"Every second life starts with a really bad first one." — Nobody said it. They should have.
The last thing I remember is rain.
Not gentle rain.
Mumbai monsoon — the full, committed kind that falls like the sky made a decision and isn't changing it.
Standing water on the road.
My headlights doing nothing useful. The wipers losing to the weather on every round.
I was twenty-nine. Driving home from Wankhede Stadium after going to watch the evening net session, because that was what I did. Not playing in it. Just watching.
Because a twenty-nine-year-old club cricketer who never quite made it apparently spends his free evenings at the gates of the place where real cricketers train.
The truck came from a side road with no front light. Too fast.
The driver probably thought the same thing I did.
That it would be fine.
Sound. Wrong light. Then nothing.
Three seconds of nothing.
Then a voice.
Not warm, not cold. Just clean. Like a notification tone that learned language.
[System: Host detected. Biological status: Terminal. Soul intact. Initiating Time Anchor Protocol. Cricket Templates: 0 loaded. Time Anchor set — 01 January 2004. Age Regression active. Host age: 10. Location: Pune, Maharashtra. Welcome, Host. You have been given something most people never get. Try not to waste it.]
'...what.'
That was it. My entire response. In my defence — I had just died.
◆ ◆ ◆
I woke up on a floor I had not been on in nineteen years.
Grey cement, cold in January, that permanent smell of plaster and coconut oil that lives in every Pune chawl forever no matter what you do.
I sat up.
Looked at my hands.
Small.
Ten-year-old small. No calluses. No scar on the right index finger. Clean palms that had never seriously held a bat.
I stared at them for a long time.
'No. No no no —'
The golden panel blinked on in the corner of my vision. Right there, real, crisp, like a game overlay that had decided to live in the real world.
[System: Host: Arjun Vikas Sharma. ]
[Age: 10. Date: 01 January 2004.]
[Cricket Templates loaded: 0. ]
[Lucky Wheel: Locked. ]
[Cash: ₹0. ]
[First objective — play a competitive match and earn your first Template.]
'Zero Templates.'
'Not even one.'
I pressed my palm flat against the cement floor. Cold. Real. The patched crack near the left corner exactly where I remembered it from childhood.
This was real.
From behind the kitchen door, my mother was making tea. The clink of steel cups. The pressure cooker building up. The squeak of the spice shelf hinge my father had been meaning to fix since 1999.
She was alive.
Completely fine. Standing twenty feet away. No idea what was in her son's head.
'Don't cry. You're ten. There is no explanation for this that works at ten.'
Her footsteps in the corridor. The door opened.
She looked exactly like I remembered. The dupatta crooked on the left shoulder. Two cups of tea, one in each hand. She stopped when she saw me sitting up on the floor.
"Arjun — why are you sitting on the floor?"
Her voice.
'Stop. Stop it. You're fine.'
I swallowed.
"Couldn't sleep," I said. Ten-year-old voice. Smaller than I expected.
She came over, pressed a cup into my hands — too hot, too sweet — and sat on the cot edge beside me. Neither of us said anything for a while. Outside, Pune was starting up. Milk cart. Auto engine. The neighbour's dog barking at its same unsolvable problem.
"Bad dream?" she said softly.
I looked at her. The small line between her eyebrows. She was worried but pretending to just be asking.
"No. Just thinking."
"About what? You're ten."
"Cricket."
She made a sound — not quite a sigh, not quite a laugh, something in between. The sound of a woman who already knew where this was going because she had married a man who was the same way.
She drank her tea. I drank mine.
The morning came in through the window crack.
'Zero Templates. I start from absolutely nothing.'
'And Sachin Tendulkar is somewhere in this city, thirty years old, at the peak of everything.'
'Right. Good. Let's go.'