The city's skin had begun to knit itself back together. Auto-rickshaws wove through traffic with their familiar, frantic energy, vendors hawked their wares with performative urgency, and the clatter of everyday life sought to drown out the memory of screams. But to Alok, this normalcy was a grotesque pantomime. How could the world dare to spin on its axis when his had been ripped from its orbit? The laughter from tea stalls felt like mockery; the bustling streets, a betrayal.
For him, time had not moved forward twelve days. It had congealed into a single, eternal moment in a rain-slicked alley, the weight of Shree's lifeless body forever in his arms.
---
The Hollow Days: A Palace of Memory and Dust
His hostel room was no longer a place of study; it was a catacomb of a life abruptly terminated. Textbooks lay open to pages annotated in her hand—precise, intelligent marginalia that now seemed like messages from a ghost. A single dried rose, pressed between the leaves of a poetry book, was a relic of a sentiment that felt alien to him now. Each object was a landmark on a map of a country that no longer existed.
Sleep was a forgotten country. His feet, guided by a phantom pain, traced the geography of their lost life. He haunted the chai stall where steam had fogged her glasses as she laughed; the garden bench where she had teasingly compared his handwriting to "a spider dipped in ink"; the very lecture hall where his world had first narrowed to the space between her eyes.
But these pilgrimages offered no solace. They were visits to a graveyard. Every familiar sight was now a tombstone engraved with the same epitaph: You were here. You were happy. You failed.
His wanderings also took him through the city's wounds—the charred skeletons of shops, the acid-smell of burnt rubber and hatred lingering in the air long after the flames were doused. These scars did not whisper; they screamed. They were proof of the world's inherent brutality, a lesson he was learning by heart.
Yada yada hi dharmasya glanir bhavati Bharata… The ancient verse from the Gita whispered in the wind of his mind. Abhyutthanam adharmasya tadatmanam srjamy aham. (Whenever there is a decay of righteousness,O Bharata, and a rise of unrighteousness, then I manifest Myself.)
But where was the manifestation? Where was the divine justice? There was only silence. And in that void, a terrible thought took root: if God would not manifest to restore balance, then perhaps a man must become God. Or a demon.
---
The Whisper of Vengeance: The River's Counsel
He found himself at the banks of the Yamuna one night. The black water flowed, silent and indifferent, a mirror to the void within him. His reflection was fractured, a collection of shattered pieces.
The thoughts that had been circling like vultures now descended, sharp and clear.
The law is a slow, blind beast, gorging on procedure while the guilty feast. Justice is a story we tell the weak to keep them docile. Her death demands an answer that the world is not designed to give.
His hands, which had once held books and her fingers, now clenched into fists of useless fury. He spoke to the river, his voice a raw scrape in the darkness.
"Aparadhe kriyate yah, sa eva pratipadyate." (The consequence of an action returns to the one who commits it.)
He was not quoting; he was vowing. The water carried the words away, but the intent settled in his bones, cold and heavy. His grief, once a formless ocean of pain, began to crystallize into a single, sharp point: purpose.
---
The Man Called Dhanna: The Serpent' Offer
The meeting felt less like chance and more like destiny's trap.
He was sitting amidst the ruins of their tea stall near Jama Masjid, the charcoal bricks crumbling under his touch, when a presence altered the air itself. He looked up.
The man was immaculate. A white kurta of finest cotton, a presence that commanded the darkness around him to recede. This was Dhanna Seth, a name that operated in the spaces between business, politics, and power—a man who understood the economy of fear better than any banker understood money.
"Tum Alok ho," the man stated. It was not a question.
Alok remained silent, his guard rising instinctively.
Dhanna lit a cigarette, the flare of the match illuminating eyes that had seen everything and been shocked by nothing. "Mujhe pata hai tum kis andar ke narak se guzar rahe ho." (I know what inner hell you are passing through.)
"Aapko kya pata mere dard ka?" Alok's voice was hoarse, defensive. (What do you know of my pain?)
A shadow of something resembling empathy crossed Dhanna's face. "Dukheshu anudvigna-manah, sukheshu vigata-sprhah." He exhaled a plume of smoke. "The Gita speaks of a mind undisturbed in sorrow. A lofty ideal. I lost my wife too. Not to fate. To a mob much like yours. That is when I learned the law is a web for flies, while the spiders walk free. Insaaf…" he leaned in, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, "…insaaf is not delivered. It is taken."
The words were a key turning in a lock deep inside Alok's soul.
Dhanna's gaze was hypnotic. "Tum rokar use wapas nahi laa sakte. But you can ensure her death was not an empty, forgotten thing. You can make it the foundation stone of a new order. You can teach this city the cost of its sins."
The word hung between them, unspoken yet deafening: Revenge.
Alok's breath hitched. The fire Dhanna was stoking found a vast reservoir of fuel. "Kaise?" (How?) The word was barely a whisper, a surrender.
Dhanna's smile was a thin, cold thing. "Yogah karmasu kausalam." (Yoga is skill in action.) "Skill must be taught. And I have teachers."
---
Forging the Weapon: The Anatomy of a Metamorphosis
The training ground was a derelict warehouse, a cathedral of rust and forgotten ambition. Here, under the sickly glow of a single halogen lamp, Alok's deconstruction began.
His tutors were Nishant and Saurabh—men whose souls seemed to be made of weathered leather and old scars. Their eyes held no light, only the flat reflection of violence accepted and mastered.
"Dukham eva sarvam vivekinah." Nishant's voice was a gravelly rasp as Alok collapsed after a brutal sparring session. "For the discerning one, all is sorrow. You can let it drown you, or you can let it become the fire in your veins. Your choice."
So, Alok embraced the fire.
He pummelled the heavy bag until his fists were a mosaic of torn skin and bruising, each impact a silent scream of Shree's name. He ran until his muscles screamed and his vision blurred, pushing past the pain because physical agony was easier to bear than the psychic void. He learned to disassemble and reassemble blindfolded, the cold metal of the weapon becoming an extension of his cold resolve.
Karmany evadhikaras te ma phalesu kadachana. (You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not entitled to the fruits of your actions.) Dhanna would watch sometimes,murmuring the verse. "Do not act for result, boy. Act because it is the only truth left to you. Become the action itself."
Grief was alchemized into focus. Pain was transmuted into power. The gentle student of poetry was systematically erased, his body and mind reforged into a single, lethal instrument.
---
The First Hunt: The Baptism of Blood
The summons came. The room was thick with the smell of expensive whiskey and cheap ambition.
"Samay aa gaya hai," Dhanna said, his voice calm. "The battle within is won. Now for the battle without." (The time has come.)
He slid a photograph across the polished wood. The face that stared back was seared into Alok's memory—a man with a scar bisecting his eyebrow, who had been at the forefront of the mob, his face a mask of joyous hatred.
"This one helped circle your Shree," Dhanna said, his tone devoid of emotion. "He believes his political connections are a shield. Show him they are paper."
That night, Alok became the hunter. He moved through the labyrinthine gullies not as a man, but as a shadow, his breathing synced to the rhythm of the city's dark heart. He tracked his prey with a dispassionate precision that would have terrified his former self.
When he cornered the man in a dead-end alley, the fear in the man's eyes was a palpable thing. The pleas began, messy and desperate.
Alok felt nothing. No rage, no hatred. Only a profound, chilling clarity. He was not a man committing violence; he was a principle of cause and effect manifesting.
The violence was not a frenzied attack; it was a brutal, efficient dissection. A message written in broken bone and split skin. When it was over, Alok stood over the whimpering form, his own hands stained, his heart rate steady.
He walked away, leaving the lesson in the dirt. For the first time since holding Shree's body, he did not feel empty.
He felt potent.
---
The Reflection: The Death of the Boy
Back in the harsh fluorescent light of the hostel bathroom, he scrubbed his hands. The water ran pink, then clear, but he knew the stain was no longer on his skin; it was in his soul. He looked up into the mirror.
The face that stared back was a stranger's. The eyes were not windows to a soul; they were flat, polished stones. The softness of the student was gone, planed away to reveal the hardened geometry of a weapon.
And then, her voice, a ghost from the ruins of his mind: "Mujhe darr nahi hai… tum ho na…" (I'm not scared... you're here...)
A seismic tremor broke through his icy control. A sob, raw and ragged, tore from his throat. He pressed his forehead against the cold glass, his breath fogging the reflection.
"Aham tvam sarvapapebhyo mokshayishyami ma suchah," he whispered, a perverse inversion of Krishna's promise of salvation. But I will not free you from sin; I will free you by sin. I will drown the world in the consequences of your death.
The tears that fell were not of weakness. They were the last drops of humanity burning away in the crucible of his transformation. They were the fuel for the final conflagration.
That night, the boy named Alok was consigned to the past.
What remained was something else entirely—a vessel of perfect, righteous wrath. A phantom in the making. A god of blood, preparing to write his scripture in the scars of a guilty city.
*War:Beyond Imagination 1
*War: Beyond Imagination (death is destiny)2