That afternoon, Dinesh sat in the empty classroom, feeling like a prisoner. Mr. Sharma didn’t scold him. Instead, he handed Dinesh a worn-out book titled “Physics for Class 9” by a mysterious author named R.D. Burman. No, that was the music director. The actual author was Dinesh —a different Dinesh—and the book was old, with yellow pages and coffee stains.

He finished the paper with ten minutes to spare—a first in his life.

He read: “A car starts from rest. It moves with a constant acceleration of 2 m/s² for 10 seconds.”