The excitement lasted exactly twenty minutes.
That was how long it took for reality to catch up.
For the first few of those minutes he had let himself imagine Portugal properly.
New coaches, new teammates, a different kind of football, the thing he had spent a lifetime wondering about finally close enough to touch.
Then the questions started arriving, and they weren’t romantic ones.
How much would it cost.
What documents he needed.
Whether his club would release him without a fight.
What happened if the trial ended in nothing.
That last one stayed longest.
Failure was always part of football.
Every player knew it.
Careers ended without warning, injuries arrived without permission, promising boys vanished every season and nobody asked where they went.
The difference was that most players didn’t know exactly what they were walking away from.
Bishal did.
He knew the life that waited if he stayed.
Not every detail, but enough.
The goals he would score.
The matches he would play.
The recognition that would come in the end, and the regret that would sit underneath it long after the noise died down.
For years he had wondered whether Europe could have changed something.
Maybe not everything.
Maybe nothing close to enough.
But something.
A little more visibility, a little more belief, a little more reason for the next boy to think it was possible.
Now he had a chance to find out, and instead of comforting him it made him nervous, because this time there would be no excuse waiting.
No question left unanswered, no road left unwalked.
Whatever happened next was his to own.
That evening the flat settled into its usual shape.
The television murmured in the corner, his mother moved between the kitchen and the table, his father read the paper and shook his head at it every so often.
Sambar on the stove, the pressure cooker hissing, children fighting over a cricket match in the lane below.
An ordinary scene, which was exactly why it was hard.
The longer he spent in 2008, the more he noticed the small things he used to walk straight past.
His mother’s voice calling everyone to dinner.
His father reading every article in the paper, including the ones nobody cared about.
The sound of a home that still felt permanent.
He knew better than to trust that feeling.
Nothing stayed permanent.
He had the proof of it folded away in another life.
His mother set the last dish down.
“Dinner.”
His father folded the paper at once, which told Bishal how hungry he was.
They ate, and for a while the talk drifted across nothing in particular.
An uncle coming up from Mysore.
A neighbour planning renovations.
A local politician making promises no one believed.
Bishal listened, and then he put his spoon down.
“I need to tell you something.”
Both of them looked up.
The air in the room changed in an instant.
His father adjusted his glasses.
His mother’s frown arrived early.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Nothing bad.”
“Then why do you sound like that?”
He smiled.
Some instincts never left a parent.
He took a breath.
“I got a football opportunity.”
His father nodded.
That part wasn’t unusual.
Trials, tournaments, training camps, they came around often enough.
The next part was the part that mattered.
“It’s in Portugal.”
The room went quiet.
Even the television seemed to drop its voice.
His mother blinked.
“Portugal?”
His father lowered his glasses.
“As in Europe?”
“Yes.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
Then his father leaned forward.
“Tell us properly.”
So he did.
The scout.
The recommendation.
The trial with Estoril Praia, a club in the Liga de Honra, the Portuguese second division.
He told them nothing was guaranteed.
And then he told them the part with the deadline in it.
“I leave in ten days.”
This silence lasted longer.
His mother stared.
His father folded the newspaper slowly and set it down beside his plate, and the paper leaving his hands meant more than anything he could have said.
It meant he was taking this seriously.
“Ten days is not much time,” his father said.
“I know.”
“How long would you be there?”
“A few weeks to start.
If they like what they see, it could go on.”
His father nodded, and then asked the question Bishal had been waiting for.
“How much will it cost?”
Football dreams always sounded romantic right up until money walked into the room.
Bishal laid out what the scout had told him.
Some of it covered, some of it not.
The club would help with accommodation during the trial.
Travel was still being worked out.
His father listened to all of it, then leaned back.
“And if it doesn’t work?”
There it was.
The question nobody wanted to ask out loud.
Bishal didn’t answer straight away, because the honest answer was complicated.
The younger version of him would have said something hopeful.
The older version knew football rarely followed the script you wrote for it.
“If it doesn’t work, I come home.”
“And then?”
The tone wasn’t harsh.
It was a father trying to measure a risk.
Bishal looked down at his plate.
The answer was simple enough.
Training would go on.
Domestic football would go on.
Life would go on.
The only difference was that he would know.
He would never spend another eighteen years wondering.
“I keep playing,” he said.
His father studied him for a few seconds, then nodded.
The answer seemed to settle something.
His mother had no interest in football logistics.
Her concern came from a different direction entirely.
“Do they eat spicy food in Portugal?”
Bishal stared at her.
“What?”
“I’m serious.”
“Amma—”
“You’ll be there for weeks.”
His father started laughing, and the tension in the room cracked open.
“What if he starves?”
“I don’t think that’s how Europe works,” Bishal said.
His mother ignored them both.
“And the weather?”
“I’ll survive.”
“It’s much colder there.”
“You’ve never been to Portugal.”
“I’ve seen television.”
That ended it.
Nobody could argue with that grade of confidence.
For a few minutes the worry split three ways, each of them holding a different corner of the same thing.
His mother fretted about clothes.
His father about money.
Bishal about football.
Then his father went quiet, and sat with it for a moment before he spoke again.
“Do you want to go?”
The question carried more weight than all the others, because it wasn’t about money or logistics or football.
It was about wanting.
And the answer came easily.
“Yes.”
No hesitation in it.
His father looked at him for a long moment, then nodded.
“Then go.”
Bishal froze.
“That’s it?”
“What else should I say?”
“I thought there’d be a lecture.”
His father smiled.
“You’re old enough to make your own decisions.”
It shouldn’t have landed the way it did.
But it did, because he remembered the first time.
The doubt, the hesitation, the fear he had dressed up as practicality and worn like good sense.
This conversation had gone a different way.
Not because his parents had changed.
Because he had.
The next morning, training felt different.
Every sprint, every pass, every touch carried the same small number underneath it.
Ten days.
The countdown had started.
The coach split them into groups for possession work, and where the old Bishal would have buried himself in the drill, this one watched everything.
The pace of it.
The movement.
The decisions.
Eighteen years had taught him things he had no words for at twenty-three, and now he could see them laid out on the grass in front of him.
The angle of a supporting run.
The half-beat in a pass that made it arrive easy or arrive hard.
The way a body had to be turned before the ball came, not after.
A teammate received with his shape all wrong and lost it.
The young players around him saw a bad touch.
Bishal saw the cause, three seconds upstream, where the man had set his feet the wrong way before the ball ever left the passer’s boot.
The game looked slower to him now.
Not easy.
Slower.
He had simply been here before.
He went home that evening tired in the good way, and the documents were waiting on his desk, and beyond them the thing that was no longer quite a dream and not yet quite a destination.
Ten days.
He could feel the clock in it now.