We Were Never There: A Family Reckoning During the Rains

By Prashant Mishra

Everyone in an artists colony in Kochi agrees on what happened, until Sana Ali, a 18-year-old museum fellow, finds a coded correction repeated across library books. Working uneasily with a musician whose missing parent started the mystery, Sana discovers that the old fire was arson committed to destroy an adoption register. Each answer makes the accepted story less believable, and then the protagonist becomes the prime suspect. To stop the truth from being buried again, Sana must confess their own connection to the case. The decisive clue is a damaged fitness tracker, which reveals that two unrelated families had been preserving opposite halves of the truth. A parallel thread follows the effort to prepare a legal-aid petition, while the task keeps bringing the protagonist back to the scene of the crime.