"Time is a track that only runs backwards."
Anonymous Station Master
The platform existed in the space between midnight and memory. Agastya stood there, clutching his daughter's photograph, wondering how grief had led him to a railway station that shouldn't exist.
The photograph was worn soft at the edges from his fingers tracing her face. Urvashi, frozen at eight years old, grinning gap-toothed at a camera that would never capture her ninth birthday. Her eyes held the kind of joy that breaks fathers who realize too late they never deserved it.
The platform reeked of coal smoke and the kind of regret that stains generations. Its cracked tiles pressed cold against his feet, each step echoing like bones settling in graves.
The train arrived without sound.
It was impossibly old, painted in fading memories... cream and green like a 1960s reel's faded glow. Steam rose from its chimney like prayers from a burning ghat, desperate and unheard. The windows did not frame landscapes. They framed the stories no one wanted to remember.
The conductor stepped down. His eyes held the weight of watching too many endings, and across his palm ran a scar... thin, deliberate, the kind that comes from breaking something precious. In their depths, Agastya caught glimpses of his daughter's face reflected back at him.
"Last train tonight," he said in Hindi that tasted of decades and ash.
"Where does it go?" Agastya asked, though part of him already knew.
The conductor's smile was ancient, carved by time's cruelest chisel. "Backwards. Every stop is a memory you wish you could rewrite. But to board is to break time's law."
"What law?"
"The past stays buried. The dead stay silent. The guilt stays yours." The conductor's scarred hand trembled. "I once tried to change my son's memory too. Brought him back, yes. But he came back empty, forgetting how to love the father who could not let him go."
Agastya looked at Urvashi's photograph. His daughter, who had built castles out of blocks to keep her parents' angry words from reaching her small heart. Who had stolen lunch money not from hunger, but from shame that tasted like salt in her mouth. Who had died holding his hand while he slept, whispering forgiveness into darkness he would never hear.
"And if I choose to break it?"
"You get one memory. Only one. But choosing fractures everything that was, everything that could be."
The train whispered his name in Urvashi's voice! soft, forgiving, impossible.
He climbed aboard, feeling time's law crack like brittle bones beneath his feet.
***
*First Stop: The Argument*
The compartment did not just dissolve into their old flat in Malad. It bled. The walls wept their arguments in scarlet streams, and the ceiling dripped with words Agastya wished he could swallow back into his throat. He watched himself, five years younger, shouting at Devaki about bills and broken promises while little Urvashi sat in the corner.
But this time, the castle she was building with blocks stretched impossibly high, its walls thick enough to contain universes. Each block pulsed with her heartbeat... desperate, small, trying to hold back the world that was breaking around her.
"Papa does not love us anymore," she had whispered to her doll that night, her voice echoing from the bleeding walls themselves.
He had heard her through the thin partition. He had done nothing.
In the corner of the fractured memory, Devaki's silhouette moved like smoke, packing a suitcase that never seemed to fill, her shoulders shaking with sobs that would haunt their daughter forever. The air thick with unspoken apologies.
The conductor appeared beside him, his scarred palm pressed against the weeping wall. "Would you silence your anger here? Stop the words that drove her away?"
Agastya's hands trembled around Urvashi's photograph. The memory tasted of salt and shame and the kind of regret that eats fathers alive. "Not this one."
The whistle blew like a child's cry. They moved deeper into yesterday's wounds.
***
*Second Stop: The Lie*
The school principal's office materialized, but the walls breathed with Urvashi's drawings. Stick figures of families, always with one parent missing, crayon hearts that bled color into the wallpaper like wounds that would not heal.
Six-year-old Urvashi sat in the too-big chair, her feet dangling in the space between childhood and the cruelty adults hand down like heirlooms. Caught stealing another child's lunch money. Not because she was hungry, but because the other children called her father a failure, and she thought money might buy back his reputation with pocket change and desperate hope.
The room stretched into eternity. Every lie Agastya had ever told Devaki echoed from the ceiling... a symphony of broken promises and tomorrows that never came. Each excuse landed like a stone in Urvashi's small chest.
"She is going through a phase," past-Agastya said, his voice hollow as a father's love turned to habit. "Children do these things."
But present-Agastya could see what he had missed. Urvashi was not stealing their money. She was stealing their cruelty, taking it inside herself because she thought if she carried their shame, it might hurt her father less.
That night, he had scolded her for embarrassing him. He never asked why she had done it.
From the principal's desk, a letter materialized in Devaki's handwriting: "I am leaving because I cannot watch her learn to hate herself the way you have taught me to hate myself."
"This memory cuts deepest," the conductor said softly, his scar catching the light like a thread of silver pain. "Here you could heal this wound, stop her from learning shame."
Agastya stared at his daughter's drawing on the wall. A stick figure family holding hands under a sun that looked like a broken heart, its rays reaching toward a happiness they would never touch. "Not yet."
***
*Third Stop: The Silence*
The hospital room bloomed around them like a poisonous flower. But instead of the sterile void he remembered, the machines morphed into Urvashi's crayon hearts, pulsing with Devaki's guilt. Each monitor beeped in rhythm with a mother's hidden sobs, and the walls themselves became canvases where his wife's shadow moved like smoke, reaching for their daughter but never quite touching.
Urvashi was seven, and the cancer was eating her dreams one cell at a time.
Devaki's presence filled every reflection... in the window glass, the medical equipment, the IV drip that carried more than medicine. It carried a mother's love that had nowhere to go, trapped outside by pride and the weight of words that could not be taken back.
"Will you tell me about mama?" Urvashi had asked, her voice thread-thin but steady.
The room expanded into a starry void where Devaki's silhouette stood waiting, her arms outstretched, lips moving in silent apologies that would never reach their daughter's ears. The air shimmered with unsent letters, unspoken lullabies, a mother's love that had been cauterized by anger.
"Mama is busy," past-Agastya had said, not looking up from his newspaper. "She will come when she can."
The lie floated in the air like ash from a cremation pyre. In the reflection of the window, Agastya saw the truth: Devaki sitting in her car in the hospital parking lot every day for three months, crying, wanting to come up but too broken to face what their fights had cost their daughter.
On the bedside table, folded beneath medicine bottles, lay Devaki's letter: "Tell Urvashi I never stopped loving her. Tell her I was too broken to be the mother she deserved."
Urvashi had nodded at his lie, accepting it because children always do. But in her eyes, he saw the moment she stopped believing in grown-ups altogether.
"Here," the conductor said, his voice breaking like a father's heart, "here is where silence murdered hope. You could give her the letter let her know she was loved."
Agastya's chest felt hollow, scraped clean by years of carrying secrets that poisoned everything they touched. "Not this one either."
***
*Fourth Stop: The Last Day*
The final station materialized as their balcony, but it extended into infinity, stars close enough to touch. Urvashi sat in her chair, too weak to play but too stubborn to sleep, the evening light painting her face like a blessing from gods who had forgotten how to be kind.
The balcony stretched forever, and at its edge, Devaki's figure waited in the starlight, her forgiveness hanging like a bridge Agastya had never let his daughter cross.
"Papa, will you remember me exactly as I am right now?"
He had been reading his newspaper, half-listening, already rehearsing conversations with funeral directors he did not want to have. The words on the page blurred with tears he would not let fall until she was gone.
"You are not going anywhere," he had lied.
"But if I do. Will you remember this? Us, talking like this?"
In the infinite balcony, Urvashi's voice echoed like a prayer offered to a deaf heaven. Her blocks from childhood materialized in the air, building castles that held all the love words had never carried. Each block pulsed with forgiveness she was too young to understand and too pure to withhold.
"Of course, beta."
"Promise?"
"Promise."
She had died that night, holding his hand while he slept in the chair beside her bed. Her last words were whispered to darkness: "Tell mama I forgive her." Words he had missed, sleeping through the most important conversation of his life.
But now, in this fractured memory, her voice came clear as temple bells: "This was not how it was supposed to end, Papa. But maybe it was how I was supposed to love."
"Here," the conductor whispered, his scarred palm pressed to his heart, "you could wake up. Hear her final gift. Carry her forgiveness to her mother."
***
*The Choice*
The train shuddered to a stop. They were back at the platform, but now it existed in all times at once. Four memories glowed like wounds in the darkness. The argument. The lie. The silence. The last day.
"Four chances to rewrite your story," the conductor said, his scar gleaming like a star. "Which one will you choose?"
Agastya looked at each memory, each door leading to a different version of grief. "If I choose the argument..."
"Devaki might have stayed. Urvashi might have had both parents through the illness. No more broken castles built against angry words."
"If I choose the lie at school..."
"You might have understood her pain. Built bridges instead of walls. She might have learned to love herself the way daughters should."
"The silence at the hospital..."
"Urvashi might have known her mother's love. Might have been held instead of abandoned. The letter might have reached her heart."
"And the last day?"
The conductor's eyes held infinite sorrow, the weight of every father who arrives too late. "You might have been awake when she died. Might have heard her forgiveness. Carried it to Devaki like a bridge between the living and the dead."
Agastya stood in the space between choices. Each memory was a door. Each door led to a different version of loss, but loss nonetheless.
"But if I change any of these," he said slowly, the truth crystallizing like ice in his throat, "she might not be exactly who she was. The Urvashi who forgave her mother. The Urvashi who built castles against angry words. The Urvashi who asked me to remember her exactly as she was."
The conductor nodded understanding flooding his scarred features. "She became who she was because of all of it. The fights, the lies, the silences, the missed goodbye. If you take away the pain..."
"I might take away the person."
Time splintered like glass under guilt, each shard a moment he could not glue back. The train began to fracture around them, its compartments collapsing into a single moment where Urvashi's face appeared in the stars, her gap-toothed smile holding all the light the universe had ever made.
"I choose..." Agastya began.
Then stopped.
"I choose none of them."
The platform cracked beneath his feet. Time's law did not just break! it exploded into stardust and memory, painting the night sky with everything that was and everything that could never be changed.
"Because she asked me to remember her exactly as she was. And she was perfect. Not despite the pain, but because of how she wore it. Like a school badge stitched on too early, uncomfortable but worn with the fierce pride of children who refuse to surrender."
The train's compartments collapsed, but instead of destruction, Urvashi's blocks materialized in the air, rebuilding the platform into her castle... magnificent, imperfect, held together by love that transcends time's petty rules.
"You kept me whole, Papa," her voice sang through the reconstructed space, each word a star falling into place. "You kept me exactly as I was."
From the platform's edge, Devaki stepped out of shadow and into light, Urvashi's letter pressed to her chest. Her forgiveness did not bridge the gap between what was and what could have been! it transformed it into something larger. Love that moves forward, carrying pain not as burden but as proof that something precious once lived.
"Some fathers," the conductor said, his scar healing in the starlight, "carry their children in memory because their arms were too late. But you learned the hardest truth. Love does not run backwards. It blazes forward."
***
*The Morning After*
Agastya woke up on the platform bench. Morning light painted the empty tracks gold, but in the air, he swore he could hear the echo of Urvashi's laughter spreading through the city like light given sound.
In his pocket, Urvashi's photograph pulsed warm against his heart, singing her name with each beat.
For the first time in three years, he could remember her laugh without drowning in it.
He walked home through a city that still smelled like rain and memory, and on every wall he passed, he began to write her story. Her gap-toothed grin. Her castle-building. Her impossible forgiveness. The city hummed with her presence, and strangers stopped to read about the little girl who had taught her father that some journeys only make sense when you choose not to take them.
On the pavement gleaming in the morning sun, lay a single block from her castle... real, solid, impossible.
He picked it up and walked forward, carrying her exactly as she was, blazing forward in unbroken time.
Behind him, very faintly, he heard the whistle of a train that only ran backwards.
But love, he understood now, only moves forward.
***
*The rule was to leave the past untouched. Agastya broke it, choosing love's memory over change.*
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