Ketu never thought he would be the kind of person who ran from a crime scene. He was six feet of amiable awkwardness: a little round at the middle where his mother's rotis had left a loving mark, shirts that strained politely at the seams, and a habit of tucking a pen behind his ear even when hands were full of solder. He'd scored eighty-nine percent in his final exams—enough to make his parents proud, not enough to be a prodigy—and that number sat in his chest like an honest, ordinary thing. He wasn't clever in the lightning-flash way of a TV genius; he was steady, practical, persistent. He'd always thought steady would be enough.
Tonight, steady felt breathless.
The tracks led from the courtyard into the market lane: heavy boot prints, a smear of oil here, a snapped twig there. Ketu followed them with Rahul at his shoulder and Jiya two paces back filming everything. Rain had softened the alleys into a maze of mud and puddles; lights from stalls blurred into halos. He kept reminding himself to breathe, to take measured steps—but adrenaline nudged him forward with a child's single-mindedness.
They reached a vendor's stall under a faded awning: a narrow shop of spare parts, wires, and secondhand chargers. A rusty tin sign swung: H. & Sons—Electricals. The metal tag fitted here; the tiny concentric circles were stamped on a ledger nail.
Ketu's heart did something stupidly honest—thump, thump. He peered inside. A young man in an oil-streaked kurta folded a strip of copper with the practiced ease of someone who had done the same movement a thousand times. He looked up, sharp and startled.
"Can I help you?" the man asked. His voice was careful, and for a beat Ketu saw not malice but tiredness. Around him, coils of wire hung like vines; a radio hummed in the corner.
Before Ketu could answer, the man crossed to a back crate and lifted a bundle of bamboo poles. He slipped a length of thin wire—too thin to cut a panel, but the type they'd used on the tamper tags—into his pocket.
Ketu took a step forward. "Where'd you get that tag?" he asked, too loud.
The man hardened. "For the charity kids, eh? You the one who sells dreams?" His tone was meant to sting.
Ketu stumbled over a reply. He'd rehearsed speeches—powerpoint data, maintenance plans—but at the mouth of the market stall, words felt small. "Your stamp," he said finally. "Supplied tags—H. & Sons. Someone used that tag after cutting our wires."
The man's eyes flicked to Rahul, to Jiya's camera. He swallowed. "Look, kid," he said. "I don't want trouble. People come and go. We sell cords and clips. I don't know who cuts what." He pushed a hand toward the lantern in the window—an old model, sold as a "backup." "If someone used a piece from my pile, it might be anyone."
Ketu's jaw tightened. He should have read the hesitation and eased off. He did not. He had a father at home who would be interrogated; a mother who would fold her hands and pray; donors waiting for updates that would either back them or pull out. Ordinary emergencies felt enormous. He pressed. "Did you sell boatloads to Suresh last month? To a Raman? Check your ledger."
The man's face went hard. "We sell to anyone with cash. Ask the Mukhiya—he buys his fairs from me."
Mukhiya. The name landed like a stone.
Ketu felt something like nausea. He had followed bootprints to a vendor, not to a confession. He had expected a villain with a hood and a hiss. Instead he found commerce and plausible deniability, the slow gears of a village economy that would chew up a man for a mistake.
"Did you see anyone leave the market tonight?" Rahul asked, quieter.
The vendor hesitated, then tapped the radio's dial. A chatter of voices, market gossip: "—Raman took a crate to Hanumanganj—" "—Mukhiya signed something this noon—" Static. Jiya rewound a clip and replayed a snatch: a courier leaving with a sealed packet, marked with three concentric circles.
Ketu's stomach pitched. "Raman," he muttered. He knew the name only because of whispers—Raman the middleman, a man who supplied breakdowns and fixed favors, a useful hand to those who wanted problems solved quietly. If anyone wanted to sabotage a village project and have the blame fall cleanly on a poor student, he was the sort who could arrange it.
They left with no more than a nudge of progress: a name, a direction, and a vendor who had been careful to supply plausible deniability. Ketu felt the edges of his composure fray. He was good at soldering, not at conspiracy. He'd imagined obstacles in terms of broken circuits and software bugs, not in the greasy, human currency of quid pro quo.
"Raman's shop is by the canal," Rahul said. "He deals with contractors and the Mukhiya's people. If anyone's buying tags in bulk, it's him."
The market's shadows closed in. Ketu's phone buzzed—Meera's message: DONORS CALLING. A line of panic: one had already frozen a pledge. He swallowed.
"Let's go," Ketu said, and felt a flash of something foolish. He wanted the chase to end; he wanted truth to be a single step away. He led them toward the canal road.
Raman's place was worse than Ketu expected: a broad compound, corrugated sheets and a locked gate, a dog that barked like a bell. A man in a maroon jacket leaned against the wall—he looked too clean for the mud around him. Mukhiya Das stood a few paces away, talking to someone with low, urgent gestures. Ketu's chest clenched. He had pictured Mukhiya as an opponent in a village council. He had not pictured him as a man cupped in private conversation with the sort of handler who bought favors.
Ketu slowed, beneath his breath calculating: step, hide, observe. He was not a cunning man. He was a little round, his breath puffing between words. He felt foolish as he crouched behind a stack of crates.
Mukhiya's voice drifted to him in fragments—words about "stopping the hurry," "livelihood," "supply chain." The handler—Raman—tapped an envelope for emphasis. A slip of paper seemed to change hands.
Ketu's mind groped. He could run down the lane, shout, film the exchange live. He could storm forward and demand answers. He could do dozens of things that would make good headlines—or make everything worse.
He did the thing that fit his bones: he stepped forward awkwardly, voice cracking, and called out, "Mukhiya! Raman! What's this about?"
Mukhiya's head snapped up as if struck. The handler's eyes narrowed. Words stopped. Then Mukhiya walked toward him—slow, very civilized—and in the space between a hundred tiny futures, Ketu felt the world compress into a single heartbeat.
"Mukhiya," Ketu said, throat raw. "Why are you talking to him? Did you—did you give him our vendor list?"
Mukhiya's smile was small and contained. "Ketu," he said, like a man who had long ago learned to say a name with taste. "You're young. You do well to be curious. But business is a river with many currents. You will learn that the hard way."
Raman's handler—clean jacket, sharp jaw—stepped forward and flicked a hand in Ketu's direction. "Boy, this isn't your business."
Ketu opened his mouth. He had rehearsed retorts, righteous turns of phrase. Instead he found the truth: his words were breath and heat. "It is my business when they cut wires that could burn a child," he said.
Mukhiya's jaw tightened. "Accusations are dangerous in a small place." He put a finger on the envelope as if to rest it there. "Be careful where you point."
At that moment, a vehicle rolled slowly past and the radio chattered in a voice Ketu hadn't expected: an official announcement—district inspectors en route, a directive to secure nodes of infrastructure. The handler's smile split into something like calculative relief. The gate slammed shut.
Ketu took one step back. For the first time since the crowd at the school, he felt painfully, embarrassingly ordinary. He had no legal training, no political leverage, only a crate of lamps and a stubbornness that sometimes read as obstinacy.
"You're not alone," Rahul said, his voice soft. Jiya kept filming, hands steady.
Mukhiya's gaze found Ketu and stayed. "Three days," he said quietly—echoing his earlier verdict in a tone that now felt full of consequence. "Prove yourself. Or the village decides what happens next."
Raman lifted his head and the handler flicked his eyes toward the canal. "And if this drags on, some may decide it's better to go the old way. People like certainty."
Ketu looked down at his hands. They were solder-stained and not particularly heroic. He had wanted to be steady; now steadiness demanded a kind of courage he hadn't quite learned. He had the tag, a name, and a whisper of a deal. He had enemies who could burn his reputation with a single anonymous complaint.
Then a shout cut the air: a child, screaming from the other side of the compound. The locked gate's dog barked its panic.
Ketu turned. Sparks bloomed near the lamppost where they'd installed the schoollight—an orange lick that shouldn't be there. Someone had thrown a crude firework into a lantern housing left for testing—the glass shattered, a flash of flame, then a dark spreading bloom.
Rahul lunged. Ketu ran. The handler's laugh was short; Mukhiya's face flinched in a way that did not look good.
Ketu reached the lamp as it toppled and, without thinking, grabbed a wet sack from a nearby vendor and clapped at the flames. Heat banded his face; the wet sack hissed. There was a sting—searing, sudden—on his forearm, a hot streak that made him gasp. He smothered the last sparks, heart hammering, breath screaming.
When the smoke thinned, a shape moved in the dim: the handler, hands empty, face shocked but not harmed. His jacket had a smear of ash near the sleeve. Mukhiya's pockets were empty; the envelope lay on the ground beside the handler—open. Inside, a scrap of paper bore a list: vendor names, suggested "incidents," payments.
Ketu's eyes snagged on one name scrawled in a neat hand: Suresh.
He stared. The world tilted.
The crowd closed in. Mukhiya stared at the paper, then at Ketu, then down the lane. For a long second, the handler's clean jaw set like a razor.
"You found something," Mukhiya said. His voice had an edge of something like alarm—then he moved fast, too fast. He scooped the scrap, folded it, and jammed it into his kurta. "Forget it, boy. You don't know what you hold."
Ketu's hand brushed the paper, the smell of ash and rain sticking to his fingers. The scrap burned like a truth too hot to hold.
Someone in the crowd screamed: "Police!"
Figures moved through the smoke—officials or men who wanted to be official. Hands seized shoulders. Mukhiya's eyes found Ketu with a look that was not pity now but calculation.
Ketu's heart dropped into his shoes. He wasn't perfect. He had stumbled, had chased shadows without a plan. But he had a name, and a scrap of paper that could topple more than a project—it could topple a network built on the slow economies of a village.
He swallowed past the sting on his arm and looked straight at Mukhiya.
"Who pays for the cuts?" he asked, voice steady when he did not feel it.
Mukhiya's smile returned, thin as a blade. "You already know too much."
And then the handler looked at Ketu with something like hunger—interest, danger—and the men who'd been watching decided, together, that tonight would not end with answers.
They closed in.
Ketu's breath hitched. Jiya's camera kept rolling. The crowd tightened like a noose.
He had wanted light. Tonight, the first light he had given Shantavan had almost burned someone. Now the only thing between him and a very ugly silence was the scrap of paper in a stranger's pocket—and a decision: run or fight for the truth.
He clutched at the pen behind his ear, not because it could fix circuits, but because it was the nearest thing to a talisman he owned.
Someone grabbed his arm.
"You're coming with us," an official said.
Ketu looked past him, at the smoking lamp, at Mukhiya's neat silhouette, at Rahul and Jiya—faces taut with worry and resolve. He wanted to shout evidence, to pull the scrap free, to show the vendor ledger, to prove the sabotage.
Instead he let them pull him forward.
Behind him, Jiya shouted, "Film everything!" She pivoted, pushing her camera up, capturing faces, names, hands—Mukhiya's hand brushing an envelope.
Ketu's ribs hurt. His arm stung. He was not a hero from a story. He was a flawed, ordinary boy who'd tried to light his village and had been smacked with consequences he hadn't imagined.
As they marched him toward the waiting vehicle—a van that smelled of rubber and rain—Ketu saw, through the blast of flashlight and press of bodies, the handler slip something small into his pocket: a matchbox with a peeled label. The same label he'd noticed earlier when the shadow had smiled.
Ketu's jaw tightened; the matchbox meant coordination. It meant this was neither random nor petty. It was planned.
They pushed him into the van and slammed the door. Rain hissed on the roof. In the dark, his breath sounded huge.
Outside, Mukhiya spoke low to the handler. The words were a murmur, but their meaning wasn't: keep it quiet, keep it clean, keep the village calm.
Ketu pressed his palms to the cool metal of the van wall. He felt, suddenly and fiercely, the smallness and necessity of one thing: facts. Photos. Donor timestamps. Vendor ledgers. Witnesses.
He had his team. He had a scrap of truth that had named names. He had a pen.
And he had a decision to make.
The van pulled away.
A single matchbox lay on the ground where the lamp had burned. Jiya stooped and picked it up, thumb worrying the ragged label. She looked at the camera, then into the night, and mouthed: Don't let him take the story.
The van's taillights disappeared down Old Mahua Road. Ketu's world narrowed to the thrum of the engine and the little burn on his forearm.
Some lights, he thought, had to be fought for. And sometimes you had to get scorched to understand how hot the truth could be.