Description

Present Day

6 November 2025 | Thursday | 5:45 PM

The highway of Bihar—usually drowning in trucks, horns, engines, and chaos—was silent. Not calm. Dead silent.

The kind of silence that felt infected, as if the air itself was holding its breath, afraid to move. The land beneath their feet no longer felt like a road—it felt like a grave stretched endlessly forward. The noise that once lived here had vanished, as though the world had stopped breathing altogether.

Thousands of people stood there. Thousands… yet it felt abandoned.

In the middle of that lifeless stretch of road, a man knelt—barefoot, white shirt, blue pants. His knees burned against the asphalt, his hands shaking violently as they clutched a torn white chunni.

The skin of his palms was scorched—red, raw, blistered—ruined by a desperate attempt that had failed. He held the fabric like it was the last proof that she had ever existed.

His hands were folded, almost like a prayer, but his head was bowed—not to God, not to fate, but to defeat.

His hair was disheveled. His body trembled uncontrollably. His face carried nothing—no tears, no rage, no grief. Just a terrifying emptiness, as if death had already claimed him and forgotten to finish the job.

He was breathing. Not because he wanted to live, but because his heart refused to stop without permission.

He was surrounded by thousands, and yet—utterly alone.

Ahead of him, a car burned. Flames ripped through metal. Smoke clawed its way into the evening sky. The stench of fire and melted rubber suffocated the air. Ash floated down, settling on skin, clothes, shoes—but no one moved. No one dared.

Then his eyes lifted, and something inside him collapsed completely.

A scream tore out of him.

It didn’t echo—it split the silence.