Post by Arihant on Apr 13, 2008 9:22:43 GMT
Vidya’s eyes flashed as she realised what her brother was doing.
“Mohana!” she exclaimed, swatting his hand away from her cards. “Mohana, that’s cheating!”
Thirteen-year-old Mohana Dayakara paused for a moment. This was bad, sure, but he was certain he could talk himself out of it. After all, his sister may have been smart as a whip, but the facts remained that, one, he had a four year age advantage on her, and two, as her venerated elder brother, he Knew Better.
He paused for a moment, poker-faced. He had the gift of being able to completely mask his emotions when he had to, and this moment most certainly qualified as necessary for such behaviour.
“Yeah, little brother, honestly. Where did you learn to be so dastardly?”
Ahhh. OK, plot foiled, then. Bhadraksh had seen him, and Bhadraksh, as elder brother of both, knew better than both by default.
Mohana mock-sighed, smiling guiltily, and dropped his cards on the table. “Fine, fine, you got me. Seriously, though, can you blame me? It’s pretty humiliating, getting whipped by your nine-year-old sister.”
“That’s why some people have the sense not to play against her,” Bhadraksh replied, rolling up the paper he’d been reading and hitting Mohana over the back of the head with it. Of course, he didn’t trouble himself to get off the shabby sofa he was sprawled across.
Mohana wasn’t perturbed at all by his brother’s behaviour; in fact, he had accepted long ago that that was most likely just Bhadraksh’s why of showing him that he loved…
Pfft. Yeah, right.
“I play against her because I’m such a good brother, as a matter of fact,” Mohana said, rubbing the back of his head. “You ought to try it sometime.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” he groaned, burying his head in a nearby pillow. Bhadraksh had exams coming up soon, and hadn’t been the most cheerful recently as a result.
“Sure,” Mohana said, turning back to Vidya. “Sorry about the cheating, Viddy, but, in my defence, you’re too clever for your own good sometimes. You want another game?”
Vidya smiled, but pulled his cards away and pushed them into the deck she was forming. “No, s’OK. You should do your homework.”
Crap.
“You sure you don’t want another game?” he asked, and now there was an edge of desperation in his voice.
“Mohana, no. You know you’re going to have to do it sometime,” she sang, and pushed the cards back into their packet. “Anyway, I have work to do too.”
“Vidya, you’re in primary school.” Bhadraksh’s muffled voice came from the sofa cushions. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘work’.”
“Said by the boy who’s currently ‘working’ so very hard at burrowing into our settee rather than doing his geography homework?” asked their father, who had just walked into the apartment. He peeled his sodden coat off – a shabby, rarely used affair, due to the paucity of rain in India – and deposited it on a hook set into the undecorated wall. He barely had time to turn around before being accosted by a small girl crashing into his midriff.
Mohana and Bhadraksh witnessed this outburst every day when their father returned from work, but their reactions were fairly – well, completely – different. Mohana found it amusing. Bhadraksh found it disgusting. It was strange how little difference the two year age gap between them made. Bhadraksh was certainly the more immature of them.
Today, though, there was something… something slightly different. Mohana thought he saw – just for a moment – he thought he saw…
Well, it was a stranger. Behind them. Behind his father and his sister, there was a man – slightly shorter than his dad – or… or was he a man? No, he couldn’t have been, he wasn’t old enough. He only looked a couple of years older than Bhadraksh – he looked quite like Bhadraksh, actually, but with curly hair like Mohana’s…
But the man was gone when he blinked, and as Mohana wasn’t the kind of person to get overly concerned about that sort of thing, he promptly forgot about it.
“Dad, I don’t always have homework to do,” complained Bhadraksh, quickly righting himself on the sofa.
“But you do have it tonight,” said Vidya, her voice as muffled as Bhadraksh’s had been a second ago by her father’s stomach. “You said to Mohana.”
“When?” asked Bhadraksh, outraged.
Vidya jerked her head back and smiled triumphantly at her oldest brother. The two of them had had a well-established feud for quite some time now. “When we were walking home from school today.” Her tone added the ‘so there’ so amply that she didn’t even have to say it.
“That’s true, Bhadraksh,” Mohana seconded.
Bhadraksh glared at them both. “D**n your eyes,” he muttered under his breath.
“Bhadraksh!” a voice issued from the kitchen above the hissing of the food that was being prepared. “There’s no call for language like that.”
He rolled his eyes. “Sorry, mother,” he called.
A tall woman walked into the room, bearing more steaming plates of yellow rice than should have been humanly possible to carry at one time. “You’re forgiven,” she said, quickly and deftly disposing all of them on the table. “Now, come on. Dinner.” (She possessed the remarkable gift of being able to always have the evening meal ready mere seconds after her husband arrived home.)
A few seconds later, they were all seated around the table, their mother’s resonant voice saying grace. It was a nice time for the Dayakara family – mainly because there was little opportunity for fighting. They were the kind of family that loved each other… boisterously. More time was spent bickering than talking, more time hitting than hugging. But for all their quarrelling, they were closer than a lot of families ever become. They were all very aware of the others’ faults but they loved each other in spite of them, and that unconditional love was something very powerful. Binding.
Forever. They’d always be like that. At least, Mohana liked to think they’d always be like that. He honestly couldn’t imagine a single thing that could tear that apart.
“So, children.” His mother’s voice broke through Mohana’s reverie. “What happened today? Anything strange or startling?”
Mohana smiled. She always said that, too. Those exact words, every night. His mother was all consistency.
And he always answered first. “Not really, no,” he said, reaching across the table for a slice of naan bread.
“Vidya?”
“I learned my four times tables today.” She smiled, clearly pleased about this tremendous achievement. Vidya was widely known as a ‘good, happy sort of girl’ because of her tendency to go around – even when just walking the streets, alone – smiling to herself, as if she was enjoying some private joke that no one else would understand. But Mohana worried about that sometimes… Well, he had to worry; it was in his nature. He just hoped that if anything ever did go wrong for her… He hoped she’d have the sense to tell someone, that she wouldn’t feel she needed to hide behind a smile for the rest of her life.
“Wow, impressive,” Bhadraksh muttered sarcastically.
Their father looked over at Bhadraksh disapprovingly. “And what happened to you today to put you in so fine a form?”
“Nothing much.”
A disbelieving silence.
Bhadraksh, world-renowned pessimist, always found that something bad had happened to him during the day, and more often than not he felt the need to share (unfortunately for Mohana, who slept in the lower bunk.)
So it was strange, that he didn’t say anything. In fact, what he was doing now was strange, too. He wasn’t eating, just staring at his plate.
“I read a story in the newspaper today,” he said, clearly wanting to change the subject. That was unlike Bhadraksh as well– he never shied away from any situation.
And for a second, Mohana thought he saw that man again, standing behind his brother, wearing a hideously twisted expression of…
Guilt?
This was the second time he’d seen him in less than five minutes. And this time, when Mohana blinked, he didn’t go away.
Why wasn’t he going away?
“Oh?” asked their mother politely, encouraging him to go on. Mohana barely heard the noise over the blood pounding in his ears – and he didn’t know why, either, because he wasn’t scared, but his body was reacting as if he was – he was tensing and his eyes were widening, as if some horrible event was coming racing toward him. But it was just out of reach, he didn’t know what it was or…
The man was walking closer to Mohana. His footsteps weren’t making any noise. Couldn’t anybody else see him?
“Yeah,” his brother said, his voice quiet. He was still staring at his plate. “Some maniac went berserk and killed his entire family.”
“Bhadraksh, I don’t really think that’s a fitting subject for-”
“What do you mean by his entire family?”
And now his father was acting strangely, too – he was almost – angry? But his father was the epitome of good nature, and he most certainly would have supported his wife’s objection to Bhadraksh’s choice of topic.
Bhadraksh looked over at his father. “All of them – everyone in the house. His parents, his brother, his sister. And then the psychologist who tried to talk to him afterwards.”
The fear was gripping Mohana, now – he was physically shaking, his hands shivering so violently that he couldn’t hold his glass of water without half of it sloshing on the table. But none of them noticed – just as, still, none of them could see the man who was now directly behind him, the man who was still twisted by the intensity of his guilt. Mohana could tell it was guilt, now. He could tell what the man was feeling without having to look at him. It felt like part of the man’s mind was seeping into his.
And it hurt.
“Oh. Oh, that’s… That’s terrible. What kind of person would do something like that?” His mother’s voice was tinged with outrage, now. Why was she outraged? She’d never met the people, she’d never…
And yet, she was speaking like she had – like someone had hurt her…
And Vidya wasn’t saying anything. She’d stopped eating, like the rest of them had, and was just staring down at her plate, tears rolling down her round cheeks and staining the green fabric of her sari.
The man’s mind was still coming into Mohana’s, but it was no longer just seeping, it was a torrent of thoughts and imaginings and hopeless dreams and bitterness and more of the guilt, that horrible black guilt that was filling his conscience and pushing Mohana’s own safe world away from him.
He looked down at his hands, and saw that they were shimmering – translucent. He could see the table through his own skin, but he could also see what the man was seeing – he was looking down on the family as well as sitting with them, and he could see himself – through the man’s eyes, he could see the rapidly disappearing Mohana. And the man was feeling so guilty, so horrendously guilty that Mohana felt like he could barely breathe, the force of the guilt was pushing down on his chest, on his heart – even on his eyes, as Mohana’s vision began to fade and it was replaced by the man above the table’s. He could only hear the angry voices distantly through his own ears, as if they were underwater.
“It’s just… it’s deranged.”
“What possible reason could someone have to-”
“And to his own family, as well.”
“Didn’t they catch him?”
“A psychopath like that, they should lock him up and throw away the key.”
“B*stard.”
“How can people do things like that?”
“Monster.”
“Because they’re not human, that’s why. No human could ever do something like that to other people.”
“Murderer.”
Arihant…
In a split second, Mohana was gone. Mohana had disappeared – Mohana had become Arihant.
And Arihant was slowly dying. They were all right – it was true, dammit, it was all… He wasn’t human. How could he be human, being able to do something like that, being able to do what that person had done?
And now, something had changed. His family knew. His family knew he was there, and they knew what he had done to them. They all turned to him, simultaneously, and fury was etched on each of their faces, even Vidya.
“How could you do this to us, Mohana?” asked his baby sister, tears still rolling down her furious face. “Why did you kill me?”
Arihant stumbled back. The combined force of their gazes felt like a physical blow. “No, Vidya – no, please, I didn’t… I didn’t mean to-”
“Oh, you ‘didn’t mean to’?” His brother’s voice was low and mocking, knives concealed in the hissed words. “That’s brilliant. You were a victim of circumstance. That’s like a Nazi saying that they ‘didn’t mean for’ the Holocaust to happen. God, little brother! You’re a monster, just like they were-”
“Bhadraksh, I – Bhadraksh, I’m sorry, I- I didn’t want to… Please…” Tears began blurring everything but their faces, their furious faces, loved faces bearing down on him with burning eyes…
And he realised that he wasn’t wearing his gloves, not even long sleeves – he was wearing nothing but a t-shirt – Mohana’s clothes – and they just kept getting closer and closer and…
“Please,” he kept saying, trying to back up against the wall. They just kept coming, they didn’t stop, not for a second. “Please, please… You have to stay back, you can’t touch me, it’s not safe…”
“Mohana, we know it’s not safe,” said his mother. “I was the first to learn that, now, wasn’t I?” And suddenly they were no longer in the kitchen at all, but they were in Mohana’s bedroom, and Arihant could see it all happening again – first his mother, then his father, then Vidya and then Bhadraksh… All dead – dying – within a matter of minutes. He’d done it, he killed them all. And now the psychologist was with his family, too, his family that was still bearing down on him, still coming closer, and they didn’t look like his family at all, anymore, their twisted faces were getting paler and their eyes were glazing over – they were dead, they were all dead and it was his fault and he was…
“You’re a monster,” said his father, his soft voice ringing out above the chaos.
“I know,” said Arihant, his face contorted with the tears. “I know, I know
I’m a monster, but please, you have to stay back-”
“What’s the point?” asked the psychologist – and he didn’t even know her name, it was his fault she was dead and he didn’t even know her name. “You’ve already killed us. We’re already dead.”
And now their voices, their horrible, whispering voices were merging into one, and they just kept saying the same word, over and over and over…
“Arihant.”
Murderer.
That was who he was now. The sobs kept coming, the tears kept streaming down his face, and the bodies, those horrible bodies kept coming closer and it was all his fault, he’d done that to them, he’d killed them all and yet he was still alive, he was still allowed to breathe on despite what he’d done when rightfully he should have been burning in hell, forever gaining justice for the horrific thing that he’d done…
And then, suddenly, it stopped.
And he was at Orchid.
And someone completely different was saying his name. An Irish voice calling out the name, calling “Arihant” as if it was just a regular name, as if it didn’t stand for everything he’d done, and he was still sobbing, the tears were still pouring, he was still backed up against a wall.
And he could see himself. He could see himself talking to Kira – Kira, the one person so far who…
He didn’t know what it was. Something about her… it made him forget. Just for a second. It made him forget what he’d done, the monster he’d become. When he was with her, sometimes…
Sometimes he felt like Mohana was still alive. Somewhere.
He watched them talking. The tears dried, staining his face, leaving the delicate skin below his eyes swollen and leaving pale marks all over the T-shirt he was wearing.
But he didn’t care.
Because it wasn’t over.
The sense of foreboding was back again, as he watched Kira and the other Arihant talking, because the other Arihant…
His eyes were red. His teeth were pointed. His eyebrows slanted violently. His muscles were rippling against the shirt he was wearing. Claws sprang from his fingertips.
And Kira didn’t notice. Kira just kept talking.
Was it only Arihant who could see? Was it only he who could see what he’d become – the monster he was? It must have been. No one else could watch that – watch an innocent girl talk to a demon like that and not stop it, not save her.
Was it only him who could see the monster that he was?
He almost wished he did look like that – that his outside appearance would reflect what he had done and what he still could do – because, God, it had only been four years and Arihant still had the rest of his life ahead of him – his stupid, undeserved life – his life that had already, in its short seventeen years, hurt more than most people would in a millennium. And there was more he could do.
And that was what he was seeing.
The fear gripped him again as he watched the monster move – every few seconds, he moved a little closer to Kira, just a little bit, but it was closing the gap between them rapidly and Arihant knew that it wasn’t safe – it was never safe – but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t stop it from happening and she had no idea what was going on – she had no idea of the danger she was in just by being with the monster, she had no idea that her life could end at any second just by touching him. The monster didn’t need those claws, the muscles, or the teeth just as Arihant didn’t need his ‘enhanced’ body – they were both dangerous enough already.
And Arihant could see what was going to happen, he knew what was going to happen – the monster kept moving closer and closer until there was just a millimetre of air between their skin, just a millimetre to keep her safe, and Arihant couldn’t move and he was stricken, the tension was gripping him and he wanted to run out, to save her – but what could he do? What could he do to save her? Every second she spent with him was putting her in so much danger – and – and –
And the gap closed. The monster was touching Kira.
“No!” yelled Arihant, snapping directly upright in his bed.
It had been a dream. Well, of course, he’d realised it was a dream even while he was in it, but this…
This was different to all the others. He raised a shaking hand to his face, to see if he was crying-
But he couldn’t tell. Obviously. The gloves stopped him from even being able to touch his own skin.
Couldn’t he take them off – just – just for one second?
He ripped them off quickly, placing them on his lap, and pressed against his cheeks with his bare fingertips. And yes, he was crying, he was still crying, and he was so hot and all over was sticky with sweat and he was…
He was a monster. Didn’t the dream say that? Didn’t his father say that? He was a monster. He knew that already – or at least, he had known that – how was he forgetting? Why was he forgetting?
All the self-hatred, all the guilt and all the dread flowed up in his mind, a tsunami of unbearable emotions – Monster. Murderer. Killer. Arihant. He would never be able to forget that – that must have been what the dream was – he was starting to forget what he was, it was a warning –
It was a warning. If he wasn’t careful – if he wasn’t careful, it would happen again. It could happen to… it could happen to Kira…
He felt a pinching feeling on his arms and looked down, seeing his fingers ripping at the brown skin, trying to – it looked like he was trying to tear his own skin off, and God, the sad thing was that if he was capable of it, he probably would – after all, wasn’t that what had caused all of this? His d**ned skin?
D**ned, indestructible skin. He stopped pulling at it and got out of the bed, walking over to the window and, resigned, laying his forehead on the cool glass.
He was a monster.
And, God, he’d nearly forgotten.
He could never forget.
And the blue night surrounded the tears that ran down the window.
“Mohana!” she exclaimed, swatting his hand away from her cards. “Mohana, that’s cheating!”
Thirteen-year-old Mohana Dayakara paused for a moment. This was bad, sure, but he was certain he could talk himself out of it. After all, his sister may have been smart as a whip, but the facts remained that, one, he had a four year age advantage on her, and two, as her venerated elder brother, he Knew Better.
He paused for a moment, poker-faced. He had the gift of being able to completely mask his emotions when he had to, and this moment most certainly qualified as necessary for such behaviour.
“Yeah, little brother, honestly. Where did you learn to be so dastardly?”
Ahhh. OK, plot foiled, then. Bhadraksh had seen him, and Bhadraksh, as elder brother of both, knew better than both by default.
Mohana mock-sighed, smiling guiltily, and dropped his cards on the table. “Fine, fine, you got me. Seriously, though, can you blame me? It’s pretty humiliating, getting whipped by your nine-year-old sister.”
“That’s why some people have the sense not to play against her,” Bhadraksh replied, rolling up the paper he’d been reading and hitting Mohana over the back of the head with it. Of course, he didn’t trouble himself to get off the shabby sofa he was sprawled across.
Mohana wasn’t perturbed at all by his brother’s behaviour; in fact, he had accepted long ago that that was most likely just Bhadraksh’s why of showing him that he loved…
Pfft. Yeah, right.
“I play against her because I’m such a good brother, as a matter of fact,” Mohana said, rubbing the back of his head. “You ought to try it sometime.”
“I’ll do it tomorrow,” he groaned, burying his head in a nearby pillow. Bhadraksh had exams coming up soon, and hadn’t been the most cheerful recently as a result.
“Sure,” Mohana said, turning back to Vidya. “Sorry about the cheating, Viddy, but, in my defence, you’re too clever for your own good sometimes. You want another game?”
Vidya smiled, but pulled his cards away and pushed them into the deck she was forming. “No, s’OK. You should do your homework.”
Crap.
“You sure you don’t want another game?” he asked, and now there was an edge of desperation in his voice.
“Mohana, no. You know you’re going to have to do it sometime,” she sang, and pushed the cards back into their packet. “Anyway, I have work to do too.”
“Vidya, you’re in primary school.” Bhadraksh’s muffled voice came from the sofa cushions. “You don’t know the meaning of the word ‘work’.”
“Said by the boy who’s currently ‘working’ so very hard at burrowing into our settee rather than doing his geography homework?” asked their father, who had just walked into the apartment. He peeled his sodden coat off – a shabby, rarely used affair, due to the paucity of rain in India – and deposited it on a hook set into the undecorated wall. He barely had time to turn around before being accosted by a small girl crashing into his midriff.
Mohana and Bhadraksh witnessed this outburst every day when their father returned from work, but their reactions were fairly – well, completely – different. Mohana found it amusing. Bhadraksh found it disgusting. It was strange how little difference the two year age gap between them made. Bhadraksh was certainly the more immature of them.
Today, though, there was something… something slightly different. Mohana thought he saw – just for a moment – he thought he saw…
Well, it was a stranger. Behind them. Behind his father and his sister, there was a man – slightly shorter than his dad – or… or was he a man? No, he couldn’t have been, he wasn’t old enough. He only looked a couple of years older than Bhadraksh – he looked quite like Bhadraksh, actually, but with curly hair like Mohana’s…
But the man was gone when he blinked, and as Mohana wasn’t the kind of person to get overly concerned about that sort of thing, he promptly forgot about it.
“Dad, I don’t always have homework to do,” complained Bhadraksh, quickly righting himself on the sofa.
“But you do have it tonight,” said Vidya, her voice as muffled as Bhadraksh’s had been a second ago by her father’s stomach. “You said to Mohana.”
“When?” asked Bhadraksh, outraged.
Vidya jerked her head back and smiled triumphantly at her oldest brother. The two of them had had a well-established feud for quite some time now. “When we were walking home from school today.” Her tone added the ‘so there’ so amply that she didn’t even have to say it.
“That’s true, Bhadraksh,” Mohana seconded.
Bhadraksh glared at them both. “D**n your eyes,” he muttered under his breath.
“Bhadraksh!” a voice issued from the kitchen above the hissing of the food that was being prepared. “There’s no call for language like that.”
He rolled his eyes. “Sorry, mother,” he called.
A tall woman walked into the room, bearing more steaming plates of yellow rice than should have been humanly possible to carry at one time. “You’re forgiven,” she said, quickly and deftly disposing all of them on the table. “Now, come on. Dinner.” (She possessed the remarkable gift of being able to always have the evening meal ready mere seconds after her husband arrived home.)
A few seconds later, they were all seated around the table, their mother’s resonant voice saying grace. It was a nice time for the Dayakara family – mainly because there was little opportunity for fighting. They were the kind of family that loved each other… boisterously. More time was spent bickering than talking, more time hitting than hugging. But for all their quarrelling, they were closer than a lot of families ever become. They were all very aware of the others’ faults but they loved each other in spite of them, and that unconditional love was something very powerful. Binding.
Forever. They’d always be like that. At least, Mohana liked to think they’d always be like that. He honestly couldn’t imagine a single thing that could tear that apart.
“So, children.” His mother’s voice broke through Mohana’s reverie. “What happened today? Anything strange or startling?”
Mohana smiled. She always said that, too. Those exact words, every night. His mother was all consistency.
And he always answered first. “Not really, no,” he said, reaching across the table for a slice of naan bread.
“Vidya?”
“I learned my four times tables today.” She smiled, clearly pleased about this tremendous achievement. Vidya was widely known as a ‘good, happy sort of girl’ because of her tendency to go around – even when just walking the streets, alone – smiling to herself, as if she was enjoying some private joke that no one else would understand. But Mohana worried about that sometimes… Well, he had to worry; it was in his nature. He just hoped that if anything ever did go wrong for her… He hoped she’d have the sense to tell someone, that she wouldn’t feel she needed to hide behind a smile for the rest of her life.
“Wow, impressive,” Bhadraksh muttered sarcastically.
Their father looked over at Bhadraksh disapprovingly. “And what happened to you today to put you in so fine a form?”
“Nothing much.”
A disbelieving silence.
Bhadraksh, world-renowned pessimist, always found that something bad had happened to him during the day, and more often than not he felt the need to share (unfortunately for Mohana, who slept in the lower bunk.)
So it was strange, that he didn’t say anything. In fact, what he was doing now was strange, too. He wasn’t eating, just staring at his plate.
“I read a story in the newspaper today,” he said, clearly wanting to change the subject. That was unlike Bhadraksh as well– he never shied away from any situation.
And for a second, Mohana thought he saw that man again, standing behind his brother, wearing a hideously twisted expression of…
Guilt?
This was the second time he’d seen him in less than five minutes. And this time, when Mohana blinked, he didn’t go away.
Why wasn’t he going away?
“Oh?” asked their mother politely, encouraging him to go on. Mohana barely heard the noise over the blood pounding in his ears – and he didn’t know why, either, because he wasn’t scared, but his body was reacting as if he was – he was tensing and his eyes were widening, as if some horrible event was coming racing toward him. But it was just out of reach, he didn’t know what it was or…
The man was walking closer to Mohana. His footsteps weren’t making any noise. Couldn’t anybody else see him?
“Yeah,” his brother said, his voice quiet. He was still staring at his plate. “Some maniac went berserk and killed his entire family.”
“Bhadraksh, I don’t really think that’s a fitting subject for-”
“What do you mean by his entire family?”
And now his father was acting strangely, too – he was almost – angry? But his father was the epitome of good nature, and he most certainly would have supported his wife’s objection to Bhadraksh’s choice of topic.
Bhadraksh looked over at his father. “All of them – everyone in the house. His parents, his brother, his sister. And then the psychologist who tried to talk to him afterwards.”
The fear was gripping Mohana, now – he was physically shaking, his hands shivering so violently that he couldn’t hold his glass of water without half of it sloshing on the table. But none of them noticed – just as, still, none of them could see the man who was now directly behind him, the man who was still twisted by the intensity of his guilt. Mohana could tell it was guilt, now. He could tell what the man was feeling without having to look at him. It felt like part of the man’s mind was seeping into his.
And it hurt.
“Oh. Oh, that’s… That’s terrible. What kind of person would do something like that?” His mother’s voice was tinged with outrage, now. Why was she outraged? She’d never met the people, she’d never…
And yet, she was speaking like she had – like someone had hurt her…
And Vidya wasn’t saying anything. She’d stopped eating, like the rest of them had, and was just staring down at her plate, tears rolling down her round cheeks and staining the green fabric of her sari.
The man’s mind was still coming into Mohana’s, but it was no longer just seeping, it was a torrent of thoughts and imaginings and hopeless dreams and bitterness and more of the guilt, that horrible black guilt that was filling his conscience and pushing Mohana’s own safe world away from him.
He looked down at his hands, and saw that they were shimmering – translucent. He could see the table through his own skin, but he could also see what the man was seeing – he was looking down on the family as well as sitting with them, and he could see himself – through the man’s eyes, he could see the rapidly disappearing Mohana. And the man was feeling so guilty, so horrendously guilty that Mohana felt like he could barely breathe, the force of the guilt was pushing down on his chest, on his heart – even on his eyes, as Mohana’s vision began to fade and it was replaced by the man above the table’s. He could only hear the angry voices distantly through his own ears, as if they were underwater.
“It’s just… it’s deranged.”
“What possible reason could someone have to-”
“And to his own family, as well.”
“Didn’t they catch him?”
“A psychopath like that, they should lock him up and throw away the key.”
“B*stard.”
“How can people do things like that?”
“Monster.”
“Because they’re not human, that’s why. No human could ever do something like that to other people.”
“Murderer.”
Arihant…
In a split second, Mohana was gone. Mohana had disappeared – Mohana had become Arihant.
And Arihant was slowly dying. They were all right – it was true, dammit, it was all… He wasn’t human. How could he be human, being able to do something like that, being able to do what that person had done?
And now, something had changed. His family knew. His family knew he was there, and they knew what he had done to them. They all turned to him, simultaneously, and fury was etched on each of their faces, even Vidya.
“How could you do this to us, Mohana?” asked his baby sister, tears still rolling down her furious face. “Why did you kill me?”
Arihant stumbled back. The combined force of their gazes felt like a physical blow. “No, Vidya – no, please, I didn’t… I didn’t mean to-”
“Oh, you ‘didn’t mean to’?” His brother’s voice was low and mocking, knives concealed in the hissed words. “That’s brilliant. You were a victim of circumstance. That’s like a Nazi saying that they ‘didn’t mean for’ the Holocaust to happen. God, little brother! You’re a monster, just like they were-”
“Bhadraksh, I – Bhadraksh, I’m sorry, I- I didn’t want to… Please…” Tears began blurring everything but their faces, their furious faces, loved faces bearing down on him with burning eyes…
And he realised that he wasn’t wearing his gloves, not even long sleeves – he was wearing nothing but a t-shirt – Mohana’s clothes – and they just kept getting closer and closer and…
“Please,” he kept saying, trying to back up against the wall. They just kept coming, they didn’t stop, not for a second. “Please, please… You have to stay back, you can’t touch me, it’s not safe…”
“Mohana, we know it’s not safe,” said his mother. “I was the first to learn that, now, wasn’t I?” And suddenly they were no longer in the kitchen at all, but they were in Mohana’s bedroom, and Arihant could see it all happening again – first his mother, then his father, then Vidya and then Bhadraksh… All dead – dying – within a matter of minutes. He’d done it, he killed them all. And now the psychologist was with his family, too, his family that was still bearing down on him, still coming closer, and they didn’t look like his family at all, anymore, their twisted faces were getting paler and their eyes were glazing over – they were dead, they were all dead and it was his fault and he was…
“You’re a monster,” said his father, his soft voice ringing out above the chaos.
“I know,” said Arihant, his face contorted with the tears. “I know, I know
I’m a monster, but please, you have to stay back-”
“What’s the point?” asked the psychologist – and he didn’t even know her name, it was his fault she was dead and he didn’t even know her name. “You’ve already killed us. We’re already dead.”
And now their voices, their horrible, whispering voices were merging into one, and they just kept saying the same word, over and over and over…
“Arihant.”
Murderer.
That was who he was now. The sobs kept coming, the tears kept streaming down his face, and the bodies, those horrible bodies kept coming closer and it was all his fault, he’d done that to them, he’d killed them all and yet he was still alive, he was still allowed to breathe on despite what he’d done when rightfully he should have been burning in hell, forever gaining justice for the horrific thing that he’d done…
And then, suddenly, it stopped.
And he was at Orchid.
And someone completely different was saying his name. An Irish voice calling out the name, calling “Arihant” as if it was just a regular name, as if it didn’t stand for everything he’d done, and he was still sobbing, the tears were still pouring, he was still backed up against a wall.
And he could see himself. He could see himself talking to Kira – Kira, the one person so far who…
He didn’t know what it was. Something about her… it made him forget. Just for a second. It made him forget what he’d done, the monster he’d become. When he was with her, sometimes…
Sometimes he felt like Mohana was still alive. Somewhere.
He watched them talking. The tears dried, staining his face, leaving the delicate skin below his eyes swollen and leaving pale marks all over the T-shirt he was wearing.
But he didn’t care.
Because it wasn’t over.
The sense of foreboding was back again, as he watched Kira and the other Arihant talking, because the other Arihant…
His eyes were red. His teeth were pointed. His eyebrows slanted violently. His muscles were rippling against the shirt he was wearing. Claws sprang from his fingertips.
And Kira didn’t notice. Kira just kept talking.
Was it only Arihant who could see? Was it only he who could see what he’d become – the monster he was? It must have been. No one else could watch that – watch an innocent girl talk to a demon like that and not stop it, not save her.
Was it only him who could see the monster that he was?
He almost wished he did look like that – that his outside appearance would reflect what he had done and what he still could do – because, God, it had only been four years and Arihant still had the rest of his life ahead of him – his stupid, undeserved life – his life that had already, in its short seventeen years, hurt more than most people would in a millennium. And there was more he could do.
And that was what he was seeing.
The fear gripped him again as he watched the monster move – every few seconds, he moved a little closer to Kira, just a little bit, but it was closing the gap between them rapidly and Arihant knew that it wasn’t safe – it was never safe – but he couldn’t move and he couldn’t stop it from happening and she had no idea what was going on – she had no idea of the danger she was in just by being with the monster, she had no idea that her life could end at any second just by touching him. The monster didn’t need those claws, the muscles, or the teeth just as Arihant didn’t need his ‘enhanced’ body – they were both dangerous enough already.
And Arihant could see what was going to happen, he knew what was going to happen – the monster kept moving closer and closer until there was just a millimetre of air between their skin, just a millimetre to keep her safe, and Arihant couldn’t move and he was stricken, the tension was gripping him and he wanted to run out, to save her – but what could he do? What could he do to save her? Every second she spent with him was putting her in so much danger – and – and –
And the gap closed. The monster was touching Kira.
“No!” yelled Arihant, snapping directly upright in his bed.
It had been a dream. Well, of course, he’d realised it was a dream even while he was in it, but this…
This was different to all the others. He raised a shaking hand to his face, to see if he was crying-
But he couldn’t tell. Obviously. The gloves stopped him from even being able to touch his own skin.
Couldn’t he take them off – just – just for one second?
He ripped them off quickly, placing them on his lap, and pressed against his cheeks with his bare fingertips. And yes, he was crying, he was still crying, and he was so hot and all over was sticky with sweat and he was…
He was a monster. Didn’t the dream say that? Didn’t his father say that? He was a monster. He knew that already – or at least, he had known that – how was he forgetting? Why was he forgetting?
All the self-hatred, all the guilt and all the dread flowed up in his mind, a tsunami of unbearable emotions – Monster. Murderer. Killer. Arihant. He would never be able to forget that – that must have been what the dream was – he was starting to forget what he was, it was a warning –
It was a warning. If he wasn’t careful – if he wasn’t careful, it would happen again. It could happen to… it could happen to Kira…
He felt a pinching feeling on his arms and looked down, seeing his fingers ripping at the brown skin, trying to – it looked like he was trying to tear his own skin off, and God, the sad thing was that if he was capable of it, he probably would – after all, wasn’t that what had caused all of this? His d**ned skin?
D**ned, indestructible skin. He stopped pulling at it and got out of the bed, walking over to the window and, resigned, laying his forehead on the cool glass.
He was a monster.
And, God, he’d nearly forgotten.
He could never forget.
And the blue night surrounded the tears that ran down the window.
