The monitors beeped their monotonous rhythm in the sterile white room of Kokilaben Dhirubhai Ambani Hospital, Mumbai. The year was 2045. Outside, the Arabian Sea crashed against the Marine Drive promenade, indifferent to the man dying on the seventh floor.
Arjun Mehra, sixty-seven years old, lay on the hospital bed with tubes snaking from his arms and nose. His body was failing — liver cirrhosis, they said, compounded by years of stress, cheap alcohol, and the relentless grind of poverty that had defined his existence. His skin had turned the sickly yellow of jaundice, and his once-bright eyes were now sunken pools of regret.
"Baba, please don't close your eyes," whispered Priya, his younger sister, now sixty-three herself, her gray hair pulled into a loose bun. She clutched his hand with fingers gnarled by arthritis, her tears falling onto the hospital sheet. "The doctor said—"
"The doctor said nothing that matters anymore, Priya," Arjun croaked. His voice was a shadow of what it had once been — the voice that had argued cases in moot courts during his engineering college days, the voice that had begged managers for overtime shifts at the Bhiwandi textile factory, the voice that had screamed into the void when their father died alone in their one-room chawl in Dadar.
Arjun Mehra had lived a life of spectacular mediocrity. Not because he lacked intelligence — he had been brilliant once. A boy from a lower-middle-class family in Mumbai who had cracked the entrance exam for Delhi Technological University in 2005 at the age of seventeen. A boy who had dreamed of becoming the next Narayana Murthy or Azim Premji. A boy who had believed that a BTech degree would be his ticket out of poverty.
But life, as it often does in India, had other plans.
His father, Ramesh Mehra, a clerk at the Maharashtra State Electricity Board, had died of a heart attack in 2007, leaving behind debts that swallowed whatever meager savings the family had. His mother, Sunita Mehra, had worked herself to the bone as a school teacher in a municipal school, earning twelve thousand rupees a month to keep the family afloat. Arjun had dropped out of engineering in his third year to work. Priya, two years younger, had somehow completed her BA from Delhi University but had married into a family that treated her like a servant.
The regrets were countless. The Bitcoin he had heard about in 2010 but dismissed. The startup ideas he had scribbled in notebooks but never pursued. The stock market tips from a colleague in 2008 that he had ignored. The small plot of land in Navi Mumbai his father had considered buying in 2003 for two lakh rupees — land that was now worth fifteen crore.
Every single opportunity had slipped through his fingers like the Mumbai monsoon rain.
"I wasted it all, Priya," Arjun said, his voice breaking. "Every chance. Every moment. I had the knowledge. I had the brain. But I didn't have the courage."
"Don't say that, Bhai," Priya said, pressing his hand to her cheek. "You took care of us. You—"
"I failed. I failed Maa. I failed Baba. I failed you." A tear rolled down his yellowed cheek. "If I could go back... just once... I would do everything differently. Everything."
The heart monitor's rhythm began to slow. The beeping became irregular, like a song losing its beat.
Arjun closed his eyes. Behind his eyelids, he saw flashes — the dusty campus of DTU (then called Delhi College of Engineering), the cramped hostel room he had shared with three other boys, the chai stall outside Gate Number 2 where they had argued about everything from cricket to communism, his sister's face when she had arrived in Delhi for the first time at fifteen, wide-eyed and terrified.
He saw his mother's hands, cracked and calloused, counting coins on the kitchen table. He saw his father's defeated posture as he returned from the MSEB office every evening, crushed by the weight of a system that rewarded sycophancy over competence.
He saw the newspaper headlines he had memorized over decades — the rise of Google, the iPhone revolution, the Indian Premier League, the 2008 financial crisis, the emergence of Jio, the cryptocurrency boom, the AI revolution. He saw it all, a forty-year tapestry of human progress and folly that he had witnessed but never participated in.
If only I could go back.
The monitor flatlined.
The room erupted in the organized chaos of a code blue. Doctors rushed in. Priya was pushed aside, screaming his name. Defibrillator paddles were pressed to his chest.
But Arjun Mehra was already somewhere else.
He was falling — not physically, but through something that felt like time itself. It was as if the universe had heard his dying wish and decided, in its infinite and inscrutable wisdom, to grant it.
The last thing he felt before consciousness dissolved entirely was an overwhelming sensation of being compressed — his memories, his knowledge, his sixty-seven years of accumulated wisdom — being squeezed into a space far too small to contain them.
And then there was nothing.
And then there was everything.
When Arjun opened his eyes again, the ceiling fan wobbled on its axis with a rhythmic thuk-thuk-thuk that he hadn't heard in decades. He was lying on a thin cotton mattress on the floor of a small room in Rohini, Delhi. The calendar on the wall showed July 2005.
He was seventeen years old again.