A Series of Coincidences
The following is a completely true story.
Something quite strange happened to me while I was in India.
Coincidence clusters happen all the time. If something has a one-in-a-billion chance of happening to any one person in any given year, then it probably happens around 8 times per year.
ChatGPT rates my story as a 5.5–6.5 on a rough 0–10 scale of historical coincidences:
- 0–1 = everyday weirdness
- 2–4 = interesting coincidence
- 5–6 = highly unusual chain
- 7–8 = internationally famous (“Richard Parker,” “twin deaths”)
- 9–10 = Guinness-tier (e.g. repeated deaths linked to one object over decades)
So it's probably nothing too crazy, all things considered. But I thought I would write about it anyway.
It was around 5:30PM IST on the 23rd of August, 2025. I was walking down the side of a busy road in Mumbai, on my way to McDonald's. I probably wasn't supposed to be walking down that side of the road and it eventually became impossible to go any further. I came across piles of broken concrete, stacks of rebar, and puddles of mud. So even though McDonald's was only a few minutes away, I used Uber to book an auto rickshaw.
When you use Uber in India, they give you a random 4-digit code. You have to give this code to the driver so that they can enter it into their Uber app and start the ride.
The 4-digit code for this particular ride was a PIN that I’ve been using since I was a child: 9518. It is also the first 4 digits of the computer password that I had used for most of my life: 9518207643wbnx. (I still remember playing around with a calculator in the back of a car and coming up with this sequence of digits.)
I had used this PIN to unlock my Apple Watch that very morning.
Another coincidence is that the last 3 digits of the licence plate were the last 3 digits of my computer password: MH04KA3643.
Another (admittedly minor) coincidence is that the first 2 digits at the end of the license plate are my birth day and month: 3/6.
I ordered the "Chicken Surprise Meal" at McDonald's for ₹99 (about $1.12 USD.) It was pretty good!
Then I booked another auto rickshaw to take me back to the hotel:
There were a few strange things about this ride, too.
First, it was the same driver: a man named Shahalam. For some reason, he had waited in the area for 20 minutes while I was having my meal at McDonalds. Then the Uber app matched me with him again. You can see that I was both his 1947th and 1948th trip.
And this time, the random 4-digit PIN was close to my ATM PIN: 0764. (Another 4-digit string of numbers that I had taken from my old password.) The random Uber PIN was off by one digit, with a 3 instead of a 6: 0734.
It's a bit of a stretch, but those swapped digits make up my birthday: 3/6.
A few days later, I received the news that Julie, my biological mother, had died. She had had a major stroke on Saturday, and she died at the hospital on Sunday. I had been noticing all these strange numerical coincidences sometime between the time of her stroke and the time of her death. I had not been in touch with Julie for quite some time so this news was completely out of the blue.
I was adopted as a baby. I didn't know Julie too well, but it was an "open" adoption so I would usually see her on birthdays and Christmas.
If I were still religious, I might also find it interesting that the driver's name was Shahalam (شاہ عالم), which translates to “King of the World” or “Ruler of the Universe.”
And if I believed in this sort of thing, it might be comforting to think that maybe the "Ruler of the Universe" was fulfilling a dying woman's last wish to take her son to McDonald's. Maybe it was something she had always wanted to do but had never been able to.
Rest in peace, Julie.
P.S. I've changed all my passwords and PINs. But in case you want some form of "proof", my old password has appeared in many data breaches. You can verify this by entering it here: https://haveibeenpwned.com/Passwords
