The merciless summer heat was a suffocating shroud, pressing down on the fields of newly independent India, a stark contrast to the distant promise of freedom. It was the third, grueling day of April in 1950.
Karmadas, a man weathered by the sun and soil, labored behind his oxen. Their strained, ragged breaths and the desperate lowing for water were the only sounds slicing through the humid silence. He watched them, their tongues thick and dry, before turning toward the shallow water pit at the farm's edge. He carried the heavy, cool clay pot, filling it and bringing the meager relief back to his beasts.
It was in that moment, as his eyes lifted over the shimmering haze of the field, that he saw him. A figure stood motionless in the distance, a dark sentinel at the intersection of the two dusty roads. The man was a silhouette of unnatural stillness, his long, black hair hanging limp, his form too far to discern any feature save the unsettling permanence of his vigil. Karmadas dismissed him as a traveler, a trick of the heat, and forced himself back to the rhythm of the plow.
But the figure remained. Day after day, a fixed, unblinking presence at the crossroads. An invisible weight settled over Karmadas, a dread that grew not from any action, but from the man's sheer, inexplicable *being* there.
Then came the rain—a sudden, violent deluge that broke the heat and turned the dust to slick, churning mud. Karmadas rushed to bring his oxen home. As the downpour blinded him, he took the shortcut through the crossroads.
The figure was there, just as always, now a dripping, black stain against the gray curtain of the rain. As Karmadas passed, the man turned his head with a slow, deliberate movement, his eyes—deep, unreadable pits—locking onto the farmer.
"Do you have a *bidi*?" the man's voice was a flat, dry thing, barely audible over the drumming rain.
Karmadas, chilled despite the humid air, fumbled for the small, ubiquitous Indian cigarette. "Yes," he stammered. "But why? Can I help you with something else?"
The man's gaze never wavered. "No," he said, the single word a finality. He turned and vanished into the heavy sheet of rain as if he had been a phantom all along, leaving Karmadas alone with the terrifying, unanswered question: Why does a figure who waits for days in the sun and storm only ask for a smoke, only to refuse further help and leave? Karmadas didn't know, but as he hurried away, a cold, sickening certainty settled in his gut: he had not seen the last of the man at the crossroads.