He stopped. He stepped back. He froze.

As the tension in his body drained out, the blade he had brought back from Germany slipped out of his fingers and fell with a deadly clang just next to his victim’s face.

The victim who was still groggy after the severe pulverising he had been subjected to, opened his eyes hesitantly and then passed out into oblivion. His spasmodically shaking limbs the only signs that he was still alive.

The assassin’s face which had knotted up uncharacteristically loosened up as a strange calm prevailed and he began a journey he had never been on before.

While everything else was a blur and a jagged motion at that, he realised that he was taking meaningful strides in reverse and floating firmly back through time where his past waited in animated suspension.

Like a freeze frame that superimposed a montage he looked back with distaste at the debris of his past. And much as he tried to avoid revisiting his yesterdays he kept bumping into people who had cameo’d into his life sometime ago. Only after a few meetings across several calendar years did he realise that there was something strange going on.

While his memory was only that of how he had met these characters and how he had killed them, the flashback sprung a surprise visual and an even more surprising scenario.

He was, he realised, flying through time, in reverse and meeting all the victims who dotted his report card of lives and deaths...and was actually asking each one of them to forgive him. In some such interactions there was an eerie kind of dispassion. He simply asked for forgiveness, which was given to him with the hint of a smile. In other cases there was melodrama and he had to contend with surviving family members who had been devastated when he eliminated the man targeted. There were tears, there was remorse and there were the unforgiving curses...and the reluctant forgiving.

And all of a sudden, the big wheel of life that had kept on turning slowed down with a groan and began to shudder to a stop. The people riding it began to relax and the hyper screams receded into the hollow distance of ecstasy.

The giant wheel came to a stop and the car that was now in front of him carried his first love, his mother. She had an ethereal look on her face as the bullet holes in her face dissolved in a potion of benignity. Her skin tightened and lost its wrinkled countenance and she smiled like an angel as she said to him that she forgave him.

It was as if a massive weight had been taken off his shoulders and he felt more like a man and less like a mule. The wheels churned up to a re-start and the film began to run straight.

The tick-tock of time rediscovered its rhythm and as he flipped from victim to victim, letting them live and giving them a second chance at the miracle called life, he shed all his earthly robes and was swathed in the divine aura of saffron. His beard began to flow and his eyes twinkled like a rivulet excited at meeting its river,

You are no longer a man, a voice told him and he felt his third eye of unseeing destruction shutting as he stepped into the shoes of a Swami...

He had nowhere else to go, nothing else to achieve. After years of turmoil he was well and truly at peace.

He was Om !!!