GHOST IN THE MIRROR
Our targets weren’t monsters.
They were men who knew how to smile.
Men who signed cheques, cut ribbons, walked with confidence, and talked about “discipline” in front of cameras.
Men like Vijay Sen.
Polished, powerful, and poison at the core.
But every empire has cracks.
And we became 'the hammer'.
After that night — the night Harish made me choice— leave or stay— I choose to stay.
He said we weren’t fighting people; we were fighting “THE SYSTEM.”
A word that sounded too big for what we really were — two broken people trying to burn something uglier than ourselves.
Harish worked like a machine.
He had files, folders, contacts.
He made maps of people’s sins— teachers who silenced victims, alumni who donated hush money, parents who called harassment “misunderstanding.”
He tracked everything.
I used to watch him from the corner of his apartment, surrounded by cigarette smoke and flickering light. His eyes never left the screen.
He wasn’t human in those moments — more like a ghost crawling through data.
“We don’t go after small fires.” he said once.
“We burn the engine.”
I didn’t fully understand what that meant until later.
At that time, I was just fire.
And fire doesn’t wait for blueprints.
Our first strike was clean.
A man, Reeva Saran’s father — head of a school trust, laundering money through fake scholarships.
This name felt familiar.
Too familiar that I can't wait to see her feel what we felt in that party when they mocked and judged us.
Tables had really turned.
Harish leaked documents to reporters. I sent anonymous emails with the evidence.
By morning, the man was on the front page — headline: ‘School Director Linked to Money Scam.’
He called it slander.
We called it justice.
Next came a politician — one of Vijay’s close friends from our school’s alumni network.
We found his private chats with underage girls, hidden inside an encrypted folder Harish cracked after three sleepless nights.
I didn’t even want to see the screenshots.
Harish did.
He read them, expressionless, then pressed upload.
By noon, every news outlet had the story.
By evening, the man’s career was over.
And somewhere, Vijay’s circle cracked again.
It was strange.
Watching people fall.
It didn’t make me happy.
It just made me quiet.
Harish kept saying,
“We’re not killing. We’re correcting.”
But sometimes correction hurts more than death.
Then we aimed higher— the school board itself.
The same board that gave Vijay awards for “educational and character excellence.”
Harish had found their weak spots — unpaid salaries, forged donations, sexual harassment cases buried for money.
We didn’t need weapons.
Just truth, released in small doses.
One by one, reputations collapsed.
One member tried to bribe us through an anonymous channel.
Harish laughed and sent him his own voice recording offering the bribe.
And just like that, the board fell apart.
Vijay started showing up in fewer events.
His social media posts turned defensive.
He fired his assistant.
He looked tired — like a man who didn’t understand why the world suddenly hated him.
That’s when I asked Harish,
“Why not go for him now?”
He didn’t look up. Just lit a cigarette.
“Because he needs to feel what we felt. Slowly. Quietly. Alone.”
I wanted to disagree.
But he was right.
Revenge only works when the person starts rotting from inside.
Weeks passed.
Days blended.
We didn’t talk about feelings, or sleep, or even the past.
We just worked.
Harish taught me how to trace financial trails, how to read encrypted emails, how to plant leaks without leaving fingerprints.
It wasn’t peaceful— just strange.
He’d type, and I’d watch him— the glow from his laptop turning his face pale.
There was something about him that scared me more than any target.
He looked too calm for someone doing what we did.
Too sure.
And yet… I trusted him.
A stranger who knew everything about me.
Who had stalked me before we even met.
Who could destroy me with one call— but hadn’t.
Maybe that was why I followed his lead.
Not because I trusted his words.
But because he was just like me— already burning.
The next big storm came for Vijay with a file he handed me one night.
Inside were photos of Ragini.
Not the ones from reports or forums— these were real.
Personal.
Her sketches.
Her notes— detailes of everyday harassment she went from just for rich kids entertainment and incompetence.
A diary entry written two weeks before her existence vanished.
She had drawn a pair of hands— tied, fading.
Underneath, she’d written:
“I wanted a bright future but they wrote dark death for me.”
I stared at it for a long time.
My throat hurt.
She wasn’t just a name anymore.
She was a girl who loved art, who trusted the wrong people, who probably smiled like me before the world killed her.
I always wondered why i was obsessed with her.
She was another darker story of me.
I was thinking to myself.
Then from another side of room Harish’s voice broke the silence.
“She wasn’t just someone I pitied.”
I looked at him.
He wasn’t looking back — just staring at the wall, eyes half-empty.
“She trusted me once. To protect her story. To expose them. And I didn’t.”
He paused for a second then said—
“I froze. I was scared. And they erased her before I could even try.”
He laughed softly — that kind of laugh that comes before tears.
“She trusted me to protect her story as evidence.
And I didn’t.
I didn’t protect her dignity nor her existence neither her wish to not want to see anymore Raginis on their list."
Something inside me twisted.
Because I knew that feeling too well.
He looked at me.
“I won’t make that mistake again. I won't be a coward anymore. There won't be another Ragini nor Kamna!”
"You will." I said with emotions that I could gather but came out dry as his confession.
He looked at me finally.
And for a moment, neither of us was pretending.
Just two people haunted by the same ghost.
We didn’t hug.
We didn’t cry.
We just sat there— like reflections that forgot who was real.
That night, we made our final plan.
Not just to destroy Vijay.
But to bury the entire system that made him.
Harish called it “The Purge.”
I called it peace.
We mapped everything — from school trusts to shell companies, from board members to hidden donors.
Each one tied back to Vijay like veins to a rotten heart.
When Harish finished the chart, he looked at me and said,
“Once we do this, there’s no going back.”
I smiled faintly.
“There never was.”
He nodded, closing the file.
And for the first time, I saw a flicker of fear in his eyes.
Not for what we were about to do—
but for what it would make us become.
It’s strange how revenge changes shape.
At first, it was sharp. Clear.
Now it’s blurred — half rage, half purpose.
Sometimes, when I saw myself in the mirror, I didn’t recognize the eyes looking back.
Cold. Still. Unblinking.
Like a ghost that borrowed my face.
Maybe that’s what Harish saw too.
Because he started avoiding eye contact after that night.
We became silent partners in something bigger than hate— a haunting.
Two ghosts in the mirror.
Waiting for the moment the real monster finally looked back.
For now— Real monster was waiting for its fall.
