The sun in Mumbai's afternoon was not something you looked at, but something you felt on your skin. It was a thick, tired heat that filled the narrow lane, making the air still and heavy, as if it had nowhere left to go. A boy walked there, his chin near his chest, watching his own feet on the hot ground. A blue backpack hung from one shoulder. Its strap was old and the threads were coming loose at the edges. He held the strap with one hand not to keep it from falling, but because it was a habit, a way of holding onto something.
His mind was not in the lane. It was in other places. He was thinking of the online books he read in those chinese websites. In those books, there were boys, not much older than him, who travel through another world and got superpower.They could fly,or pull fire from the air, or move so fast the light itself was left behind. They fought against things that wanted to end everything, and they always won.And after the dust settled, there was always a girl, standing in the light, her hair a black river down her back, her smile a knife that could cut the flow of time itself. Sometimes, the writers threw in another girl, or even two.
He shuffled forward, the worn soles of his slippers slapping the hot asphalt like tired hands clapping without joy. He thought about those extra girls. A knot tightened in his stomach, a small, sour thing. That wasn't love, he decided. That was just… hoarding. Like a magpie collecting too many shiny bottle caps. You can only wear one pair of shoes at a time, he reasoned. The rest just sit in the corner, gathering dust. What would a man do with a house full of women after the first fire in his belly had cooled to ash? A man's heart is not a warehouse. It's a small room. You can only put one bed in it. You can only truly love one person, the way a farmer loves one particular plot of land, the one he knows he'll be buried in. The rest is just wind blowing through an empty field.
He shook his head, trying to scatter the fog of those stories like a man waving smoke from his face. Enough, he told himself. These were just web novels, cheap paper boats sailed in a sewer ditch. They had no business here, not in this furnace heat, not on this strip of road that would soon lead him home.
He looked up. Between the crooked buildings, the sky was cut into a narrow blue ribbon. The sun sat in it like a white-hot coin, too bright to look at, too heavy to ignore. His thoughts, he admitted, were exactly like that sun—blazing and useless, burning holes in his day while he stood still. These fantasies, these harems with their impossible girls, they were nothing. Air. Wind. The spit that dries on the road before you even reach the corner.
And because of that spit, because his mind had been floating belly-up in some online dream, he had failed. The exam paper lay crumpled at the bottom of his bag. It wasn't paper anymore. It was a stone. A dead thing that weighed more than all his textbooks stacked together. He could feel it pressing against his spine through the thin fabric of the bag, asking him, What now?.He didn't know how he would face his father.
The father. A man welded to his work at the garage, who pulled double shifts like a mule pulling a cart up a hill that never ended. His hands wore grease the way the earth wears soil—permanently, under the nails, in the deep lines that mapped his palms. His face had become a road map of tiredness, each line a journey he never wanted to take.
His mother had died when he was twelve. Three years ago now. Since then, the apartment had felt like a room with one wall missing. Just the two of them, circling each other like survivors on a small boat. His father wasn't a man who wasted words. He kept them stored up, locked away, like coins in a jar for hard times. But his disappointment—that was different. That was loud without making a sound. It came as a long stare, the kind that pinned you to the wall without a single nail. It came as a sigh, heavy as a tire iron dropped on concrete. And sometimes, when the pot overflowed, it came as words. Harsh words that cut deeper than any slap, because a slap heals in an hour, but words live in the bone.
The boy's stomach had been singing its empty song since noon. Hunger was a familiar guest in his body, one that came and went like the afternoon heat. But he knew, with the certainty of a man watching a storm cloud approach, that by tonight the hunger would be gone. Not satisfied. Not fed. Just... evicted. Pushed out by something heavier. A cold stone would drop into his gut the moment his father's eyes fell on that crumpled paper. And that stone would sit there, all night, refusing to move. Hunger you can feed. Disappointment you can only swallow.
He reached the end of the lane and stepped out onto the main road. The highway was a wide, roaring river of traffic. The noise was a shock after the quiet of the lane. Buses groaned, cars honked, and the air was thick with exhaust fumes. He turned right, the direction that led to his home, a small room in a chawl a couple of kilometres away. The footpath was crowded, and he kept his head down, his nervousness growing with every step. It was a tight, hard knot in his chest.
Then the shout came from behind, sharp and high. "Get out of the way, stupid boy!"
He turned. His heart forgot to beat for a second. A truck was there. It was very close. The front of it was big and shiny, like a wall of metal coming at him. The driver was a man in a vest, his arm waving out the window, his mouth open. The sound of the engine was so loud it swallowed everything else. The boy saw the driver's face, red and twisted. He saw a small spot of red paint on the shiny grille. He saw the wide, black tire, bigger than his whole body.
It all happened in a moment, but that moment was frozen. He could not move. His legs felt like they belonged to someone else, or like they were made of stone, stuck to the hot road. His brain was screaming, shouting at his legs to run, to jump, to do anything. But his body would not listen. This sometimes happens. When you are crossing the road and you see something coming, a bicycle or a rickshaw, you just see it coming and you stand there like a fool.
The hitting was not a sound you hear with your ears. It was a feeling that went through your whole body. A big, empty, heavy thump that shook him from the inside. He felt his feet leave the ground. It was a strange feeling, like flying, like in the stories he read. Then the wall was there. It was hard and rough, and it hit him in the side. He heard a crack, a dry sound like when you snap a twig. Then he was sliding down the wall, and then he was on the ground. The pavement was hot against his cheek.
He wanted to move, but his body would not obey. He tried to lift his arm. Nothing. He tried to move his leg. Still nothing. He could not feel them at all. They were like parts of someone else lying there on the ground.
But he could feel something else. At the back of his head, there was a warmth. It was wet and it was spreading, soaking into the small stones and dirt beneath him. He understood this was blood, his blood, leaving his body.
The sounds around him were changing. The horns of vehicles, the shouting of people, it was all becoming smaller, as if someone was slowly turning down the volume of the world. He saw feet. Many feet. Some in sandals, some in shoes. They stood in a circle around him, close but not too close. People were looking at him. Someone was talking fast into a mobile phone. Another person just stood there, staring, their face white and without expression in the strong sunlight.
He thought maybe he should try to lift his head. He wanted to see more. But there was no strength in him. Not even in his fingers. So he stopped trying. He looked up instead, past the legs of the people, past the walls and the balconies of the buildings, up to the sky. It was white and pale blue, mixed together, a big empty space above him. It did not look like it cared about what was happening on the ground. The blood from the back of his head kept spreading, dark and wet on the grey cement.
In that last moment, when everything was fading, a thought came into his head. It was about those online novels.The old story. The one where a boy gets hit by a truck and wakes up in another world with magic powers and a system. He wondered, is this it? Is this how it begins? He thought about cultivation worlds, about flying swords and heroes who live forever. A strange feeling came and went inside him. It was almost like laughing at a joke, but he had no strength to laugh.
Then another thought came. It pushed the fantasy away. It was a picture. His father's face. Tired. His hands, covered in grease from work. He saw his father coming home after a long day, opening the door, finding the room empty. His father, sitting alone. The boy was the only child. His mother was already gone. There was no one else.Who will be there when he comes home? Who will take care of him now?
The sky above him was blurry white and blue, but it was getting dark at the edges, like someone was closing a door. The noise of the people standing around him, he could not hear it anymore. The heat of the sun on his skin, he could not feel it anymore. The last thing he saw was the sun, like a burning white coin. Then everything was black.
The thought of his father, the sadness, the worry—it was all gone now. There was no more thinking. There was only the quiet. And the dark.
....