The Ticking Clock

The room buzzes with a humming silence, the kind that weighs heavy on your eardrums like pressure at the bottom of the ocean. Two detectives sit across from him at a chipped wooden table, their eyes scanning every twitch, every movement. A digital clock on the wall ticks in sync with the fluorescent light that flickers just slightly out of rhythm. He sits there, handcuffed, the chain dragging slightly against the table. His clothes drenched in sweat, though the air conditioning is on full blast. His eyes? Vacant. It’s as though the world left him days ago, and only his body remains, waiting for the inevitable.

“You’re going to have to help us understand,” one of the detectives says, tapping a pen against the pad in front of him. “Why’d you do it, Anirban?”

Anirban doesn’t answer immediately. He looks at his own hands—palms dry and cracked, fingers trembling slightly from the handcuffs cutting into his skin. For a moment, there’s silence. The detective leans forward. “It wasn’t just an impulse, was it? You planned this. You chose that mall, thatmeeting room full of executives. What were you thinking?”

Anirban’s lips curl, not into a smile but something resembling one—a broken, ironic twist. “Thinking?” His voice is hoarse. “That was the problem. I was always thinking… thinking about them, thinking about what they needed. And you know what? They didn’t even notice.”

Two Months Earlier

At work, Anirban was the man no one saw. The one with a desk by the bathroom door. When he spoke up in meetings, his ideas were interrupted, co-opted by others, and laughed away like paper airplanes thrown in a storm. “Stick to spreadsheets, Anirban,” someone said one day. Laughter filled the room, and he laughed along with them, like a trained dog unaware it was the butt of the joke.

His manager, Mr. Chatterjee, enjoyed belittling him in ways that felt too personal to be coincidence. “I don’t know how you make it through the day, Anirban,” Chatterjee would say, patting his shoulder too hard. “But hey, someone’s gotta be at the bottom, right?”

And every time Anirban went home, he knew exactly what waited for him. His wife, Anindita, was a whirlwind of contempt disguised as disappointment. “Why do you think we’re stuck in this two-bedroom hellhole?” she’d ask, her voice sharp with the sting of years lost. “Because you can’t be a man. You can’t even keep your job stable enough for a promotion.”

His kids? They treated him like an ATM. To them, he was only relevant when they needed allowance money or a ride to a party. They never asked how his day was, and he never offered.

Then there was Rini—his “best friend” for years. Rini was charming, successful, and utterly selfish. She’d show up when she needed a loan, a favour, or just someone to vent to after her social gatherings. And Anirban would listen, because what else was he good for? It was easier to be needed, even in that hollow way, than to be entirely alone.

One evening, when Rini borrowed money again, Anirban dared to ask when he’d get it back. Rini chuckled, clinking her wine glass against his. “You? Man, you’re too soft for money games. Just let it go, Anirban. It’s not like you have anything else to invest in.”

That was the night Anirban sat awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling, feeling every invisible thread of his life snap one by one.

Interrogation Room

“You think it just happened one day?” Anirban’s voice cracks as he stares at the detective across the table. “It doesn’t work like that. It’s like… like a string stretched tighter and tighter until it finally snaps. And when it snaps—” He taps the table with two fingers. “It doesn’t care where the tension came from. It just breaks.”

The younger detective glances at his partner, shifting uneasily in his chair. “So you’re saying… everyone just pushed you into this?”

Anirban chuckles darkly. “Pushed me?” He shakes his head. “They didn’t even notice I was falling. I was drowning in plain sight, and they kept taking away my anchors.”

The Spiral

It started with little things—forgetting meetings, snapping at Anindita under his breath, staying up late scrolling through job boards he knew he’d never apply to. One morning, his son asked him for new shoes, and something inside him cracked. “Why don’t you ask your mother?” he said, voice colder than he intended. His son stormed off without a word, and Anirban felt strangely relieved.

The distance between him and everyone else grew. Chatterjee wrote him off as dead weight at work, assigning him menial tasks as a way to sideline him without the hassle of firing him. Anindita stopped pretending to care about his moods. Rini stopped calling altogether.

Then came the day in the mall. He went there out of habit during lunch—walking mindlessly through the corridors, watching the professionals with their lanyards and tailored suits. They were people who had purpose, or at least looked like it. And that was when he saw them—a group of executives from a rival firm, gathered in the glass-walled meeting room of a café.

They were everything he wasn’t: loud, confident, important. They laughed with ease, the sound like nails scraping against Anirban’s mind. In that moment, something snapped. He stopped feeling invisible and started feeling… inevitable.

The gun was already in his coat pocket. He had bought it weeks earlier, thinking maybe he’d use it on himself one night. But now, here, in the heart of this clean, polished mall filled with people who mattered, he found a strange, terrible clarity.

He stepped inside the meeting room. They noticed him now. All of them. He was in a combat position as he pulled out the gun. And for the first time in years, everyone stopped and looked at him.

Interrogation Room

“How did it feel?” the detective asks, his voice low.

Anirban meets his gaze, eyes empty yet full of some deep, dark knowing. “It felt like… silence. The kind you only get when everything that’s been screaming in your head finally stops.”

The room falls silent again. The detectives exchange a glance, both unnerved by the sheer ordinariness and coldness of the man before them. There’s no rage, no regret—only a quiet acceptance, as if this was always where Anirban was meant to end up.

The older detective leans in. “What do you think happens next?”

Anirban shrugs. “Does it matter?” His voice is eerily calm. “It was always going to end like this.”

The clock on the wall ticks loudly, each second dragging them closer to some unknown conclusion. Outside, the world goes on. Executives meet in cafés, children demand new shoes, friends borrow money and forget to return it. Life continues, indifferent and unyielding.

But in that tiny room, with the dim fluorescent light flickering overhead, Anirban sits still, watching the minutes slip away. And for the first time in years, he feels absolutely nothing.

The clock ticks.

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