Every single day, every single day, at ten in the morning sharp, Sharma ji would get ready, crisp white shirt and iron-pressed blue blazer. He worked a government job, alongside prestigious people lathered in prestigious perfumes, gold crowns placed upon their heads, embedded with jewels, red jewels, green jewels, blue jewels, supposedly brought from the traders of Africa.
Many said that men with government jobs sat upon their own thrones, carved statues representing essential human values, Betaals sitting upon their shoulders, cackling and scampering away the minute they said a word.
Sharma ji was, in essence, a respected man, a wealthy man. Of course, wealth was often directly proportional to respect, and vice versa. Sharma ji was an ex-army man; he’d spent a laboriously long time laboring in muddy fields with makeshift wooden guns only to quit later on and take a respectable employment with a government occupation. And with the respectable job came a wife from a respectable family, and then followed the stout little child.
Sharma ji would sit in his car, a very nice Mercedes. It was red—anyone with a red car was wealthy. It was an unspoken rule, really, that people with red cars were rich. Every day, Sharma ji’s son—a stout little six-year-old—would jaunt out to the car with his mother, Sharma ji’s wife, who wore at least two lakhs of rupees in jewelry. The child’s tiffin box would be held in his chubby little hand, his cloth napkin hanging from a place in his shirt where it’d be safety-pinned. At this time, Sharma ji would already be at his work desk in his office, typing away on his expensive government-issued laptop.
Vikram Sharma, Indian Army, read his army plaque, proudly displayed on the brick wall in front of his house. His mother, now an ailing woman sitting alone at a hospital bed, had drawn rangoli patterns around the plaque, with chalk. Another rangoli design was displayed on the floor in the front porch of the house—colored powders beautifully done in the form of a tulsi plant. It was auspicious.
Sharma ji’s wife dropped her child off at his school—a respected international school, with a blood-red brick wall surrounding the interior. Inside the brick wall, a large five-story building sat regally, flanked by trees with the greenest of leaves resting atop the sturdiest of tree trunks. Outside the blood-red brick wall, street vendors would yell out the snacks and sweets they sold, and try to bribe the little school kids with promises of fresh samosas. When the mothers told their kids not to buy any dirty street food, the vendors would look at the mothers and offer them freshly made paan. Vendors on that street did well with selling their food.
Everyone was familiar with the underlying currents of judgment that lurked behind gilded veneers, the whispers of “better” and “worse” concealed in the silk folds of society’s expectations, the smirks of judgment concealed in the silk folds of women’s saris. Delhi was a bustling city, with a jumble of colorful cars creating a cacophony of honking on every street, with women walking to wooden carts parked outside colonies to buy sabzis, with the gorgeous blue afternoon sky shrouded by dark clouds foretelling rain and smoke from industrial factories nearby. It was hard to breathe in Delhi, but one becomes used to it after a few months.
Vikram Sharma, ex-military man, now a government official, was well-regarded generally. He’d been a fair man, and still was one. As of now, he was commuting to the office where he did his job.
This Tuesday morning, as the car navigated the chaotic Delhi streets, a disruption appeared—not in the cacophony of honking or the haze of factory smoke, but in the presence of a man sitting in the backseat. He hadn’t been there before, since Vikram left for work alone. A wrinkled, shriveled finger pressed to the man’s dried lips.
“Don’t talk, Vikram,” said the figure. “If you talk, I’ll vanish, and you’ll never reach work.”
Vikram kept his mouth shut. He just kept driving, almost crashing to the sidewalk in shock. A man shouted a few choice words at him.
The figure reminded Vikram of madness: a perfectly normal old looking man with a not unkind air about him. But his skin was wrinkled, shriveled… except on the backs of his hands, which were smooth in an inhuman manner. A shock of otherworldly white hair graced the figure’s head and eyebrows. And there was something eerie in his stare—something vacant and distant, as if he were seeing into a realm of madness that no one else could comprehend.
The crazy, shriveled figure sitting in Vikram’s car’s backseat began talking again: “Often, people ask who I am. And I must confess, I am a Betaal.” He leaned back in the backseat, his bony frame sinking into the plush leather. His face was a mosaic of creases and cracks, like an ancient map forgotten in time.
Vikram felt a faint recollection of recognition tingle in the far uncharted backwaters of his mind—him, eight years old, head lying in his grandmother’s lap as she told him stories of dead people whose souls had never been reborn, nor granted enlightenment. Betaals.
The Betaal’s voice broke his thoughts. “Oh, don’t look so shocked, Vikram Sharma. You’ve been living among ghosts all your life—ghosts of ambition, of duty, of expectation. You’re a man who wears his duties like armor, but tell me… does it ever weigh on you? Do your shoulders sag yet?”
Vikram did not reply. If he did, he was rather certain something much worse than not reaching work would happen. His grandmother, he vaguely recalled, had told him: Betaals are creatures of paradoxes. They were traps. They crept up on innocent people, asked them strange questions about morality—answer correctly, and Vikram would live another day; answer incorrectly, and the Betaal would consume his soul, or worse, his sanity.
“Here’s the question,” Betaal said, his tone suddenly hollow and empty. “What is the weight of a crown, Vikram Sharma?”
The question lingered in the air like smoke. Vikram’s mind raced. A crown? He wasn’t a king. But then, was he not? The plaques on his walls, the respect he commanded in his office, the wealth he displayed with every carefully curated choice in his life…
“Remember,” The Betaal whispered, almost tauntingly, “if you answer incorrectly, you will lose not just your way, but yourself. And if you stay silent, well…” His voice trailed off, replaced by the faint sound of a child crying somewhere in the distance—a sound that shouldn’t have been in the car, and yet was.
Images flashed in the back of Vikram’s mind. A small village with tiny huts being burnt down. Mothers looking for their children. Those same mothers trampled by horses let loose from the nearby stable.
Some Betaals, Vikram’s grandmother had told him, die from injustice.
The man couldn’t speak. The car seemed to slow, even though Vikram hadn’t eased off the accelerator. The honking and shouting of Delhi’s streets faded into the background.
Vikram piped up. “The weight of a crown lies with the power of its wearer.”
The Betaal’s dry, cracked lips twisted into a manic smile that would have sent a lesser man scampering into the trees. Vikram had the odd urge to abandon his expensive car and perhaps just live in trees, like the Betaals of mythology did.
“Wrong,” said the spirit. “But, if what you say is true, Vikram, if the weight is so heavy, why do you still wear it?”
The car reached the government office, its grand facade gleaming in the sunlight. Vikram parked and turned to face the backseat, but the Betaal was gone.
Yet his words remained. As Vikram entered the building, nodding at colleagues and straightening his blazer, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the Betaal was still watching, still asking questions. Yet, he sat on his desk, not typing away on his expensive laptop as he usually did, staring fixedly at the little makeshift flowerpot he kept—a clearish-brown squarish bottle of premium whiskey imported from Britain, drained of the whiskey, washed thoroughly, filled halfway with water, fresh roses peeping out of the rim. The roses were changed periodically every two weeks when they shriveled up. All the roses currently in the whiskey bottle were upright and still blood red, except one awkwardly tall rose that had drooped over, hunching as if to meet the height of the other roses. But its color: still blood-red.
Every day, as Vikram Sharma sat listlessly at his desk, surrounded by other perfectly sane if not overly-power-hungry people, he felt the weight of an invisible presence perched on his shoulder, cackling softly as it scampered through his thoughts. And every day, Vikram felt his urge to go live in trees growing. As if he were slowly morphing into the Betaal himself. Which, he decided on a violently stormy day, would not be too bad.
For in Delhi, the Betaal never truly left.
Khushi Kadecha is a graduating senior at Pembroke Pines Charter High School. She is often inspired by the writing of JRR Tolkien and the stories her grandmother told her as a child. This story, “Unanswered Echoes,” which is a reimagining of an Indian myth, won first place at the 2024-25 PPCHS Short Story Contest as well as first place in the short story category at the 2024-25 Broward County Literary Fair.
theatala.org 