Goutam’s expression slowly shifted, his brow furrowing as the date registered in his mind. He understood what they were referencing. The accident. The four of them had never willingly talked about that specific month unless it was absolutely required for the municipal paperwork. It had been seven long years, but none of them had genuinely forgotten the details.
Goutam looked from Sarthok to Joy, then to Sayan. “You think... you think I was just dreaming about that day? Like a flashback?”
Joy nodded slightly, his voice quiet. “We don’t know, Goutam.”
Sayan finally broke his silence, his voice rough. “But you described the white van exactly.”
Goutam stared at him. “What about the van?”
“You said it came directly toward you down the lane.”
“Yeah. That’s what happens in the dream.”
“And you said Shweta shoved you clear of the bumper.”
Goutam nodded slowly.
Sayan swallowed hard, his throat moving. “That actually happened, Goutam. In real life.”
Goutam went completely still. His hands froze on the bench. “What?”
Joy looked down at the stained pavement between his boots. “That was almost exactly what happened seven years ago. You were standing near the corner.”
Goutam stared at them, his mind stuttering. For several seconds, nobody spoke a single word. The evening traffic continued moving steadily along the primary road, the headlights cutting through the growing dusk. A few pedestrians walked right past the bus shelter with their grocery bags, paying absolutely no attention to the four graduates gathered on the bench. Everything around them looked completely normal, mundane, and safe.
But Goutam couldn’t process the sentences he had just heard. The logic wouldn’t settle.
“I don’t remember that,” he said, his voice flat. “I remember the hospital. I remember the funeral service. But I don’t remember her pushing me.”
“We know,” Joy said quietly. “You haven’t talked about the actual impact properly in years. Every time we brought up the lane corner, you just said your mind was blank until the ward.”
Goutam lowered his eyes back to his knuckles. He had only vague, static memories of that entire semester. At least, that was the narrative he had always believed to be true. He thought his brain had just blacked out from the shock.
Sarthok leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees. “What else did you see in the sequence before everything went black?”
Goutam tried to force his mind back into the darkness, searching for the cracks in the road, the bending buildings, or the bleeding eyes. Nothing came through the wall. The memory was tightly locked.
“I don’t know,” he muttered, his shoulders slumping. “That’s the problem. I remember exactly how the panic felt, but most of the actual sequence disappears the second I open my eyes.”
Sayan sat down on the wooden slats right beside him, placing a heavy hand on his shoulder. “Then don’t force yourself to dig through it right now.”
Goutam looked sideways at him. Sayan offered a tired, genuine smile. “You just fainted in the middle of a sector road, man. Maybe your brain has had enough processing for one graduation day.”
Goutam nodded slowly, letting his back rest against the frame of the shelter, but his eyes remained distant, focusing on nothing.
The four friends sat in complete silence at the edge of the road. For the first time in seven years, none of them wanted to change the topic or break the quiet with a joke about food or bills. Because whatever Goutam had pulled from his sleep had forcefully brought back the single tragedy they had spent their entire youth trying not to think about.
The three friends stayed with Goutam until he was safely inside his house. His condition had improved by then; he was still tired and confused, but his stride had returned to normal, and he could walk up the concrete landing without help.
Before leaving the front door, Joy looked at him carefully under the staircase bulb. “Get some proper sleep tonight. If you still feel strange or dizzy tomorrow, tell your family and go see a sector doctor.”
Goutam nodded, leaning his wrist against the frame. “I’m fine.”
“You literally fainted flat on the road,” Joy pointed out.
Sarthok adjusted the fraying strap of his canvas bag. “Just focus on resting tonight.”
Goutam looked at the three of them before they could turn toward the steps. “There is something I want to ask before you guys leave.”
They stopped.
“What exactly happened seven years ago?”
Nobody answered him immediately. A passing motorcycle down the main lane filled the silence under the stairwell.
Goutam’s brow furrowed. “You all reacted strangely when I told you about the details of that dream. I don’t remember what came after back then. If there’s something critical I should know, just tell me plainly.”
Joy glanced across at Sarthok. Sarthok shook his head almost imperceptibly, his eyes fixed on the dirty floor tiles.
“We’ll talk about it later,” Joy said, clearing his throat.
“When?”
“I don’t know, Goutam.”
Goutam looked entirely dissatisfied. “You guys are hiding something from me.”
“Maybe we are,” Sarthok said, his voice flat. “But we aren’t discussing it tonight.”
Goutam opened his mouth to argue, then stopped himself, recognizing the absolute rigidity in their faces. Joy placed a hand briefly on his shoulder. “Get some rest first.”
They left before he could find another question to stop them. None of them said a single word while walking down into the street lane. They had agreed on the boundary without actually discussing it out loud. Goutam didn’t need to know the rest of the file. Not yet.
That night was exceptionally difficult for all four of them, but especially for Goutam. He lay perfectly awake for hours, staring up at the shifting shadows the ceiling fan cast across the plaster. He tried to force his conscious thoughts to reconstruct what came after the impact, but the harder he pushed against the memory block, the more distant it seemed. Eventually, sheer physical exhaustion won the battle.
The next morning came. Then another. Two days passed almost completely unnoticed through the mundane routine of the neighborhood. Goutam went back to his normal schedule, sorting his final files and textbooks. He still thought about the dream periodically during the day, but there was absolutely nothing he could do with fragments that didn’t feel like real, accessible memories.
Life moved forward because it had to. They all had to figure out what came after college.
Joy eventually found work at a small automobile parts distribution company down the sector. It wasn’t his dream engineering job, but the monthly salary was decent, and he liked learning the tactical mechanics of how the business operated. Sayan joined a local logistics company near the bypass and spent most of his first few months heavily complaining about the early morning roll-calls and the traffic snarls.
Sarthok took a noticeably different route. He had always been exceptionally good with manual machines, so he used some small personal savings to rent a small commercial garage space and started repairing motorcycles and small cars. It wasn’t much of an establishment at first—one rolling iron shutter, two wooden workbenches, a heavy steel toolbox that had already seen better decades—but local customers slowly began coming into the bay by word of mouth.
Joy sometimes dropped by to help him after his own shifts finished.
“You’re charging these guys far too little for a clutch alignment,” Joy told him one evening, wiping grease from a wrench.
“Then you can charge them more when you’re on the counter.”
“I don’t own the shop.”
“Exactly.” Sarthok went right back to tightening a structural bolt on a chassis.
Sayan, who had dropped by after his logistics shift, looked around the oil-stained garage from his seat on a plastic crate. “You know, Sarthok, if this independent business fails, you could always apply to become a professional mechanic somewhere.”
Sarthok stopped his hand, looking across the workbench at him. “I am a mechanic, Sayan.”
“Oh.” Sayan nodded slowly, examining his nails. “Then you’re already finished with the career ladder.”
Sarthok threw a dirty cleaning rag straight at his face.