The Six Missing Days

The file arrived at 1:11 a.m., when the city had finally decided to stop pretending it was awake.

Meera Iyer stared at her laptop screen in the blue-dark of her apartment, the ceiling fan clicking like a tired metronome above her. Outside, Mumbai’s winter humidity clung to glass and metal, softening the skyline until it looked like a charcoal sketch someone had smudged with a thumb. She should have been asleep. She should have been anything other than the kind of person who kept her phone on sound at night.

But the notification had come with a sound she didn’t recognize.

Not a ping. Not a chime. A single, low note, like a doorbell in a house you no longer lived in.

NIFTY.xlsx Sender: unknown No message body.

Meera clicked.

Excel opened with the quiet confidence of a tool that has ruined more lives than most weapons. One sheet. One word for a tab name: NIFTY. The grid filled her screen—rows of dates like “01-Jan,” “02-Jan,” “03-Jan”—and columns labeled by years, ten of them, a decade lined up like suspects: 2016 through 2025.

The numbers weren’t prices. They were too small for that, too neatly human.

Percentages.

They were year-to-date returns, the Nifty’s cumulative performance etched day by day, as if someone had been carving a timeline into stone, ignoring the weather and the blood and the reasons people said markets moved.

At first glance the sheet looked simple, almost innocent. At second glance it felt like a confession.

Meera leaned closer, her eyes adjusting to the patterns. She’d spent years reading markets the way other people read faces. She could spot panic in a chart the way her mother spotted lies in a tone of voice. But this wasn’t a chart. It was a calendar with its mouth shut.

She scrolled.

January. February. March. The numbers rose and fell, sometimes in gentle slopes, sometimes in jumps. And then she noticed it:

Six dates were missing.

Not blank. Not N/A. Not greyed out.

Gone. Removed from the list entirely. Like someone had cut them out with scissors.

26-Jan.14-Apr.01-May.15-Aug.02-Oct.25-Dec.

The six days the market never speaks.

Republic Day, Ambedkar Jayanti, Labour Day, Independence Day, Gandhi Jayanti, Christmas.

Holidays so fixed they felt like laws of physics. Days the exchange closed like a mouth refusing to testify. Six clean absences that sliced the year into segments, punctuation marks in a long sentence of greed.

Meera sat back, a slow chill moving from her spine to her fingertips.

This wasn’t random. Someone had built this sheet with intention. And someone had sent it to her at 1:11 a.m. with no name.

She reached for her phone, thumb hovering over the call log without thinking, and then stopped. There was only one person who would send her something like this, without explanation, in the middle of the night.

Only one person who understood that data could be a map, and maps were how you escaped.

Raghav.

She hadn’t heard from him in months, not since he’d left the firm—left everything, really—with a smile that didn’t touch his eyes and a resignation email that sounded like a suicide note written in corporate Hindi.

“I’m done working inside the machine,” he’d told her at the chai stall below their office tower. “You don’t realize how loud it is until you step out. You don’t realize how much it’s watching you.”

He’d stirred his tea with the plastic spoon until the foam collapsed. “If something ever happens,” he’d added, too casually, “I’ll send you a calendar.”

Meera had laughed then, because Raghav always spoke like he was narrating a thriller. But she hadn’t forgotten.

Now, in her apartment, the city asleep and the file open like a wound, she didn’t laugh.

She dialed.

The call failed. No ring. No voicemail. Just a flat message: The number you are trying to reach is switched off.

Meera tried again. Same.

She breathed out slowly, and her eyes returned to the sheet like they were being pulled by a magnet.

If Raghav had sent this… it meant he couldn’t say anything else.

It meant he needed her to read it.

She did what she always did when she was afraid: she started calculating.

The values were cumulative. Which meant the real story—the day-to-day—was hidden in the differences. The market’s daily returns were the footprints between the cumulative stones.

Meera opened a new tab and began subtracting: today’s number minus the last trading day’s number. The machine’s heartbeat.

As she computed, certain days hit like a slap.

23-Mar-2020: -9.32A single day that looked like a cliff edge.

She didn’t need to remember the headlines. Her body remembered them. The lockdown panic, the empty trains, the way people had started hoarding sanitizer like it was currency. The day the market didn’t just fall—it confessed to being mortal.

Then:

07-Apr-2020: +5.81A resurrection day. Too bright, too sudden, like a smile on a corpse.

And then, a different year:

20-Sep-2019: +5.22The day of the tax cut announcement that sent the market sprinting like it had been freed from a chain.

And:

04-Jun-2024: -6.34Meera’s stomach tightened. She remembered that day vividly: the election results whipsaw, the kind of candle that ruined careers. June 3rd had been euphoric. June 4th had been a knife. June 5th had been a stunned stagger to the side.

The sheet wasn’t just recording the market’s moods. It was recording shocks.

Events.

Moments when everyone in the country looked at the same number and felt the same thing: fear, relief, greed, disbelief.

Meera looked at the columns again, ten years tall and silent.

At the bottom, the year-end numbers sat like verdicts:

2016: +2.802017: +28.652018: +4.092019: +11.532020: +14.772021: +23.792022: +4.332023: +20.032024: +8.752025: +10.05

A decade of endings. Some triumphant, some limping, none truly innocent.

Meera’s gaze drifted up and down 2020’s column. The year’s lowest point was pinned to 23-Mar: -37.53. A crater. And by late December it had climbed all the way back to green, finishing positive, like a miracle that didn’t feel holy.

Raghav had once said: “A market that survives a crater learns tricks that can be used again.”

A memory surfaced—Raghav in the office pantry, leaning against the coffee machine, telling her about patterns.

“Do you know what’s creepier than a crash?” he’d asked.

Meera had shrugged. “A crash with no volume?”

Raghav had smiled without humor. “A crash that happens on schedule.”

Now, in her apartment, she found herself whispering into the air: “On schedule.”

She did something she rarely allowed herself in daylight: she looked for superstition in the data.

Not astrology. Not numerology. Just the cold superstition of repetition—the kind that happens when randomness starts to rhyme.

She filtered for dates that were consistently red across years. Dates that seemed to bleed more often than they should. And there it was, absurd and sharp:

28-Feb—down, again and again. Not once did it register as an “up day” in the years where data existed.

A cursed date.

Meera frowned. “That’s impossible,” she said to herself, and then immediately hated that she’d said it aloud. Markets didn’t do impossible. They did improbable. They did patterns so subtle they felt like ghosts.

Why would 28-Feb be so consistently negative?

She traced backwards. Late February was a corridor where budgets, global cues, institutional rebalancing—all sorts of reasons could stack. But “always” was still suspicious.

And suspicion was the entire point of a mystery.

She leaned forward until the screen reflected in her eyes.

Raghav hadn’t just sent data. He’d sent a riddle.

The room around her felt smaller. She turned the lights on, then regretted it because the brightness made her feel too visible. She closed the curtains even though no one could see her from the neighboring building unless they were trying.

Trying.

Her phone vibrated. A message, no name—just a number.

Are you awake?

Meera’s fingers hovered.

Who is this?

A pause. Then:

Stop looking at prices. Look at absences.The six days. Use them.If you want Raghav alive, don’t call anyone.

Meera’s throat went dry.

Her eyes darted to the six missing dates again, those clean cuts in the calendar.

Absences.

Use them.

She typed with shaking hands.

Where is he?

The response came instantly, as if the sender had been waiting for her to ask the right question.

He left you the map.Read it like he would.They think you won’t.

Then the chat went silent. No typing bubble. No “seen.” Just the cold glow of the screen.

Meera sat perfectly still, the way prey does when it senses a predator’s shadow.

She could call Kabir Rao.

Inspector Kabir Rao was not officially her friend. He was the kind of man whose face had learned not to show surprise. They’d met two years ago when Meera’s firm had been involved in a market manipulation case that threatened to become political. Kabir had asked questions like he was carving them into granite. Meera had answered, because she’d had to, because she’d been angry, because she’d wanted someone to take the machine seriously.

Kabir would help. Kabir would also bring noise.

And the message had been clear: don’t call anyone.

Meera looked back at the sheet, at the decade of numbers sitting quietly like a witness that didn’t know it was in court.

She began again—this time not calculating returns, but treating the calendar like a cipher.

If the six missing days were important, they might be separators. Boundaries. Marks between words.

She imagined the year as a sentence, split by those absences: January to Republic Day (but 26-Jan wasn’t there), Republic Day to Ambedkar Jayanti, and so on. Six breaks. Seven segments.

Seven segments could hold seven letters. Or seven words. Or seven instructions.

She needed a signal. Something binary. Up or down. Positive or negative.

She selected a single year—2024, because it was recent and sharp—and marked each segment by the overall direction of the market within it. But that was too coarse; too many days, too much noise.

So she did what Raghav would do: she picked the loudest days.

The days that screamed in the data.

She wrote them on a piece of paper:

• 20-Sep-2019: +5.22

• 12-Mar-2020: -7.13

• 23-Mar-2020: -9.32

• 07-Apr-2020: +5.81

• 01-Feb-2021: +4.61

• 04-Jun-2024: -6.34

• 12-May-2025: +3.86

A set of spikes across years like flares.

Then she noticed something else: each of those dates, when placed on the calendar, sat in a different segment relative to the six missing days.

As if someone had intentionally chosen one signal per segment.

Meera’s pulse quickened.

She didn’t need all years. She needed the pattern.

She took the average behavior across years—up rates, down rates—looking for dates that behaved reliably. The cursed 28-Feb. The oddly lucky 30-Aug. The consistent lift around late December for some years, the way 27-Dec kept tending positive.

Reliability was the language of codes.

Raghav’s voice returned in her head, crisp and amused:

“If you’re going to hide a message in chaos, you pick the parts of chaos that repeat.”

Meera chose seven dates—one per segment—based on reliability:

Segment 1 (Jan before 26-Jan): 05-JanSegment 2 (after 26-Jan before 14-Apr): 28-FebSegment 3 (after 14-Apr before 01-May): 26-AprSegment 4 (after 01-May before 15-Aug): 17-MaySegment 5 (after 15-Aug before 02-Oct): 30-AugSegment 6 (after 02-Oct before 25-Dec): 22-NovSegment 7 (after 25-Dec): 27-Dec

She checked the sign for each date in the most recent completed year with data—2025 for most of them, where available. Some were missing due to weekends. She filled gaps with the nearest available year. It wasn’t perfect, but codes rarely were. They were just precise enough to be understood by the right person.

She mapped up = 1, down = 0.

And she got:

05-Jan: (data unclear in 2025, but often up) → 128-Feb: down → 026-Apr: likely up → 117-May: likely up → 130-Aug: up → 122-Nov: up → 127-Dec: up → 1

1011111

Meera stared.

Binary.

She converted: 1011111 is 95 in decimal. ASCII 95 is an underscore.

An underscore?

She almost laughed, the sound stuck in her throat. Raghav, you idiot, she thought. Of course he’d use something like that. He’d always liked leaving half of the joke in someone else’s hands.

An underscore wasn’t a letter. It was a separator. A blank. A gap.

Absence.

Use them.

Meera’s fingers moved fast now, adrenaline smoothing her fear into focus. If the first seven-bit chunk was an underscore, it meant the message might begin with a break. Or it meant she’d chosen the wrong dates. Or it meant he wanted her to look deeper.

She switched from using “up/down on those dates” to using the magnitude of the daily return as the signal. Above a threshold could mean 1, below could mean 0.

Raghav had always liked thresholds. He’d said: “Small moves are gossip. Big moves are testimony.”

She took the seven segments again and, within each segment, picked the single most extreme daily move across the decade. One per segment. It took her minutes, scanning the computed daily returns, but certain days leapt out like fingerprints:

Segment 1 (early Jan): a sharp drop in some years, but she chose a standout—25-Feb-2016 had been the year’s deepest hole at -12.46 YTD, which meant the preceding days were brutal.Segment 2 (late Feb): 28-Feb itself, consistently down.Segment 3 (March crash): 23-Mar-2020: -9.32Segment 4 (April rebound): 07-Apr-2020: +5.81Segment 5 (May volatility): 12-May-2025: +3.86Segment 6 (June election shock sits after May, but still within this stretch): 04-Jun-2024: -6.34Segment 7 (September surge): 20-Sep-2019: +5.22 (though September is before 02-Oct, it fit the rhythm of the segments she was thinking in—she adjusted, re-sliced, re-stitched, until the segmentation stopped feeling like a calendar and started feeling like a sentence.)

The code didn’t settle. It kept slipping.

And then Meera realized the truth that made her breath catch:

The six missing days weren’t separators.

They were keys.

Because they never moved.

They were the only dates that didn’t carry data, the only dates that were constant across years.

A cipher needs constants.

Meera opened a blank sheet and wrote the six missing dates down as numbers:

26, 14, 1, 15, 2, 25.

She stared at them until her eyes watered.

26-14-1-15-2-25.

A sequence.

It looked like nothing.

Until she remembered something Raghav once told her after too much coffee.

“When you’re hiding, you don’t leave an address. You leave a way to derive it.”

She tried the simplest thing: interpret them as row indices, pull the values from a specific year, and treat those values as letters.

26th row in January would be around 27-Jan (since 26-Jan is missing). 14th in April is missing too, shifting. 1st in May is missing. The missing dates created offsets.

Offsets.

She felt the shape of it like a lock turning.

The file was not just a record; it was a maze with walls cut in specific places. You couldn’t walk it like a normal calendar. You had to account for the missing stones.

Meera chose 2020 as the key year, because it had the loudest extremes, the kind that would make a cipher unmistakable.

She located the row positions where each missing date would have been, and took the nearest trading day’s daily return as the key value.

Around 26-Jan: the market near that date, in 2020, had been quietly positive.Around 14-Apr: chaos; post-crash rebound territory.Around 01-May: another rebound.Around 15-Aug: mild.Around 02-Oct: early October in 2020 was a grind upward.Around 25-Dec: end-of-year drift.

Six key values.

She wrote them down and noticed something: their signs formed a pattern that, when applied as XOR to her earlier binary attempts, could turn nonsense into letters.

She wasn’t sure. She was guessing. But she was also certain that the “map” Raghav left would not require external knowledge. It would require only what was in the sheet—and the mind that knew how to treat markets like language.

So she stopped trying to decode in pure math and did what detectives did when math got slippery:

She looked for motive.

Why would someone want Raghav alive? Or want Meera quiet?

Raghav had left the firm because he’d found something. Something inside the machine.

Meera remembered the last real conversation they’d had, months ago. It had been on a rainy evening, the kind that turned Marine Drive into a necklace of blurred headlights. Raghav had called her from a number she didn’t recognize.

“Do you know why the market scares people?” he’d asked without greeting.

“It takes their money,” Meera had said.

“No,” Raghav had replied. “Because it takes their stories. It tells them a story about themselves—greedy, stupid, hopeful—and then it proves it with a number.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A ledger,” Raghav had said. “A decade-long ledger. Ten columns. Same dates. And six missing days.”

Meera’s stomach had tightened then, the same way it tightened now. “Why do you keep saying that?”

“Because it’s how they communicate,” Raghav had whispered. “They don’t send emails. They don’t call. They don’t meet in cafes like idiots. They place risk on dates. They move the market in ways that look like news. They hide in the calendar.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

Raghav had exhaled. “The people you don’t see when you watch the ticker. The ones who don’t care about direction. Only timing. Only certainty.”

The call had ended after that, cut off as if someone had yanked a wire.

Meera had told herself it was paranoia. It was always easier to call something paranoia than to accept it might be a warning.

Now, staring at NIFTY.xlsx, she felt the warning like a hand on her shoulder.

She stood up, walked to her small kitchen, poured herself water, didn’t drink it. Her reflection in the dark window looked like a stranger wearing her face.

She needed help. Not official help. Not loud help.

She needed someone who knew markets the way streets knew footsteps.

There was one person.

Bhairav “Bhai” Deshmukh—an old floor trader who’d retired before electronic screens swallowed everything, but who still ran a tiny shop in Dadar selling technical analysis books, incense sticks, and cheap calculators that never seemed to break. Bhai spoke in metaphors, but his metaphors came from scars.

At 2:07 a.m., Meera sent him a message.

Are you awake?I need you to look at something. No questions.

Bhai replied almost immediately, as if he’d been waiting all his life for exactly this.

Markets never sleep, beti. Bring tea.

—

Bhai’s shop smelled like paper and camphor. The shutters were half-down when Meera arrived, the street outside quiet except for a stray dog sniffing at last night’s garbage. Bhai lifted the shutter just enough to let her slip in, then closed it again like they were conducting a crime.

Inside, the shop glowed with a single bulb. Charts were pinned to the walls like wanted posters. Bhai sat behind the counter, his hair more salt than pepper now, his eyes sharp.

Meera opened her laptop and showed him the sheet.

Bhai looked at it for a long time without speaking. Then he nodded once, slowly.

“Ah,” he said. “Someone’s written a diary.”

“It’s just Nifty returns,” Meera said, trying to keep her voice steady.

Bhai snorted. “Nothing is ‘just’ returns. Return is memory. Return is pain in percentage.”

He pointed at the missing dates. “And those? Those are not missing. Those are… deliberate.”

“That’s what I thought,” Meera said. “Someone told me to look at absences.”

Bhai’s eyes flicked up to her face. “Someone?”

She hesitated. “A message from an unknown number.”

Bhai didn’t ask more. He didn’t need to. His life had taught him that questions were sometimes traps.

He leaned forward and traced a finger down 2020’s column, stopping at March like a man touching a bruise. “This year,” he murmured. “This year taught the market that fear has a date.”

Meera swallowed. “Can a market crash be… scheduled?”

Bhai’s laugh was short and humorless. “Every crash is scheduled. Not by the market. By humans. Humans schedule their greed and call it opportunity.”

He tapped 23-Mar. “See this? -37.53 YTD. That’s not just a number. That’s a room full of people realizing they are not in control.”

He tapped 07-Apr. “And this? +5.81 daily. That’s the same people realizing someone else is.”

Meera felt her skin prickle. “So you think the sheet is a code?”

Bhai tilted his head. “You tell me. Why would someone give you ten years of daily cumulative returns? Why not a chart? Why not a PDF? Why a matrix?”

“A matrix is easier to hide in,” Meera said, hearing her own words like they belonged to someone else. “And easier to encode.”

Bhai nodded. “Yes. A matrix can hide messages in plain sight. You can read across years. Down dates. Diagonals. You can turn it into a chessboard.”

He looked at her, suddenly very serious. “Who made this?”

Meera’s throat tightened. “Raghav.”

Bhai’s expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes sharpened. “Raghav the quant? The one who used to sit in that glass tower and say the market is a myth?”

Meera nodded.

Bhai exhaled slowly. “Then he’s in trouble.”

“He is,” Meera said. The words felt like glass.

Bhai reached under the counter and pulled out an old pocket diary, the kind with dates printed in small squares. He flipped to February and ran a thumb across the last week.

“End of Feb,” he said. “Always strange. Budget whispers. Global cues. Funds adjusting. People scared of March because March has history.”

Meera remembered her cursed date. “28-Feb is almost always down in the data.”

Bhai’s eyes gleamed. “Of course it is. 28-Feb is when people start paying attention. It’s when the market can be nudged with the least resistance. It’s like pushing a tired man.”

He leaned in. “Listen. If Raghav hid a message, he would choose dates that are reliable. Dates that behave the same most years. Like 28-Feb.”

Meera’s pulse quickened. “So he’d use them as letters.”

“Or as keys,” Bhai corrected. “Because letters change. Keys stay.”

Meera showed him her binary attempt, the underscore result.

Bhai grinned, despite the tension. “Underscore,” he said. “That’s Raghav. He always thought in code. When he was young, he probably named his pet ‘variable.’”

Meera almost smiled, and the near-smile hurt.

Bhai pointed at the six missing dates again. “These are the only constants across all years, because they are removed. That means they can be used to define a coordinate system. A cipher grid.”

He grabbed a pen and wrote the six dates on a scrap of paper. Then he wrote something beside them:

“26-Jan is missing,” he said. “So the first real clue might be the day after. 27-Jan. And 14-Apr missing means 15-Apr. Same with 01-May missing means 02-May. 15-Aug missing means 16-Aug. 02-Oct missing means 03-Oct. 25-Dec missing means 26-Dec.”

He looked at Meera. “Try those six dates.”

Meera’s hands moved quickly. She searched the sheet for 27-Jan, 15-Apr, 02-May, 16-Aug, 03-Oct, 26-Dec.

Then she looked at 2020’s daily returns around those dates, because Bhai had implied the key year might be 2020—the loudest, the most unmistakable.

The numbers weren’t dramatic there, not like March. But their signs formed a pattern: up, down, up, up, down, up—something like that, depending on the year and weekends.

Bhai stopped her. “Not daily returns,” he said. “Not yet. Look at the YTD values on those dates—because YTD is cumulative. It’s a running sum. It’s like a sentence that keeps adding words.”

Meera pulled the 2020 YTD values for those dates.

Then Bhai said quietly, “Now subtract the year-end return.”

Meera blinked. “What?”

“Because endings matter,” Bhai said. “A cipher needs a base. The year end is the base. It’s the last word. Raghav would anchor to the last value because it’s always present.”

Meera did it. For each key date, she took the 2020 YTD value and subtracted the 31-Dec 2020 value, which was +14.77.

The results were negative numbers—offsets from the ending.

Bhai smiled thinly. “Offsets,” he said. “Now you’re talking.”

He tapped the paper. “Convert the absolute value of each offset into a letter. A1Z26, maybe. Or ASCII. Or… something Raghav likes.”

Meera’s brain raced. She tried A1Z26 first, because it was simple. She mapped 1→A, 2→B, 3→C… 26→Z, wrapping if needed.

The letters didn’t form a word. Not yet.

She tried the same method but using the rank of the offset among the six—smallest to largest—as letters. That gave something like C-A-F-E… and then she froze.

Cafe.

Meera’s heartbeat stuttered.

Bhai’s eyes widened a fraction. “What did you get?”

Meera’s mouth was suddenly dry. “CAFÉ,” she whispered. “It… it spells CAFÉ.”

Bhai leaned back slowly, as if a door had opened in his mind.

“Of course,” he murmured. “Raghav would choose something public. A meeting place. Something that doesn’t look like a meeting place.”

Meera’s fingers trembled. “Which café?”

Bhai looked at her with the calm of a man who’d seen too many traps to be impressed by one more. “There is a café near the exchange,” he said. “The one with the cracked tiles and the overpriced coffee. People call it harmless. That’s why it’s perfect.”

Meera’s stomach turned. “They said don’t call anyone.”

Bhai shrugged. “Then don’t. Go alone, if you are foolish. Or go with someone who doesn’t look like help.”

He reached into a drawer and pulled out a small, battered phone. “Use this,” he said. “No GPS. No fancy apps. Just calls and SMS.”

Meera stared. “Bhai—”

“Take it,” he said. “If someone is watching your number, let them watch an empty room.”

Meera took the phone, its weight oddly comforting.

Bhai’s gaze softened slightly. “And beti,” he added, “if you feel fear, remember: fear is also a signal. It means you’re near something true.”

—

At 6:45 a.m., the sky was the color of unpolished steel. Meera stood outside the café Bhai had meant, a narrow place wedged between office buildings that looked asleep but never truly were. Inside, the smell of burnt espresso mixed with printer ink from the nearby stationery shop.

She walked in.

The café was nearly empty: a man in a cheap suit scrolling his phone, a woman with headphones staring at a laptop, a waiter wiping a table like he was erasing fingerprints.

Meera chose a table near the back, where she could see the door and the windows without looking obvious. She ordered tea. Her hands didn’t stop shaking until the cup arrived and she wrapped her fingers around its warmth.

Minutes stretched.

Then the door opened, and a man walked in wearing a plain shirt and a face that looked too forgettable to be real. He scanned the room once, his eyes moving like a camera, then walked directly to Meera’s table as if pulled by a string.

He didn’t ask permission. He sat.

Meera’s spine went rigid.

He placed a folded piece of paper on the table between them. It was the kind of paper you got from an ATM receipt, thin and pale.

“Raghav says you’re good at reading ghosts,” the man said softly.

Meera’s throat tightened. “Where is he?”

The man’s eyes didn’t blink. “Alive,” he said. “For now.”

Meera clenched her jaw. “Who are you?”

“A courier,” he said. “That’s all you need.”

She glanced at the paper, but didn’t unfold it yet. “Why the sheet?”

The courier’s lips twitched, not quite a smile. “Because the market is the only place where a scream can look like a statistic.”

Meera forced herself to breathe. “What do they want?”

“They want him to stop,” the courier said. “And they want you to stop helping him.”

Meera’s fingers tightened around the tea cup. “I didn’t even know I was helping.”

The courier’s eyes flicked to her laptop bag. “But you opened the file. That’s already help.”

He leaned forward slightly. “Raghav discovered a calendar of events that isn’t in the news. A calendar of moves that repeat with too much accuracy. He thinks someone uses the market’s most predictable seasonal corridors to hide transfers—large, coordinated positions that appear as ‘normal’ because the dates are seasonally expected.”

Meera’s skin prickled. “Money laundering?”

“Call it whatever makes you sleep,” the courier said. “But yes. The sheet is a decade-long alibi. If you move money on days the market is already likely to move, your footprint looks like noise.”

Meera’s mind flashed to 28-Feb. To late May. To the corridors where the market tended to drift upward or down.

“And Raghav…?” she asked.

“He tried to prove it,” the courier said. “He built a model. He found clusters. He found that certain windows—ten-day stretches—behave like highways. If you know the highway, you can move contraband in traffic.”

Meera’s breath came short. “So he needs me to… what? Publish it? Report it?”

The courier shook his head. “No. He needs you to find where they meet. He can’t. He’s being watched.”

Meera’s mouth went dry. “Why me?”

“Because you’re still inside the machine,” the courier said. “And you have something he doesn’t.”

“What?”

The courier’s gaze held hers. “Credibility.”

The word landed heavy.

Meera swallowed and unfolded the paper.

It contained six numbers, handwritten:

26 14 1 15 2 25

And beneath them, a single line:

Follow the gap after each. Not the day. The gap.

Meera stared, comprehension unfolding like a slow bruise.

The gap after each missing day.

The day after each holiday.

27-Jan, 15-Apr, 02-May, 16-Aug, 03-Oct, 26-Dec.

She looked up. “These dates again.”

The courier nodded. “Those are the doors,” he said. “And the gaps are the rooms beyond them.”

Meera’s voice shook. “Rooms where what happens?”

“Where the transfers happen,” the courier said. “Where the machine is quiet enough that the noise can hide the signal.”

Meera’s brain raced. She thought of 2019’s sudden leap on 20-Sep. Of 2020’s cliff and rebound. Of 2024’s election whipsaw. Of the way extreme days became cover because everyone blamed news.

“What do I do with these dates?” she asked.

The courier stood, as if the conversation had a time limit. “Look at those dates across the ten years,” he said. “Not the returns. Not the direction. The differences. Look for the year where the difference doesn’t match the pattern.”

Meera frowned. “The anomaly.”

“Yes,” the courier said. “Because the anomaly is the year they made a mistake. The year their transfer left a scar.”

He slid a small key across the table. A physical key, old-fashioned, the kind that belonged to a drawer, not a digital lock.

“Storage locker,” he said. “Number is encoded in the sheet. Raghav left it where only you’d bother to look.”

Meera’s heart thudded. “Where is the locker?”

The courier’s eyes softened, just slightly. “If you solve the locker,” he said, “you solve where Raghav is. And you solve who is hunting him.”

He paused at the door and turned back once.

“And Meera,” he added, “don’t trust a market that heals too fast. The fastest recoveries are often someone’s fingerprints.”

Then he left.

—

The day unfolded like a nightmare wrapped in sunlight.

Meera didn’t go to work. She sent a sick email with a sentence so bland it felt like a lie to her own life. Then she locked her door, turned her phone off, and pulled the sheet back up like it was a crime scene photo.

She focused on the six “gap” dates: 27-Jan, 15-Apr, 02-May, 16-Aug, 03-Oct, 26-Dec.

For each year, she looked at the daily return on those dates—how much the market moved on the day after a fixed holiday.

If those days were “doors,” then whatever happened immediately after might have a pattern. A slight bump. A subtle drift. Something small enough to be ignored.

She computed the daily returns for each of those dates across the ten years.

Most were unremarkable. Small positives, small negatives. The kind of moves that got lost in the daily grind.

But one year stood out on one date like a scream in a library.

03-Oct-2017 had a move that was too clean, too isolated—an unusually large change compared to other years on that exact “gap” day.

Meera checked again, thinking she’d miscalculated.

She hadn’t.

It wasn’t a headline day. Not like elections. Not like pandemics. Not like tax cuts.

It was just… a sudden, crisp move on a day that shouldn’t have been crisp.

A mistake.

Meera’s hands trembled. If the locker number was encoded here, it would likely be the magnitude of the anomaly, or its rank.

She took the absolute value of the anomaly and rounded it. It produced a two-digit number.

Then she remembered the courier’s instruction: “Look for the year where the difference doesn’t match the pattern.”

Year.

Not date.

She compared anomalies across all six dates. One year had subtle irregularities on multiple gap dates.

2017.

The year that ended with +28.65—one of the decade’s strongest.

A year of strength could hide many sins.

Meera looked at 2017’s path: barely negative early, then a long, steady climb, peaking around late December at +28.66 before ending at +28.65. Smooth. Confident. Too smooth.

She felt cold.

A smooth year, in markets, could be natural.

Or it could be managed.

She extracted the anomalies and mapped them to digits.

A locker number started forming: 318.

Her breath caught, because 318 wasn’t just a number.

It was a date in 2021: 18-Oct, the day 2021 hit its peak YTD at 31.80—a number that looked like it had been waiting to be read as a code.

Raghav liked layering. A code inside a peak inside a year.

Meera grabbed her keys and the physical key from the courier and left her apartment.

If she was being watched, she didn’t see it. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

Mumbai’s streets were alive now, vendors shouting, auto-rickshaws weaving like anxious insects. Meera moved through it with the numb calm of someone who’d stepped into a story and couldn’t step back out.

The storage facility was in Lower Parel, a sleek place with bright lighting and security cameras that made you feel both safe and exposed.

At the desk, a bored attendant asked for ID. Meera showed hers. The attendant barely glanced.

“Locker number?” he asked.

Meera swallowed. “318.”

The attendant tapped keys. His screen reflected in his glasses like a second set of eyes. “Third floor,” he said. “Aisle C.”

Meera’s legs felt like they belonged to someone else as she rode the elevator up. The doors opened to a corridor of metal doors—hundreds of lockers, identical, anonymous, lined up like coffins.

Aisle C.

Locker 318.

Meera found it. The lock was old-fashioned, separate from the digital system. She slid the physical key in.

It turned with a soft click that sounded too loud.

Inside was a single black notebook and a small USB drive.

Meera’s fingers shook as she picked up the notebook. On the cover, in Raghav’s handwriting, one line:

THE MARKET IS A WITNESS. MAKE IT TESTIFY.

Her eyes burned.

She opened the notebook.

The first page contained a list—ten lines, one for each year, written like case files:

2016 — Min: -12.46 (25-Feb). Max: 12.42 (08-Sep). End: 2.80 (30-Dec).2017 — Min: -0.08 (02-Jan). Max: 28.66 (26-Dec). End: 28.65 (29-Dec).2018 — Min: -4.19 (23-Mar). Max: 12.49 (28-Aug). End: 4.09 (31-Dec).2019 — Min: -2.80 (19-Feb). Max: 12.48 (20-Dec). End: 11.53 (31-Dec).2020 — Min: -37.53 (23-Mar). Max: 14.77 (30-Dec). End: 14.77 (31-Dec).2021 — Min: -2.74 (29-Jan). Max: 31.80 (18-Oct). End: 23.79 (31-Dec).2022 — Min: -11.87 (17-Jun). Max: 8.40 (01-Dec). End: 4.33 (30-Dec).2023 — Min: -6.41 (24-Mar). Max: 20.29 (28-Dec). End: 20.03 (29-Dec).2024 — Min: -2.31 (23-Jan). Max: 20.58 (26-Sep). End: 8.75 (31-Dec).2025 — Min: -6.99 (04-Mar). Max: 10.41 (27-Nov). End: 10.05 (31-Dec).

Beneath it, in smaller writing:

Each year has a crime scene. The crime is not the move. The crime is the timing.

Meera flipped pages. Diagrams. Notes. Dates circled. The six missing days written again and again like an obsession. And then a page titled:

THE TRANSFERS

Raghav’s handwriting turned tighter here, as if he’d been writing in fear.

He described a pattern: large coordinated positions entered on “gap days,” immediately after fixed holidays, using the market’s natural seasonal bias as cover. He listed windows where the average drift tended to be up, and windows where the market tended to weaken—corridors of expectation.

Late February corridor: weakness. Best cover for exits.Late May corridor: strength. Best cover for entries.Late December corridor: drift. Best cover for cleanup.

And then he wrote one sentence that made Meera’s hands go cold:

They used 04-Jun-2024 as a mask. The whipsaw hid the handoff.

Meera’s mind flashed to June 4, that -6.34 day, the chaos everyone blamed on election math. Raghav was saying it was used as camouflage.

She read further.

He had mapped a set of accounts—never names, only numbers—moving in and out around those dates. Not illegal on its face. Not obvious. But consistent. Too consistent.

He’d identified a hub.

A single location where several “courier” accounts were linked.

And he’d circled it.

BKC.

Bandra Kurla Complex.

The heart of corporate Mumbai, glass and steel, where deals lived and died with air-conditioned smiles.

Meera’s throat tightened.

This was bigger than a rogue trader. Bigger than a single firm.

This was the kind of thing people vanished for.

She looked around the storage corridor, suddenly certain someone could be behind her. The fluorescent lights hummed. The cameras stared without blinking.

Meera grabbed the USB drive, shoved the notebook into her bag, and locked the locker again.

As she turned, she saw a man at the far end of the aisle, pretending to check a locker door that wasn’t his.

He looked up.

Their eyes met.

His gaze slid away too quickly.

Meera’s skin prickled.

She walked—not ran—to the elevator. She felt the air thicken behind her, the way it does when you know someone is following but you refuse to confirm it.

The elevator doors closed.

In the mirror-like metal, she saw him start walking toward her.

Meera’s heart hammered.

Downstairs, she didn’t go back to her car. She walked out into the busy street and slipped into a crowd, letting other bodies become her camouflage. She turned into a bookstore, then out a back entrance, then into a taxi without looking at the driver.

“Churchgate,” she said, because it was a lie that sounded like truth.

Her hands shook so hard she couldn’t open the USB drive case. She forced them still by pressing her nails into her palm.

Raghav was alive.

Raghav was in danger.

And now, so was she.

—

That night, Meera did the one thing she’d sworn not to do:

She called Kabir Rao.

Not from her phone. From Bhai’s battered phone. From a public booth near a closed pharmacy. She dialed the number she’d memorized but never wanted to use like this.

Kabir answered on the second ring. “Rao,” he said, voice flat, as if he’d been awake and waiting.

Meera swallowed. “It’s Meera.”

A pause. “Where are you?”

“Not safe,” she said. “I have something. It’s… it’s market data, but it’s also not.”

Kabir exhaled slowly. “Tell me what happened.”

Meera told him the shortest version possible: the file, the code, the locker, the notebook, BKC.

Kabir didn’t interrupt. When she finished, he was silent for a moment that stretched like a wire.

Then he said softly, “You just walked into a room where people don’t leave fingerprints.”

“I know,” Meera whispered.

Kabir’s voice hardened. “Do not go to BKC alone.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Meera lied.

Kabir ignored the lie. “Where is the evidence?”

“In my bag,” Meera said. “And on a USB.”

Kabir’s tone sharpened. “Do not plug that USB into a device connected to your home network.”

Meera blinked. Of course. She’d almost done exactly that.

Kabir continued. “Meet me at 6 a.m. tomorrow. Siddhivinayak temple. Crowds. Cameras. We’ll talk while walking.”

Meera’s breath caught. “Kabir—”

Kabir cut her off. “And Meera? Whoever sent that file expected you to decode it. Which means they know you can. Which means they know what you’re capable of.”

Meera closed her eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” Kabir said, “you’re not just a witness now. You’re leverage.”

The line went dead.

Meera stood in the booth, listening to the dial tone like it was a heartbeat.

—

Siddhivinayak at dawn was a tide of devotion. People moved like water, hands folded, eyes searching upward. Incense and sweat and flowers tangled in the air. Police stood at the edges, their faces blank with practiced patience.

Kabir Rao appeared beside Meera without warning, as if he’d stepped out of the crowd itself. He wore a plain shirt and no uniform. His eyes scanned everything, missing nothing.

“Walk,” he said.

Meera walked.

They moved along the temple perimeter, blending into the flow.

Kabir spoke softly, his words hidden in the ambient noise. “I ran a few checks last night. Raghav Malhotra is officially ‘missing.’ His apartment is empty. His laptop is gone. His building’s CCTV footage for the last two days is corrupted.”

Meera’s stomach dropped. “Corrupted?”

Kabir’s jaw tightened. “Conveniently.”

Meera’s fingers curled around her bag strap. “So they have resources.”

Kabir glanced sideways. “In this city, resources are just another word for connections.”

Meera swallowed. “What do we do?”

Kabir’s gaze stayed on the crowd. “We confirm the notebook. We confirm the USB. We build a chain of custody so this doesn’t vanish.”

Meera hesitated. “And Raghav?”

Kabir’s voice softened a fraction. “We find him by following the same thing that hid him.”

“The calendar?” Meera whispered.

Kabir nodded. “Timing. Predictability. If they use repeatable windows, they will use them again.”

Meera’s mind flashed to Raghav’s note: The crime is not the move. The crime is the timing.

Kabir looked at her. “Tell me the single most important date in your sheet.”

Meera didn’t hesitate. “23-Mar-2020.”

Kabir nodded. “Why?”

“Because it’s the day the market screamed,” Meera said. “And then healed. Too fast.”

Kabir’s eyes narrowed. “Good,” he said. “Now tell me the most important recent date.”

Meera’s voice tightened. “04-Jun-2024.”

Kabir nodded again. “And what do both have in common?”

Meera stared ahead, thinking. Then it hit her with a clarity that felt like falling.

“They’re both days everyone blamed on news,” she said. “So any hidden transfer would be invisible because the move had an obvious story.”

Kabir’s mouth tightened. “Exactly.”

They walked in silence for a few steps.

Then Kabir said quietly, “BKC is a place. But it’s also a symbol. We don’t raid BKC. We pick a thread.”

Meera’s hands trembled. “Which thread?”

Kabir’s eyes flashed. “The anomaly you found. The mistake year. You said 2017 looked too smooth.”

Meera nodded.

Kabir’s voice was low. “Find me the account that benefited most from that smoothness. The one that thrives on predictability.”

Meera’s breath caught. “A market maker?”

Kabir nodded. “Or a fund that sells certainty.”

Meera whispered, “A volatility seller.”

Kabir’s gaze sharpened. “Yes.”

Meera’s mind raced, the story forming around her like a net. A fund that sold volatility—profiting when markets stayed calm—would love a year like 2017. And if they also had a side operation, moving money through predictable corridors, calm would be their cover.

Kabir’s voice cut through her thoughts. “We’re going to need you to do what you do best. Build the narrative from the numbers. But this time, the narrative isn’t for traders. It’s for court.”

Meera’s throat tightened. “And if they come for me?”

Kabir’s eyes didn’t soften, but his voice did. “Then we make sure they regret it.”

—

That night, Meera sat at a secure workstation in a police cyber cell that smelled like old coffee and new cables. Kabir watched from behind as she opened the USB on an isolated machine.

The files inside weren’t dramatic. No videos. No names. Just data. CSVs. Logs. A map of accounts moving in and out on gap dates, stacked year after year.

Raghav had done the work like a man who knew he’d be interrupted. He’d left instructions, step by step.

Meera followed them.

And the pattern emerged like a face in fog.

The same set of entities—shell accounts, linked by timing rather than identity—appearing after the six missing days, riding the natural drift, exiting during known weak corridors, repeating with a rhythm so steady it felt like a chant.

Kabir leaned forward. “Can you quantify it?” he asked.

Meera’s voice was hoarse. “Yes,” she said. “I can show how the odds of this repeating by chance are… absurd.”

Kabir nodded. “Do it.”

Meera did.

Hours passed. The city outside went from night to early morning again, a cycle as relentless as the market.

Then Meera found something that made her stop breathing.

A note embedded in a log file. Hidden in a comment field where no one looked.

It was a simple phrase, repeated once:

THE CURATOR WATCHES THE GAPS.

Meera’s skin went cold.

Kabir’s eyes narrowed. “Curator,” he said. “A codename.”

Meera’s lips were dry. “Raghav used that word once. He said someone curated volatility… curated the calendar.”

Kabir’s jaw tightened. “We find who calls themselves Curator.”

Meera looked at the screen, the phrase glowing like a threat.

Then, in the corner of the room, a monitor beeped. One of Kabir’s officers looked up. “Sir,” he said, voice tense, “we just got a hit on a camera feed. A man matching your description was seen near your house. Two hours ago.”

Meera’s blood turned to ice.

Kabir’s eyes locked on her. “They know you’re with me,” he said quietly.

Meera’s throat tightened. “Raghav—”

Kabir raised a hand. “We move now.”

Meera stood, legs shaking.

Kabir grabbed his jacket and spoke into his radio, rapid instructions. Then he looked at Meera again, and his voice softened for the first time.

“This is not just a financial crime,” he said. “This is a kidnapping. And kidnappers trade time like currency.”

Meera’s eyes burned. “How do we beat them?”

Kabir’s gaze was steady. “We do what the market does,” he said. “We use their own timing against them.”

He glanced at the NIFTY sheet still open on her screen, the decade of numbers like a silent choir.

“Tell me,” Kabir said. “When do they expect to be invisible?”

Meera swallowed, her mind snapping back to the corridors.

“During chaos,” she whispered. “During headline moves. During predictable seasonal windows.”

Kabir nodded. “Good,” he said. “Then we make our move inside their noise.”

Meera’s hands clenched. “What noise?”

Kabir’s eyes narrowed. “The next big window. The next corridor where everyone will be looking at something else.”

Meera’s mind raced—late February, late May, early June, election cycles, budget days.

Then she remembered a line from Raghav’s notebook:

They used 04-Jun-2024 as a mask.

Masks.

If they loved masks, they’d return to them.

Meera’s breath caught. “June,” she whispered. “The early June corridor. The kind of days that can be blamed on macro, flows, politics.”

Kabir’s smile was thin. “Exactly,” he said. “So we set a trap in June.”

Meera stared at him. “But it’s January.”

Kabir’s voice was steady. “Then we force them sooner.”

Meera blinked. “How?”

Kabir tapped the screen, right on a date that seemed innocent.

28-Feb.

The cursed day.

“The market bleeds here,” Kabir said softly. “If your data says it’s a consistent weak point, it means they like it. It means it’s useful. It means they may have something scheduled.”

Meera’s heart hammered. “You think—”

Kabir nodded. “We watch 28-Feb. We watch the gaps. And we watch who shows up when everyone expects the market to slip.”

Meera’s stomach tightened. “And Raghav?”

Kabir’s eyes held hers. “If Raghav built this map, he’s expecting you to reach the end.”

Meera swallowed hard, the fear and determination knotting together until she couldn’t tell them apart.

She looked at the decade of Nifty data again—ten years of collective human emotion turned into percentages, six days cut out like secrets, and a cursed date bleeding red with eerie consistency.

For the first time, she understood what Raghav meant.

The market wasn’t just a machine.

It was a witness.

And someone had been using it to hide a crime.

Meera breathed in, steadying herself with the smell of stale coffee and warm electronics.

Then she spoke, her voice quiet but sharp, like a blade finally unsheathed.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s make it testify.”

And somewhere in the city, behind glass walls and quiet accounts, the Curator watched the calendar—certain, as always, that the gaps would keep their secrets.

For now.