The walk home felt longer than usual. Every step Veer took seemed to sink into the pavement, weighed down by the report card hidden in his bag and the echoing sound of Priya's laughter. By the time he reached the narrow lane leading to his house, the sun was beginning to dip, casting long, skeletal shadows across the neighborhood.
He paused at the edge of the street, his eyes drifting toward the end of the block. A sleek, black SUV sat idling there, its windows tinted so dark they looked like voids. He knew those cars. They were the silent sentinels of the men who had dismantled his father's life—the creditors and "rivals" who were waiting for the Raheja family to finally snap under the pressure of the three-crore debt. To the neighbors, it was just a car; to Veer, it was a predator waiting for the right moment to strike.
He took a breath, adjusted his bag, and stepped through the front gate. The door to his house was slightly ajar, and the familiar scent of spices and old wood wafted out, but today it didn't feel like a sanctuary. It felt like a cage.
"You're home early," his mother's voice rang out before he had even crossed the threshold.
Veer stopped mid-stride. His mother was standing in the kitchen doorway, her hands tucked into her apron. She didn't need to see his face to know something was wrong; a mother's intuition was the one thing Veer could never hide from.
"College ended early," he lied, the words tasting like ash.
His mother walked toward him, her eyes searching his. "The teacher called, Veer. He told the neighbor that you'd walked out of class. He said something about a report card."
The air in the small living room grew suffocatingly thin. Veer looked away, unable to meet her gaze. "It's just Math, Ma. I'll make it up. It's complicated, and I... I just need more time."
"Time is the one thing we don't have," she said, her voice dropping to a whisper so his sister wouldn't hear from the back room. "The interest on your father's debt is growing. The men in those cars... they don't care about your Math grades. They care about the money. If you don't pass, if you don't get into a professional program, how are we supposed to survive?"
Veer felt the familiar prickle of irritation, the "I am the best" ego he used as a shield beginning to flare up. "I know, Ma! I know about the three crores! I know about the cars! You think I don't feel it every time I walk outside?"
He didn't wait for her response. He pushed past her and retreated into his room, slamming the door behind him. The room was a mess—a reflection of his internal state. Books were scattered across the floor, and his desk was piled with half-finished sketches and broken electronics.
He threw his bag into the corner and collapsed onto the bed. He pulled out his phone, but the screen remained dead, the internal circuitry fried from the water spill earlier. He threw the device onto the desk in frustration. It was just another failure to add to the list.
He lay there for a long time, staring at the ceiling fan as it wobbled on its axis. The hum of the motor was the only sound in the room. His eyes eventually drifted back to his desk. Among the clutter of his father's old business cards and his own half-baked sketches, his eyes landed on an old, encrypted storage drive—one of the few things his father had told him to keep safe.
He reached for it, his fingers brushing against a tattered flyer for a "Research Assistant" position at a lab he'd never heard of—The Khurana Institute. It was tucked into one of his father's old ledgers. There was no hologram, no mysterious voice—just a name and a location that seemed to pulse with a significance he couldn't yet explain.
He looked at the flyer, then at the black SUV through the slats of his window. The "Lanth" was gone. In his place, a quiet, desperate curiosity was starting to take root. If his father had kept this, maybe it was the only math he actually needed to solve.