The office smelled of stale coffee and floor cleaner. The fluorescent lights buzzed softly. Outside, the city had finished rush hour and gone quiet. Inside, the cubicles looked empty and useless. Samarth Mishra's keyboard clicked on the late-night stillness like a single clock in a dead room.
The keystrokes echoed. They sounded important only because there was nothing else to hear. He typed bug fixes, status updates, polite emails — the same small sentences he had typed for years. Typing had stopped being a way to make things and had become a way to fill time.
Everyone had left hours ago. The cleaners would come in a half hour. Each chair threw a long shadow. The monitors cast a pale blue light on Sam's face, making his cheekbones stand out. His navy jacket — bought long ago, worn through a few promotions and a few bad weeks — hung over the chair like something he meant to claim and never did.
His fingers moved automatically. His eyes skimmed the screen, his brain filled in the blanks. Once, life had been simpler: a problem, a solution, a finished piece of homework. He remembered being a small, eager kid — neat handwriting, quick answers, proud parents. His parents were strict, not cruel: lights out on time, study after dinner, no nonsense. That structure had kept him steady. He did well. He followed the map they gave him.
Then came tenth grade. He scored 97 percent. That number stuck with him. He thought it meant the future would be smooth. It gave him a false comfort.
The internet arrived late in his life. Smartphones showed up when he was already a teenager. Small distractions — a funny video, a new game, late-night browsing — found him at the wrong time. When everyone else around him was getting serious about boards and JEE, Sam slipped into scrolling and short bursts of fun. His parents noticed and tightened rules. He lied a little to cover it. He told himself he had time.
Time ran out anyway. The two important years — eleventh and twelfth — blurred. He passed JEE Mains and celebrated, thinking JEE Advanced would follow. It didn't. He couldn't even reach the Advanced cutoff. The result came like a punch. With coaching tied to family money and plans already made, his route bent into a donation seat at a third-tier engineering college. The sign said "Engineering," but the work meant survival. He learned to code in fluorescent labs, to fix bugs for clients. He built things that paid the bills, not things that changed the world.
He settled for convenience. He worked, first with some hope, then with a small, hungry focus on keeping the routine. His parents grew older. Their energy faded into routines and hospital visits. They died slowly, both of them, leaving him with the basics: bills paid, a clean flat, the same shirts on the same days. After that, life was work and sleep and work again.
At thirty-three, Sam looked like a man who had been used up. His eyes were tired. Coffee made his hands shake a little at night. He still had the eyes and forehead of his boyhood, but the shine had gone. He became very good at small tasks. He became invisible because he was always there and never risky. Being reliable had replaced being brilliant.
There was a line from a show he had once seen (Kota Factory): "Children leave IIT prep in two years, but IIT prep doesn't leave children for years." He had laughed when he first seen it. Now the line felt like a splinter under his skin. It summed up the regret he could not shake.
His body gave up in the most ordinary way possible: worn out from being pushed too long. He was alone on the office floor. His screen was dark with an unsent draft. The fluorescent light above him flickered and went. He felt himself slide out of the room. There was a small, steady light somewhere, and his heartbeat drifted away as if he were moving down a long corridor.
He lost clear thought. Instead, memories came in sharp flashes — the taste of a late dinner, the hum of the office AC, school corridors, his mother tying his shoelace. Then a different sound: a sigh that did not sound human. It was calm and old, a voice that had seen a lot.
"So many like him," the voice said. "Regret is a common thing."
The watcher — whatever it was — looked over Sam's life as if reading a list. It had seen boys trade their future for short pleasures and never get comfort in the end. After a moment, it decided.
"So be it. Return him, and a guide to steady his steps. Let one altered life become balm for those who bear the same scars."
Sam's soul — a thin, quick thing — obeyed that decision and went back.
He came back into a room that smelled of home and lemon soap. He was not on a hospital bed. He lay on a thin mattress in a small, familiar room. His eyes were young again. Light came through the window the way it did in old summers. A poster of an old mobile network hung crooked on the wall. A school uniform lay folded on a chair.
For a second everything was quiet and strange. His head buzzed as if he'd woken from a long, half-remembered dream. He swung his legs off the bed and walked to the small mirror hanging by the dresser, hardly sure why he was so full of energy.
The mirror showed a boy's face — fifteen, fresh, almost startled. For a moment Sam didn't recognize the eyes. They were the same eyes, but softer, without the tired rings he'd known for years. He touched his cheek and felt the smooth skin of someone who hadn't stayed up fixing servers and writing mails at 2 a.m.
Confusion came first. Then pieces rushed back like a broken film reel: the home lights, the steady scrawl of pens, the coffee breath of late nights; his parents' faces at the 10th result; the small, hard shape of the result that had sent him down the donation-seat path; the dull ache that had lived in his chest for a decade. He saw — vividly, painfully — the flat of his cubicle, the unsent draft, the moment his body stopped.
And then, shockingly, other things came too — flashes of a future he had not yet lived but somehow remembered: interviews and invoices, hospital corridors and quiet wakes; the quiet, ordinary death he'd just gone through. He felt the pattern of the next eighteen years laid out behind his eyes like footprints on wet sand.
The memory of both lives sat in him at once: the bright, careless boy and the tired man who had run out of time. He felt dizzy, but not empty. If the past had been a mistake, the future was proof of what that mistake cost. For the first time since he'd opened his eyes in this room, the choice was heavy and clear.
He turned away from the mirror. The house hummed with life outside — parents moving in the kitchen, the distant shout of boys playing. He pressed his hand to his chest where the old regret had been lodged. It had not vanished. But now it felt like clay to be reshaped, not a stone to be carried.
He took a slow breath. He would not waste this one.