called from the forest — a sound she didn't recognise, something between a whistle and a moan.

"You have two choices," Vikram said. "You can walk out that door, get in your car, drive back to Pune, and live your life. I will not blame you, and I'll think of you as the smartest woman I've ever met."

"And the other choice?"

"I take you through the forest." His jaw tightened. "Through a gate. Into Chhaya Lok. To see Arjun."

The room felt very still.

"This was nonsense.

And Vikram believed it. She could see it in his eyes — not the gleam of a liar or a madman, but the grim conviction of a man who had lived with an impossible truth for twenty-two years and had learned to stop fighting it.

"The second choice," she said. "Obviously."

Something moved across his face — relief? Resignation? "But if you insist on finding Arjun, I'll need help getting us through."

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