The garden Shift

Set in Kharagpur in the 1980s  

It was meant to be a quick detour—just five little girls looking for a pause from the crowd, the chaos, the glitter of Durga Puja pandals lighting up their small-sleepy town, Kharagpur. They turned off the main road that autumn afternoon and wandered into the old railway garden, a place locals mentioned in half-jokes and caution.

This was a garden they had occasionally been to. So they weren't scared. There wasn't a soul inside the scarcely visited garden on the festival day and that made it a perfect spot of the friends to steal a few moments to themselves.  

So, they marched in. 

Deeper in, they found an abandoned iron pushkart tucked beneath an old banyan. It stood adjacent to an oddly tall locked room. The cart groaned under their weight as they piled in, giggling. The afternoon air was warm with the scent of dust and old leaves. The dhak—the ceremonial drums—was still thundering from a nearby pandal, just two hundred meters away. 

Familiar. 

Comforting. 

Alive. 

They started their usual chatter and laughed off their heart out. They busied themselves showing off their new dresses, bangles and other accessories. Slowly the conversations turned to the upcoming picnic day- they were all looking forward to. 

And then, slowly, something began to change, 

The sound began to fade.

Not die, exactly. Slip.

Like someone was turning down the volume on the world.

They stopped mid-conversation, one by one darting glances at each other. 

The air thickened. One girl looked around nervously asking how much time had passed- was it half an hour? Another swore it had been an hour, while the third said it felt like eternity. 

The sky above them felt still.

The trees too still. 

The pushkart seemed to hum beneath them, though no one moved.

Time blurred. 

So did sound. 

The laughter from the pandal was gone. 

The dhak was now a distant echo, like it belonged to another town altogether. "I feel if I  stay any longer here, I will never be able to go back home," said one.

It felt like they were slowly drifting away into something that made them nervous.

“We should go,” she whispered. The others didn’t argue and started running back.

When they stepped out of the garden, everything snapped back. Lights, noise, people. The drums were deafening again.

No one else had noticed anything strange. Just them!