"The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts."
- Marcus Aurelius
The message arrived at 3:47 AM, slicing through Dev's perfect afterlife like a blade through silk.
He had been dead for exactly seventy-three days, not that time meant much in a heaven tailored to his every desire. The notification materialized as golden script floating in the air beside his bed, each letter pulsing with divine authority:
‘URGENT: Karmic Audit Required. Soul Partition Detected. Report to Administrative Division immediately.’
Dev stared at the words until they dissolved into motes of light. In all his weeks of paradise (walls the color of dawn, books arranged exactly as he preferred, marigolds blooming in impossible abundance) nothing had ever disrupted the choreographed perfection.
"Good morning, Asuran."
The woman in his doorway smiled with painted kindness, her sari the exact shade of blue his wife had worn on their wedding day. She always called him Asuran, no matter how often he corrected her.
But today, for the first time, she flickered.
For just a heartbeat, her face cracked like old porcelain, revealing something underneath... mouths forming desperate words, eyes leaking ash like monsoon tears. Then the perfection snapped back into place.
"I need to find the Administrative Division," Dev said, surprised by the steadiness of his own voice.
Her head tilted like a bird considering a strange sound. "I don't understand, Asuran. Breakfast is ready."
The message had changed everything. Before it, he had accepted this gentle heaven without question, content to drift through days that felt like honey-slow dreams. Now every perfect detail felt scripted. The birdsong too rehearsed. The garden too precisely arranged. Even his own contentment felt borrowed, like wearing clothes tailored for someone else's body.
~The Glitch~
The Administrative Division didn't exist on any map Dev could find, but maps in paradise had a way of rewriting themselves when you weren't looking. He walked through streets that shifted subtly with each step, following an instinct that felt less like divine guidance and more like being pulled by invisible strings.
The glitches were getting worse.
In the market, a woman began to say, "Such lovely weather," stopped mid-sentence, then repeated the exact same words in a voice pitched slightly higher. A butterfly froze mid-flight for exactly three seconds before resuming its path to a flower. Children's laughter skipped like a broken record.
And there was always a pen on every table he passed (elegant, gold-plated, engraved with the name "Asuran" in script that seemed to pulse with its own heartbeat). When he tried to touch one, it would write unbidden across the surface: "You stole," the ink pooling like blood.
"You're looking for something that doesn't want to be found."
Dev turned. A young woman sat on a bench that hadn't been there moments before, perhaps twenty-five, with intelligent eyes and hands bearing the calluses of hard work. Unlike everyone else in paradise, she wasn't smiling. Unlike everyone else, she cast no reflection in the fountain's still water.
"The Administrative Division," he said.
"Clever. Most souls never question the message. They just accept their perfect prison." She studied him with eyes that held centuries. "This isn't your heaven, you know."
"Then whose is it?"
"His."
Before Dev could ask who "he" was, the woman vanished like morning mist.
~The Ledger~
Dev found the Administrative Division by accident, or perhaps by design that masqueraded as accident. It existed in the space between spaces, accessible only through a door that appeared when you stopped looking for it directly.
The office was nothing like the rest of paradise. Harsh fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, casting sickly shadows across filing cabinets that stretched toward infinity. The air smelled of old paper and older guilt.
Behind a desk carved from what looked like crystallized time sat a being that was neither fully human nor completely divine. His skin held the translucent quality of rice paper, and when he moved, Dev could see ledgers and calculations moving beneath the surface like schools of fish under ice.
"Dev Sharma," the being said without looking up from his writing. "Or should I say, the fragment that calls itself Dev Sharma?"
"I don't understand."
"Chitragupta, Keeper of Records." The being finally raised his head, revealing eyes like black holes where numbers fell endlessly inward. "I've been expecting you. Though I admit, most soul partitions aren't clever enough to follow administrative notifications."
He slid a ledger across the desk. The parchment was torn, edges singed, but Dev could make out enough to understand:
< Karmic>
< Dev>
< Asuran>
< Note>
The signature at the bottom was in script that seemed to weep: ‘Chitragupta, Keeper of Records.’
"This is impossible," Dev whispered, but even as he spoke, memories began bleeding through the partition. Faces he'd tried to forget. Names he'd deliberately lost. A young woman standing at the edge of a bridge screaming something about stolen funds and a dying child.
"You split yourself," Chitragupta said with something almost like pity. "When judgment came, you couldn't face what you'd become. So you carved away the worst parts, hid them in a construct called Asuran, and imprisoned your sanitized remains in this fabricated paradise."
"Where is he now?"
"Waking up. And he wants his heaven back."
~The Sister~
The first crack in paradise appeared as Dev walked back through streets that no longer seemed quite right. A building facade peeled away like old paint, revealing a vault underneath. The walls pulsed with a rhythm that matched his heartbeat, and when he touched them, they screamed.
Voices echoed from every surface: "You took our children's medicine!" "Our retirement is gone!" "How could you do this to us?"
"You built this cage."
Dev spun around. The woman from the bench stood behind him, but in the vault's shifting light, he could see her more clearly now. There was something achingly familiar about her face... his mother's stubborn nose, his father's gentle eyes.
"Who are you?" he asked, though part of him already knew.
"I'm Kavita," she said. "Your sister."
The words didn't just hit him; they rewrote him. He had never had a sister. Had never even thought about having a sister. But looking at her face, he could suddenly remember the sound of bangles in the kitchen, the smell of jasmine oil in dark hair, the way someone used to hum old film songs while braiding marigolds.
"That's impossible." But denial had no power here. Because he could feel it now... the locket-shaped ache behind his ribs, the way his throat closed around her name.
"You built this cage to hide from what you are," she said simply. "But cages work both ways, bhaiya. I've been trapped here too waiting for you to remember."
She led him deeper into the vault, where photographs lined the walls like a gallery of broken dreams. Headlines he couldn't quite read, but he knew what they said. Families weeping. Children holding empty bowls. His own face smiling from what must have been an awards ceremony.
In one photograph, a young woman stood at the edge of a bridge, her sari whipping in the wind. Even from behind, he knew it was Kavita.
"Save Mira's funds!" she was screaming in the photograph, her voice somehow audible through the glass. "Don't steal her medicine! She's your daughter!"
The memory hit him like a physical blow. Not just the evidence he had planted in her computer, or the rumors he had spread about her mental health. But the specific moment when she had begged him to stop. The look in her eyes when she realized what he had become.
"I'm sorry," he whispered.
"Sorry doesn't resurrect the dead, bhaiya."
~The Child~
In the deepest part of the vault, a small hospital bed stood incongruously among the financial documents. A child lay there, impossibly small, her face a miniature version of his own. Tubes and wires connected her to machines that beeped weakly, their rhythm growing more irregular.
"She's dying," Kavita said quietly. "The insurance won't pay because the policy was tied to one of your shell companies. Her mother can't afford the surgery."
Through the vault's walls, he could hear a child's voice... thin, frightened: "Papa, where are you? Papa, I'm scared!"
The sound shattered something fundamental inside him. A locket materialized in his palm, tarnished silver with a photograph visible through cracked glass. Mira. His daughter. Her eyes were his eyes her smile carried echoes of his wife's laughter.
"I could have saved her," he whispered. "All this time, I could have saved her."
"You still can," Kavita said. "But first, you have to stop running from who you really are."
The vault began to shake, dust falling from the ceiling like ash. In the distance, Dev could hear footsteps... measured, confident, heading directly toward them.
"He's coming," Kavita whispered. "And he's angry."
~The Other Self~
The false paradise didn't collapse so much as it screamed itself apart.
Streets cracked to reveal not earth but flowing chains of rupees (molten, burning, hungry). The smiling people's faces melted away to show the victims underneath, each one mouthing the name of what had been stolen from them: "My daughter's wedding." "My son's education." "My mother's medicines."
And walking through it all came Asuran.
He looked like Dev, but wrong in every way that mattered. His skin rippled with the texture of stolen coins, his eyes were black holes where conscience used to live, and his smile was sharp enough to cut the hope from a child's prayer.
"Did you enjoy my gift?" Asuran asked, his voice like honey poured over broken glass. "The perfect life I built for you? No consequences, no guilt, no memory of what we really are?"
"You're killing her," Dev said, clutching Mira's locket. "Our daughter. She's dying because of what we did."
"She was always going to die," Asuran replied with casual cruelty. "Poor people's children always do. At least this way, we don't have to watch."
The vault around them pulsed with the rhythm of a distant bell, walls weeping ash that spelled out names in languages Dev couldn't read but somehow understood. Every person they had destroyed. Every dream they had murdered for profit.
"I am your greatest invention, Dev," Asuran continued, spreading his arms wide. "Guilt made you a coward. I made you a god!"
Kavita stepped between them, her form flickering like a candle in wind. "You built this cage, but you can also break it." She pressed the burning ledger into Dev's hands, her touch searing his skin. "For Mira."
Asuran reached out and touched her face with something almost like tenderness. She screamed... not in pain, but in the voice of every person who had ever been betrayed by someone they loved. Then she was dissolving, scattering like morning mist.
But in the moment before she vanished completely, she whispered: "Papa, live."
The voice was Mira's.
~The Merging~
Dev walked toward his other self, and with each step, he accepted another piece of who he really was. The man who had once given his last rupee to a beggar and the same man who had later stolen millions from the poor. The father who had wept at his daughter's birth and the monster who had stolen her future for numbers in an account.
When they touched, the universe inverted.
For a moment that lasted eternity, Dev was everything at once. He was greed incarnate and love personified, walking the same skin, breathing the same breath, existing in the terrible space where good and evil intersect in the heart of every human being.
The false heaven burned around them, but Dev barely noticed. He was too busy learning how to be whole.
"I could have been different," he said to the flaming ruins of paradise.
‘But you weren't,’ the fire seemed to answer. ‘And now?’
Now. There was only now, and the choice of what to do with it.
Mira's locket had grown warm against his palm, and through its cracked glass, he could swear he heard her voice: "Papa, help them."
The words gave him strength to take the final step... not away from his crimes, but deeper into them, carrying them like stones he would never be allowed to set down.
~The Choice~
Dev opened his eyes in a courtroom made of shadow and starlight.
Before him sat Chitragupta, his ledger spread across a desk carved from the wood of the bodhi tree. Behind him stood Yama himself, Lord of Death, one massive hand stroking his buffalo's flank as the beast snorted impatiently.
"Dev Sharma," Chitragupta intoned, his voice like the turning of cosmic wheels. "You stand accused of crimes against dharma, theft from the innocent, and the unauthorized partition of your soul."
The ledger showed Dev's life in columns of light and darkness. The light column was pathetically short (moments of genuine kindness scattered like rare coins across a lifetime). The darkness stretched across pages, a catalog of greed and betrayal that made his stomach turn.
"I could say I was under pressure," Dev said quietly. "That I didn't mean to hurt anyone. That the world forced my hand."
Silence stretched between them, heavy with expectation.
"But that would be another lie." The words came easier now, like confession had worn a groove in his throat. "I did everything you have written there. I destroyed lives for money. I drove my sister to suicide. I stole medicine from sick children, including my own daughter. I split my soul because I was too cowardly to face judgment."
Yama leaned forward, genuinely surprised. Even gods, it seemed, rarely heard such unvarnished truth.
"And what do you choose now?"
Dev thought of the message that had started it all... an unexpected notification that had shattered his comfortable prison and forced him to confront the truth. He thought of Kavita, who had sacrificed her peace to help him find wholeness. He thought of Mira, whose voice had called him back to life.
"I choose honesty," he said. "Let me guide other broken souls to face their own truth instead of hiding from it. Let my suffering have meaning."
Chitragupta's quill hesitated over the ledger, a single tear of ink hanging from its tip like a question waiting to be answered.
"You will walk the burning grounds for seven cosmic cycles," the god finally said. "You will carry the pain of every soul you wronged. And when your sentence is complete, we will speak again."
"And my daughter?"
"Will live," Yama said, and even his voice carried something almost like kindness. "The money will be returned. She will have her surgery and grow up to become a doctor herself, helping children who are sick and poor."
Dev closed his eyes, feeling something that wasn't quite peace but was close enough for now.
~Epilogue~
Dev walks now across burning sands under a sky the color of old blood.
The heat is unbearable, but he bears it. The pain is exquisite, but he accepts it. In his hand, he carries Mira's locket, the metal somehow cool against his burning palm despite the hellish landscape around him.
Other souls approach him sometimes, confused and frightened, trying to escape their own judgments. They arrive carrying the weight of their crimes like invisible chains, their eyes wild with the kind of terror that comes from finally seeing yourself clearly.
He talks to them gently, the way he once talked to his daughter when nightmares woke her crying. He tells them about unexpected messages that change everything, about the choice between comfortable lies and difficult truth. He shows them Mira's photograph and explains how love and guilt can exist in the same heart.
"How do you bear it?" a young man asks, staring at the endless expanse of burning sand.
"By remembering why I must," Dev replies opening the locket. Mira's face smiles up at them, frozen in time but somehow alive in his memory. "She lives because I face this. That has to be enough."
Some listen. Some don't. Some scream and run back into the darkness, choosing comfortable lies over difficult truth.
He walks on regardless.
In the distance, he can sometimes see other guides walking their own paths of atonement. Souls who chose honesty over comfort, suffering over denial. They nod to each other across the burning wastes, and in those brief acknowledgments, Dev finds something that might be called fellowship.
The sands burn, but Mira's locket cools his palm, carrying the promise of a daughter he will never see again but whose life his suffering has purchased. Her voice reaches him sometimes across the cosmic distance: "Papa, I'm going to be a doctor. I'm going to help people like you helped me."
With each step across the burning ground, with each soul he helps face their truth, something inside him grows lighter. Not forgiven... he will never be forgiven, and that's as it should be. But honest. Clean in the way that fire cleans, by burning away everything false.
An unexpected message had changed everything. And he had chosen what to do next.
That has to be worth something.
That has to be enough.
~THE END~
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