Anil Aggarwal's "The Mystery of the Drowned Man" (short story, free): Biological basis of drug addiction

This is as original as most of Anil's fiction, but is probably his longest story I've seen so far (most of his work appears to be flash fiction length). It also has a lot of info dumping. Read it for the idea rather than entertainment.

Government propaganda tells us that drug addiction is a bad, in fact criminal, thing. What if people differ sufficiently in their metabolism that what is poison to one is sugar to another? That's the basic idea of this story.

Story summary.

There was "some rather dubious evidence that Ramlal had been killed by Jagga and then thrown in the Indian Ocean, off the coast of Gujrat." It's also known that he was a drug addict & might have drowned. How to prove if he was killed & then thrown into ocean, or entered water on his own & drowned?

This is the story of doctors piecing together the evidence from postmortem, & finding something new about human biology.

Fact sheet.

First published: Spandan, 1995-96.
Rating: B.
Download full text from author's website.