Yamadharmaraj survives.

This time around, with odds heavily stacked against him will he be able to wiggle out? Only time or Brahma can tell! These two sentences haunted Yamadharmaraj like ghosts in graveyards. He was well aware; no amount of self-incrimination would melt the ice-cold heart of his Boss.

Brahma kept ignoring him and his best friend Chitragupta avoided him, preferring Brahma’s company in extended meditation sessions. He rued his fault in relieving Chitragupta from official work and now, he cannot take action against him for deserting his workstation. He had further complicated the matter by intimating Brahma about the flagrant absenteeism.  He wanted to keep Brahma in the loop as Chitragupta did. It had backfired. The chasm of distrust kept widening, and the threat of isolation loomed large. He cussed himself.

The never-ending threat posed by the blackmailing nerds popped up often. The nerds granted with a new lease on life, started hanging around and once in a while floated across his path, mischievously.  This game of cloak and dagger was slowly becoming unbearable. Becoming paranoid, he thought the nerds had switched sides to stalk and spy on him.

Becoming desperate and desolate, he vigorously raked his brain to find a quick exit. Would he be forced to serve under Chitragupta? How to get back into Brahma’s good books? Will Chitragupta bury the hatchet for old time’s sake? Can he call in some favours from nerds? Taking stock of everything, he decided on carpet-bombing all the three. Who knows, from which tree the fruit will fall?

With emerging clarity, a rarity from his currently befuddled mind, he sat down to draft a plan of action. Now and then he looked around to check that none of the nerds were hanging around. Already a sub plan was poking its head to take care of these nosey nerds, but for later - after extracting some useful work from them.  He mused, “Why to show your hand even before the play commences?”

He chose, remembering in time that Brahma has four heads, to appeal to each one of them, separately. He fancied his chance of evoking sympathetic feelings, if only to confuse and yet strike a conciliatory chord in one of them. A small victory was better than a zero outcome. Brahma occupying a higher plane of consciousness might not be vindictive. With hope, he prepared his batch appeals in four formats- innocence, ignorance, ineptitude and guilt.

Unsure about what appeal to be submitted to which head, he invited the nerds to play a random game, to match - innocence, ignorance, ineptitude and guilt with the right receptive head. To help them along, he dumped a heap of notes he had laboriously compiled “journals” on Brahma’s heads. He did not give them any identifying clues. Feeling relieved of their hanging presence, at least for the time being, he left them alone.

The moment Yamadharmaraj started his “journals”, Brahma initiated protective measures, to defeat and confuse the compiler. He chose an asynchronous random switch mechanism to generate thoughts in one head and acted upon them from another head.  Brahma was eagerly waiting for the day to match his wit with the skill of any hacker!  

The nerds collated, manipulated and redacted data to get an overall picture. They had this nagging inkling - the thought threads running through the extracted document clearly pointed to a single identity. It did not take them long to make an educated guess.  Beyond this point, their analytical tools simply raised their bits and bytes in defeat. Taking an easy way out, they presented arbitrarily matched profiles to mask their failure. To lend weight to their conclusion, they decided to demand some more waivers – at least another fifty years of life extension. With nothing more to lose or gain, they decided not to milk the cow beyond its udder capacity.

Yamadharmaraj felt an accidental meeting - side by side or face to face, with Chitragupta might rekindle empathy in his long-time friend and associate. Somehow, the wall of meditation had to be breached. He preferred to catch up with Chitragupta and surprise him, near Brahma’s residence. Searching for a suitable tool, he chanced upon the nerds and asked them to hang around there and alert him when Chitragupta came out. He waited anxiously for the message and kept cursing the Time for standing still.

Lying in wait, he saw Chitragupta’s side profile and then moved out of hiding to stand in front of him. His long-time friend looked straight and right through his soul, making him wonder, “Oh, what a great fall I have had”. He decided to give his prepared speech, whether Chitragupta heard it or not. “Friend, I need your help”.

Chitragupta, not wanting to spend more time than necessary in his friend’s ‘august’ company, curtly asked him, “What do you want?” Yamadharmaraj blurted out, “I have four exquisitely crafted metal capsules. I want your help in ranking them in the order of your preference. Will you come to my residence now?” He did not tell Chitragupta that the capsules have engraved appeals to Brahma.

To get it over with as soon as possible, Chitragupta agreed to play along. He declined the offered food and beverages and wanted to get straight to work. He saw the capsules kept on a table supported by bones of animal legs. Cured leather tags with numbers 1 to 4 were placed near the capsules to be ranked. Showing scorn and disinterest, Chitragupta briefly gazed at the capsules, just picked up tags and placed them in front of them, without rhyme or reason. He did not want to waste any more of his energy, unnecessarily.

Yamadharmaraj thanked his friend profusely, tried to pat him on the back which was promptly rejected by Chitragupta. Though taken aback by this reaction, he did not want to linger on the insult, to see his friend off. Then taking a deep breath, he transmitted the appeals to Brahma to the respective heads, as chosen by nerds and in sequence selected by his friend. There was no way for him to know that Brahma and the nerds have already played their tricks on him.

Brahma finally decided to restore “status quo ante” much against his wisdom. He had sufficiently briefed Chitragupta about the pecking order Vis a Vis unbreakable divine rules. Appreciating his conscious integrity in not exposing the buried secret plans of Yamadharmaraj, advised Chitragupta to attend official works.

Though a brief ray of disappointment flashed across his face, he agreed to do so. Why not give it a spin? He knew that his constant presence in the workstation would drive Yamadharmaraj’s guilt deeper and deeper. Maybe this could be his chance to change Yama into a better Boss!