They called it the year of introspection—2022, the year that the world, tired from mere survival, had lost its way to living. But for Reyan, a 32-year-old specter in a corporate life wandering through a universe of Zoom calls and shallow words, introspection was his mode of being.

He read addictively. He wrote erratically. But for the most part, he wondered.

"Who will weep when you die?"
The book had asked. And the answer, echoing off his sterile apartment, was simple: nobody.

Reyan had traded passion for security. He was the monarch of stability, the killer of dreams. His days were scheduled. His soul? Shattered.

Until the day that, while wasting time scrolling, he saw a line on a graffiti wall in a run-down industrial town:
"Go play and be like this. What a sin."

What a sin, yes—to have been born and instead choose numbness.

And so he walked. From work. From his city. Just… away.

He ended up in Jharkhand, where coal dust villages sold and dreams had soot-blackened. There, he met Anvi, a school teacher who fought malnutrition using chalk and borrowed bravery. "Biofortification and malnutrition go hand in hand," she once observed, after a child passed out in class. "But they don't remember we also need to fortify hope."

She believed education to be the medicine.

He believed nothing.

And yet, something in her unraveled him.

In that broken place, Reyan found a strange type of entertainment—not the empty kind he once binged, but the kind that seeped through street plays and children's giggles. "A dose of entertainment," Anvi said, "is how we remind the soul it's still alive."

Still, the town was dying—coal reserves depleting, electricity scarce, water poisoned. The "Looming Coal Crisis in India" was no slogan here. It was wakeless nights. It was quiet.

And from within the quiet, he listened to a whisper.

From the worn diary he found in the school in the village, with only one line on the last page:

"What you seek is seeking you." – Rumi

It stopped him in his tracks.

Suddenly, everything—Anvi’s fire, the dying children, the burning coal, the fading connections—converged.

“Let’s look deep into the relationships,” he thought. Between energy and life. Between silence and complicity. Between a man and his lost soul.

So he stayed.

Wrote.

Fought.

Loved.

And slowly, the fire within him began to speak.

He spoke, started programs, made use of his past corporate experience to secure funding. He became the voice of the voiceless. Let the fire within you be your voice, he remembered. He made every unheard whisper find a platform.

Years passed.

Reyan built an institute on that land—The House of Voices—where orphans became artists and silence symphony.

On the fifth anniversary, Anvi presented it to him sealed within the binding of the diary.

In his own handwriting.

"Dear Reyan,
If you're reading this, you've finally remembered.

This is your second life.
You died five years ago in Delhi. Alone. In your sleep.
No one cried.
But the universe gave you another chance—to search for what you always ran from.
Purpose.
You've done well.
Soon, you'll forget again.
But that's okay.".

Because now, somebody will weep when you pass away."

– You.

Reyan stood Frozen.

The flame in him burned—but didn't vanish.

He smiled.

Then stepped outside, bare feet into the scarlet dust, as the children danced off in the far distance, reciting stories he helped them write.

And in the smudged coal-colored sky somewhere, a tear finally broke through.

Reyan's odyssey was a purgatory of mission—a liminal second chance given by the universe to mend what was damaged beforehand. Finding his voice, he redefined the narrative of his soul.