What is life?
Is it waking up beside the people you love, believing their warmth is enough to keep the darkness away?
Or is it a race. A pathetic struggle where everyone claws at each other just to become richer, greater, superior.
Maybe life is simply selfishness.
A beautiful selfishness.
To eat while others starve. To smile while someone else breaks. To protect your own happiness and call it human nature.
Some choose differently. They sacrifice everything for others until nothing remains of their own soul. Heroes, people call them.
Heroes die forgotten, carrying wounds no one ever cared to see.
So what is life then. Joy? Or suffering wearing the mask of growth?
People say life is about becoming stronger. But stronger for what. To bury the people we love. To learn how to smile while rotting inside.
Or maybe life is becoming something else entirely. Something society cannot name. Cannot control.
A monster.
A killer.
Because here is the truth no one admits out loud. Humans pretend to hate darkness. Yet they worship violence. They envy cruelty. They secretly admire the villain far more than the hero.
So tell me.
What do you think life is?
An old man sat on a wooden chair stained with something dark.
His long grey hair fell across his face like a curtain, hiding his eyes. His black suit was ruined, dirty, dusty, torn in several places. Blood had dried on the fabric, flaking off like rust. A cigarette hung from his lips, the smoke curling upward in lazy spirals.
In his hand, he held a photograph.
It was old and dusty. A small tear ran along the left edge, as if someone had tried to rip it in half and then thought better of it. The image showed three people.
A man in a white sherwani, standing tall, a nervous but happy smile on his face.
A beautiful woman in a red saree, her hand resting on the man's arm, her eyes bright with joy.
And in the middle, seated on a chair, an older woman in a white saree. Her face was wrinkled but kind. She was smiling.
They all looked happy.
The old man's hand trembled. The hand was old too, covered in cuts and scars, the knuckles swollen, the nails cracked. Fresh blood dripped from somewhere on his palm and landed on the photograph.
He watched the red drop spread over the face of the woman in the white saree.
"Oh," he muttered. "It's gone dirty."
He wiped the blood with his thumb. The red smeared. He wiped again, gently, carefully, until the stain faded.
"There. All good."
He held the photograph up to the dim light.
"It is clean now, right? Tell me. It looks clean, doesn't it?"
No one answered.
The room was full of bodies.
A man in a white shirt lay on the blood-soaked floor. His shirt was no longer white. It was red. Dark, wet, sticky red. One of his arms was missing, a ragged stump where it had been torn away. A sword was buried in his chest, the blade still sticking out, the hilt slick with gore.
His eyes were wide open. His body shook. He tried to move, but a boot pressed down on his face, pushing his cheek into the cold wet concrete.
The old man stood over him. The cigarette still burned between his teeth.
"Hey, brother," the old man said. His voice was low. Almost gentle. "Tell me. Is this picture dirty?"
The man in the white shirt could not answer. His mouth opened and closed, but only a wet gurgle came out. Tears mixed with blood on his face.
The old man pressed his foot harder. The man's skull creaked.
"I am asking you a question, brother. Answer me."
A scream tore from the man's throat, raw and animal. The old man lifted his foot.
The white-shirted man gasped for air. He coughed. He wept.
"Please… please don't kill me. I didn't do anything. You already killed our boss. Why are you still doing this?"
His voice was high and broken.
"Let me live. I want to live."
The old man smiled. His teeth were red. The cigarette was clamped between them, smoke leaking from the corners of his mouth. His eyes, visible through the tangled grey hair, were bloodshot. Hungry. The eyes of a man who had long ago stopped fearing the dark because he had become it.
He took a long drag. The cigarette glowed bright orange. Then he leaned down and blew the smoke slowly, directly into the man's face.
The man coughed, gagged, turned his head away.
"Answer me," the old man said. "Is this picture dirty?"
The man's lips trembled. His whole body shook.
"No… no… it's clean. It looks clean. Yes. It's beautiful. It's clean."
His voice cracked open with desperation.
"It's clean! It's clean!"
The old man laughed. A low, rasping laugh that turned into a hacking cough. And the man on the ground laughed too, nervous and hysterical, unable to stop, laughing even as tears poured freely down his ruined face, the two of them laughing together in a room full of the dead.
Then the old man stopped.
The man kept going. His laughter became a sob. Then a wail.
"No, no, no"
The boot came down.
Bones cracked. Blood sprayed.
"LIAR!"
Again.
"LIAR!"
Again. The man's body convulsed. His skull caved.
"LIAR. LIAR. LIAR."
Silence.
The old man's chest heaved. He looked down at the stillness beneath his foot. He took a long slow drag from what remained of his cigarette. Then he looked at the photograph.
"Getting late," he mumbled. "I need to go home."
He pulled a worn leather wallet from his inner pocket. He opened it carefully and placed the photograph inside, next to a faded ID card and a few wrinkled rupee notes. He tucked it away like something sacred.
He stood and looked around the room.
Bodies everywhere. Some in suits, some in uniforms, some barely recognizable as having once been people. The walls were painted red. The smell of iron and death and something worse filled the air.
He picked up a pistol from the floor. Checked the magazine. One bullet left.
He looked at the white-shirted man's corpse.
"Liar."
He fired. The sound was enormous in the small room. The body jerked once and stilled.
The old man walked to the door.
He climbed the stairs slowly. His legs shook. Blood dripped from his arm, from his leg, from somewhere deep in his side that he had stopped caring about. He did not stop.
Butter chicken, he thought. And biryani. And one bottle of wine. No, two. Two bottles.
He smiled to himself.
If I drink too much, Gita will get angry. And if Mother finds out, she will beat me to death.
He laughed. It came out wet and rattling, bouncing off the bare concrete walls of the stairwell with nowhere to go.
When I get home I will buy a yellow saree for Maa. And a green saree for Gita. Then I will ask for forgiveness. Hahaha.
He pushed open the heavy metal door at the top.
The wind hit his face. Cold. Loud. Real.
He stood at the edge of the rooftop of an abandoned twenty-three-story residential tower in South Delhi. Cracked concrete and rusted iron railings groaned under the wind. The building had been left to squatters and ghosts years ago. Tonight it held only him.
He was forty-four, but his face belonged to a much older man. Deep grooves ran from the corners of his mouth to his jaw like dry riverbeds. His brow sat heavy and furrowed. Hair that had turned grey too soon lay matted against his scalp, sticky with sweat and city dust. The wind tugged at the torn black suit hanging from his broad shoulders. The jacket missed a button. The left sleeve had split at the seam. A dark unidentifiable stain spread along the collar. His trousers carried smears of dried mud and something darker.
One thick hand gripped a 9mm pistol. The metal felt warm against his palm, almost alive. The magazine was gone. He had left it three floors below, together with his wallet and the single photograph he could no longer bear to carry.
Empty.
Useless.
Exactly like the rest of him.
Far below, the city roared. Police cruisers jammed the narrow streets, their blue and red lights cutting across the faces of concrete buildings and the gathered crowd. Office workers in wrinkled shirts pressed against the barricades. A woman clutched a small child to her chest. The local chai wallah had abandoned his steaming cart to stare upward with the rest. Horns blared. Sirens wailed. A metallic voice crackled through a megaphone, sharp and urgent.
"You cannot run anywhere now! Surrender or we will shoot!"
He did not look down at the lights or the faces or the guns pointed toward the sky. He lifted his eyes higher, past the edge of the rooftop, past the haze of pollution, and stared straight into the open sky.
Today the sky was heartbreakingly beautiful.
Year 2040.
My name is Veda Das.
I am forty-four years old.
And I am already a dead man walking.
But I was not always like this. I was not always this hollow thing standing on the edge of nothing with empty pockets and an emptier soul.
Once, long ago, I was a soldier.
Once, I had a wife.
Once, I had a child who never drew his first breath.
2013. Age 17.
I joined the Indian Army carrying nothing but my dead father's surname and the weight of my mother's silent tears.
My mother was forty-two that year, yet she looked closer to sixty. Strands of white already threaded through her black hair. Her face had tightened into sharp lines carved by years of hunger, worry, and endless labor. She moved through each day with the slow stubborn rhythm of someone who had never been allowed to stop.
My father had disappeared the day I was born. He ran away with another woman and left behind only silence. I never saw his face. Never heard his voice. Never received a single word of explanation. He simply ceased to exist, as if I had never been born at all.
We lived in a single rented room near the Jagannath Temple in Puri. The space was barely wide enough for a narrow cot and a small kerosene stove. The walls had once been painted pale green, but the color had peeled away in large flaky patches, revealing grey cement beneath. A tiny window looked out onto the blank wall of the neighboring building, only two feet away. Sunlight rarely reached inside.
My mother worked two jobs without rest. During the day she sat hunched over a sewing machine in a garment factory, stitching collars for ten rupees per hundred pieces. Her back curved like a question mark that no one ever answered. At night she cleaned offices in Connaught Place, scrubbing floors on her knees until her knuckles swelled and cracked. She slept no more than four hours each night. She never complained. She never asked why life had chosen her for this endless punishment. She simply kept moving, kept fighting, kept believing.
"God is watching, beta," she would whisper while rubbing oil into my tired shoulders. "Always watching."
I wanted to believe her. I tried. But belief never settled comfortably inside my chest.
At seventeen I was not clever. Books felt like enemies. School was a punishment I endured in the back row, eyes lowered, never raising my hand. Teachers skipped over me as if I were invisible. My uniform was always too short because we could not afford a new one. The other boys whispered and laughed. I learned early to keep my mouth shut and my head down.
My mind moved slowly, thick and heavy, as though pushing through deep water. But my body was different. At seventeen I already possessed the frame of a man ten years older. Thick neck, wide chest, powerful shoulders, hands rough with calluses from hauling sacks at the weekend market. My back was strong. My will to endure was stronger.
The army did not ask for intelligence. It did not demand degrees or sharp answers. It only needed bodies willing to bleed and break. At seventeen, that door stood open, and it was the only one that offered money.
I did not join for glory or patriotism. I joined because my mother's hands were growing tired. Because someone had to carry the weight before she collapsed under it. I joined because staying home meant watching her kill herself slowly for a son who could offer nothing except his own flesh.
The thought of leaving her alone in that cramped room tore at me every night. Yet staying felt even worse. Staying meant I would remain useless. Staying meant she would never stop destroying herself for me.
So I made the choice.
She cried when I told her. She held me so tightly I could feel her heartbeat against my ribs, frantic and afraid.
"Don't go, son. We will manage. We always manage."
I lied through my teeth. I told her I would be fine. I told her it would only be a few years. I told her I would return rich, with enough money to let her rest for the rest of her life.
We both knew the words were hollow, but she released me anyway. That is what mothers do. They open their arms and let their children walk into fire if it means the child might survive.
I stepped out of that tiny room and closed the door behind me. I did not look back. If I had turned my head even once, I would have run back inside and never left.
That was 2013.
I was seventeen.
And my life as a soldier began.