Kabir sat in his office, the papers on his desk blurring in front of his eyes. The numbers and figures that had once commanded his attention now seemed meaningless, a jumble of ink and symbols that refused to coalesce into anything coherent. He had been staring at the same spreadsheet for nearly an hour, his pen frozen in his hand, his mind utterly elsewhere.

The afternoon light streamed through the floor-to-ceiling windows, casting long shadows across the polished wood floor, but he barely noticed it. The hum of the air conditioner, the distant sounds of traffic from the street below—all of it faded into a dull, background murmur.