Aarav yawned again, the sound soft in the orange-lit room, and before he could pull the blanket back over his head Raghu had already perched himself on the edge of the bed, one eyebrow raised. "Still half asleep?" Raghu asked, amusement and warning braided together in his voice. Aarav blinked, rubbing his eyes. "A little — manageable," he mumbled, trying to sound casual, but when his gaze drifted to the shelf something in his face went still. Raghu followed his stare. "You saw it?" he asked, quieter now. Aarav only nodded.
On the top shelf, where model cars and old photo frames gathered dust, a wisp of black smoke curled and uncurled like ink dropped into clear water. It had no solid edges, only suggestion — a human silhouette in motion, shifting with the light. The air around it seemed colder by a fraction, the room's orange warmth bending at the edges where the shadow breathed. For a moment Raghu's jocular expression faltered; he had seen enough of the Malhotra household's strange stories to know when they weren't tales. "A ghost?" he whispered, though it sounded absurd even as he said it.
Aarav didn't need to answer. He sat up straighter, the boyishness in his face replaced by something quieter and older. "It's not… like in films," he said. "I've been seeing them since I was fifteen. At first it was flashes at night — a face at the window, footsteps that stopped when I moved — but it got clearer. Now they come more often." He shrugged, a rueful little smile ghosting his lips. "They don't hurt me. Mostly they just… remember things. Talk, sometimes. I can see them, hear them, talk back." His hand hovered a beat over the laptop as if the machine were a shield he could return to.
The black wisp on the shelf shifted, and a voice — not loud but threaded into the room like air — breathed Aarav's name. It was old and grainy, like a radio left between stations. Aarav's fingers tightened. "Raghunath?" he said, though he knew it couldn't be his grandfather; Raghunath had been dead long enough to be legend. The figure didn't answer with words at first. Instead it drifted lower, examining the toy cars with a curious, almost affectionate motion, as if remembering how small hands had once handled them. Then a phrase scraped out, syllables like leaves: "Watch… shadow grows."
Raghu swallowed. "You can actually hear them?" he asked, voice small. He'd grown up listening to the old maid's stories of Raghunath Baba — the ghost hunter — but hearing proof in the air was different. Aarav nodded, eyes on the shape. "Yeah. At first I thought I was losing it. But it's real. Sometimes they want help. Sometimes they want to warn me. Sometimes—" he cut himself off and tried to make light of it, tossing a grin Raghu's way, "—sometimes they just complain about how you never clean the toy cars properly." Raghu let out a short, incredulous laugh that held less laughter and more wonder.
The shadow drifted closer and for a breath it felt intimate, like a grandmother leaning in to smell a child's hair. Aarav found himself answering, not because he dared and not because he was brave, but because the habit of speaking to what others could not see had rooted itself into his daily life. "What do you want?" he asked, voice gentle. The smoke shivered, and for a second Aarav's face tightened with concentration, listening to a language of images rather than sentences — a field of whispering reeds, a locked door, a name half-remembered. "It's warning me," Aarav told Raghu, voice low. "Something's moving. Not the usual restless spirits. This one knows of—of men who track secrets."
Raghu's eyes hardened; protectiveness flickered in the way his jaw clenched. "Then tell your ghost to mind its business," he said, trying to joke, but it came out thin. Aarav looked at him, and behind that mischief the heir's heart thudded faster — half thrill, half dread. "I can't make them go," he said. "They come when there are threads to be pulled. Granddad used to say the dead remember debts. Maybe the debt is waking up." He glanced toward the window where sunlight still pooled but felt weaker now. "If they're getting louder, it means something's changing."
For a moment the room held its breath: sunlight, silk sheets, a boy who could erase cameras with a few keystrokes, and a memory-made-man hovering where the toys slept. Raghu swallowed again and, almost without thinking, reached out to rest a steadying hand on Aarav's shoulder. "Whatever it is," he said, steady and low, "we'll face it. Together." Aarav allowed himself to lean into that small, human anchor — his mischief dimming under the weight of responsibility and a strange, uncanny inheritance.
The black smoke hovered a last second, tending to the toy car that had once been handled by a livelier hand, then thinned and rose like breath — not gone, not gone forever — just slipping back into the house's bones where the past always listened. Aarav watched it go with a complicated smile: afraid, oddly comforted, and more alive than he felt the night before. Outside, the mansion hummed with servants and schedules and Rajendra's orders; inside, a boy with rose lips and messy hair carried an echo his family both feared and revered.