[ WP ] You are a professional pickpocket . You 've just picked someones pocket only to discover that the thing you have stolen is truly horrifying .

I could swear he knew. The railway station at Dadar is always a mass of people. Scores arrive and departe, every minute, through the day, into the night, across the year. They push, kick, prod, spit, moan, weep and fall upon each other. You feel hands upon your solar plexus. Ankles dig into your knees. Jaws bruise your ears. Sputum flies and flies drone. It gets worse during the monsoon when the sea avenges its dirtying by falling from blackened skies in numberless raindrops. You are so surrounded by physical stimuli that one more surreptitious touch barely registers in your overwhelmed mind. Thousands are robbed. They don ’ t even know it until they pull out their wallets to pay the rickshaw, the beggar, or the shopkeeper selling rotten food, and in their humiliation they swear to be more careful. But they keep getting robbed and they never even realize when it happens. Not when I rob them. It doesn ’ t pay to get caught. I once saw a child-thief caught and beaten by a furious crowd until the blood stopped flowing from his torn elbow. Foolish kid looked like a pickpocket would be expected to look. Trousers as brown as the sewage he slept in, hair grey from the cheap paint of the station walls, shirt stained by betel nut spit. You need to look vaguely respectable to survive in this business. Clean shaven, formal shirts, perhaps a continuous tapping on a cheap toy phone, with an occasional imaginary conversation with an imaginary corporate minion. You had to speak some English. Anything would do, really. Perhaps do an accent from a movie trailer you saw on the flatscreens in the electronics shop. 
 
 “ No. Now, now. No time tomorrow. Today. ” 
 
 Then you can pretend that your hand in their pocket was an accident and walk away apologizing and berating a fake colleague about a fake business deal. But I don ’ t let it go that far. My victims never know. They never feel my hands. But he knew. He knew it as it occurred. I could tell that he knew from the odd grin he gave me as I moved back and let the crowd take my place. I panicked. One word from him and the crowd could tear me apart. They would love it. He should ’ ve loved it. But he didn ’ t. He laughed as I jumped over the station wall into the street, into the rain. 
 
 The wallet bulged with paper and coins. The cards would go for a hundred rupees each. The season ticket could be sold for half its price. The wallet itself might fetch me enough for two days worth of biryani at the stall. The tiny vial of what smelled like jasmine perfume could get me a discount from one of the eunuch whores of the brothel district. There were nine hundred rupees worth of cash neatly folded and tucked. Fuck the grinning idiot, this was as good a lift as any. Better, in fact. I sprayed some of the perfume on my shirt. It had a lovely fragrance. 
 
 The day was only spoiled when I found an earthworm in my biryani. It was curled up in a chunk of chicken. When I bit it, it violently unfurled in my mouth. One end seemed to reach into my throat, the other wrapped around my tongue. I retched with tears in my eyes and vomited upon my feet. The earthworm moved languidly in the grey-yellow splatter. 
 
 It rained throughout the night, and my aluminum sheet shelter was flooded. The canvas canopy was leaking from several holes. A stray dog had squeezed in and shat in the gutter water that had streamed in. The smell was indescribable. I took out the jasmine vial from my pocket and sprayed it in the air. It didn ’ t help at all. I had to get out so I stood up on my rusted bed and looked around for the plastic bag containing my clothes. It floated in the water, dangerously close to the dogshit. I jumped on the floor to get to it. 
 
 The ground tickled. The tickle moved. It crawled up my leg. I gasped as I swatted it away. It was a millipede. Massive, red, proboscis flailing. It turned and slithered towards the plastic bag and floated in. 
 
 I realized how the bag crackled and shuddered. I couldn ’ t hear its plastic moan under the sound of the rain striking the canvas, but there it was. I could almost hear it when I looked at it. Things moved within. 
 
 I poked it with the broom. It burst like a swollen nodule of stale pus. Worms squeezed out. Slowly and swiftly, bodies emulating every imaginable curvature. They were coated with maggots and wet dirt. The dog woke with a start and howled and whimpered. I sounded no different and I jumped away, upon the bed, my heart threatening to explode. The bed reeled and tipped over. The wallet fell in the water, the vial was smashed. 
 
 The world synchronized, or maybe it was only the worms. They turned one of their ends, at once, together, all of them, towards me. I might have laughed at the scene, but I couldn ’ t even weep anymore. They crawled towards me. I backed off. The dog fled. The intensity of the rain increased. The raindrops grew heavy, incredibly so. 
 
 I was frozen in place, shivering like a maniac. The worms crawled closer and closer. I could smell my own fear trickling down my legs like soft, warm tar. 
 
 And they ignored me completely. 
 
 They crawled to the remains of the vial, the oily hues of the perfume, and around the epicenter of the fragrance. 
 
 And they stopped moving. Almost in reverence. They swayed in unison, with military discipline, with trained choreography, and the maggots coating them ruffled like hair in the breeze. 
 
 The rain grew heavier. It blotted the light from the canvas ceiling. The raindrops were long. They twisted and crawled and writhed. The center of the canvas ceiling lunged towards the vial like a finger of god. 
 
 The canvas was old. It tore. The rain of worms fell, careful to avoid the epicenter of the sacred fragrance.
