Writing is fascinating to me from many angles. It is not just words or the formation of ideas and thoughts once you begin to put them on paper or screen. Sometimes stories take on a life of their own, and it is surprising what you started with and what it became in the end. Each story is a learning experience for the writer too.

The Kumbh Conspiracy started as a simple tale I wanted to write about a man’s redemption… but there were ideas in my head, a melting point of chaos and ideas, and I kept writing and writing. It took on a life of its own. And now, the sequel to that book is what I am writing.

Join me on the journey… remember it is a first draft and can be very different from the final book.

Tell me how you like it.

This is an excerpt from the sequel I am writing to my best-selling novel “The Kumbh Conspiracy.”

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From the upcoming sequel to The Kumbh Conspiracy (First Draft — shared with subscribers)

PROLOGUE

The Shadow of the Ten-Headed King

The Shivna River caught the first rays of dawn like molten copper, its waters whispering ancient secrets as they flowed past the weathered stones of Pashupatinath Temple.

In Mandsaur, where history breathed through every brick and legend walked the narrow lanes, the temple stood sentinel over the town’s awakening, a testament to devotion that had endured through centuries of conquest and change.

Dashagriva Singh knelt on the temple’s worn steps, his massive frame silhouetted against the amber sky. The name his parents had given him carried the weight of mythology; Dashagriva, the ten-headed one, Ravana’s Sanskrit epithet. Some called it hubris to name a child after the great demon king of Lanka. Others whispered it was prophecy.

The morning air carried the scent of marigolds from the temple offerings and the distant aroma of wheat fields that stretched beyond the town’s ancient boundaries. Mandsaur had always been a crossroads—once a great trading center where caravans from Malwa and Gujarat converged, now a quiet town where opium poppies bloomed white in spring and garlic crops painted the earth in geometric patterns.

Singh’s lips moved in silent prayer, his weathered hands pressed together before the Shiva lingam that crowned the temple’s inner sanctum. The warmth of Aditya, the Sun God, touched his face like a benediction, and for a moment, the learned archaeologist became simply another devotee seeking grace in the dawn.

But Dashagriva Singh was far from simple.

At nearly sixty, he possessed the physical presence of a man half his age—not the bulk of a weightlifter, but the coiled strength of a predator. His six-foot-four frame moved with deceptive fluidity, muscles that spoke of disciplines learned far from the quiet fields of Madhya Pradesh. His skin was dark as teak, his features sharp and aristocratic, bearing the proud lines of ancestry that claimed descent from a legend.

The irony was not lost on him. Dr. Dashagriva Singh, holder of twin PhDs from Maharaja Sayaji Rao University, an internationally acclaimed expert on temple architecture and Indus Valley civilization, could have claimed a chair at Oxford or Harvard with a single phone call. Instead, he had returned to this forgotten corner of India, to farmland that had been in his family for eight generations.

The temple priests knew him as the scholar who had funded the restoration of three ancient shrines in the district. The townspeople saw him as the gentle giant who never raised his voice, who sold his opium through proper government channels and his wheat at fair prices. His wife Kamala thought of him as the devoted husband who brought her jasmine flowers every morning and read her verses from the Ramayana in the evenings.

None of them suspected what else Dashagriva Singh might be.

He rose from his prayers, joints moving without the stiffness that plagued other men his age. The causeway over the Shivna was narrow and ancient; its stones polished smooth by countless feet. Below, the river gurgled around temple foundations that predated the Mughal invasions, carrying away the ashes of the faithful and the sins of the penitent.

The market lanes were beginning to stir; chai wallahs lighting their stoves, flower sellers arranging their garlands, the eternal rhythm of small-town India awakening to another day. Singh walked through it all with the measured pace of a man who owned time itself, his presence parting the early crowds without a word or gesture.

His Ambassador car waited where he had left it, gleaming white in the strengthening light. As he turned the key and felt the engine’s familiar rumble, Dashagriva Singh allowed himself a small smile. Today would bring visitors, he knew. The kind who came not for his expertise in ancient temples, but for knowledge of a different sort entirely.

The shadow of the ten-headed king was stirring once more.

Eight hundred miles away, in the manicured chaos of suburban Mumbai, dawn broke with the color of fresh blood across the Arabian Sea. Chembur’s tree-lined streets were already alive with the city’s obsession: the morning constitutional that transformed every park and lane into an open-air gymnasium.

Near Our Lady of Perpetual Succour School, where bougainvillea cascaded over compound walls and the air still held traces of night’s coolness, the joggers and walkers pursued their daily ritual of defying age and mortality. Among them, Dominic Fernandes cut a figure that drew approving glances—fifty-three years old but looking forty, his investment banker’s discipline clear in every stride.

His Lululemon tracksuit was the color of the Mediterranean sky; his running shoes were German engineering married to Italian design. Dominic had always believed that success should be visible, that a man’s achievements should announce themselves in the details. Even his morning run was a statement—three point seven kilometers at a precisely seven-minute pace, heart rate monitored, performance tracked.

He pulled up beside the familiar banyan tree, chest rising and falling in a controlled rhythm, sweat beading on his café au lait skin. Around him, Chembur’s morning symphony played out—children’s laughter from the school compound, the distant whistle of the first suburban train, birds greeting the sun from their perches in decades-old trees.

Dominic checked his fitness tracker, allowed himself a moment of satisfaction at the numbers, and prepared to complete his cool-down routine.

He never saw them coming.

The first blow shattered his right shoulder, the sound of breaking bone lost in his scream. As he crumpled to the asphalt, vision blurring with shock and pain, two figures materialized from behind the banyan’s massive trunk. They were dressed like laborers, faces covered by cloth masks, but their weapons spoke of different intentions entirely.

The aruval gleamed in the morning light; those curved machetes of Tamil Nadu that could split coconuts or sever limbs with equal efficiency. The men wielded them with the casual competence of butchers, their movements economical and practiced.

“The Octopus never forgets,” one of them snarled in accented English, the words barely audible through his makeshift mask.

The second blade whistled down toward Dominic’s left leg. Pain exploded through his consciousness like white lightning, and somewhere in the growing darkness, he heard his own voice screaming. Blood spread beneath him in an expanding pool, mixing with the morning dew on Chembur’s peaceful streets.

Other joggers materialized at the edge of his fading vision—shocked faces, someone shouting into a mobile phone, the sound of footsteps running in different directions. In the distance, like an answer to prayers he could not form, sirens began their familiar wail.

But as consciousness slipped away, Dominic Fernandes understood with crystal clarity that this was not random violence. This was a message, written in blood and bone, delivered with surgical precision in the heart of Mumbai’s suburbs.

The Octopus Group had not forgotten.

And somewhere in the networks that connected temples to boardrooms, prayer halls to intelligence agencies, word would spread that the game had begun again. The dance between ancient wisdom and modern power was resuming its deadly steps. In Mandsaur, Dashagriva Singh would soon learn that his quiet retirement was over.

If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy my novel The Kumbh Conspiracy.

🙏 Namaste