Viktoria? Now it was  ’s turn to almost snort in laughter, which only appeared more like he had officially lost his mind. What perplexed the two standing in front of him even more was him uttering something in a totally foreign language, a curse in Hindi, before continuing to laugh. "Dang it, man! Looks like I had a bigger night than I imagined last night. 'Cause I'm either still dreaming or this is some really elaborate joke," he quipped, looking around for any sign that this wasn't real. When he couldn't see one, he turned back to the door. “OK, very good, get lost now. Gotta get ready and go to college.” 

About to close the door, he looked down. The kid irritatingly clung to his leg even more, pouting his lips as if he was about to cry. “Mummy! Why are you tawking like that?”

He scrunched up his nose at the sight of some of random boy calling him, 'mummy’ and making his spotted pyjama pants dirty with his snot. 'Wait? His spotted pants? He doesn't wear spotted-', Kartik stopped mid-thought and shook his leg in an attempt to free it from the boy's clutches. “Eh?! What’s wrong with you?! Off me!”, he exclaimed. 

Aside from the boy starting to sob, the older woman in the doorway stared at him. “Are you feeling alright, darling?", she asked with concern in her voice. "Shall I come in and take care of you both today?”

Kartik stared back at her quizzically then down at the kid and then back at the woman to ask, “You know me? You sure you know me?” The woman addressing him as ‘darling’ though put him more in a state of unease, her tone resembled Kartik’s mother’s concerned one and that resemblance alone gave him an idea that she could be Viktoria’s mother, or whoever the hell she was mistaking him with. The hypothesis of a lucid dream was dwindling, but whatever conclusion that was being superseded was even more ridiculous. “Look, boy, and, uh, madam, I think there’s a mis–”

He left the rest of the sentence hanging the air with the ringing of a phone interrupting him. He turned his head to see where the ringing was coming from, thinking about whether or not he should answer it. Would it even be for him? But the boy let go of his leg before Kartik could even try to move and said, “I’ww get it, mummy,” dashing happily down the hall and Kartik finally got a moment to take a breath. The small boy picked up the reciever of what looked to be a landline and spoke into it, “Hewwo, I am Zayn tawking on the phone to you.”

Kartik watched the small boy, whose name he had just learnt was Zayn, answer the phone and seem to be listening with ears pricked for information. 'The kid seems curious,' Kartik thought. 'Bloody hell, he should be, I'm more than bloody curious about what on Earth is going on here. '

“Who are you?”, the boy asked into the phone. “Who?” Then Zayn dropped the phone on the floor and ran straight toward Kartik yelling in what seemed to Kartik as shrill excitement, “Mummy, Vikki Is In The Phone."

‘Waiiiiiiiit! Vik-Vikki! As in Viktoria?!’ The thought popped up in Kartik’s brain in a sort of light-bulb-moment.

“Vikki?! You know another Viktor-”, Viktoria’s mother began to question, now growing a little impatient with these childish antics. 

"My babyyy!", Kartik suddenly exclaimed at little boy Zayn with exaggerated sweetness of his new feminine voice. “Th-That’s my friend! Give me the phone. A-And go to your... grandma? Yeah. I need to talk in private!” He did not even give the kid a chance to respond before giving him a little shove toward the woman, his grandmother, and walking quickly up to the phone to snatch it up.

“Hello, um, Miss Viktoria?”, he asked in a lowered voice, “I don’t know how the f–k this is happening, but I think I’m in your house and, as weird as it sounds, in your body”, he said and even he couldn’t believe what nonsense he was blabbering. Then listening to some kind of sarcastic masculine-sounding reply, he whispered a little more irritatingly, "So what are ya going to do?" But her response to this sounded less than satisfactory, as Kartik started to say, “Look I’m- Uh, what place is this? Where do you liv-?” But she had hung up before he could finish.