The following week unfolded like a deck of mismatched cards — familiar shapes, strange order.
Morning prayers at school were slower. The headmaster's voice drew out each syllable until it almost echoed, though no one else seemed to notice.By the time Dev looked up, the flag rope was still trembling, yet the sound of the anthem had already finished.
He told himself it was fatigue. His mother said he wasn't sleeping enough, and maybe she was right. Nights felt longer lately, even when the clock disagreed.
At home, the silence of the clocks pressed heavier. His father's workshop — the corner room filled with ticking — now held only the smell of oil and dust. The watches lay open on the table like still hearts. Dev found himself winding them again, one by one, though none would start. He didn't tell his mother; she already had enough ghosts to fold into the laundry.
Sometimes, when he stared at a second hand refusing to move, he could feel a faint resistance in the air, like the world itself held its breath. If he blinked, it would tick again — but he could never catch the exact moment it started.
At school, Meera began watching him the way one watches a clock that keeps perfect time while every other one runs late.
"Are you okay?" she asked once after class, when she found him still sitting long after everyone had gone.
"I think so," he said.
"You keep staring at things like they might disappear."
He smiled, tried to make a joke. "Maybe I'm just checking they're real."
She didn't laugh. "You sound like my grandfather before his cataract surgery."
He looked away. "Maybe it's the rain."
The rain did strange things to sound — some days it drowned everything, other days it made the silence louder.
On Tuesday, while walking home, Dev heard his own footsteps echo twice: once in real time, and once again, a beat later, fainter, as though time itself were rehearsing.
He stopped under the same banyan where he and his father had waited for the bus. The new paint on the bus stop board was still tacky. Someone had written in chalk, Life goes on. The chalk letters looked half-erased by the drizzle.
He looked up, half expecting the world to freeze again, half afraid it might. But the rain continued, steady, unbroken.
Behind him, a familiar voice said softly, "You came the long way home again."
Meera stood there with her umbrella, its rim glinting under a streetlamp. "You could have waited; I had math tuition near the temple."
He hesitated. "Didn't realize it was the same time."
She tilted her head. "Dev, it's always the same time for you lately, isn't it?"
He almost said yes. Instead, he managed, "Maybe I just notice it more."
For a while they walked together without speaking, the sound of rain their only company. When they reached her gate, she turned. "Come to class early tomorrow," she said. "We're supposed to practice for the Independence Day play."
He nodded.
After she went inside, Dev lingered by the roadside. A scooter passed — and for the briefest instant, its headlight stayed stretched across the puddles longer than it should have, like the light itself hadn't learned to move on.
He whispered to the empty street, "What are you doing to me?"
No answer. Only the rain.