Chapter 3: Legends and Nightmares

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3

I closed Professor Rohan Singh’s diary, my mind in turmoil.

I couldn’t help but recall the story of "Parvat Ki Kahani" from my school textbooks.

Once, there was an old man named Parvat. Two mountains blocked the path in front of his house.

To clear the way, he called on his family to help him move the mountains, dumping the excavated rocks into the Bay of Bengal.

He declared that, with endless generations, the mountains would eventually be levelled.

His perseverance moved the heavens, and the gods sent a mighty deity to move the mountains away for him.

I remembered how our Hindi teacher, Mrs. Kulkarni, used to narrate this story every year just before the monsoon holidays, her voice booming through the classroom, the kids reciting lines in unison. "Mehnat karo beta, dhairya rakho—like Parvat," she would say, tapping her knuckles on the desk. My friends and I, half-dreaming of mangoes and cricket, never imagined the story could have a dark side. Outside, the first fat raindrops would thud against the windowpanes, and someone would always groan about the power cut.

In images 3 and 4 on the mountain, people dig into the mountain and throw rocks into the sea, and a giant moves the mountain away—these scenes perfectly match the latter part of the Parvat story.

But strangely, in image 1, the giant peak seems to descend from the sky, as if it were a visitor from above.

And the second image is even more unsettling:

A group of giant nagas, dressed in human clothing, kneel and worship the giant peak.

This scene has never been recorded in any Indian history book.

Could it be that in ancient times, there was once a civilization of giant nagas?

The thought itself felt both thrilling and terrifying, like the stories my Dadi used to whisper at night—serpents with human faces, hidden realms beneath our world. My fingers trembled as I ran them over the diary’s brittle pages, half-expecting them to hiss back.

My instincts told me that the secret behind all this was closely tied to Professor Rohan Singh’s disappearance.

Shivering, I continued reading the diary.

But what followed made my skin crawl.

What they found at the bottom of the sea was not a real mountain.

It was not a mountain at all, but a complete living organism.