In the labyrinthine alleys of Chandni Chowk, there lived a boy who collected what others lost.
Raghu wasn’t an ordinary thief—he stole only light.
The flicker of a dying bulb in a forgotten warehouse. The last amber glow of a temple diya before the priest snuffed it. Even the silvery trail of moonlight that slipped through cracks in the tin roofs. He caught them all in his brass lantern, its glass etched with constellations only he could name.
The Lantern’s Hunger
At first, it was just scraps—a half-hour of stolen sunset here, a handful of firefly pulses there. But the lantern grew hungrier.
One night, it whispered to him: "Bring me the light no one remembers."
So Raghu crept into the abandoned haveli at the alley’s end, where a single chandelier still hung—its crystals dull with dust, but humming with a peculiar warmth. As he reached up, the glass prisms shivered.
The Forgotten Glow
The moment Raghu’s fingers brushed the chandelier, the lantern flared.
Suddenly, he wasn’t in a ruin anymore.
The haveli blazed with a hundred oil lamps. A woman in a peacock-blue sari laughed as she adjusted the chandelier’s chains, her bangles scattering reflections like fallen stars. "Look how it dances!" she told the child clinging to her skirts—a little girl who’d grow up to be Raghu’s own grandmother.
This wasn’t just light. It was memory.
The Choice
The lantern pulsed eagerly in his hands, ready to swallow this luminous ghost. But Raghu hesitated.
Some lights weren’t meant to be kept.
He let go.
The vision faded, but as he turned to leave, a single crystal droplet fell from the chandelier into his palm—warm as a tear, glowing like a captured dawn.
Outside, the first birds began to sing.
