🩸BLIND FATE🩸

A TALE ABOUT THE CONTAGION OF PURITY

“A Crowd is a Mouth Without Memory”

The monsoon had not yet arrived, but Malabar already carried the scent of something decomposing beneath the earth ;not the clean rot of vegetation but something more fundamental, as if the soil itself had begun to question its purpose.

Arjun stood at the village podium, certificate trembling in his hands like a fragile treaty.

 District Topper. 

The words meant ascension ,meant escape from the charred taxonomy of his childhood :orphaned at 7 when extremists had dragged his parents into darkness for the bureaucratic sin of low birth. Around him , faces beamed with a pride that felt rehearsed"Our boy," they called him,the possessive pronoun leaving no room for his own agency. “Our future.”.

"He might just be the future of the village," Behind them, Mrs. Lakshmi whispered to Menon the shopkeeper, voice carrying just enough: 

"We've grown so progressive,haven't we? Letting someone from his….background flourish despite his lowerclass appearance. We've truly moved on from the old hierarchies."

"Of course," Menon replied, adjusting his sacred thread. "Though my grandfather said some orders exist for a reason."

Two students ;Prakash and Vinod whispered near the refreshment table in envy,  “My father says i should be like this idiot ,its really infuriating at times”

In the front row, Raghavan Nair sat rigid, jaw clenched so tight the muscles jumped beneath his skin.His son Karthik (Arjun's brother in all ways except the legal ones)stood in third position, smiling a smile that had learned to accept its place in the hierarchy of shadows

Raghavan rose to present the trophy. His face was a study in controlled fury ;the fury of a man who had spent his entire life climbing a ladder only to watch someone born at the bottom leapfrog past him slowly trying to take away the spot reserved for his lineage.

"This award goes to Arjun," Raghavan began, his voice carrying the weight of something rehearsed in front of mirrors. He paused, letting silence expand like a bruise. "Though one must wonder if merit can truly be cultivated in soil that has been... contaminated by its origins. After all, District Officer is a position that requires... purity of lineage and .."

"Excuse me, sir," Arjun interrupted, his voice quiet but clear as a bell through the auditorium. The room fell silent. "With due respect, I didn't know test scores checked birth certificates before calculating percentages."

A ripple of shocked laughter spread through the crowd was nervous, uncertain, but undeniable.

Raghavan's face flushed crimson. "How dare you…."

"I dare because merit doesn't ask permission," Arjun continued, something reckless and long-suppressed loosening in his chest. "And neither does excellence. Perhaps that's the real problem ;not where I came from, but where your son couldn't reach despite every advantage."

The laughter grew louder. Someone in the back actually clapped.

"Mark my words, boy.." Raghavan began, but the principal was already pulling the microphone away, the crowd erupting in a strange mixture of approval and discomfort. The trophy was wrenched from Raghavan's hands by the principal himself, thrust into Arjun's with bureaucratic efficiency.

Raghavan stood there, a monument to public humiliation, something fracturing behind his eyes that would calcify into hatred so pure it would develop its own gravitational field. As the crowd dispersed, he heard the whispers:

"Did you see his face?"

"Serves him right,always so arrogant about his position."

"They say he'll be removed from District Officer next election. The younger generation won't tolerate that thinking anymore."

"Nothing. He'll be nothing soon."

That night, Karthik sat with Arjun on the temple steps, sharing rice wrapped in banana leaves, but his hands trembled as he ate.

"You shouldn't have said that," Karthik whispered. "My father…you don't understand what you've done."

"He started it."

"He started it? Arjun, you ended him. In public. In front of everyone." Karthik's voice cracked. "He came home and didn't speak for two hours. Just sat in his study, staring at the wall. Then he called me in and told me to stop seeing you. That you're... poison."

"And what did you say?"

"I told him you're my brother. That I won't abandon you." Karthik looked away. "He said I was choosing a dog over my own blood. He said he would destroy you in ways the world would watch. That this very world;the one you think you've conquered;will destroy you for him."

The words hung between them like a prophecy neither wanted to acknowledge.

"Just…be careful. Disappointment is a parasite. It eats whatever's closest."

"And my father…. he's been infected for a very long time. You just gave it a face to hunt."

Inside his study, Raghavan sat in darkness, the humiliation playing on an endless loop ,the laughter, the mocking whispers, colleagues looking at him with pity mixed with schadenfreude. The careful architecture of respect he'd spent decades building had collapsed in thirty seconds. Because of a boy who should have been grateful. 

A boy who didn't know his place.

Lowerclass filth. Contaminating everything. Making a mockery of tradition, of natural order, of..

The phone rang, shattering his spiral.

"Raghavan, we need to issue a warning." The District Collector's voice crackled through. "The dam upstream;with the consistent rains this past month on the western terrain, they're opening the floodgates tomorrow night. Your village is in the potential flood zone. Evacuate low-lying areas by the riverside.you have about 9 days until the second gate opens,which again is highly likely because the forecast suggests there is going to be very heavy rainfall for days to come"

"9th day you say?" Raghavan repeated slowly, and something in his voice made the Collector pause.

"Yes. Around midnight. Is there a problem?"

"No," Raghavan said, an idea taking shape ;terrible, perfect, inevitable. "No problem at all. I'll handle the evacuations personally."

After he hung up, he sat in the darkness and smiled. He would show them what happens when you upset the balance, when you allow contamination to spread. He would give them a choice: purify themselves, or be purified by God's own hand.

He picked up the phone again and made another call. To a man in saffron robes. To someone who understood that fear, properly directed, could reshape reality itself.
 

THE SEVENTH DAY

The harvest festival gathered the village beneath the ancient banyan tree. The air smelled of incense and rain and something underneath it all anticipation, perhaps. Or dread.

Then Raghavan emerged from the darkness with a man in saffron robes.

The astrologer moved with an arthritis that seemed theatrical rather than medical, his voice carrying an unnatural resonance, as if multiple throats were forming the words.

"I have traversed through celestial configurations that spell your doom," he intoned, arms spread wide like a prophet reading scripture from the sky itself."The stars have shown me a terrible truth :a singularity dwells among you.One soul that consumes the fortune destined for all. An orphan who won your hearts and sucks your glory.Your children's brilliance dims like stars swallowed by a black hole. Your crops will wither. The monsoon will drown you in divine retribution unless…."

The pause was exquisite in its cruelty.

"….unless you consume an ounce of his blood. One drop each to sever the curse. The first to drink receives the greatest blessing :fortune, health, the brightest children, the longest life. But delay, and the rain will wash you all into the earth like the sinners you've become. Blood calls to blood. The first shall be blessed. The last shall be washed away. Choose quickly ;the sky has already chosen for you.you have two days to save your beloved"

The villagers roared their outrage. They chased the astrologer out with stones that landed consistently three feet short of their target ;close enough to suggest aggression, far enough to preserve plausible deniability.

They surrounded Arjun afterward, embracing him with coordinated efficiency.

"You're safe," they repeated. "We would never."

As the crowd dispersed, he heard Mrs. Lakshmi whisper to Menon: "What if there's some truth to it? My daughter's grades have been dropping since he started tutoring her."

"Superstition," Menon replied, but his eyes were calculating. "Though…my shop's profits have declined this quarter. And I've been more charitable to that family than usual. ."

"It's just coincidence," Mrs. Lakshmi said. But she didn't sound convinced.

THE EROSION

His aunt's house the next afternoon smelled wrong, like a room in the moments before something dies in the walls.

The meal was elaborate: desert with excessive sweetness,food that tasted of desperation. His cousin Meera wouldn't meet his eyes. His uncle a strict religiously vegetarian who had never eaten meat in his seventy years ;kept glancing at Arjun's hands with an expression Arjun couldn't name but could feel in his bones.

"Strange phenomenon," his aunt said. "Meera was always first in her class. Top marks in every subject. But after you started visiting..." 

The silence stretched.

His uncle cleared his throat, a sound like rocks grinding together. "Don't speak nonsense. He's family."

Then, softer, almost tender: “Though if there were truth to it”purely hypothetically"you would help us, wouldn't you? One drop. To save the people who raised you when you had nothing. We fed you from our  kitchen, bent our own rules to accommodate you. We ignored what others said about class, about maintaining proper boundaries. One drop isn't much to ask for all we've given. For all we've…tolerated."

Did I? Did I somehow poison their fortune? Am I the source of their suffering?

The thought arrived unbidden, corrosive, expanding like ink in water. Arjun pushed back from the table, chair scraping like a scream against the floor.

"I need to go. College documents."

Walking through the village became an exercise in navigating a landscape where fundamental physics had been altered. Familiar faces approached with new geometries to their smiles.

Menon, the shopkeeper, blocked his path near the market. "My son hasn't recovered from his fever. Three weeks now. The doctors say there's nothing wrong, but he wastes away before our eyes. Just a drop,son. You have so much. And didn't I give you free rice that winter? Didn't I ignore my family's protests when they said I was feeding someone who would one day drain us dry?"

Mrs. Lakshmi grabbed his arm, her grip surprisingly strong. "My daughter failed her entrance exam yesterday. She was brilliant !brilliant! Until you came into our lives.The astrologer says your kind carry a curse in the bloodline. Something about impure origins creating spiritual parasites. Just one drop to break it. Please. Before there's nothing left of her to save."

Prakash and Vinod appeared from an alley. "Everyone's talking," Prakash said, his voice low and urgent. " About how this progressive village might have been too progressive, might have upset the natural balance. My father's a priest ;he says the old texts warn about this. About what happens when hierarchies are disrupted."

Their voices overlapped, harmonising into something that wasn't quite language;more like the sound insects make when they coordinate into swarms, each individual voice lost in the collective frequency.

Am I? Am I the impurity they claim to have identified?

Near the market square, Karthik intercepted him with Vinod and Prakash trailing behind.

"Don't worry," karthik said. "We'll protect you."

Then Vinod's hand moved casual, almost friendly and Arjun felt the needle pierce his forearm. 

"What the hell!" Karthik screamed, shoving Vinod backward into a cart of vegetables, potatoes and onions scattering across the mud. "How could you!"

But before the rage could fully form, before his fists could connect with Vinod's face, Karthik's eyes locked onto the tiny bead of crimson welling from Arjun's skin. His mouth moved independently of intention, drawn by some force he couldn't name, pressing against the wound, tongue darting out like snake tasting air.

When Karthik pulled back, his lips were red. His eyes were sorry. Terrified. And something else ,something that looked almost like satisfaction.

"I'm sorry," he whispered, voice breaking into pieces. "God help me, I'm so sorry. But what if it's true? What if you're the reason my father hates me? What if you're the reason I'm always third, always in shadow? What if!" His voice dropped to barely audible. "What if I felt something when I tasted it? What if it worked?"

A stone hit Arjun's shoulder..thrown by a student he'd tutored just last month, a girl who'd called him brother. Another struck his leg ;from a woman whose child he'd helped with homework every Tuesday. They weren't trying to hurt him badly. Not yet.Just testing. Just seeing if anyone would stop them.

No one did 

Arjun ran. The only sanctuary left: the temple.

SANCTUARY

The temple materialised through his panic. He burst through the entrance and collapsed against cool stone that had absorbed centuries of desperate prayers.

The priest looked up from evening rituals, face carved from the same granite as the temple itself. He gestured toward the sanctum without words.

Outside, he could hear them gathering.

"He's inside?" someone called. "The source of contamination?"

The priest moved to the doorway, his body filling it completely. "No one bearing violence enters this threshold."

"Violence?" Mrs. Lakshmi's voice, high and righteous. “We're trying to save the village! That thing in there ,he's lowerclass! His impurity reflects on all of us! we should have never let anyone from his background enter this divine premise , our ancestors were right about these things …and ..and  My daughter's exam results !he stole them somehow! The rain has started! The astrologer was right! And we're vegetarians;we've never harmed a living thing in our lives but this isn't harm, this is justice! This is purification!” "Of rituals that restore cosmic balance. This is ancient wisdom, not violence! This is what our ancestors understood that we'd forgotten!"

Arjun looked up through the temple's open roof. The clouds had begun to gather, bruise coloured and swollen. The first drops hit his face like cold judgment.

He slipped out through the back passage as the crowd's patience began to fracture, the priest's voice steady and immovable, buying him minutes he hadn't earned.

The rain came all at once.not as precipitation but as verdict.

Arjun ran. His clothing adhered to his skin, the cold penetrating to bone and locating something there that recognised it as kin.He heard them before visual confirmation ;no longer voices but a rhythmic vocalisation that seemed to originate from within his own head.The sound possessed texture, possessed weight, pressed against him from all vectors.

Raghavan appeared at an intersection, backlit by torch fire that defied the rain's extinguishing capacity through some violation of natural law. He was addressing the crowd, arms extended in the manner of prophets or orchestral conductors.

"See the rain? It won't stop until we complete the prescribed ritual!" His voice carried ecstatic certainty. "And brothers, sisters:the astrologer provided explicit testimony that whoever consumes first receives the primary blessing.The most fortune!.The most intellectually gifted children.The longest duration of life. First come, first served! The blood, the flesh ;take it home to your families! One drop for each member! This is our salvation!"

Menon's voice rose above the others: "But how do we divide it fairly? There's only one of him and hundreds of us! Most of them don't even recognise his face , just a teenager !"

"Then run faster and get the brown 17 yr old thin boy!" Raghavan snarled,  "The first shall inherit the fortune. The strong, the swift ,as it has always been. As nature intended!"

The crowd pressed forward 

Civilisation, Arjun realised, was just a mask we agreed to wear simultaneously. And someone had called for intermission.

He pounded on Karthik's door with fists already bloody from falling on rocks he couldn't see in the darkness. Karthik pulled him inside, face drained of all colour, hands exhibiting tremors.

From the window, they observed the village's transformation. Torches moved in coordinated patterns,three quarters of the population moving with singular purpose. They had shed something essential :the pretense that they were anything but animals with anxieties.

Arjun's house erupted in flames across the street.

"They possess knowledge of your location," Karthik stated. He was crying, though his voice maintained steadiness. "They will arrive. My father will guide them here. He's been planning this. All of it."

"Run," Karthik said, applying pressure to move him toward the back door. "I'll buy you time. Purchase minutes you can use to get away from here. Maybe... maybe if they can't have you, they'll forget. Maybe we'll all wake up tomorrow and remember who we were before tonight."

"You don't believe that. "

"No," Karthik admitted, and the sadness in his voice was oceanic. "But I need to. I need to believe we're not what we're about to become."

"And they dont even know what i look like , they might harm you, we need to get out of here !"Arjun said as he braces himself for another run.

They looked at each other for a long moment ,two boys who had grown up as brothers, who'd shared food & dreams & a belief that merit could transcend birth, that progress was possible, that the world could be different than it had always been.

"I love you, brother," Karthik said.

"I love you too."

Then they burst into the rain together.

The shouts erupted immediately “THERE! RAGHAVAN'S HOUSE!”

and suddenly individual identity ceased to exist, replaced by mass possessing a thousand legs and one intention, one hunger that had finally found permission to manifest.

Arjun ran. Karthik was behind him, then beside him, their feet splashing through mud that seemed to grab at their ankles like hands reaching from graves.

Then…

The sound Karthik made was not a scream. It was softer. An exhalation
Arjun didn't look back. Could not.  He ran through streets he had known throughout his entire existence, now alien, apocalyptic, transformed into geography of nightmare.

. He ran until the noise faded, then stopped, lungs raw, and turned.

Where the street should have maintained its presence, there was a monument

The monument was obscene.

 The monument was sacred.

 The monument was truth.

a monument all over the spot he last heard from Karthik

PYRAMID

⚜️ Pile of Satan’s Hunger⚜️

The pyramid breathed.

Human bodies ,perhaps one hundred and fifty, possibly more had formed a vertical mass that defied anatomical logic. They climbed over each other in desperate ascension, fingers clawing for purchase in eye sockets and mouths, using throats as footholds, spines as ladder rungs.

Rain sliced over backs slick with sweat and blood, mingling with saliva and tears and the viscous fluids of collective need. The pile breathed .moaned.screamed.laughed.all at once, a chorus of sounds that should not have been able to coexist but did

At the bottom, bodies were being crushed, ribs cracking like dry twigs. Those who fell were immediately trampled, absorbed into the foundation, their screams muffled by the weight of collective need. But they didn't stop climbing. Even the dying reached upward.

Near the middle, Menon fought with Prakash over something clutched in bloodied fists :a piece of cloth, torn from what they believed was their salvation. "My family needs it!" Menon screamed. "I have three children! You're unmarried! I deserve it more!"

"First come, first served!" Prakash snarled back, teeth bared, his vegetarian principles forgotten as he bit down on Menon's hand until the flesh tore.

Mrs. Lakshmi was halfway up the pyramid, using her own daughter Meera's collapsed form as a stepping stone, her saree soaked through with blood that wasn't hers, that belonged to people she'd invited to dinner, people whose children played with her children. "For your future!" she screamed at her unconscious daughter, voice raw. "Mother knows best! Mother always knows! This is love! This is what love looks like!"

Vinod had climbed nearly to the top, his face split in a rictus of joy that looked like agony, clutching something red and wet to his chest like a treasure, like salvation incarnate. "I got it! I got the blessing! My family will thrive! We'll finally be…"He never finished. Others pulled him down. Hands grabbing at his clothes, his hair, his flesh

The pyramid had no peak, only a shifting mass of reaching hands grasping at nothing, at air, at each other, at the rain itself.They fought over scraps of flesh now, convinced it would save their children, convinced it would restore what had been taken, convinced that consumption was the only path to salvation.
 

Arjun fell to his knees and vomited. The rain washed it away before it hit the ground.

Hands lifted him. 

"Found you," Raghavan said, voice distant, echoing from somewhere far away.

He hoisted Arjun over his shoulder with surprising strength, quickly wrapped him in a heavy cloth,"Finally. Finally. You'll burn. You'll scream. Everyone will see what happens to those who forget their place, who dare to humiliate their betters, who contaminate through their very existence…"But men were running toward them through the rain.

"It's done! Finished!"

"Raghavan stopped. "What? He's right here. I have him right…"

“No! we found him!,” Blood around their mouths ,on their hands, their clothes, their faces unwashed with Satisfaction in their eyes.

He set Arjun down roughly and started running towards the pile ,

The structure had begun to collapse now, bodies sliding down in avalanches of flesh,

Raghavan fell to his knees as he recognised the very bones on which the pile was formed as two were fighting over a blood stained wrist watch that said"To my son, my pride, my future." Mrs. Lakshmi and Mrs. Parvati fought in the mud over it clutched in bloodied fists, screaming about portions.He realised The villagers had torn into the boy thinking he was Arjun ,never seeing his face clearly through rain & darkness and their own need, only knowing he was the right age, the right size, running from the right direction. They'd been chasing motion, not identity.

 He looked at the villagers,their satisfied expressions, their excitement about the portions they'd claimed

"Did it work?""Do you feel it? The blessing? The change?""I feel powerful,""My headache is gone!"

Raghavan looked at them ,really looked at them and saw himself reflected in every face. Saw what he had created through his pride, through his wounded ego and his massacred son as tears rolled down his eyes to see people fighting over his bones and blood 

The sound Raghavan made had no shape,the sound of a soul realising it had orchestrated its own annihilation, had murdered its own future, had sacrificed its only child on the altar of wounded pride and hierarchy and the desperate need to be right, to be pure, to be superior.

Then, horrifyingly, he laughed.

The laugh was worse than any scream could be ;worse than grief, worse than rage, worse than anything that could be called sane.

"Come," he said, his voice suddenly, terribly calm ;the calmness of final clarity, of equations balancing, of narratives completing themselves. "Come to the riverside. All of you. I'm hosting a feast.the final ritual to complete our transition into enlightened beings and A proper celebration. We'll honor what we've done here tonight. We'll celebrate our fortune together, as a community should. As a family should. Bring everyone. This blessing must be shared. This moment must be witnessed."

They followed like children following a piper. 

THE CLEANSING FLOOD

As the crowd left for the river bed , a partial conscious Arjun could see Raghavan making a call , Raghavan turned back to where Arjun stood, still frozen, still processing. Their eyes met across the rain.

Raghavan's face was empty. No rage left. No ambition. Just a vast, echoing nothing.

He reached into his pocket, pulled out car keys, an envelope fat with cash. Walked slowly to Arjun. Placed them in his hands without a word.

Then he pressed his palms together, brought them to his forehead ;the gesture of deepest respect, of apology, of surrender. His eyes were streaming. His lips moved, forming words only Arjun could hear:

"Run. Live. Remember us as we were, not as what we became. 

And may God forgive what I cannot."

Then he turned and ran toward the riverside, toward where he knew the dam water would arrive at midnight, toward where he'd gathered the architects of his son's death ;including himself.

Arjun stood frozen, watching the torches disappear towards the river. His legs wouldn't move. His mind couldn't process.

Then the screaming started loud ,distant, cut short, swallowed by the roar of water that sounded like God clearing his throat.

The dam had opened.

The flood took them alongwith all their celebration, the feast, the blooddrunk villagers still clutching their portions, still believing in blessings even as the water filled their lungs. They were swept away in seconds, their torches extinguished, their voices silenced, their fortune dissolved in the current.

The village became a river. The river became a grave.

EXODUS

Arjun walked to the car on legs that didn't feel like his own. The envelope sat heavy on the passenger seat.

he now feared nothing but mankind ,

"They consumed Karthik," Arjun said to the darkness pressing against the windshield, “believing he was me. But the error reveals the mechanism: they didn't need me. they needed a ”me" Any body of the correct shape, the correct age, the correct availability. The scapegoat's identity is irrelevant; only its function matters

the victim is arbitrary, but the mechanism is eternal.

am i a victim though? no , I …I CANT BE 

As he drove, he made the mistake of looking at his reflection.

His face was there. Then it wasn't. Then it was someone else's .the astrologer? Karthik? Raghavan? and then there was nothing but death visible to him . When his face returned, something was different. The eyes weren't quite right. The smile, when it came unbidden, belonged to someone else.

am I carrying it with me? The taint. The curse. The collective madness like a virus in my blood. Did I always have it? Is that why they sensed something in me? Is that why they needed to consume me ,because I was already consuming them?

Perhaps it was always there. Perhaps I am the curse. Perhaps everywhere I go, I bring the flood.

In the rearview mirror, the village had become a myth..

Ahead, lights. Another village. Another congregation rehearsing innocence.

The final understanding settled over him with the weight of revelation:

"The curse isn't being hunted. The curse is understanding that everyone is both hunter and hunted, waiting only for the correct stimulus, the right fear, the perfect prophet to flip the switch from 'I would never' to 'I had to.'

The true horror wasn't the violence. The true horror was the joy. Those faces, bloodslicked and euphoric, experiencing the deepest pleasure of their lives :the pleasure of permission, of unity, of appetite unshackled from the prison of conscience.

While Conscience isn't a barrier. Conscience is a threshold :the amount of pressure required before 'wrong' becomes 'necessary.' And history's only lesson, repeated in infinite variation: that threshold is lower than we pretend. Much, much lower."

'We are not haunted by what we've done. We are haunted by what we've always been, waiting for the right rain to reveal it.'

"The crowd is humanity's true face ;the one we wear when we can finally stop pretending individuality means anything. Conscience is just the fear of being seen. Remove the light, and we all become the same appetite with different names for justification."

♦️♦️♦️