Trying to sleep… I was awake all night, turning and tossing in bed. At some point, the night must have slipped past me. I got up, checked my phone — 6:34 a.m. I closed my eyes again, trying to catch up on lost sleep.
And then—chaos.
I am somewhere unfamiliar, yet not entirely strange. I am walking. And then I see it—my Maruti Dzire.
It is tilted slightly to the right. The front right tyre is punctured, driven deep into the ground. From the holes in the rubber, thick streams of water are spurting out—forceful, continuous, almost like a fountain breaking through something that should have held.
I know instantly—this is no accident.
Someone has punctured the tyre. Not casually, but violently, deliberately, with a pickaxe.
Somewhere at the back of my mind, hazy and half-formed, I see a jeep speeding away. Someone is standing on the door, holding an axe. The image flickers and fades before I can grasp it fully.
I feel a growing unease. What do I do now?
I begin to walk, instinctively moving toward a place where there are people I know. I tell them—my tyre has been punctured… with a pickaxe.
Lucas is there. Someone I knew from school, now a priest. Calm, composed, trying to help. He arranges for CCTV footage to be checked.
A young woman—familiar, though I cannot quite place her—has access to the footage. She calls me to relay the vehicle number. But there is disturbance on the line. Her voice breaks. I strain to hear. The call drops.
I wait.
Time stretches.
Lucas then tells me something strange—Ajay, who worked with me in my last company, is not allowing her to pass on the information.
There is hesitation. Then, reluctantly, he tells me—it is Ajay’s cousin who punctured my tyre.
The logic of it doesn’t matter. In the dream, it feels completely real.
“How do we get him?” I ask.
“Let’s call Mother Superior,” I say.
And just like that—the dream ends.
I wake up.
Fragments remain.
I vaguely recall that everything unfolded in the familiar surroundings of my junior school—the playground of St. Michael’s Convent.
What lingers with me is something stranger than the dream itself.
Lucas, the same age as me now, yet looking just as young as he did back then.
Ajay, from a completely different phase of life.
People from different timelines, different worlds—who could never have met—existing together, seamlessly, in the same moment.
All of them the same age.
All of it real.
At least, for a while.
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