Priya opened her own battered laptop—a Dell with LibreOffice installed. “It’s not Excel. But it opens .xlsx and saves .xlsx. It’s free. Forever. And no green buttons.”
“The ransomware locked the .xlsx files,” she said. “But you never had any. You were trying to make one.”
The first three links were shiny, official-looking ads for Microsoft 365. “Free for one month!” they sang. Anil did the math in his head. One month. That was enough for the test. But his bank account had exactly ₹1,247—enough for chai and bus fare for two weeks, not a recurring subscription he’d forget to cancel.