The bus hadn't even reached the Similipal gates before the air inside turned sour. I sat in the back row, using my camera lens as a barrier between me and the forty-nine other Class 12 students who were pretending this trip to Odisha was about history. By the time we hit the red-dirt tracks of the forest at dusk, the forced singing had faded, leaving a heavy, humid silence. Mr. Sanyal, our history teacher, kept glancing at the rearview mirror with a look that wasn't about traffic; it was the look of a man counting his exits. When the axle snapped with a bone-chilling crack near an abandoned dak bungalow, we quickly shifted from "vacation" to "survival."
Through my viewfinder, I watched Riya, our perfect head girl, begin to unravel. She wasn't scared of the dark; she was terrified of what the darkness allowed us to see. I saw her slip Mr. Sanyal’s phone into her pocket while he was busy searching for a signal in the dense sal trees—a signal we all knew didn't exist this far in. Two hours later, when Sanyal didn't return, Riya didn't call for a search party; she started a witch hunt. She accused the "outsiders" in our class of planning a prank, her voice rising to a pitch that felt more like a confession than an interrogation.
The humidity made my skin crawl, but the footage on my memory card chilled me. I had a clip from the night before we left: Riya and Sanyal in the chemistry lab, a leaked paper between them, and a threat that sounded like a final goodbye. As the rest of the class turned on each other under the flickering porch light of the bungalow, I realized the "Red Corridor" wasn't the forest around us. It was the trail of secrets we had packed in our suitcases. I hit the record button again as a shadow appeared from the treeline—not Sanyal, but someone wearing his jacket, walking with Riya’s distinct, rhythmic limp.
