He wakes up choking.
Not gently. Not from a dream.
From the same hard, panicked gasp that tore his chest open the last time.
Air scrapes into his lungs like it's late, like it has made a mistake coming back at all. His heart hammers wildly, uneven, slamming against his ribs with a frantic, arrhythmic violence he recognizes too well. The sensation is exact. The pressure. The terror. The instinctive certainty that this is it.
Again.
His body tries to curl inward, to protect itself, and fails. Something snags around his legs. Cloth. Too much cloth. He kicks blindly, tangles himself further, and the panic spikes. His arms flail, hit something soft, then something hard.
A bed.
A floor.
He falls.
The impact is wrong. Too close. Too sudden. The ground meets him before his body expects it to, knocking the air clean out of his lungs. For a terrifying second, nothing goes in or out. His mouth opens, but no sound comes.
When he finally sucks in air, it comes with a thin, sharp sound that doesn't belong to him.
It's too high.
Too small.
His head swims. The ceiling above him swims too—low, cracked, stained with age and smoke. This is not his apartment. There is no white paint. No tube light. No humming refrigerator in the corner.
The room smells wrong.
Stale air. Old cloth. Something earthy. Something faintly sweet and sour at the same time.
Cow dung smoke.
The thought lands with a clarity that slices through the panic.
No.
He pushes himself up on his hands—and nearly collapses again. His arms shake violently under the effort, as if he has tried to lift far more weight than he should. The muscles respond late, clumsily, like bad code running on failing hardware.
He stares at his hands.
They're small.
Not just thinner. Smaller. Short fingers. Rounded knuckles. The skin looks softer, paler, stretched tight over bones that haven't finished growing yet. There's no sign of the faint scar on his left thumb. No calluses. No familiar dryness.
His hands don't feel like tools.
They feel borrowed.
"No", he tries to say.
What comes out is a weak, reedy sound. A child's sound. It barely makes it past his throat.
Something inside him fractures.
He scrambles backward on instinct, hits the side of the bed, then the wall. The room spins as he tries to stand. His feet tangle in the long cloth around his legs—too loose, too unfamiliar—and he stumbles forward, crashing shoulder-first into a wooden cupboard.
Pain flares. Sharp, bright, immediate.
Real.
He clutches his shoulder, breathing hard, and that's when it hits him fully.
The pain is not distant.
Not muffled.
Not filtered through exhaustion or denial.
It is sharp, precise and alive.
He slides down the cupboard and sits on the floor, knees pulled up instinctively, chest heaving. His heart is still racing, but it isn't stopping. Not yet. The crushing tightness that ended everything last time—the cold spreading numbness, the fading edges of sound—is gone.
He is alive.
The thought doesn't bring relief.
It brings confusion.
And fear.
The door creaks open.
Light spills into the room, soft and yellow, carrying with it the low hum of voices, the clatter of metal utensils, the distant sound of animals shifting and snorting. A woman's silhouette pauses in the doorway.
"Arre?" she says softly. "You woke up?"
Her voice is familiar in a way that makes his stomach twist.
She steps closer, and his breath catches.
She's younger than he remembers her being. Her face is fuller, unlined, hair pulled back without care, her sari worn the way women wear it at home—functional, unguarded. There's no exhaustion carved permanently into her eyes. No resignation.
She looks… alive.
Concerned, but not broken.
She crouches in front of him, reaches out, and places a hand on his forehead. Her palm is warm. Solid. Real.
"Are you hungry?" she murmurs. Then, gently, teasingly, "Why are you sitting on the floor then? Fell down?"
He stares at her mouth as she speaks, at the way her lips form the words.
Ma.
The word rises automatically, unbidden, and lodges painfully in his throat.
She smiles faintly when he doesn't answer. "You are wierd," she says, shaking her head. "Must have been a dream."
A dream.
If only.
She helps him up easily—too easily—and guides him out of the room. He walks stiffly, uncertainly, misjudging the distance between his steps. His body doesn't move the way his mind expects it to. His center of gravity feels wrong, lower than it should be, unstable.
The hallway opens into a wide courtyard.
The scale of it hits him like a wave.
It's huge.
Not actually huge—he knows this, rationally—but to this body, it feels vast. The ground stretches out farther than it should. The open sky above feels too open. He takes two steps forward and bumps into a doorframe he thought he would clear.
Someone laughs.
Not cruelly. Just casually. The sound floats across the courtyard, light and unimportant.
"Slow down," a man calls. "Where are you rushing so fast?."
He flushes, heat rushing to his face, a child's automatic response to embarrassment. The emotion arrives faster than he can suppress it.
That scares him more than the laughter.
He looks around.
The Chaudhary haveli is alive.
Women move in practiced patterns, sweeping, washing, talking over one another. A metal bucket scrapes against stone. A cow shifts its weight near the outer wall, tail flicking lazily. Somewhere, a radio crackles faintly with a devotional song.
This place should not exist.
Not like this.
Not now.
He drifts toward the far wall, away from the center of activity, his mind racing. Dates. Years. Anchors. He needs confirmation—anything solid to hold onto.
His eyes catch on a torn calendar pinned near the doorway.
The paper is yellowed, curled at the edges. A picture of a god he doesn't immediately register. The numbers are printed in thick black ink.
The floor seems to tilt under him.
His breath stutters. He grips the wall, fingers digging into the cool plaster. His pulse roars in his ears, drowning out the courtyard noise.
1994 means—
His gaze snaps to the old man sitting on a charpai near the neem tree. White hair. Straight back. Strong hands resting on his knees. No oxygen tube. No tremor. No hollowed cheeks.
Dadaji.
Alive.
Too alive.
The final thread of denial snaps.
This isn't a dream.
This isn't a hallucination.
This is a reset.
And he is six years old.
The realization doesn't come with wonder. There is no awe, no gratitude, no cinematic swell of hope.
There is only one thought, sharp and cold and immediate:
I am trapped.
Trapped in a body that cannot obey him.
Trapped in a house ruled by rules he remembers but cannot challenge.
Trapped in a world where strength is measured differently—and granted sparingly.
His chest tightens, not from a failing heart, but from something worse.
Understanding.
This body is weak.
And weakness, he knows better than anyone, is not forgiven.
He swallows, hard, and forces himself to breathe evenly. Slow in. Slow out. The way he learned to calm himself during server crashes and late-night outages. Panic helps nothing. Panic kills systems.
Survive first.
Optimize later.
For now, he lowers himself onto the edge of the courtyard step, feet dangling uselessly above the ground, and watches the household move around him as if nothing extraordinary has happened.
As if a man has not died and been reborn in the space of a single, choking breath.
As if this is just another morning in 1994.
And for everyone else, it is.
For Vipin Chaudhary, it is the first day of a very long audit.