In the low corner of a church graveyard on the shore of Vembanad Lake lies Themmadikkuzhi — rogue’s ground — where the parish buries those it will not bless: the suicides, the unbelievers, the ones who got the paperwork of dying wrong.

They have no marble here, only each other. Vakka, who hanged himself after a quarrel too small to name and still chases holy water that never lands. Cheriyan, the atheist schoolmaster, dead and still unconvinced. Mathai, cracking peanuts from a skull he calls a bowl. And two small boys who arrived with no funeral at all, and watch the vicar every morning until he is out of sight.

Beneath the ground runs a coil that holds everything ever buried there. Walking it, the dead uncover their neighbours’ lives — a wager over children, a kitchen-door death three women kept secret for decades, and the older, holier ground the church was built on..

The one who tells it has lost his own name. Across the lake, machines are carrying away a white hill, and with every truckload he forgets a little more. He means to write it all down while he still can.