Chapter 4

The chanting followed me like a physical weight as I was rolled away from the microphones. "Thakur! Thakur! Thakur!" The name vibrated in the air, rhythmic and cult-like, as if the crowd believed that saying it enough times would grant them a fraction of his stolen grace. To the world, he was a mini-god, a savior in a tailored suit.

To me, he was just the man currently trying to crush my collarbone.

His hand remained clamped onto my shoulder as the cameras continued to flash. The pressure was so intense it felt like he had replaced his palm with a jagged boulder. He was smiling for the lenses, but the heat radiating from his body told a different story. He was simmering with a rage that smelled of expensive tobacco and impending retribution.

By the time the heavy glass doors of the Adarsh Hospital swung shut behind us, the cheering faded into a muffled drone. The grip on my shoulder vanished so abruptly I almost tipped out of the wheelchair.

"Assholes," I whispered under my breath.

The pain in my body wasn't going away. In fact, it was getting worse. The hospital had pumped me full of what they called "high-grade" painkillers, but I knew better. The effect was wearing off far too fast. My jaw throbbed where the slaps had landed, and my shattered leg felt like it was being gnawed on by a million tiny, rusted teeth.

A prestigious private hospital like this, and they were still cheaping out on the basic medicine. I could taste the bitterness in the back of my throat, a chalky, synthetic aftertaste that did nothing to numb the actual agony.

I wondered who I should actually blame. Was it the hospital management, whose entire purpose was to squeeze every single penny out of the dying to maximize their quarterly profits? Or was it some overworked, underpaid nurse in the basement stealing the real morphine to sell on the black market just to put a small dent in her own family’s prayer debt?

Maybe it was even simpler. Maybe it was just one of Thakur’s low-level underlings, some lackey in a cheap polyester shirt who had pocketed the difference in the medical budget to get drunk on local booze while complaining about his shitty boss. In this city, corruption wasn't a scandal; it was the grease that kept the wheels turning.

The wheelchair hit a bump as we entered the lift, and I hissed through my teeth. The smell hit me a second later. It was a suffocatingly strong perfume, something that smelled like white lilies mixed with industrial bleach. It was the signature scent of the domineering woman, the one whose name I still didn't know but whose personality I could already feel rotting the air around her.

I didn't need to see her to know she was glaring at the back of my head. Every cell in my body felt the itch, a primal urge to turn around and slap that arrogant perfume right off her face.

"You think you are smart, don't you?" she asked. Her voice was a low, dangerous hiss that echoed off the metallic walls of the elevator. "You should have kept quiet and accepted what was offered to you."

"I..." I started to speak, but the words were caught in the dry sandpaper of my throat.

"You should have used the money and tried to fix yourself," she interrupted, her voice rising in cold frustration. "You just threw away your only chance to crawl out of the gutter."

I hung my head down, staring at the floor I couldn't see. For a fleeting second, I wondered if she was right. A million Rupees sounded like a fortune to someone who had spent his life eating orphanage gruel and office leftovers. It was more money than I would have seen in three lifetimes of work. That would have been the simple, logical solution.

But then I thought about the scroll. I thought about the red numbers etched into the darkness of my mind.

How much prayer could I actually buy with a million Rupees? Even if I took every single note to one of those high-density prayer sweatshops, where hundreds of desperate souls spent eighteen hours a day chanting for a pittance, what would it get me?

A million Rupees might buy a few thousand prayers if I was lucky and knew the right brokers. But I wasn't looking for a few thousand. My debt to Dhanvantari, the God of Health, was sitting at 999 billion. Throwing a million Rupees at that debt was like trying to put out a forest fire by spitting on it. It was a joke. It was a death sentence disguised as a gift.

"What is going to happen is very simple," the woman continued. She was pushing my wheelchair now, her heels clicking rhythmically against the hospital tiles as we exited the lift. "Everyone is going to act like they care about you until the election time. They’ll bring you flowers and take photos for the news. But the election ends in exactly two weeks. What are you gonna do after that?"

She pushed me into my room and locked the wheels of the chair with a violent kick of her foot.

"When the cameras leave, the 'miracles' stop. You’ll be right back where you started, but this time, you’ll have an enemy who doesn't forget."

She didn't wait for an answer. She just turned on her heel and walked away, her perfume lingering in the room like a poisonous cloud.

I sat there on the edge of the bed, the mattress soft beneath me—a luxury I knew wouldn't last. Maybe she was right. Maybe I could have at least put a dent in my debt. I started to wonder if this was even my debt to begin with. How does one person rack up a trillion-prayer deficit before they're even twenty-five? Maybe it was someone else's debt that had simply been attached to me like a parasitic twin.

I leaned back, my mind racing. The trillion-debt was a mountain, yes. But I had publicly cornered a man who held the strings of the city. He had promised the world he would fix my eyes.

"How can I get out of the hole I dig myself into?" I whispered to the empty room.

I focused on the scroll again. I willed the numbers to appear in the blackness. They were still there, pulsing with that mocking, ghostly light.

God of Health (Dhanvantari): -998,999,999,999

Earlier, I had managed to shave off exactly one prayer. The math was simple, cold, and devastating. I still had nine hundred and ninety-eight billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine prayers to go just to reach zero. And that was just for one God.

The MLA had promised a miracle. He was going to try and fix me. He would bring in his best priests and his most expensive prayer-batteries. And every single prayer they launched at my eyes would hit that bottomless pit first.

I wasn't just a victim anymore. I was a drain. A spiritual black hole that would swallow everything Thakur threw at it.

I lay down, my body screaming in protest as I moved. I closed my sightless eyes and waited for the morning. The smell of lavender was long gone, replaced by the scent of my own blood and the cold realization that my life had just become a countdown.

Two weeks. I had two weeks before the election ended and the "miracles" were no longer necessary. I had two weeks to find out why the Gods hated me this much—and to see if I could make them hate Thakur even more.