The rains came early that year.
Not with thunder or blinding wind, but with a sighing hush, as if the sky itself had grown weary of heat. The earth drank the first drops with silent gratitude. Clay softened. Trees whispered. And for the first time in many months, the air smelled of forgiveness.
That morning, I was shaping the last of the idols beneath our awning—an unfinished Saraswati, veena cradled awkwardly in drying arms—when a shadow fell across our threshold.
It was him again. Raghava.
The Brahmin's boy.
He had returned.
And he was alone.
There was no guard this time. No hovering uncle. No glancing over his shoulder for elders who might catch him associating with a potter's son.
Just the drizzle on his shoulders, and the strange way he held a palm-leaf scroll under his arm as if it were something sacred—and forbidden.
I stood. So did Father.
Kittu peeked from behind the cart.
Raghava bowed his head—not deeply, not with formality, but with the strange awkwardness of someone unsure whether apology or explanation should come first.
"I… came to ask something," he said.
My father remained silent. His gaze flicked toward me.
Raghava stepped forward and knelt on the threshold. Mud from his sandals dirtied our floor. He did not seem to care.
"I said I would ask my father if Bhadrak could attend the chanting during the festival," he said quietly. "He refused. Said 'caste is dharma.' Said the gods will close their ears if a Shudra boy listens."
A pause.
Then, his voice cracked.
"I don't believe him."
The rain thickened. It thudded gently on the roof as if listening.
My father said nothing.
But my fingers trembled against the clay.
Raghava pulled the palm scroll from under his arm.
"He said I'm not to show these outside the house. That a Brahmin's son must guard the word like a flame. But…" He looked at me, eyes wide. "You remember better than I do. You see patterns where I see ink."
The scroll was unsealed.
Open.
Unprotected.
Offered.
I stared at it, not daring to take it.
The very air around it buzzed with danger.
To touch sacred knowledge, uninvited, was more than a transgression. It was rebellion.
But it was also a kindness.
A thread handed from one life to another.
"I shouldn't be doing this," he muttered, already regretting it. "But every time you fix those statues… it's like the gods listen to your fingers."
He rose, embarrassed by his own words.
"You don't have to read it. Just… just tell me how to remember what I read. You remember everything."
I still hadn't spoken.
I only looked at him.
And slowly—very slowly—I nodded.
For weeks after that, we met beneath the neem tree near the dry streambed, where few wandered and none questioned. The rains had faded into warm wetness by then, and Raghava began carrying slates rather than scrolls, careful to mark with charcoal and palm ink what he had memorized the night before.
I never touched the scrolls directly.
But I asked him to read aloud.
And when he stumbled—on a chhandas meter, on a rigvedic compound, on the subtle twist of a vowel—I offered gentle correction.
Not as a teacher.
Not as a student.
As someone remembering.
Someone who had once studied computer logic and regression models and Sanskrit declensions side by side, in a different life, behind glowing screens.
There was no one else there, but it felt as if the trees were holding breath around us.
Each verse Raghava read was sacred.
But so was each silence between them.
He never asked how I remembered so easily.
I never asked why he trusted me.
Perhaps we both feared the answer might break the spell.
One evening, as we traced the hymn to Saraswati again, I caught his voice trembling slightly over a line:
"Tvameva mata cha pita tvameva..."
You are my mother, you are my father…
He stopped.
"I hate my father sometimes," he said softly.
I did not answer. That line was too sharp, too personal.
"He says knowledge is only for the pure," Raghava continued. "But he hoards it. Like coins. Like it belongs to him."
The slate lay in his lap. His fingers clenched.
"He thinks I'm weak. That I'll fail. That I don't deserve to chant beside him in the yagna next year."
"Do you want to?"
He looked up. "Yes. But not to prove I'm like him. To prove I'm not."
I considered him for a long time. The boy who broke caste law to learn beside me. The boy who brought scrolls as offerings rather than arrogance.
"Then you won't fail," I said.
And in that moment, I almost spoke a lie.
He will chant beside his father.
But I stopped myself.
Because if I made that true—magically, forcefully—I would steal something sacred from him.
The chance to earn it himself.
Not all truths must be woven by power.
Some must be chosen, day after quiet day.
My father noticed the changes before I did.
He watched me leave in the mornings with a wrapped meal and return at sunset, my hands stained with ink rather than clay. He said nothing until one night, as we lit the oil lamp together, he spoke softly:
"You walk differently now."
I paused.
"Not proudly," he clarified. "But with… thought. As if your feet are listening before they touch the ground."
I smiled faintly. "Perhaps they are."
He did not press.
But I knew he was warning me, gently, like a potter tapping the edge of a new jar to test its strength.
There were rumors in the village.
Not loud yet.
But murmured.
That the Brahmin boy was seen talking with a Shudra child too often.
That perhaps he had lost his mind.
Or worse—his caste.
But nothing had happened.
Not yet.
The rains still came.
The harvest ripened.
And the neem tree kept our secret.
Then came the day when the priest's brother came to our door.
He was not smiling.
He brought no scroll.
Only a heavy look and a hand that hovered near the hilt of his waist dagger far too often.
"Keep your son away from mine," he said to my father. "We do not mix cloth and cow dung."
Father said nothing. He only turned to me.
I nodded once.
The door closed without reply.
That night, I did not sleep.
Not from fear.
From shame.
Shame that my presence had become a threat to Raghava's dream.
That I might undo all the trust he had placed in me.
I had not used my power in weeks.
And now I considered using it not for me, but for him.
He is worthy of the yagna.
He will be accepted by the priests.
They will forget my name.
Each of these lies hummed in my throat, eager to become truth.
But something stopped me.
Raghava himself.
The way he had once said: "I want to prove I'm not like him."
If I erased the struggle, I would erase the meaning.
I chose silence.
And waited.
Three days later, Raghava came.
His eye was swollen.
His lip had a cut.
But his spine was straight.
He sat by the neem tree and pulled out a slate.
"I have twenty-two verses to review."
I said nothing.
He began to recite.
Slowly. Stumbling. But determined.
And that night, beneath that tree, I saw more bravery than I had ever known.
He was not defying his father.
He was defying the idea that knowledge had a lock.
That worth had a name.
That truth came only in one skin.
And I?
I listened.
Not as a Shudra.
Not as a reborn student.
But as a witness to courage.
Weeks passed.
Then months.
The rains returned again, softer this time.
And one morning, on the full moon of Kartika, the festival began.
We were not invited.
Of course not.
The Brahmins sang.
The merchants threw coins.
The women lit lamps across rooftops, and the children paraded with garlands in their hair.
I stood at the edge of the field, a bundle of broken idols beside me. Old commissions. Rejects. I was to bury them by the river. But before I could, I heard it. A voice. Raghava's voice. Clear. Measured. Steady. Chanting the first verse of the Rigveda. My hands dropped the bundle. No one else noticed. But I heard the cadence. The rise and fall.
The perfection of memory. He was chanting beside his father. The same man who had sworn he would never allow it.I did not know how. Perhaps a miracle. Perhaps stubbornness. Perhaps some small grace I had forgotten I had once planted in his mind, long ago. But it did not matter. Raghava stood among his kin. Not because of me. But because of him. I watched until the last syllable vanished into air. Then turned. And buried the broken gods in the riverbank soil, one by one.
That night, I lit a diya at our doorstep. My mother said it looked like Saraswati's lamp. I smiled. But inside, I thought of another light— One passed, hand to hand, from a Brahmin's boy to a potter's son. From a scroll to a slate. From silence to voice. And I understood:
The gods we shape are not the only ones worth keeping.
Sometimes, the ones we teach to stand beside us…
They become the ones who carry the flame forward.
Even after we step into shadow.