Collision of Dimensions

By M. V. Ravi Shanker

AD 1647, RAJASTHAN One of the most beautiful summer retreats is built by Maharaja Raghuveer for his Queen in the pristine Aravali hills in Rajasthan. But the Royal Sage and Astrologer discovers an evil presence lurking in the House. It is waiting for somethingƒ.some mysterious power to descend. After finding the evil intentions of this 'being', the Sage advices the king not to occupy the House.The result: the House is promptly abandoned by the King.PRESENT DAY After nearly four hundred years, the evil is still waiting for the mysterious power to descend. Only this time, it has a new, deadlier face: a cult called Ghoras who worship the demon Ghorathighora. Now the power descends into the hands of Mukund Matondkar. Will he understand the extraordinary powers lurking behind the power? Is it a quirk of fate or is it preordained that he meets two extraordinary humans: Arunav Khandelwal, a wealthy hotelier and psychic and Vani Vaidyanathan, a physicist ? The trio must understand the powers of the Mystical Object called the Force and protect it. Can they fight against the might of the Ghoras and the Underworld elements? And what is that mystical portal that passes right through Raja Raghuveer's House that lies abandoned now for more than three fifty years? Will the Ghoras succeed in making that one final human sacrifice to appease their demon god- a sacrifice which will make them almost immortal? But something totally unexpected unfolds in that ancient Courtyard of the House of Raja Raghuveerƒ..

• Language: English
• Publisher: One Point Six Technologies Pvt Ltd
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9789381576724

M. V. Ravi Shanker

M. V. Ravi Shanker did his schooling in Kendriya Vidyalaya in many parts of the country like Imphal, Port Blair, Mount Abu and New Delhi. He draws from the years spent in Mt Abu to create the setting for a section of this novel. A Computer Hardware and Networking professional, Shanker works with Mahindra Satyam. He loves to read books on astronomy, philosophy and P.G. Wodehouse. At present he lives in Secunderabad with his wife Sri Satya and their two daughters, Nandini and Sivani. And when he gets the time he plays table tennis in his company's campus.

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Prologue

AD 1647: Rajasthan

The old sage shielded his eyes against the blazing mid-afternoon sun. His face appeared shrivelled from lack of water for several days and so did the rest of his body. His saffron robes were dust covered from a long journey through the treacherous semi desert.

But his spirit was indefatigable. His mind remained sharp as a sword’s edge and he was in a hurry. He paused just at the edge of the mound from where he could see the sprawling, shimmering town of Alwar before him. Raja Raghuveer’s Palace stood proudly in the blazing sun as if defying the forces of nature. It had withstood several blistering summers and appeared as if it could weather countless more summers.

Seeing the palace seemed to have imbued the old sage with a new surge of physical energy; for soon he was descending down the slope, his robes flying in the hot wind. The hot sand beneath his naked feet no way deterred his urgency.

By the time he reached the towering gates of the palace, the old sage was in the last vestiges of his energy. He nearly collapsed into the powerful arms of one of the guards at the gates.

Water! shouted the guard in Rajasthani. He gently made the old man sit in the shade of palace walls while a pitcher was brought by a passerby. Soon other guards joined the ministrations; the soles, face and hands of the sage were washed while cool water was poured in small quantities in his mouth.

"All men wearing saffron robes, who have given up this samsara’s pleasures to seek more noble truths, shall be treated like the gods themselves." This was the Commandment of Raja Raghuveer to the people of his kingdom. And even a child in the kingdom followed it to the last letter.

Soon the old sage revived like a wilted flower in rain. Energy returned in the old limbs.

"Bholenath will bless you my sons, he mumbled to the guards. And now…take me to the king, quick! I have something to say to him. I should not die with this secret burning in my bosom. So make haste!"

A chariot with a single horse was brought and the old man was helped onto it and a little later, the charioteer, a young boy of sixteen deftly drove it through the vast gates and past an array of luxurious houses and a minute later the chariot stopped outside the immense two-storied palace of Raja Raghuveer.

Half an hour later, the old sage was seated on a high-cushioned seat on a raised platform while the maharaja himself paced with a frown of worry on his face. He was a massively built man with thick moustache that curled upwards proudly. The large maroon turban on the Raja’s head made him more gigantic than he already was. A gold coloured atamsukh with rich intricate design nearly reached the king’s knees. His feet were bare.

Raja Raghuveer at last paused before the sage, his features reverential.

Oh Sacred One, so do you advise me not to occupy the house?

The sage’s features too softened as he slowly ate the last of the oranges and drank the remaining buttermilk. A turbaned servant took the silver plate and the glass and quietly walked out of the palace room. The sage waited until the door closed.

Maharaja Raghuveer, he began his voice deep and resonant. "I have travelled all the way to the hill on which you have indeed built one of the most beautiful houses I have seen. When I was shown the interiors of the house by one of your loyal servants, I was reminded of the description of Mayasabha in the Mahabharata, which had the beauty, grandeur and ability to create optical illusions to the eyes of the beholder. It is believed many were driven nearly mad. I mentally bowed to your royal architect Bhim Singh after seeing the house."

He paused, his face sombre. "I have also studied its vaastu, Maharaj. Though I did not exactly find anything wrong, but…there is something in and around that hill that warrants serious thought. I am not saying all this in idle speculation, Maharaj. I know the number of years you and your architect have spent in planning the house and having it built so painstakingly. I also know of the love you have for your wife for whom you had it built. But, it is also my dharma to warn you of the bizarre happenings in and around the house."

Startled, Raja Raghuveer looked at the sage.

Bizarre! O Sacred One! We spent nearly five years in which nearly six months were spent to scout for the location. Never in this five-year period did we have any untoward or inauspicious incident.

The old sage laughed and immediately his tone took a very grave note. It is no surprise, Maharaj. The things I speak about need psychic vision to detect their presence. A normal, untrained eye sees nothing. Let me finish telling you what I saw, Maharaj.

"One evening, I was coming out of the house after having gone through every corner at least for the hundredth time, when I detected some presence near me. I was actually in that beautiful open courtyard with the stone fountain in the centre and the huge banyan tree to the left. At first, I thought I must be mistaken. But from the periphery of my vision, I saw some movement. Turning my head, I saw a very old woman covered in black clothes hurrying out. She was mumbling something to herself. I am not a man to be frightened so easily, Maharaj. But I must say the presence of this woman in this house both puzzled and made me uneasy.

"I asked immediately in a firm voice who she was and what her business was in the house. She paused in her stride and slowly turned back. What I saw I shall never forget, Maharaj. The old woman’s eyes nearly extended to her cheekbones and she had no eyelids and no whites in the eyes! Her face changed before my very eyes! She said in a voice that was neither male nor female, that she came through the door.

What door? I asked keeping my voice firm. If she was some entity from a dark astral dimension, then my fear, if detected, would only encourage her and make her bold. She raised a long shrivelled finger with a dirty nail towards the sky above the house and said, ‘That door’. I raised my eyes towards the section of the sky she was pointing at, scanning it. It was nearly sunset so the sky had turned bright pink. When I lowered my eyes, she was gone! I looked all around rushing madly into the house and out again. But I found no trace of her. I immediately called all the servants and the caretaker of the house into the garden. I questioned each of them about the old lady. But none of them had ever seen any old lady. In fact they did not have a single woman servant amongst them. One servant, however, said he had seen me talking to myself and had obviously found it odd."

Here the sage paused walking over to the huge arched window. He could view the town activities, the busy marketplace, and the war training grounds. In the distance the semi-desert terrain shimmered in the blazing sun. He turned back to Raja Raghuveer.

Maharaj, this shows the old woman was no ordinary entity. The black clothes symbolise her dark nature. As I repeatedly recollected her words that she came through the ‘door’, I sat in the courtyard for a long time thinking and meditating on this. First, she had made her presence felt quite deliberately. Second, when she said the ‘door’ it is not in the literal sense. She meant she came through some hidden portal which opens up to other worlds.

Raja Raghuveer listened to each word spoken with utmost concentration. With every word his worry deepened.

O revered Guru, you have been our family well-wisher, guide and astrologer par excellence. Your knowledge is immense. The words you say mystify me. I am now deep in worry. Pray, guide me. I have given a word to my dear wife Goutami, whom I love more than life itself, that I shall gift the house to her by the first day of Dussera. Being a Rajput, I cannot waver from my word. In fact, I was about to seek your advice whether the first day of Dussera is auspicious for us to move into the house. You are aware, O Guru, that I have had this house built to spend some weeks with my queen during the summer when the heat here is unbearable.

There was silence in the room while the old sage pondered looking out of the window. He was about to give the actual secret to the king – a secret for which he had to travel the distance on foot.

He once again turned to face the king.

Maharaj, what I am about to say will most likely disturb you. Pray take a seat while I narrate the strange happenings on the hill – a hill which you so lovingly christened Sheetal Shikhar.

Raja Raghuveer took another cushioned seat, his powerful arms across his barrel chest.

Are you sure, Maharaj, that we are alone?

Yes, O Wise One.

Have you wondered what made me take upon such a treacherous journey on foot, Raghuveer? Why have I not been accompanied by your trustworthy soldiers?

These aspects are indeed puzzling, O Wise One. I am waiting for you to clear them.

It is because all your soldiers, servants have vanished from the house on the same night on which I saw the old woman.

Raja Raghuveer sat still, completely stupefied.

Vanished?

The sage nodded gravely.

Vanished. But I assure you, not dead. They may have been snatched by this very being into another dimension, because I thwarted its attempts.

The king became very still. For a long time his gaze never left that of the sage’s. Finally, he said, What attempts, O wise One?

The sage moved close to the king and spoke in whispers. By the time the old sage finished narrating the events that took place on the hill, Raja Raghuveer made the decision to abandon the house.

Present Day in Mumbai

Chapter-1

The Descent

When Mukund Matondkar went to sleep that fateful night, he had no idea that his life was about to change forever. There was no premonition of a profound change that was in the offing. Not many people go to bed with the notion that their lives would alter dramatically by the time they wake up into a new day; there can be an expectation of a new inspiration to dawn, or an expectation of an answer or a solution to spring from the deep recesses of one’s subconscious mind, but hardly one would have a notion of a tremendous change in their outlook. The 22-year-old Mukund was no exception to this rule, if, rule it is.

Therefore, when, after a hearty meal at Stop n Eat, a purely vegetarian restaurant in Mindspace area of Mumbai, he returned to his single-bedroom flat in Malad West, he had no inkling of the coming event that would transform his life. After an invigorating shower, he settled at his reading table where his HP laptop stood open. Even from home, he could connect to his office mailbox using a secure Internet connection. As was his habit, he checked the e-mails that might have been sent after he left office; he found 14 unread mails in his inbox. Most were irrelevant; but he found two that called for his attention. One was from his reporting manager Tiwari seeking clarification regarding an anti-virus patch update and another from his friend and colleague Yogesh Bishnoi who had forwarded an e-mail concerning the applications and the underlying technology behind cloud computing. Yogesh had sent an attachment of the power-point presentation containing the details of this technology. Mukund replied promptly to the former and read the latter with great care and saved it in his laptop.

He yawned as he looked at the time in the bottom right corner of the screen and decided to call it a day. It was twenty minutes past 11:00 pm. Switching off his laptop, he pushed it in its leather casing, and put it under the wooden table with drawers; the table occupied one side of the room. He then sat cross-legged on his bed for several minutes, listening to the silence within the room – the silence that was punctuated by the rhythmic tick-tock of an old-fashioned alarm clock on the table and the muted roar of the diminishing traffic four stories below. He listened carefully to the internal sounds and images that his mind created, and its meaningless, incessant chatter. Finally, he found his eyelids growing heavy and he gently laid his head on the pillow, stretched his legs and drifted off into an effortless sleep. The time was forty minutes past eleven.

Precisely at 02:18 am, a strange phenomenon began to manifest in the room. The dim zero-watt bulb, whose light was sufficient enough for Mukund to reach out and find any object he wanted at any time of the night, began to pale against a new light that began from nowhere. The intensity of the pure white light increased, enveloping every object in the room like a gentle caress.

The man sees the figures moving around, smiling and nodding at each other. They are all around him, in strange attires. He wonders whether they are aware of his presence. They give no sign of such awareness on their part. They move past him like the gentle flow of a mountain stream around a stone. Curiously, he does not see nor feel the firm ground under his feet; intuitively, he knows he is in the courtyard of some house. He has a sensation of floating on top of pure white, wispy clouds. As he looks around with a sense of utter fascination, his gaze is drawn towards the figure of a young Lady of surpassing beauty and grace standing near what appears to be a gushing fountain, looking at him. A smile is playing on her lips. The smile has a meaning, he knows it. But he does not know what the meaning is. She is conveying to him in a mysterious way that she is happy to see him coming through the ‘doorway’. He is puzzled at the mention of the word ‘doorway’.

Seeing his predicament, the Lady gestures with her eyes which he understands that he would know about it in due course.

The young Lady moves towards him with her right hand extended. He stares mystified at a brilliant object in her hand. The whole light seems to be emanating from that one object. All the moving figures, his own body and the Lady are bathed in the brilliance of that light.

The young Lady indicates to him with her eyes to take the object. She does not speak, yet he understands her effortlessly. He is speechless. The lady again beckons him to come close and take the Object. As he stretches his hand to take the Object, the lady places it gently on the man’s right palm. The man feels the weight of the Object. It is as heavy as a paper weight.

The brilliant Object suddenly rolls off his palm and falls.

It was the gentle thud that woke up Mukund. He opened his eyes and looked around the room in confusion and through the periphery of his vision, he saw a brilliant light rolling away under the table. He noted that the room was now bathed in a brilliant, slightly bluish unearthly light. Swinging his legs off the bed he got up and immediately felt dizzy and slightly disoriented. He steadied himself by holding the wooden frame of the bed and blinked rapidly as if this action would clear away the light which he thought he saw in the dream just now. But the light refused to fade or go away.

Then the reality and the enormity of it hit him like a physical blow. It did not feel like a dream any longer. It was more realistic than a dream – more realistic than the reality itself. The evidence was there: the brilliant rays of light shooting from under the table and bathing the room in an unearthly hue of light blue. You don’t wake up from a dream and find a previously unseen component of it that you saw in the dream, existing in real world, right in front of you. But that was exactly what he perceived with utmost clarity.

With great caution, he bent down and looked under the table. Surely, there it was, all brilliance – the Object the lady had placed on his right palm. There was of course no sign of her or the moving figures. Extending his hand, he gently touched the Object. It felt the same way it did when he held a while ago in the dream. He picked it up and straightened his face glowing in the Object’s brilliance. Was it a diamond? Or crystal, perhaps? If it was, he neither heard nor saw any diamond of such a magnitude and brilliance. It was slightly oval in shape. He frowned as he peered closer. He could discern some vague patterns. He was astonished after a few seconds to see that the patterns were changing ever so slowly like those thin wisps of clouds you see that change their shapes even as you look up at them. Slowly like a man in trance, he walked to his bed and sat with the Object shining in his hand. He noted that, though the light was intense, it did not hurt his eyes.

Where had the Object come from? Who were those moving figures and the lady? He looked closely at the Object as if the answer would be inside it. But apart from the bluish light and the ever changing patterns, there was nothing to tell him of its origin or of the mysterious figures.

He closed his eyes for some time and opened them again. The Object still was in his hands. For a while he tested the reality of it by placing the Object in various parts of the room and closed his eyes and opened them. Every time the Object would be in the same spot – its brilliance no way diminishing. He then took out a thick dark blue velvet cloth that he used normally to clean his laptop screen from the top cover of the leather laptop bag. He had recently washed it clean and had not used it for cleaning the screen. The cloth was square and bigger than a standard men’s handkerchief. Gently, he placed the Object in the middle of it and covered it by bringing all four corners of the cloth over the Object. Immediately the room plunged into semi-darkness. The glow was still there, but had dimmed considerably.

And then he discovered something stunning and something that defied all laws of light he studied in his elementary education. When he held the Object in his hand, and turned his head towards the wall behind, he did not see his shadow! Were the rays passing through his body? Yet when he covered the Object in the blue cloth, the light dimmed, as any light source would if it was covered.

Then he slowly walked back to the bed and sat with the Object held in his hands. Now that the initial astonishment and wonder diminished somewhat, he tried recollecting the…the…..what? …the dream?...No. It was not a dream. It was too realistic. Was it a lucid dream? If it was, then how would you account for what he held in his hands?

Okay…Mukund said to himself, his eyes tightly shut in concentration: let me assume, the event involving the moving figures and the lady was real. Where did it take place? Here? In this very room? If it took place in this very room, he did not recollect seeing any of the objects in the room: the bed in which he slept, the table, the walls…nothing. He could distinctly recollect having had a sensation of floating on top of some kind of a courtyard of a very ancient palace. Also he could recollect having seen a gushing fountain, the water gurgling with astonishing musical note in the centre of the courtyard.

The only logical explanation he arrived after much pondering was the Object must have descended from a different reality altogether. The reality that had blended with this for a few minutes; it was there after he slipped into a deep sleep and which disappeared after he woke up. For the time being this explanation would have to do.

Now, the next question: why? Why did the event occur at all? What was the significance of the event and the Object? The more he thought on these, the more puzzling these aspects appeared. Finally, he gave up. Curiously, he did not feel sleepy nor he felt the need to sleep. In the soothing light of the Object he felt refreshed, invigorated and his mind utterly clear. Sleep was out of question.

When he looked at the clock on the table, it showed the time as nearly half-past three. The event must have started sometimes after 02:00 am and ended at nearly half-past two.

Suddenly, a thought came to him: supposing the Object was not of a transient nature, that is, its existence in this reality prolonged further, how was he going to protect the Object? How was he going to hide it and where? Quickly he walked to the table, pulled out the top drawer and slid in the Object, now covered with the blue cloth. As he closed the drawer, he heaved a sigh of relief which instantly changed to a state of puzzlement. No light from the Object escaped from the drawer. Yet the light rays had passed through his body casting no shadow. This contradiction in the Object’s optical behaviour perplexed him. Though of course, it meant that he could lock it up safely inside while leaving for the office and thus it could remain undetected.

But what if his flat was burgled? It happened all the time in Mumbai. He felt sick at the thought of the Object being taken away from him. Until he decided upon a safe place to keep the Object, he would always carry it with him wherever he went. When inside his office, he would lock it up in the drawer in his cubicle. With this decision, he locked up the Object in the top drawer of the table and came back to the bed and lay down.

Sleep eluded him for a while, but finally when it came, his last thought was the face of the smiling lady, the bluish light from the Object and an utter sense of peace.

Chapter-2

The After-effects

Mukund Matondkar’s Hero Honda CD Dawn roared past a series of IT buildings, in the Mindspace area, North West of Mumbai. Each IT company, including the giants like Dell, HP, and Microsoft had come up with their own mind-blowing designs and structures that never ceased to amaze Mukund, no matter how many times he drove past them.

After driving past the gigantic structures of Oracle , Microsoft and Infosys buildings, he turned right, into a narrow road bordered on both sides by tall trees and slowed near the gates of a well-designed four storied structure whose façade was of concave shape with dark blue tinted windows. A huge white signboard on top of the building read: Dhruv-Tara Software Solutions below the company logo. The mid-June morning sun reflected from the glasses making it difficult to look at the building directly.

The security check post was towards the right of the entrance gate, a small white one-room affair with conical red-tiled roof. Four security personnel sauntered just behind the tall iron gates. Seeing the familiar face, all four smiled and nodded as Mukund flashed his ID card. One of them opened the gate for him.

On any other day, Mukund would have had a few words with Kanthi Lal, the amiable but strict security officer. But not today; today was not any day. The weight in his left jacket pocket was a constant reminder. He felt as if he was carrying the entire weight of the earth in his pocket. Somehow, the previous night’s experience seemed surreal.

Mukund drove his bike towards the parking lot in the basement of the building. Descending the entrance way, he slowly guided his bike to his regular parking area. Removing his helmet he surveyed the parking lot. He was well before time as usual, so there were few vehicles parked. Slowly he took out the Object from his jacket and slipped it into the front pocket of his trousers. He carefully inspected the front of his trousers and found the Object created a slight bulge noticeable if someone was curious enough. He walked out of the underground parking, towards a flight of steps wide enough for ten people to climb side by side, that took him towards the glass-panelled entrance above which the name, Dhruv-Tara Software Solutions, was neatly stencilled. The company was so named after the two kids, a son Dhruv and a daughter Tara, of the Chairman Shiv Kumar Patel, a Gujarati magnate. There was a chain of departmental stores he owned across Mumbai and a twin theatre, Dhruv-Tara, bang in the middle of Navi Mumbai.

When Mukund approached the glass-panelled door, it split automatically and opened: he walked through. He entered in to the well decorated reception. Namrata, the pretty receptionist was not in yet. Mukund continued walking, till he reached the glass-capsule lift on the left of the reception. Pressing button 3 for the third floor, he waited until the doors closed. He then carefully took out the cloth-bound Object from his pocket. Even through the thick cloth, he could see the dim glow of the diamond. As the lift door opened on the third floor, he quickly slipped the cloth into his trouser pocket and turned to the left, continued till he reached the door on which the sign, Network Room, was stencilled. He took out his ID card once again and swiped it in the small box fixed to the wall. A soft ping, followed by a brief glow of a green LED, confirmed the access. He pushed the door open and went inside.

The door opened into a small cabin whose right side had another access point and a door. The door opened into the server room. Mukund could hear the familiar drone of the cooling fans working to blow out the hot air from the servers’ bowels as they worked round the clock.

He shared the cabin with Yogesh Bishnoi, a Rajput , hailing from Jodhpur, Rajasthan. An ace systems administrator, Yogi worked with Mukund in maintaining and administering the 200-odd workstations and 5 Servers for the Dhruv-Tara Software Solutions. Both performed critical operations like updating Antivirus programmes, performing regular backups of mission-critical data of the company, and also performed rectification of systems in case they had any hardware issues. Their daily schedules were usually very hectic requiring them to be in office for long hours.

Both were single, but while Yogesh had a large friends’ circle including several women friends, Mukund was a loner who liked to read books on philosophy, astronomy and closely followed reports he could gather on unexplained phenomena like the UFOs, and other strange celestial events. Yogesh was from a well-to-do business family, his father an uneducated but shrewd garments trader with a thriving business in Kota, Rajasthan, and in Mumbai. Mukund came from a middle-class family. He lost his mother at the age of six, and since then it was his father, a Central Government employee in Mumbai, who single-mindedly brought up Mukund.

Dilip Matondkar nurtured a dream of making Mukund a heart surgeon since he lost his wife to a rare heart disease. He wanted to get Mukund into a medical college in Mumbai, but was dismayed to find that his son was a dreamer, which was not true; Mukund lived intensely in the present observing everything around him with the same attention as a cat watching the hole into which a mouse had just disappeared. At such an elevated state, Mukund somehow appeared distant to those around him, even to his father. Naturally, even Dilip Matondkar could not reach out to his son. He found Mukund lost in his philosophy books and collecting articles regarding Black Holes and Neutron stars and various other topics about which Dilip had not even a clue. Though Dilip often wanted to shake his son out of his apparent reverie, his love for his only offspring predominated. He soon realised, as Mukund started his graduation in electronics, that his son had a great flair for computers; computer hardware in particular. The microchips on motherboards, video boards dominated the young man’s attention. And so, Mukund found himself enrolled in a top Hardware Institute in Mumbai, as he was completing his final year in B.Sc.

Another area of computers which attracted Mukund was networks. He studied and gained hands-on experience in network connectivity using both wired and wireless media. He gained expertise in working with optical fibre cables in particular and in his present company, he often resolved network connectivity problems that cropped up from time to time when the delicate fibres carrying optical signals, developed minute cracks when excessively bent.

It was upon the completion of his final year in graduate studies that he came across an advertisement in Mumbai Times Jobs column that an upcoming software company needed systems administrators for maintaining nearly 1,000 systems. The interviewers were highly impressed by the young man’s immense knowledge in Computer Hardware and Networking. What impressed them even more was his versatility – his knowledge of different subjects that an ordinary youth would readily ignore. In fact during one interview round, a young lady interviewing him glanced at his CV and found Astronomy an area of his interests. Trying to catch him off-guard, she asked him about binary star formation. Mukund explained it as if he was used to delivering a discourse on binary star formation every day. The selection process was but a formality.

Mukund was thrilled. He was offered a small flat with a single bedroom in Malad area about 15 km from where his office was. But he rejected it as he wanted to be with his father and his uncle (his father’s younger brother). The salary package was decent that included petrol expenses for his bike.

It was in the sixth month of his induction into the company that one morning after Mukund had just logged onto his system, his cell phone rang. Seeing his home landline number, he spoke:

"Hello,’’ he said.

There was a silence at the other end.

Baba? he spoke. He always addressed his father as Baba. The silence puzzled him.

Mukund, come home quickly. It was his uncle, speaking in Marathi. Come ho… the rest of the words were choked with emotion.

Mukund clutched his cell tightly against his ear. His heart hammered loudly, and he felt a dread spreading throughout his being.

Is Baba... Before he could finish his sentence, the line went dead. He was on his way when he received another call from his uncle; he explained in halting, emotional tones to come to the Medinova Hospital in Bandra East.

Mukund could never recollect clearly the next one hour. He knew what was wrong. Throughout the ride to the hospital he prayed and prayed. But upon arriving at Medinova, he spotted his uncle, tear-faced and talking to the cardiac specialist. The doctor’s grave countenance told him all he wanted to know.

Just half an hour earlier his father had had his breakfast and sat down to read the daily newspaper as he had been doing since his retirement, when he felt as if some unseen hand grabbed his heart in a vice-like grip. Shouting in agony he collapsed. Hearing the shouts, Mukund’s aunt who was in the kitchen rushed to find her brother-in-law lying on the floor writhing in pain, his hand clutching his heart.

The next one month was a mixture of grief, loneliness and a deep sense of loss to Mukund. During those early days of mourning, he tried to observe his own sorrow like one would observe a complex tree structure. His attempt was not to get rid of the sorrow or fan it for its continuation, but to sincerely understand its structure, its depth. Several times he came close to understanding but eventually, it would always manage to elude like a mirage. He finally gave up and left it at that. About a month after his father passing away, he had a talk with his uncle. He pleaded with his uncle that he would like to shift out of the house to the small flat that was recently vacated by a staff member in Mukund’s office.

The house is full of Baba’s memories, uncle, he explained. Tears were welling up in his eyes.

"Is there no way I can persuade you to stay, beta?" this was from his aunt, also in tears.

With a promise that he would visit them at least once every fortnight, he shifted his belongings to the small single-bedroom flat on the fourth floor of Aravali Heights. It was a ten-storied apartment in Malad, facing the main road. Several staffers of Dhruv-Tara Software Solutions were given flats in the same building, and each felt it was manna from heaven.

Orn

On entering the cabin, Mukund heard the familiar drone of the running servers kept in the adjoining room. There were five rack-servers running round the clock, in which several critical applications ran. He took out the cloth-bound Object (strangely, he felt compelled to call it ‘the Force’) from his jacket pocket and placed it carefully on the table. He took off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. The table had two flat-screen monitors separated by about two feet. The respective computers were under the table. Mukund opened a drawer of a cupboard to the right of the table with the key he always carried in his keychain. He carefully put the Force in the top drawer and closed it. He then locked it, and sat back in his chair and looked at the closed drawer to spot any signs of the light escaping from it. Nothing.

Initially, he wanted to leave the Force locked up in the drawer in his bedroom. But what if someone broke into his flat and stole it? He could not bring himself to keep the Force away from his eyesight even for a second. I shall always carry it with me, he kept telling himself.

Even as he sat back in his chair, he began to realise the magnitude of last night’s event. The Force had transcended from a dream-like phenomenon into the real world! This meant, what he experienced with his eyes closed lying on his bed, was more than just a dream! He tried to grasp the significance of the whole phenomenon but could not. But one thing was sure: the Force that he hid inside his office drawer was precious beyond anyone’s imagination. He must protect it. He must not disclose its existence to anyone, even to his best friend Yogi. He must slowly start understanding the significance of the whole event, try to study the Force minutely and…

Suddenly an image of Yogesh pushing open the cabin door and breezing in with his usual gaiety flashed before his eyes. Instinctively, he bent down to power on his computer. It would have looked odd to Yogesh on finding his friend staring dreamily at the blank screen of the monitor. A second later, the cabin door was pushed open and in came Yogesh, with all the glitter of a movie star. Mukund had jokingly given him a nick-name: tsunami. His entry was always dramatic, breezy.

Hi there, pal, Yogesh announced and dropped in his chair. Have you a girlfriend, Muks?

What? Mukund asked absently, looking at the screen that was reflecting the Windows booting routine.

Girlfriend, sir. Don’t tell me you don’t know what that means. Yogesh pushed his fingers through his long, sleek hair.

If I had a girlfriend, you would be the first to know, my friend, Mukund said watching the Windows screen come alive on his monitor screen. How did I know Yogesh would be entering?

Lucky devil. Last night I was foolish enough to take Namrata to the movie…

You mean our receptionist? Mukund asked turning towards Yogi. Though very pretty, Namrata had always maintained that aloofness around her and was professional in her attitude and behaviour.

Yogi turned to stare at him. How many Namratas are there in this office? As Sherlock Holmes would have said on finding Watson pretty foggy, ‘Well, Watson! You are not your scintillating self, this morning!’ I say you are not your scintillating self this morning, Muksy.

But how…

"Did I manage to take her out? Well, you don’t know what you can achieve when you really put your