Chapter 5: The Missing Words

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5

Professor Rohan Singh’s diary stopped abruptly here.

"This organ is..."—followed by two more words, but they had been blotted out with ink, a mass of black smears, completely illegible.

All the following pages were soaked in ink, the writing destroyed—clearly a deliberate act of erasure.

At that moment, every hair on my body stood on end, as if a thousand-year-old block of ice had been pressed against my back.

If the diary is telling the truth,

then at a depth of ten thousand metres beneath the sea,

there exists a three-thousand-metre-tall human organ.

But then, a huge doubt surfaced in my mind:

Why did the professor blot out the name of the organ?

What exactly is that gigantic human organ?

And why is the story of Parvat carved upon it?

These mysteries battered my mind like artillery shells.

A raging fire ignited within me—a determination to uncover the truth behind it all.

Not just to solve the mystery of Professor Rohan Singh’s disappearance, but to quell the turmoil in my own heart.

Because he was not the only one to vanish without a trace.

Three years ago, I watched another person disappear from this world.

I swore I would find her.

Late that night, I found myself standing at the verandah, the city’s orange sodium lights flickering in the humidity. My mother, hearing the door creak, brought me a cup of haldi-doodh and asked softly, “Ab bhi jag rahe ho, beta?” As I sipped the bitter turmeric, I realised—whatever Parvat was, it was already inside us. I didn’t know what to tell her—that something as ancient as the ocean was waiting to swallow us whole?