Was that a dream or reality?
I still don't know.
That question circled in my mind every night when the city went quiet. I would stare at the ceiling, wondering if the story my father told me was a bedtime tale or a truth I had forgotten. It is strange how a single thought can stay alive long after everything else fades.
My life, my routine, my future, they all felt wired into place. But that one memory always felt loose, like a spark refusing to die.
A year had passed since the funeral. A year that stripped away color in my life and replaced it with silence. I learned to survive by removing everything unpredictable. The world no longer needed to be beautiful, it only needed to function. So I adapted. I became efficient, precise, mechanical. Predictability became my shield.
I used to be someone else once.
There was a time I would laugh easily, sketch faces in crowded trains, and talk about light, shapes, and meaning as if they were living things.
I was Deep, a boy with a pencil and a dream. I lived in Delhi, spent mornings chasing sunlight through metro windows, and evenings drawing strangers who never knew they were being remembered. I believed life could be captured, shaped, and understood through art.
That boy disappeared the day my world caught fire.
The crash took everything. My parents. My home. My certainty.
What remained was a void, quiet and endless. I buried what was left of me under layers of logic. I stopped drawing. I stopped asking why. Grief became a pattern that repeated until it no longer hurt.
I tried therapy. I tried music. I tried anything that could make noise in the silence. But every solution felt temporary, like thin paper over a cracked wall. My mind tore through them easily.
Grief did not fade. It adapted. It became part of my system, a quiet companion I learned to work around.
So I made a rule. If chaos could not be understood, I would become immune to it.
Machines do not feel. Machines do not break.
I built myself into one.
I found a job that required no imagination, only obedience to numbers. Every day began and ended the same way. Wake. Work. Sleep. Repeat. My life became a formula I could not fail. It worked, until it didn't.
Because one night, the system failed.
I was lying in bed, waiting for the stillness to swallow me, when the memory surfaced. It came quietly, like the soft hum before a storm. My father's voice. His story. The one I had not thought about in years.
The story of The Undying Flame.
The name Arakan echoed in my mind as if I had whispered it a thousand times before.
I do not know why it came back. Maybe it had never left. Maybe I had only buried it under too much silence. But that night, when I remembered it, something changed. The emptiness I had built around myself cracked, and through it came warmth. It was not comfort, not exactly. It was calm, the kind that feels dangerous, like standing in the eye of a storm.
Without thinking, I sat up. I grabbed my old sketchbook from the shelf. The pages smelled of dust and forgotten dreams. I opened it and started writing. Words poured out, not from thought, but from something older.
The story of the man who burned with fire that could never die.
My hands moved faster than I could think. Every detail felt real, as if I had lived it once before. The words felt like a confession. I wrote until exhaustion pulled me under, my head heavy with a strange peace.
When I woke the next morning, the world was bright again. I reached for the sketchbook, still open on the desk. For the first time in months, I felt something like hope. But when I turned the page, my heart froze.
The pages were blank.
Every word I had written, every mark of ink, every trace of thought was gone. All that remained were faint smudges where my handwriting had once been. My fingers were still stained with black ink. Proof that the story had existed. Proof that it had vanished.
I sat there for a long time, staring at the paper that had devoured my memory. The silence around me felt different, heavier, almost alive. It was as if something had reached through the night, taken what I wrote, and left behind the question that would never stop burning.
The story had disappeared.Or maybe it had returned to where it truly belonged.
That day, I realized that my system had a flaw. Logic could not explain everything. Some things don't vanish because they were never there. They vanish because they were waiting to be remembered again.
And since that morning, one question has followed me through every moment of my waking life.
Who was Arakan?