Chapter 1: Sunday

It was a quiet Sunday evening in Supernagar. Quiet by the megapolis' standards; less than a million were out on the streets, and fewer than half of them were honking. Poltu absently kicked a pebble, and it rolled behind a parked motorcycle.

"Look! It's Yay-Man!" said Rekha.

She was towing along her dear friend and neighbor. Poltu turned reluctantly. In that regard, he was like an ocean liner. Rekha often played the part of a tug boat, especially when post-dinner walks were involved.

Poltu's eyes followed Rekha's line of sight, lost the plot somewhere, and ended up on the moon. Yes, he thought, I must not look at the finger; I must look at the moon. It looks glorious tonight. Exactly like the block of cheese that he had feasted on a half hour ago.

And what a block of cheese it was. Just right amount of umami—

Poltu's ruminations were cut short by a slap on the back of his head.

"Not there! He's right in front."

Two men were walking up the stairs of the Lajawab Nagar metro station. Rekha was pointing at the fellow on the left. He was a middle-aged chap, radiating the charisma of a lifelong accountant. He was dressed to match, in brown trousers and a light blue shirt, with a black bag in hand. The shirt looked like it had seen better days, because it had. When his companion gestured expansively, the accountant nodded along enthusiastically.

"What are his superpowers?" asked Poltu.

It was hard to keep track of these things in Supernagar. There was a new Super each week. Three days ago, Biswa Kalyan Boy had made his debut. Poltu has tuned into BKB's MeTube feed, and fallen asleep thirty minutes into it. Apparently, BKB's manifesto about saving the world from the ravages of humanity had continued for another two hours. It resulted in a gridlock that lasted three hours, because traffic controllers had also fallen asleep—citywide. Within a day, BKB had been shunted to a sleep apnea research facility in Junglepur, and traffic controllers had to surrender their mobile phones when they reported for work.

"Yay-Man? He loves to agree," said Rekha.

"Agree?"

"With whatever you say. I first saw him on a news program about whether street dogs should be fed or sent to the pound."

"And?"

"He agreed."

---

Rajiv's neck felt sore. Ever since he had become Yay-Man, the incessant nodding had taken a toll on his C5-C6, the fifth and sixth vertebrae of his cervical spine. Rajiv was worried that spondylosis was a nod away.

Most of his fans—fans! some were air conditioners of Chor Bazaar make—mistook him for an accountant till they saw him nodding. That was an understandable mistake, because he had been an accountant. For an insurance firm. How that turned into this—

"How many points have you racked up this week?" asked Santosh.

Santosh has joined the same batch as him at Vayu Academy, three years ago. The academy was on the outskirts of Supernagar, one of the seven national academies that trained supers. Ever since he had spotted Rajiv loitering in a corridor, Santosh had adopted him.

"Just under seven hundred points," said Rajiv, "What about you?"

"It was one of my best weeks ever—eighteen hundred plus!"

The point system was how Supers made their living. At the top of the leaderboard were folks like Balwaan Boy, a strongman, and Gati Girl, a speedster. They netted over two hundred thousand each week.

Seven hundred points was barely enough for rent, groceries, and transport. Then again, Santosh has more marketable skills. He was a speedster, though not in the same category as Gati Girl. He was two orders of magnitude slower—if she was a normal human, then Santhosh was a snail. What made it worse was his poor sense of direction. He had ended up in the wrong country once, and had to be bailed out of jail by a reluctant government.

"Didn't you go in for to interview for a PR position with the Super Samaj Sewak? That sounded like a sweet gig." Santosh asked as they approached the turnstile to the station.

SSS was the political party that ruled Uttam Pradesh; Supernagar was its capital. Some said they ruled with a soft touch, others saw an iron fist underneath.

"It was a nice position all right, six thousand points a month, plus health and dental insurance," replied Rajiv, "Got through the written qualifiers just fine. But I had a hard time with the interview."

"What did they ask?"

"As I walked in, one interviewer said to another, 'Don't you think its a bad idea to hire a Super to work for a political party?' Then my superpower kicked in."