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Borrowed Time
What if you could give the elderly one perfect night of youth - but the bill would come due from their children?
In a cramped watch repair shop in Mumbai, where chrome towers cast shadows over dying crafts, 72-year-old Nityanand Rao keeps time for a vanishing world. His customers are widows clutching dead husbands' watches, retirees whose children see only obsolete gears. He fixes what can be fixed, charges less than he should, and maintains the fiction that craft still matters in an age of smartwatches.
Then a peculiar gentleman leaves behind an ancient bronze pocket watch bearing the seal of Kubera, the god of wealth. One touch of Nityanand's expert hands awakens something that should not a cosmic accounting system that turns his repairs into miracles. Every watch he fixes now grants its owner their happiest age from sunset to sunrise - a widow walks Marine Drive at thirty-two again, a forgotten actress reclaims her cheekbones, a physics teacher solves equations with adolescent joy.
But the universe keeps strict books. For every night of borrowed youth, the ledger claims exactly one year from the restored person's children. The mathematics are parents dance in nightclubs while their sons age overnight into grandfathers. A daughter develops arthritis at twelve. A marathoner finds himself in a wheelchair at thirty-eight.
As the debts compound and Mumbai's children pay for their parents' hunger for lost time, Nityanand faces an impossible choice. Can he break a supernatural contract bound by Sanskrit, mathematics and divine law? And when the final accounting comes, what currency could possibly balance eight hundred and forty-seven stolen years?
A haunting tale of love and sacrifice where Indian mythology meets the modern world, Borrowed Time Is borrowed time ever truly ours? And in a world that discards its elders, what is the real cost of youth?
Some gifts can only be given, never taken back.
---
A Mirrors of Maya story. 6,500 words. Reading 25-30 minutes.
In a cramped watch repair shop in Mumbai, where chrome towers cast shadows over dying crafts, 72-year-old Nityanand Rao keeps time for a vanishing world. His customers are widows clutching dead husbands' watches, retirees whose children see only obsolete gears. He fixes what can be fixed, charges less than he should, and maintains the fiction that craft still matters in an age of smartwatches.
Then a peculiar gentleman leaves behind an ancient bronze pocket watch bearing the seal of Kubera, the god of wealth. One touch of Nityanand's expert hands awakens something that should not a cosmic accounting system that turns his repairs into miracles. Every watch he fixes now grants its owner their happiest age from sunset to sunrise - a widow walks Marine Drive at thirty-two again, a forgotten actress reclaims her cheekbones, a physics teacher solves equations with adolescent joy.
But the universe keeps strict books. For every night of borrowed youth, the ledger claims exactly one year from the restored person's children. The mathematics are parents dance in nightclubs while their sons age overnight into grandfathers. A daughter develops arthritis at twelve. A marathoner finds himself in a wheelchair at thirty-eight.
As the debts compound and Mumbai's children pay for their parents' hunger for lost time, Nityanand faces an impossible choice. Can he break a supernatural contract bound by Sanskrit, mathematics and divine law? And when the final accounting comes, what currency could possibly balance eight hundred and forty-seven stolen years?
A haunting tale of love and sacrifice where Indian mythology meets the modern world, Borrowed Time Is borrowed time ever truly ours? And in a world that discards its elders, what is the real cost of youth?
Some gifts can only be given, never taken back.
---
A Mirrors of Maya story. 6,500 words. Reading 25-30 minutes.
38 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 5, 2025
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January 27, 2026
3.75 stars. Loved the sci fi and time travel aspect, but this one took some brainpower to get thru.
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