Chapter 6: The Training

The first lesson was: stillness.

Not meditation — Mishti had tried meditation, the YouTube kind, the "breathe in for four, hold for seven, breathe out for eight" kind, and it had done nothing except make her aware of how loudly the hostel's water tank leaked. This was different. This was: functional stillness. The stillness of a hunter in a machan, waiting for the tiger to come to the waterhole. The stillness her father had taught her in the forest, where movement meant detection and detection meant: failure.

Mihir sat across from her in the Reading Room. The wicker chairs. The peepal tree visible through the open archway, its leaves trembling in the February wind — the specific tremble of peepal leaves, which move when no other tree moves, which the old texts attributed to the tree's spiritual sensitivity and which Mishti's forestry textbook attributed to the long, thin petiole that acts as a pivot point. Both explanations were: correct.

"Close your eyes," Mihir said. "Find the pressure."

The pressure: always there now. Behind her eyes. The low hum that had been intensifying since Mihir's visit to Lormi. Since she'd agreed. Since the forest had gone silent in recognition. The pressure that was — she now understood — not a malfunction but a signal. Her antenna, receiving. Always receiving. The visions she'd been having were: uncontrolled reception. A radio tuned to every frequency simultaneously, picking up fragments without discrimination. The training would teach her to: tune. To select a frequency. To choose what to receive.

"I feel it," she said.

"Good. Now — don't push it. Don't try to see anything. Just: hold the pressure. Like holding a note. A singer doesn't push the note higher — she sustains it. Sustain."

Mishti sustained. The pressure: steady. Not building, not fading. Held. The effort was: immense. Not physical — cognitive. The effort of maintaining a mental state without letting it slip into either action or relaxation. The knife-edge between: doing and being.

"How long?" she asked.

"Until I tell you."

It was forty-seven minutes. Mishti knew because when Mihir said "open," she looked at the clock on the courtyard wall — an old railway clock, the kind with Roman numerals and a face that had been white and was now the colour of parchment — and calculated the elapsed time with the mental arithmetic of a girl who had grown up without a smartphone until sixteen.

"What did you feel?" Mihir asked.

"The pressure. Steady. And — at about minute twenty — I felt: a pull. Like the pressure wanted to go somewhere. Like it had a direction."

"Which direction?"

"North. Towards — I don't know how I know this — towards the river."

"The Yamuna."

"Yes."

Mihir nodded. The nod of a teacher who has asked a question he already knows the answer to. "The Yamuna is: a corridor. Not just for water. For departure. The river carries: the dead. Has carried them for millennia. The ghats at Nigambodh — the cremation ghat — produce a concentration of departures that your antenna naturally gravitates toward. It's the loudest frequency in Delhi. Every new seer points north within the first week."

"So I'm: normal?"

"There's nothing normal about what you can do. But your response is: typical. Which is reassuring."

*

The second lesson was: specificity.

Audrey taught this one. In the Map Room. The teak table with the elephant-foot legs, covered in Survey of India sheets. Audrey's teaching style was: the opposite of Mihir's. Where Mihir was patient, philosophical, the guru-on-the-mat, Audrey was: military. Direct. Impatient with imprecision.

"When you see a death," Audrey said, "you see details. You've been ignoring them. Looking at the death and not the: context. I need you to start looking at the context."

"What context?"

"Location. The background of the vision. The walls, the road, the landscape. Every vision you've had contains: coordinates. You just haven't been reading them."

Audrey pulled out Mishti's Classmate notebook. The blue notebook that had been hidden under the mattress, which Mishti had surrendered on arrival because Mihir had asked and because — she was beginning to understand — secrets in the Division were: shared resources. Personal privacy existed for personal matters. Professional data — and the death catalogue was professional data — belonged to everyone.

"Entry seven," Audrey said. "Construction worker. Falling from scaffolding. You wrote: 'Mumbai high-rise.' How do you know it was Mumbai?"

"The — the sea. I could see the sea in the background. And the buildings. The skyline."

"Which direction was the sea?"

"West. The worker was facing — he was on the west side of the building. The sea was behind him."

"And the buildings around him? Describe them."

Mishti closed her eyes. The vision: recalled. Not the death — the context. The buildings. She'd been so focused on the fall — the man's hands losing grip, the scaffolding pole sliding, the specific physics of a body in free fall, the four-second interval between release and impact that she had counted without meaning to — that she hadn't looked at: the surroundings.

But they were there. In memory. In the vision's archive, which she now understood was stored completely, not partially. She had recorded everything — her antenna had captured the full signal. She had simply been reading only the headline.

"The building under construction was — glass. Glass and steel. Modern. The adjacent building had a sign. Blue and white. I can almost — " She pressed. The pressure behind her eyes responded. The vision sharpened. The sign came into focus. "Indiabulls. The sign said Indiabulls."

"Indiabulls Finance Centre. Lower Parel. The construction site would have been — " Audrey consulted a map. Her finger traced the Mumbai coastline, found Lower Parel. "One of the residential towers going up on the old mill land. We can cross-reference with construction accident reports from that month."

"You're saying I can: go back? Into old visions?"

"You're not going back. You're reading what's already been recorded. Your antenna captures everything. The visions are: complete datasets. You've been reading the executive summary. We're going to teach you to read the: appendix."

*

The third lesson — the hardest — was: control.

This was Mihir's domain again. Week three. The Reading Room. The chairs. The peepal tree. But this time, the courtyard was: occupied. The other two seers were present.

Kaveri — a woman from Varanasi, mid-thirties, who Mihir had described as "the one who smells death." In person, Kaveri was: small. Quiet. The quietness of a person who lives with a sense that never turns off. She wore a cotton saree — the Banarasi cotton of a woman who had grown up in the silk city but preferred simplicity. Her eyes were: exhausted. The exhaustion of a woman who could smell the Nigambodh ghat's cremations from twenty kilometres away and had learned to live with: the constant presence of endings.

And Yash — a young man from Pune, twenty-five, who heard deaths. Not saw, not smelled — heard. The last words. The final breath. The specific sound of a body's systems shutting down in sequence — the heart, the lungs, the brain, each producing its own frequency of cessation, a chord of: ending. Yash wore headphones constantly — not to listen to music, but to muffle the incoming signal, the way a person in a noisy factory wears ear protection. His headphones were his barrier between: the world's dying and his sanity.

"Today," Mihir said, "you learn to choose."

"Choose what?"

"Which death to see. Until now, your visions have been random. The antenna receives whatever is loudest. Today, I'm going to teach you to point the antenna. To direct it. To look at a specific place — a city, a road, a building — and see: what is coming."

"How?"

"The map." Mihir gestured to the teak table. A map of Delhi was spread on it — the Survey of India sheet for the NCR region, the topographic lines and road networks and blue threads of rivers and canals. "Put your hand on the map. Touch: a location. And then: listen. Don't push. Don't force. Touch and listen."

Mishti placed her hand on the map. Her palm covered: Connaught Place. The heart of Delhi. The circle of white colonnaded buildings that the British had designed and the Indian government had preserved and the shopkeepers had filled with everything from Wenger's pastries to bootleg electronics.

The pressure surged. Not painfully — but strongly. Like a volume knob turned to: maximum. And then: the vision. Not random. Directed. She was in Connaught Place. Not physically — psychically. She could see the outer circle. The traffic. A pedestrian — a man, elderly, white kurta, walking stick, the specific slow walk of a man whose knees had decided that haste was: no longer an option. He was crossing Barakhamba Road. The light was green. The light would turn. He would not reach the other side. The car — a white Innova, the universal Delhi taxi — was approaching too fast, the driver on his phone, the screen illuminating his face with the blue light of WhatsApp, the blue light of: distraction.

"I see it," Mishti said. "Connaught Place. Barakhamba Road. An old man. White Innova. The driver is on his phone. The man won't make it across."

"When?" Mihir asked.

"Not now. The light — the traffic pattern — the shadows. Afternoon. Tomorrow. No — the day after. Thursday. Between 3 and 4 PM."

"Audrey."

Audrey was already moving. Phone — one of the olive-green rotary phones, the 1947 copper wire. She dialled. Three digits. A conversation: brief, coded, the specific language of a field dispatch. Mishti caught fragments: "Barakhamba crossing, Thursday, 15:00 to 16:00, white Innova, elderly male pedestrian, redirect traffic or delay pedestrian, field team Alpha."

"Will they save him?" Mishti asked.

"If your timing is right, yes," Mihir said. "This is why we train. Not to see death. To prevent it. The seeing is: the input. The prevention is: the output. You are learning to be: the instrument that connects the two."

Mishti looked at her hand on the map. The pressure: receding. The vision: fading. But the knowledge: remained. A man in a white kurta would cross Barakhamba Road on Thursday afternoon and a field team would be there to ensure he reached the other side. Because Mishti Lal — forest girl, tree climber, langur tracker — had put her hand on a map and seen: the future. And the future was: changeable.

For the first time in two years, the gift didn't feel like a curse. It felt like: a weapon. Against the wrong deaths. Against the unnecessary endings. Against the forty-one entries in the Classmate notebook that she now understood were not her failures but her: training data. Every death she'd been helpless to prevent had been: a lesson. Teaching her antenna. Calibrating her reception. Preparing her for the moment when she would be able to point and: see. And act.