the Prologue:

There is something about graveyards that nobody tells you.

People say they are quiet. Peaceful, even. My grandmother used to say that graveyards are the only honest places left in the world, because everyone lying inside them has already stopped pretending. I didn't understand that when I was seven. I do now.

But the thing nobody tells you (the thing I found out myself on a Tuesday evening in October) is that graveyards smell like wet mud and old flowers, and somehow that combination does not smell like death at all. It smells like something waiting. Like soil that has been holding its breath for a very long time and has simply gotten used to it.

I am Guddi Lepcha.

I am sixteen years old, and I said something at a graveyard once. Not a prayer. Not exactly a curse either. I'm not sure what the right word for it is. In my language we sometimes say bhannu… just to say. To speak into the air with your whole chest and let the words land wherever they want. That is the closest thing I can offer.

I said something, and then things happened.

I want to be clear that I am not telling this story because I feel guilty. I have thought about that a lot… whether guilt is the thing sitting heavy in my stomach whenever I think about Room 9-B, whenever I think about the smell of chalk dust and the way the afternoon light used to fall through the broken third window on the east wall. The one nobody ever fixed. I don't think it's guilt. I think it is something more complicated than guilt and also much simpler. I think it is just the fact that I was there. I existed in that classroom. I was part of whatever that room was, and whatever that room became.

And I am still here.

That part still surprises me, honestly.

The school is called Tashi Memorial Higher Secondary School, which is a grand name for a building that has damp walls in monsoon and a leaking roof over the science lab storeroom. It sits about halfway up a hill in a small town that I will not name, because naming it feels like pulling it too close to all of this. The town is quiet and ordinary and the mountains are beautiful there in the morning when the clouds are still low and the light is gold. I used to love that about the place before I started hating everything about it. And then I started loving it again, later, but that part comes much after.

The school has maybe three hundred students, give or take. In class 9-B specifically there were thirty-one of us. I knew the number because I used to count. Not in a strange way, just… when you sit at the back corner near the window and you have nothing else to pay attention to, you count things. Ceiling tiles. Chalk marks on the board. Students.

Thirty-one. Present on most days.

Five of them are dead now.

I have tried to write this down before. Two attempts, both abandoned. The first time I got as far as the graveyard night and then I stopped because my hands were shaking and I couldn't tell if they were shaking from fear or from something else entirely. The second time I started from the very beginning, from primary school, from the first time Priya Gurung called me something I won't repeat here, and I wrote eleven pages in one night and then burned them in the kitchen because reading them back made me feel like I was being buried alive under my own memory.

This is the third attempt;

I am trying to be fair. That is the one thing I promised myself before I started writing this. Not honest… I think honesty is too large a word and too slippery a goal. But fair. To the people who are gone. To the people who are still here. To myself. Even when being fair to myself is the hardest part, which it usually is.

Some of what I am going to tell you I witnessed directly. Some of it I pieced together later, from what other people told me, from what the police told certain people, from what I overheard, from what I found. Some of it I have guessed at, and where I have guessed I will try to say so. I am not a reliable narrator in the classical sense. I don't think anyone who has lived through something is. You can only ever tell the shape of a thing from where you were standing.

I was standing in the back corner.

Let me tell you a small thing about October nights in the hills.

They come fast. One moment the sky is that particular shade of grey-blue that happens just before dark, the mountains still faintly visible, the town below still making its evening noises… a pressure cooker somewhere, a dog, somebody's television, a child being called in for dinner. And then it is just black. Not gradually. Just black, with stars if the clouds have moved on, and the cold that comes down from the higher peaks, the kind of cold that has no mercy and no opinion, it simply is what it is.

I had walked to the graveyard alone.

This is the part where people usually ask: Why? And I understand the question. Sixteen-year-old girl, Tuesday evening, graveyard outside of town, alone. It sounds like the opening of a story that ends badly. In some ways it is.

But the honest answer is that I went there because it was the one place I was certain I would not run into anyone from school. The graveyard sat on the far edge of town where the road curved and narrowed and most people didn't go without a reason. I had a reason, but not the kind that involves anyone else's grief. My reason was just… space. The particular kind of space you need when you have been holding everything inside your ribcage for so long that your bones have started to ache from it.

I sat on the low stone wall near the older section, where the graves had no photographs, just names and years barely legible through the moss. I sat there for a while without thinking anything specific. Just the cold and the dark and the smell of the wet mud. Old flowers from someone's recent visit, slightly rotting now, the way flowers always go when nobody comes back for them.

And then, because I had been carrying it for a long time, I said it.

I am not going to write exactly what I said. Not because I'm protecting anyone. Only because I think the exact words matter less than the feeling behind them, and the feeling; I can describe that. It felt like breaking open. Like something that had been pressed hard against the back of my throat for months had finally pushed its way out. It was not calm. It was not measured or poetic. It was the way you cry when you've been trying not to cry for so long that when it finally comes out it doesn't even feel like crying anymore, it feels like something being expelled.

I wished for something.

Something bad.

Something I believed, at that exact moment with my whole exhausted self, that those people deserved.

And then the cold came down harder from the peaks, and the dog somewhere in town started barking again, and I got up, dusted the moss from the back of my uniform skirt, and walked home.

That was October.

The deaths began in December.

I want to say one last thing before the actual story starts.

I know how this sounds. I know the shape of the narrative I am setting up, and I know what you are probably already assuming about me and my role in everything that followed. I would assume the same thing. It is the most logical thing to assume.

But logic, I have learned, is a very small room. And what happened in Tashi Memorial Higher Secondary School between December and February was not a small thing. It was not a simple thing. It was not the thing anyone (including me, including the police, including the people who thought they understood) believed it was for a very long time.

When the answer finally came, it felt less like a revelation and more like the ground shifting under your feet. The kind where you don't fall. You just suddenly understand that the ground was never what you thought it was.

I am Guddi Lepcha.

I was sixteen, and I sat in the back corner near the broken window, and I said something at a graveyard in October.

And I am still trying to figure out what I am.

[Chapter One — Tashi Memorial]