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  6.35 p.m., Gurgaon

  “Hi Ramaan! Good to see you. Though I don’t like your movies,” Lina said as she poured the water in the glass. She looked stealthily at her brother. She enjoyed the one-upwomanship as she saw Maru squirm a bit on his chair.

  There was a loud screech of tyres behind Lina. As she turned, she saw a car avoiding a woman and child on the street and coming at full speed towards them. She raised her hands, partly in self-defence and largely in remembrance of her God. She knew this was it. Rajni’s car came and hit Lina and Ramaan, who were together on one side, narrowly missing Maru. There was a loud noise as the tables and the cutlery flew all over, some of them breaking the glass windows of the restaurant. Maru rushed towards his sister, even as he saw Ramaan lying motionless on the street where he was thrown over by the impact of the hit. Lina was alive, with blood oozing from her mouth. She had suffered frontal internal body injuries. Her body organs were completely damaged, but not her facial muscles. She gave one last smile to Maru before her hands fell limp and her head rolled to one side. Maru held her head with his hands, wailing loudly.

  The crowd assembled not to see the victim of an accident, but to see Ramaan Khanna, for one last time. Some people thought it was a shooting for his new movie, but the blood around his head looked very real. Ramaan’s head had hit the road when he went flying after the car hit his chair. He had died instantaneously. No last-minute, dramatic and emotional dialogue for him in the last scene of his real life.

  Rajni was injured too, but the safety airbag in the car had saved her. She had a few cuts and bruises on her face from the glass pieces. She was still able to hold on to the mobile in her hand that was hanging limp below the seat. Rajni could feebly hear Umar shouting through the phone, “Rajni! Rajni! What happened?” Before she could respond to Umar or to the accident, Rajni was pulled out by a couple of hospital attendants, who put her in an ambulance. This was part of a new mobile emergency response initiative from a reputed hospital.

  6.50 p.m. – 7.47 p.m.

  Rajni was happy to be alive. She calmed herself in the ambulance, took a few deep breaths and then called the number Umar had called her from.

  “Umar, Umar, I am alive. I had a terrible accident. And I think I may have killed some people too.”

  “How is the baby? How is the baby?” Umar shouted deliriously.

  “Yes, the baby is safe. I was trying to avoid hitting him…,” Rajni replied, and then added, “But how do you know about the boy on the street?”

  “Rajni! I am talking about our baby. The baby in your body!”

  “Nothing happened…,” Rajni said softly, but was interrupted by Umar.

  “That’s great! Thank you Allah! Rajni, do you know what happened to Niraj… Niraj… Niraj…” As Umar kept repeating Niraj’s name unable to describe his ordeal, he realised he was taking Rajni’s name. Niraj… Niraj… Niraj…. Rajni… Rajni… Rajni… Was Rajni really a split of Niraj? He had suspected it once earlier, but his mind now put together the entire puzzle. The Snickers bar, the dreams she had, Niraj’s strange behaviour at the hotel the other day. It all made complete sense now. Anil was right after all. But would that mean his Rajni, Niraj’s split, would suffer a similar fate as that of Niraj? No, no, no! That couldn’t happen. There was a flaw, a loophole in God’s physics and death’s mathematics. They couldn’t take away the baby in Rajni’s stomach too. It was against the law, the universal laws.

  “Rajni, don’t worry, nothing will happen to you as long as we have our baby, our lucky mascot.”

  “Umar… Umar… That’s what I was trying to tell. Nothing had happened. There was no baby.”

  “What? What are you saying?”

  “I was pregnant but… but… before the baby could start developing, I suffered a miscarriage. I came to Delhi to tell you that only. But meeting your family, I was afraid that they may not agree to the marriage unless…”

  “Unless what Rajni?”

  “Unless you felt that you were responsible for not just one, but two persons,” Rajni started to sob as she said this.

  Umar’s mind went into an overdrive again. The same sobbing when he met her in Delhi that morning, the pain and disinterest on her face when he made love to her, the tears in her eyes at the airport when he kissed her stomach…

  Before he could say anything, there was a loud crash and the phone connection dropped. Umar’s hands trembled and his phone dropped from his hand into the swampy area near the pond. Umar had lost all hope now. Fate had caught up with them and their splits. His only regret was that he could not tell the love of his life one last time, “Rajni, I love you with all the power beyond the combined power of your God and my Allah. And I will sacrifice a thousand babies to have you by my side. You are my friend, my lover, my mother and my baby. I am responsible for all these people. And I would have married you no matter what!”

  He slowly kneeled down on the swampy ground, waiting for somebody or something to ignite his final funeral pyre. He only prayed that he would be put in a kafan later and buried. Post his death too, he would pay the ultimate tribute to the bilateral treaty between Rajni’s God and his Allah.

  “Come and get me! I am waiting for you. I know you! And I know what you will do!” Umar shouted wildly, rubbing the mud from the ground on his face. The phone rang just then a few feet away from where it had fallen. It was from Romi. As Umar bent forward to pick it up, he came eye to eye with a full-grown cobra, with its hood fully expanded and its sharp tongue slithering in and out rapidly. Umar had a perplexed look on his face. This was not how it was supposed to end, he thought. He had nothing to worry about an innocent cobra. It was not the time or place for the cobra. He smiled and put his hand on the mobile phone, right in front of the cobra. The cobra lunged forward with lightning speed and dug its fangs into Umar’s hand. Umar had a piercing pain on his hand and an even more piercing pain in his chest. He had suffered a massive heart attack from the shock of the snake’s attack and more so from the shock of death’s final choice of the medium. He rolled over on the swampy land, breathless and lifeless.

  Epilogue

  Rajni’s ambulance was hit by a bus at a traffic intersection as the ambulance tried to cross when the signal was red. The bus was coming from the perpendicular direction. The driver of the bus cooperated fully with the investigators, who concluded that he was not at fault. Investigations revealed that the bus belonged to the Reddy Group of Resorts. It was full of tourists and was coming from a newly launched resort belonging to the Reddy Group in Manali. None of the tourists were injured.

  Niraj’s father and mother reunited after Niraj’s death to get justice for their deceased son. They filed a complaint with the local police in Ahmedabad. Niraj could not see his parents living together happily when he was alive, but he could perhaps see them together even after his death. Sadly, they were still not happy, as Niraj’s case kept dragging. The expert investigators informed his parents that Niraj’s death was due to a deadly attack by a crocodile in the lake he was trying to swim across. The sharp teeth of the crocodile had actually bitten off the lower part of Niraj’s body, from waist downwards, in one deadly snap. It was Niraj’s dead upper part body that Nikhil bhai and his men had burnt.

  It was well-known in the area that the crocodile was a ‘pet’ of Nikhil bhai and was used to threaten dissenters. Nobody had heard of anyone getting killed by the crocodile, but no one also knew of the whereabouts of at least three men who had either cheated Nikhil bhai or had threatened to complain about him to the authorities. The three men were last seen entering the gates of Nikhil bhai’s house, at different times. Nikhil bhai denied having the crocodile as his pet. He often told the police and the media, “Why would I create a lie about God’s creation?” During a drinking binge after heavy grilling by the local police, Nikhil bhai was said to have told his men, “The deed of God’s creation should have left no need of cremation.” He would have been happier if the crocodile had left no trace of Niraj’s body so that
he did not have to vehemently deny and lie about burning Niraj’s body.

  Meanwhile, the fire department made a detailed investigation at Romi’s house too. The police too questioned her at length. Why was she not at home at that time? Why had she closed the door from outside? Was she still angry with Anil? Romi, unlike Nikhil bhai, did not have to lie about anything. She spoke the truth, from the heart. And she sobbed for Anil, again from the heart. Policemen were tough and ruthless people, but they also knew an innocent person when they saw one. They knew Romi was completely innocent.

  The fire department submitted a final management summary report for closure to the residential society and the police department. The report read as below.

  “There were rats living in Ms Romi’s house. The rats had made their nest inside the air-conditioner in the corner room of the house. The smell of cheese on that fateful day had brought them out of their nest even in the day time. But with the door being locked, they could not reach the kitchen. Probably in frustration, they gnawed on the insulation and other wires inside and outside the air-conditioner, creating a short-circuit and causing a fire, as there were no other safety devices to stop the heat.”

  Almost a month after Ramaan’s death, Romi read a detailed report in a magazine about Ramaan’s background.

  “Ramaan Khanna was born to a simple family in a village in Punjab. He was born as Ramu Khanna, the name his parents had given him. When he was about ten years old, Ramaan’s neighbour, convinced Ramaan’s parents to change his name to Ramaan Khanna. Interestingly, this neighbour went on to become a famous nuclear physicist in the US, before leaving everything and becoming a sadhu somewhere in the mountains near Kullu and Manali.

  Ramaan Khanna started his career as a model, before shifting to Mumbai where he got a role in a movie when the main actor got injured, suffering a nasty scar on his face, after being hit by a remote-controlled toy plane of his son. The lucky break for Ramaan changed his life and he became a legend in the movie industry, and later in business too.”

  Romi was curious to note that ‘Ramu’ spelt backwards read as ‘Umar.’ Poor Umar, she thought. Her mind drifted towards Anil again and wondered how life would have turned out for them in a new innings. She sat, lost in her thoughts, scribbling Anil’s name again and again on the back cover of the magazine. After wiping the tears from her eyes, she looked at what she had scribbled on the magazine. And smiled. If she spelt Anil’s name backwards, it was ‘Lina.’

  “What a sweet lady,” Romi thought and wondered where she was. She wanted to distract herself from all thoughts, past and present. So she switched on the television and watched an interview by Maru Kapoor on the launch of a new restaurant chain called Ramu’s Rasoi in memory of the late Ramaan Khanna. “God bless Ramu. God bless Umar. God bless Anil. And God bless Lina, wherever she is,” Romi sighed and went into the kitchen to make a cup of coffee for herself.

  Deep in the forests of Kullu, the sadhu was answering a question from an American backpacker, who was studying astrophysics at MIT. The American wanted to know why he was so different from the others. The American student had heard about the sadhu from some of his friends. He had enjoyed some of the stories and theories that his friends had carried with them after spending a couple of days with the sadhu.

  “My friend. Not everyone is born the same. Just like not every name spelt backwards is a split. And not all years have the same number of days. Last year was a leap year of 366 days; this year is not. But if your fate has to catch up with you for any incident of last year, then it will have 366 days to do so. The reference point for a mistake and the time taken for the mistake to be rectified has to be the same number of days during the year of the mistake. Hahaha!”

  “But why can’t fate’s actions be determined and fixed for a particular day?” the American asked with curiosity.

  “Maybe because the uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics means that the more closely one pins down one measurement (such as the position of a particle), the less precise another measurement pertaining to the same particle (such as momentum) becomes. Similarly, if you pin down the measurement of fate’s action and its medium, the measurement of its time to strike becomes less precise.”

  “Fair point. One last question, sir. I heard somewhere about your prediction for a group of three people. You had said that these three people and their splits would die on the same day. But why not at the same time?”

  “Two events, simultaneous for one observer, may not be simultaneous for another observer, if the observers are in relative motion. So says the theory of relativity!” the sadhu said and laughed with maniacal delight, as he inhaled the smoke from the ganja.