Chapter 1: The Body on the Tracks
The rain came down in dirty sheets, slapping the tin roofs and turning the ground near the railway tracks into black sludge. Rohan Patil stood there with his bag slung over one shoulder, hair plastered to his forehead, staring at the dead body on the rails.
Same clean-shaven face. Same fair skin, now pale and streaked with mud. Same sharp jaw that girls back at the academy always noticed. The dead man lay twisted between the tracks like someone had dropped him there and forgotten to pick him up. One arm bent at a wrong angle. Eyes half-open, looking at nothing.
Rohan’s stomach folded in on itself. He couldn’t look away. He saw his own face on dead body.
People started gathering. First a few, then more. Someone muttered, “looks like a double.” A woman pulled her child back. Phones came out. The rain kept falling, indifferent.
Rohan’s legs felt heavy, like they belonged to someone else. He took one step closer, then stopped. His breath fogged in the damp air.
Two policemen pushed through the crowd. One was older, belly straining against his uniform. The other looked too young for this shit. They shone torches even though it wasn’t fully dark yet. The light made the body look worse.
“You know him?” the older cop asked, eyes flicking between Rohan and the corpse.
Rohan shook his head. Words stuck somewhere in his throat.
The cop stared harder. “He looks exactly like you. Twin brother? Cousin?”
“No,” Rohan said. His voice came out flat. “I don’t have a brother.”
The younger cop wrote something in a small notebook, rain spotting the pages. He glanced at Rohan again, suspicious, like maybe Rohan was lying for fun.
The crowd pressed closer. Rohan felt their eyes crawling over him. Someone whispered, “Must be some family matter.” Another voice laughed, low and nervous. In this city, people died on tracks every week. But not like this. Not wearing your own skin.
Rohan’s phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it. His hands were shaking. He shoved them into his wet pockets and tried to look normal. Whatever normal meant right now.
The older cop stepped nearer. Rain dripped from his cap. “You live around here?”
“Santacruz side. I was just coming back from training.”
“Footballer, huh?” The cop looked at Rohan’s bag, then back at the body. “Interesting.”
He asked for Rohan’s number. Rohan gave it without thinking. The cop typed it slowly into his phone. “We’ll call you. Don’t leave the city for now. Routine, you understand.”
Rohan nodded. He understood nothing.
They covered the body with a plastic sheet that flapped in the wind. For a second, before the sheet settled, Rohan saw the dead man’s hand again—fingers slightly curled, like he had been reaching for something when the train came.
Or like he had been waiting.
The crowd started to thin as the police pushed them back. But a few men stayed, smoking beedis under a leaking shelter, watching Rohan walk away. Their eyes followed him like they knew something he didn’t.
Rohan kept walking. The rain soaked deeper into his clothes. Every step felt watched. He thought about the dead man’s face. The exact same face. Same tired look around the eyes that Rohan saw in the mirror after bad nights.
*Who hates me enough to do this?* The thought came uninvited. He pushed it down, but it stayed there, warm and ugly.
His phone buzzed again. He didn’t check it.
Behind him, the train tracks gleamed wet and black under the platform lights. The body was gone now, but the shape of it stayed burned behind Rohan’s eyes.
He kept walking home through the narrow, flooded lanes. The city smelled of sewage and wet concrete. Somewhere in the distance, another local train rattled past, full of tired people who would never know what he had just seen.
Rohan touched his own face.
