A superhero should never have to stand in a queue.

Rohan Babu thought this while his Rolex Submariner watch crawled towards noon, while the Suryanagar District Court building shed flakes of white paint into the heat and a line of people clutching crumpled summons papers shuffled beneath a faded blue tarpaulin. He wore a cotton cap pulled low and a surgical mask, but his eyes betrayed him. Two college students ten feet ahead kept turning their phones at angles, pretending to photograph each other while the rear camera pointed squarely at him.

They’ll have it on Instagram before I reach the bench.

Inside, the courtroom offered no refuge. Dusty ceiling fans wobbled overhead with the insistence of old men who would not stop talking, and the digital case-list board blinked red numbers that meant nothing to him. Somewhere on that list his name had been reduced to a bare crime number and police station, a case in which the FIR had been registered months ago, the investigation wrapped up, and a bulky chargesheet filed before the court. The Magistrate had already “taken cognizance,” as his lawyer liked to say, and that single phrase had been enough for the court to start treating him like a regular item on its daily menu. First had come the summons, then a non-bailable warrant when he missed one date for a film shoot, and now, even though the matter had not yet reached the stage of “framing of charge,” he was required to be personally present every time the case was posted “for appearance” or “for supply of copies.” Lawyers in black coats shouldered past without a glance. To them he was simply Case No. 1147 of 2024, not the man whose figure measured forty feet on the hoarding outside RTC Cross Roads for “Rowdy Raja.” A stack of brown case files on the clerk’s desk stood taller than his ego had ever reached. His own file, he noticed, sat somewhere in the middle, pressed flat by the weight of everyone else’s trouble and waiting, like him, to be committed to the Sessions Court where his real trial would begin.

A duffadar read his name from the register. Not his screen name. His legal name, the one on his Aadhaar card, delivered in the same flat tone used for the petty-theft accused who had gone before him.

“Item Number 14! Writ Petition Number 1147 of 2024! Ajay Gajanan versus Rohan Ramakrishna Chawdhury! Advocate Sri Anantham! Advocate Sri Simhadri!”

He stepped forward. The wooden bar pressed against his stomach. Behind him, Ajay Gajanan sat on the last bench, arms folded, one corner of his mouth lifted just enough to be noticed. Beside Ajay, Advocate Anantham arranged a tower of manila folders with theatrical precision, smoothing each label for the benefit of no one in particular. Rohan shot him a reluctant glance. He’s performing for the gallery, not the judge.

The Additional Sessions Judge, a woman in her early fifties with reading glasses balanced on the tip of her nose, looked up from the charge sheet. Behind her, mounted high on the wall, the brass Ashoka emblem gleamed under the tube light. Four lions facing four directions, seeing everything. Rohan had never noticed the emblem in any courtroom scene he had filmed. It was larger than any cardboard cut-out ever erected outside a theatre for his openings.

“Mr. Rohan Babu,” the judge said, removing her glasses, “this court has received the charge sheet under Sections 329, 351 and 109 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Criminal trespass, criminal intimidation, and attempt to murder. You understand the gravity?”

“Yes, Your Honour.”

“Celebrity status does not purchase patience from this bench. The law moves slowly, Mr. Rohan Babu. But it moves for everyone.”

She set a new date, three weeks away. Rohan stepped out through the corridor, jostled by elbows and file-carrying clerks. The dusty glass of a tea stall counter near the gate caught his reflection and warped it, stretching his jaw, shrinking his forehead, making him grotesque.

How did it come to this. From towering cut-outs in Hyderabad, all around Andhra and Telangana, to standing like a schoolboy in Suryanagar.

~*~

Four months earlier, the world had been correctly shaped. Hyderabad had thrown its arms open for the premiere of “Rowdy Raja” and Rohan had walked through them in a midnight-blue suit while drone cameras circled above the crowd and giant LED screens replayed his dialogue on loop. Confetti caught in his hair. An award trophy gleamed gold under studio lights. He waved to the screaming gallery the way a raja waves from a decorated elephant, slow and certain of love.

Then Suryanagar. A felicitation event at a five-star hotel, marble lobby, velvet ropes, television screens chattering entertainment news. A cluster of organisers pressed a phone into his hand. On the screen, a reel played. His voice, exact in its cadence, was selling a brand of cheap hair oil he had never touched. Another reel showed a deepfake of his face grafted onto a comedian’s body, dancing obscenely. A man opened a laptop. Torrent links. Pirated uploads of “Rowdy Raja” on Ajay Gajanan’s YouTube channel, already at four lakh views with revenue flowing into someone else’s account.

His own face stared back at him from the paused pirated frame, pixelated, low-resolution, glitching at the jawline. The contrast against the 4K version he was accustomed to felt like seeing his portrait drawn by a drunk.

This bastard is eating my bread and mocking my face with it.

In his films, justice was seized. Not requested. The dialogue from “Rowdy Raja” echoed in his skull. “Nyayam adakku, laakko thammudu” he had roared on screen, and the theatre had erupted. Around him, the entourage murmured encouragement, the way flies gather around overripe fruit. “Sir, this is too much insult. Someone like you...”

He went that evening. Three men from his entourage flanked him. Ajay’s office occupied two rooms above a xerox shop. Inside, LED strip lights cast a bluish glow on a cheap green-screen cloth hanging crookedly from a curtain rod. Multiple monitors displayed dashboards of views, comments, subscriber counts. His face looped on every screen. His voice waveform danced on editing software, stolen and stretched into shapes he had never intended.

Rohan kicked a camera tripod into the wall. Glass from a partition cracked and scattered across the floor like dropped sugar. He overturned a desk, grabbed Ajay by the collar, and pressed him against the subscriber-count board until the printed numbers crumpled against his back.

“You think you can wear my face and I won’t come for you?”

He did not notice Ajay’s assistant, a thin boy of nineteen, discretely propping a phone against a coffee mug on the far shelf, the red recording dot pulsing in the corner of the screen.

Rohan delivered a monologue, almost scripted, full of film-dialogue cadences, then released Ajay’s collar and walked out. He felt the satisfaction of a climax scene. In the stairwell, faces peered through the railings, already rewatching the clip on the assistant’s WhatsApp forward.

Behind the cracked glass door, Ajay picked up a visiting card from his desk. “Adv. Anantham, Criminal Law, Suryanagar.” He turned it over in his fingers, then reached for his phone.

~*~

The summons found Rohan on an outdoor set in Ramoji Film City, a meticulously constructed Italian city street with artificial moss on fake stone walls. A white envelope with the Suryanagar court seal. His manager, reading the charges aloud, turned pale.

Trespass. Criminal intimidation. Attempt to murder…. Attempt to murder—that collar-grab, that glass, that tripod aimed at his head.

What followed was not a single humiliation but a slow grinding—a stone mortar reducing whole spices to powder. Ten court appearances over eight months. Each one required his personal presence because his counsel Simhadri, clever and hungry for cameras, never filed an application for exemption from appearance under Section 317 of the old CrPC, now Section 355 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. Each hearing meant a full day lost. His calendar app filled with red blocks marked “Suryanagar, Full Day.” Production boards at Ramoji showed his name struck out and rewritten so many times the whiteboard had a permanent grey smudge where his shooting dates should have been.

Simhadri gave interviews outside the court, positioning himself before the nameboard, occupying eighty percent of the frame while Rohan appeared as a blurred shape in the background. Rohan watched one such clip in his vanity van and felt something shift behind his ribs. Not anger. Exhaustion.

Even if they acquit me, these days are gone. I can’t reshoot them.

One hearing was adjourned because the presiding magistrate had been transferred. He had travelled five hours, waited three, and returned with nothing. In the hotel room, his suitcase lay open on the bed, half-packed, belonging nowhere.

Finally, through a mediator, settlement talks began. Ajay opened at one crore, the figure written in thick black marker on a notepad. Rohan countered at ten lakhs, the number looking thin and apologetic in smaller handwriting beneath. They settled at fifty lakhs. But attempt to murder under Section 109 BNS was non-compoundable. No magistrate could simply close it on a compromise. A criminal petition had to be filed before the Hon’ble High Court for the State of Telangana under Section 528 of the BNSS, the successor to the old Section 482 CrPC, requesting quashing on the grounds that both parties had settled and continuing prosecution served no purpose of justice. Ajay filed a supporting affidavit. Eight weeks later, the Hon’ble High Court quashed the proceedings.

The evening he left Suryanagar for the last time, Rohan looked back at the court building silhouetted against a copper sky. The building appeared no larger than a matchbox from the car window, yet it had made him feel smaller than anything in his life.

On the drive home, milestone boards ticked past. Hyderabad 120 km. Hyderabad 80 km. The distance shrank, but something inside him did not expand back to its original size.

~*~

His renovated bungalow in Jubilee Hills gleamed behind a glass facade and a manicured lawn where a Rolls-Royce Phantom sat on the driveway like a loyal animal. But beyond the compound wall, a slum had spread in the seven months since his renovation. Blue tarpaulin roofs weighed down with bricks, tin sheets rusting at the seams, plastic water drums lining a narrow lane where open drains caught the sunlight and threw it back dirty. Visiting film directors and producers had to drive past children playing cricket with a broken bat, clotheslines drooping with faded sarees. A director once murmured, “Rohan Babu garu, why is this jhopadpatti right at your gate?” and the question burnt like a lit matchstick dropped on his tongue.

One Sunday afternoon—a rare lull in the shootings—he walked to his gate and found a row of small children squatting along the outer wall, chalk drawings scrawled on the concrete, and the unmistakable evidence that they had no toilet to use. He snatched the bamboo lathi from the security guard’s cabin. The same reflex. The film-hero reflex. He charged out shouting, waving the stick, and the children screamed and scattered between the shacks like sparrows flushed from a neem tree.

He chased one boy through a gap between two huts. His polished shoes sank into a muddy puddle. The boy darted through a torn curtain that served as a door and Rohan followed, pushing the cloth aside.

Inside, the room was barely eight feet across. A thin mat on the floor. A steel tumbler. A cracked mirror leaning against the mud wall. A woman sat with her back pressed to the corner, nursing an infant whose limbs were the colour and thickness of dry tamarind branches. The baby’s hand, resting on the woman’s chest, was not much bigger than Rohan’s thumb.

He held up his own thumb without thinking. Compared. The child’s fingers barely extended past the first joint of his thumbnail.

That is a human hand. That is an entire human hand and it fits inside my fist.

The woman looked up. Her eyes held no accusation, no plea. Just the flat patience of someone for whom catastrophe was a daily weather pattern. Rohan lowered the lathi until its tip rested softly on the mat, harmless now, pointless.

He backed out. Walked home. Left muddy footprints across his own marble floor and did not order the maid to wipe them.

That night he called Satyamurthy ‘Hitaishi,’ his oldest friend, the screenwriter who had shaped three of his biggest hits and who spent his weekends volunteering at municipal schools. When Satyamurthy came, Rohan sat in his study, pressing his thumb against the edge of the desk, measuring it again and again.

“I went in there to scare them. And I saw this baby. Arey, its hand was... no bigger than my thumb. The whole hand.”

Satyamurthy listened. Then he leaned forward. “You chased children out of anger. But what chased them here? That’s where the real villain is. Failed welfare schemes, migration from villages, no sanitation, no housing, no regular work. You thought you were above the law in Suryanagar. You weren’t. But you can choose to be above your old self.”

He pulled a notepad across the table and began drawing columns. Numbers. Families. Needs.

~*~

“Maa Manchi Rowdy” broke every record that quarter. Booking apps showed “Housefull” in red across every screen in every city. The fee credited to Rohan’s account appeared as an SMS notification so long the preview cut it off at seven digits. He forwarded the screenshot to Satyamurthy with one line of text. “Let’s use this.”

They brought in Dayanand, a middle-aged Community Organizer with the GHMC, who appeared at the slum with a clipboard, a tablet, and a stack of printed survey forms. Door to door. Chalk numbers on each hut. Lists of family members, columns for skills, education, health. One hundred families. No legal housing. Informal work. Young people underemployed but willing.

Around Rohan’s dining table, layout plans spread like unfolded maps of a country he had never visited. Sticky notes in three colours. Housing. Skills. Health. Satyamurthy pinned a fourth. Education. A low-cost apartment complex on the city’s outskirts, five-storey blocks with a common playground. A skills centre offering tailoring, masonry, motorcycle repair, plumbing, computer basics, app-based delivery training. Nutrition programmes for pregnant women and children modelled on the mid-day meal scheme. Government school admissions coordinated through the district education office. Dr. Vivek Vardhan, a psychologist Satyamurthy had worked with on a documentary, agreed to run group sessions for the men, addressing addiction and anger in a community hall where maroon plastic chairs were arranged in a circle rather than rows.

Over eleven months, the slum transformed through a sequence of changing surfaces. Survey stickers on tin doors gave way to relocation notices, then to vacant, flattened earth where grass began to push through. At the construction site, steel rods jutting from foundation pits grew into painted balconies with iron grilles and name boards for each block. At the skills centre, young men and women in blue uniforms practised on motorcycles mounted on repair stands, bent over plumbing toolkits, typed at rows of second-hand computers whose screens glowed with the pale green of fresh starts. At the distribution point, sacks of rice and cartons of nutritional supplements stood in neat rows while women queued with coloured tokens, each colour corresponding to a trimester or an age bracket.

A man once notorious for drunken fights in the lane now stood shaven and upright, gripping his first bank passbook with both hands as if it were a diploma.

The families moved on an auspicious day in Margashira. Trucks loaded with metal trunks, rolled-up mats, aluminium vessels, plastic chairs. Children raced each other up staircases with painted railings, marvelling at bedroom windows that looked out onto a playground instead of a drain. Rohan watched from the side in a plain kurta, no bodyguards, no entourage. A television crew came for the inauguration and he gave two sentences before stepping out of the frame and pointing the camera towards Dayanand, towards the residents, towards a young man in a blue uniform who had just completed his plumbing certification.

Months later, on an evening when the sky over Hyderabad hung low and orange with dust and the last azan of the day drifted from a distant mosque, Rohan returned to the housing complex alone. He walked through clean stairwells where someone had drawn fresh rangoli at each landing. Behind closed doors, television cartoon jingles competed with the clatter of pressure cookers. Children sat at dining tables doing homework under tube lights, their pencils scratching against ruled notebooks.

He recognised her on the second floor of Block-B. The same woman, standing at the kitchen counter of a 2BHK flat in a simple cotton saree, stirring something on a two-burner gas stove. The aroma of daal frying with mustard seeds and curry leaves drifted into the corridor. Beside her, a toddler in an oversized T-shirt printed with a cartoon hero wobbled on a small plastic scooter, one foot pushing against the tiled floor. Her husband appeared in the doorway as Rohan approached, hands joined in a spontaneous namaste. He fell in behind him, palms still pressed together, and said only once, “Sir, I’m a mestri now.”

The child saw Rohan and ran towards him with the unsteady joy of someone who had recently discovered legs. Small fingers grabbed his hand. Rohan looked down. The child’s hand wrapped around his thumb, and this time the fingers curled more than halfway around it.

“Not tiny anymore,” he said, almost to himself.

The mother folded her hands. No speech. No ceremony. Just a shared look that held the full weight of what had changed and what never could be undone.

He walked down the stairwell and into the courtyard where children played hero-hero with toy guns and bedsheet capes, arguing over roles. One boy planted his feet wide and announced, “I’ll be the hero who builds houses, not fights. Like Rohan sir.” The quarrels dropped. A quick cheer went up—“Rohan sir!”—then scattered into laughter.

Rohan stepped through the gate of the complex and looked back. Where blue tarpaulin and tin sheets had once sagged against the skyline, rows of lit windows now glowed, each one a small screen of real life playing without intermission. He turned towards the road, and for the first time in years, Rohan Babu walked away from a crowd without waving, knowing that somewhere behind him a child’s hand had finally outgrown his thumb.