Chapter 2: The Second Vision

The visions had started on her twentieth birthday.

She'd been alone — which was unusual for a birthday in the Lal household, where birthdays were communal events involving her mother's kheer, her father's off-key rendition of "Happy Birthday" in a Hindi-English hybrid that made Deepak physically cringe, and at least fifteen neighbours who arrived uninvited because in Lormi, privacy was a concept that applied to bathroom doors and nothing else.

But on her twentieth, Mishti had been at Ranchi. Hostel room. Third floor of the women's block. Her roommate, Pallavi — a girl from Jamshedpur who studied environmental science and snored like a diesel generator — was home for the weekend. The room: small. Two beds, two desks, one window overlooking the campus cricket ground where boys played until the light died and then argued about LBW decisions until the warden threatened to lock the gate.

She'd been reading. A textbook on forest ecology — Dr. K.P. Singh's monograph on sal forest regeneration patterns, the kind of book that put most people to sleep but that Mishti read the way other people read thrillers, because the sal forest was not an abstraction to her. It was: home. Every page about canopy dynamics and root networks and mycorrhizal symbiosis was a page about the place she'd grown up in, translated into the language of science.

The pressure had arrived at 9:47 PM. She remembered the time because she'd looked at her phone — the old Redmi, the one with the cracked screen that her father had given her with the instruction "Don't break it worse" — and noted the time the way you note the time of an earthquake. Before and after.

The pressure: behind her eyes. The same pressure she would come to know intimately over the next two years. The pressure that felt like: a signal being received by hardware that was not designed for it. Like tuning a transistor radio to a frequency that shouldn't exist.

And then: the vision. A woman. Old. In a hospital — not a hospital she recognised, not the Bilaspur district hospital where she'd had her appendix out at fourteen, but a larger one, with fluorescent lights and the specific institutional green of government hospital walls. The woman was in a bed. The bed had rails. The rails were: cold. Mishti could feel them — not with her hands, but with the woman's hands. She was inside the woman's perception. Feeling what the woman felt. The cold rails. The hospital sheet, thin, inadequate, the cotton worn to translucency. The IV line in the crook of the elbow — the specific discomfort of a needle held in place by tape that was starting to peel.

The woman was dying. Not in pain — beyond pain. In the specific territory that exists past pain, where the body has stopped protesting and begun: negotiating. The heart: slowing. Not stopping — slowing. Each beat arriving later than expected, like a train on Indian Railways, the intervals stretching until the platform begins to wonder if the train will come at all.

Mishti felt the last beat. The absolute last one. The moment when the heart — the woman's heart, a heart that had beaten for seventy-three years, through a marriage and children and grandchildren and the specific endurance of an Indian woman who had carried a family on her back — stopped. Not dramatically. Not with the cinema convulsion. Quietly. The way a candle goes out when the wax is finished. The flame doesn't fight. It simply: ends.

Mishti had screamed. In the hostel room. At 9:47 PM on her twentieth birthday. She had screamed and fallen off the bed and hit her head on Pallavi's desk and lay on the floor with blood running from her forehead and the vision dissipating like smoke, leaving behind: nausea. The bone-deep nausea of a body that had just experienced someone else's death.

The hostel warden — Mrs. Tiwari, a woman built like a temple pillar, with the personality to match — had found her on the floor, concluded she'd fainted, and taken her to the campus medical center, where a bored doctor had stitched the forehead cut, checked her blood pressure, and told her to eat properly and sleep more. "You students don't eat," he said, with the specific condescension of a man who believed all female health issues could be traced to insufficient dal.

Mishti hadn't told him about the vision. She hadn't told anyone. Because what would she say? "I just experienced an old woman dying in a hospital I've never been to, and I felt her heart stop"? In Lormi, this would be attributed to one of three things: overwork, dehydration, or bhoot. The ghost explanation would be the most popular. Mishti's grandmother — her father's mother, who had died when Mishti was twelve — had been known in the village as someone who "saw things." The seeing: attributed to spiritual sensitivity by the villagers, to superstition by Mishti's father, and to possible schizophrenia by the Bilaspur psychiatrist her father had quietly consulted without telling anyone.

But Mishti's grandmother's seeing had been: different. She saw the dead. Specifically, she claimed to see the recently deceased — villagers who had died, appearing to her in the kitchen or the garden or, once, memorably, on the roof during a monsoon, which had caused her to drop the clothes she was hanging and scream in a way that the neighbours still referenced twenty years later. The grandmother saw the dead and spoke to them and relayed messages that were, according to the villagers, "sometimes accurate and sometimes not, but always entertaining."

Mishti didn't see the dead. She saw the dying. The distinction: crucial. Her grandmother's gift — if it was a gift — was retrospective. A communication with those already gone. Mishti's was: prospective. A preview of deaths that hadn't happened yet. Or were happening right now, in real time, in places she could not reach.

Over the next two years, the visions came with increasing frequency. Once a month at first. Then twice. Then weekly. By the time she returned to Lormi for the summer of her final year — the summer of the langurs and the sal tree and Ganesh Bhaiya's iron-water chai — the visions were arriving three or four times a week.

She had catalogued them. In a notebook — a blue Classmate notebook, the kind every Indian student owns, the kind with the multiplication table on the back cover. She wrote the date, the time, the location (as best she could determine), and the manner of death. The catalogue was: grim.

Entry 1: February 14, old woman, hospital, heart failure.

Entry 7: A construction worker falling from scaffolding in what looked like a Mumbai high-rise.

Entry 15: A child on a road — a village road, somewhere flat, Madhya Pradesh or Rajasthan — running after a ball, the truck approaching, the driver on his phone.

Entry 23: A farmer. Pesticide. The specific slow death of organophosphate poisoning, the body convulsing on the floor of a one-room house while a woman — wife, mother, someone who loved him — screamed in a language Mishti didn't understand but understood completely.

Entry 41: The man on the motorcycle. This morning. The truck without lights. The turn he couldn't see.

Forty-one deaths in two years. Forty-one people she had watched die without being able to help. The catalogue: her private horror. The notebook: hidden under her mattress in the hostel, and now under her mattress in the Lormi house, because some things you carry alone not because you want to but because the alternative — telling someone, being believed or not believed, being treated or pitied — is: worse.

The pressure behind her eyes after this morning's vision was: stronger than usual. Not just the motorcycle man. Something else. The presence in the forest — the attention, the weight of being watched — had been intensifying. As if the thing that watched her was: approaching. Getting closer. Deciding something.

Mishti sat at Ganesh Bhaiya's stall and drank her bitter chai and looked at the sal forest — the forest her family had guarded for three generations — and thought: whatever is coming, it's coming soon. And I am not ready.