The Mahanadi flowed like a sorrowful ribbon under the rusty iron bridge, its waters muddied obscuring centuries of tales—some spoken, many hidden. On a smoky morning that reeked of wet soil and soot, it nearly took one more.


Ananya, nearly sixteen, barefoot, shivering, and on the thin railing. Her tattered school uniform stuck to her gaunt body, dripping with sweat, fear, and river mist. Her eyes were empty, staring at the churning water below. To everyone, it seemed like a girl on the verge of jumping. To her, it felt like finally escaping something worse.


The village had spoken in whispers of her. At first, it was the silence—Ananya ceased talking. The night screams followed, the refusal to eat, muttering about someone following her through the trees. Her mother had attributed it to stress at school. Her father, too poor for doctors and too afraid of shame, had taken her to a forest tantrik. The man conducted rituals, bound talismans on her arms, and burned camphor on her palms. He told her that she was cursed. That something evil had invaded her body. Ananya believed him. That was the worst of it.


With the early mist rising, Raghav, a villager who was walking to the government school, spotted the outline of the girl on the bridge. He imagined that she was a specter at first. But then he heard her. She was murmuring to the river.


"I have no light left… They said I'm cursed. I feel it eating me."


Without hesitation, Raghav dropped his schoolbag and took off. Others around him—two field workers and an old vendor—heard the panic in his voice and rushed after them. They managed to catch her just as her body slumped forward. She struggled against them, weeping, "Let me go! Please let me go!" But they did not release her. They did not let her fall.


She was taken to the nearest primary health center—one with hardly any electricity and shared by two nurses among five villages. Rekha, one of the nurses trained under a new women's scheme, cleaned her wounds tenderly. But she saw beyond the wounds. She saw trauma. Pain without a language. The silent kind that does not bleed but sears. Ananya did not speak, but her body wailed in silence.


Her village was much the same—schools with leaky roofs, classrooms with no benches, children fighting over worn-out books. Fifty students shared one toilet. Most girls quit by the age of twelve. Some, like Ananya, remained—but were invisible, their suffering undetected. Last month, a girl had vanished. Her family said she was possessed. No one challenged it.


Superstition had proliferated in the village like a fungus—thick, spreading, occupying spaces that were meant for science and awareness. Government propaganda had risen and fallen. Water pipes were caught in Odisha-Chhattisgarh disputes. The children continued to drink water from the canal. Jaundice spread through the village like a spectre. Lunches were vowed with eggs, substituted with bananas. The anganwadi centre didn't have milk. But black magic? That still attracted believers.


Ananya stayed three days in the health center. Her mother came on the third day barefoot, bearing a bag of rice to exchange for medication. Her voice trembled when she talked to Rekha.


"They said she was cursed. I thought I was rescuing her," she explained.


Ananya did not react. But for the first time in days, she did not recoil from Rekha's grasp.


Raghav came back with books and a letter. He had called up a mental health NGO in Bhubaneswar. A counselor promised to come once a month. He also applied for assistance under the Subhadra Welfare Cell—a new program to assist education and medical expenses for girls. It was paper-intensive. The phone lines were out half the time. But he kept at it.


Weeks went by. Rains arrived. Ananya returned to school—quieter, thinner, but no longer invisible. She listened in class. She jotted things down in her notebook. She responded when called. She no longer heard voices in the trees. The river still whispered in the night, but it whispered stories and not death.


Raghav began weekend classes in the school verandah—on science, on health, on how fear resides where knowledge is absent. Some parents came. Some giggled nervously. Some sobbed silently. But they came.


The tantrik departed from the village. Nobody went to visit his hut again.


And Ananya? She walked across that bridge every morning to go to school. Every morning, she stopped—not to tumble, but to recall. The heaviness of what had almost occurred. The grasping hands that saved her. The line between light and darkness.


Not all the villagers agreed the darkness had fled. But Ananya did. And that was what counted now.


Pabitra Behera