by Samit Basu
“Goa’s like that,” Aman says.
“May I please please kill some more people?” Anima asks sweetly.
Right on cue, the wall shatters. Tejas has arrived, bringing sunlight, dust and the possibility of suddenly being crushed into a pulp. As Aman and Uzma scatter amidst falling computers, Tejas slides his arm in, looking for bodies, and retracts it quickly when Anima sinks a long power-spear into it. He yells, drawing his fist back for another wall-breaking punch.
Ignoring Uzma’s warning cry, Anima flies at him, but before she can reach the hole in the wall Tejas’s fist comes in, catching her squarely, and drives her across the room into the wall. When Tejas draws his hand back again, Anima stays stuck on the wall for an instant before sliding down to the floor. She’s alive, but her green aura seems to have broken. Sparks run from her body across the metal surfaces in the room, and she’s sobbing.
Aman and Uzma catch a glimpse of the real child behind the manga eyes, and her loneliness and fear breaks their hearts. Aman darts across the room, grabs Anima, and makes a run for the door, only to find Tejas’s hand blocking the way.
A second of pure terror as Aman and Tejas make eye contact and Aman knows what it feels like to be about to die.
And then, outside, Sher arrives on the scene and bites Tejas’s ankle. The giant falls with a resounding crash. His opponent grounded, Sher leaps for the jugular, but Tejas manages to get an arm up to block him. With his other arm, he grabs Sher’s back and sits up, holding the tiger-man like a someone trying to bathe an angry cat. Sher’s muscles writhe as he tries to break free, but the giant is stronger. Tejas’s head jerks forward, colliding with Sher’s in a thunderclap of a head-butt. Sher whimpers and collapses.
Tejas struggles to his feet. He holds Sher up by the scruff of the neck and drops him. Sher tries to get up, but can’t. Tejas raises his foot to stomp the life out of the tiger-man, but then staggers to one side, cursing, a hand on his right eye, into which Zothanpuii has just thrown a knife.
Aman and Uzma run through the corridors of Jai’s mansion, completely lost. Anima appears to be uninjured, but has fallen asleep with her head on Aman’s shoulder, and he is ashamed to admit, in a house full of window-breakers and weapon-hurlers, that he’s beginning to find her very heavy. They reach a staircase and hear a mournful wail from below. They descend to find the singer Premalata sobbing next to a wall.
When they ask her what’s wrong, she tells them, but it takes a while, because many things are wrong. A section of the ground floor is on fire, most of the house’s inhabitants are sealed off from the exits, and, worst of all, she has just met the lookout on the roof, who has told her that four more SUVs are heading towards the house — clearly Shinde’s reinforcements — and there is no one left to fight them. Andy’s mud wall has closed all the exits except the doors Jazzy had cut out, and those are blocked by flames.
* * *
Zothanpuii stands on a ledge, the walls around her all broken, and looks Tejas Shinde in the eye. He lunges at her; she vaults back to avoid his swinging hand, jumps on his wrist, and runs up his arm, there’s another knife in her hand. She leaps at his face, hoping to stab his good eye, but he catches her in mid-air, takes a short run-up and hurls her towards the Arabian Sea.
As Zothanpuii soars over the gently swaying palm-trees, the pristine white beach and the dazzlingly blue South Goa waters, she wishes she had learnt to swim. Life will not be easy for her on the ocean floor, unable to reach dry land, unable to drown, her lungs constantly collapsing and healing. The wind howls in her ears. The sun is warm on her face. She feels as if she’s floating, as if she has plenty of time before the sea rushes up to meet her. She shuts her eyes.
She’s shocked at the sudden realisation that she is floating. Shocked even further when she feels iron muscles encircling her waist: someone is holding her. She opens her eyes and sees a strong, handsome face, bright eyes, a warm smile. A blast of rushing air, the stomach-churning sensation of the ground speeding towards her, the insanely reassuring burn of hot sand. Her legs feel hollow, she’s so thrilled she can’t breathe. Her rescuer sets her down on the beach and flies up again, standing for an instant in mid-air, poised above the swaying palms, as if this were a completely ordinary way to pass the time. A wave rushes up the beach and gently tickles Zothanpuii’s hand. She lies down and smiles, completely at peace.
* * *
Four SUVs speed into the compound and halt near Tejas. He kneels and peers into the car nearest him. The driver rolls down a window and waves cheerily at him.
“Who the hell are you?” Tejas asks.
“My name is Tia,” Tia says. She whips out a gun and shoots him. Fifteen other Tias pour out of the cars, each carrying a gun. They train their weapons on Tejas.
“Surrender,” a Tia says. “By the way, those bedsheets are disgusting. I can see everything, which would be fine if you were pretty, but you aren’t, you know.”
Tejas roars, and raises his foot to stamp on the Tias, but he’s distracted by movement at the edge of his vision. He turns, just in time to see Vir flying at full speed towards him, fists clenched, face stern.
Vir is not here to bandy words: he zooms in, coming to a halt in front of Tejas’s face, swings his right arm back and connects that most superheroic of punches, the right uppercut to the jaw. The giant is lifted off his feet. He crashes into the house, embedding himself in a wall.
It’s a clean KO.
Tia looks around for people to shoot and seems vaguely disappointed when no one attacks her. She notices a beautiful girl waving wildly at her from a window, very close to where Tejas’s head is embedded in the wall.
“Hey Uzma!” Tia calls. “All good?”
“Smashing,” Uzma says, and means it. She watches Vir fly off to rescue the other denizens of the house from the slowly gathering flames on the lower levels, and so absorbed is she in Vir’s charisma and courage that she doesn’t notice when Tejas’s body, just a few feet away, shrinks down to its normal size, gives in to gravity, plummets to the ground below and shatters. Her rapture is finally cut short when she turns to Aman, sees his drawn face and knows that yet again something terrible has happened.
“What?”
“The mob in London just killed Jai’s parents,” Aman says.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Uzma is back in her room in the Yari Road house, staring listlessly at the ceiling. Her bed, like her body, creaks gently every time she tries to move. The afternoon sun is doing its warm, romantic amber thing, but Uzma couldn’t care less. She focuses her attention on the fan, trying to use her unknown superpowers to help it in its attempts to chase the rotten-fish Mumbai smell out of her room, and wishes for the cool air of just a few days ago. When Bob was alive. When she hadn’t known his parents were dead as well, killed by Mukesh during an attempted escape from Udhampur. And she wishes her first thought about Bob since her return from Goa last night had not been about air-conditioning.
After the bloodbath in Goa the day before, Aman and Tia had offered all Jai’s cohorts sanctuary in Mumbai, but had not been really surprised when no one had wanted to sample their hospitality. A few had decided to stay with Sher and rebuild the mansion, but most of the superpowered allies or prisoners had simply chosen to leave, to disappear, to let the world swallow them up. Some had shared Jai’s dreams before, but his current plight did not exactly inspire confidence — alone in England, hiding from the police while news channels all over the world played videos of his recent exploits — and the denizens of his mansion now knew exactly how much danger they had placed themselves in, how vulnerable they were in Jai’s absence. The only one who had really wanted to come back to Mumbai with Aman and Uzma was Anima, and Sher would not hear of letting her go.
There is a new resident in the Yari Road house, though: Vir has come with them. Not having met Sundar or Bob, he has no qualms about living in Bob’s room. There is still that empty room on Uzma’s floor but Vir wants to be as near the sky as possible.
When Aman asked Vir where he had been since Tia’s attack on the Udhampur base, Vir was reluctant to speak at first. When he did, it was with more than a tinge of embarrassment.
After digging himself out from under the ruins of the base, Vir’s first thoughts had not been about saving the world, or stopping Jai, or trying to achieve a more elevated sense of understanding about his new place in the universe — he had simply decided he’d had enough and needed some time off. He had flown up and away, across the Himalayas. He had sat on the top of Mount Everest, had skimmed across the valleys of Tibet. He had flown to Thailand and immersed himself in its many alleys of pleasure. He had seen the mountains of New Zealand, touched whales as they emerged from the Pacific to breathe, tried unsuccessfully to get drunk on kava in Fiji. He had walked the ice deserts of the Antarctic, trying to teach penguins to tap-dance, riding seals. He had lost all sense of time, chasing the looping sun, the world a swirl of purple and brown beneath his icicle-covered feet. He had raced bald eagles, surfed avalanches, dived into volcanoes in one headlong, sleepless, breathless journey. A power trip.
At some point of time — Vir is not exactly sure when — he started helping people. He saved a boy from falling off a cliff in Mongolia; he fought off bandits who were invading an old people’s home in New Mexico. Vir found that these simple acts gave him more joy than grand schemes. He had been troubled by both Aman’s plans and Jai’s, and realised that his true calling was not aligned with either. He had decided to be a travelling hero, the sort of person one finds in old wuxia novels and samurai films, a mysterious stranger who arrives, helps and disappears, pausing only to say wise and vaguely spiritual things, leaving grateful but puzzled innocents and bevies of sighing damsels in his wake.
Given Vir’s ability to be in three different continents on any given day, chasing the sun across the world, this was something he could have continued endlessly, a life of giving, free of politics and burdens. But one evening, sitting in a bar in Vladivostok, he had seen the news, seen the panic writ large on reporters’ faces as they spoke of a superhuman tearing across London. And he had known that he could not spend his days ignoring the state of the world, could not leave his fellow passengers behind. Deserting the Indian Air Force, betraying his family’s traditions — these were things he had found he could do — but abandoning the entire world in its hour of need? Not Vir Singh. He had flown to Mumbai, found a Tia waiting for him at the Carter Road coffee shop, at the same spot where another Tia had met the fake Vir before. Other Tias had already set off for Goa, armed to the teeth, Vir’s arrival was a lucky bonus.
Uzma hauls herself out of bed with some difficulty and passes a pair of Tias bickering furiously because one of them had started smoking and the other one didn’t want to merge. She heads downstairs, looking for Aman, looking for a little affection. They’d fallen asleep in her room the night before, too exhausted to do anything but murmur fuzzily, and he’d disappeared in the morning. Uzma hobbles into his room, expecting to see him immersed in a screen, but he isn’t there. From the look of his room, he hasn’t been there at all. Several of his computer screens were smashed by Sher or Mukesh. Memories of that horrible day return, and Uzma shudders. She steps out of the room. Across the stairs, she can see some Tias watching TVs, the Jai story is playing again on CNN.
Uzma has seen the news footage of Jai’s attack on the mob outside his family’s house several times already, and each viewing has been worse than the last. She can see it with her eyes closed now — the crowd standing outside the Mathur home in Harrow, chanting, shaking fists and placards. The sudden appearance of Jai, stalking like a spaghetti western cowboy towards the huddle. And then a ripple of activity, a sudden call to arms issued by an invisible bugle. The mysterious mob controller had twisted the crowd’s emotions, sending them berserk, even the line of policemen standing between the house and the mob had turned, and they had broken into the house. Jai’s walk had quickened to a run, and then, when the front door broke, he had plunged into the howling mass, a blur of pure anger, sending bodies flying, cutting a way through. But by the time he entered the house — leaping in through a first-floor window — his family had been torn apart.
Worse still, immediately after the mob manipulator had let go, Jai’s tidal wave of fury had swallowed up many people who had no idea why they were in a stranger’s house in Harrow, or why they had no recollection of the last few rage-hazed minutes. Jai had spent several minutes in his parents’ room, sobbing over their corpses, killing anyone who sought to disturb his last minutes with his family. Then he’d set the house on fire by way of cremation — while still inside it.
When the smoke cleared and firemen rushed in, Jai was gone. The only person who claimed to have seen him since then was Rajan “Raz” Patel, the young manager of a local cornershop. He had become a known face across the world with his story about how Jai had walked into his store.
“The geezer’s clothes were well burnt to, like, rags, man, and I knew him from the telly and I thought, This is it, mate, this is the end for Raz. Yeah, but he said he liked the song I was playing — Kishore Kumar, man, my pappaji’s favourite — and so he’d just popped in to see if he could score some buttermilk. Said he needed to think a bit, and drink a bit, yeah? Honestly, man, buttermilk, I don’t know why — I thought he was well hamstered. Turns out I did have some buttermilk, yeah, cuz I run the best shop in the city, innit? So he drinks it, and then he’s off. Cost me a couple of quid, but he just set fire to his dead family, innit? He can have some buttermilk on me.”
Perhaps swayed by Rajan Patel’s generosity, Jai has thus far not destroyed London. All of Great Britain has put itself under siege, and journalists all over the world have finally started making connections — the missing British travellers, the deaths around the world, the strange incidents at the Ram Lila ground and the Wankhede Stadium, tabloid reports on bizarre creatures sighted all over India. But no one’s managed to put it all together yet — the origin story of this renegade superhuman is proving to be as elusive as Aman is to Uzma at the moment.
She checks the ground floor — he’s not there, and several Tias take a break from cooking to tell her he’s not left the house. She finds him, finally, in Sundar’s room, sorting through mountains of miscellaneous mad-scientist trash. Uzma is reminded, sharply, of her night of discovery, of the strange cold feeling that welled up inside her stomach when she first saw Sundar’s bizarre puppet-walk, a feeling that has not yet gone away.
“I don’t think Sundar’s dead,” Aman says as Uzma enters the room. “I wondered about the label on his ray-gun the first time I saw it — I knew it sounded familiar, but I forgot to look it up.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Uzma says. “Where is Sundar if he’s not dead? Did he zap himself to America?”
“No, that would be far too mundane,” Aman says. “I think he time-travelled.”
“Eh?”
“The label on the ray gun said ‘Tachyon Dislocator’.”
“Is that supposed to mean anything to me
?”
“Well, tachyons are hypothetical sub-atomic particles that travel faster than light.”
“English, please.”
“Sorry. Basically tachyons are these things that a lot of science-fiction writers talk about as agents of faster-than-light communication. And time travel. So, if the gun said it was a tachyon dislocator, and things he zapped with it disappeared…”
“Sundar zapped himself and that blue light guy into the future?”
“Or the past. Knowing Sundar, the future, yes. It’s possible, that’s all.”
“Really, Aman? Time travel? Isn’t that a bit much?”
“If you step out this room and across a corridor, you will find a man sleeping in mid-air. Why should we rule out time travel? He was designing gadgets from the future anyway. Maybe he was following instructions he’d put in his brain from the future. I don’t know.”
Carefully removing a nameless object that seems to be constructed entirely out of razor blades and plasticine, Uzma sits.
“What the hell,” she says. “Time travel. After what we’ve seen, why not, right?”
“Exactly.”
“Is he coming back? Can he, if he wants to?”
Aman shrugs. “You tell me,” he says. “If I were you, I wouldn’t even think about it. I tried, and I have a headache now.”
He walks towards the centre of the room, waving his arms.
“I’ve not gone completely crazy, in case you’re wondering,” he says. “I’m looking for that armour. If he was somehow sending messages to himself from the future, and the last thing he did was make that armour disappear…”
“Aman? What happens to Jai now?”
“I don’t know,” he says, turning around. “I’m doing things your way now. Not trying to play with the world.”
“Yes, but he needs to be stopped.”
“Well, I can’t stop him. No idea how, in the first place. His only vulnerable point was his family — even Namrata wanted to kidnap them, and she’s one of the good guys, hopefully. This mob person obviously went a step further.”