“There are many travelers on the path to Om, and on that path, a chance encounter or a lucky token may nudge the traveler on what may, at first glance, appear to be a different path. But all paths, regardless of names, Tenets and Lore, all ultimately….”
“Leave you confused.” One young aditaru, not even out of his twenties, put in over the Sadhu-ji’s distant voice.
Glancing up, he realized that his mutterings had caught Mainak’s ears, and looked absolutely distraught. His kernel signature mirrored his reaction. Of course, without Awakening the Heart Chakra, he had little control over his signature, rendering him an open book.
“The road to knowledge starts with confusion and is paved with curiosity.” Mainak gave the unruly child what he hoped was an inviting smile. “And tempered with tolerance.”
Upon getting his bearings back, the child noticed his distinctive white cloak with green trims and gulped. His subsequent bow was so deep that it threatened to send him sprawling face-first onto the rough bark of the Vine road. The frightened green eyes looked ready to burst with tears.
“Forgiveness, Maestro!!!” said he, voice almost pleading. “I meant no offense.” Then, providing another, thankfully shallower, bow, he scurried away into the sparse crowd, one or two of whom had taken note of the incident.
“Probably the smile was not inviting enough,” Mainak muttered, picking up his own pace as well. His mood brightened when keen eyes picked out his destination, a few hundred yards ahead.
But just as his feet hit their stride, a sound reached his ears. A very unusual sound.
Hearing a child’s exuberant laughter, Mainak turned his head to the left. And then, all of a sudden, a memory took hold. A memory that was, and at the same time was not, his own.
A short petite woman, barely over six feet tall, but handsome, especially as she wore a radiant smile on her face, was telling a child to stop fidgeting while she adjusted her soft forest-green salwar. The child was a boy aged about fifteen and he seemed strangely familiar. As with all such previous memories, this one too possessed an almost ethereal quality. Some of the surrounding details seemed vague, existing between realities, of imagination and fact, like autumn mist that might dissolve at a moment’s notice.
The boy pointed off into the distance, towards the foot of a Great Vine near the lake, little more than a shadow in the weak winter light. His lips moved but Mainak could not make out the question. He did not need to. As the scene unfolded before him, the floodgates opened in his mind and memory flowed.
The mother answered, “Not until you turn thirty.”
Hearing this, the boy looked down in disappointment. But an ember of curiosity burned within him. Burned within Mainak.
“Why thirty?” Mainak muttered what the boy thought, as he was the boy who once had that very thought, though not in this lifetime, for she was not Maude.
“That is the Age of Fruition, when the body is prepared enough to survive the ordeal and the mind clear enough of the distracting thoughts of puberty, which Om help me, you just entered.” The mother, still smiling, answered her son’s unasked question.
As Mainak desperately tried to identify details about their attire and search the dreamy surroundings looking for passers-by, the woman turned her head to the left, saying, “Blue is the color of dreams, and you are all my dreams made flesh.” She nodded towards an object hidden by the sitting boy’s body. “You also require a new one as this one that I made for you is utterly ruined.”
“Sorry, mother.” The boy looked down, sounding contrite. And he truly was. Mainak knew this to be true as surely as he knew the twinsuns existed. Picking up an old, faded and often-used piece of clothing, a cashmere shawl that had seen better days, he said, “I would love another blue one.”
Mainak’s heart skipped a beat and the memory dispersed, leaving him standing like an idiot just past the brownish-red colored Blood Vines that formed the boundary between the Vine road and the narrow patch of green meadows beyond.
The cosmos may have come into existence by happenstance, but a resourceful enough person can guide Lady Chance herself into his bed, a man who was once his father in all but name used to say.
Not for the first time, Mainak wondered about the reason for these intriguing, if frustrating, visions. Is it a matter of simple chance? A Cosmic anomaly, perhaps. After not a small amount of careful consideration, self-reflection, practical experiments, research and medical checkups, he had ruled out insanity, mental illness and hallucination due to imbibing copious quantities of hashish. Ruling out the last one had been a memorable experience. The only possibility left was also the most illogical and least likely, as it had no precedence.
No claim of past-life by aditarus, humans, or stonehorns for that matter, had ever been substantiated.
And so the burning question remained. How, or more importantly why, was he experiencing these bizarre visions?
“Maybe it was premature to rule out insanity,” he muttered, putting the thought at the back of his mind as he witnessed the scene before him. The source of the laughter that had triggered the vision was quite real and thankfully, not his previous self.
Two children, a boy and a girl just entering puberty – siblings judging by their familial resemblance – were laughing while chasing after a couple of Monarch butterflies as big as Mainak’s head. Their father had stationed himself near the Blood Vine fence at the back where the Great Vine started to gradually curve downwards. An elegant middle-aged woman, clearly their mother, had a joyous smile on her face even though her occasional warnings telling them to watch their footing sounded exasperated.
Every single aditaru passing by had a happy smile on his or her face, with some of those smiles also containing more than a little hint of jealousy. Mainak could definitely understand that emotion since having even one child, let alone two, was relatively rare. Or more accurately, such a rapturous event rarely happens once and lasts for a mere fraction of an aditaru’s lifespan. Aditarus were nowhere as fertile as humans.
Not that he was overly eager to have children now, or even ever. His life was complicated enough without the added responsibility of raising a child. So, after one last look backwards, Mainak resumed his journey.
The Vine road met the Junction Platform, and split into four, with the middle two curving around the Great Vine and the other two forming a loop around it. After converging at the other end of the Platform, some quarter of a mile away, it continued towards another – larger and older – Great Vine roughly a couple of miles distant.
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This particular Junction Platform, named Nava-Niketan or New Residency in Common, held two dozen houses of modest size and half a dozen shops, most catering to Rangers and were owned and operated by their former members. All but one of the shops was located on the ground floor of the owners’ living quarters. Mainak stood before the only exception; an unremarkable-looking storefront, barely ten feet across, most of which was taken up by a sturdy plain orchid-wood door with an old brass knocker. In an odd twist of fate, the sigil on top of the door declared that the address was 89 New Residency.
The numbers 8 and 9 are significant in Omism. In calligraphic number systems, the seven base sigils corresponding to the Artifacts of Atma represented numbers one to seven, identifiable by the number of major Nodes each possessed, while the number zero was represented by the sigil of Null. Eight and nine corresponded to two concepts that were arguably even more important than the Artifacts of Atma – Mind and Heart. They are of the utmost importance, since without them all else is meaningless. As a homage to that sentiment, a sentiment as old as the race of aditaru, there exists precisely seventy-two Groves in total, with the number remaining constant ever since Rebirth three millennia ago. Whether by coincidence or providence, seventy-two also happened to be the total number of Forefathers, the very First Generation of aditarus. Furthermore, throughout the Ages, there have been exactly seven Great Sages, plus Anantika, also called the First Sage.
According to the journals that have managed to survive the test of time, Anantika detested all such sobriquet, all except that of Allmother. Hard to test the veracity of such claims since only two journals have ever been found, and authenticated. She herself did not keep a journal, neither did Aimin – her consort, nor her son – Chiranjeev. Her only grandson, however, did. But to this day, the Julibar Memoirs was a sore subject, even to the most practical of aditarun scholars.
Sensing an interesting kernel signature at the other side of the door marked by such an auspicious number, Mainak reached out with his right hand. Before touching the knocker, the door swung open, revealing a middle-aged man, oddly stout for an aditaru. He was wearing a coat over his kurta, although with buttons open.
Standing off to the side, the man gestured invitingly with his right hand. “She is expecting you, Maestro.”
After taking off his shoes in the small vestibule beyond, Mainak followed his quiet guide through the dimly lit corridor. Even considering who his mistress was, the man in front of him displayed admirably tight control over his kernel signature, revealing nothing but polite respect that Mainak’s rank and status commanded. More accurate judgment was rendered difficult by the environment.
So near the Great Vines, judging anyone’s kernel signature involved a certain degree of guesswork, especially if that person was already skilled at controlling his signature. In Mainak’s kernel sense, the Vines were almost like a solid column of purple bonfire, connecting Sindria with the greater Cosmos. Their unique and firmament-spanning kernel signature, which consisted of no less than two gargantuan Chakras, had some very unusual side effects on the surrounding lifeforms. Some scholars, including an old friend of his, postulated that this is the very reason behind an aditaru’s inherently high kernel density at birth, the highest amongst the three self-aware species on Sindria.
Arriving at their destination, a closed mahogany double-door, the man gave a bow, a normal bow of precisely the proper depth. Then, he opened the doors and stood off to the side, taking the rigid posture of a soldier at attention, with hands clasped behind his back.
“A new Novice?” Mainak asked as the doors closed behind him. “And half-human no less. Are the neighbors even making eye contact with you now?”
Not a single detail of the room had changed in over a decade. The same intricately woven tapestry of vibrant purple, crimson and silver, depicting the Peopling of Maharanya by the Forefathers, adorned the entire back wall. None of the seventy-two are still amongst the living, of course, but every single aditaru claims to be able to trace his or her lineage back to them. Some, like the proud owner of this particular painting, even have justifiable cause for such an extraordinary claim. As an orphan with no knowledge of his past except through questionable visions which lack any context, Mainak found this trait of the collective aditarun mindset quite thoroughly irksome.
“They will change their mind in a century or two.” His old signature master from the Rangers’ Hall had changed about as much as the room, or the house for that matter. “Or they will not. And circumstances will change it for them.”
With her unusually intense pale-blue eyes, eyes most men found alluring, if unsettling, Sagarika indicated the cushioned seat on the thick carpeted floor. Mainak obliged, mirroring his hostess and sitting cross-legged on the lush soft green carpet imported from the Savannah a few decades earlier during one of their numerous missions together.
“As for Nuren,” she said glancing at the closed doors, “in my field, talent like his does not come by often enough that I can afford to cling onto racial prejudices like the rest of my brethren.” Sagarika paused, lips pursed in disappointment. “It seems even the Trade Cities are not as liberal as they claim to be.”
Mainak gave a simple nod. She knew him well enough and long enough that she was aware of his views on such matters, even if she sometimes did not fully agree with them herself. One trait, however, she valued above all else: competence. Thankfully, even that was unchanged.
Seeing the small thoughtful frown on her beautiful face, Mainak’s lips tugged upwards into a teasing smile. “Love letter?” he asked, glancing at the high-quality cream-colored parchment that held what seemed like poetry, written in an elegant male hand.
“Apparently.” She gently nudged the letter, still on the surface of the desk, towards him. Seeing the earlier frown had left an echo behind her eyes, Mainak’s curiosity got the better of him. He did not need to ask if she was sure. They had spent a long time in each other’s company, some of it sharing the same bed. As he read through to the end of the poem, his eyebrows shot upwards.
After you left, nothing changed.
Stars grace the firmament, still there as ever.
Bringing promise.
Promise of Eternity.
Moons shine in the night sky, still there as ever.
Bringing Memories.
Memories of the Past.
But you are no longer here.
The moonbeams seem pale,
Eternity too long.
The memories seem hollow,
Past too far.
After you left, nothing changed.
Except me.
“Certainly better than my clumsy youthful attempts, though still lacking in rhythm.”
“But not heart,” Sagarika put in.
“True.” Mainak gave a grudging smile. “Having said that, while an aditaru professing undying love through poetry of questionable quality is not unheard of, declaring to all and sundry that he has changed is rather a novel event.”
“That was a private correspondence.”
“Even so, this is rather irregular,” Mainak said. Then, snuffing out the slight feeling of jealousy in the depths of his heart, he added, “Though, not impossible.” His gaze held her intense eyes. “Nor improbable, knowing you.” He let out a short rueful laugh. “As I very well know from personal experience.”
Sagarika produced a dazzling smile that had melted many a heart before the one beating – a little faster – inside him. “You, my dear old friend, need not change, as you were born odd and should be proud of that fact.”
“I am.”
“Still worth reminding now and then, especially by someone who you hold in high regard and who cares for you.” Tucking the letter carefully away in the desk-drawer, her tone turned casual. “I hear you are embarking upon a rather long journey to distant parts. I took the liberty of preparing your usual gears, with one or two additional items that I think you may find useful.” Mainak followed her gaze to the plain but high-quality leather satchel placed near the corner, one that emitted a faint violet-blue glow.
“Your foresight is as keen as ever.” And intelligence network even vaster than before, though Mainak expected nothing less. Rumors had a way of finding their way into her ears. On this occasion, it was even welcome. They needed to draw out the Aiminian spies in Jivanpur, after all.
“I also hear that the Wanderer is back in Ridmanya.”
Memories thought long buried came rushing back like a mountain river. “Where?”