And him? He was the same wild-haired man whom Hamid had confronted some twenty minutes before the fatal shot. We named him Wildhair, for the long blonde hair that fell down to his neck, spraying out in different directions, criss-crossing and spider-webbing within itself. It seemed as if each dark-yellow strand had a consciousness of its own. 

‘Go back to your country, he had said before he pulled the trigger, and at least fifty other faces-black-brown-yellow-white- blue turned towards him, because half the people in that bar probably had a different country to go back to, even if they preferred to continue sitting right there watching NBA basketball and dipping onion rings into mustard sauce in the United States of Fucking Amreeka—theek hai?—thank you very much. Wildhair’s ‘go back to your country’ was meant for Hamid, of course, and it was all so ridiculous because I was definitely more likely to fly a few thousand kilometres back to India than Hamid was to return to see his family in Bedminster, New Jersey. 

Hamid. Oh, he had a million expressions on his face after that shot: fear and anger and panic and sorrow. But it’s fine, let me tell you, he needn’t worry about me, yaar. It was as clean a death as I could have hoped for. A half-second of the absolute worst pain you could imagine in the forehead, where it felt as if someone had turned up the temperature to a few thousand degrees, and another half-second of the searing heat rushing down to my heart. And then: numb.

The last flashpoint left were the senses, which were paused in time forever at the moment I went from Vishnu Agarwal, the twenty-one-year-old, breathing, drinking, laughing, hot-blooded young man who couldn’t pronounce his V’s differently from his W’s, to a stinking, bleeding, about-to-shit-its-pants lifeless object. Those temperature valves? They descended to freezing point within seconds. Extreme hot to extreme cold. Mummy would say, in her voice that was the most delicate balance between affectionate and irksome: Beta, you’re going to catch a cold. 

Yes, those senses, they lasted a little longer, and so did the needling sound of screams following the gunshot, and ‘Vishnu!’ from Jess who always said my full name, and ‘Viz’ from fat-ass Hamid, who had a rare moment of stress in his voice. I heard a rush of boots thumping against the floor and then felt a dozen pairs of hands on me. I still had the taste of meat and beer in my mouth. And, suno, it felt hot; I have told you that already, haven’t I? And then cold, but the cold didn’t last too long before all of those senses froze into an eternal end. OK. Tata. Bye-bye. And after that, only the memories remained. I swear, those memories, kasam se yaar, they are real. Memories of every moment before the final moment. 

In Varanasi, my hometown, the ashes of a cremated body are immersed in the Ganga River, supposedly allowing the soul to pass from one realm to the next, or so those fraud sadhus around the ghats tell every sucker ready to believe anything uttered in Sanskrit. But my expertise is JavaScript, not scripture. I understood death more in simple binary terms: passing over from 1 to 0, yes to no. And somewhere in the eternity between that switch going from ‘on’ to ‘off’, I began to have memories that lay ahead of me too, memories without me, of moments where the senses stopped, but something-behenchod, how can I explain it?—something like an imprint of the future remained. It was, or still is, something beyond time. But listen, Vishnu, I say to myself. It’s all in your name, so this shouldn’t be a surprise, should it? You’re part of the goddamn trimurti of gods. The trilogy of creation, destruction, and everything else in between. Act like it, at least.