"Yes or no?" Changaswami asked for the third time even though he knew the answer. Bahadur was still silent with his head bowed down out of shame and embarrassment.

"There is nothing that can be done about it and I'm sure you did your best. But it is important for me to hear it from you. So just tell me." Changaswami tried to get an answer out of him.

Bahadur raised his head, looked Changaswami directly in the eye and said with a straight face "Fuck off!"

"Well, that's not the answer I was expecting. But I will obey you." Changaswami asked the Driver to stop the car, dropped Bahadur off in the middle of nowhere and continued on to where he was headed.

"Did you record that as well?" Ahmed asked.

"No. I have very little battery left. Only worthy stuff till the end of the day."

"If only you weren't wasting it on recording me in the morning while chasing me."

"That was probably the worthiest stuff I got all day."

"More than the bit with me and your duplicate?"

"Definitely!"

They both laughed and then went silent looking outside their respective windows. After a few minutes, the car stopped.

"We're here!" the Driver announced.

A Lady came out of the gate of the mansion in front of which the car had stopped. She looked through the back- seat window and signalled to come in. Changaswami got off while Ahmed stayed back in the car.

"How long will it take?" Ahmed asked, sounding a bit concerned. Changaswami ignored him and followed the Lady into the mansion.

"How are we feeling today?" the Lady asked.

"They left me in the middle of the road, Twenty- Six miles away from here. I had to walk for an hour before I could get a cab booked." Bahadur replied in a tired voice.

"I'm glad you made it. Can you tell me who are 'they'?"

"Ahmed and Changaswami. Oh. And the Driver."

"And you are?"

"See, this is why I don't like coming here. You make me feel like a mad man. This is my tenth visit here and you still have doubts about who I am. Sometimes, I feel you are the One who needs psychotherapy."

The Lady picked up a bag which was lying next to her feet, took out a piece of paper and started going through a list on the sheet.

"It is a complex situation we have here. Nine of the characters in you already know and Sixteen are yet to be made aware. And hopefully, there are no more to be discovered. So, if you could just tell me what your name is, we could take this further and I can help you make sense of it."

"What characters? What are you talking about?"

"Ok. I won't be able to do this in words. Allow me to Show you something."

The Lady got off her chair while Ahmed sat on his, confused how he got out of the car and ended up in the psychiatrist's clinic. He did not like the Lady at all. He never did. But now that he was there and she was right in front of him, he wasn't so rude that he'd just get up and leave. So, he sat there, saying nothing, watching her search for something in the cupboard which was right behind her chair. She started with the drawers in the middle, then she went through the top shelves and finally, the bottom ones.

"I can't seem to find it. I'm sure I kept it in this cupboard. Ah! There it is." She said to herself out loud.

Ahmed saw her turn around towards him with a magazine in her hand. She walked towards him with brisk steps, forgetting to close the cupboard doors, and handed him the magazine. Ahmed looked at the back page first. The whole page was white with the symbol of a Shoe, outlined with black, right at the centre of the page. He turned it around. The front cover read "TIME UP" at the top in red bold letters. There was a photograph spread across the whole cover. With black sky and stars in the background, it was a close-up shot of a man. He was wearing a Space helmet in which there was a reflection of half of the earth lit up in flames. On the bottom left, it said "Pranshu, the man who ended life on Earth."

On looking carefully for a while in detail, Ahmed found written in very small black font on the top left, along the thin red border of the cover, "Issue: Near Future". Ahmed took his eyes off the magazine and looked at the Lady who was now seated on her chair with a notepad and a pen in her hands. Behind her, the cupboard doors were now closed.

"Do you recognise this?" The Lady enquired as she clicked the button at the back of her pen while putting its tip down to her notebook.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

"What are you writing?" Ahmed asked suspiciously.

"Nothing yet! I'll be writing down your responses for my reference, if you don't mind."

"Of course, I mind." Ahmed scoffed as he got out of his chair almost in the same instant. "This is why I don't like coming here. I didn't want things to turn out like last time. That's why I sent Changaswami but somehow, I still ended up here. If you'd allow me, I'd like to leave now."

"Hello, Ahmed!" The Lady exclaimed smiling at him. "I'm really glad to see you after a long time. I understand this whole process has been particularly difficult for you. But we are at a stage where we need you the most. I will try my best to make you understand all this, but please help me out here and just stay and talk to me. I won't write anything, if it makes you feel uncomfortable. Please!" the Lady said in a soft voice as if she was scared that her loud voice would break something fragile that she had suddenly found in her vicinity.

"You said the same thing last time and we both know how that ended." Ahmed restated, still standing.

"I promise it won't be the same. Since then I have gotten a chance to talk to Eight others and they have been helping me understand you better. Just give this a last chance. If you feel like leaving at any point, I won't stop you. I promise." requested the Lady in an even softer voice than before.

Although unconvinced, Ahmed sat back down just because of her pleading tone. He nodded at her to continue with whatever she had to do.

"What were you doing before you ended up here?" asked the Lady.

"I was sitting in the car with Changaswami. You called him. He left. Then I went around with the Driver back where we left Bahadur. Before I could reach that spot, I suddenly found myself sitting here."

"Alright. Bahadur was here a little while ago."

"He was? But last time you told me he was still unaware."

"He still is. He was here very briefly. He didn't even say his name. He was telling me that you and Changaswami dropped him off in the middle of the road and how he had to walk for miles before he could get a cab booked. So, when you just mentioned that you dropped him off, I figured it must have been him."

"Oh! Ok. So, what's the plan? What's next? How can I help you? Or how can you help me?"

"First of all, before another Character switch happens, I need you to describe in detail the last time you interacted with all the characters, how they were behaving and if there was anything unusual or strange about that interaction."

"I can't really be sure if there were all of them but I'm sure there were a lot of them yesterday."

"Ok. So, tell me what happened yesterday."

Ahmed then went on to narrate the whole incident, starting from the moment he met Changaswami the previous morning and took him to the stadium where the big political rally was planned. He took care of each minute detail while narrating the Story, be it about the joggers who were behaving a little weird or about Changaswami running behind a guy when Ahmed decided to leave. He even told about the Ten people who were dressed like Changaswami, the ones he followed back to the stadium. Then about Changaswami appearing on the stage and the whole crowd chanting his name. How the Guard didn't let him meet Changaswami. And finally, the whole incident with Changaswami's look-alike and the painting on the ceiling of Changaswami's hut.

"How many girls did you say were dancing around the blue-skinned man?" the Lady confirmed while she did some mental calculations.

"Seven. But I can be wrong."

"I hope you're not. And about those Ten people you saw while returning from the stadium in the morning. Were they all men? Or a few of them could have been females?"

"Again, with your silly questions. How does it matter if they were girls, boys, kids or dead people? It is all in my mind, isn't that the whole point? If you continue asking more of such questions, I am telling you it will end up like last time and there will be nothing either of us would be able to do about it." Ahmed warned the Lady.

"Alright! I understand. But there is a reason why I am asking it. In the beginning, when One of the PranShoes came here, I was told that there are Thirteen females and Thirteen males in PranShoe. So, for a moment, if we consider you did meet all the characters yesterday, then you met only One female who was the old Lady with wrinkled hands chanting in the crowd. Apart from her, you saw Seven girls in the painting. That makes it Eight females. Now, including you, Changaswami, the Two joggers, the guy Changaswami was chasing when you left the stadium, the old man whose seat you took, the Guard, Changaswami's look-alike and the blue- skinned man on the painting, it makes it Eight males. So, in total we have Eight males and Eight females. Now it comes down to the Ten people who were dressed like Changaswami, out of which Five must have been females wearing Changaswami's dress. Are we on the same page?"

"I am not good at Maths but it seems like you have given it a lot of thought and attention, so I'll go with whatever you're saying. But what I do know is that there is no way of finding out if they were girls. And even if we do find out, how does it help us?"

"It is a slow process and we need to be certain of every little thing to be able to understand how each Character in you sees each of the other Twenty-Five characters."

"You mean, apart from how I saw the girls in the painting, you are also worried about how each One of those girls in the painting saw me? What rubbish! I think I've had enough rubbish for today. Before things get out of hand, I must leave."

Ahmed got up and began to leave. The Lady saw no point in trying to stop him or convince him to talk more. He was clearly in denial of the Reality and felt too strongly about his own perceptions. Ahmed walked back out of the gate and got into the car which was still waiting for him. There was no One inside the car, not even the Driver. Ahmed sat and waited for a while, contemplating what the Lady was saying. "Were the girls in the ceiling painting just characters in my head? Were they looking at me the same way I was looking at them? Is everybody I come across just a Character? Then what is real? I am a person living a real life. Isn't this car real? How can it all be an illusion? Even if it is, someone or something must have created this illusion. How can I get to that Reality? And even if I do get to it, how could I ever be absolutely sure that that Reality is not just another illusion?" Ahmed thought to himself while he continued to wait. He looked outside the car but no One was there. His gaze fell on a Show piece kept on the dashboard of the car. It had a married couple, a man in a black suit and a woman in a wedding dress, enclosed in a spherical glass filled with a glittery liquid.

The Lady kept the magazine back in the cupboard. She then sat back down on her seat. She picked up a glass, half filled with water, off the side table and took a few sips while she looked up at the ceiling. Above her was a painting of the Last Supper with Jesus and his Twelve apostles.