The Wealth of Regret

At fifty, Tanvir has built everything ambition ever promised him - and none of what he actually wanted. Thirty years after he let a quiet, brilliant girl named Janet walk past him rather than risk the life she might have offered, he still can’t stop wondering what he traded her for.So he builds a machine to find out.Using a private fortune and a technology no ethics board will ever approve, Tanvir creates two clones of himself - genetic and experiential copies, seeded with his own memories up to the exact moment his life diverged from theirs. Jack is sent back to relive his eighteenth year, given nothing but the one thing Tanvir never had: the courage to stay in the room with Janet instead of walking away. Robin is placed in a remote Bornean longhouse at fifteen, stripped of ambition entirely, left to discover what a life built on nothing but presence and patience actually becomes.For nine years, Tanvir watches both lives unfold from a chamber beneath his own house - falling in love with two versions of a man he might have been, while the real people around him, a wife who has learned to read his silences and a son who has learned to count the seconds before his father’s attention wanders, quietly pay the price of his absence.The Wealth of Regret is a novel about the three things a life actually needs - ambition, love, and the specific, sacred peace of being fully known - and what happens to a man who spent fifty years convinced that one of them could substitute for all three. Spanning a near-future Singapore-Malaysia corridor and a longhouse deep in Sarawak’s interior, it is a story about the cost of watching a life instead of living it, and the harder, more honest reckoning that finally arrives when watching is no longer allowed.