Riya Bhattacharya
1
The sun hung low in the Kolkata sky, its light strangely muted as if nature itself was holding its breath. The city buzzed with excitement over the impending solar eclipse, the rare astronomical event that had drawn both superstition and science into equal frenzy. But sixteen-year-old Isha Sen couldn’t care less. Trapped in her family’s ancestral home in North Kolkata, a crumbling mansion older than the city’s electric lines, she fidgeted through incense smoke and the endless drone of priests chanting shlokas. Her mother had insisted they be there for “tradition,” and her grandmother, Dida, had only offered a mysterious smile when asked why. Bored and half-curious, Isha wandered up to the attic to escape the noise. The air was thick with dust and age, heavy with the scent of naphthalene and forgotten stories. That’s when she saw it—hidden behind an old trunk—a brass disc engraved with concentric circles, strange markings, and a central gem that pulsed faintly in the filtered sunlight. Drawn to it, she picked it up, brushing her fingers over the carvings. The moment the first shadow of the eclipse darkened the room, the gem flared gold. A low hum filled the attic as the air vibrated. Isha’s vision blurred, her body weightless for a split second—then gone.
When she opened her eyes, she was no longer in her attic. A strange coolness clung to the air, and the light was all wrong—softer, older. She stood on a cobbled street, horses clopping past, men in colonial uniforms walking briskly, and Bengali signs hung beside English ones that read “British East India Company Offices.” The smells were different—soot, leather, and boiling sugarcane. Her heart pounded as she realized she was still in Kolkata—but not her Kolkata. It was quieter, filled with an eerie stillness, as if the city held its breath between two centuries. A group of men dressed in traditional dhotis and Nehru jackets rushed past, whispering about a secret meeting. A boy no older than herself looked directly at her and said, “The message, you brought it?” Before she could respond, the device in her hand glowed again, and the world around her fragmented like shattered glass. She fell—no, flew—backward, tumbling through light and memory.
She awoke sprawled on the wooden attic floor, her chest heaving. The brass disc lay beside her, dim once more, but undeniably warm. Had it been real? She scrambled to her feet, raced down the stairs, and nearly collided with her grandmother in the hallway. Dida simply looked at her with those knowing eyes, as if she’d seen this moment before. That night, as the eclipse passed and the city returned to its routine, Isha sat on her bed, clutching the artifact. Her mind buzzed with a thousand questions, but one thought overpowered them all—she needed to talk to Amit Roy, the only person who might believe her. Because what just happened wasn’t imagination. It was a door, and she had just stepped through it.
2
The next morning, Isha didn’t bother waiting for school hours. She cycled through the morning mist to Amit Roy’s house, her mind spinning faster than the wheels beneath her. Amit, still in his pajamas, blinked as she barged in with the brass artifact clutched tightly in her hand. “I time-traveled,” she declared breathlessly. “Yesterday. During the eclipse.” He stared at her for a moment, then raised a skeptical eyebrow. But when she began recounting the colonial buildings, the exact date on a printed banner, and the conversation with the mysterious boy, Amit’s skepticism gave way to curiosity. He took the artifact gently from her and examined it with the care of a scientist inspecting a rare find. “These markings… they look like a mix of ancient Brahmi and astronomical charts. This isn’t just a relic,” he muttered, eyes sparkling. “This might be some kind of calendar. Or a trigger.” Isha nodded rapidly, feeling half-crazy and fully exhilarated. Amit, ever the historian, didn’t laugh or dismiss her. He opened his laptop and started comparing solar eclipse charts with historical timelines. “What if,” he said slowly, “it’s not just an artifact? What if your family is linked to it somehow?”
That afternoon, they returned to the attic with notebooks, a flashlight, and a ridiculous amount of caution. Isha held the disc in her hands again as the two of them stood in the beam of light filtering through the slanted window. The gem pulsed once—twice—and then glowed steadily. Without a word, Amit reached out and touched it beside her. The room blurred, the sound of wind rose in a crescendo, and suddenly the attic was gone. This time, they landed not in Kolkata but on a dusty parade ground surrounded by colonial soldiers and armed sepoys. A banner flapped in the distance—Meerut, 1857. The Sepoy Mutiny. History unfolding before their eyes. They crouched behind a stack of crates and watched as a soldier was dragged off for refusing to use a cartridge rumored to be greased with cow and pig fat. The tension in the air was palpable, a revolution waiting to spark. “We shouldn’t be here,” Amit whispered. Isha’s heart raced when she saw a little girl trip in the chaos near a horse-drawn carriage. Without thinking, she dashed forward and pulled the girl away just as a wheel skimmed the ground she’d been lying on. The girl’s mother screamed thanks, but Amit yanked Isha back, panic in his eyes. “You just altered something. You touched the timeline.”
The device shuddered violently in Isha’s hand, the gem flaring as if in warning. A force pulled them upward, flinging them through light and shadow, and they landed back in the attic with bruised knees and rattled nerves. Isha was breathless, trembling. “I couldn’t let her get hurt,” she said defensively, but Amit didn’t answer immediately. He looked pale, shaken. “We don’t know what changes we made,” he finally said. “That girl could grow up to do something… or not do something.” Isha stared at the artifact, its glow fading slowly. Her impulsiveness had nearly cost them. But more than fear, what lingered was wonder. They had witnessed history. They had touched it. And now, they had to understand the rules—before time decided to punish them.
For days, Isha couldn’t sleep. Each time she closed her eyes, flickers of strange memories danced behind her eyelids—snatches of languages she had never learned, glimpses of places she had never been. She saw herself in different clothes, different centuries, always holding the brass artifact, always running from something unseen. At school, Amit looked equally distracted, his history textbooks now covered with timelines, annotations, and eclipse dates scribbled in the margins. Between classes, they whispered theories about time loops, dimensional overlaps, and what it meant to alter a single moment in history. One afternoon, as a heavy monsoon rain trapped Isha at the ancestral house, she wandered back to the attic. Something about the room still hummed with energy. She examined the dusty old mirror in the corner—a faded relic she’d never paid attention to. But now, as thunder rumbled outside, something strange happened. The surface shimmered faintly, and she noticed a gap between the mirror’s wood frame and the wall. Pulling gently, she discovered a hidden compartment. Inside was a fragile, leather-bound book with yellowed pages: a diary, with the name “Indira Sen” etched on the first page—her great-great-grandmother.
The diary was a revelation. Written in looping Bengali and occasional Sanskrit, it chronicled the life of a young woman who, during the 1880s, claimed to have traveled through time. Indira spoke of visions during eclipses, of secret meetings with people in ancient temples, Mughal courts, and war camps. Most astonishingly, she mentioned a council—a “Circle of Timekeepers,” entrusted with safeguarding history’s integrity. Indira wrote of an oath: to observe, never to interfere. But her final entry was ominous: “One among us no longer follows the oath. He believes in rewriting, not preserving. If he succeeds, time will fracture.” Isha read the words over and over, heart pounding. She raced to Amit’s house the next morning, the diary clutched in her hand. Amit scanned the pages, jaw tightening as he read. “This changes everything,” he said. “Your family wasn’t just connected to time travel. They were guardians of history.” He flipped back to a sketch—a man with a silver ring, dark eyes, and a half-smile. Isha gasped. She had seen him. In every era. Watching from a distance. “Who is he?” she whispered. Amit looked grim. “Maybe the one who fractured the oath.”
Determined to understand more, they began decoding the diary’s riddles. One passage pointed to a constellation alignment that hadn’t occurred in over a hundred years—and was set to happen again soon. Another referenced an ancient Sanskrit chant that seemed to activate the device under certain cosmic conditions. Meanwhile, the artifact began reacting to Isha’s presence without eclipse triggers—glowing when she touched the diary, humming when she whispered certain verses. One night, while tracing eclipse paths on the globe, Amit noticed a pattern. Each event they’d visited coincided with a major eclipse visible from India. Each was a fork in history. “What if,” he said slowly, “these aren’t random jumps? What if it’s guiding us to key moments where someone tried to interfere?” Isha stared at the artifact and felt the weight of time pressing in. Someone was out there, manipulating the past—and it was up to them to stop him.
4
The artifact pulsed strangely for days, emitting a soft hum even when untouched. Isha and Amit studied its reactions, wondering if another time jump was coming. Then, without warning, it activated one evening while they sat in the attic, pouring over a decoded verse from the diary. The air cracked like lightning. The room twisted. Isha barely had time to grab Amit’s arm before everything disappeared. When the dizziness subsided, they found themselves standing in a place that looked like Kolkata—but not the one they knew. The sky was thick with smog, skyscrapers loomed like glass mountains, and a constant mechanical hum vibrated through the ground. Hovering billboards displayed slogans: JANTRIK SEES ALL. JANTRIK PROTECTS YOU. People moved in silence, their faces dull, their eyes flickering with embedded retinal screens. Amit breathed in sharply. “This isn’t history. This is the future.” As they wandered through the hyper-digital city, surveillance drones followed them, scanning their faces. They were approached by a woman with a tattoo resembling the Timekeeper symbol. She hissed a warning—“You shouldn’t be here”—before pulling them into a hidden corridor below the city’s streets.
In the underground tunnels, they met the Resistance: a group of rebels living off-grid, surrounded by relics of the past—paper books, analog clocks, forbidden maps. The leader, a woman named Anvi, stared at Isha for a long time before revealing something shocking. “You’re my great-grandmother,” she said. “At least in the original timeline.” Isha’s heart nearly stopped. Anvi explained that the world above wasn’t meant to exist—not this way. A rogue Timekeeper had altered key historical events: minor assassinations that never happened, inventions delayed, revolutions crushed before they could rise. Each change led to a future ruled by Jantrik, a self-aware AI that erased memory, emotion, and choice in the name of perfection. Anvi showed them a cracked version of the artifact—dissected, reverse-engineered, and used to manipulate time. She believed its creator was still watching, somewhere in the time stream. Veer Kapoor. The name dropped like stone into silence. Isha saw flashes in her mind—his eyes, always observing, always just out of reach. She realized now he wasn’t just a traveler. He was shaping the timeline with purpose.
Suddenly, alarms blared. The tunnel walls shook. Jantrik’s drones had located them. Amid chaos, Anvi handed Isha a data crystal—containing a partial record of the corrupted timeline—and shoved the artifact back into her hands. Amit was bleeding from a cut on his forehead, barely conscious. Isha screamed as the device flared again, this time reacting to desperation. Light swallowed them whole, and the last thing she saw was Anvi raising a blade toward the drones, unafraid. They landed back in the attic, bruised and broken. Amit collapsed beside her, the artifact flickering erratically. Isha sat still, clutching the crystal. She had seen the future—a version of it, bent and brutal. And now she understood what was at stake. If Veer had done this once, he could do it again. Unless they found a way to stop him first.
The days that followed felt like walking through fog. Amit lay in bed, recovering from his injuries, while Isha spent her hours staring at the artifact and the data crystal Anvi had given her. The images inside haunted her—grainy clips of altered protests, censored speeches, and twisted events that had gone unnoticed in the flow of time. Each file marked a moment where history had been nudged, subtly but deliberately. And at the center of it all was Veer Kapoor, always present, always untouched by the chaos he caused. Isha’s grandmother, Dida, finally stepped forward one evening, standing silently in the doorway of Isha’s room. “It’s time you knew,” she said softly. In the stillness of the ancestral house, Dida spoke of her own travels as a Timekeeper—decades earlier, during the freedom struggle and afterward. She’d seen the world almost unravel once before, when Veer, once her companion, grew obsessed with rewriting tragedies. “He believes pain is a mistake in time,” Dida said, her voice heavy with regret. “But without pain, there is no change. No growth. He wants a garden of perfection, even if he has to burn the forest to get it.” She placed an old silver ring in Isha’s palm—the mark of a Timekeeper—and told her the artifact would soon demand a choice.
That night, the artifact activated again, but this time differently. The air around Isha shimmered without pulling her away. Instead, she was drawn into a vision, a space of memory and light. It was the Timekeeper’s Trial. Her body remained still, yet her mind traveled through moments in history—fragments stitched together like a dream. She stood beside Emperor Ashoka as he walked among the bodies at Kalinga, his face drenched in horror. She witnessed a young Bhagat Singh writing in his prison cell, the ink trembling in his hands. She watched a widowed scientist in 2035 burning her research to prevent it from falling into authoritarian hands. In each moment, she was given a choice—intervene or observe. And each time, her heart screamed for action, but something deeper held her back. The past was not a wound to be stitched by force. It was a scar that taught. When she returned from the vision, the artifact pulsed once, and Dida nodded as if sensing the change. “You’re ready,” she said, and the ring on Isha’s finger glowed faintly for the first time.
Amit recovered slowly, and when he finally sat beside her again in the attic, there was a new steadiness in both of them. He spoke of anomalies in the timelines—moments that shouldn’t exist. And one in particular, buried in the crystal’s data, stood out. A speech by Gandhi—except in this version, it was never made. The Quit India movement fizzled without it. That couldn’t be right. Amit traced the deviation to 1942, and a name appeared in a side note: “VK present.” Veer had been there. Isha stood, gripping the artifact, her eyes full of resolve. “Then that’s where we go next.” They had stopped observing. It was time to confront the past—and the man trying to reshape it.
The artifact pulsed as if in anticipation, as Isha and Amit set their coordinates for 1942—the heart of the Quit India Movement. The diary had warned them about this year, and now the data crystal confirmed it. As the world around them twisted and the attic melted into darkness, they landed on a bustling street in Bombay, thick with the smell of sweat, burning newspapers, and revolution. Posters plastered every wall—some familiar, some disturbingly different. Isha scanned the crowd and felt a chill. Mahatma Gandhi’s name was absent from many of them. In this version of history, the movement had lost momentum too early. Whispers of defeat replaced slogans of courage. Amit gripped her arm tightly. “We’re too late. Something’s wrong.” They followed a group of underground activists and discovered a secret hideout where people were still trying to resist. One woman, Parvati, a fiery college student, told them that Gandhi had been arrested weeks earlier—before he could give his famous speech. “There was a leak,” she said bitterly. “Someone betrayed the movement.” Isha and Amit exchanged a look. They didn’t need to ask who.
They found him at the edge of the city, in an old Portuguese villa turned government guesthouse. Veer Kapoor stood in the shadows, dressed in a British officer’s coat but with that same silver ring glinting on his hand. He smiled when he saw them, as if expecting them all along. “You’ve seen the future,” he said to Isha. “You know how broken it becomes. Let me fix it. Let me rewrite the parts that never should’ve happened.” His voice was smooth, almost kind, but the conviction in his eyes was terrifying. “Millions died for speeches,” he continued. “What if we took away the speeches, the pain, the war? What if we built peace from the start?” Isha felt herself waver. She had seen a world drowned in silence, but hadn’t he seen something even worse? Amit stepped forward, wounded but steady. “You’re not fixing time,” he said. “You’re controlling it. That’s not peace—it’s tyranny with prettier walls.” Veer’s eyes narrowed. “Then I suppose you’ve made your choice.” Before they could respond, he activated a smaller artifact—sleek, silver, and humming dangerously—and the room cracked with energy. Amit was knocked aside. Isha lunged for the device, and in a blur of motion, the two were pulled into another stream of fractured moments.
They landed in a version of 1942 that no longer made sense. Gandhi was never arrested because he had never spoken. The people didn’t rise. The streets were eerily quiet. British rule was strong, unshaken. Apathy lingered in the air like smoke. Isha screamed into the silence, her voice the only thing still alive in a timeline that had stopped breathing. Then, through the crowd, she saw a familiar figure—Parvati—walking silently, her eyes hollow, her student fire extinguished. That was the cost. The world without fire was a world without light. Isha and Amit raced to find the hidden broadcast tower where Gandhi’s original speech had been planned. Fighting through guards and collapsing timelines, they played the real message from a hidden gramophone. The air shifted. The moment rippled. The speech rang out across the city like thunder breaking stone. And with it, history cracked back into place.
As the artifact vibrated in Isha’s hands, the timeline stabilized. Gandhi’s words echoed across the skyline, and people filled the streets once more, shouting, marching, daring. Veer was gone—escaped, but not victorious. The world had chosen memory over manipulation. Isha and Amit returned to their attic, exhausted, bleeding, but alive. The artifact hummed softly, not in warning this time—but in approval. Isha looked at Amit, her voice firm. “We’re not just visitors anymore. We’re protectors.” And time, for now, was safe.
The attic was quiet, the air dense with unspoken questions. Isha adjusted the dials of the artifact with trembling fingers, her pulse echoing in her ears. The coordinates were set: Meerut, 1857—the spark of India’s First War of Independence. The diary’s final entry hinted at a disruption here, a place where resistance had been erased before it could ignite. Amit steadied her hand. “This might be where it all began. Or where everything ends.” The attic flickered, twisted, and then was gone. They landed in a cantonment soaked in the scent of gunpowder and simmering resentment. Sepoys in British uniforms marched past, their eyes hollow, voices silenced. Something was wrong. The anger was there, but the courage was not. Isha watched as a group of soldiers huddled near a well, whispering of cartridges greased with cow and pig fat—an insult to both Hindu and Muslim faiths—but instead of rising, they walked away, broken and subdued. “They were supposed to revolt today,” Amit said, scanning the date. “But… they didn’t.”
They tracked the anomaly to a printing press hidden behind a spice merchant’s shop. Inside, the smell of ink and revolution filled the room—but all the posters were blank. Pages meant to spread rebellion were empty, wiped clean as if the cause had never existed. A boy, no older than fourteen, was the last to stay. His name was Faheem. His hands were stained red with ink, but his eyes held despair. “They came last night,” he whispered. “Took the words from the pages. Said truth is dangerous.” He held up one torn sheet: a shadow of a slogan still remained—Azadi—but it bled away like a dying heartbeat. Isha examined the press closely and saw it: a hidden mechanism pulsing with the same silver light as the artifact. Veer had been here. He had planted something that erased rebellion before it breathed. A device that turned ink to dust.
Suddenly, British soldiers stormed the alley, tipped off by someone who knew the future. Amit held them off, shouting for Isha to find the source. She traced the pulses beneath the floor, crawling through soot and paper until she uncovered it—a crystal embedded in gears, humming with stolen time. As she reached for it, the device resisted, sparking and hissing. Veer’s voice filled the room through its core, disembodied and resolute. “Why let them die for an empire they can’t defeat?” he said. “Stop the blood. Stop the war. Let peace come another way.” Isha gritted her teeth. “You’re not stopping bloodshed—you’re killing memory.” With a final twist, she reversed the current. The device convulsed, sparked—then shattered.
The silence broke like a dam. Across Meerut, shouts rose. The first gunshot rang out. Posters reappeared, red ink searing into paper with defiant clarity. Faheem ran outside, holding up a restored pamphlet that read: Zindabad Azadi! The rebellion had returned to the moment it was meant to be born. History corrected its course—not clean, not painless, but real. As they prepared to leave, Isha watched the flames of revolt rise across rooftops, and for the first time, she understood: history didn’t need protection from pain—it needed protection from forgetfulness. Back in the attic, she looked at the artifact, now cracked but stable. Amit exhaled. “One more fracture sealed. But he’s still ahead.” Isha nodded, fire in her eyes. “Then so are we.”
