The Dreamer's Blueprint

The neon-soaked streets of Sakinaka had a way of playing tricks on your mind. Mumbai's industrial heart beat to its own rhythm here – a symphony of machinery and mankind that never quite settled into silence. But it wasn't the endless whir of textile machines that kept me awake those nights in 2008. It was the dreams. They started innocently enough. A shadow here, a silhouette there. But soon, he emerged from the darkness of my subconscious – a figure that straddled centuries like they were mere stepping stones across a stream of time. Rane, I called him. A name that came to me as naturally as breathing.