After the Missing Floor

By Prashant Mishra

Neil Dutta has built a careful life as a game designer in a border town in Punjab, avoiding the questions that ended an old friendship. At 27, that restraint collapses when Neil inherits a key to a room that does not appear on the building plan. The return of a colleague who may be protecting the culprit makes the search both intimate and unreliable. Their evidence suggests that a supposedly spontaneous romance was designed as a marketing campaign. Then the online mob turns on the protagonist. To protect the wrongfully accused, Neil may have to trust the person whose lie began the investigation. The clue hidden in a rehearsal recording captured by mistake proves that the protagonist’s first assumption protected the real culprit. Away from the main investigation, the need to catalogue objects from a demolished house, while a festival deadline leaves no room for delay.