Chapter 14: What Mihir Is

She asked on a quiet Tuesday. The Division: slow. No active saves. Kaveri in Varanasi on a personal visit — the woman who smelled death returning to the city of cremation, which was either courage or masochism, depending on how you understood her gift. Yash in his room with his headphones, listening to silence because silence was: the only thing he couldn't hear deaths through. Ramu Kaka in the kitchen, making the rajma that was the Division's unofficial fuel.

Mishti and Mihir sat in the courtyard. Under the peepal tree. The May heat: punishing. The peepal providing shade that was: insufficient but symbolic, the tree's canopy a reminder that shelter existed even when the shelter was: not enough.

"What are you?" Mishti asked.

Mihir looked at her. The look that contained: calculation. Not dishonesty — the calculation of how much truth a person could absorb at one time. He had been doing this with Mishti since Lormi — releasing information in portions, the way a doctor administers medication, dosing the reality so the patient could: process.

"I was born in what is now Varanasi," he said. "In the period that your history textbooks call the Gupta era. I was a priest. Not the kind you see at the ghats now — the ritual performers, the businessmen in saffron. I was a different kind. The kind that sat at the burning ghats and: listened. To the dead. To the departing. I could hear the exact moment a soul separated from a body. The sound was — is — a frequency that most human ears cannot detect. A hum. The frequency of transition."

"The Gupta era," Mishti repeated. "That's — fourth century. Fifth century."

"Approximately 420 CE. Give or take a decade. The record-keeping was: imprecise."

"You're sixteen hundred years old."

"Approximately."

Mishti sat with this. The number: too large for the mind to hold without distortion. Sixteen hundred years. The fall of the Guptas. The Mughal invasion. The British Raj. Independence. The Emergency. Liberalisation. Sixteen hundred years of Indian history, lived — not studied, not read about, lived — by the man sitting across from her under a peepal tree in a colonial building in Jor Bagh, eating rajma with his fingers because he had been eating with his fingers since before forks were: invented.

"How?"

"The gift extends life. Not indefinitely — I will die. But the frequency I attuned to at the Varanasi ghat — the transition frequency — it rewired my: biology. The cells repair. The aging slows. Not stops — slows. I age approximately one year for every hundred. I am: biologically sixty. Chronologically sixteen hundred. The math is: unusual."

"And the Division?"

"The Division has existed in some form since the Mughal period. I started it when I realised that hearing the dead was: insufficient. That the gift could be directed. That people like your grandmother — seers, smellers, hearers — existed across India, appearing in every generation, and that together, we could: intervene. Change the outcomes. Redirect the departures. Not all of them — never all of them. But: enough."

"The government knows?"

"The government has known since 1947. Nehru knew. Not the details — the existence. He was: a rational man who encountered something irrational and chose to: fund it, quietly, through budget lines that no auditor has ever examined. Every Prime Minister since has known. Some have used us. Some have ignored us. Some have tried to: shut us down. We survive because the work is: necessary. And because I am: persistent. You learn persistence in sixteen hundred years."

Mishti looked at the peepal tree. The tree that had been in this courtyard since before the British built the walls around it. The tree that Mihir had probably: planted. Or known the person who planted it. Or watched it grow from a seed that fell from a bird that landed on a branch that was part of a tree that was part of a forest that no longer existed because the city had consumed it, the way cities consume forests, one building at a time.

"The language you speak on the black phone," she said. "The old one. What is it?"

"Prakrit. The language that existed before Sanskrit became: formalised. The language of common people in the Gupta period. The language I dream in, when I dream, which is: rarely. The language of the transition frequency. The language the dead: understand."

"You speak to the dead."

"I have spoken to the dead for sixteen hundred years. They are: excellent conversationalists. Better than the living, in many cases. They have: perspective. The perspective that comes from having left the body and seeing, from the outside, what the body could never see from the inside."

"What do they say?"

"Mostly? They say: 'I should have spent more time with the people I loved.' The dead are: unanimous on this point. Across sixteen centuries. Across every language, religion, caste, gender. The dead all agree: they should have loved more. Worked less. Held the people they cared about: closer."

The courtyard: silent. The peepal: trembling. The May heat: pressing down. And Mishti thought of Ganesh Bhaiya — the man in the red section, the man whose chai tasted like iron and home — and wondered if he, too, from wherever he was, was saying the same thing. That he should have loved more. That the chai stall was just a stall, that the jaggery he gave to children was: the real work, and the chai was: the excuse.

"Do you speak to Ganesh Bhaiya?" she asked. Quietly. The question she hadn't known she was going to ask until it: emerged.

"I did. The night he died. Before you called. He was — confused, as they often are in the first hours. Fire deaths are: disorienting. The transition is violent and the soul carries the: shock. But he settled. And he asked about you."

"About me?"

"He said: 'Tell the girl who climbs the sal trees that the langurs are back. And the chai stall is just wood. She is: not.'"

Mishti cried. In the courtyard. Under the peepal tree. In the May heat. The tears: hot, immediate, the tears of a woman who had just received a message from a dead man through a sixteen-hundred-year-old priest who ate rajma with his fingers and funded his operation through budget lines that no auditor had ever examined. The tears that were: grief and gratitude and the specific, impossible comfort of knowing that the dead could speak and that what they said was: love.