Ravi stood frozen for a heartbeat, the strange glowing door still ajar beside him. Its faint hum called to him, but the weight of the papers and files in his hands pulled harder. “This is real,” he whispered, clutching them. “These are answers, not fairy tales.”
He turned his back on the mysterious doorway and stepped into the streetlight’s glow. The door’s hum faded closely behind him. He sat on the edge of the sidewalk and flipped through the files. The tables of numbers, charts, and photographs filled the pages, statistics on waste, sanitation, and disease.
One page showed a chilling headline: “Over 2 million deaths each year linked to poor waste management.” The images were worse, overflowing dumpsites, flooded slums filled with plastic, children wading through polluted water. He swallowed hard, flipping to another chart: “Cholera cases spike where garbage disposal is neglected.” A highlighted note at the bottom of a page read: “Change begins with one act. One bag, one hand, one choice.”
Ravi’s throat tightened. He remembered the reeking piles on his daily commute, places he’d walked past without a second glance. The papers didn’t lecture, they revealed what he ignored. They made his indifference feel sharp and heavy. For a moment, the sounds of the night, the chirping crickets, a distant scooter horn, seemed far away. All he could hear was the rustling of those pages and the echo of his own heartbeat. He folded the papers carefully, his mind spinning. Was this a warning? A second chance?
The numbers no longer felt like statistics. They were lives. Ravi closed the file and stared at the empty street.
Options for You, the Reader:
Think carefully about what to do next.
Ignore the papers and keep walking home
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