Fiction: Exiled from celestial court, a once powerful yaksha pretends to be a human in Mumbai

“I need your help.”

I shut my eyes for a moment. Maybe he was a figment of my imagination, and when I open them again, he would be gone. I had been looking forward to this evening all week and now that it was finally here, I didn’t want to get involved in whatever problem he was going to dump on me.

No such luck. He was still very much there. The faint musty smell of cigarettes clung to him like a persistent ex, who can’t take the hint.

He looked like a walking stereotype of an absentminded professor. In his mid to late seventies, if I had to put a number on it. His glasses were comically oversized. His clothes looked crumpled like he had been sleeping in them for a few days, the creases in them mirroring the growing wrinkles of annoyance on my forehead.

We were at the Sensex bar in Bandra, which had a cute little gimmick. The prices of drinks dropped with every order of that beverage that came in. Something about supply and demand, which I didn’t really care about. The barest smidgen of magic could twist the numbers in my favour.

I had dropped the price of spiced rum to a few rupees. Nobody seemed to notice. It was the only drink I truly enjoyed in this place. It reminded me of a happier time – they called it Soma back then, but, it was really the same thing in a different bottle.

While ordinarily I had no interest in helping strangers who wandered off the streets and came asking for favours, today I wanted to do so even less.

I had a date. My first in a long time. If you think dating is tough among humans, picture how hard it is for those of us who have lived for thousands of years and met all kinds of idiots in our lifetimes. Think of every dating horror story you’ve ever heard and multiply that by a hundred – that’s how difficult it is for us to find a match.

I gave him the nicest smile I could manage without scaring him. Full of sparkling white teeth and dimples on either side. “Today’s not a good day for me. Maybe we can speak tomorrow?”

He shook his head. “This can’t wait.”

“I’m busy at the moment.”

“This is urgent,” he repeated, a note of hysteria creeping into his voice.

Yeah. It always was.

I had no one to blame but myself, really. It started a year ago when I helped find a missing cat. His owner was a regular at the bar and clearly very fond of his pet, given how much he bawled over his loss.

The cat in question was a bleached orange tabby called Nick Furry. Nobody knows if he was blind in one eye to begin with or if his owner being a Marvel fan had something to do with it.

In a moment of weakness and mainly to shut him up, I helped him find his missing pet. His rescue brought me free drinks and a lot of admiring glances from other drunks at the bar. What I didn’t put together until much later is how good deeds always come back to bite you when you least expect it.

Slowly word spread. It shouldn’t have because, and I can’t stress this enough, it was just an ordinary cat. It wouldn’t come when called, couldn’t sing or dance or predict the next World Cup winner – it was an ill-tempered, feral ball of fur that tried to bite me when I pulled it out of the drainpipe it had gotten itself stuck in.

Yet, somehow, that had catapulted me from another rando in a bar to a local hero who could find “anything”. Before you knew it, people were coming to me with all sorts of odd requests, some of which weren’t even related to missing items. Vandals who spray-painted someone’s car, a couple of poison pen letters, three cases of revenge porn…that sort of thing.

None of this was my business. I was not a private investigator. Heck, I wasn’t even human – though they didn’t know that. I had a knack for finding things, thanks to a few unique abilities I possessed. Most of the time when I got involved, I did it because I was bored and needed to entertain myself. When you are semi-immortal, life can get repetitive pretty fast.

This might be as good a time as any to explain the “not human” bit. There’s a reason most jokes don’t start with, “A celestial walked into a bar.” Most of them don’t like to live anywhere where you can find humans. I’m not thrilled about the prospect either, but I’ve had time to get used to the idea. Exile is a wonderful way to make you reconsider your life choices.

Long story short, I happen to be a Yaksha – a semi-immortal, banished for a crime I don’t remember committing. It’s too long a tale and will make you all weepy to hear it now, so we should probably save it for another day. It’s great for killing the mood at parties.

Excerpted with permission from Shadows Rising, Rohan Monteiro, Westland.