Karna's Heir - Chapter 5

Chapter 5: The Hunted Man

The echoes of the warrior’s agony and the bloody sacrifice faded from Aryan’s mind, leaving behind a residue of cold horror and a deeply unsettling connection to the golden things now fused with his very being. He lay on Ajay’s filthy mattress, trembling, not from the physical pain of the merge anymore – that had subsided into a strange, thrumming vitality – but from the sheer psychic weight of the inherited trauma.

He touched his chest. The skin felt smooth, like ordinary skin. He scrambled to the cracked mirror, his movements surprisingly fluid, less clumsy than before. In the dim, murky reflection, Ajay’s face stared back, stubbled and worn. He ripped open the cheap shirt. His chest was bare. The intricate golden patterns, moments ago a raised, terrifying brand, were gone. Vanished. As if they’d never been.

“What the…?” He ran his hands over his chest. It felt like his skin, Ajay’s skin. But beneath the surface, he could still feel it – that subtle resilience, that integrated strength. He touched his earlobes. They looked normal, the old piercing holes visible, but the golden sun motifs were gone from sight.

“Okay,” he breathed, a shaky laugh escaping him. “So, it’s an internal feature now? Like built-in body armor with optional invisibility? That’s… surprisingly considerate for a cursed, millennia-old set of homicidal bling. Next, it’ll tell me it makes julienne fries.” He paused. “Though I wouldn’t say no to the fries right now. Or an exorcist. Whichever is easier to find in Dharavi.”

The brief moment of surreal discovery was shattered by the cold, hard reality of his situation. Shetty. The one-hour deadline had evaporated hours ago. By now, Shetty wouldn’t just be angry; he’d be geological in his fury, ready to erupt and bury Ajay under a mountain of violent retribution. And the package – the Kavacha and Kundal – was now, quite literally, a part of him. He couldn’t deliver it even if he wanted to, not without a repeat of the warrior’s gruesome self-extraction, a prospect that made his stomach churn.

Panic, swift and urgent, surged anew. He was a marked man, in a body that wasn’t his, fused with artefacts that clearly had a body count, and hunted by gangsters who weren’t known for their patience or gentle persuasion.

“Right,” he said, his voice tight with adrenaline. “Time for ‘Operation: Don’t Become Today’s Special on Shetty’s Revenge Menu.’ Catchy title, needs work on the execution.”

He had to move. Now.

He scanned the room. Ajay hadn’t owned much. A few changes of equally deplorable clothes, the small wooden chest Aryan had stashed under his waistband earlier – that was coming with him, no question – and a pitifully small wad of grimy rupee notes stuffed into an old cigarette packet. Pocketing the cash and ensuring the wooden chest was still securely, if uncomfortably, lodged against his spine, he took one last look at the hovel that had been his bizarre rebirth chamber. “It’s been… an experience,” he told the empty room. “Mostly terrible. Zero stars. Would not reincarnate here again.”

Slipping out of the room and down the narrow, rickety stairs felt like stepping onto a battlefield. Every shadow seemed to lengthen, to coalesce into the shape of one of Shetty’s goons. Every shout in the crowded lane sounded like his borrowed name being called. He pulled the collar of Ajay’s shirt higher, trying to melt into the teeming anonymity of Dharavi, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs – ribs that now felt subtly, strangely reinforced.

His first priority was distance. He walked, fast, almost ran, fueled by terror, pushing through the crowds, his head down, trying not to make eye contact. He had no plan, no destination, just a desperate need to put as much space as possible between himself and Shetty’s presumed hunting ground.

After what felt like an eternity, but was probably only an hour or two, he found himself in a slightly less chaotic, though equally grimy, part of the city. He spotted a sign for a cheap lodge, its paint peeling, promising hourly rates and no questions asked. It looked like the kind of place where hope went to die, but for Aryan, it was a temporary sanctuary.

He paid for twelve hours in a tiny, windowless room that smelled of stale cigarettes, desperation, and unidentifiable despair. The single bed boasted a mattress even lumpier than Ajay’s, and the shared bathroom down the hall looked like a biohazard site. “Five-star fugitive accommodation,” he muttered, collapsing onto the bed, the small wooden chest digging into his back. “At least the ambiance screams ‘no witnesses’.”

Thus began his life on the run. Days blurred into a monotonous cycle of fear, flight, and filth. He rarely stayed in one place for more than a night, sometimes only hours. Cheap lodges gave way to even cheaper ones, rooms shared with snoring strangers, the occasional night spent huddled in the shell of an abandoned building, listening to the rats skittering in the walls and wondering if they were Shetty’s advance scouts.

His dark humor became his constant companion, a grim narrator to his descent. “My new hobbies include competitive mattress testing in establishments of questionable hygiene, advanced paranoia, and an ongoing anthropological study of Mumbai’s most creatively stained walls.” He learned to sleep with one eye open, to eat whatever cheap, greasy street food he could find without drawing attention, to conserve Ajay’s meager funds with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to a toothpick.

The fear was a constant, gnawing presence. Every time he stepped out, he scanned faces, his gaze darting, looking for anyone who might recognize Ajay, anyone who might carry a message back to Shetty, or to the other cold-voiced man who’d called. The police were another terror. Ajay’s life had clearly been lived on the wrong side of the law; any interaction with cops could lead to questions he couldn’t answer, a past he couldn’t escape. He imagined the headlines: ‘Local Goon Found With No Memory, Claims To Be Dead Engineer, Mysteriously Invulnerable To Papercuts. Film at Eleven.’

Amidst this desperate scramble for survival, another, more personal need began to surface: to know what had truly happened to Aryan Sharma. Had he really died? Or was this some elaborate, cruel cosmic joke where his original body was lying in a coma somewhere while his consciousness was trapped in this nightmare?

He needed a computer, internet access. After a few days of building up his courage and scouting locations, he found a dingy internet café, tucked away in a crowded bazaar, filled with teenagers playing violent video games and shadowy figures hunched over flickering screens. It felt exposed, dangerous, but he had to know.

He paid for an hour, his hands clammy as he sat down at a sticky keyboard. The browser was slow, the connection agonizingly erratic. He typed ‘Noida construction accident Aryan Sharma’ into the search bar, his heart pounding.

The search results loaded, a list of news articles. His breath hitched.

‘Engineer Killed in Tragic Crane Collapse at Noida Mall Site.’

‘Safety Lapses Questioned After Fatal Accident Halts Mega-Project.’
He clicked on one, his hand trembling. There was a grainy photo of the collapsed section of Tower C, his last sight on earth. Another showed a covered gurney being loaded into an ambulance. That was him. Or, the him that was.

Aryan Sharma, B.Tech Civil Engineering, twenty-eight years old, was officially, irrevocably dead.

A strange numbness settled over him. It was one thing to experience death, to wake up in another body. It was another to see it confirmed in stark, impersonal black and white, a news item for public consumption. “Well, look Ma, I made the news,” he whispered to the flickering screen, a bitter taste in his mouth. “Shame it’s the obituary section.”

He read on. The articles detailed the aftermath. The construction company was facing a major police investigation. Work on the entire multi-crore mall project had been halted indefinitely. There were quotes from grieving colleagues, a statement from the company offering condolences and promising full cooperation. Sharmaji probably was having kittens.

A small, grim satisfaction flickered within him. His death, it seemed, had at least forced some accountability. “Maybe they’ll build a memorial,” he mused darkly. “‘Here lies Aryan Sharma. He told you that rebar was dodgy. You didn’t listen. Enjoy the crater, suckers.'”

The confirmation of his own death brought another, even more profound realization crashing down on him. If Aryan Sharma was dead, then this wasn’t a body swap in the way he’d vaguely imagined, where Ajay the gangster might have simultaneously woken up in Aryan the engineer’s hospital bed. No. Aryan had died. Ajay had died. And somehow, Aryan’s consciousness, his soul, whatever it was, had… migrated. Jumped ship from one sinking vessel to another that had just happened to be empty.

Relief, pure and overwhelming, washed over him, so potent it almost brought tears to his borrowed eyes. His family. His mother. His meticulously managed savings, the small nest egg he’d been building for her, for their future. It was safe. Ajay the gangster hadn’t taken over his life, his body, his bank accounts.

“Thank God,” he breathed, the words heartfelt, raw. “I had visions of Ajay discovering my mutual fund portfolio and investing it all in bad hooch and worse decisions. Mom would never have forgiven me… or him. She’d have probably found a way to haunt him from the great beyond with lectures on fiscal responsibility.”

It was a small mercy, a tiny island of solace in an ocean of terror and confusion, but it was something. He hadn’t just abandoned his responsibilities; he had been forcibly removed from them by death. And his new, unwelcome tenant status in Ajay’s body meant that at least his old life, his family’s security, remained untainted by this criminal mess.

“So, it wasn’t a hostile takeover of Aryan Sharma Industries by Ajay the Goon,” he thought, a fresh wave of his typical gallows humor resurfacing, strengthened by this small victory. “It was more like… a desperate refugee situation. My consciousness fleeing a collapsing building and finding an empty, albeit highly problematic and previously condemned, apartment to squat in.”

He still didn’t know how it had happened. Divine intervention? Cosmic clerical error? A particularly bizarre side effect of dying near poorly grounded high-voltage equipment? The ‘why’ was even more elusive. But knowing that his old life was definitively over, and that his family wouldn’t suffer because of some consciousness-swapping gangster, brought a strange kind of closure. It didn’t make his current predicament any less lethal, but it did remove one heavy burden from his already overloaded psyche.

His hour at the internet café was almost up. He logged off, a man officially twice-dead, yet stubbornly, impossibly alive. As he stepped back out into the cacophony of Mumbai, the fear of Shetty and the unknown “Collectors” still clung to him like Ajay’s body odor. But now, there was something else too. A grim resolve. He was Aryan Sharma, and somehow, some way, he was going to survive this.

Even if it meant being the most sarcastic, unwilling, gold-plated gangster in the history of the Mumbai underworld. The hunt was on, and he was the prey. But this prey was starting to feel a very faint, very strange stirring of something that might, one day, with a lot of luck and even more dark humor, resemble a fight.