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The Satori Ashram in Kasol was perched above a pine-drenched ridge, promising digital detox and inner stillness to its urban visitors. On its second week of the Vipassana retreat, the guests were instructed to observe a 48-hour silence. Phones turned in. Eye contact discouraged. Meals devoid of spice and salt.
On Day Ten, Anvesha Roy, a wellness influencer with over 600K followers on BerryMind, hosted a special ‘silent meditation livestream’ for her Patreon subscribers before surrendering her devices for the final leg of the retreat. With her camera set before a backdrop of prayer flags fluttering in Himalayan breeze, her livestream began with soft bells, incense smoke, and her serene expression dissolving into stillness.
What none of her subscribers expected was that her video—meant to end at 9:00 PM—continued even after others had logged off. Her camera never stopped. For three more hours, it silently broadcast an empty mat and a candle burning too low. Then a glimpse: a silhouette moved swiftly across the frame, followed by a muffled exhale. The recording ended abruptly at 12:16 AM.
The next morning, as the kitchen boy came to refill her herbal tea urn, Anvesha was found slumped in lotus pose on her mat, eyes forever shut. Her pupils constricted, face pale. An open vial of turmeric essential oil beside her. Local police suspected an overdose or heart failure, until the retreat’s tech assistant, Riaan Das, uploaded the livestream archive and flagged the cryptic ending.
Riaan, who had given Anvesha customized access to the Ashram’s hidden Wi-Fi to maintain her ‘minimum content promises’, was the first to notice that her OBS software had glitched. The camera had never stopped. The system logs indicated someone had been remotely connected. When the footage was enhanced, the silhouette resembled a person wearing official Ashram staff robes.
Every resident had surrendered their devices—except, as Riaan noted bitterly, for a few ‘old masters’ who were exceptions to the rule. One in particular: Siddhant Bhargava, a former entrepreneur-turned-guru, known for his midnight lectures and erratic moods.
But Siddhant had an alibi. He’d been sitting in the forest clearing for eight hours meditating, witnessed by two guests and a trail camera. Meanwhile, the Ashram’s healer, Dr. Pema, softly accused another: Maya Sinha, a former yoga teacher dismissed from four studios over behavioral issues and secretly infatuated with Anvesha. Maya maintained her innocence, claiming it was the work of ‘panch-tattvas reacting to ego vibrations’.
The truth emerged not from confession, but from metadata. One file, auto-uploaded from the OBS cache to an unlisted cloud folder, revealed what had happened between 9:20 and 12:16. At 9:26, Anvesha’s frame suddenly shifted mid-stream, as if nudged. A shadow approached from the side, posed a hand in front of her mouth, then swiftly dissolved a capsule into her water flask. She never reacted. She was known to barely blink during meditation.
Riaan, shocked, realized the poisoning had been planned using her own ritual against her. He cross-checked the clients that accessed the Ashram’s hidden Wi-Fi that night. One MAC address didn’t belong to any known guest—it matched a lost phone from a visiting film crew that had left weeks ago. But the Ashram’s router logs had a final clue: the device was accessed once before, exactly eight days earlier, to upload a burned version of Anvesha’s Patreon payout report.
Motivation emerged. Siddhant Bhargava, despite his monastic image, was in severe debt. Anvesha had refused to invest in his expanding chain of ‘digital ayams’—meditation pods for co-working spaces. Instead, she mocked it in a private chat now leaked via the same network. In a final move, Siddhant used a lost burner device to enter her livestream software, masked himself in robes, poisoned her mid-broadcast using oil laced with carfentanil, and vanished into night. He banked on her minimal motion and deep trance hiding the physical signs.
When Riaan presented the proof, Siddhant denied everything—until a single mistake betrayed him: a remote desktop client auto-logged his device name during the livestream control. It was recorded as ‘Sidd-Satori-Mac’.
He was arrested two nights later, hiding in a shepherd’s hut beyond the retreat perimeter. When they found him, he was in lotus pose. Eyes closed. Lips whispering mantras—only this time, silent to everyone but himself.
