Every evening at dusk, a woman's voice rises from the bottom of the old stepwell at Sankhera. The village calls her the Bride. Nobody goes down the steps after the lamp is lit. Naina Vyas records the sounds that other people stop hearing. When a restoration grant sends her to a dust-coloured village on the edge of the Thar, she expects a quiet month with a microphone and a flask of tea. Then her recorder catches the song a second time, seven seconds late, with every breath in the same place. She knows that song. Her mother made it up for her, and no one else alive could sing it. Twenty years ago, one October dusk, her mother walked down those steps with a tape machine and never came home. The old men of Sankhera will not meet her eyes. The richest man in the district is kindness itself. And every night, as the light goes, someone in the dark is still keeping the Bride singing. Some things in a village are buried so well that only a sound can find them.