The same evening a new star appeared, a tragedy on the river overtook the people of the small village of Vakr at two bends in the river. The bodies of young Najair and his mother Tarakini were lost in the current while swimming to catch a floating basket. Najair was swept underwater and his mother dove to get him, and neither came back up.

The ferryman of the bend, Vasudeva, who had encountered them each day they were alive, had found no trace of the two. The slow Brahmani river carved out deep and fast channels in the bends that changed and shifted like the moon. He stood watch in his loincloth, aged birdlike and with calloused hands trembling, scanning the water’s edge. With his long toes gripping his stout ferry that could carry three large Sindhi or Gir cows, his sobs shook it with little mournful ripples reaching outward across the divide. 

Vasudeva watched and thought of Tarakini, she who had prayed for a full season for her son to come had suffered in his birth. She bled, coloring the river until her skin was the color of thin clouds. Samanas, wandering ascetics, dusty and unkempt, from downriver, saw the carmine color and came to offer Vedic prayers from the holy book along the riverbank. Chanting under the starlight mist, their voices dabbed the water and swirled through the reeds. The village, breath held, waited. Old women wrung their hands as tales of a pale mother were told to them by their mothers. They cried in secret places as the child cried through the night. In the morning, Tarakini still faintly breathed and the chants slowly dissipated into sighs as her color returned, and so life returned to the two bends. The villagers left lotus and gifts of fish and incense for good health and luck, and after, revered her as Tarakini, Blessed of the river. Her husband, Ravi, offered daily prayers and thanks for his fortune and showered his love upon them.

As Vasudeva watched, wails echoed for two days through the village and the scent of incense mixed with tears. Youthful monks in saffron robes tended low fires, their prayers like smoke drifting through cloth. 

Mourning was not just for the two river-lost, but for the father as well. Honoring tradition, Ravi gave his name back to the Brahman until such time peace found him able to honor his family with the proper rights and return them, even if just in spirit, to the river. Only then could he take a new name or, as tradition, he will wander the world for eternity knowing no peace. The village offered prayers for Ravi and supplied dried fish and bananas for his journey. A passing ascetic in rags with a thin body carved deep with self-denial, mixed crimson dye with saliva from the villagers and painted a thick line of mourning down his chin, marking him a nameless spirit.

Vasudeva, a small raft lashed to his ferry, took a jewel from the man—a payment to ferry a spirit. Then he stood aside and let his charge aboard. He was to take this man, this shadow, to the center of the river, and then set him on a journey of no return. 

Vasudeva pushed the ferry out, the villagers on the bank murmured and pointed. As he finished the push, flower blooms swirling in the current overcame the long pole lifting muck from the bottom of the river. Turning, Vasudeva marveled, the Brahmani was filled with countless marigold blossoms floating down the river.

A strong current began with the flowers, and Vasudeva had to brace the ferry. He nodded to his passenger with no name, a ghost, a man he had known as a child who was no more.

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The man with no name sat on his small raft and heard the stillness of the village fade behind him as the flotilla of flowers accompanied him. He wished to refer to himself as something, a way to pin himself to this task he feared, but that pilgrimage required he not, so he waited with no name. And he sat in silence with only the scent of the flowers and the river that carried him. 

The man only glanced as he passed huts and fishers, farmers and goatherds, bathers and women doing laundry. It was a short time before he was far away from his home … no, he thought, not his home. That was the home of what he was before. And so, trusting the river, he slept until he came upon a small village that looked to be the same size as Vakr and the current left him ashore and the marigolds collected around his raft and the scent brought out all who were awake to gawk and whisper until a kindly monk named Sahil, with a necklace of large beads and a toothy smile to match, came to him and invited him to the temple.

Temples are houses of ghosts he had learned, so it seemed fitting that he should break his fast with the monk. This temple was, he understood from Sahil, a famous leaning temple that was so old it had partially sunk and spirits had reinforced it so that it had not fallen on the holy man who had lived there for a lifetime without speaking—who abruptly left one day, still without saying a word.

Having not been a ghost before, he was unsure on what he should say, so he nodded and looked at the temple, which seemed sound, though it was perhaps leaning only a small amount.

Sahil talked about the village and with each tale of the life of the village, the veil of the ghost seemed to lift and the man found solace between the people and this monk. Though he didn’t talk, he perhaps felt that the man liked that he didn’t speak and so to keep hearing the stories, he sat and drank tea and ate bread and oil. The monk spoke at length about how the river had brought them a new holy man who didn’t speak, and the pilgrims would return with their money and goods. 

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That night he lay on a mat and thought that maybe the river had brought him here to replace the mute monk who had left and this brought him joy, though he was no holy man, and so his ghost quivered and shook his sleep.

In the morning, a woman in red and white wearing bracelets and long, bound hair, woke him and asked him to follow. Moving behind her, he inhaled her fragrance and remembered his old life before casting his eyes to the ground. Coming to a stop by the river, his eyes took in his raft and the marigolds. Some were wilting and brown, staining the water. Soon they would smell.

The woman in red and white touched his hand and motioned at the raft and his ghost moved there, then his body. He sat, stared into her eyes as she pushed the raft into the swirls of flowers and the blossoms dislodged to travel with him once more. She pointed at the new star above distant peaks and hills. He held up a hand in thanks and watched the wilted blooms sink.

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The man, a ghost on the raft, floated with sinking flowers towards the star above the mountains. He passed villages and bathers; he passed pyres and mourners; he passed temples and huts, and he passed families idle on the shore, enjoying the time they had.

The river’s scent was unfamiliar here, so far from what he knew. It became pungent due to all it had endured, and the marigolds diminished to only a few. The river left him on a lonely shore as the last flower floated up, still flawless. He picked up the blossom, and keeping its beauty in his hand, thanked the river and began toward the mountain.

The river flowed on toward its sea.

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An unnamed ghost, holding a perfect yellow flower, walked slowly until finding a road with deep ruts leading to the hills and mountains. He slept along the side of this cart-path as butterflies collected along his hips and legs, fanning their wings. In fitful dreams, he floated over water as he kept drifting farther from an empty shore.

Come morning, a passing merchant’s cart with a Samana named Samir hanging off the back called and woke him. He had to run to catch up and join the man. Samir didn’t ask his name as he told him about his journey to see the new star. He said that there were people from a place so far away that ice fell from the sky there and they had set up a contraption of glass and metal that allowed you to see the heavens, and Samir wanted to look. The people also had odd customs and kept their dead instead of burning them and casting their ashes to the river to be reborn.

It all sounded disturbing, but bumping along this road into the hills, the simple idea of seeing that one star made his soul start.

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In the foothills of a steep and jagged mountain, the people from afar had rows of carved stones and kept asking the man for his name. They explained they kept their dead underground and even laid stones on top of them, which seemed no way to treat spirits. But they also had the contraption of glass and metal and had erected a stone building to house it and keep it safe during the monsoon. 

The people had many who had come to see the stars. They tried to let each get a look. They kept a list of those that were to gaze through the glass, and for the man, he was on the list as simply “unnamed man with flower”.

On his night to view the star, there was a star shower, many stars falling were even visible in the dusk light. As the call came for the unnamed, he stood holding the still perfect flower, his clothes now rags, his chin still crimson and his body now gaunt. All stopped to watch the man enter the observatory, which was next to the stones that kept the foreigners’ spirits in place. 

He nodded when they asked if he, too, wanted to see the new star. Sitting him on a stool, they adjusted knobs and dials and, finally satisfied, gestured for him to look.

Bending forward, he gazed into the eyepiece. At first he viewed nothing, but then he saw it—it was not one star but two, smaller and larger, and he could feel their presence. He looked at them for a time and lifted and nodded his head. A sadness took him.

The operator of the device said that he would show the man the river of stars in the sky and cranked on a rounded wheel and moved levers. Moments later, he gestured again.

Again, with an eye to the device, the unnamed man saw it, a river of stars, and there in the center of a bend, the new star he had followed now clearly laid out in its place, fully visible. He thought of his task and gave the device a bow and shook the hand of the operator and walked outside.

The foreign people called them “meteors”, the falling stars, and they were exploding across the sky—more than all the monks in all the temples could count. More than the leaves on the trees, and as the sky fell, it silently streaked to the river far, far below.

He stood, bathing in the light of Brahman setting the sky alight in a wonder never seen by man, before or since.

The flower in his hand grew warm. He dropped it and it fell apart. The petals landing formed a word, his new name, Shaan—dignity.

Under the sky fire, he was unnamed no more.