The voices began in the sixth month of his second year of incarceration, when the winter had settled over Mandara and the prison walls had grown cold enough that the inmates slept in their clothes and woke with their breath forming clouds in the grey dawn light. At first, Alexei Volkov thought they were dreams. He had always dreamed vividly, his subconscious populated by the figures of his past: his mother singing in the servants' quarters, the cook wrapping him in sari cloth, the faces of the men who had killed her, though those faces were always blurred, as though his memory had refused to preserve them.
But the voices were different. They came not in sleep but in the quiet hours of the afternoon, when he was alone in his cell with the books he had already read and the thoughts he had already thought. They spoke in overlapping murmurs, like a conversation heard through a wall, and although he could not always distinguish the words, he knew who was speaking.
His mother. Kavita. Her voice was the clearest, rising above the others like a single bell in a carillon. She spoke in the dialect of her village, the one she had used when she sang the harvest songs, and she asked him questions that he could not answer. _Have you lived, my son? Have you lived as I wanted you to live?_
But there were other voices too. His father, Abhay Varman, asking for a forgiveness that Alexei could not give. His grandfather and great-uncles, the men who had held his mother down on the riverbank, their voices harsh and accusatory, demanding to know why he had destroyed the family they had built. And other voices, voices he did not recognise, men and women who had been connected to the Varman family over the centuries, the accumulated chorus of a dynasty that had been built on limestone and political patronage and the blood of a low-caste girl.
The prison doctor, a harried man named Dr. Srinivasan who had served in the Central Correctional Facility for fifteen years, diagnosed auditory hallucinations brought on by stress and isolation. He prescribed medication that Alexei did not take, and he recommended that the prisoner be transferred to a cell with a window that received more sunlight. The transfer was arranged, and the sunlight helped, but the voices did not stop.
"They are not hallucinations," Alexei told Rishi, during one of his brother's monthly visits. "Or if they are, they are hallucinations that are telling me the truth. My mother is asking me if I have lived. My father is asking for forgiveness. The others are asking for things I cannot give them."
Rishi, who had brought a stack of legal documents related to the trust and a thermos of chai that the guards had allowed him to carry in, studied his client and half-brother with the same careful attention he had once devoted to the police files from 1985.
"What do you say to them?"
"I do not say anything. I listen. I have spent my entire life trying to drown them out, first with ambition and then with revenge. Perhaps it is time to hear what they have to say."
"And what do they say?"
Alexei was silent for a long moment, his hands wrapped around the cup of chai that Rishi had poured for him. The steam rose into the cold air of the visitors' room, and the guards at their posts shifted their weight from one foot to the other.
"They say that the chasm cannot be filled," he said finally. "They say that I have been trying to fill it with the wrong things. My mother says she wanted me to live, but she did not tell me how. My father says he is sorry, but his apology cannot undo what was done. And the others, the ones who killed her, they say nothing. They simply stare at me with their blurred faces, and I understand that they will never be held accountable, because they are already dead."
"What do you want to say to them?"
"I want to tell my mother that I am trying. I am trying to live the way she wanted me to live, but I do not know how, and I am afraid that I will never learn. I want to tell my father that I cannot forgive him, not yet, but that I understand him better than I once did. And I want to tell the others, the murderers, that they are beyond my reach and always have been, and that my revenge was an attempt to punish people who were already beyond punishment."
Rishi sat with this for a moment, and then he said, very quietly, "That sounds like the beginning of wisdom."
"It feels like the beginning of madness."
"Perhaps they are the same thing." Rishi poured himself another cup of chai, and his face, in the harsh fluorescent light of the visitors' room, looked older than his twenty-four years. "I have been reading about the classical Kharaveli concept of darshan. It is usually translated as a vision, but the literal meaning is closer to a seeing. Not just seeing with the eyes, but seeing with the whole self. The epics are full of characters who receive darshan at moments of crisis, when the veil between the living and the dead becomes thin. They see things that are not there, and in seeing them, they understand things that were hidden before."
"You are telling me that my hallucinations are a religious experience."
"I am telling you that what you are experiencing has a name, and that name is very old. Whether that makes it a hallucination or a vision is a question for philosophers, not for me. But I will say this: if my mother were speaking to me from the dead, I would listen."
The visiting hour ended, and Rishi departed, leaving Alexei alone with the voices and the chai and the winter light that fell through the barred window of the visitors' room. He returned to his cell and lay on his bunk, and the voices continued their murmuring, and for the first time, he did not try to silence them.
The winter passed, and the spring arrived, and the voices remained. Alexei learned to live with them the way a man learns to live with a chronic pain, acknowledging their presence without allowing them to dominate his consciousness. He continued his reading, continued his exercises, continued his conversations with the prison chaplain, a Catholic priest named Father Thomas who had served in the facility for twenty years and who had heard confessions far stranger than anything Alexei had to tell him.
"The dead do not usually speak to us," Father Thomas said, during one of their sessions. "But that does not mean we cannot learn from them. Your mother is asking if you have lived. That is a question worth asking, regardless of whether it comes from her spirit or from your own conscience. How would you answer it?"
"I do not know," Alexei said. "I have spent my life surviving. First the exile, then the planning, then the revenge. I am not sure I know the difference between surviving and living."
"Surviving is what you do when you are afraid. Living is what you do when you are free."
"Then I have never been free."
"Perhaps that is what the voices are trying to tell you. Perhaps your mother is asking you to become free, and the first step toward freedom is listening to what the dead have to say."
The conversation stayed with Alexei through the spring and into the summer, when the heat returned to Mandara and the prison walls became ovens that baked the inmates through the long afternoons. He thought about freedom, and he thought about living, and he thought about his mother, whose voice had become a constant companion, as familiar as his own heartbeat.
And then, on a morning in late July, when the monsoon had just begun to gather its strength for the coming deluge, a guard came to his cell and informed him that he had a visitor. The visitor was not Rishi, and not Meera, and not Ishaan Ghosh. The visitor was someone Alexei had never expected to see again.
Varun Varman had come to the prison.
He was thinner than Alexei remembered, his face hollowed by months of drinking and isolation, his clothes rumpled and stained, his eyes carrying the wild, unfocused quality of a man who had been running from something and had finally run out of places to hide. He sat in the visitors' room with his hands clasped on the table before him, and when Alexei entered, he did not stand.
"I did not expect to see you here," Alexei said, taking the chair across from him.
"I did not expect to come." Varun's voice was hoarse, as though he had been shouting or weeping or both. "But I have been hearing things. Voices. The voice of my father, mostly. He keeps asking me why I abandoned the family. Why I ran away. Why I let you destroy everything and did nothing to stop it."
"The voices," Alexei said, and something cold settled in his chest. "You hear them too."
"You hear them?"
"Every day. For months now. The dead are speaking to us, Varun. Your father. My mother. The men who killed her. All of them."
Varun stared at him, and for a moment, the wildness in his eyes subsided, replaced by something that looked almost like relief. "I thought I was going mad. I have been in the hunting lodge for nearly two years, drinking myself into oblivion, and the voices still come. I thought I was the only one."
"You are not the only one. But I do not know why they are speaking to us, or what they want."
"I know what they want," Varun said, and his voice dropped to a whisper. "They want blood. More blood. They want us to finish what was started thirty years ago. They want one of us to kill the other."
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the voices, which had been murmuring at the edge of Alexei's consciousness since he entered the room, seemed to pause, as though they too were listening.
"That is madness," Alexei said.
"Is it? Think about it. Our father loved your mother, and his family killed her for it. You came back to destroy the family that killed her. I was the heir to that family, the one who was supposed to protect it. We are the final actors in a drama that began before either of us was born. The dead want a conclusion. They want one of us to die so the other can live."
"And if I refuse? If I tell you that I am done with revenge, that I have spent the past two years trying to learn how to live instead of how to destroy?"
"Then perhaps the voices will never stop. Perhaps they will follow us for the rest of our lives, reminding us of the debt that was never paid."
Alexei looked at his half-brother, this man who had once been the golden boy of the Varman family, the heir apparent to a dynasty that was now ash. He saw the brokenness in him, the desperation, the terrible certainty of a man who had been driven to the edge of reason by forces he could not understand.
"The chasm," Alexei said. "The void that opened in my chest when my mother died. I thought I could fill it with revenge. I was wrong. I thought I could fill it with justice. That helped, but the void remained. Now I am beginning to understand that the void cannot be filled by anything external. It can only be accepted. Carried. Lived with."
"And the voices?"
"I do not know. Perhaps they will stop when we stop listening to them. Perhaps they will continue until we die. But I will not kill you, Varun. And I will not let you kill me. The cycle of blood ends here."
Varun stared at him for a long moment, and then, very slowly, he began to weep. It was not the weeping of a man who was sad, or frightened, or relieved. It was the weeping of a man who had been holding something inside himself for so long that he had forgotten it was there, and now that it was finally being released, he did not know what to do with the space it left behind.
"I came here to kill you," Varun said, when he could speak again. "I had a knife. The guards took it at the entrance. I was going to stab you in the visitors' room and then turn the knife on myself. I thought it was the only way. The only way to end the voices. The only way to restore the family's honour."
"There is no honour in killing. Our family's history is written in blood, and adding more blood will not erase what was already spilled."
"Then what do we do?"
"We live. We carry the chasm. We listen to the voices, if we must, and we try to understand what they are telling us. And we do not kill each other. That is the only victory the dead can give us. The victory of choosing life over death."
The visiting hour ended. Varun stood, and his legs were unsteady, but his eyes, when they met Alexei's, were clearer than they had been when he arrived. The guards escorted him from the room, and Alexei watched him go, and then he returned to his cell and lay on his bunk and listened to the voices as they resumed their murmuring.
His mother was singing. The harvest songs of her village, the ones she had sung when she thought no one was listening. The melody was faint, barely audible beneath the overlapping murmur of the other voices, but it was there, and for the first time, Alexei thought he understood what she was trying to tell him.
Not to fill the chasm. Not to silence the voices. But to live. To live with the chasm and the voices and the weight of everything that had happened. To accept the presence of the dead without being ruled by them. To choose, every day, the difficult, unglamorous work of being alive.
He closed his eyes and listened to his mother sing, and the chasm in his chest, which had been his constant companion for three decades, felt, for just a moment, like something that could be carried.
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