It was ten in the morning, Banaras was supposed to glow. Usually, the city was drowned in a golden suffocating sunlight, but today it lay beneath a heavy blanket of clouds, as if the sky itself was holding it's breath. Banaras was no metropolis, yet it carried a strange ancient rhythm, a chaotic symphony of endless horns and shouting crowds, underpinned by a calm that moved like the Ganga slow, and eternal.

  It was known as the city of gods. The devout believed that it was guarded by Kala Bhairava, the fierce keeper of time and direction, and piligrims arrived daily to kneel before his shrine, seeking a moment of mercy from the master of their destiny. But among these millions of believers = lived a man who dismissed all of it as nothing more then a convenient myth.\

  Dr Aman Mehta had devoted his life not to gods, but to medicine. As one of the most renowned surgeon in the city, he was a man who put his faith in scalpels rather then prayers. There was a sharp irony in his existence; he came from a lineage of priests and sages, a family that measured the value of life in rituals and ancient mantras. Aman, however, measured life in a steady pulse of a heartbeat and the sterile, rhythmic beeps of monitor prople often say that humans change when the time is right i don't believe that.

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  I believe time changes people only when it is done waiting waiting for them to move on their own. And that morning, time was finished waiting for the doctor.

  You might ask how i know all this. I was there to witness the beginning of an end.

  Aman had been always obsessed with the how and the why. Since childhood, he had been fascinated by the clockwork of the universe, always needing to know what would happen if he pulled a certain lever or cut a certain string. he wanted to dismantle the human body just to understand the ghost inside the machine.

  He wasn't born to these holy ghats; he was raised in the frantic, modern chaos of Delhi. A man who loved the cold logic of the capital was now practicing in the mystical heart of Banaras. was it fate? was it calling? No one knew, not even me. But i am certain of one thing; the man who trusted only what he could touch, who measured life in breath and blood, was about to have his reality turned upside down.

  The clock was ticking and for Aman Mehta, the hands were about to move backward.