Prologue – Disconnected
By the time the email came through, the internet was already dying.
The progress bar on Bilal's laptop had been stuck at 92% for the last ten minutes, the little spinning icon pretending everything was fine. Outside, the alley hummed with generators and motorbikes and someone's nephew yelling into a phone that no longer carried his voice anywhere.
Then the page refreshed all at once, like a last breath.
"Due to repeated connectivity issues at your end, we are terminating this contract effective immediately. We wish you the best in your future endeavours."
Bilal stared at the words. He read them once. Twice. A third time, because his brain refused to update patch notes that quickly.
Third contract this month.
Same template. Only the excuses changed: unstable connection, missed deadlines, poor responsiveness. All of them true, in a way. It was hard to be responsive when your government treated the internet like a light switch and your livelihood like collateral damage.
The fan above him coughed warm air around the little room. It wasn't even really a room – more like someone had taken the back corner of his mother's house and decided to pretend it was independent housing by putting a separate electricity meter outside. A narrow bed. A plastic chair. One folding table with burn marks from overworked chargers. And on that table, his entire life: a mid-range laptop, a dead phone, and a router with its single green light blinking like it was apologising.
Bilal closed the email.
He didn't slam the laptop, didn't swear, didn't punch the wall. That kind of anger was for people who still believed someone might fix things. He just sat there, thirty-five years old, shoulders too broad for the cheap plastic chair, and let his jaw unclench slowly.
Thirty-five and still single. Not for lack of trying.
He could almost hear the aunties, the polite ones from the "good families" in Lahore and Islamabad, carefully circling the issue over tea.
"Beta (son), your work? Freelancing? So… no permanent job?"
"And your baradari (caste) again?"
"Oh. Oh, I see. They are good people also, of course, but you know… society…we are from different caste"
Translation: You earn, but not enough for us. And your caste is not enough for us either.
The other side of town was worse in a different way. The families who didn't sit on imported sofas, who didn't quote English lines from Turkish dramas, had fewer objections about baradari, but their definition of "good girl" was simple: obedient, uneducated, and ready to deliver sons into a system that would chew them up the same way it chewed him.
He had money now, technically. More than anyone from his lane usually saw who wasn't driving a politician's Prado or laundering someone else's. But for the "civilized, educated" families he wasn't stable. For the traditional ones he was the wrong caste, wrong history, too opinionated about why their sons should maybe not spend all day in chai dhabas (street tea stalls) discussing revolutions they would never fight.
So he moved through a rotating cast of almost and maybes. Situationships, the internet called them. A girl who liked his ideas but wanted a Canadian passport first. Another who called him late at night to complain about her husband and then blocked him when he suggested she deserved better. A third who liked Bilal's brain but not his address.
None of that made it into the contracts section of his freelancing profile, of course.
He glanced at the overstuffed plastic drawer under the table. Somewhere inside were three small notebooks, each with his sisters' names on the cover, full of expenses he never dared to calculate as "charity" or "support". Just entries.
Three sisters. All married. All with husbands who were "trying their best" in an economy that had stopped pretending to care ten years ago.
Whenever one of the kids got sick, the child appeared in his mother's house with a little backpack and a cough, deposited like a parcel with a note: Just for a few days, bhai (brother), until he gets better. Whenever a sister was pregnant, she "rested" at their mother's too, because her in-laws "didn't have space" or "it's easier this way".
Easier meant: Bilal will pay. Bilal will take them to the clinic. Bilal will miss deadlines because he's sitting in a government hospital corridor arguing with a receptionist who's been told there are no free medicines today.
This was the tragedy of Punjab and almost all Pakistan no one wrote poems about. You either grew a thick skin and watched people bounce off it, or you stayed soft and everyone learned how to press exactly where it hurt.
He rubbed his eyes and leaned back. The fan groaned again as the power flickered. Somewhere in the town a policeman was shouting, someone was honking, and somewhere higher up – in the capital, in the ministries, in whatever hotel the visiting IMF delegation was currently occupying – someone had decided that turning off the internet would help "control the situation".
They never turned off their own salaries. Just the connections that fed people like Bilal.
No job from the state. No safety from the state. No healthcare worth the name. And now no freelancing either, whenever there was a protest, an election, a rumor, a speech.
"Patch 2025," Bilal muttered. "All bugs, no fixes."
His voice sounded flat in the small room. The router's light went from blinking to solid red.
Offline.
He checked his phone out of reflex. No signal. The little indicators that ruled his day – green checkmarks, blue ticks, little numbers popping up beside app icons – were gone. Silence, except for the fan and the distant noise of a cricket match on someone else's TV.
Work was impossible. Doom scrolling was impossible. Arguing with strangers about politics was impossible.
For a moment, he didn't know what to do with his hands.
Then he remembered the box under the bed.
It was old, made from some cheap wood that had warped slightly in the heat over the years. It held the sort of random things that survived multiple house moves because no one knew whether to throw them away: school trophies that had lost their name plates, a cracked ashtray an uncle had brought from Dubai, a pocket-sized Qur'an his mother still kissed before travelling, and a few books that had somehow avoided being sold off with the exam guides.
Bilal pulled the box out and rummaged through it until his fingers closed around a thick spine with peeling letters.
The cover was faded, half-eaten by time and humidity. The title still showed through: Freedom at Midnight. The author's name was smudged. The paper smelled like mould and old tea.
He remembered the book vaguely. It had been part of his father's small collection once, back when his father still believed that reading English histories of Partition made you educated. Bilal had tried reading it as a teenager and given up somewhere between the endless descriptions of British dinners and all the names of politicians who never visited their lane.
He flipped it open now, more to kill time than out of interest, and squinted at the tiny print.
Maps. Dates. Descriptions of the Viceroy's house. Speeches in Parliament. Men in suits drawing lines on maps, talking about millions of lives the way developers talked about users.
He read about midnight ceremonies and flags being raised and national anthems composed. About how they had agreed to give "freedom".
He snorted softly.
"Freedom, haan. And after that? Who's going to fix the drains?"
He could feel the old irritation rising like acid.
All his life, when older uncles talked about "azaadi", they spoke as if the story stopped there. The British left, we got a flag, end credits. No one talked about who was supposed to build the boring parts after the firework show: the pipes, the clinics, the sewage lines, the law that worked the same on both sides of a police station desk.
From a game designer's brain, the whole thing looked insane.
You don't just hit "Independence: TRUE" in your settings and expect civilisation to run smoothly. There should be quests: build X kilometres of pipe, connect Y villages to clean water, reduce Z maternal mortality. Instead, the devs of history had focused all their cutscenes on negotiation room drama and skipped the entire infrastructure tree.
He turned the page. The type crawled across the paper like ants.
The book's clean English called it "communal rioting", "disorder", "disturbances". Bilal's imagination supplied the actual patch notes.
He saw it the way his grandparents' generation never managed to say it out loud.
Trains leaving Amritsar and Gurdaspur full of families, bundles tied with rope, goats and brass pots squeezed between bodies; and then the same trains coming back hours later, rolling slowly into stations that smelled of rust and heat. No faces at the windows. No hands waving. Just doors that had to be pried open with iron bars, and inside, layer upon layer of people who would never argue about borders again.
Sometimes the engines arrived with the whistle already blown by someone else: don't open that one in front of the children. Sometimes they arrived silent. Station masters learned to recognise the wrong kind of quiet.
He imagined rumours running ahead of the trains like stray dogs:
They cut off the men's heads and lined them by the track.
They took the women in the fields.
They nailed a child to the door of the gurdwara.
No, bhai, you've got it wrong, they hanged the children in the trees as a warning.
Each retelling made it worse, like a story passed from village to village, lane to lane, with people adding their own nightmares to the script. You didn't need newspapers. You just needed one caravan of survivors, one train full of corpses, to tilt the whole region into madness.
He saw kids' bodies dangling from branches in someone's retelling, blown bigger in the telling until every grove of trees became a potential gallows in people's minds. He saw wells turned into graves because entire groups of women had decided cold water was better than warm hands on their skin. He saw men who had never left their district suddenly convinced that every Hindu, every Sikh, every Muslim two villages over was part of one giant conspiracy to wipe them out.
The book mentioned "mass rape" in one careful sentence, and hurried on. Bilal's mind didn't. It lingered on the quiet after, the way families never spoke the details, just folded the shame into their bones and passed it to their children as silence.
And above all this, the administrators of empire.
In the book's polite prose, they were "distressed", "overwhelmed", "heartbroken at the violence". They held meetings, wrote memos, made regretful faces, and then – when the paperwork was done and the flags had been handed over – they turned out the lights on the Raj (British Empire in India) and walked away.
It was the same logic as tonight's shutdown, just scaled up.
Need to control unrest? Switch off the connection. In 1947, they had switched off the entire operating system. One day the British Indian Army and the railways and the telegraph lines belonged to the Crown; the next day, good luck, chaps, here's your freedom, do mind the gap between the platform and the burning train.
They left like landlords who had sold the house and didn't care what happened to the pipes once the cheque cleared.
He turned another page, jaw tight.
Somewhere in the book, Lord Mountbatten smiled, pose perfect for the camera. Somewhere else, Nehru talked of tryst with destiny. On another page, a serious, thin man from Karachi argued in measured English tones that Muslims needed safeguards. The book called him "cold", "aloof", "inflexible". Bilal knew the photos; they were everywhere in his childhood – on walls, in offices, on stamps.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The Qaid.
They never showed him getting stuck in traffic behind donkey carts, Bilal thought. Never showed him arguing with a corrupt clerk. Never showed him standing in line at a government hospital. They had turned him into a statue and then blamed the statue when the toilets stopped working.
He read on.
The words stopped being lines and started feeling like steps in a long staircase he was descending without meaning to. Dates blurred. Names blurred. Only patterns remained.
Elites negotiating with elites. Borders being drawn for reasons no one in his neighbourhood would have understood. The book talked about communal passions as if they were weather, visited upon innocent administrators by the gods.
Bilal's eyelids felt heavy. Maybe it was the heat, or the fan's lazy rhythm, or the way the tiny letters danced in the dim light.
He reached the part where midnight loomed – trains being prepared, speeches finalised, history about to be "made".
His thoughts wandered.
What would he do, if this was a game and he was handed control here? What if the dev console opened in 1930 instead of 1947, and he could patch the whole thing early? Rebalance some stats. Nerf a few egos. Buff the plumbing.
"Not freedom," he murmured. "First, pipes. Then flag."
On the page, the word freedom appeared again. Black ink on yellow paper. It seemed to darken, the edges thickening like a drop of oil spreading on water.
He blinked and leaned closer.
The letters swam. The F became a crack. The crack widened.
For a second, he thought the power had gone again – the room dimmed, the outline of the book blurring at the edges. The fan's drone receded, replaced by a thicker kind of silence, like being underwater.
The word freedom opened up into a hole.
Bilal felt his stomach flip, a lurch like the drop on a rollercoaster, except he was still sitting in his plastic chair, hands gripping paper that no longer felt solid.
This is stupid, he thought distantly. I'm tired. I should just sleep.
Then the page fell away beneath him.
There was no wind. No sensation of moving, just the awareness that up and down had stopped meaning anything. The darkness around him was not the familiar load-shedding dark of his lane, with its distant TV sounds and backup lights. This was clean, absolute, like the screen of a game before the first pixel loaded.
He tried to say something – a curse, a prayer, a bug report – but his voice had nowhere to go.
After a time that could have been a second or an hour, a faint rectangle of light appeared ahead of him, hanging in the black. It grew slowly, resolving into something solid: the pale outline of a wall, then a bookshelf, then the polished edge of a heavy desk.
His feet touched ground.
The darkness receded just enough to sketch shapes. A high ceiling. Tall shelves lined with leather-bound volumes. The faint smell of tobacco and furniture polish. The desk in front of him was mahogany, deep-red and gleaming, its surface almost absurdly tidy: a pen stand, some papers, an ashtray with a thin trail of smoke rising from it.
Behind the desk, a man sat in a straight-backed chair.
He was thin, almost fragile-looking, dressed in a perfectly cut white suit that seemed to glow softly in the gloom. A dark tie. Clean-shaven cheeks. High forehead. The kind of face you saw in history books, on currency, on framed portraits in government offices and old school corridors.
The man regarded him over a pair of rimmed spectacles, head tilted slightly as if assessing a late and unexpected witness.
Bilal's mind supplied the name before his mouth could catch up.
Jinnah.
The Qaid of textbook covers. The constitutional lawyer whose speeches his father used to quote. The main character of the book Bilal had been reading ten seconds ago, now sitting in front of him in some impossible, dark-paneled room.
Bilal's throat was dry. He swallowed.
Jinnah set his pen down carefully beside the inkwell and folded his hands on the mahogany.
"Ah," he said, in an English-educated accent Bilal had only ever heard in scratchy recordings. "You are late. But perhaps not too late."
Bilal looked down at his own hands, half-expecting to see them holding a dog-eared paperback still.
They were empty.
The book was gone.
The room was very real.
And so was the man behind the desk.