18 Days
That is how long it had been since Aditya had bought anything beyond groceries, gym fees and rent.
Three weeks of discipline. Three weeks of trading carefully, building the app quietly, following Dr. Priya's meal plan without complaint and going to bed at a reasonable hour like someone's responsible older brother.
He checked his trading account that morning and stared at the number for a long moment.
It had grown more than he had planned.
A lot more.
He leaned back in his chair.
'Okay', he thought. 'I think I've earned one stupid day.'
He opened his laptop first and checked the app one final time.
It had been ready for two days. He had just been checking it repeatedly out of habit — the same way you reread a message three times before sending it even though you know exactly what it says.
Everything was clean. The interface worked. The scheduling feature ran smoothly. He had tested it more times than was strictly necessary.
He took a breath and submitted it to the App Store.
Done.
He closed the laptop.
'Now', he thought, grabbing his jacket. 'Time to spend some money.'
He had never been a big shopper back home. Partly because he didn't have the money and partly because shopping required energy he usually preferred to spend elsewhere. But walking into the mall that morning felt different.
He had money. Real money. More than he had ever had in his life.
And he was twenty two years old in New York in 2011 with absolutely nowhere to be.
He stood at the entrance of the mall for a second just taking it in. The size of it. The number of shops. The smell of new things and food courts mixing together in that specific way that only exists inside large American malls.
'Right', he thought. 'Where do I even start.'
He started with clothes.
He had been wearing the same rotation of basic outfits since arriving — practical, unremarkable, designed not to draw attention. That had served its purpose. But he was tired of looking like someone who had packed in five minutes, which was exactly what he had done.
He went into a store and spent an unhurried forty minutes picking out proper clothes. Not anything flashy — just things that actually fit and looked like they belonged on a person who knew what he was doing. Jeans that weren't baggy. Shirts that weren't oversized. A jacket that didn't look like it had survived a monsoon.
He paid without checking the total, which felt genuinely wonderful.
Shoes next.
He had never owned a genuinely good pair of shoes in his life. His mother had always bought him reasonable ones — practical, long lasting, sensible. Good qualities in a shoe. But not exactly exciting.
He tried on four pairs, walked around the store in each one and bought two. A clean pair of white sneakers and a pair of dark boots that looked sharp without trying too hard. The kind of shoes that made the rest of an outfit make sense.
He carried the bags out feeling slightly ridiculous and entirely pleased with himself.
Watches next.
He stopped outside a watch store and looked through the window for a moment. He had never worn a watch regularly. His phone told the time. That was perfectly sufficient.
But there was something about a good watch that he had always quietly appreciated without ever admitting it. The weight of it. The way it looked on a wrist. The fact that it communicated something without saying anything out loud.
He went in.
The sales assistant — a polished man in his forties who clearly assessed customers the moment they walked in — looked at Aditya once and then looked again, recalibrating slightly at the shopping bags.
"Looking for something specific?", he asked.
"Something that looks good without being too loud", Aditya said. "Not too flashy. Just — quality."
The man nodded and brought out three options.
Aditya looked at all three carefully. He picked the middle one — a clean, simple design with a dark face and a steel strap. Classic without being boring.
He put it on his wrist and looked at it.
'Yeah', he thought. 'That works.'
He paid and walked out wearing it.
Electronics was where things got genuinely out of hand.
He had been working on a basic laptop since arriving. It had done the job but it was slow, the screen was mediocre and using it for long coding sessions required a patience he increasingly didn't have.
He walked into the electronics store and immediately felt at home in the way that any person who had grown up watching tech videos on YouTube inevitably does inside a large electronics store.
He bought a proper laptop first. The best available in 2011 — fast processor, clean display, enough RAM to run everything he needed without complaints. He spent twenty minutes with the store assistant going through the specs before deciding, which the assistant seemed to genuinely appreciate.
Then he looked around at the rest of the store.
A large flat screen TV caught his eye.
He didn't technically need a TV. His apartment was fine without one. But it was also a small furnished box with plain walls and exactly zero personality and he had been staring at those walls for three weeks.
He bought the TV.
Then he stood in front of the gaming section.
He had grown up watching his friends play games on consoles he couldn't afford. He had always been more of a phone games and PC person by necessity rather than choice. Standing in front of a full wall of consoles and games with actual money in his account felt like a completely different situation.
He bought an Xbox 360. Then he looked at the PlayStation 3 beside it.
He bought that too.
Then he spent another fifteen minutes picking games — a mix of whatever looked good and a few titles he had always wanted to play — and added those to the pile.
The store assistant helping him load everything onto a cart had stopped looking surprised somewhere around the third console game and had settled into a quiet professional admiration.
"Good choices", he said at one point.
"Thanks", Aditya said. "I've been saving up."
This was technically true.
He arranged for everything to be delivered to his apartment and walked out considerably lighter in the wallet and considerably happier about it.
He was heading back toward the mall entrance when he passed a large window display he hadn't noticed on the way in.
A motorcycle showroom.
He stopped.
He had always liked bikes. Not in the obsessive way some people did — he had never owned one — but in the quiet appreciative way you like something you have always wanted but never had a practical reason to get.
He looked at the bikes in the window for a moment then walked in.
The showroom was clean and well lit. A sales rep approached almost immediately but kept a sensible distance, clearly experienced enough to let customers look before talking.
Aditya walked slowly through the floor. A few models caught his eye but one stopped him completely.
2011 Harley-Davidson Sportster XR1200X.
He stood in front of it for a long moment.
Dark. Low. Aggressive without being theatrical. The kind of bike that didn't need to announce itself.
'Okay', he thought. 'That's the one.'
The sales rep appeared beside him at exactly the right moment.
"Good eye", the man said. "XR1200X. That's one of our most popular this year."
"How soon can it be delivered?", Aditya asked.
The rep blinked slightly.
"You're not going to ask about the specs?"
"I already know the specs", Aditya said.
The rep smiled.
"Two to three days", he said.
"I'll take it."
He filled out the paperwork, paid the deposit and walked out.
He had come to the mall for clothes.
He was leaving with clothes, shoes, a watch, a TV, two consoles, a laptop and a Harley-Davidson on the way.
Not a bad Tuesday.
He was passing a cafe on his way back through the mall when he heard someone call out.
"Three people!"
He turned.
Lindy was sitting at a small table near the cafe entrance, a coffee in one hand and a notebook open in front of her. She was looking at him with an amused expression, her eyes dropping briefly to the shopping bags he was carrying.
"You've been busy", she said.
"Slightly", he said.
"Sit down", she said, nodding at the chair across from her. "You look like you need to recover."
He sat down.
"Did you buy the entire mall?", she asked.
"Not the entire mall", he said. "Just the parts that seemed useful."
She looked at the bags again.
"Is that a watch box?"
"Possibly."
She laughed.
"Okay so the startup thing is going well then."
"Better than expected", he said, which was exactly what he had said the first time they met.
She caught it too.
"You said that last time."
"It keeps being true", he said.
She smiled and closed her notebook.
They talked for a while the same way they had in the cafe — easy, unforced, no particular agenda. She had filed her Brooklyn story that morning and was waiting to hear back from her editor. She seemed cautiously optimistic in the way people are when they have worked hard on something and are trying not to want it too much.
"It's good", she said about the piece, then immediately — "I think. I don't know. I always think something is good and then I read it back the next day and want to delete everything."
"That's probably a sign it's actually good", he said.
She looked at him.
"Why?"
"Because people who write badly don't usually worry about whether they've written badly", he said.
She was quiet for a second.
"That is either very reassuring or very depressing", she said.
"Hopefully the first one", he said.
She laughed at that.
After a while she had to leave — a follow up call with a source she had been trying to reach for a week.
"Same cafe next time?", she said standing up, half joking.
"Apparently we just keep running into each other anyway", he said.
She smiled.
"Apparently."
Then she was gone again.
He sat for a moment finishing his coffee — she had insisted on buying it, which he had let happen after approximately two seconds of token protest — and then gathered his bags and headed home.
The delivery arrived two hours after he did.
He spent the rest of the afternoon setting everything up. TV mounted on the wall — or rather propped against it because he didn't own a drill, which was a problem he solved by stacking two boxes behind it and deciding that was fine. New laptop up and running. Xbox connected. PlayStation connected.
He looked at the room.
It looked like an actual place someone lived in now rather than a temporary holding space between tasks.
He changed into new clothes, put the watch on and sat down in front of the TV.
He picked up the Xbox controller.
For the next three hours he played video games, ate the poha he had made from the MTR packet he had bought at the Indian grocery store and did absolutely nothing productive whatsoever.
It was excellent.
That evening he checked his stats.
"Khushi."
"Yes, host."
"Show me my current stats."
[Host : Aditya]
[Species : Human]
[Gender : Male]
[Age : 22]
[Stats]
[Health : 8] (Normal person : 10)
[Energy : 0]
[Strength : 9] (Normal person : 10)
[Speed : 7] (Normal person : 10)
[Endurance : 8] (Normal person : 10)
[Intelligence : 14] (Normal person : 10)
[Attributes : 0]
[Skills : Driving (level 1), Swimming (level 1)]
[Equipment : Nil]
[Points : 270]
Strength up one point. Endurance up another. Health up one point too — the meals, the sleep, the routine finally showing up in the numbers.
He looked at the numbers quietly.
'Slow is smooth', he reminded himself. 'Smooth is fast.'
He put the phone down and picked the controller back up.
Tomorrow he would get back to work.
Tonight he was twenty two years old with a PlayStation, a bowl of poha and absolutely no complaints.