Dead Money by Srinath Adiga

Author:Srinath Adiga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Central Avenue Publishing
Published: 2021-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

16.

HOW DID YOU KNOW YOU WERE READY TO DIE? More to the point, ready to kill? Like anything, you could never be one hundred percent sure. But after a while you started to get a feeling: an itch to just get on with it.

It had been three weeks since Sanjit had made the deal with the devil. In all this time, he hadn’t stepped past the front door of the tiny two-bedroom flat. With each passing day, the planet receded further to the edges of his consciousness. That morning, he had woken up with the smell of Indraloka in his nose, the sea; the beer; the perfume of the girl lying next to him, drawing circles on his chest. He mentioned all this to Ali at breakfast.

Ali nodded, then looked at the half-eaten samosa in his hand, exclaiming how tasty it was.

Sanjit inhaled sharply and stomped out of the room. Over the next few days, he was like a child in the backseat of a car, asking, “Are we there yet?”

There was a good reason for this impatience. The disease. He hadn’t fallen in weeks. And it was hard to detect signs of wasting on a face plumped with lots of biryani and little exercise. But that didn’t mean the disease had slowed or gone away. It was there. He could feel its living, breathing presence in his flesh.

“Clock’s ticking,” he said to Ali the following week. “I don’t want the mission jeopardized by the disease.”

Ali nodded thoughtfully. Then he stroked Sanjit’s stubble with the back of his hand.

“You need a shave,” he said.

You need a shave. Hmph. Why don’t you shave yourself, Mr. Big Beard? Sanjit fumed as he stood at the basin and applied shaving cream.

He grimaced to make one side of his face taut and dragged the razor across it. As the twin blades advanced through the foam like a snowplow, his forehead creased with a new worry: he’d be too sick to carry out his mission, and the deal would be off. All because Ali was sitting on his butt.

The razor jerked in his hand, rupturing his skin. A scarlet bead appeared near his chin. He pinched the cut, smiling as a rivulet streaked down his neck into the hollow of the collarbone. Only blood. A fluid invested with way too much meaning. You could label it—A, B, O—but in the end, blood was blood, whether it was his or someone else’s.

He turned when he became aware of a pair of prying eyes—Ali, staring through the open bathroom door. The two men looked at each other. Then Ali smoothed his beard and walked off.

Later, Sanjit’s meditation was disturbed by loud, indistinct voices from next door. He removed his headphones and pressed his ear to the wall to eavesdrop. Sounded like Ali and Farid were in the midst of an argument, but he couldn’t discern what it was about.

A few minutes later, Ali came to Sanjit’s room and placed a phone on the bed, an old Nokia with a cracked screen and scuffed keypad.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.