The phone was wrapped in a yellow silk sari, tucked between recipe books that still smelled of turmeric and time. Meera found it on the third day of sorting through her grandmother's flat in Hounslow, that particular Thursday when the rain hammered the windows like urgent messages from another world.
It was ancient, this phone—a Samsung from 2012, its screen cracked in a spider web pattern that reminded her of the henna designs Nani used to draw on her palms during Diwali. The charger took forty minutes to find, buried in a drawer full of charging cables that belonged to devices that had long since turned to landfill dust.
"Why keep this?" Meera muttered, but her fingers were already working, connecting it to power, watching the screen flicker to life like a digital séance.
The wallpaper was a photo of Meera herself, age seven, gap-toothed and grinning, wearing a Superman cape made from one of Nani's old saris. The sight of it punched something loose in her chest. She hadn't cried at the funeral. Hadn't cried when they found Nani peaceful in her chair, her knitting still in her lap, the television murmuring its evening prayers of game shows and weather. But this photo, this moment of preserved joy, made her eyes burn.
Most of the apps were dead, their servers long since vanished into the electronic ether. Facebook opened to an error page. WhatsApp demanded an update it would never receive. But there, in the corner of the screen, sat an app she didn't recognize: a simple icon of an eye, half-open, with "Tomorrow's Strangers" written beneath it in Devanagari script that shifted to English when she stared at it.
The app opened to a camera interface, nothing more. No menu, no settings, no explanation. Just a viewfinder waiting to see. Meera aimed it at the wall, at the window, at her own face. Nothing happened. She took photos. Still nothing. The images didn't even save to the gallery.
It wasn't until the next morning, on the Northern Line heading to her job at the data analytics firm in Kings Cross, that the app revealed its purpose.
The tube was packed with the usual Thursday morning congregation of the half-awake. Meera stood pressed against the door, the phone in her hand because she'd been carrying it everywhere, unable to let go of this last piece of Nani. Without thinking, she opened the strange app and aimed it at a businessman reading the Financial Times, his pink face already sweating despite the morning cool.
The moment she pressed the button, text appeared over his image in the viewfinder: "Will dance alone in his office at 11:47 AM to 'September' by Earth, Wind & Fire."
Meera nearly dropped the phone. The text lingered for three seconds, then faded. She tried to screenshot it, but the image came out normal—just a tired man on a train. She aimed at a woman with purple hair and a nose ring. Click. "Will find twenty pounds in a coat she hasn't worn since last winter."
An elderly Sikh gentleman. Click. "Will receive a call from his grandson in Toronto who hasn't spoken to him in three years."
A teenage boy with headphones. Click. "Will ace his chemistry exam despite not studying."
By the time she reached Kings Cross, Meera had photographed seventeen strangers. Each prediction was small, specific, intimate. None of them earth-shattering. All of them impossibly precise.
"You alright?" Yusuf asked when she arrived at the office fifteen minutes late, still clutching the phone. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Maybe I have," she said, then laughed it off and buried herself in spreadsheets and code, trying to forget the impossible thing in her pocket.
But she couldn't forget. At 11:47 AM precisely, she found herself standing outside the businessman's office—she'd followed him from the tube, calling in sick, unable to resist. Through the glass door, she watched him stand up, stretch, check that no one was watching, and then—
He danced. Awkwardly, joyfully, his arms shooting out in that distinctive September move, his hips trying to find rhythm they'd clearly lost decades ago. He was smiling, this stern man in his expensive suit, dancing like nobody was watching because nobody was. Except Meera.
That evening, she ran home to Nani's flat instead of her own studio in Elephant and Castle. In the bedroom closet, behind saris that released the ghost of sandalwood perfume when disturbed, she found them: thirty-seven notebooks, each dated, each filled with Nani's careful handwriting.
The first entry was from 1973:
"The app appeared on my computer at work today. Not an app then, of course. A program. No one else can see it. It shows me tomorrow's strangers, just small glimpses. I think it is a gift, though I don't know from whom or why. Perhaps from the same place dreams come from. Perhaps from the place we all go when we're not being watched."
Meera read through the night, following her grandmother's journey through decades of secret observation. Nani had documented everything: the predictions, whether they came true (they always did), her theories about what it meant. She'd drawn maps of connection, showing how the strangers' lives intersected in ways they never knew. The businessman whose dance she witnessed—his grandfather appeared in a 1981 entry, predicted to "whistle Beethoven while fixing a stranger's bicycle." That stranger became a teacher who taught a student who became a nurse who—
"Marcus Chen," Meera whispered, finding the name in an entry from just last month. "Will save a life without knowing it."
She knew that name. She'd photographed him that very morning—a tired-looking man in scrubs. The app had said he would "feed six cats behind Tesco at 7 PM and cry."
Without thinking, Meera was moving, out into the London evening where the air tasted of coming rain and diesel fumes. She took the tube to Whitechapel, found the Tesco, waited in the alley that smelled of rotting vegetables and urban decay.
At seven precisely, Marcus appeared, carrying a bag of cat food. The cats materialized from shadows—tabby, black, tortoiseshell, ginger, more tabby, white with one eye. Six cats for a tired man who knelt on the dirty concrete and filled their bowls with the patience of a parent.
And then he cried. Not sobbing, just tears sliding down his face as he petted the brave tortoiseshell who climbed into his lap.
"Long shift?" Meera asked, stepping out of her hiding spot.
Marcus startled, wiped his face quickly. "Yeah. Yeah, you could say that." He looked at her more closely. "You're not here to tell me I can't feed them, are you? Because I've already had that conversation with the manager and—"
"No," Meera said, sitting down on the ground beside him, not caring about her work clothes. "I'm here because—" She stopped. How could she explain? "Because my grandmother would have wanted me to."
Marcus looked at her, this strange woman in the alley, and something in her face must have told him a story he recognized. "Lost someone?"
"Three weeks ago."
"I'm sorry." He held out the bag of cat food. "Want to help?"
They fed the cats together in silence that felt like prayer. The white cat with one eye climbed into Meera's lap, purring like a small engine of comfort.
"I lost someone today," Marcus said finally. "A patient. Eight years old. Cancer. I've been a nurse for fifteen years, and it never gets easier. Especially the kids."
"My grandmother was a nurse," Meera lied, then realized it wasn't really a lie. Nani had been nursing the whole city in her way, watching over strangers, documenting their small triumphs and private sorrows.
"Yeah? Where did she work?"
"Everywhere," Meera said, and that was true.
Over the following weeks, Meera fell into the rhythm of the app. She photographed strangers on her morning commute, verified predictions in the evening. She filled her own notebooks, continuing Nani's work. She learned that the app had rules: it only worked on public transport, only for strangers, only once per person. The predictions were never about money or fame or disaster—always these tiny, human moments that mattered only to the person living them.
She photographed a schoolgirl: "Will perfect her Arabic pronunciation of 'grandmother.'" A construction worker: "Will see a fox in Regents Park and remember his father." A banker: "Will give her sandwich to a homeless woman and they will talk about dogs."
But it was Marcus she kept returning to, not with the app—that only worked once—but in person. Coffee after his night shifts. Dinner when their schedules aligned. He never asked why she'd been in that alley. She never told him about the predictions. They talked instead about loss and cats and the strange beauty of London at 3 AM when the city finally exhaled.
Yusuf noticed the change in her. "You're different," he said one afternoon, finding her smiling at her computer screen where she'd been analyzing patterns that had nothing to do with work and everything to do with the invisible mathematics of human connection. "Less... statistical."
"Maybe," she admitted.
"It's good," he said. "Your grandmother would be happy."
That night, Meera found the last notebook, the one Nani had been writing in when she died. The final entry was dated three days before her death:
"The app showed me my own tomorrow today. I broke the rule—photographed myself in the mirror when the bus passed through that tunnel near Hammersmith where the lights flicker and you can see yourself in the window. The prediction said: 'Will complete the circle.' I understand now. The app isn't about knowing the future. It's about seeing that everyone has one, that every stranger carries tomorrow in their pocket like a secret letter. We are all walking toward something, even when we feel still.
Meera, my darling, when you find this—and you will find it, the app told me so—know that you were my favorite tomorrow. Every day, you were the future I was walking toward. The app will work for you as it worked for me, but remember: the gift isn't in the knowing. It's in the caring enough to look."
Meera sat in Nani's kitchen, surrounded by notebooks and the smell of ghosts, the phone in her hand. She opened the camera app—the regular one, not Tomorrow's Strangers—and turned it toward herself. Her face looked back: tired, tear-tracked, but somehow more alive than it had been in years.
She could do it. Could open the strange app, photograph herself in the mirror, learn what tomorrow held. The temptation pulled at her like gravity.
Instead, she texted Marcus: "Dinner tomorrow? I want to tell you something strange and wonderful."
His reply came quickly: "Yes. Always yes."
She put the phone down and opened Nani's recipe book, the one stained with decades of turmeric and love. Tomorrow she would cook aloo gobi the way Nani taught her. Tomorrow she would tell Marcus about the app, about the predictions, about the way strangers' lives touched without knowing. Tomorrow she would give him the phone, let him see for himself the small magic threaded through ordinary days.
But tonight, she sat in her grandmother's kitchen and didn't need to know what came next. The not-knowing felt like freedom. It felt like faith.
Outside, London hummed its evening song—sirens and car horns and the distant rumble of the underground carrying strangers toward their tomorrows. Each person a story walking, a future unfolding, a small prediction coming true in ways no app could ever quite capture.
Meera opened a fresh notebook and began to write: "Today I learned that love is not knowing what comes next but choosing to walk toward it anyway, hand in hand with beautiful strangers who won't be strangers for long."
The cats behind Tesco would be fed tomorrow. Marcus would smile that crooked smile that made her stomach flutter. Somewhere, a businessman would dance alone in his office. A grandmother would be found in a coat pocket in the form of twenty pounds. A grandson would call from Toronto.
And Meera would be there, not watching from the shadows anymore but living inside the prediction, becoming the tomorrow someone else might glimpse but never quite understand. The app would continue to work, showing its small mysteries to whoever needed to remember that everyone carries a secret future, a private dance, a moment of joy that no one else might see but that matters beyond all measurement.
She wrote until the sun rose, filling pages with observations that weren't predictions but presence—the here and now of being alive in a city full of beautiful strangers all walking toward tomorrow, together and apart, seen and unseen, each one a small miracle of continuation.
When she finally slept, she dreamed of Nani young and laughing, dancing to Earth, Wind & Fire in a office somewhere in 1973, her sari swirling like a prediction of joy, her eyes bright with the secret knowledge that tomorrow always comes, carrying its small gifts for those who know how to look.
The phone sat on the kitchen table, its cracked screen catching the morning light like a promise, like a bridge between worlds, like the eye of someone who loves you watching from very far away and very close at the same time, saying without words: look, look how beautiful they all are, these strangers who won't be strangers tomorrow.