AUTHOR’S NOTEEvery book I have written begins the same way — with a question I don’t yet know how to answer, and a character who insists on trying anyway. “An incomplete soul needs a completeness, or is it a liability to the world?” is the question this one begins with, and I will admit, even now, at the end of the draft, that I am not entirely sure I have answered it. I am not sure it can be answered. I only know that it is worth asking honestly, through a story that does not flinch from the parts of a life — illness, first love, friendship, family, ambition, grief — that never quite finish the way we plan for them to.
THE INCOMPLETE SOUL borrows, deliberately, from the shape of my own life. The names of the people who raised me and stood beside me appear here in fictional form, carrying fictional weight, doing and saying things the real people never did. That is the nature of the borrowing. What is true is the debt.
The crime at the centre of this novel is invented, but the world it moves through — the procedure, the law, the slow, unglamorous grind of an actual investigation — is one I have tried to render honestly rather than dramatically. Where the two were in tension, I chose honesty, on the theory that a reader who trusts the mechanics of a story will forgive it almost anything else.
Thank you for picking this one up. I hope it keeps you awake past the hour you meant to put it down.
— S.N.
GRATITUDE
To my mother and father, for a love that did not always announce itself but was never once absent.
To my sister, who has spent a lifetime being the softest possible landing for every hard thing I have brought home — including, more than once, the drafts of this very book.
To the friends who let me borrow their names and their loyalty for the people in these pages, and who never once asked for anything back.
To the teachers who told a quiet student that his smile, and later his sentences, were worth something.
And to every reader who has followed my work from one incomplete story to the next, trusting that I would eventually find my way to something whole. This one is for you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
S.N. is an independent author based in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, writing across crime thriller, psychological suspense, literary fiction, and creative nonfiction. His published catalogue includes 12789 – Murdeshwar SF Express, Dead and Alive, DEVI: Article 21 Betrayed, 257 Days of Middle Class, and 20 or 40 Meters, alongside further work published on Matrubharti and StoryMirror. He also writes Tamil-language literary fiction under the pen name Viyazhan Bharathi Ragu.
A commerce graduate by training, S.N. handles every stage of his books independently — manuscript, cover design, formatting, and metadata — and is known for stories built around recurring themes of incompleteness, family, and the long shadow that childhood friendship casts over adult life.
PART ONE — The Highway and the First Night
PROLOGUE
3:00 AM, Anakapalli Junction
The highway was cold in a way Andhra Pradesh highways were not supposed to be in August, and SN lay flat on the gravel shoulder with his notebook shut against his chest like something he was protecting from rain that hadn’t started yet.
Above him the sky had the over-scrubbed clarity that only comes after a day of wind, and he found himself doing the thing he always did when a case had gone quiet on him — counting stars he couldn’t name, as if naming them was ever the point. Somewhere behind him, half a kilometre down the shoulder, his team’s two vehicles sat with their hazard lights ticking in the dark, and nobody had come looking for him yet, which meant they understood, the way people who had worked with him long enough always eventually understood, that some silences were not to be interrupted.
Nineteen hours. That was what the case had cost him so far. Nineteen hours since a mother in Chennai had folded her daughter’s college ID card into his hands like it was something fragile enough to need two people holding it, and he had said the sentence he always said and always meant and had never once been fully sure he could deliver on — I will bring her home.
He was no closer now than he had been at hour one. He was, if he was honest with the notebook and not just with himself, further away. Twelve hours ago the case had a shape he could hold in one hand — a missing girl, a boyfriend with a record, a city to search. Somewhere between then and now it had grown into something with four states, two dozen names, and a set of numbers he had begun, privately, to hate the way you hate a person who keeps almost telling you something and then doesn’t.
He thought about incompleteness the way other men his age thought about money or marriage — constantly, uselessly, without any plan for fixing it. Varsitha, half a life ago, in a hostel in Kotagiri, sick on food that shouldn’t have made anyone that sick. Thosif, cycling beside him down a hill with a brake cable that had been fraying for a week and neither of them had checked. Ishu, on a birthday he still couldn’t watch back in his memory without wincing, saying let’s end it in a voice that had no anger left in it, only tiredness. A diagnosis in Madurai that a doctor had needed seven days just to believe, let alone treat.
Somewhere in all of that was a version of the question he had been asking himself, in one form or another, since he was fourteen years old and lying in a hospital bed being told that dizziness wasn’t laziness. He said it out loud now, to nobody, because the highway was empty and the case was cold and there was no one left to perform composure for.
“An incomplete soul needs a completeness,” he said. “Or is it a liability to the world?”
The horn came before the light did — a long, flat, mechanical certainty rolling in off the dark, growing until the gravel under his back began, very faintly, to hum with it. He knew the sound before he placed the train. He had grown up close enough to a line that certain horns had become as familiar as voices.
Tirupati–Puri Express. Somewhere behind that light were four hundred sleeping strangers being carried, without any say in the matter, from one unfinished life toward another. He wondered, not for the first time that night, how many of them were running from something and how many toward it, and whether either direction ever actually mattered as much as the people doing the running believed it did.
He sat up as it passed, and the wind of it moved his collar, and for one full second — no more — he let himself believe that the case would end here, on this shoulder of highway, with an answer arriving the way the train had: loud, inevitable, and not stoppable by anything he might have preferred instead.
It didn’t, of course. Nothing ever ended the way you were braced for it to.
Nineteen hours ago, none of this had existed yet — not the highway, not the silence, not the number he would come to hate the sight of on a printed ledger sheet months from now. Nineteen hours ago it had only just begun, at nine o’clock the previous night, in a police outpost in Chennai that smelled of instant coffee and dust, with a mother’s hands shaking around a laminated ID card.
9:00 PM — 26 AUGUST 2026
He became aware, gradually, of the small sounds a highway makes even when it is officially empty — the tick of his own car’s engine cooling somewhere behind him, a nightjar working some private argument in the scrub beyond the shoulder, the distant, directionless hum of a truck that never actually arrived. He had chosen this stretch of road for no better reason than that it was the last place the day’s search had put him, and he had lain down on it for no better reason than that his legs had simply stopped being willing to keep standing.
There is a specific kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with sleep, he thought, turning the phrase over because turning phrases over was the only thing his mind still wanted to do. It was the tiredness of holding a shape — investigator, son, brother, the man who says I will bring her home and means it — for so many consecutive hours that the shape began to feel less like something he wore and more like something wearing him.
