Many Last Wishes

Prthvir Solanki

Illustrated by Vivan Kamath

My friend Ketan returned from the dead one Thursday afternoon as I was washing the dishes. He was a little translucent to look at, and when I tried touching him, his skin felt thick and goopy, like putting my hand into a piece of jelly.

“I need a favour from you,” he asked straight away. It was only a few weeks ago that I was at the police station, identifying the mangled remains of what was left of him. He’d driven his speeding vehicle straight into a wall, the impact crushing his bones and organs into a viscous bloody pulp. He wasn’t drunk or distracted; there wasn’t any other vehicle involved nor did there seem like there was any nefarious wrongdoing. The police, and all of us, concluded that Ketan was just a bad driver.

My mind was so occupied with scrubbing the night’s dinner off my plates that I hadn’t seen him materialize in the kitchen at first, even though his body let out this otherworldly, soft, pulsating glow. It was his deep, nicotine voice that initially startled me, somewhere by the back of my right ear, in crisp, pristine quality, like he had crawled into my earhole and whispered at my eardrum. When I turned around and saw his luminescent body standing exactly how he used to back when he glowed less and was alive more - his ample behind resting against the cabinet, hands ready to break into manic gesturing to accompany the barrage of words he was always prepared to launch - I stumbled back and suffered what I’d later Google and find out was probably a miniature cardiac arrest.

Any grip I might have had on reality a second prior was violently yanked out of my body. The pot that was in my hand fell to the floor, the clang loud enough to also arrest my hearing for a fraction of a second, a fraction in which I felt no gravity, a fraction in which I felt a fear that was like someone reaching into my body and pulling out all of my organs. I immediately let out an aggressive howl that emerged from the depths of my lungs before managing to muster the only words my garbled brain could formulate: “What the fuck?”

After the reverberations from the clang of the pot and the howl of my lungs dimmed into nothing, and all we could hear were the sounds of crickets and cars collaborating to ensure this remained the city that never slept, Ketan continued to speak. He shrugged past the visible spiritual carpet bombing I was experiencing in real time, and kept speaking until my heartbeat returned to human levels.

“I live in this weird nothingness,” he tried describing to me what the afterlife was like as I picked up everything I had dropped to the floor, and wiped the soap off me clean. “It’s like the physical manifestation of nothing. When you’re alive, you think of nothing as nothing, but only now have I understood what it actually means. I can see it with my eyes, feel it with my fingers.”

It was all gibberish to me, quite frankly, but I did miss hearing him speak. The more he spoke and the more I saw him in front of me - moving, talking, present - the faster I calmed down. The familiarity of his presence in my home gave me peace, and his aloofness about returning from the dead felt oddly reassuring. As I felt myself being pulled back into real life, and the fact of my best friend’s return from the dead began to be accepted by my initially resistant brain cells, my fear of seeing a ghost in my house slowly turned into joy at seeing Ketan again. 

He had an aggressive manner of speech, and he emphasized words he thought were important as if they were triple underlined in red. But though he spoke with a sense of urgency and purpose, and with a rich vocabulary of difficult to spell words, most of what he said meant absolutely nothing. It’s what made him an asset to have on your team in college. We used to sit back and allow him to jabber on during classroom presentations, all of us acutely aware that teachers enjoyed the sound of words a lot more than the meaning of words. He once introduced a history presentation on India’s fight for independence by calling it “a Hobbesian voyage towards unshackling ignominy.” The boys who thought Gandhi’s real first name was ‘Mahatma’ stood second in class.

“I feel forsaken here,” he said to me, same aggressive tone, same matter of fact attitude, as if he were instructing me and not laying his ghostly heart out, describing his ghostly fears, and explaining his ghostly difficulties. The quicker I referred to his actions in ghostlike nomenclature, I thought, the sooner I’d get used to his spectral form.

He shuffled his (ghostly) feet and had his hands deep into his pockets; any deeper and he’d have started looking like a thumb. He explained to me how desperate he was for company in the afterlife, which wasn’t as populated as he thought it would be. When your geography is as vast as space and time, the chances of randomly running into a fellow human ghost will always be slim. A maddening ordeal for Ketan, who, while alive, spent every second of his life with someone by his side and every weekend hosting parties he planned for months.

They weren’t particularly great parties - almost always overcrowded, perpetually underlit, and the food always the most garbage iteration of whatever cuisine was being served on the day - but they were short, souped-up doses of youth that we liked injecting into our shrivelling, wilting, aged bodies. On those weekends, we would drink more than we were capable of drinking, we’d stop being embarrassed to sing the karaoke version of Wonderwall for the fifth time in the night, and we’d laugh at “that’s what she said” jokes freely again, without fear of judgement, like they were the pinnacle of comedic banter.

On days when there was no partying, though, Ketan would be helpless. That sweet talking of his got people to do things for him, to the extent that he became an adult without knowing even a few basic skills of life. He couldn’t fold a t-shirt, for example, and how ever much one tried teaching him how to do it, the more exceptional he became at getting others to fold t-shirts for him. The more he learnt about something, the better, the more detailed his cajolery became. Once, on a challenge, he convinced a friend of ours to scratch an itch he had somewhere deep within the rank folds of his clammy armpit that stored the worst version of his sweat in front of us. And none of us mocked the poor chap after. We knew - had Ketan turned his attention to any of us, we’d have scratched the itch and convinced ourselves of the good deed we’d done.

His inability to perform any task on his own, and his insistence on never trying was sometimes quite astonishing. He had an inspirational sort of laziness about daily chores, one that greatly stimulated incompetence in others, including me, and made a third person question the worth of doing literally anything. Alas, he was my closest friend.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked, eager, looking forward even, to hear what my buddy, my bumchum, my bro from another hoe, as he used to point at me and exclaim during his parties, desired.

“It’s quite simple - I need you to kill Amla so she can join me here.”

Let me tell you, the gulp I gulped was aggressive enough, forceful enough to swallow an elephant whole, and for the second time in the span of a few short minutes, Ketan induced another abnormal cardiac event inside my chest. I could handle uninvited guests from the dead, I could even take scratching a little itch my best friend had in his hairy armpit, but murdering his wife?

In the hierarchy of things I would hurt - flies would absolutely make the list. I immediately suspect any liar who makes the false claim they wouldn’t hurt a fly. It is human nature to wish the worst upon flies, to dream up devices that could zap all of them out of existence in an instance. In fact, I would hurt most insects. Anything with more than two to four legs is an immediate enemy of mine, and I would hesitate very little to see them splooshed against a wall like a vintage Pollock, or to see their slimy carcasses being pecked at by birds of all varieties. Some birds also would make the cut. Pigeons (too much shit), woodpeckers (too much noise), swans (too much pride) chickens (too much nutrition). Mammals were all safe, except in the event that I was being attacked by one. But I had never considered a human being to be a point of discussion in a conversation about the things we desired to kill with our own bare hands. Especially not the love of my best friend’s life.

“I can’t do it, Ketan. She’s my friend.”

 “I’m your friend. Think of this as my last wish. I couldn’t have one when I was alive, let me please have one now that I’m dead.”

He joined his hands together tightly, as if the tightness of the grip while he pleaded with me to kill his wife would factor into my decision-making. He shouted the word ‘please’ a few more times, his voice cracking with each recitation, and when his vocal chords began to give way to tears in his eyes, he buckled and fell to his knees. I moved a step back when he tried to put his head down near my feet and asked him to get up. I’d never seen him like this.

“It’s lonely here. I need my Amla or I won’t be at peace.”

The first time I had laid eyes on Amla, I knew she would marry Ketan. I’d seen her in our college canteen, across the room and through the lazy throng of half-asleep students feeling around the pockets of their torn jeans to see if they could discover some change to buy the spittle our institution dared to call chai. She was untidily chomping down on a chicken roll the size of an arm. Bits of the sauces spilled onto her t-shirt and onto her straight long jet-black hair that fell down to her hips. If she were about two Fair & Lovely shades fairer, you wouldn’t be wrong to mistake her for an apparition.

It’s difficult to tell why I immediately thought of Ketan when I saw her, even though he himself hadn’t seen her yet at the time, let alone known her name or had a conversation. Maybe it was that they both had a uniquely perfect set of teeth. Ten out of ten dentists felt inadequate upon seeing the pristine state of their oral hygiene.

Maybe it was the fact that they seemed to have a romance-ready height difference. Or maybe it was the fact that she wore the same Green Day t-shirt he happened to be wearing the same day. Whatever it was, whatever the strange vibe I felt between the two of them that day, I was right. They met, they fell in public, schmaltzy, nauseatingly saccharine love, and lived happily ever after until the day he drove his Hyundai i10 into a wall.

After his death, Amla spent the first few days of widowhood alternating between loud wailing and deep slumber. Her wailing unfortunately sounded ugly, like a yodeller being strangled, which made it difficult for others to sympathise with her after a point. But soon after she got over the initial shock of loss, and her cries turned to sombre, lifelong depression, her grief took her on a new journey. She dramatically declared via Instagram stories that her life had no meaning; she took to testing the limits of her credit card by purchasing pots and pots of plants to fill the void in her home, and she had also begun constantly tweeting grammatically questionable non-sequiturs that had nothing to do with the day’s events (“tears should be cinnamon flavoured”, “good morning is an opinion not a greeting”, “pillows”). She did anything to distract herself, and fill her mind up with anything in the world other than Ketan.

Her well-wishers, I included, took turns to visit her to ensure that she ate and hydrated, while also scanning the apartment for any sharp objects that might hold the potential to be utilised in unfortunate ways. She’d brought up suicide a few times while crying into my shoulder. I foolishly discouraged her back then, but had I known Ketan would be visiting me and making such demands, I’d have brought my speakers, played some calm, motivational music from some Japanese playlist I’d find on YouTube, and gladly opened the window she planned to leap out of myself.

The prospect of me doing the deed, though, was terrifying. A Buzzfeed quiz that was supposed to inform me of whether I was a lover or a fighter glitched after I put in my responses and called me a ‘little bitch’. I wasn’t built for physical exertions. I was built to pass through existence uneventfully, and all of this felt a little too eventful for my otherwise humdrum as hell destiny.

But Ketan was on his knees again, buckling after seeing the hesitancy in my eyes. He tried holding my ankles in despair, but only got the goopy constituents of his spectral body to drip off of my brand new trousers. He spoke to me in a way that made me want to trust him, made me even pity him a little. He spoke in a way that managed to bring out a benevolence in you that you didn’t know you had. He had tonal fluctuations that wriggled and wrangled their way through your aural system and then managed to charm your body into doing what he wanted done. 

Anyway, two mornings later, I murdered Amla. It was a far more complicated task than I imagined. All my knowledge about the act of murder was from movies, the good ones and the bad. There didn’t seem to be a stark difference in the quality of depiction of killing, and all of them were limited to a very fixed set of methodologies, which was unhelpful to those planning to find their niche in the homicide business.

There was the standard gunshot, of course: an almost guaranteed immediate kill, as long as your aim remains true. But I didn’t own a gun, nor had I ever held one. Even purchasing them seemed far too complicated. To legally get one, I’d have to go through months and months of bureaucracy that I do not have the patience for, and it didn’t make too much sense to me to legally acquire a gun in order to illegally murder someone. Then there was the cruder but also fairly popular stabbing, but the hit rate seemed lower. There were far too many movies where stabbed characters survived and avenged the attack, holding on to their wounds, walking haggardly through city streets, the blood oozing through their flesh never enough to stop them from seeking sweet cinematic vengeance.

There was also the question of where to dig the knife in - was the heart the best place to attack? It seemed like a very solid part of the body to penetrate. One would have to be a little too precise to find the little gap between the bones. Was the stomach adequate? There, it just felt like there were far too many organs and skin to go through before hitting anything even remotely dangerous. Stabbing felt more like a spur of the moment murder, an unplanned one where the murderer frantically finds the sharpest object to jam into skin. Nobody ‘plans’ to stab someone, and if they do, you know there’s a little bit of raw inexperience to their technique. Stabbing was also far too bloody. Seeing all of it would make my weak stomach eject out all kinds of DNA evidence over the remains of my unfortunate victim. 

Then there was classic asphyxiation, but it was simply too much work. If Amla happened to have more strength than I did, I would be immediately overpowered, and she’d probably then reach out to the nearest sharp object to fatally lodge into my skin.

I realised I had to tap into my own skill set. I wasn’t an obviously talented guy. I rarely, if ever, came first at anything. My mother, god bless her, was prescient enough to realise this very early on, probably because I started walking and talking only when I hit age four. The doctors she’d take me to all insisted there was nothing wrong with me; that I was probably just choosing to remain silent, choosing to stay seated, because nothing else could logically explain the delay in my development.

But despite my otherwise unremarkable childhood, I did have a small phase when it was discovered that I was very good at throwing things. The inner mathematics in my head could do all the trigonometry, angles, add the right numbers and what not, to throw things right on cue and right on target. I could stand on a basketball court, back facing the basket, and throw the ball behind me, over my head, and ten times out of ten it would go clean through the net. I could pick up a cricket ball and throw it straight at the wickets, as long as the strength in my arm allowed me to throw it that far. In classrooms, I’d be asked to throw paper balls from different angles and distances, and bets were placed among students about whether I’d make it or not. The harder the angles, the better I got at the maths in my head. I got so good at it that when teachers found out about the juvenile betting circles that ran in my name, instead of reprimanding the responsible kids, they joined in.

It was unfortunate that I was horrendous at everything else. I couldn’t catch a ball to save my life, and I couldn’t run without shitting my pants a little bit. I also had stage fright which manifested itself with me foaming at the mouth, but I got over that the moment everyone stopped having any expectations of me. What I had in strong natural mathematical ingenuity, I lacked in literally every single other thing you could think of; a jack of zero trades, master of one.

I sat in my living room, drinking my tea and scratching my chin, the TV playing a random Tom and Jerry episode on mute, thinking about what I could throw at Amla that could kill her instantly. When Jerry pulled a piano from a height to slam on top of Tom, I knew what I had to do.

Pianos were large enough to ensure that one would die immediately upon impact, and I could do it from a far enough distance from the eventual crime such that I wouldn’t have to see any of the blood and guts that would probably spill to the floor. The piano store wasn’t too far away from me either. It was the only store in the nation that sold pianos and nothing else - and business was busting. I was garlanded on arrival and given orange juice as a welcome gift for being the first customer in months. They had a wide variety of pianos and I bought one that was big enough and affordable. The salesman and owner of the store, a small man with bloodshot eyes and crooked fingers, asked if I knew how to play.

“No,” I had said. “I’m using it to throw at someone from a great height.”

 “Oh, you should have said that, we have a recreational piano section right this way.”

Those were more ergonomic, well designed pianos meant to never be played. I asked him to deliver it to Amla’s roof and I stood with it over there, waiting for her to walk out of her building. She had recently said to all of us that she was feeling better and had begun going on walks by the sea nearby. The smell of salt and fish, she said, overwhelmed her senses so much that she’d forget a lot of the pain inside of her.

I saw her walk out of her building from the terrace. It wasn’t a very tall building, and the good people from the store placed the piano at the edge of the roof which made it much easier for me to push it off. Of course, the maths had to be perfectly right and not only did I have to calculate the pace and direction in which she walked, but the speed and force of the push I’d give to the piano. I couldn’t risk the piano missing her, or worse, just taking off an arm or a toe.

About 30 minutes later, I saw her coming back and I knew this was my chance. I held the piano and let my intuition take over, and allowed it to guide the force in my hands to give the piano a little nudge when it felt just about right to. My genius brain figured it out perfectly, of course, and it landed right on top of her, with all the keys hitting the pavement at the same time, sounding off the first ugly note of a one second-long symphony that ended with Amla’s body flattened and lost under all the constituent parts of the instrument.

Any guilt I had from doing it was immediately laid aside when I returned home. Just as I was preparing to take a bath to wipe the sweat off me, Ketan’s ghostly form returned, this time with Amla next to him. They were holding hands, and that luminescent glow that seemed so dull on Ketan’s first arrival was now shining bright. They both thanked me over and over again. Amla’s glowing smile made me think murder was not so bad after all. In the right context and with the right spirit, it could be a force for good.

*

I liked having this connection with Ketan. It was comforting to know that I’d still be able to talk to him, even after his death. I looked forward to him visiting again, whenever he could, so we could catch up on good old times and pretend like he never really died. Back then, we would spend hours and hours together, watching cricket, and talking very generally about the world and about our lives.

But the rest of our friend circle was struggling to deal with the losses. At a gathering held in memory of Amla, we talked about the gaps left in all our lives, and how it would be years before any of us could recover from this trauma. Some even suggested that we never actually would recover. We’d drag it with us for the rest of our lives, it’d pull us back as we tried to go ahead, and the more we struggled with trying to let it go, the tighter it would grab on. Someone angrily hoped that whoever dropped the piano on Amla would be found and punished, and I nervously tugged at my collar. If only I could tell them how much happier our friends were; but I feared I’d be seen as a lunatic if I mentioned any of what happened to them.

As I was leaving the gathering, Ryan came up to me. Ryan was about a foot taller than me, and a foot wider. He had a bald head that turned a deep red in the sun, and was the subject of a viral video a few years ago when his sister fried an egg on it during a particularly harsh heatwave. Ryan could have passed off as a bouncer at a super-exclusive club only meant for very important people, but he was our neighbourhood’s most marvellous home baker, and a close friend of our deceased friends.

“I want to bring the weekend parties back,” he said. “In Ketan’s memory. I know he’d want us to.”

I thought I’d ask Ketan the next time I saw him, but in the meanwhile I accepted Ryan’s proposal and promised to be there the next weekend. But Ketan never came. I’d expect him every few hours or so, and I’d mistake the slightest disturbance for his arrival. I’d be watching TV, and a slight fuzz in the signal would make me think he’s appeared suddenly, somewhere in the house. I even searched around sometimes. Ketan was famously poor at finding locations, even with the help of technology. But I never saw him.

The police, meanwhile, were on the lookout for whoever dropped the piano on Amla. Thankfully, they were all legendarily bad at their jobs. The Google page of the police station had a litany of one-star reviews that read like several criminal reports, all of which ended with the cops messing up the investigation. These were interspersed with other one-star reviews that just had middle-finger emojis, all in different colours, race no bar. Ours was the only city in the entire country where the majority of crimes committed remained unsolved. Leading newspapers in circulation referred to them as the ‘Poo-lice Force’. In misguided and ill-thought retaliative anger, the cops let crimes happen as if to punish the citizens for their insolence, for which they were called more names. It was this cycle of ineptitude that kept the city from running smoothly. But I still had to be on my toes.

I paid off the man who sold me the piano with a weekly subscription of alcohol that kept him going. The piano business was a dying one anyway, people could write Beethoven’s Fifth on their watches now. My bribes were probably the single greatest injection into the piano economy in many years. I kept a generally low profile, even at gatherings and even at the weekend parties that began again at Ryan’s. The first party was awkward, most people breaking down in tears, eyes welling up while AP Dhillon boomed in the background. Everybody used each other’s clothes to wipe the tears off because Ryan did not account for the amount of crying at the party while buying tissues. The more alcohol the partiers consumed, the harder it became for them to mask their emotions, and despite Ryan organising strobe lights and loud speakers, the vibe initially felt more like a disco-themed grief counselling session, everyone’s crying faces each represented on the little squares of the mirrorball that hung from the ceiling.

Truth be told, Ketan’s absence from my life began to strike me as well. He hadn’t returned in weeks, and I was beginning to feel that pang of pain again. I tried replicating Amla’s solutions to loss - I bought plants, I started a Twitter account, I walked by the sea, but the crater that grief left in me was far too large for botany and pontification to fill. It was recommended I instead seek help and heal.

I began to meditate. An instructor who wore only shades of blue and had earphones on at all times taught me how to breathe, which I’d apparently been doing wrong all my life. I’d been breathing in and breathing out, when I should have been breathing inward and outward. “‘Inward’ and ‘outward’ define a process,” she would say. “In and Out is crass.” It seemed to help. I took deeper breaths and really taught my lungs to experience each air molecule like the wondrous gift of existence that it was. I was moving on.

But I was only halfway through this transformative journey when Ketan came back. Several weeks had passed. I was cosying up in my armchair, scrolling through my Netflix account to see what show to lobotomize myself with next when I saw the familiar glow in the corner of the room. It was Ketan, and he was alone. That shining, bright glow that he had the last time was missing.

He looked a little shifty, a little small. The usual assertiveness, that usual drive to occupy the room with his whole personage, the gregariousness that would shift the dimensions of the whole Universe to put him at its centre, all of it was absent. He stared at his feet while speaking to me.

“I need another favour of you,” he said, with a little hesitation. “This is very difficult for me to ask.”

I went up to him and asked him to sit down. He slowly walked past me, careful not to make eye contact, and sat down. I thought I spotted a tear in his eye, but that might also have been the reflection of a streetlamp coming through the window.

“Tell me what’s up, bro?” I asked. All that grief that began to put me in a cocoon tapered off immediately. I was trying to be calm and collected for my friend who was clearly traumatized by something, but behind the super serious expression on my face that was meant to be indicative of friendly support, I was bristling with happiness. That feeling of relief returned, where I could fool myself that he wasn’t dead, that no amount of plant buying and breathing inward and outward could do. I wanted to place my hand on his shoulder in brotherly comfort, but it was shaking too much from the excitement. He didn’t say anything for a while. It seemed like he was shaping a sentence inside his head before he said it out loud.

“Amla and I have been having some issues, I don’t really want to get into it. But she really needs to talk it out with her girlfriends, get their advice and figure a way forward. She also misses Girl’s Night Out with them and wants to bring it back.”

Ketan and Amla never had trouble in this realm. Amla once posted an Instagram reel where she said that if they ever had an argument, or a disagreement about something, they would both close their eyes and remember how much they loved each other, and how that was stronger than any negative feelings they might have about one another. And the anger would subside. Ten thousand likes.

Maybe the eternal aspect of the afterlife wasn’t all that great for love. When lovers exclaimed that they’d love the other forever, it conveniently seemed to ignore the fact that people die. It was an easy commitment to make when there’s a 100% chance that you’d not be around forever. It’s why I had never gotten into a serious relationship. When me and my partner(s) reached the point where we began quantifying our affection, I couldn’t bring myself to exaggerate the stats to induce romance. They all left soon after such a conversation.

Ketan began to cry. Being dead really wasn’t suiting him and I wanted to help.

“There there, Ketan,” I said. I tried rubbing his back but all I got was ghost goo all over my hand. I wiped it off on my pants. “What do you want me to do?”

Ketan cleared his throat and took a deep breath. He still wasn’t looking me in the eye. “I don’t want to sound like a bother, and you’ve already done so much. But it would be quite the favour if you found the time to kill Rita, Somya and Sunaina so they too can join us over here. She’ll have someone to speak to about it, and I think she needs some time to herself as well. They’ll be able to help”

I listened to him and gave it a quick thought: a single murder was one thing, but a triple homicide? The logistics of it would be difficult to figure out, and besides, I’d have to take a day or two off work to properly finish the job - the murder, the clean up, the cover up. It wasn’t going to be easy.

“Ketan, one murder is one thing,” I said. “But three? It seems a little excessive, if I’m being honest.”

“You know I wouldn’t ask it of you if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. I need this to happen. I’m worried about mine and Amla’s future.”

He finally looked up at me, and I could see that he had been crying for days. Wrinkles began to appear on his otherwise clear skin, and it looked as if he hadn’t slept in weeks. I wasn’t sure if you could die in the afterlife, but Ketan’s face suggested that he wished you could. When he’d asked to kill Amla, I thought that would be the most desperate I would see him. But what I saw now was worse. This was Ketan struggling to breathe, and coming to me for life support.

Naturally, I accepted my friend’s request. To give love a chance. To give Ketan hope in the afterlife, and provide hope to the rest of humanity that untethered, joyous love was indeed a possibility. And in anticipation of a future demand, I decided I’d kill the three women’s husbands as well.

*

The six of them were regulars at Ryan’s parties, and I had shared many nights of unchecked debauchery with them. They were all perfectly lovely people, extremely happy and very well-to-do, and despite taking the death of Amla the hardest, these three friends of hers really powered through and came out the brightest. I decided to strike after the next Ryan weekend bash.

Using a piano this time was obviously out of the question. If I really did the maths, I might have been able to drop the piano in a way that I got two of them at one time, but that would still mean purchasing two more pianos for the other four. And I didn’t have the time, nor the money for that.

It was again in my living room, with my chin being scratched, and my TV on mute, when inspiration struck. India was playing England in a cricket match that was on, and one of the fast bowlers delivered a scorching bouncer that struck the batsman right on his head. He lay still on the ground for a few short seconds. The players and the audience thought that the fellow might have died, but thankfully the helmet rescued his life. As far as I knew, Rita, Somya, Sunaina and their respective husbands did not wear helmets on a casual night out.

I left Ryan’s home a little early that Saturday night, and waited just round the corner from his building, where all of us had our cars parked. A few hours later, the six of them walked out together, in one pack, talking over each other, ripe for the taking for someone in the market for a sextuple homicide.

I had bought a box of six cricket balls. They were small enough for me to throw at a great distance and speed, yet heavy enough to kill someone if it struck the right part of their head. I had six people, six balls, six attempts.

I breathed inward, I breathed outward, and then I took aim and launched ball number one. Direct hit.

The second ball was a little harder. All of them moved haphazardly, bodies unsure whether to move towards the now-deceased Somya, or move in search of the assailant. I had to anticipate how the wave of chaos would move, and find my target. I struck again, two for two.

One by one, I launched the balls at the rest of them, and before any of them could react to the previous person's death, another ball was already hurtling towards them, prepared to kill.

The place was empty enough for me to approach their deceased bodies and confirm how dead they were. I placed my finger under their nose to see if there was air coming out, like I had seen in the movies, and even picked up the cricket balls and left. A crime scene with no traces left behind. I might be a genius, I thought to myself. If only my mother were alive to see me.

Ketan, Amla, Rita, Somya, Sunaina and the three husbands whose names I did not know appeared again when I returned home as I was washing off the sweat I accumulated on my body from throwing all of those balls, and they thanked me once again, tears in their eyes, gratitude in their hearts. The brightness from their bodies was much too high, and I had to speak to them with my eyes closed unless I wanted to risk being blinded. The new entrants all expressed to me the numerous hardships they were encountering back on the mortal plane, and the release of death unburdened them from the shackles of debts, unemployment, and other personal issues.

Once again, I felt my guilt vanish, and I felt like I was doing good for my friends, especially Ketan. I was glad to see him and Amla together again, holding hands like they were teenagers.

The next weekend party at Ryan’s had six fewer visitors. Once again an aura of sadness clung on to the air. The music, however good, just did not do enough to get people to shuffle their feet and bob their heads any longer. Ryan switched from disco-pop to Techno to House to Gangsta Rap to Classic Bollywood, but all they became were a soundtrack to the stillest party in the world. At this point, people might have begun to think, they weren’t just losing their closest friends; they could be next.

“Does it scare you?” asked Ryan, as I tried to pour my fourth glass of rum and coke, but instead spilled all of it to the floor. He was still on his first drink, nervous about the state of his parties. People dying weren’t good for vibes, he told me earlier, when I entered. He gave us all party hats to lighten the mood, but party hats did surprisingly little to alleviate grief.

“Does what scare me?”

“Everyone dying.”

“It doesn’t scare me,” I replied honestly. “But it does make me sad.”

And I was sad indeed. I thought after the last crime I committed, the sheer scale and audacity of it, Ketan would do the courtesy of visiting me more often. But I hadn’t seen him, or anyone else, since that day. I had killed seven people for my friend, I had killed seven friends for my friend, but I still felt excluded.

I told myself it might take a while for Ketan to come back for a small chat. That’s all I wanted, really, another hang with my pal before he sauntered off into the void forever. Some beer, some snacks, maybe a Terminator or two to watch. But the afterlife, I explained to myself, talking out loud while pacing my bedroom, was an entirely new concept. The first humans on Earth weren’t eager to go to the Moon, they spent time figuring out how to manage being alive and satisfied on Earth. Eternity was like a new toy, and I knew how distracted Ketan could get. I’d probably be the same way, I thought.

Inward breaths, outward breaths.

The police were as clueless as ever, of course, and they declared the cause of death for the six of them to be an argument they had that led to a physical altercation that resulted in everyone finding a way to punch someone in the head hard enough to cause death. The last two just happened to do it at the exact same time. I was now certain that it wasn’t me who was particularly good at murder, I was just being chased by the world’s worst cops. I could spit in a man’s face in front of them, and they’d find a way to blame the clouds.

*

Ketan returned after a prolonged absence again, and this time didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He sat down and asked about my life, and we chatted shit like the good old days. But just as I was about to boil water for my third cup of chai during our conversation, he asked for another favour.

“Whatever you’ve done for us so far has been amazing, but the place we’re at is a bit of a mess. You think you can, you know...” He made that throat slitting gesture with his hand and tongue out. “Could you maybe kill the help we had at home?”

Killing friends and acquaintances was one thing, but killing the help felt a little politically incorrect. This wasn’t just a case of homicide now, but also a matter of class warfare. But the man was right, he looked like an absolute mess. His clothes were stained everywhere, unironed, even torn in some parts. Ketan promised the help would have a better life there, free from the poverty-laden life on Earth fate had cursed her with.

So I did it, but this time I used a golf ball - they were cheaper and easier to carry around in a pocket. The first strike didn’t quite do the job entirely, I had to quickly retrieve the ball and throw it at her head again, but that was enough.

“The maid died,” Ryan told me at the next party we had at his house. I wasn’t aware that the same woman did the work at his home as well, and it was evident. Cups and cups of half-drunk tea and coffee lay on the tables; plates of food left around, with some pieces on the floor; dust and dirt gathered on all the corners, rats coming to feast on the chunkier bits. Flies buzzed around, occupying chairs, tables, walls, squatting unobstructed in Ryan’s presence. He couldn’t hire someone new because of the money he was spending on the parties. He had brought a DJ out for this one, as well as a whole troupe of dancers with colour coordinated clothing, even though their dance moves didn’t seem all that coordinated.

“Stop throwing the parties, Ryan,” I said to him.

“I can’t. I don’t want to forget my friends.”

He joined the dancers for a salsa session over the pile of trash in the living room.

Ketan’s visits became far more frequent, and each one went similarly - he’d come in, we’d chat for a while, I’d make tea for myself, a couple of times we even sat down to watch a cricket match, and then he’d drop a new request, like a radio call-in show for murder.

The first few requests seemed like the regular ones - common friends of ours who he or Amla wanted there for various reasons, but the circle got wider. The others who I had sent to the afterlife, names I couldn’t even remember at that point, they had their own requests. I was the genie who granted three bodies to each, that was the limitation I gave them, and they all exhausted it rather quickly.

My M.O. didn’t change. I still found various heavy objects and used my skills to target the exact spot in the head that would ensure fatality, but my work became more sloppy. I left things behind. Sometimes it was the bills from the stores I purchased my weaponry from, other times it was footprints. Being a serial killer was giving me burn-out, which in turn made me more careless. I’d come back home and sleep dreamlessly because my body was too exhausted to make imaginary shit up.

Ketan’s requests also began to expand - a driver, any driver, was next to be sent into the afterlife. Next came a tailor, then plumbers, electricians, chefs, the list went on and it felt like Ketan was building a society for himself there, one where he could be the centre of the Universe.

I couldn’t keep track of how many I had killed at this point - but the cops seemed to be aware. The Poo-lice Force seemed to have deployed an entire battalion to hunt me down, and I was getting less confident of my dependence on their incompetence. They had, after all this time, finally linked all the murders to a single friend circle. I had to be on my toes.

*

Ketan came to me with one more request. He was pacing up and down my bedroom while I gulped down my sixth cup of coffee in the morning in the hope it would keep me semi-conscious.

“Ryan. I heard he throws great parties and I need someone to share the load with here.”

 I never stopped attending Ryan’s parties, even though now, after all the murders, it was just him and me.

“I can’t do it, Ketan. I’m tired.” My eyes were bloodshot. I wasn’t breathing inward and outward anymore. I was barely breathing in and out.

Ryan was also the only friend I had left on the mortal plane of existence. I stood firm this time.

Ketan stopped and stared at me, one eyebrow in the air, his thick, translucent body slowly peeling off. “I knew you weren’t really my guy,” he said. “A real buddy would do this for a buddy.”

And before I could respond, he disappeared into thin air again. I sat there alone in my room. For once the streets were quiet. I just heard the whirring of my fan as it spun thanklessly to keep me cool. I made a glass of whisky for myself and turned on the television, taking off my shirt for maximum comfort. This silence, this loneliness, this drink, it all felt so good. My muscles relaxed, and as I sat to watch the thirteenth episode of The Big Bang Theory for the fifteenth time in my life, I could feel the screws of my brain loosen. I slunk down into my seat and fell asleep. It was the best sleep I ever had.

*

Ryan insisted on throwing his parties. It would just be the two of us now, but I wanted to honour his request. People had different ways of coping, and if this was his, I would fully support him. All of his and my friends were dead - of course, he didn’t know it was me that caused all of their deaths, but I felt good knowing that I chose to keep Ryan alive. And I owed him a life worth living now.

On the way to his home for our Saturday night romp, I stopped by the liquor store to buy a bottle of something. I got the third-cheapest gin I could find. I walked over to his place. The streets were full of energy. Young people going out for their parties, the sounds of people hailing rickshaws and taxis, most rejecting them without acknowledgement, even the sound of car honks seemed pleasant knowing that the impatience stemmed from people just wanting to head to a location that guaranteed a good time. The full moon was out, the stars were bright, the night was good.

Just as I turned the corner to get the Ryan’s, the same corner where I killed Rita, Somya and Sunaina, I saw a flyer stuck to the wall. It flapped in the wind, and I could only see the WANTED sign in big, bold letters. I held down the bottom half of the page and saw the police were offering a reward of more than a lakh rupees for a man who had murdered approximately 25 people. The face in the middle was a crude sketch drawing of a bald man with beady eyes - it was Ryan.

At his home, everything seemed normal. The flashing lights were ready to party, the music was loud, there were streamers flying through the air. The house, though, was still a mess.

Ryan clearly had no idea that the police were after him. He was terribly sad and depressed about all his friends dying, but he didn’t seem to have any fear in him.

“We’re definitely next,” he insisted. “There’s no way we survive this.”

All the guilt I should have accumulated from all the murders before was now all laying into my body at the same time. It felt like a hole was forming in my centre. I was seeing double, I could hardly hear the music and any of Ryan’s complaints. I wanted to hurl.

“Are you okay?” he asked me. He noticed the sweat beginning to glisten on my face. “It’s probably the alcohol,” he told me. “This gin is terrible.”

The doorbell rang. Ryan looked at me confused. He hadn’t invited anyone else.

“Police, open up.”

 Ryan looked confused. He began thinking about all the friends he had. Did anyone else die? He thought they all were already dead. Beads of sweat now fell from the top of my head. My heart was thumping out of my ribcage and threatening to tear open my skin. I looked at the window and thought of jumping.

“Do you know what this is about?” he asked me. He began walking towards the door. I had to make a choice. 

“Ryan, wait.”

He turned to look at me. I didn’t say anything for a while and he looked at me perplexed. I breathed inward, breathed outward, then grabbed the closest sharp object I could find.

***

About the Author:

Prthvir Solanki is a Goa-based writer whose work spans fiction and non-fiction for both print and screen. He is a fellow with the South Asia Speaks Fellowship 22-23, and is working towards the completion of his first book of short stories.