Harsh woke up. Kicking his blanket away, he sat up, disgruntled. He had been dreaming of Shivali for a whole month now, but every morning, he felt just as distorted on opening his eyes and not finding himself in the fifteen hundreds. Rubbing the sleep off his eyes, he stepped through all of the books and clothes on the floor and threw the curtains open. Ten floors below him, he could see people on their early morning jogs, some with their pets tailing along. The sun hadn't come up yet, but the sky was light.
Three hours later, he sat in his lecture hall, his professor writing away on the whiteboard about dating methods and reconstruction of the past. His first class after the disaster that was his last semester. Most students sat sullenly at having to take another class with this professor. 

When there were still about twenty minutes of the lecture left, he rubbed the board clean and turned to the students. 'I see a lot of you have chosen the Baland Mahal mystery for their assignment last semester,' he said, fixing his eyes on certain students. Harsh straightened up in his seat.

'Well, that was an interesting choice,' he gave an intrigued smile. 'It also happens to be relevant to our subject this semester.' The class grew quieter. 'No doubt forensic anthropologists have been trying one after the other to date the two skeletons, unable to believe they belong to the same time. An exciting topic to write essays about, sure.'

Harsh felt a wave of pride surge through him for having chosen a topic this impossibly hard to impress professor approved of.

'But none of you, I assume, have bothered to follow up with any further discoveries that have been made?'

The professor smiled wider with the satisfaction of being proven right when all the students averted their gazes and looked down into their books.

'Well, I have found a paper you might find interesting,' he said, and whipping up his laptop, he had a student connect it to the projector. 

'Facial reconstruction,' he announced. 'One of the fields in anthropology that has heavily benefitted from the AI boom.'

Fiddling around with the tabs open in his laptop, he found the one he was looking for.

'Here,' he scrolled down the research paper he had opened up till he reached the page he wished to show the students. 'They have used some brilliant generative AI models to reconstruct the face of this mysterious lady with no identity. Aren't the results just intriguing?'

The professor went on to talk about what this meant for the future of facial reconstruction, and about an open elective the students could choose which dealt with it. The class was no longer listening to him and low chatter filled the hall. But Harsh sat stiff where he was, his throat dry and his heart hammering, unable to tear his eyes away from the image.

Shivali. The floor beneath him spun. Those big eyes stared lifelessly at him, and her hair fell farther down her back than he remembered seeing, but there was no mistaking it. 

His dreams, he realised with a jolt in his heart, weren't simply dreams. Shivali was real. And maybe so was he, Ajay.