Critics called Hanuman Ansh slow and full of magic. Much of that should stand. But a verdict on craft is not a verdict on the whole, and a devotee who treats every criticism as an insult does more damage than any two-star review.

Did Neem Karoli Baba’s train really stop? I cannot prove it, and neither can you. But look at what he asked for: a station for a village. How logic reads every miracle in Hanuman Ansh, without blind belief and without mockery.

At Hanuman Ansh, people took off their shoes in a multiplex and stayed through the credits. The building did not need to become a temple. They carried the temple in with them, and that is exactly why devotion needs judgement.

A dog walks five kilometres of the most closely modelled ground on earth and nobody puts anything down for her. Past the checkpoint, a fruit seller drops half a spoiled guava beside her cart wheel without looking.

Dev Sharma wakes at 4:50, eleven minutes before his house expects him. For nine months the rear gate’s latch has been fully closed. This morning the dog does not go to her bowl.

Samar approved Harish Oberoi’s file before the chime finished sounding. Sixty-two, a moustache going white on one side first, confidence 97.1. Years later he asks the Archive what happened to the man.

For twenty-six years Dev Sharma knew a longer recording of his night at Gate Four existed. He never asked to see it. On a Tuesday, in plain clothes, he sits down in a low chair in the Archive and asks for all four minutes.

Aisha has signed more than nine hundred files. She fought about sixty. Four she still thinks were wrong. Then Samar, two years out, comes to her office to ask how she saved one tailor’s licence.