I'm glad that I have been successful at detaching the Twenty-Six characters from myself. But what is left of me, doesn't seem like something worth celebrating. I'm lonely, bitter, regretful and directionless. Almost like a different Character is born altogether. The Twenty Seventh Character, you could say.

Coincidentally, as I write this, I am Twenty- Seven years old. I wonder if this is just a way a person matures in life; sheds the old skin and moves forward. Maybe I'm not that special after all. Maybe we all just become a totally different Character each year of our life. Maybe the characters were all symbolic of the different personalities I had acquired in the past. At some point I was a realist like H, and at some point, I wanted to rule the world like N. Could it be the sequence in which I grew up? That I was Pran in the first year of my life and Ragini in the Twenty sixth? Are they all gone for good or are they still a part of me? Also, then who am I now? Would I need another word to define me? The alphabets are all taken. Should I shift to numbers then? They won't exhaust till the day I'm alive and who knows, maybe I will go on to see The Hundredth Character. If I somehow become immortal, I would be able to see even The Millionth Character in me. I wonder how that Character would think and behave. Probably like a God, an important role like destruction, preservation or creation would be taken by that Character, for who would be better than him to see the larger purpose of all that happens in the Universe and beyond. It wouldn't even matter if he had the physical ability to do those things. Just considering the sheer amount of Experience he'd have had by then; he would be the best person to be assigned that role. He would know how to alter world politics, how to adapt with climate change and even how to write the greatest stories of all time. He would have anecdotes grander than the longest epics we have. I wonder what he'd have to say about religion and faith, for that is the closest the mortals have come to imagining such a person.

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This situation that I am in now, it reminds me of the Story behind the reason why Brahma, the Creator is not worshipped at the same scale as Shiva, the Destroyer or Vishnu, the Preserver. You see, Brahma created the first woman in the Universe, Shatarupa, the One who could take a Hundred forms. He fell so madly in love with her that not even for a moment He could take his eyes off her. Wherever she would run, His eyes would follow. To a point where He developed Four heads covering all Four directions, so that she couldn't hide anywhere. To escape Brahma's gaze, she jumped on top of His head. He then developed The Fifth Head to look upwards. Seeing this kind of attachment towards His own daughter, Shiva cut off Brahma's fifth head and cursed Him that He would never be worshipped as a God since what he had done was worse than what the basest of creatures would do and that His name didn't deserve to be taken in the same breath as Shiva and Vishnu. And to this day, you won't find as many devotees of Brahma as you would find of Shiva and Vishnu.