The blue progress bar on Angat's screen inched towards 100%, a digital sigh of relief. Another day, another dirham. The pixelated face of his client in Dubai offered a final, "Shukran, Angat. Until next week." Angat returned a weary smile, ended the call, and let the silence of his cubicle wash over him.
Tired, yes, but a current of electricity buzzed beneath his fatigue. It was that time of the year. In the quiet hum of the cooling laptop, he could almost hear the whisper of promises: a 30% hike. He'd earned it. He'd bled code and placated clients for it. The number played in his mind, a golden mantra—thirty percent—as he swung his backpack over his shoulder and made for the exit.
The elevator doors slid open with a soft chime and there she was Priya.The world seemed to narrow, the fluorescent lights of the hallway sharpening into a spotlight on her. She was looking at her phone, a stray lock of hair falling across her cheek. As if sensing him, she glanced up. Their eyes met. For a heartbeat, the buzzing in his head about appraisals vanished, replaced by a different, warmer kind of static. A faint, rosy blush bloomed across her cheeks, and she offered a small, flustered smile before looking back at her phone.
He stepped in, the doors sealing them in the intimate, silent box. His mouth went dry. Now. Say something now.
"The,uh... the rain's been crazy this week," he managed, the words sounding absurd the moment they left his lips.
Priya's smile widened, a little less nervous now. "Tell me about it. My commute's been a nightmare." Her voice was music after a day of corporate jargon.
It was his chance. His moment. But before he could form another syllable, the elevator dinged. Accounting - 4th Floor.
"Looks like this is me," she said, stepping out. She threw a glance back over her shoulder, a flicker of something in her eyes—was it anticipation?—before turning the corner.
The doors closed, leaving Angat alone with the ghost of her perfume and the echo of his own cowardice. He let out a long breath, the 30% hike feeling suddenly less potent. After the appraisal, he promised himself. When he had the confidence of a confirmed raise to back him up. Then he'd ask her out.
He pushed through the glass doors of the office building and was immediately assaulted by the world. A thunderstorm, biblical in its fury, had erupted without warning. The sky was a bruised purple, and rain fell not in drops but in solid, punishing sheets. The wind howled, whipping his trousers around his ankles. He fumbled for his phone, the screen slick with spray.
Thirty minutes he stood there, thumb aching from refreshing the ride-share app. The digital map was a constellation of "No Cabs Available." Finally, a match. A surge of relief was short-lived.
The car that splashed to a halt beside the curb was a decade-old hatchback, rust blooming around its wheel wells. Inside, an elderly man with a deeply lined face squinted at a phone mounted on the dashboard, his thick finger stabbing at the screen with palpable frustration.
"Angat?" the man shouted over the drumming rain.
"Yes. That's me."
"Good, good. My son's account," the driver said, as if that explained everything. "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 technology, Angat leaned his head against the cool window and surrendered to the glow of his phone.
The world inside the rattling taxi shrank to the glowing rectangle in his hands. He thumbed mindlessly through an endless scroll of Instagram Reels—dancing cats, cricket highlights, prank videos—each one a fleeting digital pacifier. But the algorithm's noise couldn't silence the deeper current of his own thoughts, which began to drift, pulled by the undertow of memory.
First, his father. A man carved from granite and discipline, his posture still a testament to his military past. Angat could feel the weight of his father's silent disappointment, a heavy cloak he could never quite shrug off. He had chosen code over combat, a keyboard over a rifle, and in his father's eyes, he had chosen a softer, lesser path.
Then, his mother's face surfaced, a balm to the old wound. Her love was unconditional, a fierce, gentle force that always shielded him from the worst of his father's frustration. "Let him be, he's happy," she would whisper, a loyal defender in the quiet wars of their household. And his sister, bright-eyed and sixteen, who saw in him a trailblazer. She was already talking about startups and tech, wanting to follow her big brother into a future their father couldn't comprehend.
And now, the new pressure, as inevitable as the monsoon rains: marriage. At twenty-six, in his typical Indian Brahmin family, he was a prime candidate for an arranged match. His phone, the very device he used to escape, was already being peppered with photos of potential brides from hopeful aunties. He was going to have to disappoint them all over again. How could he explain that his heart had already chosen? That Priya, with her Baniya surname, was the reason every suggested match felt like a betrayal?
His thoughts melted into her image. Not just her faint smile in the elevator, but the way she tucked her hair behind her ear during meetings, the sharp intelligence in her arguments, the quiet grace of her every gesture. It wasn't that he was totally awkward; they had shared lunches with colleagues and debated project timelines with ease. But in those rare, unguarded moments alone, his carefully constructed composure would soften, and a familiar, thrilling fluster would take hold.
Thump-thump.
A sudden, violent quake in his chest. Not a skipped 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 changed. The familiar, honking, chaotic traffic was still there, gridlocked in the storm, but it was now a grotesque, silent film. 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 were still lit, but their light seemed… blackened, absorbed by a thickening gloom.
Then, the sky tore open.
A flash of white, so pure and violent it seared his retinals. Not lightning as he knew it, but a blade of raw energy that connected the heavens to the earth with a crack that was less a sound and more the shattering of reality itself.
The pain was instantaneous and absolute. It was not of the body—it was beyond it. It was the feeling of a hook catching not his flesh, but his very soul, and ripping it backwards through a sieve of bone and consciousness. A scream died before it could be born.
He didn't know it yet, in any rational sense, but the fundamental truth of his existence had been rewritten.
He was dead.
But it was not his death.
In the driver's seat, the old man's life—a life of sixty-odd years of memories, of a son who set up this ride-share account, of 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, pathetic thought, a dying 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.