The rhythmic hum of the office air conditioner whispered against Aarav's consciousness like a metronome counting down the empty hours. 3:17 AM. The blue-white glow of his monitor painted ghostly shadows across his face, highlighting the hollow crescents beneath his eyes. His fingers moved across the keyboard in a dance they knew too well—not from passion or necessity but from the numb comfort of routine.
Somewhere in the building's silent depths, a security guard made his rounds, keys jangling like distant wind chimes. The cleaning crew had departed hours ago, leaving behind the faint chemical scent of disinfectant that mingled with the cold coffee congealing in Aarav's forgotten mug. The office lights had dimmed to their energy-saving twilight, bathing the empty workstations in an artificial moonlight—all except for his small island of illumination, a lighthouse of isolation in an abandoned sea.
But he stayed. As he always did. A choice that had long ago ceased being a choice at all.
On paper—well-arranged, ordered lines of his resume and bank statements—Aarav had constructed what others called a "successful" life. The quotation marks hung invisible but heavy around that word, a frame that never quite fit the picture inside. A senior software engineer at a respectable IT firm in Bangalore, his salary afforded him a twelfth-floor apartment with a balcony he never used, weekend takeout from restaurants whose delivery personnel knew his order by heart and a premium Netflix subscription whose recommendations grew increasingly desperate to capture his attention. "Because you watched..." notifications piled up like unopened mail from a persistent friend.
His colleagues nodded with respect when he spoke in meetings. His manager trusted him with the company's most crucial projects. Every performance review praised his "dedication" and "reliability"—corporate code for a man who had nowhere else to be. But respect wasn't the same as connection. Trust wasn't the same as being seen. The careful professional distance he maintained had hardened into walls too high for anyone to scale.
There was a time when his dreams were bursting with color. As a boy sitting cross-legged on his parents' modest verandah, watching monsoon rains transform the world into shimmering silver, his heart had overflowed with visions too vast to contain. Not dreams sewn from the common cloth of wealth or celebrity—those seemed paper-thin, easily torn by time and circumstance. No, what burned in young Aarav's chest was hunger for legacy. To create something that would echo long after his bones had returned to dust. To carve his name into history's unyielding granite where wind and rain and time itself could not erode it.
But what immortality could he forge from debugging sessions and client meetings? What verses would poets write about the man who optimized database queries and fixed compatibility issues in mobile applications? The sublime ridiculousness of it sometimes struck him at 4 AM, when the line between exhaustion and clarity blurred, making him laugh until the sound twisted into something dangerously close to a sob.
History—real history with its blood and thunder and terrible beauty—had always been his first love. While classmates yellowed pages of love stories and epic space journeys, Aarav lost himself in the conquests of Alexander whose tears fell not from pain but from the agony of running out of time to conquer. He traced the shadow of Genghis Khan's empire stretching across continents like a storm cloud. He studied the tactical genius of Napoleon, the empire-building vision of Chandragupta Maurya and the administrative brilliance of Suleiman the Magnificent.
Even figures like Hitler—whose name he could barely whisper without a shiver of revulsion crawling up his spine—held him transfixed, not for their atrocities but for the terrible lesson they taught about will and charisma bent toward darkness. These men, saints and monsters alike had written themselves into humanity's story with ink that could never be erased.
While he... he merely existed. The exclamation points he added to this thought in his private journals were the loudest noise he allowed himself to make.
It wasn't hatred that defined his relationship with his career—hatred required passion he no longer possessed. His job was sanctuary. Stability. A temple built from his parents' sacrifices and hopes. His father a school teacher whose voice grew hoarse each evening from pouring knowledge into young minds all day, would return home and still find energy to help Aarav with mathematics. His mother with hands roughened by household work but gentle as butterfly wings when they brushed away his tears, would save the sweetest portion of dessert for him even on days when sugar was a luxury.
They had weathered the storm of middle-class life with dignity, squirreling away rupees with the patient determination of creatures preparing for winter, all to ensure their only son could step into a life untroubled by the hardships they had known. Aarav had been the perfect return on their investment—studious, obedient his rebellion limited to occasionally staying up past bedtime with a history book and flashlight. The good son who never raised his voice, never caused worry, never brought anything but pride to the small government-provided apartment where love made up for what money could not buy.
But nothing—not love, not sacrifice, not even the most carefully constructed foundations—lasts forever.
His mother's cancer came dressed in innocuous symptoms: unusual fatigue, occasional pain dismissed as age catching up. By the time they caught it, the disease had already staked its claim, colonies of rogue cells establishing their own empire within her failing body. She departed as she had lived—quietly, gently, apologizing even as the morphine dragged her under. "Don't worry," she whispered through cracked lips during her final week, her fingers like autumn leaves against his cheek. "I had a beautiful life."
His father, the man who had taught generations of children about resilience and strength, simply folded in on himself like a star collapsing. For two years, he went through the motions—retired now, shuffling through the apartment they had shared for forty years, opening cupboards only to forget what he was looking for. When pneumonia came for him during a particularly harsh January, it felt less like an illness and more like a reunion being arranged. Aarav sat beside the hospital bed watching the monitor's peaks grow shallower, his father's hand cold and impossibly light in his own. When the flatline came, tears he didn't know he still harbored fell onto those lifeless palms—each droplet carrying unspoken words, regrets, gratitude too deep for language.
And then came the true darkness. Not grief, which at least has rhythm and purpose, but the hollow aftermath. That irreplaceable warmth that only family provides—love that asks for nothing, that simply is—vanished like a candle flame pinched between cruel fingers. The apartment he had purchased to be closer to them now stood as a monument to absence.
Friends tried to breach the walls of his isolation. They appeared at first like determined rescuers—messages lighting up his phone, knocks on his door bearing home-cooked food, invitations to gatherings designed to distract. But friendship, even at its deepest, couldn't fill the peculiar void left by those who had known him before he knew himself. One by one, they retreated in the face of his polite but firm resistance, their own lives demanding attention—marriages transforming them into different people, children pulling them into orbits he couldn't follow, housewarming parties in suburbs he visited once with gift bags that felt inadequate in his hands.
His life remained suspended in amber while theirs flowed like rivers finding new paths to the sea. Time passed differently for Aarav, measured not in milestones but in the unchanging routine of work-home-sleep-repeat, seasons changing outside windows he rarely opened.
Still, he might have found his way back to himself eventually. Grief given enough time and space, sometimes transforms into a different kind of strength. The human heart has remarkable capacity for healing, for finding new configurations of joy.
He might have healed. He might have hoped again.
If not for her.
---
He had met Sneha in the final year of high school. She was clever and outspoken with eyes that laughed even before her lips did. She challenged him — academically, emotionally, even morally. He fell hard, as boys do when they meet their first love, and to his joy, she caught him mid-fall.
Their relationship was the kind that blossomed slowly but deeply, rooted in stolen moments between lectures and midnight study sessions illuminated by desk lamps and shared determination. The first time their hands brushed while reaching for the same library book, something electric passed between them—a silent promise of more to come.
In the quiet corner of the campus café, they would lean close, her laughing as he wiped a fleck of foam from her upper lip, his heart skipping when she looked at him with those amber eyes that seemed to hold secrets of their unwritten future. Their romance built itself on a foundation of small gestures: how he remembered she liked her tea with honey not sugar, how she could sense his mood from the slant of his shoulders before he'd said a word.
They whispered dreams to each other late one night, lying on a blanket beneath stars that seemed to shine just for them. 'I want to walk the cobblestone streets of Prague with you,' she said, her fingers intertwined with his. 'And watch the sunset from Santorini,' he added, pressing a kiss to her temple. They imagined adopting a golden retriever they'd name Apollo, 'guardian of our adventures,' she'd called him. They painted futures with words—a small house with mismatched furniture and walls lined with books, growing old together arguing playfully about which historical queen was the most fascinating, stealing kisses to end debates neither truly wanted to win.
But dreams need fuel — money, time, understanding. And the middle class has only so much to give.
After graduation, Aarav dove into the grind. His job wasn't glamorous, but it paid. He moved cities, took up freelance gigs to supplement income, worked weekends. All to build that promised future. Sneha had taken up a corporate job too, and for a while, they managed. Late-night calls. Weekend trips. Promises.
But cracks appeared. Small, at first. Missed calls. Cancelled plans. A distance not measured in kilometers, but priorities. He saw it coming — the emotional drift, the unspoken disappointment in her eyes when he said he couldn't make it to another event.
His friends noticed. Warned him. But he refused to believe her heart could change. He made excuses. Just a phase. Work stress. Life catching up. He had seen too many love stories crumble and believed theirs was different.
Until the day he saw a photo — a candid, laughing moment between Sneha and a colleague he had never heard of. Posted on social media, tagged carelessly, the intimacy undeniable. It wasn't just jealousy that coursed through his veins; it was a shattering clarity that cracked open his chest and left him hollow. The kind of truth that doesn't just hit like a punch to the gut—it dismantles you piece by piece, memory by precious memory.
He didn't sleep that night. Tears wouldn't come, though his eyes burned with the need for release. Instead, he sat motionless, bathed in the blue light of his screen, scrolling through her timeline like an archaeologist excavating the ruins of what he once believed unbreakable. Each image, each comment, each forgotten mention became evidence of a parallel life she'd been living alongside theirs. A life where he was becoming increasingly peripheral.
His heart thundered against his ribs when she returned from work the next day. Words he had rehearsed all night tumbled out—not in anger, but in the broken cadence of someone desperately trying to hold together something already slipping through his fingers.
'Why have you never mentioned him?' His voice was barely a whisper, afraid that speaking any louder would make the nightmare more real. 'Why have you been so distant lately? Was it something I did?'
Her answers cut deeper than accusations ever could—a carefully constructed wall of deflection behind which she was already retreating. 'You're invading my privacy,' she said, her eyes not meeting his. 'You're overthinking things. Don't you trust me at all?'
Then came the final blow, delivered with a practiced detachment that suggested she had rehearsed these words long before he discovered the truth.
'I think from now on, we should just be friends, Aarav.' Her voice was steady, unmoved by the visible trembling of his hands. 'I can't be in a relationship where I feel caged and disrespected. This isn't working.'
He said nothing. Couldn't. The words lodged in his throat alongside the fragments of promises they had made under starlight. It wasn't just a breakup—it was watching years of tender moments, whispered dreams, and quiet sacrifices being rewritten as suffocation. The revelation that he had offered his whole heart as a sanctuary, only to discover she had been seeking an escape.
It was three weeks later when he saw them together—stepping out of a sleek black Audi at the entrance of that upscale restaurant he and Sneha had once walked past, joking about saving up for their fifth anniversary. Only now he understood the lingering way she had stared at the chandeliers visible through those windows. The hunger in her eyes had never been for a future with him.
Friends they shared now found themselves caught in the middle, awkwardly carrying bits of information between their two separate lives. They let small details slip about him—Dhruv Malhotra. His family's money came easy, passed down from his father who built a tech company. Important buildings had his family name on them, and he lived the kind of life that appeared in fancy magazines. The type of man who flew to Europe for the weekend as casually as others might drive to the next town for dinner.
'I heard he's taking her to Paris next month,' Priya mentioned, then immediately bit her lip, regretting the information as soon as she saw Aarav's face. 'I'm sorry, I thought you knew.'
Paris. The city they had pinned to their shared dream board, planning to visit on their honeymoon, after years of saving. Now she would walk those streets holding someone else's hand, staying in hotels they couldn't have afforded in a decade of careful budgeting.
He found himself wondering which had come first—her dissatisfaction with their modest life or the appearance of someone who could offer her more. Whether all those nights she had assured him that their love was enough, that they would build something beautiful together even if it took time, had already been shadowed by doubt. By wanting.
She moved on with a speed that suggested she had already left long before she said goodbye. Her social media transformed from casual coffee dates and local festivals to yacht parties and private club events—her smile the same but somehow different, polished now, wearing designer clothes he didn't recognize, tagged at locations that required membership or connections.
And he? He wrapped his grief in spreadsheets and deadlines, buried his broken heart beneath meeting agendas and project timelines. Work became both his punishment and salvation—the only place where the echoes of her laughter didn't follow him through empty rooms. Some nights, staring at the ceiling of his too-quiet apartment, he wondered not about what he could have done differently, but whether he had ever truly known her at all.
---
Work was the only thing that didn't abandon him. It became his shield, his drug, his prison. Aarav stopped going out unless it was for groceries. His weekends blurred into weekdays. Holidays were just longer work hours. His apartment, once filled with books, warm lighting, and the faint scent of his mother's favorite incense, now felt more like a server room — cold, quiet, efficient.
He told himself it was just a phase. That pushing himself now would open bigger doors. A promotion, a relocation abroad, something. But deep down, he knew the truth. He wasn't climbing anymore — he was digging. Trying to bury the hurt, the loneliness, and that ever-present voice in his head that whispered: "You were never enough."
Sleep became a luxury. His nights were filled with vivid dreams — not nightmares, not quite — but visions. Ancient battlefields. Marching armies. Blood-stained maps. Massive thrones carved from obsidian and gold. Sometimes he stood alone atop a hill, watching empires rise and fall like sandcastles to waves. Other times, he stood at the heart of those empires — a crown heavy on his brow, decisions weighing on his chest like stones.
At first, he dismissed them. Just his mind regurgitating all the history he had consumed over the years. But they kept returning, more frequent, more intense. It became harder to tell where dream ended and reality began. He'd wake up sweating, heart pounding, mind buzzing with strategies and languages he had never learned. His doctor prescribed sleeping pills. They barely helped.
He began keeping a journal, jotting down fragments from these dreams. City names that didn't exist. War tactics not taught in any book. Names — strange, powerful names — whispered to him by faceless figures in his sleep. The dreams weren't just dreams. They felt like echoes — like someone was calling him.
Meanwhile, life moved on without him.
His childhood friends married. One by one, they became fathers, husbands and homeowners. Their lives unfolded in predictable chapters marked by wedding invitations and baby shower photos that arrived in his mailbox like painful reminders of time passing without him.
At first, he tried attending these celebrations. He would iron his best shirt, practice his smile in the mirror, and show up with carefully wrapped gifts and rehearsed congratulations. But beneath the polite conversation and obligatory toasts, he felt like an intruder—a ghost haunting celebrations of a future he'd once believed would be his. He'd watch couples lean into each other, their casual intimacy a language he no longer spoke, and excuse himself early.
The drive home always felt longer than the journey there, his apartment growing darker and more silent with each returned invitation. Eventually, he stopped going. Stopped replying. The invitations became less frequent, then rare, then ceased altogether.
His apartment grew quieter. The spaces that had once seemed temporary—a place to build memories until the real life began—now stretched before him, permanent in their emptiness. The second bedroom he had once imagined as a nursery became storage for work files. The dining table that was supposed to host family gatherings collected mail instead.
---
It happened on an unusually cold March morning, when the Bangalore air carried a bite that seemed to slip through the building's climate control and settle into bones.
Aarav hadn't slept in forty-eight hours and seventeen minutes. His eyes burned like they'd been scrubbed with sand, and the muscles in his back had long since knotted into a geography of pain he no longer bothered to map. Three energy drink cans formed a small aluminum graveyard beside his keyboard. The fourth remained clutched in his left hand, half-empty and warm.
A critical system deployment had collapsed spectacularly the previous evening. Client data fragmenting, transactions failing, error logs blooming like digital wildflowers across their servers. Others had suggested postponing fixes until morning, when fresh minds could tackle the problem. But Aarav had stayed, volunteering with that quiet nod his colleagues had come to expect. The unspoken guardian of midnight crises.
"I'll handle it," he had said, the words so familiar they might as well have been etched on his tombstone.
The office had emptied. The security guard had made his final round at 2 AM, pausing at Aarav's desk with a concerned frown before continuing on. The cleaning staff had vacuumed around his feet at 3 AM, exchanging glances in their native Tamil that needed no translation.
Hour by hour, line by line, he rebuilt what had broken. The code on his screen transformed from chaos to order under his trembling fingers. Each solution unlocked three new problems, but he pursued them methodically, like a man dismantling a bomb with infinite patience and dwindling time.
At 5:37 AM, he found the final bug—a misplaced semicolon that had triggered a catastrophic cascade of failures. A single character. He corrected it, ran the integration tests, and watched as the system began healing itself, digital tissues knitting back together. A small, tired smile crossed his face as he typed his final commit message: "Fixed deployment issue. All systems operational."
At 5:40 AM, he tried to reach for his phone to text his team but found his arm strangely heavy, as if someone had replaced his bones with lead while he wasn't looking. A curious numbness bloomed behind his left eye, spreading like ink in water.
At 5:41 AM, a pressure built in his skull—not pain exactly, but an awful fullness, like his thoughts were suddenly too large for the container that held them. He tried to stand, but his legs wouldn't obey. The room tilted sideways. The ceiling lights fractured into prisms. His mouth opened but produced no sound.
At 6:52 AM, as the first golden rays of sunrise painted the windows of the office building across the street, Aarav's colleagues found him slumped over his keyboard. His right hand still rested on the mouse, his left had finally released the energy drink, which had spilled across the desk, creating a sticky puddle that caught the morning light like amber. His screen displayed the successful completion of all system checks, the cursor blinking expectantly, waiting for commands that would never come.
"Hey, burning the midnight oil again?" Priya called out as she entered, her voice bright with morning energy that died the moment she saw him. "Aarav?"
They thought he had finally surrendered to exhaustion—a common enough sight in their industry. Vikram reached out, shaking his shoulder with the familiar exasperation of colleagues who had learned to parent each other through impossible deadlines.
"Come on, man. Go home and sleep in a real bed."
But Aarav didn't stir. Didn't grunt in protest. Didn't lift his head with those bleary, confused eyes they had all come to know after late-night coding sessions.
The silence that followed contained entire universes of realization. Priya's coffee cup shattered against the floor. Vikram's fingers pressed against Aarav's neck, searching with increasing desperation for a pulse that wasn't there. Someone screamed. Someone else called for an ambulance. The security guard sprinted toward them, already radioing for help.
By the time paramedics arrived, pushing through the gathering crowd of horrified coworkers with their equipment and urgent voices, Aarav had been gone for sixteen minutes. They tried anyway—chest compressions, adrenaline, defibrillator pads placed on his too-cold skin. But some departures cannot be reversed by even the most determined hands.
The cause, clinically recorded on forms that reduced his life to checkboxes and medical terminology: massive cerebrovascular accident—a severe brain stroke. The contributing factors listed beneath read like a biography of his final years: chronic hypertension (undiagnosed), severe sleep deprivation, prolonged cortisol elevation consistent with extended periods of acute stress, mild cardiomyopathy.
His body hadn't suddenly failed. It had been surrendering territory for years, raising white flags he refused to see, sending distress signals he methodically ignored. The doctors used the term "sudden death" when speaking to his colleagues, but there was nothing sudden about a fortress that collapses after years of siege. His end had been constructed as carefully as any code he had written—line by line, night by night, missed meal by missed meal, silent grief by unprocessed loss.
His funeral was held three days later, on another unusually cold morning. The crematorium was nearly empty—a small gathering that barely filled the first row of seats. Four colleagues who had worked directly with him. His project manager, uncomfortable in a formal suit, who kept checking his phone until a glare from Priya made him put it away. Two friends from college he hadn't seen in years, who stood awkwardly near the back, their faces etched with the particular guilt of those who had meant to reach out but never found the time.
No family occupied the seats reserved for them. No parents to collapse with the special agony of those who must bury their children. No siblings to share childhood memories. No partner to receive the folded flag that had briefly draped his simple coffin—a ceremonial gesture for a man who had served nothing larger than quarterly deliverables.
When the time came for eulogies, the silence stretched painfully until his manager stepped forward with a cleared throat and a sheet of hastily prepared notes.
"Aarav was... dedicated. A team player. Always willing to go the extra mile."
Corporate platitudes for a corporate death. No one spoke of how he had wept silently at his desk the day after his father's funeral, refusing to take bereavement leave. No one mentioned the history books stacked neatly in his cubicle, or the detailed maps of ancient empires he had pinned to his corkboard. No one knew of the fire that had once burned in him—the desperate hunger to be more than a cog, to leave something behind that time could not erase.
No one spoke of his battles, because no one had recognized he was fighting any.
Afterward, they placed his ashes in a simple urn that would remain unclaimed in the crematorium's storage, eventually to be scattered in the communal garden of remembrance when the statutory waiting period expired. His apartment was cleared out by the building management. His possessions—history books, a collection of strategic board games, a half-finished manuscript about the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire—were donated or discarded.
At his company, a framed photograph appeared on the "In Memoriam" wall in the reception area. A formal headshot from his ID badge, slightly pixelated from being enlarged. His eyes stared out with a solemnity that might have been mistaken for depth by those who didn't know better. His name beneath, with employment dates. Nothing more. He joined the small gallery of others who had died while employed there—heart attacks, car accidents, cancer. The wall that equity couldn't prevent.
His colleagues observed appropriate rituals of remembrance. They shared memories during lunch for a few days. Someone created a small memorial fund for heart disease research that received modest donations. They left his desk untouched for exactly one week before HR quietly arranged for his belongings to be boxed up and his equipment to be reformatted for the new hire starting the following Monday.
By month's end, his name appeared less frequently in conversations. Projects moved forward. Deadlines loomed. The world continued its relentless spin. Aarav's absence, initially a raw wound in their daily routine, scabbed over and began to fade.
In the vast ledger of human existence, it seemed his entry had been closed. A life summarized and filed away. Another name that would slip through history's fingers like so many grains of sand, leaving no impression deep enough to survive the tide.
Aarav was forgotten.
Or so it seemed.
---
End of Chapter One