Fiction: Are You Going to Beat Me?

Sudeesh K

It was one of those tired nights that sag under their own weight. The city had gone quiet except for the faint murmur of traffic from the main road. By nightfall, I felt hollowed out, my gears turned by work assignments and routines, a weariness fit for a clockwork creature mimicking the machine-like pulsations of life. The kitchen light stayed off; the idea of cooking felt almost impossible.

From the third-floor balcony, I watched the street below, waiting for my biryani. On my phone screen, the delivery boy’s blue dot hovered somewhere nearby, then froze. For a while, it stayed there, motionless, uncertain, before vanishing altogether. Later, he said the navigation had betrayed him, that he’d pressed something wrong. The call had dropped. The app, he said, was useless that night. 

I remember how, in the small stillness between one call and the next, hunger began to feel like a kind of pressure…heavier, almost dramatically moral.

I waited patiently, earphones in, absorbing a podcast on Roger Penrose as the minutes drifted past. I recalled something Roger Penrose wrote in Shadows of the Mind that there is a profound distinction between what is computable and what is truly knowable. Even the most precise algorithm cannot account for the subtleties of human understanding. I could barely bring myself to care when the delivery boy arrived.

Fifteen minutes passed before he called again. His voice came thin and nervous, the kind that carries apology before the words even form. He asked me to send my location on WhatsApp. I did, though a quiet irritation was already gathering in my chest.

In this city, migrants and gig workers drift through long nights, knowing that suspicion settles on their faces long before their voices are heard. During that waiting time, it never occurred to me that the delivery app could map every road in the city, but not the road this boy had walked to reach me.

When I finally spotted him, he was standing by the gate, small and hesitant, a shape under the dull orange street light.

“Come up to the terrace,” I called out.

I’d been walking slow these days after an ankle injury. The stairs were not kind to me. Perhaps he, too, carried a limp of his own experience, one that wasn’t physically visible. Helplessness, after all, changes shape but never its underlying claim on us.

From the third-floor balcony, I shouted again, saying, “Just come over here!”

He hesitated at first, then started climbing. I could hear his footsteps falter midway, a dry breath escaping between each floor. When he reached me, he stopped a few feet away, his eyes restless, scanning my face as if measuring the weather in my expression.

And then, softly, almost whispering to himself, he asked,

“Sir… are you going to beat me?”

The words cut through the air. For a moment, I could only stare at him.

The beating question carried something raw and unguarded, a truth larger than either of us.

He was young, perhaps not even twenty, yet his clueless face had already learned a deep, resigned exhaustion, the kind etched by endless rides, unpaid dues, and the quiet, accumulating violences of simply trying to survive.

Of course, I had been irritated a moment earlier. But his fear belonged to another universe altogether, one that no ratings or tips could fix. It was the kind of fear that comes from knowing how badly he could be treated by the world he lived in. Perhaps he might as well fear an interaction that spirals into questions about his identity, his papers, his very right to be in the city. 

I shook my head slowly.

“No, brother. My leg’s not doing well; I can’t move fast. Just pass me the biryani packet and head on. You’ve already done enough.”

He nodded, quickly, almost in disbelief. He handed me the packet, trying to murmur something that sounded more like relief, and disappeared down the stairs. 

For a while, I just stood there, the food warm in my hands. And the night suddenly became vast and strange. From somewhere far below, the city’s low hum rose again: the endless cries of engines, honking horns, and a thousand other riders chasing timers through hunger, rain, and fatigue.

And I found myself baffled. What kind of world teaches a delivery boy to ask if he will be beaten for being late with someone else’s dinner?  

My hunger seems to have vanished somewhere, and as I resumed the podcast on Roger Penrose, physics felt heavier, especially that gap between the computable and the not, a kind of dim alley the mind keeps walking without ever finding a streetlight.

***

Bio: Dr Sudeesh K is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bangalore, Yeshwanthpur Campus, India. He holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad. He is a CertTESOL-certified faculty member, awarded by Trinity College, London. In addition to his regular publications in the fields of popular culture and crime cinema, he has given many invited lectures on cinema studies, audiovisual studies, and the Posthuman turn in English Studies. He has published articles in newspapers such as The Hindu and The Wire.   He has taught numerous MDC papers, including "Narratives of Crime," "Literature on Money," and "Literature on Fantasy," among others. Recently, he has served as a national-level conference convenor for themes related to Urban Humanities and Medical Humanities. 

Personal Email ID: sudeeshpadne@gmail.com

Institutional Email ID: sudeesh.k@christuniversity.in

University website link: https://m.christuniversity.in/ENGLISH%20AND%20CULTURAL%20STUDIES/faculty-details/NjA0MA==/centres

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Setu, December 2025