The Godman

Arjan is twenty years old, ruined by a drought that will not end, and drowning in debts he cannot pay. When his creditors file criminal charges against him, he runs — boarding a random train with no ticket and no destination, stepping off it hours later in a place he has never heard of, with three rupees in his pocket and no idea that the accident of that stop will make him one of the most powerful men in India. In Amritsar he finds work wrapping sweets for pilgrims, and he begins to notice something. The people climbing the shrine road are not buying food. They are buying hope — from chilli-pirs who cure the evil eye, from cow-feeders who fix failing businesses, from astrologers who mend marriages. Money flows out of frightened hands in a steady, endless river. And when the remedies fail, as they always fail, the faithful simply come back and pay again. Then a cassette-seller named Malik tells him about a fraud who lived like a king by pretending to be a saint. And Malik asks the question that will define both their lives: A dead saint holds power over a living crowd. So why should the saint have to be dead? They restore a forgotten tomb on a Punjab highway. They stage a miracle. They invent a holy man — and within a decade, a hundred thousand people call Arjan Baba. His sermons draw crowds of thousands. His centres spread across three states. Chief ministers arrive to touch his feet. Nobody knows that Arjan has never believed a word of it. He is not a fallen believer. He never had faith to lose. He preaches devotion to people he privately regards as fools, feeds on their kneeling like an addict, and teaches a doctrine with no God in it at all — no destiny, no judgment, no ledger keeping score. There is only what a man can get away with, for exactly as long as he can get away with it. Then Arjan sends a truck to a village that once wronged him. An old man is beaten to death in his own courtyard. And in the dust of that courtyard, one of Arjan's men drops a phone What follows is a slow, patient unravelling — a grieving son who will not be bought, a corrupt investigator who cannot be satisfied, and two friends who helped build a god and are only now beginning to understand what they made. Because Arjan is not merely robbing these people. He is standing in front of a hundred thousand of them every week, a man with no morals, teaching them how to live. And somewhere in Punjab, a cracked phone is still waiting in the dark for a hand that has not yet come to find it. The Godman is a gripping crime thriller about faith, fraud, and the debt no earthly court can collect — and about the moment a man finally looks directly at what he has become, and chooses it anyway. For readers of Age of Vice**,** Sacred Games**, and** The White Tiger**.**