Chapter 6: The Investigation

Meghna — 2020

The police found nothing because there was nothing to find.

Sub-Inspector Rajesh Chauhan conducted the investigation with the procedural thoroughness of a man following a manual: he interviewed the dhaba staff (no one had seen anything), interviewed the truck drivers who had been parked outside (no one had seen anything), interviewed the patrons who had been drinking inside (no one had seen anything, and several could not remember their own names, which was the specific testimony of men who had been drinking Old Monk since 7 PM and who regarded the police with the unfocused goodwill of the profoundly inebriated). He checked CCTV—there was none; Sharma's dhaba operated on the principle that surveillance was for cities and that in Waknaghat, people watched each other, which was more effective and considerably cheaper. He checked phone records—Jaya's phone had been switched off at 10:34 PM, four minutes after she left the table, and the last cell tower ping was the one nearest the dhaba, which covered a radius of three kilometres and included the highway, the pine forest, the apple orchards, and approximately two hundred houses whose residents were, theoretically, all suspects and practically all asleep.

The investigation stalled. It stalled the way investigations stall in small towns with small police forces and small budgets: not with a dramatic failure but with a gradual loss of momentum, the daily file growing thinner, the follow-up visits becoming less frequent, the urgency that had characterised the first week dissolving into the routine acknowledgment that some cases were solved and some were not and that the resources of the Waknaghat thana—four constables, one sub-inspector, a Bolero with 180,000 kilometres on the odometer, and a forensic kit that had been purchased in 2011 and had not been updated since—were not sufficient to find a woman who had vanished from a parking lot on a December night without leaving a trace.

Meghna did not stall.

She took leave from the school—two weeks of casual leave, then medical leave obtained through Dr. Bhatt in Solan who understood that the medical condition being treated was not physical but the specific, consuming anguish of a woman whose best friend had disappeared and who could not sit in a classroom teaching Class 6 English grammar while the world outside continued without Jaya in it. She drove to the dhaba every evening—parking her Maruti Alto in the same spot where she had parked on the night of Jaya's disappearance, sitting in the car with the engine running for warmth, watching the parking lot with the patient attention of a woman who believed that the man in the dark jacket would return.

He did not return.

Or rather—he might have returned, and Meghna might not have recognised him, because the memory of the silhouette was peripheral and imprecise, a shadow without features, a shape without a face. She had told Sub-Inspector Chauhan about the man, had described—as accurately as the memory allowed—the dark jacket, the position near the trucks, the stillness, the watching. Chauhan had noted it, asked if she could identify the man, received the honest answer that she could not, and filed the information in the category of leads-that-cannot-be-pursued, which was, in his experience, the largest category in any investigation.

But Meghna pursued it. Not through the police—through her own methodology, which was not forensic but social. She was a teacher in a small town. She knew people. She knew who talked, who listened, who watched, who remembered. She went to the chai stalls—Bittu's on the highway, Kamla Devi's near the school, the one at the bus stand that had no name but whose operator, a man called Gopal, had been serving chai at that location since before Meghna was born and who knew the movements of every person in Waknaghat with the comprehensive surveillance of a man whose workplace was the town's central node.

"The second Saturday," she said to Gopal, sitting on the wooden bench outside his stall with a glass of ginger chai that burned her tongue and warmed her chest. "December. Did you notice anything unusual? Anyone you didn't recognise? Any vehicle that shouldn't have been here?"

Gopal poured chai—the practiced arc from pot to glass, the stream of dark liquid catching the winter sun. "Saturday night? Half the district comes to Sharma's on Saturday night. Trucks, cars, tempos. People I know, people I don't. You're asking me to remember one Saturday from a month ago?"

"I'm asking you to try."

He tried. The effort was visible—the furrow between his eyebrows, the slight tilt of the head that indicated a man searching a mental archive that was vast and disorganised. "There was a tempo—Solan plates, I think—that I hadn't seen before. Parked near the highway turn, not at the dhaba. I noticed because tempo drivers usually park at the dhaba for food, but this one stayed on the road."

"Did you see the driver?"

"No. It was dark. The tempo was there when I closed at eleven—I close early in winter, nobody drinks chai after ten in this cold—and gone in the morning."

A tempo. Solan plates. Parked on the highway turn, not at the dhaba. It was not evidence—it was a thread, thin and frayed, the kind of thread that might connect to something or might connect to nothing but that Meghna wound around her finger and held because it was all she had.

She built a map. On the wall of her bedroom—the bedroom in her parents' house, the house she had returned to after college because returning was what unmarried daughters in Himachali towns did, the gravitational pull of family and economics combining to create an orbit that was comfortable and confining—she pinned a map of Waknaghat and its surroundings. On the map, she marked: the dhaba (red pin), the last cell tower ping (blue circle), the parking lot (red X), the position of the man in the dark jacket (black pin, approximate), and Gopal's tempo (yellow pin, on the highway turn).

Then she added other marks. Over the following weeks, as she talked to more people—the postman, the forest guards, the women at the ration shop, the retired teachers who gathered at the community centre on Sundays and who constituted, collectively, the unofficial archive of Waknaghat's history—she heard other stories. Not about Jaya—about disappearances. Small ones. Unconnected ones. The kind that, individually, did not constitute cases but that, accumulated, constituted a pattern.

A tourist from Delhi, 2002, found dead on a hiking trail above Waknaghat. Heart attack. No investigation.

A truck driver from Haryana, 2005, found dead in his cab at a highway rest stop near Solan. Heart failure. No investigation.

A pilgrim from Varanasi, 2008, found dead at a dharamshala in Kasauli. Natural causes. No investigation.

A woman from Chandigarh, 2012, who had been staying at a homestay in Waknaghat and who had gone for an evening walk and had not returned. Missing person report filed. Never found.

A college student from Shimla, 2015, who had been hiking in the pine forests and who had been found dead at the base of a cliff. Fall. Accidental death. No investigation.

The marks accumulated on the map—red pins for deaths, blue pins for disappearances, each pin representing a life that had ended or vanished in the geographic vicinity of Waknaghat over a period of seventeen years. Individually, each event was explainable: heart attacks happened; people fell from cliffs; missing persons in mountainous terrain were, statistically, victims of the terrain. But collectively—

Collectively, the pins formed a cluster. And at the centre of the cluster, like the eye of a storm that no one had noticed because no one had looked at the weather from above, was Waknaghat.

Meghna stood in front of the map on a January evening, the Himachali cold pressing against the window, the single bulb in her room casting shadows across the pins, and felt the specific, vertiginous sensation of a person who has been looking at a picture and has suddenly seen the image within the image—the hidden pattern, the concealed design, the thing that was always there and that no one saw because no one was looking.

Someone in Waknaghat was killing people.

And that someone had taken Jaya.