Episode 4: The Ghost on the Steps
The haveli near Dashashwamedh Ghat was built of damp, cool stone, centered around an open courtyard with a single tulsi plant and a dry marble fountain.
“We’ll stay here?” Kishan Lal asked, looking up at the high carved arches. “You are very kind. Such grand hospitality.”
Arjun turned his back and unzipped the luggage with harsh, violent jerks. Hearing the tyrant who had terrorized his childhood praise his “hospitality” felt like an insufferable, subtle torture.
At dusk, they descended toward the river. The alleys of Varanasi were suffocating—crooked stone passages crowded with pilgrims, stray bulls, funeral biers, and five thousand years of accumulated silt. Yet Kishan Lal navigated the broken flagstones with an instinctual, fluid ease, his body remembering the turns long after his mind had abandoned them.
They emerged at the top of Dashashwamedh Ghat. The Ganges spread before them—vast, iron-grey in the twilight, streaked with the fiery reflection of the evening sky. Kishan Lal stopped on the top step. His face remained entirely blank.
They walked down to the water’s edge, sitting on a cold, wet stone step. Kishan Lal dipped his right hand into the current. “It’s cold,” he murmured. “In my village, there was a small river. With fish.”
“What was the village like, Papa?” Arjun asked, leaning close, desperate for a sliver of truth.
But his father’s attention had already dissolved. He was watching a young boatman nearby violently pitch a tour to a couple, laughing at the boatman’s loud, theatrical exaggeration. “He’s very clever,” the old man chuckled.
That was all. No grand homecoming. No surge of emotion.
Arjun stared into the dark water, feeling the familiar, hollow ache take hold. He was forty-seven years old. He owned a massive freight company, three apartments, and an empty life. He had built it all to force this man to acknowledge him—and now the judge had left the courtroom forever.
Then, a darker, more terrifying thought struck Arjun: I prefer him like this.
This smiling, polite stranger was gentle. This man didn’t bark orders or strike out. The disease had done what thirty years of Arjun’s overachievement couldn’t—it had disarmed his father. Arjun pressed his knuckles into his eyes, sickened by his own relief, while the cold river wind cut through his coat.
Next on The Stranger’s Son: Episode 5: The Only Brain Left. Out on the water, a wooden rowboat forces Arjun to relive the brutal afternoon that forged his entire life.
Leave a Reply