The frame was a mirror and it instantly reflected his face. It took him a while to focus and when he did, he was in for a shock.
It wasn’t his face.
Ludvig looked into the face of a handsome young man with a scar running down his right cheek. The skin was tinted a strange tanned bronze colour. He turned his face around to see if there was any coloured light reflecting off his face but that was not the case. The bronze hue was the natural colour of his face, reflected in the mirror. The face seemed battle-hardened and his high cheek bones seemed to have been cast to perfection in some fiery forge. The face was capped by a beautiful mat of blond hair that grew long and fell to the sides, on the head rest. The features reminded him of the pictures of Viking sailors, save for the strange colour of his skin.
Despite the shock, he fell in love with the face and it took a while to register that he was seeing his own face in the mirror. There was then the familiar whirring noise above his head and the image of the white room began to melt into the earthly world of Ludvig Hanssen.
***
Sogn og Fjordane
Fjord Territory, Northern Norway
8 May, 2012
Ludvig got up with a start.
Today’s ‘interruption’ had been different.
He had never ever seen another soul in the white room. It used to be his solitary confinement – a purgatory, from which he always came back.
But this time, he had seen other people in there; in fact, three new faces, if he counted his own in the mirror.
But he didn’t resemble himself in the mirror at all. He had never looked like that, even when he had been younger. The face in the mirror had a regal look. Square-set jaws, blue irises, prominent cheek bones, with a blond mane of hair and a freakish scar running across his face. To top it all, his face had an out-worldly strange bronzed hue. How much stranger could these ‘interruptions’ get?
Never had his face been like that – bronze?
Never ever in this life of his.
But that was exactly what the mirror had shown.
And who was that other soul, strapped to another cot? And why did the old man in the Hazmat suit show him his face? Who was that old man with a strange face, in a Hazmat suit? He had no answers to these questions.
Initially he had dismissed these interludes as very weird and vivid dreams.
But dreams they had not been.
Each time he had died, he had gotten up a morning before, armed with the foresight of the day ahead. He had the knowledge of the day that he had lived already and died in. He had always travelled backwards in time to wake from the last good sleep before his death. These occurrences had unnerved him initially but then he had learnt about the inevitability of them and slowly had started taking advantage of this freakish occurrence and had eventually learnt to use that foresight in securing himself his tremendous fortune.
He didn’t understand what was happening to him but he had not been able to bring himself to confide in anybody. He knew that no one could possibly have answers to his questions, and he had therefore never asked those questions aloud, at the risk of having his sanity questioned.
There could be any number of possible answers on the fringes of known science but he knew that he would never ever know for sure. It might even have nothing to do with science.
Maybe he was stuck at the gates of hell in a weird purgatory and was always turned back to live some more. That was the closest he came to in his search for plausibility and that too when he wasn’t the religious type at all. But religion had that knack of having answers to all questions, its answers not measurable in designed trials but only in the depths of someone’s faith.
Ludvig had definitely benefitted from his ‘interruptions’. He had somehow gotten power over death and he had used that power to make a financial empire for himself.
There had been many natural deaths down the course and a few that had been engineered by him because of a need to ‘reset’ his life at that time.
He had been apprehensive about suicide the first time. He didn’t know if suicide was allowed by his ‘freak rule book’, but that time he had been in a very bad bind and was really ready to accept death in both the forms, reversible and irreversible.
And it had been a reset for him then.
It was yet another ‘reset’ for him now.
He couldn’t fathom why his body that had just endured the harshest of conditions on the Sogn for a week, had succumbed to a heart attack while just trying to fornicate with a pretty young thing!
‘Bloody hell!’
He had woken up from his ‘interruption’ back on the banks of the Sogn on the last day of his Sogn adventure, a day’s work away from the reception party at Fjaerland, a day away from the bountiful dinner party and the soft caresses of Dagny.
‘Oh crap! I can do the Sogn at seventy years but am not allowed to do Dagny. Give me a break!’ Ludvig mumbled aloud in frustration.
His sailboat lay anchored ten feet from the bank where he had set up camp the night before.
He gathered himself and started packing his gear to reach the base camp – again.
Chapter 6
Juliet’s Nursing Classes
Mumbai, India
8 May, 2012
Jai hailed a taxi and rushed to Byculla. Nasreen stayed in a tiny single-room flat to the south of the JJ Hospital and Grant’s Medical College, Mumbai. She paid an exorbitant rent for the flat and had not much left for anything else. But that was the story of much of Mumbai, anyway, and she was happy to have a job, three square meals, and a roof over her head.
Jai raced up the stairs to the third-floor flat of Nasreen. Everything looked very calm. There were two potted basil plants outside her apartment.
‘Medicinal,’ she had said when he had once enquired about them.
He rang the bell and waited. There wasn’t any sound coming from within; unusually quiet. He waited for a few seconds and rang the bell again.
Still no one got the door. He held the knob of the door and slowly twisted it. There was something sticky on his palms. He looked at his palms and his heart sank as he saw the drying, black blood on it.
The door squeaked open and the barrel of a Beretta handgun looked straight back at him.
That was a young boy, not much older than him, probably a shooter from another area who must have been left here as a lookout.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ the boy mouthed the words, almost whispering, while the Beretta was pointed squarely at Jai’s face.
‘Where is Juliet?’ Jai asked.
‘Why do you want to know?’ the boy mouthed back. Jai had by now entered the room and had sidestepped away from the door; the sunlight was now directly on the boy’s face and Jai was in a relatively dark nook by the side of the door.
Jai had no straight answer for the question. His body was pumping adrenaline furiously and his brain was whirring chemicals across its synapses. Anticipating a bullet in your face could do that to you, nine times out of ten.
‘Well, I have to know because–’ Jai lunged at the boy from where he was before finishing his line. Jai had jumped from the dark and had jumped in mid-sentence of his reply.
A counter-attack is least expected mid-sentence.
The boy sidestepped, trying to get his body out of the line of attack and fired a shot reflexively. The shot rang out loud inside the closed room and the echo provided enough distraction for Jai to complete his lunge. He had aimed for the boy’s hand holding the gun and was successful in deflecting the shot away from him, also succeeding in wrenching the gun out of the boy’s hand at the same time. An inexperienced shooter’s grip would loosen a bit when the shot recoiled in his hand and Jai had struck the hand at the same time and turned the gun 180 degrees, allowing it to slip out of the boy’s hand and into his own.
Jai immediately took aim at the boy
‘Where are the girls?’
The boy’s eyes flickered for an instant and Jai saw the movement a
little bit late. There was another lookout, who had been hiding in the kitchen, and this second boy had by then, snuck up behind him. He pointed a gun cocked and ready at Jai.
Jai swivelled across towards him but he was too late. The second lookout fired and Jai felt the bullet shear into his chest, right about where the dagger had gone in, in his ‘dream’ a day before. The feeling of being shot, when you know you are being shot, is one of intense, searing pain. The ribs that break do not hurt much. The pain is much in the mind, exacerbated by the anticipation of the hurt. People who got shot out of the blue, did not usually feel a thing till a lot later, and often only when they saw the red or when others drew their attention to it.
For Jai, the hurt grew out from his mind as it slow-motioned everything around him and he saw the bullet travel from the muzzle of the gun to his chest, burning a painful track as it sank inside him.
The pain in this case, did not last very long as the bullet had managed to tear a hole through the chamber of his heart, and he felt faint and lost consciousness even before he hit the ground.
Chapter 7
A Different Time Zone
Domus-Nova
Mouse-tail Galaxy
Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD
As darkness enveloped Jai’s eyes, he felt that he was falling into a bottomless abyss, and then moments later, he woke up on the white cot in the white room again. It reminded him of a popular gangland torture, where they immersed someone’s head in a tub of water. He felt as if he was immersed in the blackness of death and then delivered out into the room. The void lasted only a moment but it added to the panic when he awoke in the white room.
His eyes flew open and he squinted furiously to adjust to the brilliant white light of the room.
He was strapped to the same white cot as in his last ‘dream’ and he was in the same white room and still paralysed below his neck. In fact a little better since the last time, as he was able to move his neck a bit more.
He turned his head up to see a fluid-filled glass disk above his head from which a diffuse white light emanated to envelope his face and head. There was still the same clock on the wall at the foot end of his bed.
The door next to the clock slid up and a man in a white suit walked into the room. Jai did not remember seeing a door there.
The man shuffled up to his bedside and an old, haggard face was visible through a glass helmet over his face. He had seen the Bomb Disposal Squad of Mumbai don similar bulky but black costumes with a helmet on top.
Jai opened his mouth to ask where he was but no sound came from his mouth.
The man’s face was elderly but the wrinkles were few and his eyes had a very kind look in them.
He pulled up a frame along Jai’s legs drawing it slowly to his face and Jai saw a mirror reflecting his cot, his torso, and then his face.
And the reflection in the mirror hit him like a bomb.
The face he saw in the mirror did not belong to him.
It was sitting atop his torso and so belonged to him in a technical sense, but it was not the face he had known to be his, all these years. It was a foreign face, in fact a strangely different face altogether – rust-brown-coloured and with black hair, a much more adult face, someone in his late twenties to early thirties, much more mature looking, and with very deep and thoughtful eyes. The face had a natural, stately poise and there was a steely resolve in the eyes that he saw.
Jai was bewildered by what he saw and he screamed at the top of his voice. The lips moved but the room remained eerily silent. The man in the suit smiled compassionately and gently brushed Jai’s hair with his gloved hand.
The man quietly retreated and as he was going, he pointed to the clock on the wall.
The door slid down and the wall adjusted itself to absorb the door within itself. Jai’s eyes shifted to the clock. The time was six thirty on the clock.
But then again, was it?
It really was not six thirty.
Both the clock hands pointed straight down at the number eight. And the clock face had been numbered one to sixteen around. That made a count of sixteen hours for the half-day and thirty-two for the full!
‘What the hell?’
There was a soft whirring noise above Jai’s head and the white of the room started to slowly fade away from Jai’s eyes. Jai sighed in exasperation as darkness closed in on him.
Chapter 8
The Home Run
Mumbai, India
8 and 9 May, 2012
Jai got up.
He was back on the bed in his room in the chawl. He was sure that it was the morning of the day before, yet again. He shifted his eyes around the room and waited.
He was waiting for Billoo to bust through the door and into the room any second.
And there he was
‘Saale chutiye! Get off your ass right now. Some haraami took a shot at Bhai last night. I just got off the phone with Ali. We need to be at Murtaza’s now.’
Jai got up from the bed. He put on a shirt, still dazed by what was happening.
He knew there wasn’t much time in his hands. He locked himself in the bathroom while Billoo was rummaging for his gun. There was a small three by two foot window in the bathroom that opened onto the ledge of the adjoining building. A sewage pipe ran down from the bathroom to the sewer below. The vase came crashing down inside the room and Jai knew that he had to make his run now.
Jai found his footing on the window sill, climbed out of the window, down the pipe, and ran. There was no looking back now.
He had to get to Byculla as soon as he could.
He took a taxi and reached Nasreen’s in twenty minutes. Billoo had called him twice in the interim and Jai had ignored his calls. Salim had made his call and he ignored that too.
He bounded up the stairs to the door of the apartment. He paused just for a second, checked the door knob. No, there wasn’t any blood on the knob. He turned the knob. It was locked.
He rang the bell once.
No answer.
He rang again and whispered
‘Juliet, open up – it’s me.’
Still there was no answer.
Jai could sense her eyes through the lens on the door. He stood back and spread his arms in an embrace, forcing a smile on his face.
The door cracked open and Jai entered the apartment. Juliet ran into his arms and started sobbing furiously.
‘Juliet! Hey dear, Bhai survived. And we don’t really have any time. We need to leave now. Do you understand?’
Juliet looked up at him. There was shock mixed with fear in her wide eyes.
‘Do you understand?’ Jai held her by the arms and repeated.
Juliet nodded her head; tears still flowing down her cheeks.
‘Where’s Nasreen?’
‘Hospital… duty,’ Juliet muttered.
Jai knew there was nothing he could do about Nasreen. Bhai’s boys would be here anytime now and they could not wait here for Nasreen.
‘We have to go now.’
Juliet nodded and disappeared into the bathroom, to emerge a couple of minutes later, clad in a full-length burqa.
She then turned to the corner of the room to pick up an already packed air-bag. There was dread in her eyes, mixed with hopelessness. She had hoped that with Bhai’s death, her ordeal would come to an end. That not happening meant that both of them were in for a world of hurt.
Anyway, they were now resigned to this fate. They had to run.
They took a taxi to the Dadar railway station, which was some distance away from Byculla. Jai avoided the Victoria as that would be the first place anyone would trail them from Nasreen’s flat, being the nearest train station.
Jai was afraid that people would soon be searching for them at all the bus stands and the railway stations. He was hoping that he would be early enough to give the search party a miss.
The Dehradun train was due at night and they could not wait that long.
They sat at the station
awaiting the Dadar-Kolkata express that was scheduled in half an hour’s time. The two of them did not utter a single word between them. Jai was expecting a bullet to hit him any second from almost any quarter. He was sitting out there in the open on a station platform and it was impossible to track activity on all quarters on the busy platform. Every man on the station looked like a hit-man and every movement seemed like the drawing of a gun.
Possibly the biggest manhunt in the Mumbai underworld would soon be underway to hunt them down. He had to get away, far away from here.
The train came, and left with them, without any further excitement. They sat in the cramped general compartment clinging to each other. She held his arm with both her hands and rested her head on his shoulder. Despite the circumstances, Jai realised that this was the closest that they had ever been to each other. Jai finally belonged to someone and he loved feeling responsible for someone other than himself. She had a scarf draped around her head and her hair wafted a pleasant perfume of shampoo.
‘Do you know my name, Jai?’
‘I know you by the name of Juliet.’
‘No, that is not my real name. That was the name I was given when they brought me here.’
‘What’s your real name?’
‘Henna.’
Henna was such a beautiful name. Jai held her hand and gave it a squeeze. She smiled and drifted off into a tired sleep, her head on Jai’s shoulder in the crowded compartment.
Jai kept thinking about her name. He too had been given other names – Yousuf was one of them. It seemed like ages before, when he was known by that name. He had heard himself being addressed as Abdi in his earlier nightmares. Now, he had yet another face – without a name – in his recent interludes in the white room.
Faces and names could not alter what he was, where he was, and with whom he was now. And he cherished that moment of togetherness, names and times be damned.
The train rumbled into the crowded Asansol railway station at six in the evening the next day. The platform was very crowded and Jai and Henna got down into the hot and humid hustle-bustle of the railway station.
Immortals Page 5
