Fiction: Exiled from celestial court, a once powerful yaksha pretends to be a human in Mumbai

“I need your help.”

I shut my eyes for a moment. Maybe he was a figment of my imagination, and when I open them again, he would be gone. I had been looking forward to this evening all week and now that it was finally here, I didn’t want to get involved in whatever problem he was going to dump on me.

No such luck. He was still very much there. The faint musty smell of cigarettes clung to him like a persistent ex, who can’t take the hint.

He looked like a walking stereotype of an absentminded professor. In his mid to late seventies, if I had to put a number on it. His glasses were comically oversized. His clothes looked crumpled like he had been sleeping in them for a few days, the creases in them mirroring the growing wrinkles of annoyance on my forehead.

We were at the Sensex bar in Bandra, which had a cute little gimmick. The prices of drinks dropped with every order of that beverage that came in. Something about supply and demand, which I didn’t really care about. The barest smidgen of magic could twist the numbers in my favour.

I had dropped the price of spiced rum...

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