July, 2026
The office lights flickered once before stabilising, a brief, almost apologetic gesture from an overworked power system.
Ram Prasad Gupta barely noticed.
He was staring at his screen; eyes fixed on a spreadsheet that had long since stopped making sense. Rows of numbers stretched endlessly, forecast deviations, seasonal corrections, regional adjustments. Somewhere in that grid was a mistake. There was always a mistake.
"Still here?" came a voice from behind.
Ram didn’t turn. "Hmm."
His colleague, Ankit, leaned over his shoulder. "It’s 7:15, bhai. Even that stickler brown-nosing Reddy has logged off."
Ever since Janardana Reddy had pipped Ankit for credit in a joint project, he had become Ankit’s worst enemy. Ram sympathised, privately.
Ram finally looked up, blinking as though surfacing from underwater. "Yeah. Just finishing this model."
"You’ve been ’just finishing’ since five."
Ram gave a faint smile. "That’s how it works."
Ankit shook his head. "One day you’ll die in this chair. Then they’ll send an email, ’deeply saddened’, and post your job the next day."
"Two days," Ram corrected dryly.
Ankit laughed. "Optimistic."
The joke lingered longer than it should have.
By the time Ram shut down his system, most of the floor had emptied. The cleaning staff had begun their quiet routines, wiping desks, emptying bins, moving like ghosts through corporate fatigue.
He packed his laptop carefully, almost ritualistically. Charger coiled. Notebook aligned. Pen clipped into place.
Routine mattered.
Outside of work, life tended to blur. Inside routine, things held shape.
As he stepped into the elevator, he pulled out his phone. The article was still open.
"Colonial extraction was not merely economic; it reshaped social hierarchies, labour patterns, and political imagination..."
He skimmed a paragraph, then scrolled back, reading more slowly this time.
He had discovered this corner of history almost by accident a few years ago, first through documentaries, then books, then academic papers dense enough to deter most casual readers.
But for Ram, it scratched something deeper. Not patriotism, not in the loud, performative sense. Something quieter. A need to understand how things became what they were.
Why did India develop the way it did? Why did inequality persist even after 80 years of independence? Why did certain systems feel... inherited?
He often wondered what it would have been like to live then. Not as a hero. Not as someone in textbooks. Just... a man trying to get through the day.
The elevator doors opened to the lobby.
Outside, the sky had already broken.
Rain fell hard and slanted, bouncing off the pavement in restless bursts. The air smelled of wet dust and diesel, a scent uniquely Indian, uniquely monsoon.
The security guard glanced up from his stool. "Late today, sir."
Ram nodded. "Hmm."
"Rain will get worse."
"I hope to reach home before it does."
"You are too optimistic, Sir," the guard said, smiling with commiseration.
Ram stepped out.
The first drops hit his face cold and immediate. Within seconds, his shirt began to cling slightly at the shoulders. He ran to the parking lot.
The parking lot was half-empty.
Rows of bikes and cars stood under uneven shelter, some covered, others exposed. Ram reached his car, an old Alto 800 that he had purchased second-hand to learn driving and did not feel any particular need to upgrade.
For a moment, he just sat there in the parked car, watching the rain.
There was something about it, how it blurred edges, softened the harshness of concrete and glass. Even the office building behind him looked less sterile, almost human.
His phone buzzed.
A message from his mother.
"Reached home?"
He typed back: "Leaving now."
A pause, then another message: "Eat something on the way. Don’t skip."
He didn’t reply; he never replied to that message.
The engine sputtered once, then started.
Ram adjusted his seatbelt and eased into the road.
Traffic had already thickened. Headlights smeared into long streaks across the wet surface. Autorickshaws darted unpredictably, their drivers hunched forward like men at war.
A bus honked, a long, aggressive blast that seemed less about warning and more about dominance.
Ram kept to the left, steady, cautious. He was a careful driver, not out of fear, but out of habit.
The ride was slower than usual. The rain had thickened, turning into a steady sheet that blurred the edges of everything. Streetlights glowed like distant halos. The road, slick and treacherous, demanded attention.
Ram drove carefully, his mind quieter now, focused on the immediate.
A bus rumbled past too close. A delivery rider sped recklessly ahead. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rolled.
At a red light, he stopped, tapping his fingers against the steering wheel. His phone buzzed in his pocket. The signal turned green before he could check it. As he rode, his mind drifted again, not fully, just enough to layer thought over instinct. The article returned to the forefront of thought.
Colonial policies. Land taxes. Famines.
He thought of numbers again, but different ones this time. Grain output. Export figures. Mortality estimates.
Thousands of tonnes of grain, millions of people, always millions.
Reduced to data points.
He wondered what those numbers looked like on the ground.
A farmer watching his crop being taken. A family having less to eat each day. A clerk writing it all down somewhere, detached, obedient.
"Someone like me," Ram muttered under his breath.
The thought lingered longer than expected.
The rain intensified. Visibility dropped. A truck ahead splashed through a pothole, sending a wave of muddy water across the lane. Ram flinched slightly but held steady.
His phone buzzed again inside his pocket.
He ignored it.
Another signal ahead.
Red.
He slowed, stopping behind a line of vehicles.
To his right, a car window rolled down. Music spilt out, something loud, celebratory, out of place in the heavy rain.
Inside, a group of young men laughed.
For a moment, Ram watched them, reminiscing about his own group of friends and the fun times they used to have before everyone got scattered and distracted by their jobs and families. For a moment, he was returned to that carefree time.
The moment broke; he looked away.
The signal turned green, traffic surged. And then-
Something was wrong.
At first, it was just a sound. A sharp, irregular screech cutting through the layered noise of rain and engines. Ram turned his head instinctively.
A truck. Too fast. Too close. Definitely overloaded. Its headlights wavered, its body tilting slightly as it struggled against momentum.
Someone shouted.
"Brake! Brake!"
But the truck didn’t slow down.
Time did something strange then. It did not slow, not exactly, but stretched. Ram saw details he shouldn’t have had time to see. The truck driver’s face, wide-eyed, panicked.
The angle of the wheels. Water spraying outward in violent arcs. A bike ahead skidding sideways. His own hands tightening on the wheel, his legs pumping the clutch and the accelerator, trying to get ahead of the impending doom. For it was doom.
A single, clear thought surfaced: so, this is it.
Not fear. Not even regret. Just recognition.
Impact.
Metal screamed. The world shattered into motion and force.
Ram felt himself thrown against the window glass, weightless for a fraction of a second, then violently pulled back into gravity.
His head banged something hard.
Darkness didn’t come immediately. There was sound first; distant and muffled, like hearing through water.
Then voices, running footsteps.
Someone was shouting for help.
Pain flickered, sharp, then dull, then strangely absent.
Something, maybe rain, trickled down his face, warm, persistent and very uncomfortable. He tried to move, to wipe the trickle; his body did not respond.
He tried to think, but the thought wouldn’t hold.
Images came instead, fragmented, disjointed.
His mother’s message, the spreadsheet, the article.
A line he had read earlier:
"History is not made by the exceptional alone, but by the countless ordinary lives shaped by forces they barely understand."
He almost laughed.
Or thought he did. Then, nothing.
Darkness wasn’t empty; it had a texture
A strange, enveloping density that pressed in from all sides.
Ram was aware, but not in any way he recognised. There was no body, no breath, no sense of up or down, only a drifting awareness.
His sense of time dissolved.
There were no seconds here, no minutes, only... a continuation.
And then, a sound, faint and distant. A woman’s voice.
Strained.
Crying.
1914
The darkness shifted.
"Push, Vidya! Just a little more!" The voice cut through everything.
Urgent. Grounded. Real.
Another voice, older: "Careful...steady...yes..."
Pressure.
Sudden and overwhelming.
Ram, no, something that was Ram, felt compressed, forced forward through an impossibly narrow space.
Instinct took over where thought could not.
Movement.
Struggle.
A pull toward something brighter.
The crying grew louder.
A surge; light exploded into existence, and cold air struck him instantly.
A violent, involuntary gasp, and then, a cry.
High. Raw. New.
"There! A boy!"
Hands lifted him.
The world was chaos-blurred shapes, flickering light, overlapping voices.
A woman’s face appeared.
Exhausted.
Sweat-soaked.
Eyes searching, then softening.
"Vidya," a man’s voice said, trembling slightly, "it’s a son."
"Let me see him."
The child was placed in her arms.
She looked down, studying him as if memorising something fragile.
"Ram," she whispered.
A pause.
The man stepped closer, voice steadier now, as if anchoring the moment.
"Ram Prasad," said Hari Gopal Gupta. "Ram Prasad Gupta."
The name settled into the room.
And with it, a life began.