Return to Zero

The room was quiet, drowned in the orange glow of a dying sunset. It was a small room, the same room where he had slept as a boy, the same room where he had dreamed of becoming a doctor, the same room where he had cried into his pillow until the cotton turned damp.

He sat on the edge of the bed. His back was curved, his shoulders sharp and bony under his thin shirt.

On the small wooden table in front of him sat the cake. It was small. It was imperfect. He had baked it himself that morning, his hands shaking as he measured the flour. He had covered it in white cream and placed a single red cherry in the center. Beside the cherry stood one unlit candle.

He looked at the wall clock. 6:00 PM.

"Two hours," he whispered. His voice was like dry leaves scraping together. "Just two hours more. At 8:00 PM, I will light it. At 8:00 PM, I will be fifty."

He wanted to celebrate just once. Just once in a life that felt like a long, grey hallway with no doors.

He closed his eyes, and the memories came, not as pictures, but as weights pressing on his chest.

He remembered being twenty-five. The stack of medical books on his desk that he couldn’t understand. The heavy, suffocating expectation in his parents' eyes. He remembered the first lie. Then the second. He remembered the shame of walking out of the exam hall knowing he had failed again, wasting five years of his father’s hard-earned money.

Zero, the voice in his head whispered. You are back to zero.

He remembered being twenty-seven, thirty, thirty-five. The years didn’t pass; they blurred. He tried to draw, but the paper remained blank. He tried to build his body, but his will was too weak. He tried music, but the silence was louder. He became a ghost in his own house.

He remembered the factory. Forty years old. The smell of rubber glue that stuck to his skin. The noise of the machines that drowned out his thoughts. He worked the night shift so no one would see the man who was supposed to be a doctor, now gluing soles onto cheap shoes.

Then, the silence of the house when his mother died. He hadn't cried. He felt he didn't deserve to cry. He thought she was ashamed of him.

Then, the hospital room. His father, hooked up to beeping machines. He remembered the day he emptied his bank account—every rupee he had saved from the factory, twenty years of sweat—and handed it to the hospital. It wasn't enough to save him.

But he remembered the hand squeeze. His father’s grip was weak, skin like paper.

"Take care," his father had rasped. "I am still proud of you. I will love you always, as I did."

Those words had shattered him. He had spent his life hiding from their judgment, only to realize on the very last day that there was no judgment. Only love. He was forty-five, and he was finally broken.

He was alone. No wife to hold his hand. No children to call his name. Just the factory. Just the glue. Just the empty house.

He stopped eating. Why feed a machine that produced nothing? But the money kept coming in, and he had nowhere to put it. So he gave it to the children. The orphans. The ones the world had forgotten, just like him. He gave anonymously. He didn't want thanks. He just wanted them to have a chance he felt he wasted.

At forty-seven, the blood came. He coughed into a napkin, and it came away red. Stage 3 cancer. The doctor spoke about treatment, about chemotherapy, about fighting.

He just smiled. It was a tired smile. Fight for what? he thought. To live another ten years in this silence?

He refused treatment. He kept working. He kept giving.

At forty-nine, he visited the orphanage one last time. He gave them the final envelope. The staff cried. They hugged him. For a fleeting second, he felt a heartbeat that wasn't his own. He realized these children were his legacy. He was their invisible father.

He came home. To this house. He cleaned it. He scrubbed the floors until his knees bled. He wiped the dust from his father’s TV. He smelled his mother’s saree in the cupboard. He fell to the floor and wept, the first real tears in forty years, crying for the boy who wanted to be a doctor, crying for the man who ended up alone.

He sold the house to the charity, signing the papers with a trembling hand. He asked to stay just until his birthday.

And now, here he was. 6:00 PM.

A sudden pain twisted in his stomach—sharp, brutal, like a knife turning. He gasped, clutching his abdomen. Warm blood rushed up his throat, spilling from his nose and mouth, staining his shirt.

He tried to reach for the table. He tried to reach for the cake.

No, he panicked. Not yet. It’s not 8:00 PM. Please, not yet.

But his body didn't listen. He fell backward onto the pillows. The room began to spin. The ticking of the clock slowed down... tick... tick... silence.

The darkness came. It wasn't black; it was a deep, velvet void.

He felt a tearing sensation. It was his soul peeling away from the sick, broken shell of his body. He felt himself falling and rising at the same time. His physical form—the failures, the cancer, the scars—dropped away into the abyss below.

But he... he floated up.

He drifted through the endless dark, weightless. Finally, he stopped looking down. He looked up.

Far away, a single square of golden light pierced the darkness.

He floated toward it, drawn like a moth. As he got closer, the light became a window. He peered through it.

He saw a dining room painted in warm yellow. There was a table made of heavy oak. The smell of roast chicken and fresh bread wafted out, smelling like heaven.

Sitting at the head of the table was a man.

The man looked like him, but without the hollow cheeks. His eyes were bright, crinkled at the corners with laughter.

Beside him sat a woman with kind eyes, passing him a bowl of potatoes. Across from them, two children—a boy and a girl—were giggling, hiding vegetables under their napkins.

The man at the table threw his head back and laughed at something his daughter said. He looked... complete.

The soul watched from the darkness outside.

A terrible, beautiful ache bloomed in the center of his chest. It hurt more than the dying. It was the pain of seeing the impossible.

He saw the life he could have had if he hadn't lied. If he hadn't given up. If he had believed he was worthy of love.

But as he watched the man kiss his wife’s hand, the soul didn't feel jealousy. He didn't feel anger.

Tears made of starlight streamed down the soul's face.

I am happy for him, the soul whispered into the void. I am happy for him who is not me. I am happy for him who I never became.

He watched the family eat. He watched the love fill the room.

I am glad, he thought, his vision blurring, that somewhere, in some time, his life found meaning.

With a warm, soft smile—the first true smile he had worn in decades—he closed his eyes. He let the vision go. He let the darkness wrap around him like the mother’s embrace he had missed for so long.

Back in the silent room, the clock ticked to 6:01 PM.

The body lay still on the bed. The pain was gone. The face was peaceful.

On the table, the icing on the cake began to soften in the heat. The single candle stood tall, waiting for a flame that would never come.

He was fifty years old. And he was finally home.