Prologue

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The stage was already lit when I arrived.

 

A warm amber glow across a floor swept clean. A few props were scattered—an overturned stool, a brass pot, a wooden wheel. Nothing in its place yet. The back curtain rippled as if someone had just stepped offstage.

 

Lord Vishnu sat in the front row, legs crossed, a script in his lap.

 

He didn’t look up as I approached. Just flipped a page and nodded to himself.

 

“Have we done this one before?” I asked.

 

He shrugged. “Does it matter?”

 

I took my place near the wings, adjusting my robes. The hem caught on a nail. I pulled it free without tearing. Somewhere overhead, someone adjusted a light. It hummed once, then held.

 

Vishnu stood and walked to the edge of the stage. He carried a small bell. It wasn’t necessary, but he liked the sound it made.

 

“We’ll take it from the top,” he said. “You’re center left. You cross to the river.”

 

I waited for the cue.

 

He rang the bell—once, lightly. A single chime.

 

Then he looked at me and smiled, as if remembering something halfway between amusement and affection.

 

“A glass of water would be nice,” he said absently, turning back to his script.

 

I nodded.

 

And I stepped forward.

 

The light shifted.

 

The set changed.

 

And the world began.

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I.

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The brass cup felt warm in my hand.

 

I had been walking a while. The sun was high, the sky blank and unconcerned. My feet kicked up dust that didn’t rise far—just swirled around my ankles before falling again, tired like everything else.

 

It was Vishnu’s request, of course. He had asked for a glass of water.

 

No thunder. No commandment. Just a quiet request beneath the neem tree, scratching the back of his neck and squinting at the heat shimmering off the road.

 

“Would you fetch me a glass of water?” he said—like a man asking for a second helping of lentils.

 

So I went.

 

The river was just beyond the tamarind grove. I had passed it before, I thought. Or maybe I had only heard of it. The trees rustled as I stepped through them, as if they’d been expecting someone but weren’t sure it was me.

 

At the bend in the river, I saw her.

 

She was crouched at the bank, drawing water into a brass pot. Her sari clung to her ankles. Her bangles made music as she moved. A strand of hair slipped across her cheek, and she brushed it away without thought.

 

And just like that, I forgot the taste of the sky.

 

I didn’t speak. I only watched.

 

She turned—perhaps sensing me—and smiled. Not a smile meant to enchant. Just the kind villagers give to strangers when the day is too beautiful to hold back warmth.

 

But something in me shifted. A small, strange tug. As if a thread, long buried, had been pulled.

 

“Are you lost?” she asked.

 

“No,” I said—though I wasn’t sure.

 

She tilted her head, studying me. “You look as if you’ve never seen a river before.”

 

“I haven’t,” I said.

 

She laughed. It was a clear sound—nothing mystical or alluring. But it echoed in my chest as though it had been waiting there.

 

I asked her name. She gave it. I forgot the sound as soon as she spoke it—only remembering the way her lips shaped it.

 

She picked up her pot and turned toward the trees.

 

“Wait,” I said, though I had no question.

 

She paused.

 

“I’m… looking for water.”

 

She raised an eyebrow, amused. “Then you’ve come to the right place.”

 

And she walked away—not like someone inviting me to follow, but like someone certain I would.

 

I looked down at the cup in my hand.

 

Empty.

 

Again.

 

Somewhere, very far away, someone was waiting for a glass of water.

 

But here, in this quiet place between water and wind, it seemed he could wait a little longer.

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II.

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I did not follow her right away.

 

Instead, I sat beside the river, letting my fingers comb through the current like it was hair I once knew. The water was cool, thin, and alive. I cupped a handful and let it pour back through my palms, listening to how it did not answer me.

 

The sun had begun its descent. Its light stretched long across the trees, turning every leaf gold on one side and black on the other. Shadows moved without sound. A frog leapt from a rock into the shallows and vanished without a trace.

 

The wind carried the scent of tamarind, wet clay, and something sweet I couldn’t name.

 

I told myself it was good to rest. Even the gods pause between acts of creation. What harm in a moment? I had been sent to fetch water, after all. And hadn’t I found it? In the same way a singer finds a silence, or a pilgrim finds a place they don’t mean to stay—but do.

 

She had been kind. That was all. A girl at the river. A smile in sunlight. No enchantments. No illusions. Just a presence that made the air seem easier to breathe.

 

Surely the Lord would not begrudge me a few hours here. After all, the world itself was His design—was it not wise to admire the craftsmanship? Study the structure? Learn the flavors of its breath?

 

I reached for my vina, intending to strum a few notes to mark the moment.

 

It wasn’t there.

 

Strange.

 

I never travel without it.

 

I patted my side, then the small pouch across my chest. Gone.

 

Not lost—just… absent.

 

It struck me then—not as a warning, but as a curiosity. Like realizing you’ve forgotten a word, or a face you once loved, and it no longer feels urgent to remember.

 

No matter.

 

I lay back on the riverbank, my head resting in a cradle of warm grass. The earth beneath me was solid, generous, unhurried. A flock of parakeets passed overhead like a laugh with wings. I closed my eyes.

 

Her face rose again in the dark behind my lids—not radiant, not divine. Just… real. The way her eyes had met mine without hesitation. The round wet mark the pot had left against her hip. The loose hair that did not care who saw it.

 

I opened my eyes.

 

A few hours, then. Perhaps a day. I could learn her name again. Ask what the villagers called this river. Learn how they boiled their rice. Ask which god they whispered to before sleep.

 

To know the world is to know its Maker more fully. Isn’t that what I have always done?

 

I stood slowly. Brushed the grass from my robes. My legs felt a little heavier than before, but not unwilling.

 

Just for a little while longer.

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III.

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The path she had taken wound gently between trees, past a rusted ox-cart half-swallowed by vines. I followed without meaning to follow—my feet moved as if they had once known the way and only needed reminding.

 

Soon the trees thinned. The air grew warm and dense with the smell of smoke, turmeric, and cow dung. I heard voices—low and practical, punctuated with laughter. And then I saw them.

 

Thatched roofs like crouching animals. Whitewashed walls cracked with heat. A courtyard where chilies dried on a mat and a baby toddled between hens. A boy chased a goat with a stick, yelling something about a mango thief.

 

She was there, walking ahead of me, her pot balanced on her hip now like a sleeping child.

 

No one looked at me strangely. No one asked where I had come from.

 

Strangers arrive sometimes, the elders would later say. Especially during festival season. Must be here for the rites. I nodded when they told me this, and said nothing more.

 

Her name, I learned, was Meera.

 

She lived with her father, a potter whose fingers were always grey with clay and who walked with a limp that turned each step into a question. His voice was dry and slow, like wood being carved. He studied me for a long time before offering a place to sleep—under the awning behind his kiln.

 

In exchange, I could help him fire the pots.

 

I accepted.

 

It was good to work with my hands again.

 

There was a kind of listening in shaping clay. It taught you things: where to press, where to wait, when to let go. The fire, too, was its own teacher—impatient, greedy, easily offended. I liked the way it roared in the early morning, when the air was still cool and the sky looked bruised.

 

Meera brought us meals—flatbread wrapped in banana leaves, lentils spiced with mustard seed. She never stayed long, but her presence remained after she left, like the smell of warm stones after rain. Once, she laughed at something her father said, and the sound passed through me like a breeze through tall grass—nothing touched, yet everything moved.

 

The days unfolded gently. Not with urgency, but with rhythm.

 

Children ran barefoot through the alleys, shrieking with joy or hunger. Women gathered to pound grain, their songs rising and falling in loose harmony. A monkey stole an oil lamp from the temple and was chased across three rooftops before it dropped it into a basket of onions. The priest declared it a bad omen; the village women declared it a good story.

 

In the evenings, we sat around a central fire.

 

The elders smoked thin pipes that smelled of fennel and damp bark. They told stories—not grand myths, but things that happened last year or last generation, depending on who was listening. One woman spoke of a snake that had lived in her grain jar for thirteen days without touching a single kernel. Another swore her dead husband had returned as a squirrel that only stole from her neighbor’s tree.

 

I listened. I asked questions. I laughed at the right times.

 

I wasn’t trying to become one of them.

 

But I was no longer entirely outside them, either.

 

At night, I lay on a mat beneath a torn mosquito net, the warmth of the kiln seeping through the wall behind me. I could hear the soft chime of Meera’s bangles as she washed dishes. I could smell the river in the distance, quiet and unbothered by all our lives.

 

And each night, as my eyes closed, it seemed less and less strange that I had stayed.

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Continue to Part 2

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