Bibhuti Bose: The One with the Missing Children (Chapter 5)

 Chapter 5: The Boy Without a Shadow

 

Part 1: Fractures

The rain had ceased by morning, but the sky still hung low like a lid over the city. Kolkata’s streets glistened with puddles and silt, and people moved with the sluggish gait of those recovering from a collective nightmare. But inside the Bose apartment, there was no such relief.

Bibhuti sat by the dining table, unmoving, staring at the empty teacup in front of him.

“They were alive,” he said at last. “Every one of them. Trapped behind clay and silence.”

Tuhin sat across from him, pale and exhausted. “But why masks, Bibhuti? Why the performances? Why the drawings? What’s he trying to do?”

Parboti, who had been standing near the window, spoke softly. “He’s trying to erase them.”

They turned to her.

“Erase who?” asked Tuhin.

“Not just the children,” she said. “The world they came from. Their pain. Their past. Their identity. He’s trying to make them into something else. Something that obeys.”

Bibhuti nodded slowly.

“Yes,” he murmured. “And one child might hold the key to everything.”

Of all the children rescued from the hidden chamber beneath the school, one stood apart.

He was perhaps nine. Thin, undernourished, but oddly poised. His mask had fallen off in Bibhuti’s arms, revealing a face blank of emotion—yet behind the eyes flickered something else.

He wouldn’t speak.

He wouldn’t eat at first.

But what disturbed Bibhuti most was that in the daylight, as the others slowly blinked and whimpered back into awareness—

this boy never cast a shadow.

Tuhin had noticed it first. “It’s the light,” he said at first, uncertain. “Has to be.”

But they checked again. Under lamps. In sunlight. Near open flames.

Nothing.

It was as if he didn’t exist on the surface of the world.

They brought the boy—temporarily named Anirban—to a child psychologist. Dr. Ira Mitra was experienced with trauma cases, and she welcomed Bibhuti’s arrival with tired eyes.

“I’ll do what I can,” she said, “but if this man has been manipulating their personalities, this will not be simple.”

Her interview with Anirban lasted nearly an hour.

When she emerged, she looked shaken.

“He doesn’t blink,” she whispered.

“What?”

“I spoke to him under several lighting conditions. Even in dim light. He kept staring. At me. Unmoving. And when I asked him his name…”

She hesitated.

“What did he say?” Bibhuti asked.

“Not a word. He drew something.”

She held up the paper.

It was a puppet. With its strings cut.

That evening, a new visitor arrived at the door—a woman named Roshni Das, frantic and tearful. She had seen the news about the children and came clutching a tattered photo.

“My son,” she sobbed. “He vanished two years ago. No one believed he’d been taken.”

She showed them the photo.

The same boy. Anirban.

But in the picture, he smiled. There was mischief in his eyes. His arm draped lovingly around a younger sister.

“My son loved stories,” Roshni said. “He used to act in school plays. But he had a stammer. The other kids made fun of him.”

She wiped her tears. “When he disappeared, he left a note. It said, ‘I’ll come back when I’m perfect.’”

The investigation led Bibhuti and Tuhin to another abandoned building—an old warehouse near Shobhabazar, long since shut down. It had once been a theater school.

Inside, they found the evidence of the Puppeteer’s deeper work.

Not just masks now.

But molds.

Dozens of them. Plaster casts of faces in agony, joy, fear. Children’s expressions, frozen in time.

And at the center of the room, a black notebook.

On the first page:

“Art is not imitation. It is correction. I take the broken and make them whole.”

And on the second page:

“One among them has already become what I dreamed.
He has no shadow because I erased his past.
He has no voice because the world did not deserve to hear it.
He is my mirror. He is my proof.”

Back at the apartment, Bibhuti placed a large mirror before Anirban.

“Do you know who that is?” he asked gently.

Anirban stared at his reflection.

Then, for the first time, he spoke.

Very softly.

“That is not me.”

 

Part 2: Echoes of the Puppeteer

The mirror stood silently between them.

Bibhuti kept his eyes on Anirban. The boy had spoken barely above a whisper, but his words had sent a chill into the room that even Parboti, listening from the next room, seemed to feel.

“That is not me.”

Tuhin shifted uneasily in his seat. “What do you think he meant?”

Bibhuti didn’t answer right away. He turned back to the boy and asked, gently, “If that’s not you, then who is it?”

Anirban looked at the glass again. This time his lips moved, but no sound came.

Then, he slowly raised one hand—and touched his own reflection.

But not to his own face.

To the eyes in the mirror.

And then he turned and pointed—not at anyone in the room—but at the window. The sky outside was darkening again.

The next morning, Bibhuti met with a former professor of sculpture and mask-making from Rabindra Bharati University—Dr. Shyamal Sarkar—who had heard about the mysterious case through whispers in the academic community.

“Clay masks… mirror theaters…” Dr. Sarkar muttered, flipping through sketches Bibhuti had shown him. “This… this is someone trained in performance psychology. Not just an artist. A manipulator.”

He paused over one drawing in particular.

A full-face white mask with thin, drawn lips and closed eyes.

“I taught someone once who had a… fixation like this,” he said slowly. “Brilliant, disturbed man. His name was Ashwatthama Guha. Not his real name, of course. He renamed himself after the mythic warrior cursed with immortality.”

Tuhin raised an eyebrow. “That’s dramatic.”

“He believed children were born blank,” said Dr. Sarkar. “That parents and teachers ruin them by forcing them into broken systems. He thought it was his duty to restore them. Rebuild them. Mold them anew.”

Bibhuti leaned forward. “Where is he now?”

Dr. Sarkar’s voice lowered. “He vanished twelve years ago after a fire at a children's home in Purulia. Several children died. It was ruled an accident.”

“But you think he survived,” said Bibhuti.

“I know he did. Because six months later, I found this on my doorstep.”

He opened a dusty folder.

Inside was a clay mask.

With Dr. Sarkar’s own face.

Eyes closed.

Mouth sealed.

Back at the apartment, Anirban had not spoken again. But he had begun to draw—feverishly. Sketch after sketch. He would not let anyone touch the papers. He arranged them on the floor in a circle.

Parboti called Bibhuti urgently.

“He’s made something,” she whispered. “It’s… strange.”

They knelt beside the boy.

The drawings formed a sequence. Like a storyboard. A performance in stages:

1.  A group of children sitting in a circle.

2.  A man standing above them, wearing a mask.

3.  A fire.

4.  A child walking out of the fire, unharmed.

5.  A building behind him crumbling.

6.  A mirror.

7.  A puppet with no strings.

And in the last drawing:

8.  A door with no handle, standing alone in a field. Beside it, the faceless man. And beside him… a child.

Anirban himself.

That night, as thunder cracked through the city again, Bibhuti received an envelope slipped under his door.

No name.

Inside: a cassette tape.

They played it.

A slow, rasping voice filled the room.

“You found him. My first. My success.
But do not mistake his silence for consent.
He is not yours.
He is part of the Final Act.
And if you do not return him…
You will see how silence can become a scream.”

Tuhin stared at the speaker in horror. “He knows where we are.”

But Bibhuti’s face remained calm. He stood and walked to the window. Rain had begun again—more violently than before.

“Let him come,” he said.

Then he turned back to Tuhin and Parboti.

“We’ve been following his clues for too long. It’s time we set a trap of our own.”

Outside, the city shivered beneath the storm. Somewhere in its shadowy veins, a faceless man moved unseen, watching.

But inside the Bose home, something had shifted.

For the first time, Anirban had begun to hum.

Just a few notes.

A lullaby, almost.

And Bibhuti recognized it—not from the present.

But from a file he had read weeks ago.

A recording taken from a ruined children’s home. Purulia. Twelve years ago.

 

Part 3: Memory Fractures

The lullaby was simple.

Four notes, repeated with a hypnotic rhythm. It drifted from Anirban’s lips like smoke—barely audible, yet haunting. Bibhuti stood still, letting the sound wrap around him.

Parboti, seated beside the child, looked up. “He’s humming it constantly. I tried to ask where he learned it. He just stared at me.”

Bibhuti nodded. “It’s not a lullaby. Not originally.”

Tuhin entered from the study, holding a file marked Purulia Fire Case (2013). He flipped it open and pointed to a typewritten paragraph:

Survivors of the Purulia Children’s Home fire incident reported hearing music before the blaze. One mentioned ‘a song like a lullaby, played through the walls, over and over again’...

Parboti’s eyes widened. “It’s a trigger.”

Bibhuti agreed. “And perhaps… a key.”

Bibhuti had no intention of waiting.

He and Tuhin returned to the abandoned studio where the Puppeteer had left his molds and tools. They spent hours planting decoys—an altered version of the sculpture Anirban had made, a mirror infused with a camera, and a cassette player that looped the same lullaby Anirban had hummed.

“We give him what he wants,” Bibhuti said. “He thinks he’s in control. But we’ll be watching.”

Tuhin frowned. “What if he doesn’t come?”

“He will,” Bibhuti said. “Because he doesn’t just take. He performs. He needs an audience.”

That evening, as Parboti sat with Anirban, the boy grew restless. His hands moved in the air as if tracing invisible strings.

Then, without warning, he stood, walked to the wall, and began to tap it rhythmically.

Tap-tap. Pause. Tap.

Bibhuti watched silently. He took out a notepad and copied the pattern.

“Do you recognize it?” Parboti asked softly.

“It’s Morse code,” Bibhuti whispered.

He translated.

D–O–O–R.
W–H–E–R–E.
K–E–Y.

Then Anirban collapsed to the floor, eyes wide, whispering something over and over.

“He said I was broken… he said I had to be rewritten…”

The trap was laid.

Bibhuti and Tuhin waited in a darkened hallway adjoining the studio. A small red light on their camera flickered—on standby. The lullaby looped, slow and eerie.

Hours passed.

Then—movement.

A shadow entered the room.

He wore no mask now. He didn’t need one.

His face was lean, angular. His eyes, sunken but burning. His coat was stained with clay and ash. He moved not like a man in a hurry, but like a conductor preparing a silent orchestra.

Ashwatthama Guha.

He approached the sculpture in the center of the room—the clay child seated on a pedestal.

Then he reached out and caressed it gently.

“You are my truth,” he whispered. “They will try to take you from me. But I will write you again. And again.”

Then he turned to the mirror.

And stared.

As if sensing something behind it.

Tuhin’s finger hovered over the camera switch.

But before he could press it—

Ashwatthama spoke directly to the mirror.

“Hello, Bibhuti.”

The lights cut out. Instantly.

They rushed into the room. But he was gone. Only the sculpture remained.

And something else:

A note taped to the underside of the pedestal.

Written in red ink.

“The boy remembers more than he admits.
You took him, but he is still mine.
Come to where it all began.
The House of the First Curtain.”

Back at home, Anirban was shaking. His hum had changed tempo—now chaotic, unsteady.

Parboti held his hand gently. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

But he looked up with wide, frightened eyes.

“No… He’s inside me,” the boy said.

Then he ran to the wall, picked up a crayon, and began scribbling furiously.

A house- Long corridor. Red curtains.

A mask on a hook. And in the middle—an eye. Large. Watching.

Bibhuti stared at it for a long time.

“The House of the First Curtain,” he said slowly. “It’s not just a location.”

“It’s where the story began.”

Anirban, the boy without a shadow, was beginning to fracture.

But it was in those fractures that memories lived.

And somewhere in the city, the Puppeteer waited—ready to begin the final act of his twisted play.

Bibhuti looked out over the city.

“We’re almost there,” he said.

“Almost inside his mind.”