The entertainment lounge was completely silent. The garden hummed with its eternal golden glow outside the floor-to-ceiling windows, but the air inside was suffocatingly thick. Suyash sat in his leather armchair with his fingers steepled. He watched as Bunty paced the length of the Persian rug, moving like a man trying to outrun his own skin.
Tanya perched on the edge of the sofa; her carefully composed demeanor was betrayed only by the slight tremor in her hands.
"You asked about my parents," said Bunty, his voice cracking as he stopped mid-stride. "Let me tell you about their thirty-fifth anniversary."
Suyash didn't interrupt. Sometimes, the only way to defuse a bomb is to let the timer run out.
"I spent months planning it," Bunty muttered, his eyes fixed on a spot on the wall. "I rented a massive hall in Lokhandwala. I invited everyone—old friends, neighbors, and the loyal regulars from Dad's restaurant. I even paid extra for a cake with their wedding photo printed on the icing. It was the one photo where they actually looked happy." He let out a hollow, scraping laugh. "They didn't even make it to the cake-cutting ceremony. Mom grabbed the microphone and announced that she wanted a divorce. At her own anniversary party. In front of two hundred people."
He resumed his frantic pacing, running his hands through his hair.
"Her exact words were...'I should have listened to my mother. She told me you were worthless." And Dad? Dad just stood there. He didn't blink. He didn't defend himself. He spent twenty years breaking his back to turn Surya Prakash Bhojanalaya into a trendy Bollywood café, yet Mom still tells him he has no style, ambition, or spine. Every single morning.
"It's not always that bad, Bunty," Tanya said softly as she reached out to him. "Sometimes they have peaceful days."
"Peaceful?" Bunty whirled around, his eyes red-rimmed and tired. "Do you know what a good day looks like in my house, Tanya? It's when they pretend the other doesn't exist: Mom locks herself in the bedroom and listens to All India Radio reruns, and Dad hides in the commercial freezer. That's a good day." Silence. I grew up thinking that the absence of screaming was what love looked like."
He looked at Suyash, dropping his guard entirely. The bravado was gone. He was just a broken son.
"The sick part is, I don't entirely blame them. Mom was raised by Boli Devi—my grandmother. She was a tyrant who spent her life preaching that the world is a slaughterhouse, that men are predators, and that you have to be made of iron to survive. Mom quotes her like scripture. And Dad? His father was Rai Bahadur Dhyanchand. He treated Dad worse than the hired help. He made him fetch his gun and clean his shoes. He called Dad "Gadha"—donkey—every day of his life. To top it off, Dad wasn't even his biological son. Just an obligation."
Bunty finally collapsed onto the sofa. Tanya immediately took his hand and pulled him close. This time, he didn't pull away.
"I refused to marry Tanya for years because of them," Bunty whispered, staring at their intertwined fingers. "I told her that marriage was a voluntary mental institution. Because every time I try to picture 'forever,' all I see is that damn uncut cake."
He looked up at Suyash, his eyes burning with desperate, reckless hope. "But what if I could go back to 1975? Before the wedding? I could show my mother that she doesn't need armor. Show my father that he's worth something. I could break the cycle before it destroys them."
"It's a huge gamble, Bunty," Suyash said in a low, steady voice. "Change their defining traumas, and you change who they become. You might erase the versions of them that raised you. You might erase yourself."
"I know." Bunty didn't hesitate. "But I'd rather not exist than live knowing that I had the power to save them, but I walked away."
Silence reclaimed the room. Outside, the garden's mysterious stones pulsed—golden, patient, and indifferent to human grief.
In the span of two hours, Dr. Yash had transformed the central gazebo of the garden into a fever dream co-sponsored by the Ministry of Science and a manic wedding planner.
The time pod—a sleek, metallic cylinder wrapped in rotating gyroscopic rings—hovered directly over a patch of jasmine. The professor found the spot by crawling on all fours while his Chrono-Sniffer shrieked like a dying smoke detector.
"Aha! The harmonic peak!" Dr. Yash crowed, terrifying a passing gardener. "This jasmine is practically vibrating with fifth-dimensional resonance! The ambient energy here is off the charts."
Komal, who was wearing safety goggles that she had found in a drawer, leaned over the flowers. "Can the jasmine time-travel?"
"Probably not on its own," Dr. Yash muttered as he adjusted a dial. "Though we shouldn't rule it out."
By the time Suyash arrived with Bunty and Tanya, the courtyard was bustling. Babita was already taking notes furiously on a tablet and analyzing the soil's inexplicable energy output. Pragya sat on a nearby stone bench with her eyes closed, harmonizing her breathing with the garden's heavy, natural aura. Daya was distributing drinks to the group, unfazed by the localized manipulation of spacetime. Anita stood with her arms crossed, glaring at the time pod as if daring it to explode.
"Status, JARVIS?" Suyash asked, stepping up to the console.
The AI's crisp voice emanated from a speaker Komal had taped to a trellis. "All systems nominal, sir. The garden's ambient energy grid is synchronized with the pod's frequencies. The environment is highly cooperative."
"Cooperative!" Dr. Yash beamed as he brushed dirt off his mismatched socks. "It's as if the earth itself wants us to tear a hole in the universe. Magnificent."
"The test," Suyash prompted, keeping them focused. "Walk me through it."
"Simple. We open a micro-rift. It's a tiny window into the temporal stream. No passengers, no grand paradoxes. It's just a knock on the door of history to see if the hinges hold." Dr. Yash gestured grandly toward a line of decorative pebbles on the grass. "If everyone will stand behind the safety perimeter, we can begin."
Babita peered over her glasses at the pebbles. "That perimeter is barely eight feet away."
"I am a physicist, Babita, not a coward," Dr. Yash replied cheerfully.
The pod began to hum.
It started as a low thrum that Suyash felt in his molars and quickly deepened into a heavy vibration. The metallic rings spun, blurring into a luminous blue-white halo. Beneath the soil, the glowing stones flared, answering the machine with concentric waves of golden light.
"Energy levels critical," JARVIS announced. "Attempting micro-rift generation."
At the center of the pod, the air simply tore. There was no flash of light or swirl of darkness. It was a dinner plate–sized absence of reality. Looking at it made Suyash's eyes water as if his brain were rejecting the concept of a place where now didn't exist.
"It's working!" Komal yelled over the hum.
The rift pulsed. Once. Twice.
Then, with a sound like a snapping rubber band, it collapsed.
The rings whined in protest as they spun to a halt. The mysterious stones dimmed back to their lazy, ambient glow. The garden birds, which had fallen silent, tentatively began chirping again.
Dr. Yash stood frozen, his hand hovering over the console. He didn't touch any gauges. He didn't sigh. He just stared at the empty air where the rift had been, his face entirely blank.
"What happened?" Bunty surged forward, panic returning to his voice. "Did we lose power?"
"No," whispered Dr. Yash.
"Then what? Is there a bottleneck? Do we need a bigger amplifier?"
"No." Dr. Yash slowly looked up. For the first time since Suyash had met him, the eccentric scientist looked genuinely unnerved. "The power is at one hundred percent. The harmonic alignment was flawless. The pod's structural integrity is perfect. The energy field practically spoon-fed us the breach."
Bunty grabbed the edge of the console. "Then why did it close?"
"I don't know."
His words hit the garden like a physical blow. For a scientist like Dr. Yash to say "I don't know" was infinitely more terrifying than an explosion.
"What do you mean you don't know?" Babita pressed, stepping forward, her tablet forgotten.
"I mean exactly that," Dr. Yash said, his voice tightening. "By every known law of physics, quantum mechanics, and temporal theory, that door should be wide open right now. There is absolutely nothing wrong with the machine. Nothing is wrong with the math. But the universe just rejected it."
Bunty's face crumpled. If the machine were broken, they could fix it. But what could they do about a flawless machine that just didn't work? That was a dead end.
"But I'm here now!" Bunty snapped, his voice breaking. "And I have to live with it every second we fail."
Tanya wrapped her arms around him and buried her face in his shoulder. Suyash stepped forward and placed a heavy, reassuring hand on Bunty's back.
"That's enough for today," Suyash commanded softly, his tone leaving no room for argument. "Power it down, Professor. We aren't going to stare at a closed door until we go mad." He looked at the others. "Everyone, back inside."
Hours later, the estate was cloaked in the quiet darkness of midnight.
Suyash sat alone in the darkened entertainment lounge with a glass of old monk, staring out the window at the metallic silhouette of the pod in the gazebo.
He wasn't frustrated by the failure. In fact, a faint, knowing smile played on his lips.
In theory, he didn't need Dr. Yash. He could simply pull a fully functioning time machine from a sci-fi movie and bypass the professor's baffling roadblock entirely.
However, a stolen fictional machine would be useless without a real-world destination. Without the exact temporal anchor of his own reality, he would be cast adrift in the multiverse. He desperately needed Dr. Yash's pod to lock onto the physical coordinates of their timeline's past so that Suyash could use them to pinpoint the exact moment to reach Mala.
So why had Suyash let the experiment fail today without interfering?
Because of a memory from his past life.
He remembered this cult-classic sci-fi movie from his previous life. He knew the narrative rules of the universe he now inhabited. Sanctioned, heavily monitored daytime tests of experimental time machines never worked. The universe always rejected them.
The machine was completely flawless, just as Dr. Yash had said. However, according to the plot etched in Suyash's memory, the pod would only activate for someone whose emotional destiny was fundamentally anchored to that specific era. It would only work for Bunty.
More importantly, it would only work when the protagonist was desperate enough to break the rules.
Suyash glanced at the digital clock on the wall. 11:58 p.m.
Right on cue, a shadow detached itself from the guest villa and crept silently across the manicured lawn toward the gazebo. Bunty. He had come alone to try it.
Suyash set his glass down, causing the amber liquid to slosh slightly, then stood up.
Through the glass, he watched Bunty reach the gazebo. The pod's console flickered to life under his frantic, trembling hands. Instantly, the garden's mysterious stones began to pulse. The ambient energy, which had stubbornly refused to cooperate during a sterile, scientifically sanctioned daytime test, now thrummed with a warm, violent intensity.
Suyash slipped out the back doors, his footsteps silent against the manicured lawn.
Ahead, the pod's gyroscopic rings spun into a blinding blur. This time, the air at the center of the gazebo didn't just tear—it shattered. A massive, human-sized rift of roaring blue-white light ripped open, casting long, erratic shadows across the garden.
Bunty took a deep, shuddering breath, closed his eyes, and stepped toward the glowing void.
A heavy hand clamped firmly onto his shoulder.
Bunty gasped and nearly jumped out of his skin as he spun around. Suyash stood right beside him, perfectly calm, his sharp features illuminated by the ethereal glow of the time rift.
"S-Suyash?" Bunty stammered, his eyes wide with panic, over the deafening hum of the machine. "I—I had to." I couldn't just sit there and—"
"Did you really think I'd let you crash your parents' wedding alone?" Suyash interrupted, his voice steady over the roar of collapsing spacetime.
Bunty blinked, the panic giving way to stunned disbelief. "You're…you're coming with me?"
"Someone has to make sure you don't accidentally erase yourself from existence before the appetizers are served," Suyash said. He stepped up to the edge of the rift.
He looked into the blinding light. This was it. The doorway was open. If they survived, the temporal coordinates would be locked. He would finally have his map.
Suyash tightened his grip on Bunty's shoulder.
'Hang on, Mala,' Suyash thought as the pull of the void grabbed them. 'I'm getting closer.'
Together, they stepped forward.