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The silence of DhyanaGiri, a secluded spiritual retreat perched above the Nilgiris, was interrupted only by wind through pine trees and the occasional clap of wood chimes. Founded by the enigmatic Guru Athmanand, it attracted urban seekers yearning to disconnect, detox, and rediscover purpose.
Among the recent arrivals were seven carefully screened participants—a software developer from Bangalore, a grief-stricken widow from Chandigarh, a government officer on sabbatical, a vlogger documenting ‘digital silence’, a philosophy professor, a school principal, and an inscrutable man simply known as Mr. Gulati.
Each had surrendered phones, watches, and last names. Room assignments were random; speech forbidden after sundown. Meals were taken in silence. The sole communal event apart from chanting sessions was the 5 PM meditation—a ritual no one missed.
Until Day Four, when Room Number Seventeen remained locked.
Gulati hadn’t shown up for lunch or the afternoon session. Retreat manager Subbu, a stern but polite Tamil man, knocked repeatedly. When there was no response, he used his passkey. The curtainless room had low daylight, a roll-mattress on the floor, a brass bowl of soaking lentils—and Mr. Gulati sitting upright on his stool, still and wide-eyed.
Dead.
Dr. Sen, the professor, was the first to whisper, “Poison,” after local police confirmed cardiac arrest and found traces of crushed datura in the leftover soup. Yet no one had spoken to Gulati much. He was silent even before the mandatory silence hours. Stooped, intense, observant—it was as if he studied others more than the teachings.
The retreat was sealed. Interrogations began in unconventional ways. Inspector Devika Rao—tasked to investigate—attended group meditations, skimmed handwritten reflection journals, and cross-referenced meal logs. The chef swore every lentil bowl was made in bulk.
But in a silent retreat, it was easy to slip things into unattended food bowls.
Dr. Sen noted, in her journal, that Gulati had flinched when Guru Athmanand mentioned ‘karmic debts’. The vlogger, Sunita, had sneakily interviewed participants before the retreat began. Her footage—extracted from her confiscated camera—showed Gulati arguing on a public bus with a young woman. Investigators couldn’t identify her, but layered audio analysis caught a name in the argument: “Muskaan.”
The widow, Mrs. Naidu, whose loss had driven her to spiritualism, disclosed something curious to Inspector Devika the next morning. Though the retreat enforced silence, she had seen Gulati and the school principal, Mr. Bhaskar, exchange notes.
More digging revealed that Gulati wasn’t Mr. Gulati at all. A cross-referenced Aadhaar scan off his fingerprint revealed his real name: Naman Verma. A former university lecturer dismissed eight years ago over allegations of sexual misconduct—filed by a student named Muskaan Jhala. The case never went through; she later died in a suspicious hit-and-run while on vacation in Ooty. The case faded.
But not for everyone.
Inspector Devika confronted Mr. Bhaskar with this. He cracked.
Muskaan Jhala had been his niece.
He had tracked down Naman/Gulati after years of obsessive guilt. When the opportunity presented itself—when Gulati enrolled anonymously in the retreat using a false name but inadvertently used the same address associated with his real identity—Bhaskar saw his moment.
He booked himself under a fake spiritual crisis and joined the batch. In the silence of the retreat, guilt and vengeance grew louder.
Three nights before the murder, Bhaskar left a neem-laced datura pod on Gulati’s window sill. Next day, he plucked the soaked lentils from the shared bowl an hour before dinner and gently dusted powdered datura over one portion—after carefully consulting the seating order.
There were no cameras. No speaking. No watchers in the kitchen courtyard.
“Yes,” Bhaskar said when Devika asked why. “Some crimes don’t bleed. They just fade into paperwork and policy. But their ghosts chase aunties to their deaths.”
But Devika wasn’t done.
The real twist emerged when the soup samples came back from the secondary lab. Unexpectedly, they showed no trace of datura.
It wasn’t the soup at all.
It was the lentil soak water. Gulati had drunk it cold after rehearsal meditation, as Subbu testified. A tiny brass cup left on his stool held the last drops.
Which meant someone had dosed the soaking bowl before Gulati sipped.
The only person with access to that pre-meditation room was the retreat’s founder: Guru Athmanand.
Further search revealed Muskaan’s name written into one of his old notebooks—her application to the retreat from years before. She’d been here. She’d confronted him for letting Naman go. There had been an explosion in the ashram kitchen then, covered as an accident. Attendance logs from that month had vanished.
Gulati, in truth, had come to destroy Athmanand. He had uncovered the Guru’s role in burying Muskaan’s allegations. The camera Sunita brought had been tipped off to secretly film Athmanand’s confession.
The footage, salvaged, showed Gulati confronting Athmanand near the waterfall, off retreat grounds. Calmly, the guru had said: “Let karma sort the past.”
But he made sure karma had a little help.
Athmanand was finally arrested. The retreat was shut. Bhaskar never knew that the man he sought to kill had already been marked.
In Room Seventeen, silence echoed longer than any chant ever had.
