“In the Belly of Empire: A Night Between Jailers”
A story told in secrets, ghosts, and dreams, as overheard by the bricks of Old Calcutta
The Bengali jailer rarely spoke now. Most of him had melted into the damp of bricks and the rust of forgotten iron. But once in a while—on nights heavy with guilt and monsoon heat—his voice returned, curling like smoke along the river walls.
That night, the Andaman jailer visited. He had the clipped air of a man who once took notes in triplicate. Even in death, he smelled faintly of turpentine and punishment.
“So,” the Andaman one said, tapping at the air with his ghostly baton, “this is where it started.”
The Bengali chuckled. It sounded like rats in the drain. “Started? Brother, it ended here. What came after was just echo.”
The two sat across a memory. Between them, a soft humming—faint, feathery—rose from the stones. She was waking.
Kaalikotri-Kalika.
They never looked directly at her. You don’t look at Kalika. You listen sideways. You feel the chill behind your eyes when she begins to speak.
She had once been the dungeon. Now she was voice, presence, the throat of a truth that never made it into footnotes.
The Bengali jailer looked at the moss-darkened walls, remembering the night the British were stuffed inside her like bad intentions in a sealed envelope. He hadn’t known what would happen. No one did. It was chaos, not cruelty. No orders came from the Nawab. Just confused guards, some local heat, and bodies packed into the dark like colonial ambition in a shipping ledger.
“They came in drunk on trade and went out drunk on death,” he said. “And one man—Holwell—turned their gasps into gospel.”
“Ah, Holwell,” said Kalika, her laughter rustling like torn silk. “My little playwright. The Empire’s first one-man pity parade. He turned one night of bad decisions into a whole century of revenge.”
“Trickster?” asked the Andaman jailer.
“Clown,” said Kalika. “A clown who weaponized grief. He wrote the Empire’s creation myth in my ribs. And oh, how they clapped.”
The Bengali sighed. “You know, I stood outside that night. I heard them choking. But what could I do? We had no plan. They were prisoners, not people.”
Kalika hummed. “You were a prisoner too. You just didn’t notice. That’s the joke. The Black Hole didn’t just trap them. It swallowed everyone’s dignity whole.”
Above them, a flashlight swept across stone. The archaeologist had returned. Sandals, notebook, carefully curated doubt. He had a grant. He had instruments. He had no patience for metaphor.
He tapped the wall, muttering, “No forensic proof of a chamber this small holding so many. No primary orders. Possibly exaggerated.” And then, the fatal phrase:
“Maybe it never happened.”
Kalika’s silence grew sharp.
That night, the archaeologist dreamed.
Not a dream, really. A visitation.
She stood at the foot of his bed, draped in shadows and colonial irony. Her hair was ash. Her eyes were holes. Around her floated twenty-three faces—archetypes of the survivors: trader, missionary, bureaucrat, mercenary, each mouthing the script of empire like priests repeating a lie.
“I didn’t choose this story,” she said. “They built me into a shrine for their shame. And then forgot me.”
He woke choking.
The next day, he tried again. Tapping, measuring. Recording the echo of her breath and calling it structural resonance.
And she? She whispered to the walls.
The two jailers watched.
“You think he’ll listen?” asked the Andaman one.
“No,” said the Bengali. “Not yet. He wants bones, not breath. Numbers, not names.”
Kalika circled them like dusk. “But he’ll keep coming. Because I am a wound that doesn’t scar. I am the joke history tells itself to feel better.”
“And us?” the Andaman jailer asked.
Kalika smiled, teeth white as colonial linen.
“You? You keep telling it. Whisper it into monuments. Cough it into textbooks. Murmur it to pigeons. History doesn’t remember what we did. But it remembers how we made it feel.”
And below the archaeologist’s feet, the dungeon laughed—a soft, low ripple that made his instruments falter.
Somewhere in the archives of empire, a page curled. A silence cracked.
And twenty-three ghosts waited—not to be mourned, but to be understood.
Parwatisingari's Weblog 
Leave a comment