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So in Freenagar, young Chakram Shastri decided to be a superhero. He gathered together resources, built a secret hideout, figured out custom catch phrases, worked on those facial expressions, trained hard to be able to fire quick witty comebacks to supervillains’ dangerous threats, and a lot of other superheroic stuff.

Then he got to the identity part. He had a name in mind. He was sure it would work. The name was Batman.

He groaned. Apparently, a self righteous do-gooder had already taken it. Chakram wasn’t one to persevere. But he had a way to make the name his. And it wasn’t entirely impossible. His uncle, a scientist of no repute, had once made a time machine that worked.

Chakram pointed all his research into the said Batman’s past (it involved a lot of googling) and came up with an effective plan. The research even exposed Batman’s identity to him, but that was of no consequence. He knew that at a distant point in his past, the screwed up psycho billionaire Bruce Wayne had looked out of his window and had seen a bat.

“Heh!” Chakram said to himself.

Chakram thus, pointed the time machine to the Wayne manor in the far off Gotham City of a couple of decades past. Good timing landed him mere days away from his intended night of reckoning. He made his preparations, calculated a lot and at the right moment was found perched on a tree in front of Wayne Manor. In front of the room in which Bruce Wayne sat, looking into the darkness outside, waiting for inspiration to strike.

Chakram waited with his dartgun out. His other hand held a pigeon. He waited. Bruce Wayne sighed. Then Chakram saw it.

Silhoutted against the moon, a bat approached the manor. In exactly one minute, it would pass Bruce Wayne’s window. Chakram shot. The bat fell silently into the grass. Chakram let the pigeon free. It fluttered toward the window and made it there in time. Bruce Wayne turned, he saw the bird.

Chakram grinned into his binoculars as he read the billionaire’s lips. They said, “I shall become a pigeon.”

Chakram stayed one more day just to be sure of things. An old man named Alfred found a dead bat in the lawn the next morning as the billionaire jumped around him talking about a certain place called the pigeonhole.

Chakram returned to present day Freenagar and checked reference points. The Prime Minister was someone called Manmohan Thing and the country’s national fruit was now banana. Apart from that not many visible changes marked the altered present. Chakram’s calculations had confirmed as much.

He did a doodle search for batman and found no references of much consequence (there was a Norwegian production house called Batman Films). Further research showed that the Billionaire had been exposed two years after donning the feathered cape. His embarrasment then caused him to disappear from public sight.

Chakram was a happy man. If all went well, Batman could start hero work in a couple of weeks. A few minor glitches would have to be taken care of though. The batman.com domain for example. It was taken. Some random blogger.

The above piece is a work of fiction. DC comics, Warner Brothers, Wayne Enterprises, and all others who might be offended by this… please don’t sue me. It’s all Chakram’s fault. I am not affiliated with him. We are not even in the same universe.

Posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 1:33 pm and filed under Myth, comics, stories.

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