The progress bar on Angat's screen finally filled. Another day, another client placated. The pixelated face of his contact in Dubai signed off with a casual, "Shukran, Angat. Until next week." Angat offered a weary smile, ended the call, and for a moment, just sat there, listening to the quiet hum of his computer settling down for the night.
He was tired, bone-tired, but a jittery excitement buzzed just underneath the fatigue. It was that time of year. In the silence of his cubicle, he could almost hear the whisper of a promise—a 30% raise. He'd earned it, he told himself. He'd poured lines of code and swallowed client frustrations for it. The number played on a loop in his mind, a hopeful little mantra—thirty percent—as he slung his backpack over his shoulder and made for the exit.
The elevator doors slid open with a soft sigh, and his heart did a little flip.
It was Priya.
The noisy office floor seemed to fade away, the harsh fluorescent lights suddenly gentle, framing her like a spotlight. She was looking down at her phone, a single strand of hair falling across her face. Sensing his presence, she glanced up.
Their eyes met.
For a single, suspended heartbeat, the buzzing thoughts of appraisals and career plans vanished, replaced by a warm, fluttering static. A delicate blush coloured her cheeks, and she offered a small, slightly flustered smile before looking back at her screen.
He stepped into the elevator, the doors closing behind him, sealing them in the intimate, silent space. His mouth went dry. Now. Say something now.
"The, uh... the rain's been something else this week," he managed, the words feeling clumsy and inadequate the moment they left his lips.
Priya's smile widened, becoming a little more genuine. "Tell me about it. My commute's been a complete nightmare." Her voice was like a melody after a day of corporate monotony.
This was it. His chance. But before he could form another thought, the elevator chimed. Accounting - 4th Floor.
"Looks like this is me," she said, stepping out. She threw a glance back over her shoulder—a flicker of something warm, something like anticipation—before disappearing around the corner.
The doors closed, leaving Angat alone with the ghost of her perfume and the heavy echo of his own hesitation. He let out a long breath he didn't realize he'd been holding. The 30% raise suddenly felt less potent, less real than the opportunity he'd just let slip away. After the appraisal, he promised himself. When he had the confidence of that confirmed number backing him up. Then he would ask her.
He pushed through the heavy glass doors of the office building and was immediately assaulted by the world. A thunderstorm, fierce and sudden, was in full fury. The sky was a deep, bruised purple, and the rain didn't fall—it sheeted down, a solid, punishing wall of water. The wind snatched at his clothes, whipping his trousers around his legs. He fumbled for his phone, the screen instantly slick with spray.
For thirty long minutes, he stood there, his thumb growing sore from relentlessly refreshing the ride-share app. The map was a hopeless constellation of "No Cabs Available." Finally, a match. His surge of relief was immediately dampened when the car arrived.
It was a tired-looking hatchback, at least a decade old, with rust blooming around its edges. Inside, an elderly man with a face etched with lines squinted at a phone mounted on the dashboard, his thick finger jabbing at the screen with palpable frustration.
"Angat?" the man barked over the drumming rain.
"Yes. That's me."
"Good, good. My son's account," the driver said, as if that single phrase explained the entire struggle. "This map... it is not listening."
Angat slid into the worn backseat, the scent of old upholstery and damp cloth filling his nostrils. So much for a triumphant end to the day. As the old man wrestled with the stubborn technology, Angat leaned his head against the cool window and escaped into the glowing rectangle in his hands.
The rattling taxi faded away as he fell into the endless scroll of Instagram Reels—a dancing cat, a cricket six, a prank gone wrong. But the digital noise couldn't quiet the deeper current of his own thoughts, which began to drift, pulled under by the weight of memory.
First came his father. A man carved from discipline and duty, his posture still a soldier's. Angat could feel the man's silent disappointment like a physical weight, a heavy cloak he could never shrug off. He had chosen a keyboard over a rifle, code over command, and in his father's eyes, it was a softer, lesser path.
Then, his mother's face surfaced, a soothing balm. Her love was a fierce, gentle force field that had always protected him from the worst of his father's frustration. "Let him be, he's happy," she would whisper, his most loyal defender in the quiet wars of their home. And his sister, only sixteen with eyes full of stars, who saw him as a pioneer. She was already talking about startups and tech, eager to follow her big brother into a future their father couldn't map.
And now, the newest pressure, as inevitable as the monsoon: marriage. At twenty-six, in his traditional Indian Brahmin family, he was a prime candidate for an arranged match. His phone, the very device he used to escape, was already clogged with photos of potential brides from hopeful aunties. He was going to have to disappoint them all over again. How could he possibly explain that his heart had already made its choice? That Priya, with her different surname, was the reason every suggested match felt like a betrayal?
His thoughts dissolved, reshaping into her image. Not just the shy smile from the elevator, but the way she tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear during a meeting, the sharp wit in her arguments, the quiet grace in her simplest gesture. It wasn't that he was a mess around her; they'd shared lunches and debated deadlines with ease. But in those rare, unguarded moments, his professional composure would soften, and that familiar, thrilling nervousness would take hold.
Thump-thump.
A sudden, violent lurch in his chest. Not a missed beat, but a fist of pure dread slamming against his ribs. His head snapped up from the phone.
He looked out the window. The world had shifted. The familiar, honking chaos of Bangalore traffic was still there, gridlocked in the storm, but it had been muted. No one was honking. Not a single blast of sound. The silence was deafening, a vacuum that sucked all meaning from the scene. The streetlights and neon signs glowed, but their light seemed… dimmed, swallowed by a thickening gloom.
Then, the sky was torn in two.
A flash of white, so pure and violent it burned his vision. This wasn't normal lightning; it was a blade of raw energy that connected the heavens to the earth with a sound that was less a noise and more the shattering of reality itself.
The pain was instantaneous and absolute. It was beyond the body. It was the sensation of a hook catching not his flesh, but his very soul, and ripping it backwards through a sieve of bone and consciousness. A scream formed and died before it could find air.
He didn't know it yet, not in any rational way, but the fundamental truth of his existence had been overwritten.
He was dead.
But it was not his death.
In the driver's seat, the old man's life—a lifetime of memories, of a son who set up this app, of small struggles and small joys—glitched. Like a corrupted video file, it stuttered, pixelated, and was abruptly deleted. The old man slumped forward, silent, his argument with the digital map eternally unresolved.
For Angat, there was only silence. A silence as heavy and absolute as infinity. He lost all sense of time, of place, of self. His final, fading thought, a pathetic echo in a collapsing universe, was of an unfulfilled life. The appraisal he wouldn't get. The father's pride he wouldn't earn. The sister he wouldn't guide. The girl he would never, ever ask out.
The silence swallowed everything.
And from within that infinite, crushing quiet, a vibration began. Not a sound, but a knowing. A resonance that predated time, etched into the fabric of what he now was. Words, ancient and eternal, surfaced not in his mind, but in the core of his consciousness—a truth he had heard in his childhood but never understood until this very moment of annihilation:
{{ न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचिन् नायं भूत्वा भविता वा न भूयः।
अजो नित्यः शाश्वतोऽयं पुराणो न हन्यते हन्यमाने शरीरे॥
(The soul is never born, nor does it ever die. Once it exists, it never ceases to be. It is unborn, eternal, ever-existing, and primeval; it is not slain when the body is slain.)
}}
The silence broke. Not into sound, but into light. The pain, the fear, the regret—it all fell away like a shattered shell. The appraisal, his father's disappointment, Priya's smile... they were not lost. They were just… let go.
Angat, or the essence that had been Angat, understood. The taxi was a tomb. The storm was a catalyst. But he… he was none of these things. The journey was not over. It had just begun.