The rains that came after the festival did not just flood the riverbanks — they filled the hollow of my chest with a soundless echo I could not explain. Something had been stirred awake within me during my time among the royal envoys and their entitled heirs. I returned to my father's hut with mud-caked feet and mind still spinning with distant drums and polished words.
Back in our village, the days returned to their rhythm — goats bleated for fodder, the potter's wheel turned slowly, and the scent of damp straw filled the air. Yet I was no longer part of that rhythm in the same way. Something inside me refused to fall back in line. It wasn't pride. It wasn't bitterness either. It was something subtler: a silent refusal to remain untouched.
Kaurava princes were not gods, only boys fed with power. Their arrogance did not impress me, but their certainty did — they moved like the world belonged to them, and I could not unsee it. I had seen in them the dangers of truth used carelessly, of lies weaponized in jest. They lived in a world where their stories were already being carved into marble.
And me?
I was still whispering truths to tree trunks and goats.
Yet even a whisper, when well-timed, could become a drumbeat in the mind of history. I had no throne. I had no teacher. But I had patience — and a truth-weaver's gift the world did not know it had birthed.
One early morning, before the mist had lifted from the grass, I sat by the old neem tree near the river, sketching figures into the dirt with a twig. Numbers, symbols, foreign shapes — some from the old life, some that had crept into my dreams. I wasn't drawing for beauty or logic. I was drawing to remember — to keep alive the part of me that still thought in other tongues.
Behind me, I heard Kittu's familiar shuffle. "You always draw things no one understands," he said, not unkindly.
I didn't turn. "Maybe someone will someday."
He sat beside me, hugging his knees. "Everyone says you're changing. That you speak less, even when you're not dreaming."
I smiled faintly. "Speaking less doesn't mean I'm not listening."
He nodded, then hesitated. "Do you ever wish we were born as them? The princes?"
I looked up toward the hills. "No," I said quietly. "They were born wearing masks. I'd rather grow into my face."
That night, I did not sleep in our hut. I wandered into the nearby grove, where moonlight filtered through branches like pale threads of memory. There, I whispered a single sentence into the cool air.
"He is born of no caste, yet keeper of all truths."
I waited for the change to come — a breath, a pulse, a sense of reality realigning. But the lie did not take. Nothing happened. The words fell dead into the leaves.
I realized then: even truths I yearned for needed to be earned.
The following weeks passed like a season of silence. My power, though undimmed, lay dormant. I used it only when necessary — when a sick calf would not rise, when a lost child's mother trembled with despair. Small mercies. I had begun to understand that the most profound acts did not always echo with thunder. Sometimes they arrived like a feather landing on a still pond.
But deep inside, I was weaving.
A rebellion without swords.
One evening, while sweeping the front of our hut, I overheard two elders discussing the news from Hastinapur. The princes were to undergo a final test soon — a public display of skill, watched by kings and sages alike. A murmur spread through the village: would Arjuna shine brightest? Would Duryodhana challenge him openly?
The names no longer felt like distant myths. I had looked into Duryodhana's eyes. I had seen the shadow of thunder within his smile. He was not a villain, but a storm with feet — and I knew storms could reshape valleys.
That night, I dreamed not of war, but of balance.
A loom stood at the center of the forest, strung with threads of fire and threads of ash. I approached it with trembling hands and tried to weave — but each time I did, the loom sparked in protest. "Not yet," it whispered. "You do not yet know the weight of a word."
When I woke, I wrote the phrase in the dirt beside my mat.
"The weight of a word."
Perhaps my rebellion began there.
The next day, I left the village without telling anyone.
I carried nothing but a satchel of herbs and a dried papaya leaf where I had inked a star chart. I had no plan, only a compass stitched into my chest — a pull toward the forest paths northward. Toward the place the wandering sage once said knowledge flowed not from bloodlines, but from silence.
They called it Naimisharanya — the forest of insight.
It was not marked on maps. No roads led to it. You arrived when you were ready, and not before.
I traveled alone for days, bartering for food with chores and songs. Once, a woodcutter gave me a ride on his cart. "Where is your family?" he asked.
"With me," I said, placing my hand on my chest.
He did not question it further.
At night, I slept beneath banyan roots, listening to the owls speak. In those hours, I thought not of power but of restraint. Could I, if tested, allow a falsehood to stand unchallenged? Could I learn to let fate be, when it whispered its secrets to others before me?
In those woods, I began to sense the shape of what I truly sought. Not vengeance, not recognition.
But equilibrium.
On the ninth day, I reached a clearing where no insects buzzed. It was as if sound itself bent its head in reverence.
A monk stood there, bald and silent, gazing at the bark of a great tree.
"Is this Naimisharanya?" I asked.
He did not answer. He simply gestured for me to sit.
And so I did.
We sat together in silence for hours, watching ants move in a spiral, watching leaves fall in slow descent. The monk never spoke. But in his stillness, I found questions I had never dared to ask.
When I rose, I bowed.
He did not return the gesture — only watched me as if seeing a thread loosen from its knot.
As I left the clearing, I whispered the day's lie into the wind: "This boy has been blessed by silence."
This time, the world shifted.
When I returned to my village a month later, I carried no trophies. My clothes were ragged, my satchel empty. But I moved differently. People noticed. They asked nothing.
I did not need to tell them where I had been. My silence answered.
Only Kittu asked, "Did you find what you were looking for?"
I nodded. "Part of it."
"And the rest?"
I looked east, toward Hastinapur. "Still waiting for me."
By winter's arrival, I had begun copying birdsong patterns into clay tablets. I noticed how each species had a rhythm, a meter. The bulbul sang in triads. The crow in broken iambs. I matched each to old Vedic meters and found, to my surprise, that some chants aligned.
Nature was a scripture no priest had yet written.
One evening, I dared to visit the edge of the Brahmin quarter again. I hummed the meter of the crow beside their chanting hall.
A child inside — a boy with sand-covered feet and missing teeth — began to hum it back.
His teacher scolded him, but I walked away smiling.
The rebellion had begun. Quiet, unnoticed.
I was twelve by the time I met the traveling scholar they called Vakranayana — the Crooked-Speaker. He had one eye, and a limp from an old war. But he carried a scroll that glowed faintly in moonlight.
He watched me from afar before saying, "Your shadow hums when you walk. Do you know what that means?"
I shook my head.
"It means your truth has weight."
I said nothing.
He leaned closer. "Be careful, boy. Truths are not always gifts. They are sometimes debts. And your kind — the ones born outside the Veda's womb — you must pay more dearly than most."
He offered me the scroll. I reached for it, but he withdrew it.
"Not yet. Someday, when your lie is heavier than a king's word, I will return."
Then he vanished into the dusk.
That night, I sat beside the river, tracing the edge of my reflection.
What had I become?
Still a Shudra. Still my father's son. Still silent in the village gatherings.
But something inside had tilted forever. My rebellion was not against caste, or kingdom, or even cruelty. It was against the idea that only some could shape the world.
I had shaped mine, thread by thread.
Not with fire. Not with blood.
But with whispers, balanced on the weight of a single word.