Chapter 9: Andhere ka Raaj (Kingdom of Darkness)

Power is not a switch. It's a dial, and the dial only turns one way.

By July, I had stopped attending lectures at Fergusson. Not formally — I hadn't dropped out or filed paperwork. I simply stopped going, the way you stop watering a plant you've forgotten about: not a decision but a neglect, a gradual withdrawal of attention until the thing that was once alive has dried to a husk.

The monsoon was in full fury. Pune's streets were rivers. The autorickshaws moved through them like boats, their engines sputtering, their passengers holding bags over their heads. The sky was permanently grey — not the gentle grey of November but the aggressive grey of July, a sky that has committed to being wet and will not be persuaded otherwise.

I spent my days in the wada.

Vaidehi trained me mornings. Dhananjay supervised afternoons. Rahu channelling happened at night — always at night, always in the basement, always alone. The rhythm had become monastic: wake at 5, pranayama, cold bath in the courtyard — the wada had an old stone trough that collected rainwater, and July rain was cold enough to make your teeth clench — then meditation, then training, then more meditation, then channelling, then sleep. Repeat.

The siddhis were growing at a pace that frightened even Vaidehi.

Telekinesis: no longer nudges but directed movement. I could lift a brass lota from across the room, hold it steady in the air for minutes, set it down without spillage. Dhananjay said this was unprecedented for a practitioner of eight months. Vaidehi said nothing, which from her was the highest form of alarm.

Emotional reading: no longer requiring focus or proximity. I could sense the emotional state of a person in the next room, through walls. In the group sessions, I became a barometer — other members would glance at me to gauge the collective mood, because my face betrayed what I was reading from the room's emotional weather.

And the newest ability — the one that Dhananjay called "projection" — the capacity to push an emotion into another person. Not mind control — nothing so crude. More like turning a dial in someone else's interior, amplifying what was already there. If a person was slightly anxious, I could make them more anxious. If they were slightly calm, I could deepen the calm. I was not creating emotions — I was adjusting volumes.

The first time I used it deliberately was on a chai-wallah.

Ramesh, the tapri outside Fergusson Gate 1. Our Ramesh, Kavya's and mine, the man who made chai too sweet and too strong. I had gone to the tapri one afternoon — muscle memory, the body going where the heart used to be happy — and Ramesh had been irritable. Bad day, low sales, the monsoon keeping customers indoors. He slammed the cup down harder than necessary. The chai slopped over the edge onto my hand — hot, stinging.

Without thinking, I pushed. Not aggressively — a gentle nudge, an amplification of the small thread of contentment I could sense buried beneath his frustration. His shoulders dropped. His jaw unclenched. He looked at me and, for no reason he could have articulated, smiled.

"Sorry, baba," he said, suddenly gentle. "Kharab din hai. Aur ek chai doon? Free."

I took the free chai. I drank it standing in the rain, and I felt sick — not from the tea but from what I'd done. I had reached into another human being's interior and adjusted it without his knowledge or consent. I had performed the emotional equivalent of pickpocketing, and the fact that I'd taken nothing and given comfort didn't change the fundamental violation.

I told Kavya that evening. She was at the hostel, cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by printouts from the Jyoti Vikas Foundation investigation. She'd been making progress — bank records, property transfers, a chain of shell companies that led from the dissolved foundation to a current entity called Prakash Consulting.

"You manipulated a chai-wallah," she said flatly.

"I didn't mean to."

"The fact that you didn't mean to makes it worse, not better. It means it's becoming reflexive. Your default setting is shifting from 'feel' to 'control.'"

She was right, and I hated that she was right, because being told uncomfortable truths by someone who loves you is the most painful form of love there is. It's easy to hear hard truths from enemies — you can dismiss them. From friends, you can deflect. But from the person whose thumb traces the scar on your palm and whose chai cup sits next to yours at every tapri in Pune — from that person, truth has no buffer.

But I didn't stop. I couldn't stop. The siddhis had become my identity in a way that nothing else had ever been. I was not Moksh-the-student or Moksh-the-grieving-son or even Moksh-Kavya's-boyfriend. I was Moksh-who-can-do-things-no-one-else-can. And identity, once formed, defends itself with the ferocity of a cornered animal.

Dhananjay began using me.

Not overtly — Dhananjay was too sophisticated for overt exploitation. But he started including me in meetings that were not Mandal sessions. Private meetings, in his study, with visitors I didn't recognise — businessmen in pressed shirts, a municipal corporator from the Pune Municipal Corporation, a lawyer whose name I would later find in Kavya's investigation files.

"Sit," Dhananjay would say. "Observe. Tell me what you sense."

And I would sit, and I would read the visitor's emotions, and after they left I would report: this one is honest, this one is lying about the property deal, this one is frightened of something he hasn't disclosed.

I was a human lie detector. Dhananjay's personal instrument of assessment. And the visitors, who came seeking spiritual guidance or Mandal connections or whatever they told themselves they were there for, left without knowing that a twenty-two-year-old had catalogued their emotional inventory and reported it to the man behind the desk.

"You're his tool," Mihir said.

We were at the COEP canteen — vada pav, the constant, the culinary heartbeat of Pune engineering education. Mihir had been distant for weeks — my fault, I'd been cancelling plans, forgetting to reply to messages, allowing the friendship to starve the way I'd allowed my education to starve. But Mihir, like Kavya, was not the kind to give up without a fight.

"He's using me because I'm useful," I said. "There's a difference."

"There is no difference. Tool, useful — same sentence, different grammar." He bit into his vada pav. Chewed. The particular Mihir chew that meant he was processing not food but frustration. "Moksh, when was the last time you went to class?"

"I'm taking a break."

"You're not taking a break. You've abandoned your education to sit in a wada with a man who has you reading strangers' emotions for his personal benefit. Do you hear yourself?"

"I can do things, Mihir. Real things. Things that matter."

"Making a chai-wallah smile without his consent matters? Reading a corporator's feelings matters? To whom? Not to you. Not to your future. Not to Kavya, who by the way looks like she hasn't slept in weeks because she's spending every night investigating your cult's financial records."

"It's not a cult."

"You know what, forget the word. Call it whatever you want. But answer me this: when was the last time you made a decision that wasn't about the Mandal?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it. The vada pav sat in my hand, cooling, the bread going soft in the monsoon humidity.

"That's what I thought," Mihir said quietly. "Tu kho gaya hai, bhai. And the worst part is, you don't even know it."

He left. The canteen buzzed around me — engineering students arguing about algorithms, a group watching cricket on a phone, the smell of frying batter and hot oil and the accumulated ambition of a thousand futures being built one equation at a time. Normal life. The life I was supposed to be living.

I threw the vada pav in the bin and went back to the wada.

That night, Baba tried.

I came home at midnight — standard now, the 1 AM arrivals had become midnight because I'd stopped pretending they were unusual. The house was dark except for the kitchen, where a single tube light buzzed. Baba sat at the table. In front of him was a plate of poha — cold, untouched, the flattened rice stiffened, the peanuts gone dull. He'd made it and waited for me.

He never made poha. Aai made poha. It was her dish — her morning ritual, her particular ratio of jeera to hing to mustard seeds, her specific hand that judged the moisture level without measuring. For Baba to make poha was an act of archaeology — digging into the dead woman's recipe to construct a bridge to the living son who was disappearing.

"Baith," he said.

I sat.

"Kha." He pushed the plate toward me.

I ate. The poha was wrong — too much turmeric, not enough lime, the onions cut too thick. It tasted like effort, like a man trying to speak a language he'd only ever heard his wife speak. It was the saddest thing I'd ever eaten, and I ate every bite.

"Teri Aai ko yeh dekhna padta," Baba said. His voice was steady but his hands, on the table, trembled. "Toh woh mujhe kabhi maaf nahi karti."

If your Aai had to see this. She would never forgive me.

Not "she would never forgive you." She would never forgive ME. Because Indian fathers, even the distant ones, even the silent ones, even the ones who compress entire conversations into "Hmm" — they carry the blame. Every failure of the child is a verdict on the parent, and Baba was sitting in his kitchen at midnight with badly made poha, pronouncing his own sentence.

"Baba —"

"Main jaanta hoon kuch ho raha hai. Tujhe lagta hai main nahi dekhta — budha hai, news dekhta hai, kaam pe jaata hai, kuch nahi samajhta. But main dekhta hoon. Tu college nahi ja raha. Tu kisi ke saath hai raat ko jo tujhe badal raha hai. Tu apni Aai jaisa ho raha hai — woh bhi ek samay pe aise hi gaayab hoti thi. Aur main tab bhi chup raha tha."

He knew. Not the details — not the Mandal, not the siddhis, not Rahu. But he knew the pattern. Because he'd seen it before. In Aai. In the woman he'd married, who had her own relationship with the Mandal, who had disappeared into that same wada years before I was born. He'd been silent then. He was trying not to be silent now.

"Main theek hoon, Baba," I said. Lie number — I'd lost count. The pebbles had become grains of sand, innumerable, flowing between my fingers.

"Nahi hai tu." His voice cracked. One crack, quickly repaired, like a plate that's been glued back together and mostly holds but will never be the same. "Aur main teri Aai ko nahi bacha paya. Tujhe bacha sakta hoon. Agar tu mujhe chance de."

I stood up. Washed the plate. Put it in the rack. The water from the tap was cold — monsoon water, fed by the Khadakwasla dam, carrying the chill of the Western Ghats.

"Goodnight, Baba," I said.

I went to my room. Closed the door. Lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to Baba's footsteps — slow, heavy, the footsteps of a man carrying two failures now instead of one — move through the house, switching off lights, checking locks, performing the nightly rituals of a home that had become a tomb.

Rahu spoke in the silence.

He loves you. But love without understanding is a cage. He cannot comprehend what you are becoming.

"What am I becoming?"

More than he can hold. More than any of them can hold. The question is not what you are becoming, Moksh. The question is whether you'll have the courage to let go of what you were.

I closed my eyes. Outside, the monsoon raged. Inside, the dial turned another notch.