✦⭑ I. When Threads Become a Web
By the time the first pillars of the new Uyyalawada mansion rose and wedding-talk had begun to invade even his dreams, Narasimha realized he had another problem:
His information had grown faster than his ability to hold it.
Messages poured in from:
caravan routes between Kurnool and Madras,
ports in Ceylon, Muscat, Calcutta, Bombay,
hill paths near Mysore,
small coffee houses in Madurai,
even from inside British cantonments.
Grain prices.
Tax changes.
New laws.
Rumours of British promotions.
Which officer drank too much.
Which local landlord was secretly negotiating for more Company backing.
Whispers of unrest.
Whispers of betrayal.
All that came to him.
At first it had felt flattering.
Now it felt… dangerous.
One evening, in the still-unfinished Map Room, scrolls and palm-leaves were piled so high they looked like small fort walls.
Narasimha sat in the middle of them, knees drawn up, one palm pressed to his forehead.
Sri stood at the doorway with her arms folded.
"This," she said, "is not a map room. This is a drowning."
He stared at a particular bundle.
"This report," he muttered, "about a Company officer in Bellary taking bribes—came two weeks late. Because it was stuck under a note about grain spoilage. Because the boy who carried it handed it to the wrong man, who didn't know who to give it to. If that officer had been more ambitious, if his bribes had gone toward buying extra troops, we might have missed something worse."
Ayyappa stepped in, picking up one scroll and then another.
"And here," he said, "one spy sent the same information three times through three different routes. Good for redundancy. Bad because you ended up reading the same 'news' thrice and thinking it came from three different places. That could have made you overreact."
Raghava added quietly,
"Last month, one message about a possible mole in our coastal branch took eight days to reach us. In that time, the mole almost slipped away. If not for Devudu catching something odd in a shipping manifest…"
He let the unfinished sentence hang.
It was clear.
The Trinetra that Narasimha had been slowly weaving—the "three-eyed" scattered watchers hidden among:
caravan boys,
temple drummers,
travel singers,
port scribes—
was too big to run as a hobby.
It needed to become something else.
Not just an instinctive network.
A system.
Narasimha looked at his three closest advisors:
Sri, his mind for patterns,
Ayyappa, his soldier,
Raghava, his quiet shadow.
"Until now," he said, "we have behaved like a village gossip circle—just very efficient and well-travelled. If we keep growing like this without structure, one mistake will cost us everything. One scared boy, one captured courier, one loose tongue… and the British will start pulling at threads."
"And if they pull hard enough," Sri added, "they might see the shape of the web."
He exhaled.
"Then we don't give them a web to see," he said slowly. "Only pieces. Confusion. Fragments that never add up in their eyes. We must become…"
He searched for words.
"Like a hidden devata in a village," he said at last. "Everyone feels something watching—no one knows the name, the form, or where its shrine is. Offerings reach, but never reveal the idol."
Sri's eyes lit.
"So," she said, "we formalize Trinetra… by erasing Trinetra. At least on paper."
Ayyappa smiled grimly.
"A shadow that sees everything," he said, "but never stands where arrows can find it."
Raghava merely nodded.
He knew what this meant.
More work.
Less glory.
Perfect.
❖ II. Legacy of Chanakya, Whispers of the West
The next step was not building walls.
It was opening old books.
In the cool depth of an inner room, Narasimha sat with:
palm-leaf copies of the Arthashastra,
temple inscriptions mentioning guptacharas (hidden agents) of ancient kings,
stories of how empires had once used spies, informers, and counter-spies.
Beside those, like strange imported spices, lay:
notes from Edwin Fairfax about how some European states used "intelligence bureaux" and "informal agents,"
tidbits about British systems of "native informers" and "political officers,"
rumours of French networks from previous wars.
Venkanna watched him with a small smile.
"You are not the first to think of hidden eyes," the Guru said. "But you may be the first to think of them across oceans."
Narasimha traced a line on one palm-leaf from the Arthashastra.
"Chanakya speaks of types of spies," he murmured. "Householder spies, merchant spies, wandering ascetics, courtesans, storytellers. He speaks of double-agents. People planted to mislead the enemy. It is all here. We forgot."
He lifted Edwin's notes.
"And here," he said, "they talk of central 'desks' where reports are collected and analysed. Of separating 'collectors of information' from those who decide what it means. If one is compromised, the other can still function."
He looked up.
"We will take both," he said. "We are not ashamed to learn from anyone—old or foreign. But we will not become their copy. We will be ours."
He drew four circles on a blank palm.
In the centre he wrote a small sigil—a vertical line with three intersecting curves.
Around it, he wrote four words:
Dṛṣṭi – Sight.
Buddhi – Mind.
Kavacha – Shield.
Chhāya – Shadow.
"Eyes, mind, shield, strike," Ayyappa murmured, watching.
"Collection, analysis, counterintelligence, covert action," Sri translated into Edwin's rough English categories.
Narasimha smiled faintly.
"RAW," he said quietly, in a language not yet born. "Not the word they will use in some future office, but the idea. Research and Analysis of a world that wishes we stayed ignorant."
"What is RAW?" Sri asked, hearing only the strange syllable.
"A seed," he said. "I will explain in a hundred years."
She rolled her eyes.
"Fine," she said. "For now, let us work with what we can see."
✢ III. The Four Faces of Trinetra
They met at night, in the nearly finished Map Room.
Doors barred.
Lamps low.
On the table, stones were used as markers:
black for Trinetra agents already in place,
white for potential new recruits,
red for known British informers,
grey for "unknowns"—those who might be trouble or opportunity.
Narasimha drew four simple diagrams.
1. Dṛṣṭi – The Eyes (Collection)
"These," he said, touching the black stones, "will be the Dṛṣṭi—the eyes.
They will be:
caravan boys,
dockworkers,
clerks in British offices,
temple musicians,
storytellers in bazaar corners.
Their job is simple: see and carry.
See:
troop movements,
new laws,
tax increases,
suspicious meetings,
unusual shipments,
local grievances brewing into revolt.
Carry:
not opinions,
not rumours they invent,
but what they have truly seen or heard."
"We already have many," Raghava said. "But now we can name and train them deliberately."
Narasimha nodded.
"We teach them," he said, "how to remember details. How to hide messages. How to survive questions without giving their hearts away. They will not know everything. Just their piece. If caught, the chain stops with them."
2. Buddhi – The Mind (Analysis)
He drew another circle.
"In the middle," he said, "we need Buddhi—the mind.
A small group.
They will:
receive fragments,
cross-check them,
remove duplicates,
spot patterns.
They will be:
scribes with patience,
people like Sri who can see shapes in chaos,
a few older merchants who understand how one tax change in London can sink a ship in Calicut."
Sri smirked.
"So I become the brain of this beast," she said. "Fitting."
"Not alone," Narasimha said. "We'll need at least three minds, so no one person becomes a single point of failure."
He underlined this.
"If one analyst is bribed or broken," he added, "the others must catch the deviation. No one sits above suspicion. Not even family."
Raghava nodded firmly.
"Good," he said. "Trust, but with eyes open."
3. Kavacha – The Shield (Counterintelligence)
The third circle he darkened with thumb-smudged charcoal.
"This," he said, "is Kavacha—shield.
Their work is to:
find enemy eyes that look back at us,
spot British informers inside our own system,
test our own agents occasionally,
feed false information outward when needed."
Ayyappa's gaze sharpened.
"Counter-spies," he said.
"Yes," Narasimha replied. "They will be unpopular. No one likes being doubted. But they will prevent the worst poison: rot from within."
He looked at Devudu, who had quietly joined them.
"You have a nose for lies," he said. "You see who hesitates at the wrong word. You'll help build this wing."
Devudu scratched his beard.
"I don't like suspecting our own people," he said.
"Neither do I," Narasimha replied softly. "But if we don't, our enemies will recruit them first. I'd rather catch a good man before he falls than punish him after."
4. Chhāya – The Shadow (Covert Operations)
Finally, he tapped the last circle.
"And this," he said, his voice cooling, "is Chhāya—shadow.
These are the ones who:
quietly remove threats,
sabotage shipments of guns meant to break villages,
rescue innocents when we cannot move openly,
sometimes… make certain men vanish."
A heavy silence.
This was a line that could not be sugar-coated.
"Assassins," Ayyappa said bluntly.
"Not butchers," Narasimha replied. "Not killers for hire. Tools used rarely, like a surgeon's knife. We are not building Thuggee cults. We are building a scalpel for when infection refuses all other cures."
He looked each of them in the eyes.
"Understand this," he said. "Chhāya is dangerous not just to our enemies, but to us. Men who get used to solving everything with a dagger stop believing in courts or compassion. So—rule: shadow only moves when Dṛṣṭi and Buddhi agree that all other paths are closed. And Kavacha watches them too."
"Layers watching layers," Sri murmured.
"Three eyes watching each other," Venkanna added. "Like Shiva's Trinetra—if any one eye is blinded, the others see."
Narasimha, without realizing, had redesigned his network from a loose spiderweb into something else:
A living organism,
with nerves and reflexes,
mind and immune system,
hands that could reach silently across distances.
✢ IV. Erasing the Name
"Now," Sri said, tapping the centre sigil, "what do we call it?"
"Trinetra," Devudu suggested. "That is what some of us already whisper."
Narasimha shook his head.
"Not anymore," he said.
They turned to him, surprised.
"Names are invitations," he said. "Anything that can be named can be hunted. If we keep saying 'Trinetra, Trinetra,' one day some British file will contain it. Then they will go looking."
"Then what do we call ourselves?" Ayyappa asked.
He smiled faintly.
"To each other, we use only what is needed," he said.
He touched the four circles.
"A field agent from Dṛṣṭi knows only:
'I send news to this contact in this way.'
He does not know he is 'Trinetra.'
An analyst in Buddhi knows:
'I receive reports from many and make sense.'
She does not know all the hands that gather.
Kavacha agents test, shadow, and protect, but never speak of being part of some glorious secret corps.
Chhāya… moves in darkness and vanishes when done.
Outside this room, the word 'Trinetra' is never spoken again."
Raghava frowned slightly.
"But men need names," he said quietly. "How will they feel part of something?"
"They already belong to village, clan, Sangha, kingdom," Narasimha said. "This one… they belong not for pride, but for purpose. If they need a name, they will call themselves messengers, guards, clerks. Only we, here, will hold the full pattern."
He looked at the diagram.
"We are building something that must be like a hidden god in the stories," he repeated. "Protector no one can point to. Punisher no one can accuse. Explainable in parts, never in whole."
Sri's eyes softened.
"In other words," she said, "we are building the future version of something that will one day be called RAW, IB, intelligence services, and… various scary acronyms."
He grinned.
"Exactly," he said. "Except ours will be better dressed. We are in south India. We have standards."
❖ V. Training Ghosts
Once the design was set, came the hard part:
Training.
They did not build a single "spy school" with banners and slogans.
They built habits.
One by one, existing agents were called quietly to Uyyalawada—or met on neutral ground:
a caravanserai on the road to Bellary,
a temple town by the Tungabhadra,
a warehouse in Machilipatnam.
There, in small groups, they were taught:
Observation
Venkanna himself led some sessions.
He would have them sit in a marketplace and then ask:
"How many bangles on the woman who sold you lentils? What colour turban did the cobbler wear? How many steps from the well to the banyan? Which guard scratched his beard with his left hand?"
At first they groaned.
Then they improved.
Message Crafting
Sri invented simple yet resilient codes.
A grain order might say:
"Send five sacks of red millet, three of white, delays expected near the northern border."
Where:
"red millet" meant soldiers,
"white" meant new officers,
"delays near northern border" meant suspicious British troop movement toward a particular district.
Agents learned:
how to hide meaning in trade tallies,
how to use poetry, proverbs, and even bhajans as carriers of certain fixed phrases.
Cover Identities
Ayyappa drilled into them:
"You are never 'spy' in your own head. You are:
weaver,
potter,
singer,
cook,
clerk,
who sometimes notices things for your conscience's sake.
If you think of yourself as spy, you'll start swaggering. Then you'll die."
They laughed, but the point stuck.
Interrogation Resistance (Soft)
They did not torture their own.
But they simulated pressure:
sudden questioning,
threats of job loss,
bribery offers,
emotional ploys.
Venkanna taught them:
small breathing tricks to stay calm,
harmless lies to throw off suspicion,
how to answer just enough to be boring.
"Most men," he said, "will not beat you if they find you dull. Let them think you are small. Invisibility is your armour."
Compartmentalization
Each was assigned:
a narrow focus,
a single contact,
specific drop-points.
No one knew:
the full map,
all the names,
all the plans.
That knowledge stayed with:
Narasimha,
Sri,
Raghava,
two or three others in Buddhi and Kavacha.
✢ VI. The First Test: A Leaking Roof
No system is real until it is tested.
The test came sooner than they wanted.
In a coastal town, a Sangha warehouse supervisor named Subbayya suddenly seemed… lucky.
His small house improved too quickly.
New brass pot.
New anklets for his wife.
Better clothes.
He was, by all accounts, cheerful, competent—and not particularly clever.
Too not clever to suddenly make perfect grain bets several months in a row.
Subbayya happened to handle:
manifests of which ships were bound where,
rough knowledge of which convoys had more "valuable" goods.
Kavacha noticed.
Devudu sent a whisper.
"Test him," he said.
They did.
First gently, through accounts—Raghava tracked where Subbayya's extra coins originated.
It led, not directly, but crookedly, to a British intermediary, a half-Indian fixer who sometimes helped match local services to Company needs.
He had been paying Subbayya small sums for "hints":
"Which routes are lightly guarded?"
"When do Sangha ships carry more textiles than grain?"
On the surface, it looked like someone trying to offer information to pirates or competitors.
Digging deeper, Buddhi saw more:
Those hints matched sudden, targeted "inspection raids" by Company patrol ships.
They weren't just harassing pirates.
They were probing Sangha's routes.
The leak was small.
But leaks in boats and networks grow fast.
In the old days, Narasimha might have stormed in personally.
Now, he didn't.
He let the system move.
Kavacha:
quietly rewrote some manifests,
fed false patterns through Subbayya's mouth—routes that seemed rich but were actually traps.
Dṛṣṭi:
watched the British ships adjust course based on those "tips."
Chhāya:
prepared, just in case.
On a hot afternoon, a British patrol ship moved to intercept what they believed was a fat target.
Instead, they found:
a smaller, lightly-laden vessel with just enough value to justify their trouble,
an apparently flustered captain who "accidentally" mentioned he'd been redirected by a last-minute warehouse order—signed by Subbayya.
The British officer, thinking himself clever, made note of the signature.
Later, when he tried to piece together why several of his "lucky strikes" had turned into mediocre catches, those notes added to the load.
His suspicion fell, not on a grand conspiracy, but on:
"One greedy warehouse supervisor playing both sides badly."
Kavacha watched this.
Then moved.
Subbayya was not dragged into a public trial.
Narasimha did not hang him as an example.
That would only show the British they had almost hit something sensitive.
Instead:
Subbayya was quietly dismissed for "accounting irregularities,"
moved to a distant, minor post where he could harm no one,
and watched.
Raghava visited him, simply, one evening.
"Why?" he asked.
Subbayya, sweating, wrung his hands.
"I thought… just a little extra money," he stammered. "They asked simple things. Not about you, Dora. Only… routes. I thought—"
"You thought you could dance between waves without getting wet," Raghava said.
He left him in his small new house.
Sometimes, living with your choices was the sharper punishment.
More importantly, Trinetra had just proved:
Dṛṣṭi saw the change.
Buddhi connected the dots.
Kavacha identified the leak and used it.
Chhāya never needed to draw blood.
The roof had leaked.
The new structure had held.
❖ VII. Confusing the Company
British intelligence in Madras had its own webs:
paid informers in courts and bazaars,
"native agents" in important houses,
suspicious clerks who reported what they thought mattered.
From time to time, memoranda crossed desks.
One such report, some years after Trinetra's formalization, read:
"Regarding Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy –
Intelligence remains inconsistent.
Some describe him as devout, others as pragmatic.
Some say he despises us, others that he is unusually cooperative.
One source claims he funds rebels; another that he calms them.
Trading patterns of his associated merchants suggest great wealth, yet land revenue records show moderate holdings.
No clear seditious activity can be conclusively tied to him, but unrest in regions he 'influences' appears strangely contained rather than eruptive.
Conclusion: Subject remains confusing. Recommend continued observation."
Another, even more frustrated, said:
"Our attempts to map this so-called 'merchant guild' (Samudra Vyapara Sangha) onto standard organizational charts have failed. No central office, no single treasurer, no clear hierarchy. Whenever we try to squeeze one node, branches shift. It is like grasping fog."
That fog was not an accident.
It was design.
Trinetra—now nameless—played a long game:
sometimes giving British just enough useful information about worse threats (bandits, rival gangs, genuine criminals) so that Company efforts were directed away from villages Narasimha wanted left alone,
sometimes making sure British knew about a particularly brutal minor noble elsewhere, so that their "reform zeal" was exhausted on someone expendable,
sometimes allowing small "successes" against irrelevant targets, to maintain the illusion that their networks worked.
"They must never feel blind," Sri said once. "A blind enemy flails and hits everything. A half-sighted one is easier to guide."
"And us?" Narasimha asked.
She smiled.
"We," she said, "are the god in the corner of their eye. Always almost visible. Never clear."
✢ VIII. Marvel Takes Note
In Kamar-Taj, the senior Master who had been watching India sighed as yet another vision-thread showed:
messages moving in hidden channels,
decisions being made before crises erupted,
British efforts somehow always… one step behind.
"The mortals are building their own version of all-seeing networks," he murmured to an apprentice. "Without magic. Just discipline and fear and care."
"Is that… a problem?" the apprentice asked.
"Not in itself," the Master said. "It is… interesting. When the time comes that we must ask someone on this land to help hold a line against darker forces than colonizers, it is useful to know there exists a mind already accustomed to thinking in layers and shadows."
He made an entry in his private notes:
"Terra Subject U.N.R. – Intelligence Web: high sophistication for era. Covert, decentralized, high dharmic bias (protective, not purely exploitative). Potential future ally if cosmic threats intersect with political turbulence."
Elsewhere, an Eternal archivist watching long human patterns wrote:
"The Rayalaseema anomaly has now created something akin to early proto-'intelligence agencies' centuries ahead of their time, blended with ethical constraints. Will likely influence later Indian state forms."
In some far future:
when S.H.I.E.L.D. would run files,
when Kingsman would whisper about "old Indian contacts,"
when RAW and IB would share turf,
Shadow-analysts would look back and quietly mark Uyyalawada's nameless network as an ancestor.
They would not know its name.
Because it never had one.
That, too, was by design.
❖ IX. The Lion and His Invisible Armour
One night, much later, when a crisis had been averted because of early warnings—an uprising redirected so villagers were spared Company reprisals—Narasimha found himself alone with Venkanna on the mansion's roof.
Below, lamps of the new house glowed.
Beyond, the dark land breathed.
He leaned on the parapet.
"Tired?" Venkanna asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Proud?" the Guru added.
He considered.
"A little," he admitted. "Not of victories. Of… the fact that when some farmer in a small village sleeps tonight, he has no idea that three different people carried three different messages to prevent some idiot British officer from marching through his fields."
He smiled faintly.
"He will thank his local deity," he said. "And maybe curse the rains. He will never know that a secret network decided he was too important to lose."
"That," Venkanna said, "is how it should be. If he knew, he would start looking up, not forward. You don't want a people dependent on invisible hands. You want them to stand. You are armour, not crutch."
Narasimha chuckled softly.
"So," he said, "I am now a lion wearing invisible armour made of other people's courage and quietness. How poetic."
"Do not say it like that in front of poets," Venkanna warned. "They will steal the line and you will hear it in songs for the next fifty years."
He turned his gaze upward, toward invisible heavens.
"The boy," he said softly, "has built his own hidden god."
In Vaikuntha, Parvati smiled.
"No," she said. "He has built a hidden temple. The god is still us. But the work… that is his."
Lakshmi added,
"And that temple is not made of stone. It is made of trust, fear, and paper."
Saraswati's veena-string thrummed lightly.
"Intelligence," she said, "is just another word for applied knowledge. He honours me well."
Maheshwara glanced toward the mortal realm.
"And now," he rumbled, "when the time comes for war, he will not fight blind. That is all we can ask of a king who cannot die."
✵ X. Closing of "The Eye That Leaves No Shadow"
By the end of Chapter 25, another crucial layer of Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy's destiny had crystallized:
The loose Trinetra of watchers became a structured, nameless intelligence organism, divided into:
Dṛṣṭi – Eyes (collection),
Buddhi – Mind (analysis),
Kavacha – Shield (counterintelligence),
Chhāya – Shadow (covert operations).
Its name was deliberately erased, leaving no single word for enemies to chase—only a haze of "helpful clerks," "busy merchants," "nosy bards," and "lucky guesses."
It grew more hidden than any single sect or guild—confusing to British records, invisible to ordinary villagers, yet present in every serious choice the chieftain made.
It became a proto-RAW, a prelude to future agencies, stitched together from Chanakya's ancient guptacharas, European methods whispered by Edwin, and Narasimha's own ruthless, dharmic clarity.
To some, it would always look like coincidence:
"How did Simha Dora know to move grain before that bad flood?"
"How did his men arrive just when the tax raid was about to turn into a massacre?"
"How does he always seem… prepared?"
To British eyes, it remained an irritant:
"Subject remains confusing. No clear pattern of subversion found. Recommend continued observation."
To the gods, it was an invisible offering:
A network built not for glory,
not for titles,
but so that when the roar finally came—
when Empire, Marvel forces, and cosmic storms converged—
their chosen lion would not stand alone on a bare rock,
but at the centre of a web of eyes and minds,
a hidden god's quiet, mortal equivalent:
Seeing.
Thinking.
Shielding.
Striking when it must.
And then fading again into silence,
leaving behind no name,
only the simple fact that:
"Somehow…
the people here
were not crushed
when they should have been."
✦ End of Chapter 25 – "The Eye That Leaves No Shadow" ✦