The train to Pune was a slow, grinding counterpoint to the frantic pace of Mumbai. Harsh sat by the window, watching the urban sprawl give way to scrubland and then to the greener, quieter outskirts of the old city. The shift in scenery felt like traveling back in time, which was fitting. He was going to dig up a ghost.
Anjali Kulkarni lived in a modest apartment building near a school. The air smelled of rain and textbooks, a world away from the diesel and desperation of the docks. Harsh found her name on a mailbox and climbed the stairs, his footsteps echoing in the quiet hall.
She answered the door herself. A woman in her early thirties, with sharp, intelligent eyes and a wary stillness about her. She wore a simple cotton sari and had a smudge of chalk dust on her wrist. She looked at Harsh, taking in his Mumbai-sharpness, the intensity in his gaze that didn't belong in her quiet hallway.
"Yes?" she said, her voice guarded.
"My name is Harsh. I'm here about a fire. Fifteen years ago. A warehouse. Your father, Ramesh Joshi."
The wariness in her eyes didn't fade; it solidified into something harder. She didn't ask how he found her. She simply studied him for a long moment, then stepped aside. "You'd better come in."
Her apartment was neat, filled with books and the quiet light of the Pune afternoon. A framed photograph on a shelf showed a smiling man with his arm around a teenage girl—a younger, happier version of the woman before him.
"You're not the first to come asking about my father," she said, not offering him tea, not sitting down. She remained standing, a sentinel at the gate of her own history. "The others worked for him. They offered money. Then they offered threats. Which are you here with?"
"Neither," Harsh said. He remained standing too. This wasn't a social call. "I'm here with an opportunity. For you. For me. I am burning Venkat Swami's empire to the ground. The fire that killed your father was the first brick in it. I want to use that brick to smash the rest."
He saw it then—a flicker of raw, undiluted hatred in her eyes. It was quickly masked, but it was there. A deep, cold well of it that fifteen years had not filled.
"You speak like a vengeful god," she said, her voice low. "Not a businessman."
"I'm whatever I need to be to finish this," Harsh replied. "The police have evidence. The press has the story. But it's not enough. He has politicians, judges, policemen in his pocket. He'll stall, he'll obfuscate, he'll pin it on underlings. To break him completely, I need to break his story. I need the truth about how it started."
She turned and walked to the bookshelf, picking up the photograph of her father. Her fingers traced the glass. "The official report said faulty wiring. They said he was careless. They ruined his name to cover their crime."
"And the unofficial truth?" Harsh asked.
She looked at him, her decision made. "My father was not careless. He was successful. Too successful. A self-made man who built a thriving business from nothing. A man like Swami—he was nobody then, just a sharp, vicious young fixer—approached him. Wanted a 'partnership'. My father refused. He was a proud man. He believed in building things honestly."
She took a shaky breath. "A week later, the fire started in the middle of the night. In three different places. The night watchman, a loyal man who had worked for my father for twenty years, vanished. His body was found in a ditch a month later. The police called it a robbery. My father wasn't just killed. He was erased. His business was sold off for debt to a shell company that Swami controlled. It was his first big score."
She put the photo down. "I tried to tell people. The police, the newspapers. I was a hysterical girl. A nuisance. Then the threats started. Against me, against my mother. So we left. We changed our names. We disappeared."
Harsh listened, the pieces clicking into place. It was the same pattern, refined over fifteen years. Intimidation, murder, theft, cover-up. Swami hadn't changed; he had just gotten better at it.
"I need you to come back," Harsh said.
She flinched. "No. You don't understand what you're asking. He'll—"
"He's focused on me now," Harsh interrupted. "His back is against the wall. The last thing he's worried about is a ghost from fifteen years ago. But your testimony, now, to the right people, with the evidence I have... it connects him directly to murder. Not treason, not corruption. Murder. It makes it personal. It makes it real for a jury. It's the nail in his coffin."
He could see the terror in her eyes, the old, familiar fear. But beneath it, the hatred was stronger.
"I have a life here," she whispered. "A quiet life."
"You have a chance to give your father back his name," Harsh said, his voice quiet but relentless. "A chance to be the daughter who didn't just run away, but who came back and fought for him."
It was a low blow. He was using her love, her guilt, just as coldly as Swami used fear. But war required terrible weapons.
She was silent for a long time, clutching the photograph. Finally, she looked up, and her eyes were dry and hard.
"What do you need me to do?"
Harsh laid out the plan. He would have Merchant, the investigator, take her full statement, notarized, detailed. He would then take her to Inspector Sawant. Not as a hysterical girl, but as a material witness with a documented story that predated Swami's power. A story that couldn't be ignored.
He left her apartment as the sun began to set. He had what he came for. Not just information, but a weapon. A living, breathing witness to the original sin.
On the train back to Mumbai, the city's skyline emerged from the haze, a fortress of power and pain. He was no longer just a businessman or a rebel. He was an archaeologist of doom, digging up the past to bury the present.
He had the money. He had the evidence. He had the witness.
The final move was no longer a matter of strategy. It was a matter of timing.
The teacher from Pune was coming to town. And she was bringing the truth with her.
(Chapter End)