The door to his room clicked shut, a fragile barrier against the shockwave his words had unleashed in the living room. Arjun sat heavily on the edge of his bed, the springs groaning a familiar protest. He clutched his head, fingers digging into his scalp as if trying to physically hold the fracturing pieces of his mind together.
Outside, the muffled voices were a surreal chorus to his internal chaos.
"Well, that was fast," came Ria's voice, pitched with teenage incredulity. "How long have they even been dating? A month? Two?"
"Finally, he's got some sense!" his mother's voice, rich with relief and burgeoning plans. "What's his age now? Twenty-six! He's getting old. This is good, this is very good."
Then, his father's deeper, measured tone, cutting through the excitement. "Marriage, he's agreed to? Just like that? But we have to talk to the in-laws. These things don't get decided in minutes. Ask him tomorrow for their address. Let's meet this new bahu. Properly."
Two lives. Two worlds. One me.
The thought was a dizzying mantra. He squeezed his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids, a brutal montage played: the cold, institutional corridors of the orphanage; the searing, solitary glare of his gaming monitors; the profound, echoing silence of his empty apartment. A life etched in loneliness and digital victory.
Then, like warm water flooding a cold cavity, the new memories surged. His father's hand on his shoulder after he'd failed his first engineering exam, not in anger, but in quiet support. His mother forcing a second helping of gajar ka halwa on him last winter. Ria, years younger, clinging to his leg and refusing to let go. And Priya… Priya laughing at a stupid joke over chai, her focus during a college project meeting, the determined set of her jaw when she talked about her job. A tapestry of connection, worn and real.
He let out a long, shuddering sigh, dropping his hands. The storm inside didn't cease, but its fury lessened to a manageable roar. He looked around the room—the cricket poster from 2011, the cluttered desk, the familiar crack in the ceiling plaster.
"At least in this life," he whispered to the quiet room, "I've got a family." He paused, the next thought feeling like stepping off a ledge. "And maybe… a wife?"
Sleep, when it came, was not an escape. It was a descent.
He was drowning, not in water, but in a churning, infinite ocean of pure data. Binary code streamed past like schools of glowing fish. Strings of Python, Java, C++ twisted into kelp forests that wrapped around his limbs. Server logs cascaded in waterfalls of timestamps and error codes. He tried to swim, to push towards a surface he couldn't see, but the current of information was relentless, pulling him deeper into the silent, screaming depths of everything he had ever debugged, every line of code he'd ever written, every pixel of every game he'd ever played. The overwhelm was absolute, a pressure crushing his chest.
Then—nothing. A merciful, sudden blackness.
He jolted upright in bed, gasping as if breaching the surface of that terrible sea. His t-shirt was stuck to his chest with cold sweat. The digital phantom currents still tingled on his skin.
Morning light, soft and golden, painted stripes across his floor. Arjun stumbled out of bed, his body moving on the autopilot of a thousand mornings in a different room, in a different life. He turned sharply left, hand reaching for a bathroom door that wasn't there, and walked straight into his wardrobe with a dull thud.
"Aahh," he groaned, rubbing his forehead. The collision was more than physical; it was a clash of neural pathways. "These memories are messing with my brain's wiring!"
He stood still for a moment, letting the new-blueprint of this house solidify in his mind. Bathroom. Right. He found it, splashed cold water on his face, and stared into the mirror. The face that looked back—the tired brown eyes, the slight stubble, the hair that perpetually needed a cut—was both a stranger and the most familiar thing in this new world. Which set of memories did those eyes belong to? Both, now. Always.
The house was a living organism in the morning. The air was thick with the scent of toasted parathas and ginger tea. His mother was a whirlwind at the kitchen counter, her hands a blur as she wrapped aloo sabzi in a roti for Ria's lunchbox. Ria herself stood in the hall, one foot on a chair as she tied the laces of her school shoes, her 12th-grade physics and chemistry textbooks a towering, ominous stack by the door.
From downstairs, two short, impatient honks sounded.
"Coming, Papa!" Ria yelled, grabbing her lunch bag and hefting her backpack. "Bye, Ma! Bye, bhaiya!" She flashed him a grin and vanished out the door in a flutter of navy-blue uniform and flying hair.
"Bye," Arjun called after her, the simple word carrying a weight of newfound wonder. A family. A home. Something I never had before. The warmth of it was a tangible thing in his chest, fighting back the residual chill from his data-nightmare.
As he helped clear the breakfast plates, his mother fixed him with a look that could curdle milk. All the earlier excitement was gone, replaced by the stern pragmatism of a general preparing for a delicate campaign.
"What are you getting all giddy about, huh?" she said, wiping her hands on her apron. "Dreaming about your marriage? Not so soon. We still haven't seen this girl. Send her parents' address to me and your father. We're going to her house this afternoon."
"I will, Ma," Arjun nodded, the surrealism of the situation settling into a bizarre normalcy.
"And bathe properly. Wear your good shirt. The blue one. Not that faded green thing." She eyed him up and down. "We are meeting your potential in-laws. Nothing is final until it is. Remember that."
Alone in his room, Arjun powered up his laptop—a slower, bulkier model than he was used to. The familiar whir and beep were a comforting anchor. He opened a blank document, then a notebook, his mind switching from emotional overload to analytical mode.
He began to cross-reference. A quick search confirmed his suspicions. The technology here was recognizable, but lagging—smartphones were ubiquitous, but the apps were simpler; social media was dominant, but not yet the all-consuming beast; streaming was nascent. His old company, the soul-crushing IT giant, didn't exist in any corporate registry. A ghost from a ghost life.
His fingers flew over the keyboard, digging deeper. The date glowed in the corner of the screen: February 15, 2019.
The air left his lungs in a soft rush. 2019. February.
A pivotal, terrifying knowledge crystallized in his mind. COVID-19. The lockdowns. The digital acceleration. The remote work revolution. The skyrocketing valuations of certain tech stocks, the collapse of others, the birth of new giants. It was all a storm on the horizon, invisible to everyone but him.
If I play this right, he thought, a fierce, unfamiliar energy crackling through him, cutting through the confusion, I can prepare. Invest. Build something. Not just survive this life… but shape it.
He began jotting down notes in a hybrid of shorthand and code. Cryptocurrency names. Tech startups that were currently garage operations. E-commerce platforms ripe for explosion. Pharmaceutical companies. Dates, approximated trends, warnings. It was a map of the future, drawn in the present.
A sharp knock on the door shattered his focus. Ria poked her head in, her school uniform swapped for a bright yellow kurti, her eyes sparkling with mischief.
"Get ready!" she singsonged. "We're leaving in 10. Don't you dare run away now!"
Arjun looked from her eager face to the scrawled notes on his desk—a bridge between a lost past and a malleable future. He smiled, a real one. "I won't." He closed the notebook with a decisive snap. "This is enough for now. There's time."
He chose the green shirt after all. His mother would tut, but it felt like a small, necessary act of owning this new self. He glanced at the closed notebook one last time, a secret tucked under the mundane, then headed downstairs.
The family car was a capsule of palpable tension and excitement. His father, in a crisp white kurta, gripped the wheel with focused intensity. His mother sat regally beside his sister, her green and red silk saree whispering with every movement. Ria bounced in the back seat, a sunbeam of yellow and giggles.
Arjun slid into the front passenger seat, the familiar scent of old car upholstery and his father's sandalwood talc surrounding him. Their shoulders brushed—a simple, profound contact that grounded him.
"Address?" his father asked, voice tight.
Arjun handed him the slip of paper with Priya's home address, written in a handwriting that was both his and not his.
Let's see what this new life has in store.
The engine turned over. The car pulled away from the curb, carrying him away from the safety of research and into the living, breathing unknown of a family meeting, a future waiting to be written.
And just like that, Arjun Mehta stepped into the unknown—again.