Community archivist Meera Ahuja arrives in Shimla just as the first monsoon mists roll across the Ridge, contracted to inventory the contents of Rose Court, a once-grand hill-station hotel wedged between Lakkar Bazaar and a deodar stand overlooking Scandal Point. The building is slated for a swift, quiet redevelopment; her task is to move faster. Inside a cold room with terrazzo floors and a teak dresser scarred by suitcase edges, she finds a ledger with names inked in violet, a shoebox of Kodak negatives, a palmful of silver charms wrapped in old ration slips, and three 16mm reels hand-labeled "Silver Dream." With her mother's dialysis bills mounting in Delhi and a fragile fellowship depending on documented, community-consented returns, she has no choice but to finish the work and keep her own rules intact: do no harm, and don't get entangled.
Arman Singh, a restoration contractor from Solan with a civil engineer's patience and a carpenter's hands, has been hired to turn Rose Court into a glass-and-timber eco-lodge for a Mumbai consortium. After a breakup that taught him that buildings are easier than people, he sticks to checklists and avoids historians who slow projects with second thoughts. Yet from the moment Meera walks the colonnade tracing the joints of the old balustrade with a pencil, he realizes she knows this place the way he knows load-bearing walls. He needs the commission to keep his father's workshop afloat and a bank manager off his back; he does not need a stubborn archivist who smells faintly of camphor and rain insisting that a tin trunk can change a timeline.
As they map drain lines and catalog a life in objects, Meera and Arman begin decoding the archive's heart: letters between Noor D'Souza, an Anglo-Indian nurse at Ripon, and Hari Thakur, a Pahari drummer who played weddings in Summerhill, stretching from 1947 to 1963. A train ticket for the Kalka–Shimla Railway, a bracelet with a tiny silver camera, and a hand-painted poster for a never-released film called "Silver Dream" point to a rumor older residents still murmur over chai: if the original projector in Rose Court's little cinema room screens that film, the building qualifies for heritage review and demolition must pause. Restoring a Bell & Howell that coughs dust, negotiating with a prickly ward officer and an equally prickly consortium head, Meera and Arman find their routines bending toward each other—toward midnight reels, shared pakoras on the Mall, and choices that threaten their contracts, reputations, and carefully arranged lives. The reel might be too brittle, the clause too fragile, the past too contested. But the more they stand together in the flicker of silver light, the clearer it becomes that the only way to save a hillside's memory may also be the only way to risk their guarded hearts.
