Something in Goutam’s face changed once the date landed.
He knew what they meant.
None of them talked about that month unless some form at the municipal office made them.Seven years, and none of it had really become easier to talk about.
He looked at Sarthok, then Joy, then Sayan.
“You think I was just — dreaming about that.
The accident.”
“We don’t know what it was, Goutam,” Joy said.
Sayan was the one who finally said it.
“You described the van exactly.”
“What about it?”
“The way it came down the lane.
Straight at you.”
“That’s just what happens.
In the dream.”
“And Shweta pushed you clear of it.”
Goutam nodded, not really thinking about it, the way you nod at a detail from a dream that doesn’t seem to matter yet.
Sayan didn’t nod back.
“That happened, Goutam.
It wasn’t just the dream.
That’s what actually happened.”
Goutam’s hand went still on the bench.
Joy was looking at the pavement now.
“That’s more or less exactly what happened.
You were at the corner.”
For a while nobody said anything else.
Traffic kept moving on the main road, headlights sweeping across the shelter in the dark.
Somebody walked past with a bag of vegetables, not looking at any of them.
It was such an ordinary evening that the conversation felt like it belonged somewhere else.
“I don’t remember that,” Goutam said finally.
“I remember the hospital.
I remember the funeral.
I don’t remember her pushing me.”
“We know,” Joy said.
“You’ve never really talked about the actual impact.
Whenever it came up you just said everything went blank until the ward.”
Goutam looked down at his hands.
He’d always assumed that was simply what shock did to a person — took the worst of it and blacked it out, clean, like a switch.
He’d never questioned it past that.
Sarthok leaned forward, elbows on his knees. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“What else did you see.
Before it went dark.”
Goutam tried, actually tried, to push back into it — the road, the sound, anything before the white.
Nothing gave.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I remember what the fear felt like.
Not what happened.”
Sayan sat down next to him and put a hand on his shoulder, not saying anything for a second.
Then: “Don’t force it tonight.”
Goutam looked at him.
Sayan managed something like a smile.
“You fainted in the middle of the road, man.
Give your head a break.”
Goutam let his head fall back against the frame of the shelter and didn’t say anything else.
None of them reached for the usual thing — a joke, a complaint about the bill, anything to move the air along.
For once, nobody tried.
They walked him home and stayed until he was inside.
He’d steadied some by then — tired, still a little unmoored, but walking fine on his own.
At the door, under the bad staircase light, Joy studied him for a second.
“Sleep properly tonight.
If you’re still off tomorrow, tell your parents and get to a doctor.”
“I’m fine.”
“You fainted on the road, Goutam.”
“Rest tonight,” Sarthok said, adjusting the strap on his bag.
“That’s it.”
Goutam stopped them before they got to the stairs.
“One thing.
Before you go.”
They stopped.
“What happened seven years ago?”
Nobody answered right away.
A motorcycle went by out on the lane, loud in the quiet.
“You all went strange the second I mentioned the van,” Goutam said.
“I don’t remember what came after.
If there’s something I should know, just say it.”
Joy looked at Sarthok.
Sarthok gave the smallest shake of his head, eyes on the floor tiles.
“We’ll talk about it,” Joy said. The source of this chapter is novelping.com.
“Later.”
“When.”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re hiding something.”
“Maybe,” Sarthok said.
“Not tonight, though.”
Goutam started to push it and then didn’t.
Something in how still they’d both gone told him it wouldn’t move.
Joy touched his shoulder once.
“Rest.
That’s all tonight.”
They left before he thought of another way to ask.
None of them spoke on the way down the lane.
It wasn’t a decision so much as something they’d all landed on without saying it — Goutam didn’t need the rest of it yet.
He didn’t sleep much.
He lay there watching the fan’s shadow drag across the ceiling, trying to push past the white in his memory, and the harder he pushed, the further back it seemed to sit.
Eventually his body gave out before his mind did.
A couple of days went by the way days do.
Goutam went back to sorting through his last stack of textbooks and old lab files, half-heartedly deciding what to keep.
The dream came back to him now and then during the day — usually at some ordinary moment, waiting for tea to boil, scrolling through nothing on his phone — but there wasn’t much to do with something he could remember only in fragments.
Life had its own momentum, and it carried them all forward whether the questions were answered or not.
Joy took a job at a small auto-parts distributor near the sector market.
Not the engineering role he’d pictured for himself, but it paid steadily, and he found he didn’t mind learning the back end of how the business actually ran.
Sayan ended up at a logistics company near the bypass, and for the first month or so complained, almost daily, about the early roll-calls and the traffic getting there.
Sarthok went a different way.
He’d always been good with his hands, better with an engine than with people some days, and he put what savings he had into renting out a narrow garage space — one shutter, two workbenches, a toolbox that had clearly outlived at least one previous owner.
Word got around the way it does in a neighborhood, and customers started showing up.
Joy came by most evenings after his own shift ended, usually to help close up.
“You’re undercharging for a clutch job,” he said one night, wiping grease off a wrench.
“Charge them more yourself, then.”
“It’s not my shop.”
“There you go.”
Sayan showed up not long after, dropping onto an upturned crate, looking around the oil-stained floor like he was appraising it.
“If this doesn’t work out, you could always go get a job as an actual mechanic somewhere.”
Sarthok didn’t look up from the bolt he was tightening.
“I am a mechanic, Sayan.”
“Right.” Sayan examined his own nails for a second.
“So you’ve peaked, then.”
Sarthok threw the rag at his head without even aiming.