The last thing I remember is rain.
Not gentle rain. Not the kind poets write about.
Mumbai monsoon — the angry kind, the kind that falls like the sky made a decision and committed to it. Standing water on the road. My headlights cutting through the dark like torches in soup. The wipers losing every round.
I was twenty-nine years old. I was driving home from Wankhede Stadium because I had gone to watch the evening net session. Not to play in it. Just to watch, because that was apparently what a twenty-nine-year-old club cricketer who never quite made it did with his evenings — haunt the place where real cricketers trained.
The truck came from a side road with no light on its front left. Too fast. The driver probably thought the same thing I thought.
That it would be fine.
We were both wrong.
I remember the sound. Then the light going very wrong. Then nothing.
The nothing lasted three seconds.
Then a voice.
Not warm. Not scary. Clean, flat, like a notification tone that learned to talk.
[System: Host detected. Biological status: Terminal. Soul integrity: Intact. Time Anchor Protocol loading. Cricket Template: 1%. Time Anchor set — 01 January 2004. Age Regression active. Host age: 10. Location: Pune, Maharashtra, India. Welcome, Host. Try not to waste it this time.]
'...what.'
That was my entire response to being told I was getting sent back nineteen years as a child.
In my defence, I had just died. The brain was doing what it could.
◆ ◆ ◆
I woke up on a floor.
Not a hospital floor. Not any floor I had been on recently.
Grey cement, cold even in January, with that faint smell of old plaster and coconut oil that lives inside every Pune chawl permanently, no matter how many times you clean it. A floor I had not been on in nineteen years.
I knew this floor.
The small ridge near the left corner where the cement had cracked when I was six and my father patched it. I used to trace that ridge with my finger before falling asleep.
'No. No no no —'
I sat up slowly.
The room was dark. Grey-dark, the kind where the only light is leaking under the door from the corridor bulb outside. I looked at my hands.
Small.
Really, embarrassingly small. Not slightly smaller than I expected. Child hands. No calluses on the right palm. No scar on the index finger from the net session accident when I was sixteen. Clean, soft, the hands of someone who had never gripped a bat seriously in his life.
I stared at them.
Like maybe if I stared long enough they'd go back to normal.
They did not.
Then, in the top right corner of my vision — crisp, real, not like a dream — a golden panel blinked on.
[System: Host: Arjun Vikas Sharma.]
[Age: 10. Date: 01 January 2004].
[Cricket Template: 1%. ]
[Cash: ₹0. ]
[Lucky Wheel: Locked. ]
[First objective — play a competitive match.]
'Okay. So this is actually happening.'
I pressed my hand flat against the floor. Cold. Real. The plaster crack exactly where I remembered it.
Somewhere in the building, a tap was dripping. The same tap that had dripped my entire first childhood and was apparently still at it.
This was real. Whatever it was.
From behind the kitchen door — sounds.
The clink of steel cups. The pressure cooker building up. The squeak of the spice shelf hinge that my father had been meaning to fix since I was in primary school.
My mother.
She was standing twenty feet away, making tea, completely alive, with no idea her son's body was currently occupied by a twenty-nine-year-old who had watched her die in 2019 and spent five years learning to live with the silence after.
I sat on the cold floor and just breathed.
'Don't cry. You're ten years old and if you cry right now you will not be able to explain why.'
The kitchen door opened.
Her footsteps in the corridor — that slightly quick walk she had in the morning because she was always running a little behind on the tea.
She pushed open the room door.
She looked exactly like I remembered. Exactly. The dupatta slightly crooked on the left shoulder. Hair not fully pinned. Two steel cups, one in each hand.
She stopped when she saw me sitting up.
"Arjun — why are you sitting on the floor?" she said.
Her voice.
'Don't. Don't don't don't —'
I swallowed hard.
"Couldn't sleep," I said. My voice came out smaller than expected. Obviously — ten-year-old vocal cords.
She crossed the room and pressed a cup into my hands. Too hot. Too sweet. She sat on the cot edge beside me.
Neither of us said anything for a bit.
Outside, the city was starting up — the milk cart on the road, an auto engine turning over somewhere, the neighbour's dog barking at the same thing it barked at every single morning and had never once resolved.
"Bad dream?" she asked softly.
I looked at her. The crooked dupatta. The small line between her eyebrows that meant she was worried but pretending not to check on me.
"No," I said. "Just thinking."
"About what? You're ten."
"Cricket," I said. Because it was the simplest true thing I had.
She made a sound. Not a sigh, not a laugh — somewhere between the two. The sound of a woman who had married one cricket-mad man and was watching it happen again in her son. She drank her tea. I drank mine.
The morning came in through the window.
'Nineteen years. I have nineteen years.'
'Don't waste them sitting on a floor.'
I straightened up.
In the kitchen, the pressure cooker started its first hiss. The city outside got louder. Somewhere across Pune, an eleven-year-old Virat Kohli was probably still asleep. A young Dhoni was playing Ranji cricket. Sachin Tendulkar had just turned thirty and was the best batsman alive.
'And I have a cracked bat and the body of a ten-year-old.'
'Right. Let's go.'
To be Continued...