The bus lurched forward with a mechanical groan, and I found a window seat without really looking for one. My body moved on autopilot bag on lap, forehead against glass, eyes open but seeing nothing outside.
Thirty days.
Thirty days had passed like sand escaping through a clenched fist no matter how tight you held, it slipped. Grain by grain. Hour by hour. And now there was no more sand left to hold.
Tomorrow was here.
Ms. Sneha's last words were still hanging in the air around me, light and certain, the way only a teacher's words can be.
"Vijay, this is the last day. Tomorrow morning, the competition starts sharp at 10 o'clock. Come early. Sleep well tonight."
She had said it the way you'd remind someone to water a plant casually, confidently, as if the outcome was already decided and she was just filling in the administrative details.
I had smiled back at her.
"Don't worry, ma'am. I will."
And I had meant it at that moment, standing in the school corridor with the afternoon light falling across the library door I had practically lived inside for a month, I had genuinely meant it.
The confidence wasn't borrowed. It wasn't the loud, hollow kind that boys perform to impress teachers. It came from somewhere quieter and deeper from three months of grinding so consistent it had become its own kind of religion. Dawn pages. Night pages. Lunch break pages. Every book in that library had passed through my hands like a prayer bead.
Ms. Sneha had once caught me reading a Class 12 physics reference book during what was supposed to be a free period.
"Vijay, that's not even in your syllabus."
"I know, ma'am."
"Then why..."
"Because the competition doesn't care about my syllabus."
She had stared at me for a long moment with that expression teachers get when a student says something that they can't technically argue with. Then she had walked away, muttering something under her breath that sounded suspiciously like "this boy..."
I had smiled and turned the page.
That version of me the one in that corridor, in that library, turning pages like the world owed him nothing and he owed the world everything that version had been ready.
But that version of me had apparently gotten off at a different bus stop.
Because the one sitting here now, forehead pressed against cold glass, watching streetlights blur into orange smears this one was quietly, methodically, falling apart.
State level tomorrow.
The words landed in my chest differently now, away from Ms. Sneha's steady gaze, away from the familiar smell of old books and library dust. Here, in the rattling bus with strangers around me who had no idea what tomorrow meant
State level. Then national. Then international.
Each word was a stone. And someone was stacking them, one by one, directly onto my ribcage.
I pressed my eyes shut.
I had lived thirty years in another life. Thirty years. I had seen stress, failure, deadlines, the quiet desperation of a man watching his life not become what he imagined. I was not, by any reasonable definition, a child facing his first exam.
And yet.
Yet.
My palms were damp against my bag strap. My heartbeat had developed an irregular, nervous little rhythm that it had no business having. My mind, which had consumed textbooks like a black hole swallows light completely, greedily, leaving nothing behind was now spinning uselessly on a single axis.
What if it's not enough?
The thought arrived uninvited and sat down like it owned the place.
Because here was the truth that no amount of library hours could fully silence I had never stood on a stage this large. Not in this life. Not in the other one either. My previous existence had been lived in the comfortable, forgettable middle not remarkable enough to be celebrated, not broken enough to be rescued. Just... existing. Quietly. Without stakes.
But these stakes.
My family's faces floated up behind my closed eyes, unbidden and devastating.
My mother, who hadn't once complained about the extra lamp bill burned through late nights. My father, who had started saying "our son is going to do something" to neighbors with a quiet, fragile pride that physically hurt to witness because what if I couldn't protect it? What if I walked onto that stage tomorrow and that pride became something he had to carefully, privately, pack away?
Thirty-year-old soul. Ten-year-old shoulders.
Funny, said the dry, exhausted corner of my brain that never fully stopped being sarcastic even in crisis. Very funny arrangement.
I didn't notice the bus stops passing.
I didn't notice the evening crowd thinning, the streetlights shifting, the city slowly softening into the quieter lanes of my neighborhood. I didn't notice the conductor announcing stops I should have been counting.
I noticed none of it.
I was somewhere else entirely standing at the edge of a stage that didn't exist yet, looking out at an audience I hadn't faced, with every version of tomorrow playing simultaneously in my head like a film reel someone had set on fire.
The bus groaned to a halt.
I looked up.
My stop. Somehow, impossibly, my stop I had arrived home on pure muscle memory and subconscious navigation, my body shepherding me back while my mind was busy catastrophizing three competition rounds into the future.
I stepped off.
The evening air was warm and smelled of someone's dinner cooking nearby something with mustard seeds and curry leaves, ordinary and grounding. A dog barked two streets over. A child laughed somewhere above, from a balcony.
Life, continuing its completely unbothered business.
I stood at the gate of my house for a moment longer than necessary.
Tomorrow at 10 o'clock, I thought, everything changes. One way or another.
The nervousness was still there. I wasn't going to pretend it had resolved itself into something clean and cinematic on the bus ride home. It sat in my chest, dense and real, the entirely legitimate anxiety of someone carrying more weight than their frame was built for.
But underneath it underneath the damp palms and the racing thoughts and the weight of every face that believed in me
There was still that quieter thing.
That thing built from three months of pages turned in the dark. From questions answered before teachers finished asking them. From a library consumed like a meal, like a weapon, like a lifeline.
It was still there.
Small, I thought. But still there.
I pushed open the gate.
Tomorrow would come whether I was ready or not.
So I might as well go inside, eat my mother's food, and let the thirty-year-old in a ten-year-old's body get whatever sleep he could before the storm arrived at precisely 10 o'clock in the morning.
Some battles announce themselves politely before they begin.
This was going to be one of them.
I just had to survive the night first.