38-year-old, light yellow kurta and denim jeans clad Anjan Sengupta took another sip of his 4th glass of iced Americano at the neighbourhood café in Noida. The café staff would often laugh at his eccentric habit of wearing a pair of sunglasses indoors while working on his laptop for hours. This enigmatic patron had been a regular at the café for the last 2 years. Other frequent patrons would at times bet on what this funny man did for a living. Some said he is a junky, some said he is an undercover narcotics officer in a bid to bust rumoured drug rackets in the neighbourhood, while some would guess that he was the café’s angel investor.
Anjan would often overhear these speculations about him and grin.
He was a successful self-help writer who wrote under the pseudonym “Swami Shoonya”.
Not the robe-wearing kind—Shoonya wore no saffron, but he had a legion of online followers who swore that his minimalist philosophy “The Zero Point Path” had transformed their lives. Ironically, Anjan himself hadn’t been able to sleep through the night in years.
At exactly 3:33 PM that day, as he always did, he opened a fresh Google Doc and typed.
Chapter 1: The Man Who Was Being Written
He leaned back and smiled.
“I am going to break the damn fourth wall this time,” he muttered, stirring the melting ice in his glass.
This wasn’t for the Swami Shoonya brand. This was for him. The real HIM.
Anjan had decided to write fiction again, a full decade after abandoning it for the cleaner economics of self-help. This new book would be about a failed writer who suspects his life is being written by someone else. A character who begins to receive strange notes, glitchy visions, and encounters with people who seem to know the next line of his life before he does.
He had already named the character. Arjun Sen. Close enough to himself, but not quite.
And then, something strange happened. As he typed the first paragraph —
“Arjun Sen adjusted his sunglasses in the café, sipping his fourth iced Americano…” he noticed the waiter standing nearby, watching him curiously.
“Sir,” the waiter said hesitantly, “didn’t you… just come back inside?”
Anjan blinked. “No, I’ve been sitting here the whole time.”
The waiter frowned and looked down at the table, where the bill slip lay. It showed two separate entries both for “Table 9 – Americano x 4” in the last hour. Anjan picked it up, confused. The customer name section, usually blank had a faint scribble this time.
Arjun Sen.
He stared at it. Then looked at the screen. The same name blinked back at him in the Google Doc. Anjan tapped the bill, half-expecting the ink to smudge off like a prank. But it stayed the same. Arjun Sen. Clear. Spidery handwriting. Not his own. He looked around. No camera crew. No prankster friends. Just the usual mix of laptop zombies, influencers pretending to meditate for Instagram, and a couple who shared a muffin like it was their last supper.
“Maybe the barista’s dyslexic,” he mumbled, returning to the laptop. But his fingers hovered uncertainly. He clicked back to the Google Doc. Another line had been added.
He hadn’t typed it. He was sure.
Arjun Sen blinked at the name on the bill and looked up, wondering if he was still dreaming.
Anjan’s hand paused in mid-air. He glanced over his shoulder. No one was near his laptop. No device sync. No shared access. He was alone. And he was not dreaming. To test the glitch or the joke, he deleted the last sentence. Then patiently waited.
Nothing happened for ten minutes. “Must be a laggy extension. Chrome can be like that”, he said to himself. He typed another line, deliberately dull.
Arjun Sen went to the washroom to clear his head and check if he still had one.
He chuckled at his own sarcasm, got up and went to the café washroom. But when he returned, the entire table was cleared. His laptop was gone. In its place sat another iced Americano, sweating gently in the brightly lit café.
A second bill.
Customer Name: Arjun Sen
Order: “One iced Americano, black. No existential questions, please.”
He picked up the cup. On the inside of the cardboard sleeve, written in tidy, printed letters were words that make Anjan really have existential crisis for a moment.
“You’re not writing the story. The story is writing you.”
Anjan spun around. The waiter was gone. The café felt quieter. Too quiet. The sound of typing caught his ear from behind the counter. No one should have been there. He walked toward it, heart thudding. There, behind the espresso machine, sat a laptop. And an open Google Doc.
Chapter 4: The Man Who Was Being Written.
… Anjan Sengupta approached the screen, realizing too late that he was no longer the author, but the authored.
Anjan stood frozen. The laptop behind the espresso machine whirred quietly, the cursor blinking like a metronome ticking toward a breakdown. He read the next line as it appeared.
He will now attempt to close the document, but he won’t find the cursor. Instead, he’ll find a folder. And inside it, he’ll find himself.
His hand, almost involuntarily, reached for the trackpad. The screen wouldn’t respond. But the file window opened. A single folder blinked. “CharacterSheet_anjansengupta”
He clicked on it, frantically and scared.
• Name: Anjan Sengupta
• Occupation: Pseudonymous self-help guru
• Core Flaw: Doesn’t believe his own teachings
• Desire: To feel real again
• Author’s Note: “Use him for irony. Collapse him in the café scene.”
He scrolled down. There were more.
Character Sheet – Arjun Sen
Character Sheet – Swami Shoonya
Character Sheet – You
He stared at the last one. “You?” he whispered. The moment he clicked it, the lights in the café flickered.
The café went dark. Not a blackout. A silence. A stillness too precise to be real.
Anjan stood alone in the glow of the screen. The folder “Character Sheet – You” was still open. Inside, just a single line now.
Did you think you were the dreamer?
He shut the laptop. The café flickered back to life like nothing had happened. Conversations resumed mid-sentence. Baristas took orders. Steam hissed.
But the barista who handed him the bill looked different this time; same apron, same smile, but eyes that held something deeper. Almost knowing.
“Name for the bill?” she asked.
Anjan hesitated. “Swami Shoonya.”
She smiled and scribbled it down without blinking. “No one ever really writes themselves out of the story,” she said, handing him the slip.
He looked down.
Customer Name: Swami Shoonya
Order: One iced Americano, infinite refills
Note: “Endings are just chapters pretending to be full stops.”
Outside, the sun hung low like a glowing cursor in the sky. Anjan walked out of the café, lighter somehow. Not entirely free. But aware.
He didn’t know who the author was. Maybe he never had been one. But for the first time in years, he wasn’t trying to fix the plot. He was just living the sentence.