"You came," he said, not looking up.
When Nandana woke up the next morning, she was in her own bed, her feet still dusty from the temple floor. The bell never rang at midnight again. But something had changed inside her.
"Who are you?" Nandana whispered.
One evening, a strange thing happened. The town’s ancient temple bell began ringing by itself at midnight. No wind, no rope-puller, no bird. Just the deep, resonant dong rolling across the sleeping streets. People woke up terrified. The priests muttered about bad omens. The next night, it happened again. And again.
She lived in a small coastal town in Kerala, where the backwaters turned the color of old silver under the monsoon sky. Her father ran a tiny shop selling bronze lamps, and her mother painted murals on temple walls. Nandana inherited her mother’s quiet hands and her father’s habit of laughing at absolutely nothing.
On the fourth night, Nandana crept out of bed. She didn’t feel fear—only a strange pull, like a thread tied to her navel. She walked barefoot to the temple. The rain had stopped. The air smelled of jasmine and wet stone.
Nandana Krishna Soumya was named by her grandmother, who had insisted on all three names. "Nandana" means daughter, the one who brings joy. "Krishna" was for the dark, playful god. "Soumya" meant gentle, soft, and luminous. It was a heavy cargo of meaning for a single child, but Nandana grew into each name like a tree growing into the hollows of a rock.
He stood up, brushed the butter off on his yellow silk, and placed a finger on her forehead. Suddenly she saw it—a vision of herself years later, not as a famous artist or a scholar, but as a woman sitting beside a hospital bed, holding a stranger’s hand until dawn. Then as a grandmother, planting a jackfruit tree where a broken wall once stood. Then as an old woman, laughing alone in the rain.