The next morning, Bengaluru reminded him that dreams cost money.
Not in the abstract.
Literally.
At 9:15 the power went.
One moment the fan was turning above him, the next it slowed, groaned, and stopped, and the silence that came after it felt wrong.
The fridge cut out.
The television went dark.
The whole flat seemed to exhale and give up.
“Again?” his mother called from the kitchen.
His father looked up from the paper.
“Scheduled cut?”
“No idea.”
Bishal lay there looking at the stalled fan while the June heat thickened around him.
In 2026 the cuts had mostly gone, at least in his part of the city.
In 2008 they were just weather.
You didn’t ask whether the power would go.
You asked how long.
An hour passed.
Then another.
By half eleven the flat was an oven, his mother’s patience was thinning, and even lunch had become a negotiation with physics.
Finally Bishal picked up the landline.
“I’m calling.”
His father folded a corner of the paper.
“Good luck.”
The board transferred him three times before a human answered, in a voice that made answering the phone sound like a personal injury.
“Hello?”
“Sir, our area’s had no power for three hours.”
“Hmm.”
Bishal waited.
Nothing came.
“Hmm?” he tried.
“Maintenance.”
“When does it come back?”
A pause.
“Soon.”
The way he said it, soon could mean ten minutes or next Thursday.
“Can you be more specific?”
“No.” Click.
Bishal stared at the receiver for a while, then put it down.
His father was already laughing.
“I told you.” Even his mother joined in from the kitchen.
“At least now you know.” And despite himself, Bishal laughed too.
Some institutions never changed.
He couldn’t take the heat indoors, so he went out, and found the whole neighbourhood had made the same decision.
Without electricity, everyone had migrated into the open.
Shopkeepers stood outside their shutters talking.
Retired uncles had claimed the plastic chairs under the trees.
Women gathered at the building entrances working through a full agenda of vegetable prices and relatives.
The children had taken the street.
The power cut had built a small festival without meaning to, the kind of thing that would quietly disappear from the city in the years ahead.
“Bishal!”
Three boys near a makeshift wicket.
One with a bat, one with a tennis ball, the third waving like he was flagging down a plane.
“Come play!”
“I think my cricket career ended before it started.”
“One over!”
“No.”
“Just field, then.”
“No.”
“Five minutes.”
The negotiation went on. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
The boys clearly believed persistence was a strategy, and the worst part was they were right.
As he gave in and walked over, something caught his eye.
The boy with the bat wore an old Argentina shirt, oversized, the name on the back faded but still legible.
Maradona.
“You follow football?” Bishal asked.
The boy looked baffled.
“Not really.”
“Then why the shirt?”
“I wanted a Sachin shirt.” The others nodded along like this was the most natural thing in the world.
“What happened?”
“Too expensive.”
“How expensive?”
“One thousand rupees.” The boy pointed proudly at the Argentina shirt.
“This one was a hundred.”
The whole group cracked up, and Bishal couldn’t stop himself joining them.
The logic was perfect.
Not Maradona.
Not Argentina.
Budget.
Somewhere, the greatest footballer alive had lost a straight fight to Indian household economics.
They got him to stay, and ten minutes in he remembered exactly why he hated street cricket.
Every ball was a court case.
“Out.”
“Not out.”
“He crossed the line.”
“What line?”
“There.”
“There’s no line.”
“Use your imagination.”
The rules changed every third delivery and somehow everyone followed them anyway.
The chaos was strangely comforting.
This was the India he remembered.
Loud, illogical, held together with nothing, and working all the same.
When it finally collapsed into an argument too big to recover from, the boys bought orange ice sticks off a passing cart, five rupees each, and one of them handed Bishal one without asking.
The first bite took him straight back.
Artificial flavour, artificial colour, pure childhood.
They sat in a row on the kerb and for a few minutes nobody said anything.
Then one of them spoke.
“Bhaiya?”
“Hmm?”
“Why don’t footballers get rich like cricketers?”
The others turned to look, waiting.
Bishal thought about it, then shrugged.
“Because more people watch cricket.”
The boys nodded.
That made sense to them.
Then another question.
“What if people watched football too?”
Bishal looked down the road.
At the kids, at the lane, at a country that loved the game and couldn’t be bothered to love its own players.
Then he smiled.
“Maybe one day they will.”
The power still wasn’t back when he got home.
His father had moved his chair to the window to use the last of the daylight, a notebook open beside him, pages full of numbers.
“What are you doing?”
“Calculating.”
That made Bishal suspicious immediately.
“Calculating what?”
His father turned the notebook around.
Flight estimates.
Travel costs.
Emergency money.
Accommodation.
Winter clothes.
Every page covered in his father’s careful hand.
The sight made Bishal’s stomach tighten, because there it was, the dream with a price tag attached, and the price wasn’t small.
“We’ll manage,” his father said.
Bishal looked away.
The words were meant to reassure him and did the opposite, because his parents weren’t wealthy.
Comfortable, yes.
Not wealthy.
Every rupee going into this was a rupee given up somewhere else.
The boy he used to be had never really understood that.
The man he was now understood it completely.
His mother came in with tea.
“Your father’s been at that all morning.”
“I can see.”
She set the cups down.
“Have you bought warm clothes?”
“No.”
“Portugal will be colder.”
“It isn’t Antarctica.”
“Cold is cold.”
That ended it.
The next day disappeared into paperwork.
Passport photographs, photocopies, forms, phone calls, a travel agency.
The romance of the thing evaporated the moment the documents arrived.
By evening a small stack of them sat on his desk, and for the first time Portugal looked less like a dream and more like a place he was actually going, which made it both better and worse.
The electricity came back just after sunset.
The fan spun up, the fridge found its hum, televisions flickered on across the neighbourhood, and somewhere nearby a cheer went up, the whole area apparently waiting on the same moment.
Bishal stood at the window and watched the lights return one flat at a time, a city switching itself back on.
Then his eyes went to the desk.
Passport.
Invitation.
Travel estimates.
Each one a step forward and a step further from home in the same motion.
That night, long after the flat had gone quiet, he got up for a glass of water.
The television was off, the street outside silent, only a few far-off dogs marking the dark.
On his way to the kitchen he saw a faint light from the small pooja room near the living room.
The door stood slightly open.
He slowed.
His mother sat cross-legged before the altar, the oil lamp soft on her face, eyes closed, hands folded.
She hadn’t heard him.
He stood where he was, unsure whether to go.
Then he caught her voice, barely above a whisper, and only pieces of it reached him.
Safe journey.
Good health.
Protect him.
Give him strength.
Let it work out.
Simple prayers, the kind that never made it into any newspaper, the kind no one else would ever hear, the kind only a mother made.
Something pulled tight in his chest.
In his first life he had never seen this.
Maybe it had happened while he wasn’t looking.
Maybe he had been too busy chasing the next thing to notice his mother asking the dark to look after him.
He stood in the hallway a moment longer, then went back to his room without the water, and lay awake for a long time, thinking about how many people quietly carry a piece of your dream without ever being asked to.
In the morning his mother said nothing about it, and neither did he.
She put an extra dosa on his plate and watched him eat it with the particular attention of someone memorising a thing before it goes away.
His father read out a headline about petrol prices nobody had asked to hear.
It was the most ordinary breakfast in the world, and Bishal understood now that this was exactly what made it worth keeping.
He ate slowly.
He let his father finish the whole article.
There would be a day, not far off, when he would have given a great deal for one more dull morning at this table, and unlike everyone else in the room, he already knew it.