“You two are twins separated by money,” she’d laugh.
Akaal nodded.
Fateh opened the door. He didn’t look surprised. He looked tired.
The end.
They sat on the cracked pavement. Akaal pulled out two bottles of lassi from a roadside stall. Fateh laughed—a rusty, painful sound.
“Erase something for me,” Akaal said. “Let’s start a business. Your brain. My money. But this time… no safety net. Let the pencil break. Let the line smudge. Let’s write it together.”
He found him in a dusty kothi in Sector 38, wiping sweat off his forehead. The rickshaw was parked outside. The engineering degree was framed on the wall, covered in a thin film of greasy dust.
Akaal’s father was a rich sardarji who owned a tractor dealership. Fateh’s father was the mechanic who fixed the tractors in the oily pit. In the first grade, their teacher, Mrs. Dhillon, made them sit together. She noticed they held their slates the same way—crooked, left-handed, a sign of doomed artists.
“See?” Fateh grinned, holding the letter. “The pencil worked for me today. The line came out straight.”
Fateh went to Chandigarh. Akaal went into his father’s showroom. At first, they called every day. Then every week. Then Fateh’s calls went unanswered because Akaal was “busy closing a deal.” Akaal’s calls went unanswered because Fateh was “busy staying awake on four hours of sleep and instant noodles.”
The night the results came, they sat on the rusted water tank behind the mechanic’s shed. The monsoon was late. The air tasted like dust and broken dreams.
Five years later, they had fifty employees. Fateh was the CTO. Akaal was the CEO. They never fought over shares. They never drew a line between yours and mine.
Because in the end, God might have written their fate with a sharpened pencil. But he forgot one thing: a pencil is useless without a hand to hold it. And a hand is useless without another hand to hold onto.
That was the first crack.