Zakir Ali "Rajneesh"'s "Visfot" ("Explosion") (short story, invisibility, Hindi, free)

Note this story is in Hindi.

OK reading. A revenge story that is a sort of mix of invisibility stories with David Marusek's "Osama Phone Home".

Story summary.

Shahid is a man from Doda (JK, India) who's lost his family over the years to multiple terrorist attacks. Now it's time for his revenge.

He sets up a lab in Delhi to develop an invisibility paint. Spread it on a surface, & the surface becomes invisible because "it absorbs light"! Won't absorbing light make it black, & easily identifiable against the background? But I'm nit-picking.

Anyway, his plan is to go across the border to PoK, & plant bombs in terrorist training camps being run with Pakistan government's aid. He will be successful, but die after returning in rain because of a side effect of invisibility paint discovered too late - paint washes off in water, removing invisibility, but this solution is fatal to wearer.

I guess social mores prevented the author from stating that the man must have crossed the border naked. He had painted his body; not his clothes.

Fact sheet.

First published: indiascifiarvind.blogspot.com, 1 September 2008.
Download full text (in Hindi).
Rating: B