The shock was absolute.
He could see his face but could not bring himself to believe it. It was not the same Kautuk that he knew. The face was paler. Meshes of veins were prominent under the eyes and on the cheeks. The smile on his lips, which Anay was so used to being comforted by, was gone. Instead, there was a hurt and angry expression on the face. The lips were frozen into a puckered grimace, and a deadpan expression filled those cold, staring blue eyes.
"Wh-who are you?" Anay asked, stepping back.
The lips moved. A wisp of cold breath came out of it, as if clearing the pathway for more words to come. In that breath, Anay smelled the same putridness that emanated from stale meat past its due date in a cold storage.
Then the lips opened, and cold flat words swept out of them that had no intonation or modulation.
"At long last, I have you where I wanted."
"What do you mean?" Anay said even as he felt the steeliness of his own words within his throat.
Kautuk swept forward. "Don't you recognize me, brother?"
"Truly, I don't," Anay said, cowering under the assault of those stony words. "I don't know what you are."
"I am your colleague. Your office buddy. Your best friend. The lapdog who always hung around by your side for years, but you noticed me only when you needed me."
"But you can't be Kautuk! He's a living breathing person."
"Ha! Living, breathing. What does 'living, breathing' mean? Does it mean only to exist? Does it not mean to be noticed and appreciated? Think about the time before your life started getting fucked up. Think about your friends at that time. Your group of friends. That Vishwa, he had Renee. You, you had a job, an apartment, your freedom. What did Kautuk have? He just tagged along with you guys, wherever you went, whatever you did. No different than a pet dog that you would take along with you. What other purpose did he have?"
"It is not like that!" Anay backed off further, stumbling into a row of seats, for that mysterious being had now stepped ahead in his rage. "Kautuk is the jolly one of our group, the one who keeps us together."
All of a sudden, Kautuk glided forth with a hissing sound, zooming like a projectile, and jabbed a finger into Anay's chest. With remarkable rage, he spewed forth words that would ring in Anay's ears for a long time to come: "NOT EVERYONE WEARS THEIR PAIN LIKE A BADGE!"
Anay felt the piercing fingertip on his chest. "What? What does that mean?"
"People suppress their pain. People don't talk about it. It does not mean they do not have it."
"But why would you, Kautuk..."
"STOP IT! Kautuk! Kautuk! Kautuk!" He repeated the name like a clacking lizard, with his tongue pressing hard and rapidly against those rotting teeth. "What did you know about Kautuk? What do you know about anyone, you selfish bastard?"
"I... I don't understand..." Anay had no words. His eyes spoke for him and they displayed utmost fear.
"You fool! You don't understand because your mind is so narrow. You can only see what bites you on the nose. Don't you see that I am not this poor sucker, Kautuk? I have just been using his body for a while. I didn't need his body before. I would follow you as a ghost—in the conference room, in the elevator, at the restaurant, that was me! Others could see me, but you could not. Because I didn't want to show myself to you. All I wanted was to follow you. We have had a very complex relationship, Anay Ghosh, only you have never known it."
"But why Kautuk?" Anay stammered.
"Why, you ask! I could not follow you forever as a ghost, could I? Others could see me, but I knew you never would. I had to get closer to you. I had to talk to you, get in your mind. That was possible if I could have a proper, concrete body. And who better than Kautuk! The poor sucker was as depressed and lonely as I was. And he was always around you. And—let me tell you a secret. He loved you. On those lonely nights in his bedroom, he craved you! He wept because he could not be with you. Every time you touched a girl, his heart broke a little. Did you never see that in his eyes? Good riddance, though. The weak have no right to simper and keep living."
Anay fumbled for words. "Since how long..."
"Since ever! And when that selfish bitch entered your life again, he could take it no more. He was the only one who saw through her. Didn't she latch on to you only because she wanted a job? And you could not see that. Do you even know he wanted to pour out his heart to you? He didn't expect anything from you, only to feel lighter. But you went on and flaunted your girlfriend under his nose. You were a selfish bastard as always, only thinking about yourself! Poor bloke wanted to kill himself. I saw that misery in him. I had been waiting for such a moment, for such a chink in your armor that I could possess, and your friend, Kautuk, with all the depressed aura he had, was the best choice."
A heavy pause followed. The silence of the moment was terrifying.
"Do you want to know when I did it? On the night when you were arrested. I had just finished off that slut you had taken home, but then the police took you away. And when Kautuk got that call, I was with him. I could feel his anger and frustration. He was livid because you let yourself be fooled by a girl again, and to the extent of murdering her. Yes, that was his thought initially; that you had actually murdered the girl. He was at his emotional lowest, and that was when I possessed him. That's the best time for us ghosts to get into a body—when they are in the worst frame of mind. We thrive on your depression and loneliness. And since then, I have been drifting in and out of his body. But I don't know how much longer I'll be able to use him. Every time I leave him, he is getting weaker and weaker. Now, do you understand who I am?"
"You are... you are..." Anay could not bring himself to utter his name.
That was enough to anger the incited spirit that now possessed Kautuk. In flying rage, he lifted his icy sharp finger upward. It moved up from Anay's chest and slashed it right up to his collarbone. His shirt ripped apart at once, flying open in the middle. And even as he braced himself for the next assault, he became aware of the agonizing hairline wound that the dead fingernail had left on his chest.
"But Kautuk was always good to me. He heard me out. He helped me. He stood by my side..." Anay protested.
"He would! He loves you despite all your selfishness. Only, he knows that his love is one-sided; that you cannot love him the way he does you. He has made his peace with that. But let us talk about that girl, shall we? Do you think you really love her? Aren't you using her too? You spurned her but then went back to her when you needed her help. You are a selfish man, Anay, and your selfishness has no limit. You are universally and unequivocally selfish. Well, it's perfect in a way. She's using you too."
Anay looked at him, stunned.
"But I have been enjoying this for a while. Putting you in misery for all you did to me. Seeing your life crumble in front of your very eyes. Seeing yourself getting stripped and humiliated the way you did to me in the school as a boy. Yes, I made that happen. Don't you remember the time you ragged me, made me walk naked in front of your friends? How does it feel, Anay? Didn't you feel like giving up your life? But I didn't want that. I wanted you see the suffering. All of it. Now you know why I stopped you from killing yourself."
"No! No! Why are you doing this? What have I done to you?" he protested.
"Fucker! Don't you know? How would you, selfish lout? Then I will spell it out to you. I have all the time in the world."
Anay threw his arms over himself to save himself from the next attack, knowing that it would be the last one. And then, Kautuk's body distorted in an unimaginable way, till it did not look as if it was alive anymore, and a jet of black smoke issued out of it. As Kautuk hit the floor, Anay looked at the black shadow that had projected out. Somewhere in that shadow were two shining blue orbs. And then everything turned black.
***
When his eyes opened again, the first thing he realized was that he was not on his feet. His world was horizontal all of a sudden. It was as if he was drifting away somewhere, floating upwards, and everything he knew as the world was turning smaller and going farther. He gasped. Was this his moment of death? Was he in purgatory and being called out for his various sins before his eternal future could be decided?
The ground beneath him was distant now. He was hanging somewhere, high up. He tried to move past the haze that had gathered around his delirious mind and tried to look at what he was leaving behind.
Several feet below, on the ground, he saw a prone body. For a moment, he thought that was his own body, and he lamented his death. But then he saw it was not him. Those were not the clothes he had been wearing. It was someone else.
It was Kautuk.
He was lying motionless on the floor of the stage, discarded like a snake sheds its molted skin.
An utter cold wind was blowing his way. Feeling that now, Anay began to shiver like a leaf on a tree caught in a storm. But a moment later, when realization struck, it gladdened him, for he could feel the cold. He could feel the cold! That meant one thing—he was not dead.
As he looked at his own body—his bloodied and naked body—he was sure that he was alive.
That was when the agonizing cry left his mouth. He realized the pain of the many blade-thin wounds that were on his skin. All of a sudden, their pain came alive with the force of a thousand stings. He screamed, and the scream confirmed for him he wasn't dead. But he was going to be. He knew it. Was this going to be death by a thousand cuts?
"Why have you done this to me?" he screamed out into the empty space.
As if it had been waiting for that realization, from out of the corners of the stage, just behind those gigantic curtains, arose that shadowy figure again. It fluttered like a piece of cloth until it caught Anay's gaze, and when he looked, it swept across the entire span of the space to come up to Anay and stare at him in the eyes with its terrifying blue orbs.
That made Anay realize where he was—suspended on a frame thirty feet above the stage, above the hanging strobe lights, above the frames that held the giant curtains. He tried to move but found that he was rendered immobile. His arms and legs had been tied to a cross-shaped frame. His pain and humiliation were absolute.
As if that were not enough, the ghost enveloped in many black rags wafted up to his nose and stared at his nearly bare, bleeding body with his limpid cerulean eyes, ogling every inch of it in the most vulgar manner.
Anay should have been scared. This was probably his final moment. But why hadn't been killed yet? Did this thing want to torture him? A swell of rage built within him.
"What do you want? Bastard, kill me and get done with it," he cried.
The vacuous mouth of the spirit opened. Hollow words wafted out of it: "Not yet. First, you will listen to my story."