Chapter 1 – The Diary in the Rain
Patna was drowning in rain.
Not the gentle, rhythmic kind that made you want to stand by the window with a cup of chai, but the relentless kind — heavy, bone-deep, as if the clouds were punishing the city for some forgotten sin. Streets had turned into sluggish rivers, the smell of wet earth clung to every breath, and the sound of splashing tyres mixed with the angry honks of trapped auto-rickshaw drivers.
Naina Verma adjusted the ends of her soaked dupatta as she stepped off the curb, narrowly avoiding a puddle that looked deep enough to swallow a bicycle. Her leather sandals were already ruined. Of course, she thought, the one day I decide not to carry an umbrella.
The old City Library loomed ahead, its sandstone façade darkened by decades of weather and monsoon grime. The building had once been a British colonial outpost before independence — now it was just a slightly forgotten archive that the younger generation barely noticed. To Naina, though, it was more than a library. It was her escape.
She pushed the heavy wooden doors open, and the familiar scent hit her instantly — a mix of dust, fading ink, and something faintly sweet, like old wood soaked in memory. Inside, the lighting was dim, yellow bulbs buzzing faintly overhead, casting a glow that made the air feel warmer than it was.
Only a handful of people were scattered across the reading tables. A pair of college students whispered in the far corner over a stack of exam prep books. An elderly man dozed in an armchair, newspaper slipping from his fingers. Somewhere in the back, the creak of a ladder told her one of the assistants was restacking the upper shelves.
Naina smiled faintly. This was her element — the quiet hum of pages turning, the low shuffle of footsteps, the occasional cough. She had been volunteering here for three months, helping catalogue old donations and historical journals. It wasn’t glamorous, but it made her feel useful, connected to something bigger than her own life.
She walked past the central desk, nodding at Mr. Tripathi, the elderly librarian, who returned her greeting with a distracted wave. His spectacles sat precariously at the tip of his nose, and his attention was buried deep in a ledger older than her parents.
Her task today was simple: return a stack of 1960s historical journals to the back archives. She made her way down the narrow aisle between two towering rows of shelves, each crammed with books in various states of decay. That’s when something caught her eye in the “Donations” bin by the side wall — a crate filled with random volumes, magazines, and an old globe missing half of Australia.
On top of the pile sat a leather-bound diary. Its cover was cracked and uneven, the corners frayed. The spine was held together with rough black thread, as if someone had repaired it by hand. There was no library tag, no name on the cover, not even a hint of its origin.
She almost left it there. But when she reached for it, a faint scent rose from the pages — jasmine, mixed with tobacco smoke. It was strange and oddly… human, like the lingering presence of someone who had owned it for years.
She opened to the first page. The paper was thick, slightly yellowed, the ink a deep brown as if it had aged. The handwriting was sharp and deliberate, every letter precise.
> "On the 19th of next month, someone will die in the rain."
Naina’s brows knitted together. Was this… fiction? A prank? She flipped a few pages, scanning for context.
> "I have been watching her for weeks. She doesn’t know I am the reason she comes here every Thursday."
A chill ran down her spine. She glanced around the aisle instinctively. No one. Just the steady patter of rain on the high windows and the occasional crackle of lightning.
She turned another page.
> "If she discovers the truth before I’m ready, everything will end. Not just for me. For her, too."
Her throat felt dry. She snapped the diary shut, the sound unnaturally loud in the quiet aisle. It’s just someone’s bad attempt at a mystery story, she told herself. But something about the tone didn’t feel like fiction. It was… too intimate.
She slipped the diary under her arm and stepped back into the main reading area. That’s when she saw him.
He was seated at the far corner table — the one half-hidden behind a shelf of law books. Tall. Lean. His rain-darkened hair clung to his forehead, a few strands dripping onto the open book in front of him. He wore a charcoal shirt, sleeves rolled up, revealing forearms that looked both delicate and strong. Thin glasses framed his eyes, though the shadows kept them unreadable.
And yet, she knew she had seen him here before. Not once, not twice — but at least half a dozen times in the past month. Always alone. Always at the same table.
Their eyes met.
It wasn’t like in films, where violins swelled and time stopped. No. It was unsettling. Like looking at the surface of a deep well and wondering what waited in its darkness. His gaze was steady, unhurried. Then, without a word, he gave a faint nod and returned to his book.
Naina’s heart was doing something it shouldn’t. She wasn’t sure if it was fear or curiosity — or both.
Mr. Tripathi’s voice broke her thoughts. “Naina beta, can you help with the map cabinet? The lock’s stuck again.”
She nodded quickly, hiding the diary under her notebook. But even as she followed the librarian to the archives, she felt the weight of that stranger’s presence. She could swear his eyes had followed her, just for a moment longer than they should have.
The rest of the evening passed in quiet tasks — cataloguing old railway maps, wiping down dusty cabinets, logging book donations. Yet the diary burned in her bag, pulling her thoughts back to those lines again and again.
At closing time, the rain had grown even heavier. Mr. Tripathi offered to let her wait until it eased, but she declined. She had her grandmother waiting at home, and besides… she needed to be alone with the diary.
As she stepped outside, the city was a blur of headlights and water. Somewhere nearby, the evening prayer from a mosque echoed, mixing with the temple bells across the street — a sound that was so utterly Patna, where faiths and worlds existed side by side.
But as Naina walked into the rain, she had the unshakable feeling that she had stepped into a different world entirely. One where the line between love and danger was already beginning to blur.
And she had no idea she had just turned the first page of a story that would take her far beyond India — into cities she had never seen, languages she didn’t speak, and secrets older, and far darker, than love itself.
