Chapter 1

Cogito_Ergo_Sum

@Cogito_Ergo_Sum

Room 702, C ward, Dr K.C Bose Hospital

South 24 Parganas District, West Bengal

The man could not remember anything. Not who he was, where he had come from, whether he had a family. It was all---blank.

His battered and bruised body had been fished out of the Hooghly River just as it flowed past Noorpur. A well to do family of landed gentry had been on a picnic by the river banks, the children squealing with excitement as they played games of hopscotch and lock and key on the crunchy sands; the adults wading excitedly but warily, up to their knees into the turbid, fast flowing river. The waters were almost in spate, the onset of the monsoon having transformed the sluggish Hooghly into a raging, frothing torrent.

A few members of the party had gazed idly at a pile of driftwood that happened to be pulled along by the current---and then one of sharper eyed members of the family had gasped in alarm. A figure was clutching tenaciously onto the pile of logs, a man evidently only on the brink of consciousness.

Their reaction had been swift and commendable. Despite the turgid waters and the swift undertow, the adults had formed a human chain of sorts, leading further into the river. They had been lucky, or perhaps it was just that the fates had determined that the man deserved to live longer, to go on to achieve greater things. For the current had fortuitously dragged the pile of driftwood into the shallows, where the best swimmer among the rescuers could reach the man, and pull him to safety.

The family, as we have seen, was one of means, owning vast tracts of property all along the Hooghly, partly devoted to paddy cultivation and partly to aquaculture of shrimp. The head of the family was a philanthropist of some renown, and was the patron and chairman of the nearby KC Bose Hospital.

And thus it was that the man, completely unconscious by this time, running a critically high temperature and his lungs almost filled with water, had been rushed to that hospital. One of the senior doctors pressed into his care by the good patron, took one look at the man, and shook his head in dismay. It did not look good---he would try his best, of course, but in his professional opinion, the man did not have one chance in ten thousand. Perhaps, not even one in a million.

But then, the doctor did not know the true nature of the man who had been entrusted to his care. Against all the odds, clinging tenaciously to life, with a determination and steely will evident even when he was thus comatose, he had grabbed the one chance in a million which the experienced doctor judged to be his fate.

48 hours later, his pulse and breathing had stabilized, and his internal injuries started to heal, though he was still in a coma. He had healed remarkably well, for a man who had been so severely battered by the fury of the elements. The doctor shook his head again, this time with a considerable measure of awe. His patient's lithe, athletic and supremely toned frame, had no doubt enabled him to survive being dashed about by the monsoonal fury of the flooded river. But wise with his long years of healing, the doctor knew that there was something more. The man had something---or someone---to live for. Something---or Someone---who was of such inestimable importance, that he just would not---and could not--- leave and go gently into that good night.

72 hours after the man's vital signs had stabilized, he had come out of his coma for the first time. And to the considerable dismay of the doctor and the team of nurses, who had all turned into keen well wishers of this determined man fighting to cling on to life, he had not recollected a thing about his past or his identity.

The dismay they had felt, however, was nothing compared to the utter distress this inflicted on the man himself. He knew, without knowing why or how he knew, that he needed to leave this hospital and get back. To Someone. Someone who would be waiting for him, with a desperate intensity mirroring his own.

The team at the hospital did their best to find out what the antecedents of their patient could be. There had been no missing persons report filed at Noorpur, and now, once again they made an inadvertent error of underestimating the sheer resolve of the man they were treating. For they confined their inquiries with the police stations within the district itself---and drew a blank each time. They never checked if a man tallying with the patient's description had been reported missing from Kolkata. It was inconceivable to them, after all, that any person could survive falling into that flooded river, and being dashed about for almost 60 kilometers...

And despite the man's valiant attempts, his efforts at remembering yielded precious little, except for one, constant memory. Apart from this singular, overpowering thought, all else was like a jumbled, hazy swirl of patterns, half remembered images and sounds filtering indistinctly into his senses. It was almost like watching a kaleidoscope of fragmented images, a dizzying, jerky tableau that he could not fully see.

The colors of his indistinct memories shifted and swirled, the hazy images changing from day to night. But none of the images lasted for long, and dissolved again back into the jumbled mass of  memories that clouded his mind---all save that one, lasting image.

The only image constant, was that of Her Face...a young, exquisitely lovely woman, her shoulder length, luxuriant tresses whipping in the breeze. Her eyes burning with the fire of her indomitable will, as she focused on him with grim determination, as if her entire life, the very meaning of her existence, depended on that one action she would now take...

And with a vague sense of shock, the man saw amidst the maelstrom of images clouding his mind, this woman crouching and pulling the trigger of a menacing looking pistol that she grasped tightly in her hands. The reverberating crash of that memory, echoed through his mind and assailed his recovering senses.

Try as he might, he could not remember anything further about this woman. Who was she? What was her connection to him? Why had she wanted to shoot at him?

Occasionally, other unknown people entered his mind, shimmering indistinctly within the broken shards of his memories, in the middle of forgotten conversations with him. None of them lasted, the memory of every other person, being transitory and ephemeral.

They all changed. All but Her face. A thrill of an unknown, undefinable sensation went down his spine as he dwelt on thoughts of Her. Was it fear he felt? A reaction to his oncoming doom, even as she leveled a shot at him? Almost involuntarily, the man shook his head. It could not be terror, not that base, cowardly emotion. He did not know the first thing about who he was---but he did know, with an incontestable certainty from the very marrow of his bones, that it was not fear or panic that he felt, when those images of Her face slid into his mind. He just knew, that he would not tolerate any weakness, any fear, within himself.