The Third Face - Part One

by Virender Jaiswal

The video had been live for forty minutes when Vasanthi Rajagopal watched herself say something she had never said.She sat in her car outside the newsroom with her phone propped on the steering wheel. It was her face, her green cotton salwar suit, her habit of tucking her hair behind the left ear before a hard sentence. Ninety seconds long."Sources inside the Rashtriya Navodaya Party confirm that the party's treasurer routed campaign money through the Sri Vinayaka Charitable Trust," the other Vasanthi said. "And that the death of candidate Prakash Deshpande was not an accident."She stopped listening after that. The other Vasanthi went on for another minute, calm and unhurried, and then the clip ended. Twenty-one lakh views.Her phone buzzed. Unknown number: You should have stayed quiet.Then another. Everyone knows your face.By midnight the hashtag had a name. By two, someone had posted...