The rain hammered against the windshield like a thousand tiny fists, turning everything outside into a blurry watercolor painting. Dr. Arjun Mehra gripped the steering wheel tighter than necessary as he navigated through Delhi's nighttime traffic, which was its own special kind of hell even on a good day. Tonight wasn't a good day.
His mind was still buzzing from the lecture. God, what a night that had been.
The auditorium at JNU had been packed. Not just full but actually overflowing, with students sitting in the aisles, standing against the back wall, some even perched on windowsills like they were watching a rock concert instead of an academic lecture. The media had hyped it up as "the most controversial lecture of the semester," which was saying something considering this was JNU, where controversy was practically the unofficial curriculum.
They had called his talk "The Congress Party's Constitutional Betrayals: Seven Decades of Missed Opportunities." Even the title had been enough to make half the faculty want to ban it before he'd opened his mouth.
He could still see their faces. Shocked. Outraged. Some looking like they wanted to throw things at him, others nodding along like he was finally saying what they'd been thinking for years but were too scared to voice out loud. A few professors had actually walked out halfway through, which he took as a compliment. If you weren't pissing anyone off, you probably weren't saying anything worth hearing.
"The Congress party didn't just fail to build the India we deserved," he had said, his voice carrying across that packed auditorium with the kind of confidence that came from knowing your facts were bulletproof. "They systematically dismantled every institution that could have achieved true greatness. They took our democracy and turned it into a family business. They took our economy and made it a tool for winning elections. They took our national security and turned it into a performance for foreign audiences who were never going to respect us anyway."
The silence that had followed those words had been beautiful. Absolutely beautiful.
Arjun was only thirty years old, but he had already made a name for himself that older academics would kill for. Three bestselling books, each one a deeper dive into how the party that claimed to have won India's independence had actually been slowly suffocating the country ever since. His publishers loved him. The establishment hated him. The reading public couldn't get enough of him.
His secret weapon, if you could call it that, was his memory. Not just a good memory but an eidetic one, the kind that meant he could recall entire conversations from documents he'd read years ago. He could quote government reports verbatim, could pull up exact numbers from obscure policy papers, could reconstruct entire timelines of political decisions with the precision of a surgeon. It made him dangerous. It made him impossible to argue with when he got going, because he always had the receipts.
His phone buzzed on the dashboard, lighting up with another message. He glanced at it quickly, just long enough to see it was another threat. Anonymous, of course. The Congress IT cell had been working overtime ever since his latest book had come out six months ago.
"The Nehru Dynasty: India's Greatest Political Fraud" had spent half a year at the top of the bestseller lists, which apparently made certain people very, very unhappy. The threats had started small. Now they were getting creative.
He swiped the notification away without reading it. This was what, the hundredth one this month? Maybe more. He'd stopped counting after the first few dozen. Fear was pointless. What were they going to do, kill him? That would just prove his point and make his books sell even better.
The really funny thing, the thing that made him laugh every time he thought about it, was the offer. Last week, someone from the Congress party's "young leaders" program had reached out. They wanted to meet. They wanted to talk about bringing him into the fold, maybe finding some "common ground," maybe helping to "reshape the narrative from within."
It was the most pathetic thing he'd ever heard. They wanted to buy him off. Turn their loudest critic into another tame voice in their chorus. Neuter him by making him part of the system.
He'd agreed to the meeting, though. Tomorrow morning, actually. Not because he was interested in their offer. He would rather eat glass than join the Congress party. But he was curious about how the whole thing worked, how they tried to corrupt people, what kind of pressure they applied, what they promised. It would make great material for the next book.
"Veiled constitutional monarchy," he muttered to himself, the phrase rolling around in his head like it had been for months now. It was the concept that obsessed him, the idea that kept him up at night doing research when normal people were sleeping.
What India had really needed, what it had desperately needed right from the start in 1947, was a system with actual checks and balances. Not the fake ones they'd set up that could be bent and broken whenever it was convenient. Real institutional architecture that could prevent one family, one party, from capturing everything and turning it into their personal empire.
Maybe something like a constitutional guardian. Someone with real power to stop bad policies before they destroyed a generation. Someone who could say no when the politicians tried to sell out the country for votes. Someone who actually put the nation first instead of their own dynasty.
His mind was already racing through the alternatives, the way it always did when he got on this topic. What if things had been different from the beginning? What if someone with actual foresight had been there in 1947, someone who knew how badly things could go wrong? What if they'd built a system that couldn't be hijacked by one family's ambition?
The India that could have existed made him want to scream sometimes. All that potential, all that promise, all of it pissed away by leaders who cared more about their own legacy than the country's future.
If only someone had known. If only someone could have been there at the very start, with knowledge of all the mistakes that were coming, all the disasters waiting to happen. If only they could have stopped the constitutional sabotage before it even began, could have prevented India from becoming a shadow of what it should have been...
The thought was still forming when the truck appeared.
One second there was just rain and darkness and the glow of distant streetlights. The next second there were headlights, impossibly bright, impossibly close, coming at him from an angle that made no sense.
Time did that weird thing it does in moments like this. Everything slowed down to a crawl. He could see individual raindrops frozen in the headlights' glare. He could feel his hands trying to turn the wheel, too slowly, always too slowly. He could hear his own breath, sharp and quick, as his brain processed what was about to happen.
The irony hit him before the truck did. Here he was, spending his last moments thinking about how to fix India's broken democracy, and he was about to die in a stupid traffic accident. How absurdly, perfectly appropriate.
Then the impact came. Metal screaming against metal, glass exploding into a thousand pieces, his body thrown against restraints that weren't enough, pain that was somehow both everywhere and nowhere at once.
And then, strangest of all, he was watching.
He could see himself in the driver's seat, slumped and broken. He could see the paramedics arrive, running through the rain with their equipment, shouting things he couldn't quite hear. He watched them work on a body that used to be his, watched them try to restart a heart that had already decided it was done, watched them eventually slow down and look at each other with that expression that meant they knew it was over.
His last thought, floating in whatever strange space he now occupied, was oddly academic. Death, it turns out, is the ultimate primary source. You can't get more firsthand than this.
But apparently death wasn't quite finished with him yet. No. It had other plans.