Moon at Half Past Noon

The silence on the ridge was not empty; it was judgmental.
Arjun stopped, his breath misting in the thin Himalayan air. He checked his phone. The screen was a harsh, artificial white in the grey afternoon: No Service. He tapped the glass—a nervous tic of the city—before sliding it into his pocket. He was a jagged tear in the landscape, his neon-blue windbreaker and synthetic orange backpack clashing violently with the muted slate and moss-green of the mountains.

Below him, the village of Saur lay in a bowl of mist. From this height, it looked like a postcard from a forgotten century. Smoke curled lazily from a chimney. A washing line strung between two houses held a bright red sari, stiff in the breeze. On a wooden porch, an elder sat hunched over a hookah.
Arjun adjusted his straps. He wanted quiet. He wanted to escape the relentless notification ping of his life in Delhi. He didn’t know that some silences are heavy enough to crush bone.

He entered the village square, his expensive trekking boots crunching loudly on cobblestones polished smooth by centuries of feet.

“Namaste!” he called out.

The sound died instantly, swallowed by the porous stone.
The elder on the porch didn’t turn. He stared at the horizon, the hookah pipe held loosely in his hand.

Arjun walked deeper. He passed a courtyard where a woman stood frozen in the act of winnowing rice, the basket held high.
“Sister?” Arjun asked, stepping closer. “Is there a shop open?”
She didn’t blink. The wind gusted, swirling dust around her ankles, but her sari didn’t flutter. It remained rigid, draped in a perfect, gravity-defying curve.

A cold prickle danced down Arjun’s spine. He reached out, his finger trembling slightly, and touched the woman’s shoulder.
Clunk.

Hard, cold masonry.

He stepped back, the breath knocked out of him. She wasn’t flesh. She was paint. A masterpiece of trompe-l’œil rendered on a crumbling plaster wall. The depth was a lie; the life was a trick of the light.
He spun around. The elder with the hookah? A two-dimensional guardian on a three-dimensional ruin. The children playing marbles in the alley? Static ghosts trapped in peeling oil.

Arjun was standing in a graveyard dressed up as a living room.
That night, he broke the lock of a house that felt less watched. To combat the crushing weight of the silence, he turned on his Bluetooth speaker. He needed noise to prove he was alive.

Thump. Thump. Thump.

The heavy bass didn’t just fill the room; it violated it. It vibrated against the ancient slate, shaking dust from the rafters. It felt profane, like screaming in a cathedral.

Outside the window, a shadow winced. The Curator stood in the dark, hands over his ears, physically sickened by the dissonance.
Morning brought the first border.

Arjun stepped out to urinate and froze. A perfect, geometric circle of white lime powder—chuna—surrounded the house.

“Inside is yours. Outside is mine.”

The voice came from the roof. Arjun looked up.

A man sat there, blending into the tiles like a chameleon. He wore a moth-eaten military sweater and held a vintage Lee-Enfield rifle with the casual familiarity of a limb.

“Who are you?” Arjun asked, his voice cracking.
“The Curator,” the man said. He didn’t aim the rifle, but his eyes were sights, locked onto Arjun. “You are leaking.”
“Leaking?”
“Noise. Smell. Chaos. You vibrate at the wrong frequency.” The Curator pulled a rag from his pocket and polished the rifle bolt. Click-clack. “Stay inside the line. Do not infect the exhibits.”

The siege began.

Arjun tried to leave, but the path back to the ridge was gone—blocked by a mountain of freshly cut acacia thorns and felled pine, a barricade built with manic, soldierly precision. He went to the communal tap for water; the faucet was painted red, sealed shut with industrial adhesive.

He was a rat in a maze, and the maze was shrinking.

Three nights later, the storm broke. It was a cloudburst, the kind that drowns the mountains. The roof of Arjun’s shelter gave way, turning his sanctuary into a waterfall of mud and slate.

Hypothermic and broken, he ran through the deluge to the only house with warm light—the Curator’s fortress. He pounded on the oak door.

“Open up! It’s flooding out here!”

The door creaked open. The Curator stood silhouetted by the golden glow of a kerosene lamp. He looked at the shivering, muddy boy with genuine pity.

“You washed away the border,” the Curator said softly.
“Please.”

The old man stepped aside.

The inside was not a home; it was an anatomy lab for memory. Sketches of eyes, hands, and mouths covered the walls. The smell was overpowering: turpentine, old paper, and the musk of obsession.

The Curator poured tea. He didn’t drug it. He didn’t have to. Arjun was already drunk on exhaustion.

“I was a signalman,” the Curator said, his voice rhythmic, hypnotic against the drumming rain. “My job was to filter the static. To find the message.”
Arjun drank greedily, his hands shaking. “Is that why you’re here?”
“The world down there…” The Curator gestured vaguely at the floor. “Everyone talking at once. Screaming to be heard. No one listening. Here, the walls listen. The people stay.”

Arjun’s eyes grew heavy. The warmth of the fire was a trap, lulling him into submission.

“I saved them, you know,” the Curator whispered. “They wanted to leave. To become ghosts in the city slums. I made them permanent.”

Arjun slumped forward, sleep finally claiming him. The Curator watched him, sad and loving.

“Shh,” the old man whispered. “You are so temporary. It must be exhausting to be you. I will fix it.”

When Arjun woke, the storm had passed. The dawn was a cold, cruel grey.
He was bound to a heavy wooden chair in the center of the village square. The ropes cut into his wrists.

The Curator stood before him. He held no weapon, only a palette and a thick, bristle brush.

“What do you want?” Arjun croaked. “Money? Take the gear.”
“I want the composition to be right,” the Curator murmured. He dipped the brush into a pot of thick, grey clay paint.

He stepped forward and slapped the wet brush across Arjun’s forehead.
The sensation was shocking—cold, slimy, suffocating.

“Stop twitching,” the Curator chided gently. “You are ruining the line.”
He painted down Arjun’s nose. Over his cheeks. He wasn’t torturing the boy; he was editing him. He was painting over the sweat, the fear, the stubble. He was formatting the human.

“I am not a wall!” Arjun screamed, the terror piercing his paralysis.
“You will be.”

The Curator moved to paint Arjun’s eyes closed.
Arjun snapped. A primal, animalistic rejection of the erasure. He threw his entire body weight forward.

CRACK.

His forehead smashed into the Curator’s chest. The chair tipped. The palette flew from the old man’s hand.

SPLAT.

Bright crimson and yellow pigment exploded across the pristine, ancient cobblestones. A chaotic, violent mess on the ordered grey stone.
The Curator gasped. He fell to his knees, staring at the spill. He touched the paint, trembling. “The mess… look at the mess…”

He began to scrub the stone frantically with his sleeve, sobbing. He had forgotten the boy. The stain on his order was more painful than the violence.
Arjun ripped his arm free, skin tearing against the rough rope. He scrambled up, half his face masked in grey slime, looking like a golem born of the mud. He didn’t look back. He ran.

He crashed through the thorns, the barbs tearing his nylon jacket, blood mixing with the rain. He plunged into the white mist of the jungle, the silence finally swallowing his gasping breath.

Weeks later, the sun shone on Saur. The sky was a piercing, innocent blue.
The red stain on the cobblestones was gone. Scrubbed clean.
The Curator stood before the house where the visitor had slept. He held his fine-tip brush. He stepped back, tilting his head.

On the wall, a new mural had appeared.

It was Arjun.

But he was not wearing neon. He wore a traditional wool vest and a round Pahadi cap. He was not screaming. His hands were folded in a respectful

Namaste.

And his face… it was not the face of a victim. The Curator had painted a smile on him. It was a soft, serene smile. A smile that said, Thank you.
Thank you for taking the noise away.
The Curator touched the painted cheek affectionately.
“There,” he whispered to the wall. “Now you belong.”