KARENG 574157

The fiftieth edition of Incident — the legendary festival at NIT Karnataka, Surathkal was meant to be the grandest celebration in the college's history. Then the Dean of Student Welfare goes missing, three days before it opens.

The students conducting the festival do what students do. The show goes on.

A week after the last performance, a body washes ashore near SEARCH — the institute's own AI research centre, at the edge of the Arabian Sea. An apparent suicide. The body too deteriorated to say otherwise.

There are eerie parallels to something that happened at this same festival, fifty years ago. A student died then too — his body found in the sea, too deteriorated to establish cause of death. A love story that never got to be told. A woman who stayed, rebuilt her life, and kept her silence for nearly five decades.

One connection keeps coming up: KARENG 574157 — the old telegraphic address of the college. A message left by the dead for the living?

Four students digitising the institute's archive begin pulling on a thread. Then it becomes something else. Dark and personal.

The Arabian Sea has given up two bodies now. Both asking the same question, fifty years apart.

Some secrets the sea gives back. Some she keeps forever.