CHAPTER 2: THE MARKET OF FACES

The apartment door shut behind me with a sigh. Not a bang, not a click, but a tired, wheezing whoosh of old rubber seals. Sound of a city breathin' out. I stand there in the hallway, linoleum floor cool through the thin soles of my shoes. From under other doors, the muffled churn of morning news anchors—that same, smooth, government-lubricated voice, leakin’ through like sewer gas. "Economic optimism," the voice say, tinny and trapped. "National pride." I can picture the faces. Hair helmet-hard with spray. Teeth like bathroom tile. Smiles that don't reach the eyes, just stretch the skin. A practiced, patriotic rictus.

I’m headin’ for the stairs, bypassin’ the elevator with its little TV screen shoutin’ ads for life insurance and probiotic yogurt. But my hand, my damn hand, it’s already twitchin’ in my pocket. Pullin’ the phone out. A reflex. Like a baby grabbin’ for a rattle. The screen lightin’ up my own face in the stairwell gloom. Another notification. A flash-sale for "artisanal" socks. Algorithm thinkin’ it knows my feet. I swipe it away. My thumb movin’ on its own, openin’ the social feed. Scrolling. Just a quick hit. Like a smoker takin’ a first drag.

Seeing pictures. Rahim Bhai, from back home in the village, postin’ a selfie in front of his new rickshaw. Big grin, eyes squintin’ against the Dhaka sun. Caption say: "Hard work pays off! Allah’s blessing!" But I’m seein’ the cracked plastic of the rickshaw hood, the tired slump in his shoulders the camera didn’t quite catch. The smile too wide, showin’ too much gum. A smile sayin’, Look, I have a thing. I am a success. A marketable smile. Bought on installment.

Scrolling. A cousin’s wedding photos. Girls lacquered in gold and silk, smiles stiff as the embroidery on their saris. Boys posin’ with cars they probably rented for the day. Every picture a transaction. A statement. See our happiness. It is expensive. The likes pilin’ up below like digital offerings. Heart emojis, fire emojis. A currency of affirmation. And me, my thumb hoverin’, then givin’ a like. Adding to the pile. Playin’ the game. My face in the dark screen, lookin’ blank. Performin’ the act of approval.

Shovin’ the phone back in my pocket. Feelin’ the grime on the stairwell railing under my hand. Real grime. Not digital. The city’s sweat and dust. Down the five flights, each step a hollow clang. Out into the street, and the sound hits you like a wall. Not a noise, a presence. The roar of a million engines, the blare of mismatched horns, the hawkers’ cries, the azan from a distant mosque tangled with a Bollywood tune from a tea stall radio. A chaotic symphony of want.

And the faces. Allah, the faces. A river of them, flowin’ past. Rickshaw-wallahs, faces carved from teak and exhaustion, eyes fixed on a patch of road three feet ahead. Office-bound men in tight collars, faces slick with sweat and ambition, talkin’ loud into phones about "lakhs" and "deals." Schoolgirls in uniform, braids swingin’, faces flickerin’ between childhood and a wary, too-early maturity. Garment workers in flip-flops, moving in quiet flocks, faces masked by ornas, showin’ only eyes hollowed out by overtime.

I’m standin’ still, lettin’ the current flow around me. My work. My real work. Readin’ the faces. The market of human expression, and everythin’ is for sale.

Take the rickshaw-wallah over there, parked at the corner. He’s not just waitin’ for a fare. He’s cultivatin’ an expression. A look of reliable poverty. A slight, hopeful hunch. Eyes that say, "I am honest, I am cheap, my bones are your comfort." It’s his sales pitch. Then a potential customer approaches, some middle-class uncle with a belly. The rickshaw-wallah’s face shifts. The hope gets brighter, the hunch more deferential. A salesman’s smile, showin’ betel-stained teeth. Negotiation happens. The uncle’s face is all dismissive power, a scowl of practiced bargaining. They settle. The uncle climbs in, face shiftin’ to one of mild triumph. The rickshaw-wallah’s face, as he turns to pedal, collapses back into the pure, unadorned fatigue it probably was all along. A transaction completed. Faces worn, used, put away.

And the walls. They’re shoutin’ with faces. Billboard after billboard, towerin’ over the street like giant, gaudy gods. A actress sellin’ fairness cream. Her face not a face, but a surface. Porcelain-smooth, no pores, no history. A mask of calculated perfection. The cream promise not just lighter skin, but a lighter life. A face like hers, the ad whisper, and you too can ascend. Next to it, a politician’s face, ten feet tall. Jaw set, hair perfect, hand raised in a wave that’s both a greeting and a command. A slogan underneath in bold Bangla: "Progress. Stability. Faith." The face projects strength, unity, paternal care. But look closer—the eyes are dead flat. Printed pixels. No soul behind ’em. Just brand recognition.

A young boy tugs at my sleeve. "Uncle, a pen? A packet of chips?" His face a masterpiece of calculated despair. Big, liquid eyes. A practiced tremor in the lower lip. He’s maybe eight. He’s learnin’ the market value of sorrow. I shake my head, my own face hardening into the city-dweller’s mask of indifference. A necessary shield. His face changes instantly, the despair evaporatin’, replaced by a sharp, streetwise smirk as he spots a better target. A performance ended. On to the next show.

I start walkin’, gettin’ pulled into the human current. Past the street vendors. The fruit-seller arranges his mangoes into perfect pyramids, his face a study in proud artistry. The old woman sellin’ borhani wears a face of timeless patience, a rock in the river of time. But then a city corporation official in a cheap uniform swaggers up. The vendor’s face melts into obsequious fear. A wide, toothy smile appearin’ like magic, hands comin’ together in a nomoshkar. He’s offerin’ a free mango, his face sayin’, "See, I respect your authority. Please do not break my cart." The official takes the mango, his face a mask of corrupt entitlement, and moves on without a word. The vendor’s smile vanishes, replaced by a look of deep, weary bitterness. Then a customer calls, and the market-face of cheerful service slaps back on. Layer upon layer. Mask upon mask.

My stomach grumblin’, not for food, but for quiet. For a place where the faces ain’t so loud. I duck into a coffee shop chain, one of those glass-and-steel boxes sellin’ the idea of the West. AC blastin’ so hard it feels like walkin’ into a refrigerator. The smell of roasted beans and sanitizer.

The girl behind the counter—the barista. She’s maybe twenty. Pretty in a standard way. Hair tied back neat. A branded apron. I get in line. Watchin’ her. She’s servin’ a loud, obnoxious man in a polo shirt. He’s complainin’ about the milk temperature. Her face is… a perfect algorithm. A smile dialed to precisely 67%. Eyes attentive, but not too engaged. Nods calibrated to show listening, not agreement. She’s a machine outputting Customer Service Expression 3: "Polite Accommodation of Mild Irritance." She apologizes, voice a smooth, neutral syrup. Offers a remake. The man puffs up, satisfied. His face sayin’, "I have exerted dominance over the service economy."

Then it’s my turn. Her eyes flick to me. The algorithm resets. Same smile, maybe 65% now. Slightly less energy for the scruffy-looking guy in plain clothes. "Sir, your order?" Her voice the same. But I’m lookin’ past the smile. At the eyes. There’s a faint purple shadow under the concealer. A tiny tic at the corner of her left eye. A weariness so deep it’s seeped into the bone. And on her right wrist, peeking from the apron cuff, the very edge of a tattoo. A black line, a curve. A fragment of a story her uniform tries to hide.

I order a black coffee. Simple. As she turns to the machine, her market-face drops for a single, unguarded second. Just pure, blank fatigue. The face of someone who’s been standin’ for eight hours, breathin’ fake air, manufacturin’ cheer. Then the hiss of the steamer, and the mask is back on. She hands me the cardboard cup, smile reinstated. "Have a nice day, sir." A script. A sound her mouth makes. I take the cup, our fingers not touchin’. A clean, sanitized transaction.

Findin’ a small table in the corner. Plastic seat cool through my pants. Sippin’ the coffee. It’s bitter, over-roasted. Tastin’ of global supply chains and profit margins. But it’s a prop. Lets me sit. Lets me watch.

The coffee shop is a stage. Everyone’s performin’. Two businessmen at the next table, leanin’ in close. They’re talkin’ big—export quotas, LC openings, foreign buyers. Their faces are masks of shrewd confidence. Puffed chests, firm handshakes. But one guy’s foot is jigglin’ under the table like a piston. The other keeps checkin’ his phone, a flicker of anxiety in his eyes before he re-straps on the confident mask. They’re sellin’ each other an idea of their own success.

A young couple by the window. Dressed nice. On a date, maybe. The girl talkin’, animated, tellin’ a story. The boy noddin’, but his eyes are on her phone, which is lyin’ on the table between them. He’s not listenin’. He’s waitin’ for it to light up. His face is a mask of pretended attention, but it’s thin, transparent. Underneath is a different face: hungry, distracted, connected to some other, digital world. The girl’s face starts to change. The animation fadin’. A little crease formin’ between her brows. Her smile becomin’ fixed. She’s seein’ the mask slip on his face. She’s realizin’ she’s competin’ with a pocket-sized screen. Her face shifts to a mask of quiet disappointment, then to one of resigned acceptance. The performance of romance hittin’ a technical glitch.

I pull out my own phone. Not to use it. To use its eye. Turnin’ the camera on. Discreetly, under the table, pointin’ it towards the couple. Zoomin’ in. Capturin’ not their whole faces, but fragments. The boy’s distracted eyes, reflected in the window. The girl’s hands, clutched tight around her own cup. The space between them, cracklin’ with unspoken static. I snap a few pictures. Silent. The phone makin’ a tiny, fake shutter sound in my mind. I save it to the album. Label it later: "Digital Proximity. Transaction Failed."

A vibration in my pocket. A push notification. The phone, feelin’ the GPS, knowin’ exactly where I am. The screen lights up with a cheerful alert: "Hey! You're at 'Java Junction'! Try our new Seasonal Spice Latte - a taste of autumn!" Autumn. A concept from another planet. Here, it’s just hot, hotter, and monsoon. They’re sellin’ a foreign season in a cup. My location, my data, my past orders—all fuel for this machine that wants to sell me a feeling. A curated experience. The notification is a face too. A grinning, winky-face emoji. Fake friendly. A mask for the data-mining operation beneath.

I kill the screen. Shove the phone away. It feels hot, alive in my pocket. A little panopticon I carry with me. My own personal jailer I pay for every month.

Finishin’ the bitter coffee. The AC is givin’ me a headache. Need real air, even if it’s foul. Steppin’ back out onto the street is like bein’ slapped with a wet, hot towel. The noise surges back. I start walkin’ with no direction, just lettin’ my feet carry me, my eyes sweepin’ the human landscape.

I find myself in an older part of town. The buildings lean closer, whisperin’ to each other. The smells change—damp concrete, fryin’ oil, the sweet-rot scent of overripe fruit in the gutter. Fewer glass facades, more shutters. And then I see it. A bookshop. A real one, not a stationery store with a few textbooks. "Progressive Books." The name painted in faded blue on a flaking wooden board.

The display window is a museum of neglect. A few dusty classics—Tagore, Saratchandra, their spines cracked and yellowin’. Some cheap thrillers with lurid covers. A stack of exam guides for BCS and bank jobs. And a whole shelf of self-help books. Bright, shiny covers. "Unleash Your Inner CEO!" "The 5 AM Miracle: Steal Your Success From Sleep!" "Get Rich With The Right Mindset!" Faces on the covers. Smiling, white-teethed, usually foreign. Selling a dream of transformation. A market for a new you.

But on the far right, a section of the shelf is… empty. Just bare wood, darker where books used to be. Above it, a small, handwritten sign on a card, tucked into the shelf edge. It reads, in careful Bangla: "Certain texts available upon inquiry. Discretion assured."

My heart does a little stutter-step. I look inside the shop. Dark, cool. Shelves crammed, aisles narrow. And behind a small wooden counter, the owner. An old man. Boddo purush. Hair white and thin like mist on a pond. Thick, old-fashioned glasses magnifyin’ his eyes, makin’ them look huge, watery, and profoundly tired. He’s readin’ a book, a real book with paper pages. He’s not lookin’ at me.

I stand at the window, not going in. My hand twitches for my phone, to take a picture of this relic, this holdout. But I don’t. It feels like a violation. Instead, I just watch him. His face. It is not a market-face. It is not tryin’ to sell me anything. It is simply… present. A face etched with deep lines—not just from age, but from thought. From readin’. From witnessin’. There’s a sadness in the slope of his shoulders, but also a stillness. A quiet defiance.

He must feel my stare. He looks up. Our eyes meet through the grimy glass. For a second, nothin’. Then, the ghost of a smile touches his lips. Not a salesman’s smile. Not a polite smile. A knowing smile. A smile that says, I see you looking. I know what you see. And I know what you don’t see. He gives a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of his head. A warning? A greeting? A shared resignation? Then he looks back down at his book. The conversation is over.

That simple exchange—no words, just a look, a micro-expression—feels more real than anythin’ I’ve seen all day. It’s a crack in the world of masks. A glimpse of a face not for sale.

A group of loud college kids pushes past me, jostlin’ me from my reverie. They’re headin’ into a flashy clothing store next door, blarin’ pop music. Their faces are alight with the hunger for new things. For logos, for style, for an identity off the rack. I look back at the bookshop window. The old man is a statue.

I turn and walk away, the image of his face burned into my mind. A touchstone. A reminder that not every face is a billboard. Some are just… archives.

My feet lead me towards the university area. The crowd gets younger. Backpacks, jeans, clusters of students chatterin’. The air vibrates with a different energy—not just commerce, but the commerce of potential. Here, faces are bein’ crafted for the future market.

I see a boy and a girl sittin’ on the low wall of the campus, textbooks open but ignored. They’re argu’in’. His face is a mask of arrogant logic, chin juttin’ out. Hers is flushed, eyes flashin’ with genuine anger. Real emotion, raw and unprocessed. For a moment, the market is suspended. They’re not sellin’, they’re feel’in. It’s jarring. Beautiful. Then a friend calls from across the street, a loud, performative shout. The boy’s face shifts instantly. The arrogance softens into casual cool. The girl wipes her eyes, forces a laugh. The moment of realness is packed away. The public faces are back on. They join their friend, their argument left to evaporate in the heat, a private transaction with no conclusion.

I lean against a lamppost, suddenly exhausted. Not physically. Soul-tired. The effort of seein’, of decipherin’ the endless code of faces, is a weight. My phone buzzes again. A message from my father. No words. Just a screenshot of a bank transfer confirmation. The semester’s tuition fee. A number with so many zeros it looks like a telephone number. The message is a face too. My father’s face, etched with worry and silent sacrifice. A face sayin’, "I pay, therefore you will become." A transaction of hope for a return on investment called my future.

I look up at the university gates. Grand, imposing. "Knowledge is Light," carved in stone. But the students streamin’ in and out, their faces tell a different story. I see the frantic crammers, faces tight with the anxiety of memorization. The networkers, faces slick with the smile of connection-building. The dreamers, faces soft with ideas not yet crushed by practicality. And the resigned, faces already blank, just goin’ through the motions, buyin’ the degree that’s the receipt for this colossal transaction.

A street vendor wheels his cart past, sellin’ jhalmuri. The spicy, tangy smell cuts through the abstract stink of ambition. He calls out, his voice a ragged song. "Jhalmuri! Garam garam!" His face is purely in the moment. Concerned only with the now, with the next sale, with the balance of spice in his mix. No mask for the future. A face of immediate, tangible need. For a second, I envy him.

My own face, in the dark reflection of a closed shop window, looks back at me. Pale. Eyes shadowed. What mask am I wearin’ right now? The observer? The critic? The disillusioned son? It feels thin. Transparent. Underneath, I can feel the shape of the other face—the bored one, the scared one, the one that wants to scream at the billboards and shake the smiling barista and ask the old bookseller, "How do you keep the mask off?"

But I don’t scream. I don’t ask. I just stand there, in the river of faces, my own face settlin’ into the neutral, passin’ expression of the urban ghost. The one that says, "I am here, but not here. I am seein’, but not involved. I am buyin’ nothin’, and sellin’ even less."

The sun climbs higher, hammerin’ the city with white light. The shadows of the billboards grow shorter, the faces on them lookin’ more stark, more desperate in the noon glare. The market is open. Business is brisk. And I, the unwilling accountant of expressions, turn for home, my pockets empty of money, but my head stuffed full of faces, all of them askin’ to be bought, to be believed, to be seen as real. And the only face I trust is the sad, still, silent one behind the dusty glass, fadin’ already in my memory, a watermark on the relentless, smilin’, shoutin’, sellin’ page of the day.

CHAPTER 3: THE EDUCATION FACTORY

Mornin’ come scratchin’ at the window like a damn rooster with a head full of gravel. Ain’t sunlight, though. Just the blue-white glow from the phone screen, buzzin’ on the nightstand like a trapped hornet. Hadn’t even opened my eyes proper, but my hand was already out there, pattin’ around in the dark like a blind man lookin’ for a dropped coin. Fingers find that smooth, cold glass. Tap. Screen lightin’ up the whole damn room, cuttin’ shapes out the shadows. My own private sunrise, made by some bastard in California or Shenzhen or wherever the hell they cook this shit up.
First thing I see ain’t the time. It’s a red dot. Then another under it. Like blood drippin’ down the screen. A notification: “Your payment for Semester 4, B.Sc. in Digital Media Management is overdue. Click here to avoid late fees.” The words just sittin’ there, glowin’. Dad’s face flashin’ behind my eyelids. Not his smilin’ face from them old photos when he still had hair and hope. His face now. The one that looks like worn-out leather, eyes sunk deep, countin’ numbers in his sleep. The face he makes when he’s signin’ them digital checks, his big, work-calloused thumb strugglin’ with the tiny on-screen keyboard. Each tap soundin’ like a hammer fallin’ on an anvil in my head.
I toss the phone aside like it’s burnt my hand. It lands on the pillow, screen still glowin’, accusin’. The room’s the same four walls it always is. Peelin’ paint in the corner by the window where the rain gets in. The sound of Auntie Shobha next door, already bangin’ pots, startin’ her day of cookin’ for other people’s families. The smell of cheap detergent and old wood. My world. Then I think of the other world—the one I’m payin’ to get into. The college.
The bus ride over is a slow crawl through the city’s guts. I’m pressed against a window, my breath foggin’ up the glass. Outside, the world is a blur of billboards sellin’ skin-whitenin’ cream and motorbikes with girls in nothin’ but helmets clingin’ to the seats. Every face on them posters is smilin’, teeth so white they look like they’d glow in the dark. “Achieve Your Dreams!” one screams at me. But the faces on the bus ain’t smilin’. They’re just… blank. Stared out. Lookin’ at their own little glowin’ rectangles. A young fella in a delivery uniform, his head bobbin’ as he sleeps standin’ up, clutchin’ his phone like a lifeline. An aunty with a giant sack of vegetables at her feet, scrollin’ through videos of other people’s fancy weddings, her mouth a thin, tired line.
Me, I’m just watchin’. Watchin’ the faces. It’s my thing. My only real skill. See, people think they’re hidin’ behind them screens, but the truth leaks out around the edges. It’s in the slump of the shoulders. The quick, nervous tap of a thumb. The way a fella’s eyes might crinkle for half a second at a meme, then go dead flat again, like a pond after you stop tossin’ stones. That aunty watchin’ the wedding videos… her face don’t show joy. It shows a kind of hungry curiosity. Like she’s lookin’ through a keyhole into a room she knows she’ll never get to enter. She’s consumin’ a dream that ain’t hers, sold to her by an algorithm that knows she’s a fifty-five-year-old woman from a workin’-class neighborhood who likes cookin’ shows. They’re sellin’ her a fantasy, and she’s buyin’ it with the only currency she’s got left: her attention.
The bus heaves to a stop near the college gates. “St. Xavier’s Premier Institute of Technology & Management.” The letters are big, made of fake chrome, gleamin’ in the hazy morning sun. They’re perched on top of a giant arch made of the same shiny, piss-yellow stone they use for all the new malls and apartment blocks. It’s meant to look grand, “global standin’,” but it just looks cheap and angry, like a gold-plated tooth in a rotten mouth. Under the arch, a river of students flowin’ in. A sea of nearly-identical backpacks, cheap formal shirts bought for “professional development,” and the same hollow look in the eyes I just saw on the bus. We’re all marchin’ into the factory. The Education Factory.
Inside the gates, the air changes. It gets quieter, but it’s a heavy quiet, full of the hum of air conditioners strainin’ in glass-walled buildings and the faint echo of footsteps on polished fake-marble floors. The grass is a weird, unreal green, like it’s been painted on. Nobody walks on it. Signs say: “Maintain Aesthetic Integrity.” Everything here is a performance. A show put on for parents, for accreditation boards, for the fuckin’ brochures.
My first class is “Digital Ethics & Societal Impact.” The room is a “smart classroom,” which means the lights are too bright and there’s a projector screen so big it makes the professor, old Dr. Chatterjee, look like a tiny, wrinkled puppet. He’s up there, clickin’ through a PowerPoint presentation. The slides are from 2012. I know because the copyright date is in the corner. The graphics are pixelated. The information is about “The Promise of Web 2.0” and “MySpace Connectivity.” The room is ice-cold from the AC, but Dr. Chatterjee has a little bead of sweat on his bald head, reflectin’ the projector’s light. His voice is a dry, crackly monotone, readin’ the bullet points off the screen.
“The internet… fosters global village… democratizes information… empowers the individual…”
He reads the words, but his eyes are dead. They’re not lookin’ at us. They’re lookin’ at a point on the back wall, like he’s readin’ his own obituary off it. This man probably wrote real papers once. Maybe he had fire. Now he’s just a tape recorder, playin’ back a script the college bought ten years ago. He’s part of the machinery. His job ain’t to teach us to think. His job is to process us. To run us through the curriculum, stamp us with a grade, and send us down the conveyor belt to the next station.
A hand goes up. It’s Rohan, sits in the front row, always got his notes color-coded. “Sir, for the internal assessment, should we focus on the positive societal impacts listed on slide eight, or also consider the, uh, challenges like data privacy?”
Dr. Chatterjee blinks, his eyes swimmin’ back into focus like a fish comin’ up from deep water. He looks annoyed. Not at the question, but at the interruption. The smooth, mindless hum of the machine has been disturbed.
“The syllabus,” he says, the words comin’ out slow and careful, like he’s placin’ bricks, “is your bible. The exam will draw from the prescribed chapters. Focus on… the positive frameworks. The challenges are… supplementary. For… broader understanding.”
He don’t say “don’t rock the boat.” He don’t have to. It’s in the way his mouth pinches shut after. It’s in the way the kid next to me, Amit, lets out a quiet, exasperated sigh and shakes his head, like Rohan just wasted three minutes of valuable memorizin’ time. The message is clear: Don’t ask what ain’t on the test. Don’t question the ancient, dusty data. Just consume it. Write it down. Regurgitate it. Get your marks. Move on.
The projector fan whines. The slide clicks to the next one: a stock photo of a multi-ethnic group of young people smilin’ and pointin’ at a laptop. The photo is so generic it hurts. Nobody in this room looks like that. We’re all tired. We’re all calculatin’ the cost of bein’ here, in rupees and in pieces of our soul.
I find myself starin’ at Dr. Chatterjee’s face. Behind the glasses, behind the learned frown, there’s a deep, swampy kind of tired. Not the tired of a long day. The tired of a long life spent doin’ somethin’ that don’t matter no more. The tired of knowin’ you’re a cog in a machine that grinds up curiosity and spits out compliant employees. He catches me lookin’. For a split second, our eyes meet. And in that second, I see it. A flicker. Not of anger, not of pride. Of shame. Then he looks away, adjusts his glasses, and goes back to readin’ about the fuckin’ “global village.” The mask is back on. Solid.
The bell rings, a harsh electronic shriek that makes everyone jump. The spell, such as it was, is broken. The factory floor erupts into noise—chairs scrapin’, bags zippin’, the low murmur of a hundred private conversations startin’ up. I stay sittin’ for a minute, lettin’ the crowd flow around me. My phone buzzes in my pocket. A notification from the college app: “Reminder: Library fees outstanding. Access will be restricted.” Another tap from Dad’s dwindlin’ account.
I wander out into the corridor. It’s a canyon of that same shiny yellow stone and glass. Students are clumped in little islands. I hear the chatter. It ain’t about ideas. It’s about transactions.
“D’you get the notes from Gupta’s class? I’ll trade you for Mehra’s.”
“My cousin said the final project for Marketing is just a copy-paste from this website, if you pay for the premium subscription…”
“Gotta get an internship at any multinational. Doesn’t matter what. Just need the name on the CV.”
“Fuck, man, my dad’s already askin’ about placement percentages. Says if I don’t get a package of six lakhs, this was all a waste.”
Their faces are animated, sure. But it’s a brittle animation. Like the twitchin’ of a puppet on strings made of fear and family expectation. Their eyes dart around, not seein’ each other, but scannin’ for advantage, for a shortcut, for a way to game the system they’re payin’ so much to be a part of. They’re talkin’ about “packages” and “placements” like they’re discussin’ the specs for a new motorbike. The human bein’ inside, the one that might wanna write a poem or understand why the sky is blue or just sit quiet for a damn minute… that fella is bein’ buried under a landslide of “professional development.”
I see Sanjay, a guy from my hometown. We took the same bus up to the city two years ago. He was nervous then, but his eyes were bright. He wanted to study renewable energy, build things. Now he’s wearin’ a cheap blazer that’s too tight in the shoulders. His face is pale under the fluorescent lights. He’s talkin’ to a placement cell officer, his head bobbin’ up and down like one of them toy birds that dips its beak in water. He’s smilin’ a wide, toothy smile that don’t reach his eyes. It’s a performance. He’s sellin’ himself. And the officer is buyin’—or not—based on a checklist. Grade point average. Extra-curricular (must show “leadership”). Communication skills (must say “synergy” and “paradigm shift” without flinchin’).
Sanjay catches my eye over the officer’s shoulder. For a half-second, the salesman smile flickers. There’s a flash of somethin’ else. A deep, drownin’ panic. A silent scream that says, “What the hell am I doin’? Who is this person I’m pretendin’ to be?” Then the officer says somethin’, Sanjay’s head snaps back, and the mask slams down again, harder than before. The smile returns, now lookin’ a little cracked around the edges, like old paint.
My stomach is turnin’. I need air that ain’t processed through an AC unit and thick with ambition and despair. I head for the one place the factory hasn’t completely paved over: a scraggly patch of trees behind the new auditorium. They’re old neem trees, probably left standin’ by mistake. Their roots are bucklin’ the fancy tile walkway, and there’s a sign tied to one with plastic rope: “Future Site of Innovation Centre – Coming 2024.” They’ll be bulldozed soon. But for now, they give some shade.
I slump down with my back against the rough bark. Pull out my phone out of habit. But I don’t open it. I just turn it over in my hands. This little slab of glass and metal. It’s my library, my newspaper, my social circle, my distraction. And it’s also the main tool of the factory. The college app tracks my attendance. The learnin’ portal dumps PDFs of outdated textbooks. The WiFi logs every site I visit. They’re buildin’ a digital profile of me here, too. Not of who I am, but of how compliant I am. How well I follow the digital breadcrumbs. How predictably I consume the content they serve.
A couple of first-year kids wander by, their backpacks still lookin’ new. They’re talkin’ loud, full of that first-month bravado.
“Bro, this course is gonna get me straight into Google, I’m tellin’ you,” one says.
“Just gotta network, man. Connect with the right seniors. It’s all about who you know.”
They pass by, swaggerin’ into their own private dream. I wanna stop ’em. I wanna say, “Look at Sanjay. Look at Dr. Chatterjee. Look at the fuckin’ PowerPoint from 2012. This ain’t a gateway. It’s a toll booth. And the price is everythin’ you are that don’t fit on a resume.”
But I don’t. I just watch ’em go. My phone buzzes again. This time it’s a notification from a shoppin’ app. “Students like you bought these formal shoes! 20% off today!” They’re trackin’ my location, know I’m at an educational institution, and assumin’ I need to buy the costume for the role I’m trainin’ for. The whole world, it seems, is just one big, interconnected factory farm, and we’re the livestock, bein’ fattened on a diet of dreams and sold to the highest bidder.
I think about my dad again. Him, bent over his accounts book in the evenin’, the single bulb swingin’ overhead, castin’ long shadows. Him, who left school after tenth grade to work the land, then lost the land to bad debts, now drivin’ a borrowed auto-rickshaw through the city’s choked streets. Every bump in the road, every curse from a passenger, every drop of sweat—he’s convertin’ it into rupees, sendin’ it down a digital pipeline to this shiny, yellow-stoned prison. He thinks he’s buyin’ me a ticket out of his life. He don’t know he’s just buyin’ me a different kind of trap. One with air conditionin’ and a certificate at the end.
The anger rises in me then, hot and sour at the back of my throat. It’s an anger with no clear target. Not at Dr. Chatterjee, the hollowed-out shell of a teacher. Not at Sanjay, the desperate performer. Not even at the college administrators in their glass offices, countin’ the money. It’s an anger at the whole goddamn system. This slick, polished machine that takes raw, confused kids and their families’ lifetimes of savings and promises to polish them into somethin’ valuable, but really just grinds ’em down into a uniform shape that fits neatly into a corporate cubicle or a government form. It scrapes off the rough edges—the questions, the doubts, the poetry, the anger itself—until you’re smooth and blank and ready for the stamp.
I take out my own cheap phone, the one with the cracked screen protector. I open a notes app, one that ain’t connected to any cloud. My fingers start movin’ over the letters, clumsy with feelin’.
Factory whistle blowin’ at dawn but it’s just a phone buzzin’. Conveyor belt made of polished marble carryin’ us from class to class. Input: family hope, father’s sweat, a loan from a cousin. Process: sit in cold rooms, stare at dead slides, learn the dance of the right answer. Output: a person shaped like a key, designed to fit one specific lock. A lock on a door leadin’ to another room with another conveyor belt. The product ain’t minds. It’s compliance. The education factory polishin’ the “I” out of every eye, leavin’ just a glassy sheen, good for reflectin’ back whatever light the management shines on it.
I write in that broken, non-finite way. No proper sentences. Just fragments of the poison in my head. It’s the only thing that feels real. The only process in this whole damn place that ain’t about turnin’ me into somethin’ else for someone else’s use.
A shadow falls over me. I look up, squintin’. It’s a groundskeeper, an old fella with a broom made of twigs. He’s sweatin’ in the heat, his shirt stained dark under the arms. He looks at me, sittin’ under his tree, then at the phone in my hand. He don’t say nothin’. Just gives a slow, almost imperceptible shake of his head. It ain’t a judgment. It’s a recognition. A seein’. He’s been here longer than the yellow stone. He’s seen thousands of me come and go. He knows the factory’s appetite. His eyes say, “They’ll get you, too, son. One way or another. They always do.” Then he sweeps a pile of dead leaves—some of the last bits of nature refusin’ to be tidy—into a dustpan and moves on, his sandals slap-slappin’ against the tiles.
The bell shrieks again. Time for the next shift. “Professional Communication Skills.” I heave myself up, my bones feelin’ old. As I walk back into the cold, bright canyon of the main building, I pass a huge, framed vision statement on the wall. It’s got more stock photos of smilin’ people. Words in fancy font: “Empowering Tomorrow’s Leaders. Fostering Innovation. Building Character.”
I stop and look at it. Really look. And for the first time, I see the words for what they are. Not a promise. A taunt. An epitaph for the things this place was maybe supposed to be, but ain’t. The smile on the model’s face in the photo looks like a rictus grin. The word “Innovation” hangs in the air, empty as a blown egg.
A group of students hustle past me, jostlin’ my shoulder. “Move, man, we’re late!” one barks. They don’t even see the sign. They’re already in the next part of the process. And I’m just standin’ there, a faulty piece on the assembly line, startin’ to see the cracks in the machinery, and knowin’ that seein’ ’em is the most dangerous thing of all.
I turn away from the vision statement. I join the flow of bodies headin’ to class. My face settlin’ into the same neutral, expectant mask everyone else is wearin’. But inside, the words are still curdlin’. The observation turnin’ into a record. The anger coolin’ into a hard, sharp resolve. The education factory might be polishin’ the “I” out of my eyes. But it’s forgin’ somethin’ else in the dark behind ’em. Somethin’ watchful. Somethin’ that writes. Somethin’ that refuses, in its own quiet, broken-verb way, to be the product on the label.

CHAPTER 4: THE DANCE HALL

PART ONE: THE DESCENT

The night come down like a coal-sack thrown over the city. Not gentle. A thump. One minute, last streaks of orange fightin' the smog on the horizon, the next—black. But not the black of home, not the black of the village where stars pierce through like needle-holes in Allah's curtain. This black got a glow to it. A sick, orange-yellow glow from a million sodium-vapour lamps, from neon signs sputterin' and buzzin', from the eternal backlight of a million phone screens held in a million walkin' hands.

I'm walkin'. Just... walkin'. Ain't got no destination 'cept away. Away from the four walls that hum with the Wi-Fi router. Away from the screen that shows me a world so perfect it makes my own teeth ache. My feet carry me, like they got a memory their own. A muscle-memory of this path. Past the shining glass towers that look like they been dipped in chrome and stood up to dry. Past the 24/7 marts with their blue-white light spillin' out onto the pavement, makin' everyone inside look like ghosts pickin' through packaged food. The air's thick—thick with exhaust, with the greasy smell of fried dough from a street cart, with the perfume of some woman in a hurry that hangs in the air after she's gone, a sweet ghost.

And underneath it all, the smell of wet concrete. The city always smell like it just finished rainin', even when the ground's bone-dry and dust is swirlin' around your ankles. Like the sweat of a million people, the piss in a million dark corners, the damp rot of things forgotten in the underbellies of buildings—all of it soak into the stone and breathe back out, constant.

My pocket buzz. Once. Twice. I ignore it. The third time, my hand go in on its own, like a reflex. A trained animal. I pull out the slab of glass and metal. The screen light up my face from below, makin' me look like some kinda ghoul. Three notifications. One from the food-delivery app: "Biriyani cravings? We know you do!" One from a news app: "NATION PROGRESSES UNDER STRONG LEADERSHIP, SAYS PM." One from the social media: "You have memories with..." and a picture from a year ago, me standin' with college mates, all of us grinnin' like fools, arms around each other's shoulders. I look at that boy's face—my face. The eyes look empty. Like two raisins stuck in dough. The grin don't reach 'em. I swipe it away. The screen go black. For a second, my own reflection look back at me in the dark glass. A shadow with hollows for eyes.

I shove it back in my pocket. The weight of it, a constant pull. A lodestone. A leash.

The buildings startin' to change now. The glass and chrome givin' way to older brick, stained dark with decades of grime. The smooth pavements crackin', tree roots pushin' up through like swollen veins. The shops got iron shutters pulled down, graffiti sprayed on 'em—names, curses, political party symbols fresh-painted over older ones. The light here ain't the clean white of the main roads. It's yellower, dimmer, comin' from single bulbs hangin' over doorways, from the flickerin' tubes of a paan shop where an old man sit on a stool, starin' at nothin'.

And the music. You hear it first as a thump. A bass line you feel in your chest before you hear it with your ears. A deep, syncopated thud-thud-thud that seem to vibrate up from the street itself. Then the tinny treble of synth melodies, a mechanical wail. It comin' from somewhere ahead, around a corner, down a narrower alley.

This is the old part. The part the city maps on the app don't show proper. The part labelled with vague warnings: "Area may have slower traffic." The part my mother's voice echo in my head about: "Don't you go there, baba. Bad people. Bad things."

But the bad things... they feel real. The shiny things in the glass towers, they feel like pictures. Beautiful, empty pictures.

I turn the corner. The alley so narrow two people can't walk side-by-side without touchin'. Walls on both sides, damp, moss growin' in the cracks. Lines of laundry hang overhead like sad, droopin' flags—saris, lungis, cheap nylon shirts. The music louder here, the bass makin' the wet air shake. And a new smell cuttin' through the damp—the cloying, sweet smell of agarbatti incense, mixed with something sharper. Cheapest perfume. The kind that smell like fake flowers and chemical alcohol.

At the end of the alley, a red light.

Not a traffic light. A single, bare bulb with a red plastic shade over it, hangin' above a black-painted door. The light pool on the wet ground below it, makin' a circle of blood-colour on the cobblestones. A man lean against the wall beside the door, arms crossed. Big man. Not tall, but wide, like a bull. Wearin' a cheap polyester shirt, sleeves rolled up over thick forearms. He watch me comin'. His face don't change. Just watch.

My heart start doin' that thing—beatin' fast but also feelin' like it's sinkin' down into my gut. This is the place. The "hall." The "kotha." The "dance bar." It got a hundred names, none of 'em say what it really is. A transaction house. A place where shadows are sold.

I reach the red light. The man's eyes on me. Dark, small eyes like a pig's. He don't speak. Just give a tiny jerk of his chin towards the door. A question. You goin' in or not?

I nod. Just once.

He push off the wall, turn, and open the door. A blast of sound hit me—the music ten times louder, a wall of noise. And the smell rush out—perfume, sweat, stale cigarette smoke, the sour tang of spilled beer. It wash over me, thick and warm. He stand aside. I step through.

From the quiet, damp darkness of the alley into a world of sensory assault.

PART TWO: THE HALL

It take my eyes a second to adjust. The light inside ain't bright, but it's busy. A single, dusty disco ball hangin' from the centre of a low ceiling, spinnin' slow, catchin' light from coloured spotlights—red, green, blue—and throwin' little dots of colour that swim across the walls, the floor, the faces. The walls themselves painted a dark, glossy purple, maybe meant to look fancy once, now scuffed and stained. Mirrors line one wall, cracked in one corner, makin' the room look bigger and more broken at the same time.

Tables, small and round, crammed close together. Most of 'em occupied. Men. All men. Some alone, starin' into glasses of amber liquid. Some in groups, laughin' too loud, shirts unbuttoned, faces flushed. Their faces... in the swimmin' coloured light, they look like masks. Grinnin' masks, leerin' masks, blank masks. They eyes reflect the disco ball dots, glintin' like animal eyes in the dark.

And the sound. The music so loud it feel like a physical pressure in my ears. A Hindi film song from ten years ago, remixed, the vocals distorted, the bass cranked up so high it vibrate the sticky film on my table. Underneath the music, the clink of glasses, the shout of a order to a waiter, the high, forced laughter of a woman.

The women.

On a narrow stage along the far wall. Three of 'em. Dancin'. Or movin' to the music. Their bodies... barely covered. Glitterin' scraps of fabric that might be called a dress if you were bein' generous. Bikini tops and sequinned skirts so short they just a wide belt. Their skin shine under the lights—sweat or oil, makin' their limbs gleam.

I stand there, frozen in the doorway, feelin' the big bouncer's presence behind me. A waiter appear—a young boy, can't be more than sixteen, wearin' a stained white shirt and black trousers too big for him. He gesture with his chin towards an empty table in the corner, near the wall, partly in shadow. I nod, and weave my way through the maze of tables, avoidin' touchin' anyone, feelin' eyes on me. The new fish. The fresh face.

I slump into the chair. It's plastic, cracked, one leg shorter than the others so it wobble. The tabletop sticky with old spills. The waiter appear again, silent. He wait.

"Water," I say, my voice soundin' small and thin under the music. "Just a bottle of water."

He give a slight nod, a flicker of... what? Disappointment? Contempt? He turn and disappear into the gloom towards a makeshift bar at the back, just a counter with bottles on shelves.

Now I can look. Now I can do my work. My only real work: Watchin'. Readin' faces.

My eyes go back to the stage.

PART THREE: THE DANCERS

The one on the left. Tall, skinny. All sharp angles—hip bones pokin' out, collar bones like shelves under her skin. Her hair jet black, frizzy, piled up on her head with a plastic clip. She dancin' with a kind of frantic energy, throwin' her arms out, twistin' her hips, but her face... her face is a million miles away. She lookin' over the heads of the crowd, at a spot on the wall, her eyes unfocused. Her mouth a straight, thin line. No smile. No frown. Nothin'. She performin' the motions of seduction, but her spirit ain't in the room. It's somewhere else. Maybe back in her village, in a field. Maybe in a dream she had when she was a little girl. Her body here, sellin' the shadow of itself. Her mind, gone.

The one in the middle. Older. Maybe thirty, but life in this place add years, so who know. She got more flesh on her, a roundness to her belly, her thighs. She wearin' a red sequinned outfit that catch the light. She smilin'. A big, wide, toothy smile. She makin' eye contact with the men at the tables closest to the stage, winkin', blowin' a kiss. Her movements smoother, more practiced. A professional. She know the game. She know what they want to see—the fantasy of the willin', hungry woman. She sellin' that fantasy with her smile, with the swing of her hips. But if you look past the smile, to the eyes... there's a hardness there. A flat, calculating hardness. Like a shopkeeper weighin' produce. She assessin' the crowd, lookin' for the ones with loose wallets, the ones whose eyes linger too long. Her smile a tool. Her eyes, the real her, behind the counter.

The one on the right. Younger. Can't be more than nineteen, twenty. Her body still holdin' the softness of a girl, not yet worn down. She wearin' a blue outfit, simpler. She not dancin' with the practiced moves of the middle one, nor the frantic detachment of the left one. She movin' shyly, almost awkwardly, her arms wrapped slightly around herself, as if tryin' to hide even as she's put on display. Her eyes downcast most of the time, lookin' at her own feet as they shuffle on the stage. Every now and then, she glance up, quick, nervous, like a frightened animal, then look down again. Her face holdin' an expression I can't quite place. Not emptiness. Not calculation. Shame? Fear? A deep, tired sadness? She the only one who look like she feelin' the weight of where she is, what she's doin'. And that make her seem the most naked of all, even though she wearin' more fabric than the others.

I'm leanin' forward, my water bottle forgotten, my whole being focused on readin' them. On tryin' to crack the code of their faces, their bodies. This ain't about desire. I feel no stirrin' in my groin. It's about... recognition. Seein' the truth behind the performance. Seein' the cracks in the mannequins. It feel more honest than anythin' outside. In here, the transaction is naked. You pay money, you get to look at a woman's body. Out there, the transaction is hidden. You pay with your soul, your time, your silence, and you get... what? A sense of belongin'? A new phone? The approval of invisible algorithms? Which one is more honest? This crude bazaar of flesh, or the polished, invisible market of my attention?

My thoughts gettin' tangled. The music poundin'. The waiter bring my water. I peel off a wet note from a wad in my pocket. He snatch it, no thank you.

Then, a presence beside my table. I look up.

It's her. The girl from the right side of the stage. The young one. The shy one. She standin' there, holdin' the edge of my table for balance, maybe. The music so loud she have to lean in close. I catch the full force of the cheap perfume, mixed with the smell of her sweat. Up close, I can see the makeup caked on—foundation too light for her skin tone, a streak of blue eyeshadow, lipstick a garish pink. Underneath it, her skin is pale, with a faint sheen. Her eyes, now lookin' directly at me, are a light brown, almost honey-coloured. And in them, I see it clear now: terror. A raw, animal terror, just barely held in check by somethin' else. Desperation.

"You... want company?" she say. Her voice is thin, reedy, havin' to shout over the music. It crack on the word "company." She tryin' to sound allurin', but it come out like a plea.

I just stare at her. Lookin' at the way her chest rise and fall too fast. Lookin' at the tiny tremble in her lower lip, almost hidden by the bright lipstick.

She mistake my silence for interest. She force a smile onto her face. It's a horrible thing to see. It don't touch her eyes. It just stretch her skin tight, showin' her teeth. "Private room," she say, her voice a little stronger, like she's recitin' a line she been taught. "More comfortable. We can... talk."

Talk. That word hang in the air between us, pathetic and hopeful. She know, and I know, nobody come here to talk.

I find my voice. It sound rough. "No," I say. "I'm just... just watchin'."

The forced smile vanish from her face like I slapped it off. For a split second, her real face show—a flash of confusion, then hurt, then a blank, cold nothin'. She straighten up, pullin' her hand back from the table. She give a tiny, almost imperceptible shrug. A "suit yourself" gesture. Her eyes go flat. The terror and desperation get buried again, deep down. The professional mask slam back into place—a mask of indifference.

She turn and walk away, her hips now swayin' with an exaggerated motion, head held high, a performance for anyone who might be watchin'. She go to the next table, where a fat man in a safari suit sit alone. She lean down, say the same words. He grin, a gold tooth flashin'. He nod. She take his hand, pull him up. He fumble in his pocket, pull out some notes, tuck 'em into the waistband of her skirt. She lead him towards a curtain at the back of the hall. They disappear through it.

I watch the curtain swingin' back and forth. My stomach turnin'. That cold nothin' in her eyes... I seen that look before. In the mirror. When I'm scrollin'. When I'm noddin' along to the professor. When I'm smilin' for my mother's camera. The look of someone who's left the building, even though their body's still goin' through the motions.

I take a swig of the water. It taste flat, warm.

My eyes go back to the stage. The tall, skinny one is gone. Probably with a customer. The older one in red is still there, now dancin' closer to the edge of the stage, lettin' a man from the front row tuck a note into the top of her costume. She laugh, a loud, hollow sound that get swallowed by the music. She catch my lookin'. Her hard eyes meet mine across the smoky room. She hold my gaze for a second, her professional smile never waverin'. Then she give a slow, deliberate wink. Not a flirtatious wink. A knowing wink. A wink that say, "I see you, watcher. I know what you are. We're all performers here. You just ain't on the stage."

I look away, feelin' exposed.

PART FOUR: THE FAMILIAR FACE

That's when I see him.

At a table near the back, half-hidden in the shadow of a pillar. A group of four, five guys. Young. Loud. Clinkin' glasses, shoutin' to be heard. And one of them... I know that face. The shape of the head, the way the hair is cut. Raju.

Raju from college. Raju from Business Statistics class. Raju who always sit in the front row, who always have the right answer, who wears crisp, ironed shirts and talk about "market penetration" and "brand equity" with a shine in his eyes. Good boy Raju. Ambitious Raju. Future MBA Raju.

And here he is. In the blood-red light of the dance hall. His tie loose around his neck, his collar unbuttoned. His face is flushed, laughin' at somethin' one of his friends said. He got his arm around the shoulders of the guy next to him. He look... relaxed. Happy. In his element.

My heart do a strange stutter. Not fear this time. Somethin' else. A weird sense of... violation? No. Recognition again. But a sickening kind. Seein' the mask off. Seein' the other performance.

Our eyes meet.

It happen by chance. He look up, sweepin' the room with his gaze, and his eyes land on mine, sittin' alone in my dark corner.

For a full second, there is nothin'. Just two pairs of eyes lockin' across a room full of noise and shadows and sold flesh.

Then, I see the change. I see it happen in real time, like watchin' a shutter come down.

First, the shock. His eyes widen. The laugh die on his lips. His body go stiff. He see me. He recognize me.

Then, the shame. A hot, red flush spread up from his neck, over his cheeks. His eyes dart away, then back, then away again. He look like a child caught with his hand in the biscuit tin.

And then, the fastest of all, the mask. The performance. His face smooth over. The flush get willed away. The shame get buried. His lips curve into a smile—not his real, relaxed smile from a moment ago, but a tight, social smile. A "colleague" smile. He give me a tiny nod. A nod that say, "Oh, hey. You here too. Fancy seein' you." A nod that try to make this normal. A nod that try to pull me into the conspiracy, to make us co-performers in this new scene.

Then he deliberately turn his head away, back to his friends. He say somethin', throw his head back, and laugh again. But the laugh sound forced now. Strained. His shoulders are tense. He's actin'. And he's bad at it, now that he know he's bein' watched by someone from the other world.

I sit there, stunned. The water bottle sweat in my hand. Raju. Here. Participatin'. Not just watchin', like me. He's part of the transaction. He's a buyer. Good boy Raju is a buyer of shadows.

And his quick-change act—the shock, the shame, the mask—it's the most fascinatin', horrible thing I seen all night. It's a masterclass in how we live. See somethin' that don't fit the story you tell about yourself? Feel a feeling that's not allowed? Shove it down. Slam the mask on. Perform the acceptable version.

He's just like the dancer. Just like me.

The older dancer in red finish her song. The music shift to another pounding remix. She step off the stage, headin' towards the bar. Raju and his friends are orderin' another round. The air feel thicker, hotter. The smoke sting my eyes.

I can't breathe.

I push back my chair. It scrape loud on the concrete floor. I stand up. I don't look at Raju's table again. I just start walkin', fast, towards the black door. Past the tables of grinnin' masks. Past the bouncer who give me the same pig-eyed stare as I push past him. I shove the door open and stumble out into the alley.

PART FIVE: THE AFTERMATH

The cold, damp air hit me like a physical blow. After the oven-heat and noise inside, the silence of the alley is deafenin'. For a second, I just stand there under the red bulb, gulpin' in air that taste of garbage and wet stone, but feel clean compared to what's inside.

The music is muted now, just a bass throb comin' through the door, feelin' through the soles of my shoes. The alley is empty. Dark. The lines of laundry hang like ghosts.

I start walkin', fast, not carin' which way, just away from the red light. My mind a riot of images. The dancer's terrified eyes. Her forced smile crumblin'. The older one's knowin' wink. Raju's face—the shock, the shame, the mask slammin' down.

My legs feel shaky. I lean against a damp wall, my head spinnin'. The night's smells—urine, spice from a nearby restaurant, diesel—all swirl together.

And then, a vibration in my pocket.

I flinch. For a second, I'd forgotten it existed. The leash. The lodestone.

Slowly, I pull it out. The screen light up my face again in the darkness of the alley.

A push notification. From a map app I never use. It say: "You were at 'Nightlife Zone - Eastern District.' How was your experience? Rate and review to help other users!"

A chill run down my spine, cold as the alley damp. It's not a question. It's a statement. A record. You were here. We know you were here. They know. The phone know. The grid know. The invisible eyes in the glass slab know I was standin' under a red light, in a street that don't officially exist, watchin' girls sell their shadows.

The notification sit there, glowin'. An invitation to participate. To normalize it. To turn my sick fascination, my voyeuristic shame, into a data point. A star rating. "Had a great time! Dancers were energetic. 4/5. Would recommend for a boys' night out."

My thumb hover over the screen. For a wild second, I think about typin' the truth. "Saw a girl so scared she was tremblin'. Saw a classmate buy a piece of someone's soul. Saw my own reflection in everyone's dead eyes."

But I don't. Of course I don't.

I just swipe it away. The screen go black. In the dark glass, my reflection look back at me—a pale oval, hollow-eyed, standin' in a pool of shadow.

I shove the phone deep into my pocket, like I'm tryin' to bury it. I push off the wall and start walkin' again, faster now, headin' blindly back towards the main road, towards the clean white light of the glass towers, towards the world of the other performance—the one where the transactions are cleaner, quieter, and infinitely more devourin'.

My feet carryin' me home. But in my head, the music still poundin'. The red light still glowin'. And the eyes—the dancer's terrified eyes, Raju's shamed eyes, the older one's hard, knowin' eyes—they all watchin' me. They all askin' the same silent question, the one my phone just echoed in its own sterile way:

How was your experience?

And I got no answer. Just the feelin' of a mask on my own face, grown so tight I can't remember what's underneath.
CHAPTER 5: THE BEGINNING OF WRITING, THE SILENT WAR
It weren’t that I just got back home, it were more like I were seeping back into the flat. The door shutting behind me with a click like a bone snapping. Real quiet then, except for the fridge humming its one sad note in the dark kitchen. Like a monk chanting for a world that forgot gods. Outside, the city were a smear of orange light against the blinds. Inside, it were just me and the ghosts all my gadgets made.
Took my shoes off at the door, soles sticking to the cheap laminate. Just standing there a minute. Feeling the day’s grime on my skin—smoke from the dance hall, cheap perfume that weren’t Mila’s, the greasy feel of the subway pole, the invisible dust from a thousand scrolling thumbs. It were a second skin. A shadow-skin.
The ritual starting. Wallet on the side table. Keys clinking. Phone. The phone. I set it down screen-up, but it were like setting down a live thing. A creature with a bright, dead eye. I could feel it watching the ceiling, counting the cracks, waiting for me to pick it back up. My hand hovering over it. An ache in the palm. A phantom itch. Just check, it were saying. Might be a message. Might be someone needing you. Might be the winning lottery numbers for a life you ain’t even bought a ticket for.
I left it. The leaving felt violent. Like walking away from a fight you know you’re gonna lose anyway.
The computer were in the corner, an old hulk of plastic and fan noise. It groaned to life when I hit the button, the sound of a beast waking in a cave. The monitor flickered, a blue light then a white flash, then settling into the black of the desktop. Icons scattered like trash on a riverbank. Games I never played. Work folders for jobs I didn’t have. And there, in the middle, the icon for the text editor. A simple white square. Looked like a blank grave marker.
I clicked it. A window opening up, pure white. A void. A field of fresh snow waiting for the first bloody footprint. The cursor blinked. Blink. Blink. Blink. A tiny, regular heart attack right there in the center of the screen. My fingers, they just hung over the keyboard. These ten dumb soldiers, trained for years to type “LOL” and “BRB” and “Where u at?” and “Order confirmed.” Now they were being asked to storm a castle. They were trembling.
The first word. It had to be the right one. The true one. The one that would break the dam. I were thinking of all the clever things. Big words I’d read in books they tried to make us forget. Poetic shit. Metaphors about cages and light.
But my fingers, they had a mind of their own. They went and typed the only honest thing left in the room:
I am bored.
Just like that. Three words. A tiny, pathetic confession. Not “I am enraged.” Not “I am enlightened.” Just… bored. The king of all small deaths.
I stared at it. The letters looked naked. Ugly. Like a worm cut in half on the sidewalk. This were it? This were the grand rebellion? Telling a machine I were bored? The computer didn’t care. The internet wouldn’t care. God wouldn’t care. My own father would read that and say, “So? Get a job. Be bored with money.”
But it were true. It were the root. The boredom were a fungus growing in the damp cellar of my soul, eating all the fancy furniture of ambition and hope they’d tried to put in there. The boredom with the screens, the faces, the talk, the buying, the selling, the pretending. A deep, bottomless, yawning boredom.
And then I stopped. Just froze. The fear coming down like a cold sheet of rain.
See, writing in your head, that’s free. Thinking them dangerous thoughts, that’s a private party. But putting words on a screen… that’s making evidence. That’s leaving a trail. That’s painting a target on your own back with letters instead of paint.
What were safe to say? What could slip through? I tried to think like the algorithm, like the men in the cheap suits who wrote the rules. They got words they hate. Words that trigger the red flags in their shiny, soulless machines.
Freedom. That’s a dangerous word. Too hopeful. Smells of protest.
Oppression. That’s a whiny word. Victim mentality. Not conducive to national morale.
Truth. Hell, that’s the most dangerous one of all. ‘Cause everybody’s got their own, and theirs is the only one that’s legal.
My mind were running through the news reels I’d seen scroll by while waiting for a video of a cat to load. That smooth-faced anchor on the state channel—hair perfect, tie knotted just so, smile like a polished tombstone. Him talking ’bout “our glorious digital future” and “the harmonious online community.” His voice were like warm syrup, pouring over everything, making it all stick together nice and sweet.
But then, in the same breath, in that same syrup-voice, the ticker at the bottom of the screen would crawl its poisonous way: “Citizen detained for inflammatory social media commentary.” “Blog ‘The Unseen’ permanently shut down for violating community standards.” “New amendment to Digital Harmony Act grants greater oversight for public safety.”
The anchor’s face wouldn’t twitch. Not a muscle. His smile stayed fixed, a permanent monument to contentment. The disconnect were absolute. It were like watching a man serenely play the violin while his house burned down behind him. The words said “progress,” the subtext said “shut up.” The face said “all is well,” the law said “or else.”
My own words on the screen—“I am bored”—looked back at me. Was that “inflammatory”? Was admitting to the great national emptiness a violation of “community standards”? Was my boredom a threat to public safety?
The silence in the room got louder. The fridge hum turned into a judge’s droning voice. The blinking cursor were an accusing finger. Go on, it blinked. Say it. We dare you.
So my fingers, they started moving again. Not thinking, just… leaking. Leaking all the poisoned water that had been building up behind my eyes. I weren’t writing sentences no more. I were making a stain. A verbal stain on the digital white sheet.
I am bored, I understand my smart phone keeps an eye on me. Every day it tries to brainwash me into buying consumer goods I don’t need. I don’t work I just look at the expressions on people’s faces. My country’s media spews religious ideology for money. The education system is almost all privatized. I just keep watching expressions. On people’s faces. I go to brothels, don’t have sex. I like watching girls dance naked. The country’s leaders talk in favor of free speech but they are the ones who implement black laws if you speak. This.
I didn’t use no full stops for a while. Let it all run together, a torrent of piss and vinegar. No fancy grammar. No paragraphs. Just a block of angry, confused, horny, lonely text. A snapshot of a rotting brain in a wired world.
When I finally stopped, my hands were shaking. Not from fear, but from the effort of holding back a scream for so long. The screen were full. A wall of my own shame and anger. I read it back.
It were ugly. It were crude. It were everything you weren’t supposed to say. It talked about lust and politics in the same breath. It mixed up personal failure with national sickness. It admitted to being a voyeur, a parasite, a useless pair of eyes.
But damn. It were true. It were the first true thing I’d made in years.
The thrill lasted about three seconds. Then the cold fear washed back in, twice as strong.
This were it. This were the line. Once I saved this, I were a criminal. Not in the eyes of the law maybe—not yet—but in the eyes of the system. I were creating contraband. Thought-crime in a .txt file.
My eyes flicked to the computer’s camera, a little unblinking black dot above the screen. Was it on? Did it have a little red light my model didn’t show? I’d put a sticker over it once, then took it off ‘cause it looked paranoid. Now I wished I’d used superglue.
The microphone. Could it hear the clack of the keys? Could some algorithm somewhere, right now, be listening to the rhythm of my typing, matching it to “patterns associated with dissident content creation”? I’d read about that. They don’t just read your words, they read your habits. The time you write. The pauses. The backspaces. My every hesitation were a data point in my own trial.
I had to hide it. Not just on the desktop. That were like hiding a body in your living room. I needed a grave.
I moved the mouse, the pointer skittering like a scared bug. File > Save As…
The box popped up. I had to name it. Couldn’t call it “MY_REBELLION.doc.” Had to be boring. Invisible.
Notes_for_Project.txt
Perfect. Bland as boiled rice. The kinda file a thousand students had on a thousand computers. It promised homework, not heresy.
I saved it to the desktop. Then immediately felt exposed. Too out in the open. I created a new folder. Called it “Old_Software.” Inside that, another folder: “Drivers_Backup_2019.” Deep inside that digital nesting doll, I dragged my little text file. Burying it under layers of digital boredom.
But that weren’t enough. They can search folders. My heart were hammering. I needed a lock. A digital padlock.
I found a compression program. Zipped the whole “Drivers_Backup” folder into one package. Then, the beautiful part: I could password-protect the zip. My fingers trembled with a new kind of excitement. This were active resistance. This were building a secret room inside the panopticon.
The password box came up. What to use? Not my birthday. Not “password123.” Something I wouldn’t forget, but no algorithm could guess. I thought of the only thing that felt real from the day. Mila’s eyes when she said, “You write?” Not the empty eyes on stage. The real ones, curious and sharp. The color of dark honey in the dim backroom light.
I typed: honey_in_the_backroom_tea
Ridiculous. Poetic. Unhackable by brute force ‘cause it were born from a moment, not a formula. I clicked OK. The file vanished into its encrypted shell. A secret inside a secret inside a forgotten folder. A matryoshka doll of dissent.
I leaned back in the chair. The plastic groaned. The deed were done. I had committed a crime of authenticity. The silence felt different now. It weren’t just empty. It were listening. And I were listening back.
Shutting down the computer felt like closing a coffin lid. The fan whined, then died. The blue light on the tower blinked out. Darkness, except for the streetlight glow through the blinds.
I moved to the bed, collapsing more than lying down. The ceiling fan were on, spinning its lazy circles. Click… click… click… with each rotation. A loose screw or a bent blade, singing its tiny, broken song. I stared up at it, watching the shadows from its blades slice across the ceiling, across the water-stain map of some forgotten leak. The light and dark cutting, merging, cutting again.
And the faces of the day, they started parading behind my eyes. Not like memories, but like ghosts visiting on their way to somewhere else.
The barista girl. Her smile so professional it looked painted on. But the tattoo on her wrist, peeking from the uniform—what were it? A bird? A word? A fragment of a story she told herself when no customers were looking. Her eyes holding a tiredness no amount of free coffee could fix. She were a machine for serving caffeine, but her soul were in hock to some landlord somewhere.
The bookshop owner. Old man with glasses thick as bottle bottoms. His eyes weren’t tired, they were resigned. He’d seen the banned lists come and go. He knew which books lived under the counter. His little handwritten sign—“Selected books on special request”—weren’t an offer, it were a test. A loyalty test. You had to ask. You had to say the words. And in the asking, you showed your hand. He gave you the book, and you both knew you were now bound by a secret. His faint smile weren’t friendly, it were a shared scar.
The professor. Oh, the professor. The flicker of pure annoyance on his face when my hand went up. It weren’t just about the question. It were about the disruption. I were breaking the trance. The holy trance of the syllabus, the exam, the grade, the job. I were introducing the virus of “relevance” into the sterile lab of certified knowledge. His quick recovery, the mask of professionalism snapping back into place—it were a masterclass in survival. He weren’t a teacher; he were a warden, making sure we stayed in our intellectual cages, polishing the bars till they shone.
Mila on stage. Not the Mila from the backroom, but the dancing Mila. The emptiness in her gaze weren’t stupid. It were strategic. It were a withdrawal. She weren’t selling her body, she were renting out a hollow statue. Her real self were tucked away, deep inside, counting the money, counting the minutes, counting the days till she could maybe buy herself back. The “professional emptiness”—it were the most expensive thing in the room.
And my classmate. The shame on his face in the red light, then the swift, brutal apathy. That were the most terrifying face of all. ‘Cause it were mine. It were the face of someone caught in the act of being human in a place where humanity’s a commodity. The shame of wanting, the fear of being seen wanting, and then the decision: to bury the want so deep you pretend it never existed. To become apathetic. To become safe.
All these faces. All these masks. We were all just costume artists in a play nobody wrote, for an audience that weren’t watching, and the main punishment were forgetting who you were before you put the damn thing on.
The question came then, hot and sour in my throat: Was I any different?
I thought about my own face in the glow of the phone, thumb hovering over the “like” button on some stranger’s vacation photo. What expression did I wear? A vague, approving blankness. The “socially engaged” mask.
I thought about my face at the kitchen table, listening to Dad talk about tuition fees, my mother’s worry-lines etching deeper with every digit he recited. My face then were the “responsible son” mask. Concerned. Nodding. Hiding the scream inside that said, “It’s all a scam! I’m learning nothing but how to be a better slave!”
I thought about my face in the college hallway, after the professor shut me down. The “accepting student” mask. A little defeated, a little humble. The mask that says, “You’re right. I’ll stick to the syllabus. Sorry for thinking.”
I wore masks better than anybody. My whole life were a wardrobe of them. The Observant One. The Silent One. The Consumer. The Son. The Student. The Voyeur. Where was the face under all that? Had I ever had one? Or was I just born with a blank spot, waiting for the world to stick its posters on me?
But then… a stirring. A nasty, uncomfortable itch right behind my breastbone. It weren’t my heart. It were something smaller, meaner, and more stubborn. A little knot of no.
It started whispering. Not in words, but in a feeling. A pressure. It wanted out. It wanted to write more than those three lines. It wanted to scream on paper. It wanted to take a hammer to all the pretty, empty storefronts in my mind. It wanted to find a wall—a real, physical wall—and scratch the truth onto it with a rock until my fingers bled. It wanted to say:
LOOK. THIS IS OUR LIFE. THIS IS THE CAGE WE’RE BORN IN, A CAGE WITH NO DOOR ‘CAUSE WE’RE TAUGHT THE BARS ARE DECORATION. THIS IS OUR FACE. WE’VE FORGOTTEN WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE. WE THINK THE MASK IS THE SKIN.
The whisper got louder. It drowned out the click of the fan. It drowned out the city’s hum. It were a voice made of pure, undiluted fuck you. And it were coming from inside me.
I shut my eyes tight. Not to sleep. To escape into the dark behind my lids. But the fan’s sound followed me in, changing, morphing. The click-click-click became the sound of a key turning in a lock. Then it became the sound of a hundred little locks snapping open.
I weren’t in my room no more. I were in that big, round hall from before. The one from the dream. But it were clearer now. The ceiling weren’t just high, it were lost in shadow, like a cathedral to a god nobody named. The air were cool and still, smelling of old stone and… expectancy.
And we were all there. All of us. Not just faceless shapes, but people I knew. The barista girl was there, still in her apron, holding a tray of ghost-coffees. The bookshop owner, squinting without his glasses. The professor, clutching a sheaf of blank papers. Mila, but not in her dance clothes—in simple jeans and that white t-shirt, arms crossed. My classmate from the brothel, looking at his shoes. Faceless_07, though I couldn’t see her face, I just knew it were her, a posture of keen observation. Even the smooth TV anchor was there, but his tie were loose, his hair messy.
And we all, every last one of us, had these masks on. They weren’t scary. They were beautiful in a cheap way. Smooth, porcelain-white, with a gentle, permanent smile painted on. The kind of smile you see on department store mannequins. The Universal Approval Mask.
We were just standing, facing the center of the room. Not moving. A gallery of the happily enslaved.
Then, from the edge of my vision, I saw him. The bookshop owner. His old, spotted hand came up, slow as a rising moon. His fingers found the edge of his mask, right at the temple. There were a pause, a held breath that filled the whole hall.
And he pulled.
It didn’t come off easy. It made a sound. Not a tearing, but a deep, resonant CRACK, like ice breaking on a winter lake. The sound echoed in the vast space. He held the mask in his hand, looking at its empty, smiling front. Then he just… opened his fingers.
The mask fell. It hit the stone floor and shattered. Not into pieces, into dust. White, fine powder.
And his face. God. His face. It weren’t grand or heroic. It were old. Tired. Wrinkles cut deep as riverbeds. Eyes swammy and red-rimmed behind where his glasses should be. A nose too big, lips thin and pressed tight. It were a face that had seen too many books burned, too many questions go unasked. It were ugly with truth. And it were his.
The sound of that first mask breaking hung in the air. Then… another CRACK.
It were the barista girl. She ripped her mask off like it were burning her. Underneath, she were young, so young. Acne scars on her cheeks she hid with foundation. A raw, red mark on her nose from her glasses. And her eyes were swollen, like she’d been crying forever in silence. She let out a sob that got choked into a gasp as her mask, too, hit the floor and dissolved.
CRACK. CRACK. CRACKCRACKCRACK.
It were a cascade. A symphony of breaking. The professor’s mask fell away, revealing a pinched, anxious man, terrified of his own irrelevance. Mila’s came off, and her face were fierce, angry, beautiful in its defiance, the dark-honey eyes blazing. My classmate’s mask shattered, and he looked up, his expression one of pure, childlike confusion and hurt. The TV anchor’s perfect shell came apart, and the man underneath was pale, sweating, with the desperate eyes of a hostage reading a script.
And Faceless_07… when her mask went, there were just a blur of light. Not a face I could see, but a presence. An intelligence. A witness.
The floor were covered in the fine white dust of a thousand broken facades. It smelled like chalk and forgotten things.
And then we all looked at each other. Really looked.
First, there was fear. Naked, trembling fear. Seeing someone’s real face is a violence. It demands something from you. A recognition. An equal vulnerability.
Then, the fear melted, washed away by something hotter. Wonder. Awe. We were a room full of monsters, and we were beautiful. Ugly noses, crooked teeth, scars, wrinkles, puffy eyes, freckles, furrowed brows—a gallery of glorious, imperfect humanity.
And then… someone laughed. A short, disbelieving snort. It were Mila. It broke the spell in the best way.
Then the professor—the anxious, pinched man—started to cry. Not elegant tears. Ugly, heaving sobs that shook his whole body. He weren’t crying for sadness. He were crying for fifty years of silence.
And then we were all making noise. Laughing, crying, shouting words that weren’t words but just sounds of release. The hall filled with a roar of life. Real, messy, unbranded, unapproved LIFE.
There were no screens. No notifications buzzing for attention. No thumbs hovering over buttons. There were just faces, and voices, and the shared, dizzying freedom of having nothing left to hide.
We were connected. Not by Wi-Fi, but by the raw, exposed nerve of our own being. For the first time, I weren’t just watching expressions. I were sharing them. I were in the goddamn picture.
BRRRRING-BRRRRING-BRRRRING!
The sound tore through the dream like a chainsaw through silk. I jolted upright, a cold sweat slick on my back, my heart trying to punch its way out of my ribs. The hall, the faces, the dust—all sucked back into the void.
Dark room. Clicking fan. Orange streetlight.
The alarm on my phone. Screaming its mechanical head off from under the pillow. 7:30 AM.
The transition were so violent it left me nauseous. The beauty of the dream, the profound connection, shattered by the most mundane sound in the world. It were a lesson: reality always wins. Reality is the alarm clock.
I fumbled for the phone, my fingers clumsy with sleep and the fading ghost-touch of Mila’s real hand. I swiped the alarm off. Silence rushed back in, but it were a different silence. The empty, waiting silence of the daily prison.
The screen glowed bright in the dark. Before I could even think, my thumb did its dance. Swipe up. Passcode. Home screen.
12 New Notifications.
The little red badges hovered over the icons like warning lights. Email. Social Media. News App. Messaging. The digital world had been busy while I dreamed of freedom. It had accrued a debt of attention, and I were expected to pay up immediately.
I just stared at them. Those twelve little demands. Each one a tiny hook in my flesh, pulling me back into the stream. Each one an erasure of the hall, the faces, the dust.
My thumb hovered. The dream-feeling lingered—a phantom limb of courage. Don’t, it whispered. Let them scream. You just dreamed of silence. Keep it.
But the habit were older, stronger. The itch were too familiar. What if it were important? What if someone needed me? What if I missed a sale, a joke, a piece of gossip, a scrap of validation?
With a sigh that felt like deflating, I tapped the first one.
And just like that, I were back in.
Scrolling.
CHAPTER 6: INVISIBLE THREADS
Alright. You settle in. Let me tell ya how it were.
See, it weren’t no great, blowin’-the-trumpet kind of moment. It were a slippin' into somethin’ else. Like walkin’ through a bog and not known’ your boots is already soaked through. One minute you’s just treadin’ water, scrollin’ that shiny little slab of glass like it’s feedin’ you air. Next minute, you’s drownin’ in it, only you don't know you's drownin' ’cause your lungs is full of the same damn water.
Scrolling, I’m tellin’ you. A feller’s finger just… movin’. Up, down. A little twitch. A little tap. Like a nervous tick, only the tick is in the phone, not in you. It’s pullin’ the finger. Every one of them little red bubbles, them notifications, it’s a strand. Thinner’n spider silk. Invisible. Tied right to the meat of your brain. You can’t see ’em, but you can feel ’em. A tiny tug. A whisper: Look here. This way. Down, down, down.
And you go. Down, down, down. Not ’cause you want to. ’Cause the strand is pullin’. Day turnin’ into another damn day, sun up, sun down, and your face lit by that same bluish glow. Eatin’ the light. Drinkin’ the buzz.
But see, while my finger’s dancin’ to their tune, somethin’ else is growin’ in the dark. In the belly of that old, clunkin’ computer of mine, the fan whirrin’ like a tired insect.
The file. "Notes_for_Project.txt." It were gettin’ fat. Gettin’ a life of its own. It weren’t just a page no more. It were a whole damn world. A secret country in there.
I start makin’ folders. Like diggin’ root cellars under my own house. "Faces_1." Click. A hole in the ground. Drag in them pictures. The barista’s tired smile. The bookman’s watery eyes. The professor’s mask-snappin’ back into place. All them frozen faces, lined up in the dark. "Market_1." Another hole. Words about the billboards, the candy-red lips, the feelin’ of wantin’ what you’re told to want. "Edu_1." A deep pit. The taste of tuition fees, like metal on the tongue. The sound of that classroom drone.
It were my own private internet, see? A web I were weavin’ in the opposite direction. They’s sendin’ out strands to catch me. I’s gatherin’ strands of my own, tyin’ ’em into knots of truth. My own dark web, burrowed deep in a flash drive no bigger’n a thumb. A whole civilization of discontent, just sittin’ there in the silence, hummin’.
Then it happen. One evenin’, sky gone the color of a bruised plum. The scrollin’ finger… it slip. Or maybe it’s guided. Lands on somethin’ that ain’t shinin’ bright. Ain’t got no flashy pictures. Just text. Gray on black.
A forum. Called somethin’ like: "The Unfinished: For Prose That Don’t End."
Well. That got my ear. Prose that don’t end. Sounded like my whole damn life.
I poke my head in. Like peekin’ into a barn where you hear strange noises. And inside… Lord. It were a sanctuary of sighs. Posts, long and ragged, like torn cloth. All in first person, all talkin’ in pieces. Not tellin’ a story with a beginnin’, middle, and end. Just… talkin’. Spillin’. A feller talkin’ ’bout the sound of rain on a tin roof and how it sound like the government countin’ votes. A woman writin’ ’bout buyin’ tomatoes at the market and seein’ the whole cycle of life and death in the bruise on one. Frustration. A low, mean hum of it. Elation so sharp it cut. Boredom so thick you could spread it on bread. And under it all, that sound. That silent protest. A tooth achein’ in the gum.
They weren’t shoutin’. They was usin’ code. Metaphors thicker’n blackberry bramble. Talkin’ ’bout shadows when they meant the law. Talkin’ ’bout dust when they meant lies. Hidin’ in plain sight. Just like me.
My breath catchin’ in my throat. This were it. This were the hum I’d been hearin’ in my own head. Only it weren’t just in my head no more. It were out here. In other heads. Typed out by other fingers, probably just as twitchy as mine.
One post. Title: "Ceilin’ Fan."
I click it. Heart goin’ like a kicked rabbit.
It read: Fan spinnin’. Light and shadow cuttin’ across the face. Whose face? Mine? Or the shadow’s? The shadow I’m wearin’ ’fore I step out the door. Steppin’ out the door. Walkin’ the street. Every face a mask. Who’s to say there’s light under the mask? Who’s to say there’s anythin’ but another mask under there?
I just stare. The words swimmin’ a little. That were my thought. That were the very itch in my own skull. The fan. The cuttin’ light. The mask upon mask. Only this stranger, this ghost on the screen, had said it cleaner. Had carved it out of the air and pinned it to the page.
A feelin’ wash over me. Not quite joy. Not quite fear. A mix. Like findin’ a fellow prisoner in the next cell, tap-tappin’ on the wall.
My hands, they start shakin’ over the keyboard. A wantin’ to answer. A terrible need to tap back. To say: I hear you. My wall is thin, too.
But fear. Always the fear. What if this is a trap? What if the forum is a honey pot, and they’s just waitin’ for fools like me to stick their tongues in? What if this "Ceilin’ Fan" feller is some bored cop in a room somewhere, sippin’ coffee and waitin’ for the mice to nibble?
I fight it. I sit on my hands. For five minutes. For ten. The cursor blinkin’ in the reply box, mockin’ me.
Then… a kind of recklessness take me. A fever. If this is a trap, then let it spring. I can’t sit in this silence no more.
Fingers hittin’ keys, hard and clumsy. I write: My fan spins too. Got a click in it. Old. Dust gathers on the blades. The shadow it throws… it gets in my mouth. Stops up my words.
I hit "Post." The screen flickerin’. My words, out there now. Floatin’ in the digital ether with a stranger’s. I stare at the "Delete" button. It glow a little, accusin’ me. My finger hoverin’ over it. One tap. One tap and it’s gone, like it never were.
But I don’t tap. I let it sit. I let my rebellion, small as a pebble, just sit there.
Nothin’. Five minutes. Ten. The silence from the other side feel heavier than before. Maybe I’d got it wrong. Maybe it were just words. Maybe the other feller had logged off, gone to make supper, forgotten all about the fan and the masks.
A hollowness startin’ to grow in my gut. The old feelin’. The alone-ness.
Then.
A ding.
Soft, from the bowels of the computer. A private message. A little envelope icon, pulsin’.
I click it, hand cold.
It’s from the "Ceilin’ Fan" feller. Username: Faceless_07.
The message, short. No hello. No nothin’. Just:
Your fan’s click… is it a hard click? Like a bone snappin’? Or just a tired tick, like a clock countin’ down to nothin’?
I read it. Again. Three times. The hollowness in my gut fillin’ up with somethin’ else. Something electric.
I type back, fast, ’fore I lose my nerve: A tired tick. But steady. And the dust… it ain't just on the fan. It's in the air. We're all breathin' it in. Gets in your lungs. Makes a paste.
The reply come near instant. Like they was sittin’ there, waitin’:
Dust on the blades. Dust on the masks. We all wearin' 'em. We all breathin' the same choked air. You from the city?
Yeah, I type. You?
A different cage. Same zoo.
And just like that. A connection. Not a grand handshake. Not a beam of light. Just… a strand. A new kind of strand. Invisible, like the others. But this one ain’t pullin’ me down into the scroll. This one is runnin’ sideways, to another prisoner tap-tappin’ on their wall. An understandin’ strand.
We talk more. In little bursts. Careful, like skatin’ on thin ice. They tell me they’s a she. A student. Not in my city. Somewhere else. Studyin’ somethin’ called "socio-anthropo-ology" or some such. Big word. Means she watches people. Really watches. For a paper.
Her paper’s title make me laugh a bitter laugh: "The Performed Self: Masking and Authenticity in the Urban Digital Panopticon."
I say, That’s a mouthful.
She write back: It means I’m studyin’ how folks put on faces to survive. You’re doin’ the same thing. You’re collectin’ faces. I’m collectin’ the reasons behind 'em. We’re two dogs diggin’ at the same hole from different sides.
That stuck with me. Two dogs at the same hole.
She introduce me to others. Not in person. Never in person. Through the secure app she send me a link to. "Signal," it’s called. Encrypted. We rename our chat "The Dig." Fittin’.
There’s Faceless_12. Used to be a journalist. Had a blog where he called out a big construction company for usin’ bad materials. Blog got disappeared. Not just shut down. Disappeared. Like it never were. He’s bitter. Talks in short, sharp sentences. Like he’s savin’ his words.
Faceless_33. An accountant. A numbers man. He say he used to see nothin’ but columns and figures. Then he start seein’ the lies between the numbers. The money that vanish. The funds for schools that never get built. The numbers started screamin’ at him. Now he helps folks—the little folks—untangle the knots the big folks tie in the ledgers. He’s quiet. Precise. Sees patterns in everythin’.
Faceless_18. A housewife. Lives in one of them new, shiny apartment blocks. Says her whole world is the glow of the supermarket freezer aisle. Says she watches other wives, their faces tight with a kind of desperate happy. Says they’re all curatin’ their lives like it’s a social media page. Perfect kids, perfect kitchen, perfect emptiness. She’s the saddest of us all, I think. ’Cause her cage is the prettiest.
We ain’t no guild. No secret society with a handshake. We’s just voices in a dark room. We don’t share real names. We share… observations. Little pieces of the truth we’ve scraped up.
I tell ’em ’bout my writings. The brothel. The dancin’. The raw, ugly bits.
Faceless_07—she say I can call her Seven—she write: That's raw meat you're handlin'. The unvarnished itch. You can't show that to just anybody. It'll get you noticed. The wrong kind of noticed. You thinkin' of puttin' it out there?
I tell her no. The thought alone makin’ my throat close up. I’m just collectin’. Like a squirrel with nuts. Hidin’ ’em away. For what? I don't know. Just for the knowin' that they’re there. An archive. A proof that this… this feelin’… it were real.
Faceless_12, the journalist, he chime in, his text comin’ in abrupt chunks: An archive. That's the most dangerous thing of all. More dangerous than a bomb. A bomb just destroys what is. An archive… it preserves what was. It remembers. They can't stand that. They want you scrollin'. Always forward. Never lookin' back. The past is a country they've burned the maps to.
His words sit heavy. He’s right. The scroll is always forward. Never back. Memory is a sin.
’Bout this time, my phone—my regular, spy-in-my-pocket phone—it pings with somethin’ new. An app. Silently installed one night after an "update."
A friendly-lookin’ icon. A little green leaf. Called: "Digital WellBeing: A Initiative for a Healthier, Happier Online Citizenry." Government sponsored. "Voluntary." But the notification say: "Over 98% of your contacts have already joined! See how you compare!"
Faceless_33, the numbers man, he message me on Signal right after. Download it. Don't make a fuss. If you don't, it's a data point. A red flag. They'll find another way to measure you. A tax audit. A fee. A visit. It's easier to swim with the current, even if it's headed for a waterfall.
So I download the damn thing. I give it all the permissions it asks for. Lets it see my screen time. Lets it see what apps I use. Lets it "suggest" more positive content. I don’t know if it reads my keystrokes. I have to assume it does.
A new rule in The Dig. We only use Signal late. After 11 PM. The "WellBeing" app has a "Wind Down" mode it encourages then. Maybe it’s less watchful. Maybe it’s not. We act like it is. Our conversations become a thing of the deep night. The click of my fan the only other sound.
Seven, she’s the brave one. She sends files. Snippets of her research. Audio clips of people talkin’ in cafes, their voices lowered. "My boss said if I share that post, I'm gone." "We pretend we don't see the soldiers at the university gate." "I teach my children to smile at the camera and say nothing." She’s recordin’ the sound of the mask bein’ fitted on.
It’s dangerous what she’s doin’. She knows it. The ethics of it are murky, she writes once. But so is the air we breathe. Sometimes you have to get your hands dirty to prove there's dirt.
I start addin’ her snippets to my folders. The archive gettin’ fatter. "Voices_1." "Fears_1." It’s not just my boredom no more. It’s the boredom of a generation. The frustration of a hundred stifled yawns. The face behind a thousand masks.
And all the while, the other strands—the ones from the official world—they keep pullin’. The ads get smarter. They know I looked at a cheap kettle once. Now my screen is full of kettles. Kettles that sing. Kettles that connect to your phone. Kettles you don’t need. The "Digital WellBeing" app sends cheerful reports: "You spent 5 hours on social media yesterday! That's 2 hours more than your peers! Try our 'Mindful Minute' exercise!" It congratulates me for bein’ more addicted.
The news on the TV keeps playin’ its tune. The same smooth faces. Talkin’ ’bout prosperity. Talkin’ ’bout tradition. Then, in the same breath, a ticker at the bottom: New public order act passes unanimously. Strengthens penalties for online defamation.
Defamation. Such a clean word for makin’ the powerful blush.
One night, particularly late, the clickin’ of the fan seems louder. I’m in The Dig, just me and Seven. The others gone quiet.
She writes: They're closing in. I can feel it. Not on me, necessarily. On the air. It's getting thinner. Harder to breathe.
I ask what she means.
The filters, she writes. They're not just flaggin' the big bad words anymore. They're flaggin' combinations. Sentiments. A sigh typed out too many times by too many people in the same geographic area becomes a "disturbance pattern." My research... it's a map of sighs.
You thinkin’ of stoppin’? I ask.
A long pause. Then: No. But I'm thinkin' of sendin' you a copy. The whole thing. The map. Just in case my door gets a knock. You keep diggin' your hole from your side. Promise me.
I promise. A cold stone settle in my gut.
She sends a link the next day. A file, huge, compressed. Named: Masks_Off.rar. Don't download it on your regular line, she warns. Use a public one. A cafe. And… it'll delete itself in 24 hours. Like it never was.
I go to a internet cafe, the kind with sticky keyboards and boys playin’ loud shootin’ games. I download the file. It takes an age. A progress bar creepin’ across the screen. My heart thumpin’ in time with the gunfire from the headphones next to me.
When it’s done, I disconnect. I go home. That night, I check The Dig. Faceless_07’s profile picture is gone. Just a gray silhouette. Her last seen status: "Over 24 hours ago."
She’s not offline.
She’s gone.
And the new strand, the understandin’ one, it goes slack. Not broken. Just… silent. Waitin’. And the other strands, the invisible ones from the world, they seem to pull all the harder. The scroll feels heavier. The screen feels colder.
But on my hard drive, in the deepest root cellar, there’s a new folder. It’s called "Seven’s Map." And it’s full of the sound of a thousand people, all tryin’ to remember what their own face feels like.
The diggin’ from the other side of the hole has stopped. The silence from over there is now my burden to fill.
I take a deep breath. The air is still dusty. But now I know the name of the dust. And I know I ain’t the only one chokin’ on it.
CHAPTER 7: THE GUILD OF THE FACELESS
A clickin’. Just a soft click-click from the keyboard in the dead of night. Fan hummin’ overhead, stirrin’ up the dust that been settlin’ on everything—the monitor, the stack of old bills, the picture of Ma from before the cough took her bad. My fingers movin’ like they got a mind of their own, tappin’ out words into that encrypted box. No proper sentences, just… bits. Pieces. Things I’m seein’. Things I’m feelin’. Things that don’t got no end.
Postin’. Just postin’ a sliver on that forum. "The Fan." Wrote about the light and shadow cuttin’ a face in two. Didn’t say whose face. Didn’t need to. Was just puttin’ it out there, like leavin’ a note in a hollow tree, hopin’ maybe a bird’d use it for nestin’, or the rain’d wash it away. Didn’t expect nothin’ back.
Then gettin’ a ping. A private message. From someone callin’ themselves Faceless_07.
"Your fan… it click?" they wrote. Simple. Direct. Cut right through the noise.
My breath hitchin’ in my chest. How’d they…? "Yeah," I typed back, fingers clumsy. "Clicks. Old. Dusty. Like everything else."
The reply comin’ fast, like they was sittin’ right there in the dark with me. "Dust settles on masks. We all breathing dust."
That was it. That was the hook. Didn’t need no fancy handshake. Just… knowin’. A shared understandin’ of the grit in the air, the film on the glass. We started talkin’. Not chit-chat. Not "how’s the weather" (we both knew the weather was a soupy, polluted haze). We talked in shards. In echoes. She—turned out she was a she—was a student, way across the city in one of them glass-and-steel universities. Studyin’ people. Anthropology, she called it. Watchin’ folks like I did, but with a notebook and a recorder hid in her bag, not just eyeballs and a sick feelin’ in the gut.
"Me, I’m just watchin’," I told her one night, the app’s encryption supposedly keepin’ our words safe. "Ain’t got no method to it. Just… folks’ faces in the market, on the bus. They look like they wearin’ masks made of clay. Dryin’ and crackin’."
"And you?" she wrote back. "You think you ain’t wearing one?"
That stoppin’ me cold. Lookin’ at my reflection in the dark monitor screen. Seein’ a pale shape, a ghost-boy. Was that my face? Or was I wearin’ the "good son" mask for my ailin’ Pa? The "quiet student" mask for the professors? The "disinterested observer" mask for the world? My fingers hovered. "Maybe," I finally sent. "Maybe mine’s just thinner. Maybe it’s crackin’ too."
She sent a smiley. Not a yellow one. Just a colon and a dash. :-  "Cracking is good. Cracking is how the light gets in. Or how the real face starts pushing through."
She introduced me to others. Not in person. Never in person. That was Rule Zero. You stay a ghost in the machine. You stay faceless.
First was Faceless_12. His messages came in bursts, angry and sharp, like gunfire. He was a journalist. Used to work for a real paper, back when papers meant somethin’. Got a blog after that. Blog got "disappeared." His words: "They didn’t shut it down. They disappeared it. Like it never was. Like I never was." Now he was driftin’, pickin’ up freelance scraps, writin’ things in code so bitter it’d eat through metal. He talked about "narrative control" and "manufactured consent." Big words I had to look up. But the feelin’ underneath… that I knew. The feelin’ of your voice bein’ stuffed back down your throat before it even left your lips.
"Your archive," he typed one night, the digital clock readin’ 2:47 AM. "The one you’re buildin’. It’s dangerous."
"How?" I asked. "It’s just words. My words. On my drive."
"Memory is dangerous," he shot back. "They want you livin’ in the now. The eternal now. The now of the next click, the next buy, the next shiny thing. You look back, you start seein’ patterns. You start rememberin’ what they said last year versus what they’re doin’ this year. You remember your own anger from last month. An archive is a rebellion. It’s a ‘fuck you’ to the eternal now. They’ll sniff it out."
He spoke from experience. They’d raided his apartment once. "A routine check," they said. Took his old laptops, his external drives. Left him with the new, state-approved tablet they were "encouragin’" all citizens to use. He laughed about it, a dry, cracklin’ sound even in text. "Joke’s on them. The real stuff’s in the cloud. Scattered. In pieces. You gotta learn to fragment. To scatter. Be like seeds on the wind, not a tree they can chop down."
Then there was Faceless_33. He was different. Cool. Calm. Spoke in numbers and percentages. A chartered accountant. Said he used to believe in the clean logic of math, the balance sheet of life. "But the numbers stopped adding up," he wrote. "The national growth figures, the employment stats… they’d sing one tune. But the numbers in my clients’ books, the whispers in the tax corridors… they’d hum a different one altogether. A sadder, poorer one." He saw the country as a vast, leaky ledger. Money pourin’ in one column, vanishin’ in another, marked down as "administrative costs" or "strategic development." He was the one who told me about the new app.
"They’re rolling out a ‘Digital Wellness’ suite," his message popped up, perfectly punctuated. "Voluntary. For now. But the tax office is… keenly interested in early adopters. Non-adopters may face… enhanced scrutiny. I’d advise downloading it. And letting it run."
My gut clenchin’. "Let it spy on me?"
"Let it think it’s spying on you," he corrected. "Feed it a diet of blandness. Search for cooking recipes. Watch approved sporting highlights. Click on the positive news links. Create a digital ghost of a happy, compliant citizen. While the real you… does its work elsewhere. In the cracks. Like moss."
It felt like surrender. It was surrender. But Faceless_33’s logic was cold and hard, like river stone. "You cannot fight a flood with your bare hands. You dig a trench. You divert. You survive."
So I downloadin’ the damn thing. A cheerful, blue icon. "Be Well!" it chirped when I opened it. It asked for permissions. Location. Microphone. Contacts. App usage data. Network data. I felt sick grantin’ every one. It was like invitin’ a vampire into your house and pointin’ it to your neck. It started generatin’ reports almost immediately. "Your screen time is higher than 68% of users in your demographic." "We recommend a 10-minute mindfulness break!" "You’ve visited several news sites today. For a balanced perspective, try this article: ‘Government Initiative Brings Joy to Rural Farmers.’"
I showed the report to Faceless_07. She wrote back a single line: "The panopticon is now personalized. And polite." I had to look up "panopticon." A prison where the inmates can always be watched, but never know if they’re being watched at any given moment. Yeah. That tracked.
The app changed how we talked. Our "Projection" app sessions got moved to a dead-zone window: after 11 PM, before 5 AM. The time when the digital babysitter was maybe, maybe, takin’ a nap. Our language got more coded.
Faceless_12: "The weather in my district is getting heavy. Pressure systems moving in." (Meaning: increased police presence, feeling of oppression.)
Faceless_33: "The quarterly audit for my small business client was unexpectedly thorough. Many queries about miscellaneous expenses." (Meaning: his cover or a contact was being investigated.)
Faceless_07: "My field research hit a snag. Several subjects have become reticent. Fear of participation bias." (Meaning: people were too scared to talk to her anymore.)
We were a sorry bunch. A ghost club. A guild of the bruised and the watchful. Faceless_18 joined later. A housewife from the endless suburban sprawl. Her world was the supermarket aisle, the school gate, the balcony where she hung laundry. Her observations were domestic, devastating. "The price of cooking oil," she wrote. "It’s like a fever chart for the country’s health. When it jumps, you see the faces at the store change. The smiles get tighter. The eyes drop to the price tag first, not the item. The kids’ fruit gets smaller, fewer. You see mothers doing math in their heads, their lips movin’ silently. Putting things back. That’s the real news. Not what’s on the TV."
She talked about the "quiet riot" in her housing complex. No burnin’ cars, no shouts. Just folks startin’ to ignore the homeowners’ association rules. Hangin’ laundry on banned lines. Parkin’ scooters in the flower beds. A slow, stubborn reclaimin’ of inches. "They can control the speech on the screen," she said. "But they can’t control the way I stack my lentils on the shelf, from cheapest to most expensive. That’s my protest. My archive."
Faceless_07 was our theorist, our glue. She’d take our ragged observations—my faces, 12’s anger, 33’s numbers, 18’s prices—and weave ‘em into a tapestry that almost made sense. "You see?" she’d write, her text blocks long and passionate. "It’s all connected. The economic pressure (33’s leaky ledger, 18’s oil prices) creates social anxiety. The anxiety necessitates control (the policing 12 sees, my reticent subjects). The control is sold through ideology on the media (the faces you see, Arian, the masks). And it’s all lubricated by consumerism—the promise that the next purchase will fill the hole the system itself is digging. It’s a perfect, closed loop. A machine for grinding down human complexity into manageable, monitorable data points."
She called people outside the loop "anomalies." I was an anomaly, with my face-watchin’. Mila, the dancer, was an anomaly, sellin’ the shadow of her body but keepin’ her soul in a locked room. The old bookshop owner was an anomaly. We were glitches in the system. Noise in the signal. And the system hated noise. It had to either absorb you, silence you, or make you irrelevant.
"Your writings," Faceless_07 said to me, focusin’ in. "The raw ones. About the brothel. The watching. They’re important. They’re the view from the gutter. The unvarnished, ugly truth. But they’re also a lightning rod. You put that out there, unflagged, uncoded… the system will see it as a direct attack on the ‘pleasant & stimulating’ reality it’s building."
"Should I stop?" I asked, fear curdlin’ in my stomach.
"No," she replied, firm. "You should archive. Collect. But be smart. Fragment. Scatter, like 12 says. Don’t build a single tree. Plant a forest of whispers."
The pressure was buildin’ though. Not just digital. Real-world. That classmate from the dance hall, Raj. He started showin’ up more. Not just in class. In the canteen when I was alone. At the bus stop. His questions were always casual, wrapped in a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. "You seem preoccupied, man. Always thinking. Writing in that little notebook? Working on a novel or something?" He’d laugh. "Better be a happy novel. Nobody likes sad stories these days."
I’d mumble somethin’, my mask of the shy, awkward student slippin’ on easy. But it felt thinner every time. More brittle.
I told the Faceless group about Raj. Faceless_12 was immediate: "He’s a snitch. Student informant. They plant them in every department. For ‘campus harmony.’ He’s feeling you out."
Faceless_33, ever practical: "Assume your campus network is compromised. Assume your location is tracked from the moment you enter the gate. Your phone is a beacon. Your student ID card is a beacon. Act accordingly."
Faceless_07 was more nuanced. "He might just be a scared kid trying to earn points. Trying to prove his loyalty. The most effective prison guards are the ones who were once prisoners. Don’t hate him. Outmaneuver him."
Outmaneuver him. How? By bein’ smarter? By bein’ more paranoid? I was just a kid from a dusty town, my head full of faces and a heart full of a restless, formless anger. I wasn’t a spy. I wasn’t a revolutionary. I was just… bored. And seein’ too much.
The "Digital Wellness" app started gettin’ more… personal. One afternoon, a notification popped up: "We notice you’ve been in areas with potentially stressful environmental factors. For your mental wellbeing, we suggest this relaxing music playlist and a guided meditation on ‘Acceptance and Contentment.’"
The "area" was the street where the old bookshop was. I hadn’t even gone in. Just walked past. They were trackin’ my ambient stress through my heart rate monitor? My microphone listenin’ for the tense tone in my voice? Or just flaggin’ neighborhoods known for "discontent"?
That night, in our late-night window, the group was quiet. A heavy quiet. Faceless_12 broke it first.
"My IP’s been dancing with firewall flags for a week," he wrote. "Getting hot. I think… I think I need to step back from the main channel. Go dark for a bit."
A cold dread washed over me. He was the firebrand. The one who said the quiet parts loud. If he was feelin’ the heat…
Faceless_33 wrote next. "Received an audit notice today. For a charitable trust I administer. One that has… tangential links to some independent publishing efforts. The notice is unusually broad. ‘Fishing expedition’ broad. I will be entering a period of necessary silence. Minimize all non-essential contact."
One by one, the ghosts were bein’ chased back into the shadows. The guild was dissolvin’.
Only Faceless_07 remained, her avatar a steady, pale blue dot in the app.
"They’re tightening the mesh," she wrote. "Our analysis was correct. The system’s tolerance for anomalies is decreasing. The ‘Wellness’ push isn’t about health. It’s about predictive policing. Flag the stressed, the discontent, the ‘at-risk’ thinkers… before they think too loudly."
"What do we do?" I asked, the words feelin’ pathetic on the screen.
"We do what we’ve been doing. We watch. We record. We archive. But now, we think about dissemination. The archive is no good buried. A seed in a vault is not a tree."
"Dissemination? How? They’ll crush it."
"Then we make it uncrushable," she wrote, a new intensity in her tone. "We make it a ghost, like us. We fragment it. We print it on paper and leave it in bathroom stalls. We encode it in images and post it as pet photos. We speak it and record it on devices that never touch the net. We turn our archive into a rumor. A folktale. The system can fight a brick. It can’t fight mist."
She was talkin’ crazy. Beautiful, terrifying crazy.
"Your writings, Arian," she continued. "And my research. The raw data of our… discontent. We should combine them. Create a testament. Not a manifesto. A witness statement. ‘This is what we saw. This is how it felt.’"
The idea was terrifyin’. And electrifyin’. To take the secret, festerin’ thing inside me and give it shape. To put my name—or a name—to it. To stop just watchin’ and start… testifyin’.
"But they’ll come for us," I wrote.
"They might," she acknowledged. "But they’re already coming. The mesh is closing. 12 and 33… they’re the canaries. We can wait for the gas, or we can try to scratch a message on the wall of the mine before it hits."
She told me she was gonna send me her stuff. All of it. Years of interviews, notes, audio files, photographs. A digital tumbleweed of truth.
"I’m sending you a link," she wrote. "A one-time, encrypted dead-drop. You’ll have 24 hours to pull everything down. Then it vanishes. The server’s in a place with… forgiving laws. But nothing is forever. Save it. Keep it safe. Build our testament."
"Why me?" I asked, feelin’ the weight descendin’.
"Because you see the faces," she answered simply. "You see the human cost in the eyes. My research is data. Your writing is the soul. One without the other is just noise. We need both."
The transfer began. A progress bar inched across my screen. It was gonna take hours. We sat in silence, the cursor blinkin’, the fan clickin’, two ghosts in the machine, passin’ a heavy, dangerous treasure between us.
Just before she signed off, she sent one last message.
"Remember, Arian. The goal isn’t to win. Not in the way they think of winning. The goal is to be a witness. To say, ‘I was here. I saw this. It was wrong.’ To plant a seed of memory so that someday, when this particular madness ends—and all madnesses end—someone will know it was real. That we were real. Faceless, but real."
The progress bar finished. "Transfer Complete."
Her blue dot winked out.
Faceless_07 is offline.
The guild was gone. I was alone in the dark again, with a fan clickin’ and a hard drive full of ghosts. And a task that felt bigger than the sky and heavier than the world.
I looked at the new folder on my desktop. She’d named it.
Masks_Off.rar
I double-clicked. It asked for a password. She’d given it to me earlier. A string of nonsense words and numbers. I typed it in.
The archive opened. A list of files longer than my arm. Interview_Subject_A1.mp3. FieldNotes_UrbanDecay.pdf. Photo_Protest_Eyes.jpg. Data_EconomicDisparity.xlsx.
I clicked on one at random. A photo. A close-up of a man’s hands, gnarled and stained, holdin’ a pay stub. The numbers on it were almost laughably small. The fingers were clenched so tight the knuckles were white bone.
This was her archive. Our archive now.
The dust was settlin’. But underneath, somethin’ was pushin’ through. Crackin’ the mask.
I opened a new document. The blank page glowed.
My fingers went to the keys. Not tappin’ in fragments anymore. Not just watchin’.
Beginin’ to build.
CHAPTER 8: MILA

I went back. Not ’cause I wanted to see the dance. Hell, I’d seen enough skin and shame-light to last a lifetime. Went back ’cause somethin’ was pullin’. A string tied ’round my guts, and somebody—or somethin’—was givin’ it a good hard yank.

Place hadn’t changed. Smelled worse, if that was possible. Stale smoke and cheap perfume and somethin’ sour underneath, like milk gone bad in a hot room. Sound was the same—that bone-thumpin’ bass you felt in your teeth. Light spinnin’, cuttin’ the dark into jagged pieces. All a big machine, oiled with sweat and rupees, chuggin’ along.

I was doin’ my usual. Planted in a corner, bottle of warm water in my hand—overpriced, tasted like plastic—just watchin’. But I warn’t just watchin’ the stage. I was watchin’ the watchers. The men with their eyes glazed over, like they was lookin’ at a TV screen, not a live woman. The way their faces went slack, not with desire, but with a kind of… vacancy. Like they’d unplugged themselves for a spell. They was payin’ for a dream and sleepin’ through the show. Faceless_07’s words rattlin’ in my head: What are you lookin’ for? What’s drawin’ you in? Damned if I knew. Maybe just the raw, ugly truth of it. Out here, ever’thing was varnish and polish. Here, the varnish was peeled off, showin’ the termite-ridden wood underneath.

The girls on stage… they was different this time. New faces. Or maybe just the old faces lookin’ older. One of ’em moved like her joints hurt. Another smiled so wide and empty it looked like her face might crack. I was cataloguin’ it all. Expression 47: Professional Agony. 48: The Hollow Grin. My mind a damned filing cabinet for other people’s misery.

Then, a voice. Right at my ear, so close I felt the breath. Not sweet, not perfumed. Just… human.

“Back again to watch?”

I near ’bout jumped outta my skin. Spun around, chair scrapin’ loud on the dirty floor. And there she was. Not on the stage. Standin’ right in the mess of it all, lookin’ like she didn’t belong. No sparkly nothin’. Just plain jeans, faded at the knees. A simple white t-shirt, gone a little grey from too many washes. Hair tied back, simple. Face clean. No mask of paint. And her eyes… Hell. Her eyes warn’t empty. They was lookin’ right at me, sharp and dark, holdin’ a question and a challenge all at once. It was the girl from before. The one who’d offered. But she warn’t offerin’ now.

My tongue felt thick. “You…” was all I could get out.

A little tilt of her head. “Mila. My name’s Mila.” She said it plain, like she was handin’ me a tool, not a secret. “You just watch. Why?”

Why. The million-rupee question. I fumbled for an answer, somethin’ smart, somethin’ from all my thinkin’ and writin’. But all that came out was the plain, dumb truth. “’Cause… your movements… out there. They’re real. When ever’thin’ else out in the world is just… pretense. A show.”

A smile touched her lips then. Not the stage-smile. This was different. Smaller. Colder. Wiser. It didn’t reach her eyes all the way. “Real?” she said, and her voice had a rough edge to it, like unpolished stone. “This is pretense too, bhaiya. A performance. For money. You think they’re dancin’ for joy? They’re countin’ the minutes ’til their shift ends. Countin’ the notes in the manager’s fist.”

She was right. I knew she was right. But still… “Even so,” I muttered, lookin’ down at my bottle. “The pretense here… it feels more honest than the pretense out there. Out there, folks pretend they’re happy, they’re successful, they’re free. In here… they’re just pretendin’ to want you. It’s a cleaner lie.”

Mila studied me for a long minute. The noise of the place seemed to fade. Then she jerked her chin towards a shadowy corridor behind the main bar. “Want some tea? My room’s at the back. Less noise. And fewer… eyes.”

Wasn’t an offer like before. Was an invitation. A dangerous one. My brain screamed all sorts of warnings. Trap. Setup. Trouble. But my feet were already movin’, followin’ her as she wove through the tables, not lookin’ back to see if I was comin’.

The corridor was narrow, walls stained with who-knows-what, smellin’ of damp and disinfectant. She stopped at a door, thin plywood with a weak latch. Pushed it open.

The room wasn’t much. A prison cell with aspirations. A narrow cot with a faded floral sheet. A small table with a hot plate and a couple of chipped mugs. A plastic stool. A cracked mirror on the wall, reflectin’ the bleakness back on itself. A single bulb hangin’ from a wire, castin’ a sickly yellow light. But it was clean. Or as clean as it could be in a place like this. No frills. No lies.

“Sit,” she said, pointin’ to the stool. She busied herself with the hot plate, fillin’ a kettle from a jug of water. Her movements were efficient, economical. Not the exaggerated sway of the stage, but a practical, grounded grace.

I sat, feelin’ awkward, my knees too high. Watchin’ her. The silence wasn’t comfortable, but it wasn’t hostile either. It was just… there. Waitin’.

She made the tea silently—black, strong, too much sugar, the way folks from the villages make it. Handed me a mug. Our fingers didn’t touch. She leaned against the table, cuppin’ her own mug, blowin’ on the steam. She was studyin’ me again, and I felt naked under that look. Like she was seein’ past my clothes, my skin, right into the mess of wires and confusion inside.

“You write,” she said flatly. Not a question. A statement.

A jolt went through me. Cold tea sloshed onto my thigh. “How’d you—?”

She cut me off, a faint, knowin’ curve to her mouth. “Your finger. Right index. See?” She nodded towards my hand clutchin’ the mug. “No ink stain. ’Cause it’s all computers and phones now, no? But there’s a mark. A flat spot. A little callus. From hittin’ the same key, over and over. The ‘A’ key, maybe. Or the space bar. A writer’s mark.” She took a sip, her eyes never leavin’ mine over the rim of the mug. “And your eyes. They don’t just look. They… take apart. You was lookin’ at the girls on stage like you was memorizin’ their bones. Not their skin. You categorize. You file away.”

I was speechless. She’d seen me. Truly seen me. In a way nobody in the coffee shops or college corridors ever had. They saw a face, a student, maybe a bored kid. She saw the mechanic inside, takin’ things apart to see how they worked, even if he couldn’t put ’em back together.

I just nodded, my throat tight.

She looked away then, into the steam of her tea. “I used to write too,” she said, her voice goin’ softer, driftin’ back to some other place, some other time. “Poetry. In school. Teacher said I had a gift. Could make the village pond sound like an ocean. Could make the sound of my mother grindin’ spices sound like a song.” A shadow passed over her face. “Then… Abbu got sick. The kind of sick that eats money. Eats savings. Eats land. The poetry book got replaced by a doctor’s bill. The pen got replaced by… this.” She gestured vaguely, takin’ in the room, the thin walls, the sound of bass thumpin’ through them. “Now the body writes. Body language. A different kind of verse. More expensive. More… final.”

The words hung in the damp air. I didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry” felt like a pebble thrown into a deep, dark well.

“Is it… dangerous?” I finally asked, the question soundin’ stupid even to my own ears. Everythin’ about her life looked dangerous.

She let out a short, dry sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Physically?” She shrugged a shoulder. “Maybe. Some men, they forget it’s a transaction. They think buyin’ the dance means buyin’ the dancer. You learn to handle it. Fast talk, fast feet, a whistle for the bouncer.” She tapped the side of her head. “Mentally? Pakka. Sure as sunrise. It eats at you. The look in their eyes. The smell on their breath. The way you have to… disconnect. Like you’re floatin’ above your own body, watchin’ it work.” She looked straight at me, and her gaze was like a pin, holdin’ me in place. “But here’s the thing, writer-boy. In here, on that stage, I have control. I decide what I show. How much I show. The angle of the hip, the drop of the shoulder, the look over the shoulder… it’s all choreographed. My choreography. My choice. Out there…” She jerked her thumb towards the door, towards the world beyond the stained alley. “Out there, what control do I have? To be a poor village girl with a sick father? To be a poet with no paper? To be an educated woman they’ll still call ‘characterless’ if she walks home alone after dark? Out there, the mask is forced on you. They pick it for you. They tie it on tight. In here… I pick my own mask. And sometimes, I take it off.”

Her words hit me like a physical blow. They echoed Faceless_07’s cool, academic analysis—the individual’s negotiation of identity under oppressive structures—but they were hot, lived, scarred. This wasn’t theory. This was the bloody, beaten reality.

“Do you wear a mask?” I asked, my voice barely above the thump of the music.

She didn’t blink. “Every damn day,” she said, her voice a low rasp. “From the moment I step out of this room to buy paan, to the moment I step onto that stage, to the moment I lie to my mother on the phone sayin’ I work in a ‘beauty parlor.’ A daughter mask. A worker mask. A dancer mask. A strong-woman mask.” She leaned forward slightly, the yellow light catchin’ the determined planes of her face. “Don’t you?”

And there it was. The question I’d been askin’ myself in the dark, now comin’ at me from this woman in this terrible, truthful room. I saw ’em all flash before me. The Good Student mask for my parents, absorbin’ their dreams and their debt. The Detached Intellectual mask for college, where caring was a weakness. The Silent Observer mask for the streets, where seein’ too much could get you seen. The Writer mask for the empty document, where I pretended I had somethin’ to say.

“Yeah,” I breathed out, the word leavin’ me deflated. “Yeah, I do.”

She nodded, like I’d passed a small test. Finished her tea. “So you watch. You write. You file us away in your little boxes. Bored College Boy Observes Fallen Women. What’s it for?”

The accusation in her tone warn’t angry. It was weary. She’d been observed her whole life—by lustful men, by judgmental neighbors, by a society that only saw her value in her body or her shame. Now she was bein’ observed by a boy with a thinker’s callus on his finger. Same song, different instrument.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, and it was the truest thing I’d said all night. “It just… comes out. The words. To prove I’m seein’ it. To prove it’s real. That I’m real. In the middle of all the… not-real.”

She was quiet for a long time. Lookin’ at me. Seein’ through me. Then she said, “Show it to someone. Your writing. Don’t just hide it in a little box on your computer. That’s just another mask. A safe one. Art… it ain’t art until it connects. Until it risks somethin’.”

Risk. The word echoed in the tiny room, mixin’ with the distant thump of the bass. Faceless_07 talked of risk in terms of data packets and IP addresses. Mila talked of risk in terms of skin and bone and reputation. A deeper, older currency.

I couldn’t tell her about the Faceless group. That was a risk of a different color. So I just said, “It’s dangerous.”

She snorted. “Everythin’ worth a damn is, babu. Breathin’ is dangerous. Stayin’ silent is dangerous. What’s your danger? Hurtin’ some powerful person’s feelin’s? Makin’ your professor frown?” There was no mockery in it. Just a stark measurin’ of scales. Her danger was a fist, a disease, a knife in an alley. My danger was a bad grade, a disapproving click of a tongue.

It shamed me.

I finished my tea, the sugar gritty at the bottom. The conversation was windin’ down, the heaviness of it settlin’ in the room. I stood up, the stool scrapin’. “I should go.”

She didn’t try to stop me. Just nodded. “You know where to find me. If you want to watch again. Or… if you want to talk without the music.”

It was an open door. A crack in the wall. I just nodded back, a stupid, jerky motion.

As I reached for the flimsy door handle, she spoke again, her voice softer. “That girl you was watchin’ last time. The one with the tired eyes. She’s gone. Went back to her village. Husband found out. There was… trouble.”

The news landed like a stone in my stomach. My Expression 43: Silent Resignation. Gone. Erased. Just another data point retired. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled again, the words useless.

“Yeah,” Mila said, not lookin’ at me now, starin’ at the stain on the wall. “Me too.”

I stepped out into the reekin’ corridor, leavin’ the yellow light of her truth-tellin’ room for the flashin’ lies of the main hall. The bass felt louder, dumber. The faces looked cruder. I pushed through the crowd, out into the alley, gulpin’ the foul night air.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A notification. The Digital Wellness app. “You appear to be in a high-stimulus environment. Consider a digital detox for mental peace.”

I laughed, a harsh, barkin’ sound that startled a cat rummagin’ in a pile of trash. Mental peace. What a goddamn joke. I looked back at the pulsing red light of the entrance. In there, in that terrible, honest room, I’d felt more peace—a grim, clear-eyed peace—than I had in months of scrollin’. She’d taken off a mask, just for a minute. And she’d forced me to see my own, glued tight to my face.

I started walkin’, the city’s noise closin’ around me again. But Mila’s question walked with me, a persistent shadow: Don’t you?

Yeah. I did. We all did. But she’d shown me somethin’. That sometimes, in the darkest, most forgotten rooms, you could choose which mask to wear. And sometimes, if you were brave enough, you could take the damned thing off.
CHAPTER 9: CONNECTION AND WHISPERS

The whispers, they didn’t come in loud. Naw. They come in the way rust creeps up on a tin roof. One day you ain’t even notice it. Next thing you know, the whole damn shed’s gone orange and brittle, flaking away to nothing. And you can’t pinpoint the day it started. Just the day you saw it.

See, after I started meeting with Mila regular-like, things… they shifted. Like the ground under my feet wasn’t just dirt no more, but sand. Shifting sand. My phone, that little slab of glass and lies, it was the first to start whispering.

That Digital Wellness app—the one them bastards suggested I get—it stopped being a chirpy little bird. Stopped saying, “You’re doin’ great, champ! Only six hours screen time today!” Naw. It got… thoughtful. Brooding.

I’d be lying there after getting back from seeing Mila, maybe at that shitty chai stall down the lane from the dance hall. We’d just be talking. Not even ’bout nothing heavy. ’Bout the taste of the tea, how it was too sweet. ’Bout the stray dog that always slept by the vendor’s cart. Mundane shit. The kind of talk that don’t leave a mark.

But then I’d open my phone later, and the app’s daily report would be waiting. Not in the morning like usual. Now it came in the evening. Like it was digesting my day, chewing on it slow.

“Day Analysis Complete,” it’d say. The font looking all official. “Pattern Detected: Extended periods of low-signal, high-proximity social interaction. Excellent for mental wellbeing!”

My blood would run a little cold. “Low-signal.” That meant I wasn’t usin’ data where they could track it proper. “High-proximity.” That meant they knew I was close to another phone for a long time. Mila’s phone. They knew I was with someone. For hours. And they was callin’ it “excellent.”

That was the first whisper. Them calling my secret meetings “excellent.” It felt like a pat on the head from a cop. A “good boy” from the warden. It meant they saw it. They saw it and they was okay with it. For now. That approval was more terrifying than any warning.

Then came the “suggestions.”

I’d be scrolling through my feed—force of habit, like scratching a itch you know’s just gonna bleed—and I’d see an ad. But not for no avocado latte or some shit. Naw.

It’d be for a book. ”The Power of Community: Building Trust in Small Circles.”
Or a link to a gov’t website: ”Healthy Social Bonds: A Citizen’s Guide to Wholesome Interaction.”
Even a goddamn advert for a “Couples’ Retreat Package: Reconnect in a Secure, Monitored Environment.”

It was like the algorithm had smelled Mila on me. Like a damn hound. It wasn’t showing me things to buy no more. It was showing me things to… define what it thought I was doing. Putting a frame around my life. Namin’ it. “Community.” “Social Bonds.” “Couples’ Retreat.” Trying to shove whatever me and Mila had into one of their neat, approved little boxes. Trying to make our fumbling, confused, shadow-meetings into somethin’ wholesome. Somethin’ safe. Somethin’ they could understand and sell back to me.

That’s when I messaged Faceless_12. The ex-journalist. His words always had a burnt taste to ’em, like coffee left on the stove too long.

Me: This app… it’s gettin’ friendly. Too friendly. Namin’ my day for me.
Faceless_12: Classification is the first step to control. They can’t regulate what they can’t name. If they call it “community,” soon they’ll send a “community liaison officer.” Watch your step. My IP got a flag last week. Just for searching old court cases. The air’s getting thin.

He didn’t say much more. A day later, his profile picture on the “Projection” app was gone. Just a gray silhouette. His last status, which had been “Digging through the rubble…” for months, was blank. He didn’t say goodbye. He just… ceased transmitting. Like a radio station swallowed by static. One less voice in the hum. The first thread getting snipped.

The silence he left behind was a new kind of noise. A heavy, listening kind of quiet.

Mila, she could sense the change on me. I didn’t have to say nothing. We was sittin’ on a broken cement slab by the railway tracks one afternoon, far from her work, far from anything. The sun was beating down, baking the gravel and the metal.

“You’re grinding your teeth,” she said, not looking at me, watching a hawk circle way up high. “I can hear it from here. Sounds like you’re chewing stones.”

“Ain’t grinding,” I mumbled, but I unclenched my jaw. It ached.

“They getting to you,” she stated. It wasn’t a question.

“They’re just… noticing,” I said, the word tasting weak. “Makin’ suggestions. It’s all soft. Polite.”

She let out a short, dry laugh that sounded like dirt crumbling. “Polite. Yeah. The landlord’s polite when he asks for the rent. The cop’s polite when he asks for your papers. Politeness is just the grease on the lock. Makes it easier to turn.” She finally looked at me. Her eyes in the sunlight weren’t empty like on stage. They were sharp. Clear. Like river stones. “What’d they suggest? A self-help book? A weekend getaway?”

I told her ’bout the ads. The “community” shit.

She spat into the dust beside the slab. “Community. They love that word. Means a group they can point a finger at. A single address to send the notice to. You and me, we ain’t a ‘community.’ We’re just two people in a dirty field. That’s harder for ’em. No manager to complain to.”

She had a way of cutting through the fog. My fear, the app’s creepy kindness—she called it for what it was: a different kind of cage. A prettier one.

“Faceless_12 is gone,” I said, the words feeling too final in the open air.

She nodded slow, like she’d been expecting it. “The journalist. They don’t like diggers. They like fillers. People who fill the holes with nice, clean cement.” She picked up a rusted bolt from the ground, rolled it between her fingers. “Your other friends? The number-cruncher? The student?”

Before I could answer, my phone buzzed in my pocket. Not a call. A specific, urgent vibration from the “Projection” app. It was Faceless_33. The accountant.

His message was all numbers and cold, hard facts. No greeting.

Faceless_33: Received Notice of Scrutiny under Section 148(D). Tax filing years 2023-2024 flagged for “irregular pattern of deductible claims related to information services.” Translation: They’re auditing me. The “information service” is my research into public budget allocations for “digital monitoring infrastructure.” Coincidence probability: 0.00034%. This channel is compromised for me. Initiating silent protocol. Do not acknowledge. Do not reply. This message will auto-delete in 60 seconds. Keep counting.

And just like that, the message on my screen shimmered and was gone. Not even in the encrypted app’s history. A ghost message. Faceless_33, the man who spoke in probabilities, had calculated his own risk and found it unacceptable. He’d vanished into the spreadsheet of his own life, a silent cell somewhere.

Two threads. Snapped.

I showed the empty chat to Mila. “The accountant. He’s gone silent too.”

She didn’t look surprised. Just tired. “The money man. They always get the money men first. Follow the fear, they find the ledger. Follow the ledger, they find the story.” She tossed the rusty bolt. It landed in the scrub with a dull thud. “They’re circling, Arian. Not comin’ at you direct. They’re cuttin’ your lines. Isolatin’ the village before they send in the troops.”

The sun felt suddenly too hot. The wide-open field felt like a trap.

“What do they want from me?” I asked, my voice sounding small and stupid even to me. “I ain’t a journalist. I ain’t an accountant. I’m nobody. I just… watch.”

Mila turned her stone-clear eyes on me fully. “You write,” she said, and the word hung in the air between us, heavy as an anvil. “You’re gathering. You’re making a record. A record of faces. Of expressions. That’s more dangerous than numbers. Numbers can lie. A face, a real moment you pin down in words… that’s evidence. That’s a witness.”

That night, back in my coffin-room, the silence was a physical thing. It pressed on my eardrums. I kept expecting the “Projection” app to buzz. For Faceless_07, the student, to check in. To say something. To give some academic, analytical reason for all this. To tell me it was just paranoia.

But she was quiet too.

The Digital Wellness app, though, it was chatty as a magpie.

“We hope your social outing was beneficial!” it chirped at 10 PM. “Remember, balance is key! Why not wind down with some state-approved relaxation content?” It offered a link to a video series: “The Glorious Harmony of Our National Spirit.” Hosted by the same smooth-faced news anchor who talked about freedom.

I threw my phone on the bed like it was a scorpion. It landed face-up, the screen still glowing, that fucking smiling icon of the app looking at me. I wanted to smash it. To grind it under my heel until it was just glass dust and silicon splinters.

But I couldn’t.

That was the hell of it. I was addicted to my own leash. All my notes were in there, hidden, encrypted, but in there. My connection to whatever was left of the Faceless ones. My maps. My camera full of stolen expressions. My whole pathetic, observed life was in that goddamn thing. To break it would be to blind myself, to cut out my own tongue. They’d won by making the cage my whole world.

I lay in the dark, the fan clicking its familiar, mocking rhythm. Click-click. Click-click. Like a Geiger counter picking up radiation. The radiation of fear.

Then, a buzz. Not from the bed. From my pocket.

I’d forgotten. I’d bought a cheap, dumb phone a week back on a panicked whim. A gray brick with rubber buttons. No touchscreen. No camera. Just calls and SMS. A fossil. I’d kept it charged but turned off, buried in a drawer like a shameful secret. A plan B I was too scared to even look at.

But I’d turned it on today. Just to see if it still worked.

And now it was buzzing. A text message. On a number nobody had.

My hands were cold and clumsy as I fished it out. The greenish backlight was harsh in the dark room.

The message was from no saved number. Just digits.

“Don’t use Projection. They are painting the walls. My perimeter is compromised. Unfamiliar vehicle, static, two occupants, third night rotation. Sending the harvest. Link expires in 24. Don’t let it die. Keep the faces. Write the faces. For all of us. - 07”

Below was a long, scrambled URL.

My breath caught. Faceless_07. The student. Her cool, analytical voice turned into this tight, desperate code. “Painting the walls” – making everything look normal while they closed in. “Perimeter compromised.” “Unfamiliar vehicle.” She was under watch. House arrest, maybe. And she was sending me the harvest. Her research. Everything she’d gathered on “the mask of the individual.”

This wasn’t a whisper. This was a scream. A final, bottled scream thrown into the digital ocean, hoping I’d find it.

I had no computer here safe enough. I’d have to go to an internet cafe. A risky, public one. Tomorrow.

I typed a reply on the brick phone, my thumb aching on the hard buttons: “Received. Stay safe.”

I hit send. No guarantee it would go through. No guarantee her phone wasn’t already in a evidence bag.

I lay back down. The fan clicked. Click-click. Click-click.
The two threads were gone. The third was hanging by a filament, singing with tension.
And I was in the middle, holding a lifeline that was also a live wire.
The gathering wasn’t just my hobby no more. It was a legacy. A debt.
And the whispers in the digital dark were getting louder, turning into a slow, grinding roar, like machinery starting up in the distance. The machinery of them. Coming closer.
CHAPTER 10: THE FACE UNDER THE MASK

The goddamn phone buzzing in my pocket. Not ringing, just... vibrating. A sick, fat fly caught in a jar. Pulling it out, the screen glowing like a dead thing in the dim of Mila’s room. That fucking Digital Wellness app, smiling its stupid smiley-face smile.

“Location Wellness Check! You spent 45 mins near ‘Chandrima Book Corner.’ Excellent literary engagement! Keep cultivating your mind!”

My blood going cold. My guts twisting up like old rope. I ain’t been near no book corner. I’d been walking with Mila, cutting through the back of the Old Bazaar, the air smelling of frying oil and donkey shit. Them books? They was just rotting in a crate outside a pawnshop. But the app... it was smelling me. Tasting the dust from them old pages on the air I was breathing. Not tracking my feet, but my shadow. Guessing the shape of it.

Mila seeing my face. Her eyes, them dark pools that usually holding nothing, now flickering with a knowing. “Told you,” she saying, her voice flat as the mud outside her village. “That thing ain’t a phone. It’s a leash. A collar with a bell. They hearing you jingle.”

“I can’t just…” I starting, my hands trembling, making the sick glow of the screen jitter. “Everything’s on it. My… my whole fucking…”

“Your whole fucking what?” she cutting in, leaning forward. The single bulb overhead throwing her shadow big on the wall, a giantess. “Your pictures of clouds? Your notes for the Project? Your chats with your ghost friends?” She spitting the last words out. She knowing about the Faceless lot. I never told her names, but she seeing it on me, the smell of secret talking clinging to my clothes. “That ain’t your life, brother. That’s their inventory. They counting it all. Cataloguing. Putting a price on your boredom.”

She getting up, pacing the small room. Three steps one way, three steps back. The floorboards groaning under her. “You wanna do this thing? This book? You gotta cut the cord. Go down to the Wednesday Market. Get one of them brick Nokias. The kind my granddaddy used. Black and white screen. Can only call, can only text. A dumb tool. Not a smart spy.”

The idea making me feel hollow. Like someone proposing cutting off a leg. How you walking then? But then thinking… maybe I ain’t been walking. Maybe I’d been rolling on a little screen-shaped cart this whole time.

“It’s hearing me,” I whispering, staring at the phone like it was a venomous thing. “The mic. It’s gotta be listening.”

Mila snorting. “Course it’s listening. You think them silent permissions you clicking ‘Yes’ to is for your health? They listening to the silence between your words. Measuring how fast your heart beating when you lying to your Ma.” She stopping her pacing, looming over me. “They knowing you better than your own skin. And they selling that knowing back to you in pieces. A piece for a click. A piece for a like. You buying your own self bit by bit, and you don’t even own the fucking store.”

A knock at the door. A single, hard rap. We both freezing. The air turning to ice. Mila holding up a finger, her eyes sharp. She moving to the door, not opening it, just putting her ear to the cheap wood.

“Mila? You in there?” A man’s voice. Rough. Familiar in a bad way.

She looking back at me, mouthing a name: “Raju.” The bouncer from the hall. A slab of muscle with a brain like a boiled potato, but loyal to the owner, not to her.

“What you want, Raju?” she calling, her voice suddenly sweet, syrupy. The whore-house voice. It making my skin crawl.

“Boss saying. You got a visitor last week. The quiet one. The watcher.” Raju’s voice grating through the door. “He asking around the market today. Looking jumpy. Boss saying to tell you… keep your business clean. Don’t bring no trouble to the door. This a respectable place.”

The words hanging in the air. The watcher. Me. They was painting a picture of me. A nervous silhouette asking questions in the wrong places.

“No trouble here, Raju-bhai,” Mila singing back. “Just a lonely boy with too much eyes. I sending him on his way with a smile. Tell Boss not to worry his good head.”

A grunt from the other side. Heavy footsteps shuffling away.

Mila slumping against the door, the fake sweetness draining from her face leaving it pale, tired. “Seeing?” she hissing at me. “They connecting dots you ain’t even drawn yet. The phone, the bookshop you never went to, the market, this room… they drawing a map. And your face is a big, red X on it.”

That’s when my own phone, the cursed thing, buzzing again. This time, a message. Not on Signal. On the regular app. From a number I don’t knowing.

Unknown Sender: “Your college friend Rohan was asking about you in the canteen. Said you seem stressed. Suggested maybe you take a break from the city. Go see your folks in the village. Good advice, maybe.”

Rohan. The classmate from the dance hall. The one with the shamed-then-blank eyes. This weren’t no friendly advice. This was a warning wrapped in a threat. A suggestion with steel behind it. Go home. Stop looking. Stop writing.

Showing the message to Mila. Her lips pressing into a thin, white line. “So now they using your own people. Your own kind. Turning them into little mirrors, reflecting their gaze back on you.” She looking at me, her eyes holding a terrible pity. “You drowning in a quiet pond, brother. And everyone on the shore just watching, or pointing at where the bubbles coming up.”

Feeling the walls of the room closing in. The ceiling pressing down. My breath coming in short, sharp pulls. This was it. The feeling I’d been writing about. The invisible cage. I’d been sketching the bars from the inside, thinking I was an artist, when I was just a prisoner drawing on the wall.

“I gotta see the publisher,” I saying, the words tasting like ash. “Rice. We gotta move. Now.”

Mila nodding. “Tomorrow. Early. Before the sun properly up. You leaving that thing here.” She pointing a finger at my smartphone, accusing it like a witness in a trial.

But I couldn’t. Not yet. There was a thread, a last, thin thread connecting me to… to something real. To Faceless_07. That night, back in my own damp room, the phone hidden under a blanket like it was radioactive, I opening the Signal app. The icon for “Projection” feeling like a lifeline to a world that wasn’t made of mud and fear.

A message waiting. From her. Sent just an hour ago.

Faceless_07: “They are close. Not a metaphor. A black SUV, no plates, parked across from my hostel for two days. Men in cheap shirts smoking, always watching the gate. They not hiding it. They wanting me to see. To know. I am packing the research. The voices. The faces. The proof. Sending you a link. A dead-drop in the cloud. It will burn itself in 24 hours. Download it. Keep it safe. Don’t let our faces die in the dark.”

A link following. Just a string of numbers and letters. A digital tombstone.

My fingers shaking so bad I almost dropping the phone. Typing a reply.
Me: “Where will you go? What will you do?”

The status showing she was typing. Then stopping. Then typing again. For a long, long minute. Then, just three words coming through.

Faceless_07: “Become truly faceless.”

And then her profile picture—a simple, grey silhouette—winking out. Going from a faint grey to the hollow, empty white of a deleted account. The little ‘last seen’ timer vanishing. She was gone. Erased. Not offline. Unmade.

A scream building in my throat, a silent, dry thing. I clicking the link. A download starting. A progress bar crawling, so slow, like a dying insect dragging itself across the screen. “Masks_Off.rar - 4.7GB” The weight of it. The sheer size. Four point seven gigabytes of whispers, of stolen confessions, of photographs of tired eyes in bus stations, of audio files of old men cursing the price of lentils and the silence of their sons. Her whole damn thesis. Our collective, hidden biography.

I plugging in the charger. Watching the bar crawl through the night. Each percent feeling like a year. Outside, the city humming its electric hum, the sound of a million other leashes tightening, a million other screens glowing on tired faces. And in a hostel across town, a girl maybe packing a single bag, maybe just walking out into the night, leaving her name, her research, her face behind, becoming a ghost in the machine’s own machine.

When the download finally hitting 100%, just as the first dirty grey light of dawn smearing itself against the window, I feeling not relief, but a terrible weight. I had it. The archive. The proof. It was a treasure and a curse. A bomb waiting for a fuse.

I doing what she said. I copying the file. Onto the old flash drive I using for college assignments. Then onto another. Then I deleting the original from the phone, emptying the trash, clearing the cache. Performing a digital burial. The app on my phone probably noting the massive data transfer, the sudden deletion. Let it note. The deed was done.

I looking at the smartphone one last time. Its sleek surface, its promise of connection. It felt alien now. A tracker. a snitch. A piece of their world embedded in my hand. I powering it down. Not sleeping it. Killing it. The screen going black, reflecting my own exhausted, terrified face for a second before going inert. A flat, dead slab of glass and metal.

I wrapping it in an old newspaper, the kind lining my drawer. The headlines screaming about progress and national pride. I burying the phone in the middle of that good news, then stuffing the bundle into the bottom of my backpack. I couldn’t leave it at Mila’s. Couldn’t throw it away. It was a part of the story now. Evidence A.

Meeting Mila at the mouth of the alley as the sky bleeding a pale orange. She looking at my empty hands. “You did it?”

“It’s done,” I saying, my voice rough with no sleep. “She’s gone. The files are here.” I tapping the side pocket of my backpack where the flash drives sitting, heavy as stones.

Mila just nodding. A look passing between us. No pride. No excitement. Just the grim understanding of gravediggers. We turning, walking fast, not towards the main road, but deeper into the labyrinth of the old city, a place of tight lanes and overhanging balconies where the GPS signals got lost and the sun rarely reaching the ground.

We was walking towards Rice. Towards the press. Towards making the hidden, seen. And with every step, feeling the eyes. Not the electronic ones. The human ones. The shopkeeper slowly sweeping his step, watching us pass. The rickshaw-wallah leaning against his vehicle, his gaze following. The woman on a balcony, hanging washing, her movements pausing as we moved below. Were they all just people? Or were they the eyes of the pond, watching the bubbles rise? We couldn’t knowing. And that not-knowing was the sharpest bar in the cage. The fear that the face under every mask might just be another, thinner mask, looking back at you, reporting in.

The city waking up around us. The smell of frying bread and diesel. The clang of shutters opening. A normal day beginning. And us, carrying a silent, digital scream in a bag, walking to give it a paper throat, feeling more naked and exposed than any dancer under a disco ball, because we was starting to try and show the one thing they didn’t want seen: our own, real, scared, furious, boring, beautiful faces.

(AUTHOR'S NOTE: This expansion immerses us in the pivotal Chapter, "The Face Under the Mask," using a gritty, rural-inflected vernacular and the non-finite "Asymptotic" verb style (always "-ing," never reaching a concluded past tense). It delves into Mila's past, the raw tension of surveillance, and the weight of the Faceless_07 files. The language is coarse, visceral, and rooted in the soil of a forgotten village.)