Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati....
The heat was a physical weight, a smothering blanket over the quarry. Dust, fine as ground bone, coated every surface—the chiselled grey rock, the rough-hewn blocks waiting for transport, and the sweat-streaked skin of the labourers. Among them, a man named Vasu worked with a quiet, rhythmic intensity. His body bore the story of his labour: corded muscles under sun-darkened skin, a lattice of old scars from flying stone chips, hands that were more callous than palm.
He was shaping a cornerstone for the new city gate. The design was simple but robust, meant to last centuries. As his hammer struck the chisel, a familiar, fleeting pain lanced through his right shoulder—the ghost of an old injury, or perhaps a memory trying to surface. He paused, rolling the shoulder, and his gaze drifted from the blinding white rock to the distant, hazy silhouette of the King's palace on the hill. A strange, hollow feeling bloomed in his chest, a longing for something he could not name.
"Daydreaming again, Vasu?" called Mahesh, the quarry foreman, his voice good-natured but edged with the impatience of schedule. "That stone won't shape itself, and the King's steward inspects tomorrow."
"The stone will be ready," Vasu replied, his voice a low rumble. It was a voice that felt older than his thirty-five years.
He returned to his work. Tap-tap-tap. Each strike was precise. He had an uncanny gift, an intuitive understanding of the stone's grain, its hidden faults, its points of yielding. He could find the shape within the rock as if remembering it. It was this skill that had elevated him from a common breaker of rocks to a master carver. Yet, for all his skill, his origins were a mystery, even to himself.
Ten years ago, he had been found at the edge of the Surya Kund, the sacred sun-temple pool on the outskirts of the city. He was feverish, near death, his body a roadmap of terrible wounds—a savage puncture scar over his heart, deep cuts along his arms and back. His memory was a void, scoured clean by trauma or fever. The temple priests had nursed him. When he recovered, he knew how to speak, how to eat, how to work, but he knew not his name, his village, or his kin. They called him 'Vasu', for he had been found with a single, water-smoothed gemstone of lapis lazuli in his clenched fist—a 'Vas'. He took to stonework as if born to it, and the growing city of Anga, ever under construction, gave him purpose.
At day's end, Vasu washed at the communal pump, the cool water a blessing. He shared a modest meal of lentil stew and flatbread with the other labourers in their dusty courtyard. The talk was of the city, of the King.
"They say the King rides out tomorrow to the northern villages," said young Daku, his eyes wide. "To settle a land dispute himself. No steward, no magistrate. The King."
"He does that," grunted old Mani, who had worked in Anga since its founding. "King Karna… he had a way of listening that made you feel like your small life mattered. This new king, his son Vrishasena, he tries to walk the same path. A good lad. But the shadow of his father is long."
Karna. The name, as always, sent a peculiar shiver through Vasu. It was everywhere in Anga. In the ballads sung in taverns, in the grand friezes on the palace walls depicting a radiant, armour-clad hero, in the quiet, enduring grief of the people. The great, tragic Surya Putra. The King who was a brother to the poor. The peerless archer betrayed by fate. The loyal friend who died on the field of Kurukshetra.
"They say he was invincible," Daku whispered, as if sharing a secret. "That he was born with golden armour. That he gave it away! Can you imagine?"
Vasu stared into his bowl. A flash, not a memory, but a sensation: the cool, impossibly light weight of something against his skin, the glitter of gold at the periphery of his vision. He shook his head, dispelling the phantom feeling. Stone dust and daydreams, he told himself.
That night, as a dry heat lightning flickered over the eastern plains, Vasu dreamed. Not the usual fragmented, formless dreams, but a stark, vivid scene.
He stood on a vast, flat plain under a bruised sky. The air reeked of iron, mud, and death. He was not Vasu the stonecutter. He was clad in fine, bloodied armour, a celestial bow in his hand that felt like an extension of his soul. Before him stood a chariot, drawn by white horses that seemed to shine with their own light. In it, a dark-skinned man with eyes of infinite compassion and cunning held the reins, and a resplendent archer, his face a mask of agonised determination, aimed a bow directly at his heart.
He felt no fear. Only a profound, weary clarity. He lowered his own bow. He stood straight, his arms slightly open, a strange peace flooding him. He spoke, his voice resonating with a kingly authority he had never known: "Fire, Arjuna. Fulfill your destiny."
The arrow flew. It struck. Not with pain, but with a world-ending finality.
Vasu woke with a gasp, sitting bolt upright on his thin pallet. His hand flew to the centre of his chest, to the old, jagged scar. In the dream, that was where the arrow had hit. His heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat of a life he didn't own. The name echoed in the dark hut: Arjuna.
The next day, he was a ghost at his work. His hands moved by rote, but his mind was on that plain, in that body, facing that arrow. The foreman's shouts sounded distant. The stone before him was no longer just rock; its layers seemed like strata of time, its flecks of mica like stars in a forgotten sky.
His work took him to the palace grounds in the afternoon, to deliver and fit the finished cornerstone. As he guided the ox-cart through the service gate, he passed the royal stables. A tall, broad-shouldered man in practical riding clothes, not royal silks, was inspecting a horse's hoof. He had a strong, kind face, etched with the lines of responsibility and a sorrow that never fully left his eyes. It was King Vrishasena.
Vasu's breath hitched. A surge of emotion, fierce and protective and agonisingly tender, overwhelmed him. It was the feeling a father has for a son. He stumbled, catching himself on the cart.
Vrishasena looked up, his gaze sharp. "Are you unwell, brother?"
The word 'brother', the common address of a king to his subject, struck Vasu like a physical blow. He bowed deeply, his voice strangled. "No, Majesty. The heat. Forgive me."
Vrishasena approached. His eyes, a warm brown like his mother's, studied Vasu not with royal disdain, but with genuine concern. They lingered for a moment on Vasu's face, on the strong line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders. A flicker of something—not recognition, but a deep, inexplicable puzzlement—crossed the King's features. "You work in the quarry?"
"Yes, Majesty. Vasu, the stone-carver."
"Vasu," Vrishasena repeated, as if testing the name. He nodded slowly. "Your work is known. My chief architect praises it. The city is built on the strength of men like you." He placed a hand briefly on the cornerstone on the cart. "Solid. True. It will outlast us all." He gave a small, weary smile that didn't reach his eyes, and turned back to his horse.
Vasu stood frozen long after the King had gone. Solid. True. The words were a blessing and a condemnation. He was a cornerstone, buried, anonymous, holding up a structure whose history was denied to him.
The dreams did not stop. They came now with increasing clarity. A laughing, proud prince placing a hand on his shoulder (Duryodhana). A weeping, beautiful woman begging him in a forest (Kunti). A stern sage with a terrible curse on his lips (Parashurama). The weight of golden armour being lifted from his body by a disguised god (Indra). And always, the final, accepting gaze into the eyes of Arjuna, his brother.
He began to seek out the stories. He would sit at the edges of tavern circles, listening to travelling bards sing the Mahabharata. When they reached the parvas of Karna—his birth, his loyalty, his generosity, his death—Vasu would feel a cold sweat break out, his scars tingling with a phantom heat or cold. He found himself drawn to the Surya Kund, where he had been found. He would sit by its still, reflective waters, staring at his own face—a face of hard labour, framed by dust-greyed hair—trying to see the king, the warrior, the god's son.
One evening, an old, blind bard came to the quarrymen's quarters. His voice was like worn leather, and he sang not of great battles, but of small moments. He sang of Karna walking incognito among the people of Anga, listening to their disputes under a banyan tree. He sang of Karna teaching a young, eager Vrishasena how to string his first bow, his large hands gently correcting the boy's grip.
As the bard sang of the bow, Vasu's hands, resting on his knees, twitched. They moved through the air, mimicking the action—the feel of the sinew, the flex of the wood, the precise alignment. He did it without thought.
The old bard stopped singing. Though his eyes were milky white, he turned his head unerringly towards Vasu. "You have the hands of an archer, stonecutter," he said quietly.
A silence fell over the group. All eyes turned to Vasu. He clenched his hands into fists, hiding them. "I shape stone, grandfather. Not arrows."
The bard smiled, a knowing, sorrowful smile. "Some men shape their destinies. Others have their destinies shaped for them, by hands mightier than their own. The stone remembers the mountain it came from, even when it is dust."
That was the breaking point. The void within Vasu was no longer empty; it was a chasm screaming with echoes. He could not live as a ghost in his own life. He had to know. The answer, he felt with a certainty that was his first true memory, lay not in Anga, but on the field where the world had ended.
He gave no notice. One morning before dawn, he took his meagre savings, a waterskin, a blanket, and his best chisel—not as a tool, but as a talisman of the man he had been for a decade. He turned his back on the quarry, on the rising palace, on the only home he knew, and began to walk east, towards the legendary field of Kurukshetra.
The journey took weeks. He travelled as a labourer, a pilgrim, a man haunted. The land changed from Anga's fertile plains to drier, more haunted expanses. People spoke of Kurukshetra in hushed tones; it was a place of pilgrimage, but also of profound sorrow, where the wind still seemed to carry whispers of clashing steel and dying breaths.
When he finally stood on the field, it was anticlimactic. It was just land. Fields of mustard flower waved in the breeze where chariots had churned mud. Farmers tilled soil that had once drunk the blood of legends. There was no sign, no marker.
He wandered, lost in more ways than one. He felt nothing but a deepening despair. Had it all been a fever-dream of a lonely stonecutter?
Near dusk, he found himself in a small grove of ancient, gnarled trees at the edge of the field. In the centre of the grove was a simple, unadorned stone platform—a forgotten shrine, perhaps. Exhausted, he sat upon it, head in his hands. The weight of his unknown life crushed him.
"You seek something that cannot be found in geography."
Vasu looked up. An old sadhu stood there, his body frail, his eyes preternaturally bright. He hadn't heard him approach.
"I seek… myself," Vasu said, the admission torn from him.
The sadhu nodded. He pointed to the stone platform Vasu sat on. "This is not a shrine. It is an altar. It was here that a king's body was cremated by his brother, who learned the truth too late. The ashes were taken, but the earth remembers."
Vasu looked down at the stone. It was weathered, stained by centuries of rain and wind. He reached out, his stone-carver's fingers tracing its surface. And then he felt it. Not with his fingers, but in his soul. A resonance. A profound, echoing silence that was his own.
He looked at his hands, then at the sadhu, understanding dawning, terrible and absolute. "I am not him," he whispered. "I am… what was left. The memory the earth kept. The echo."
The sadhu's gaze was compassionate. "When a great tree falls, the stump may send up a new shoot. It is not the same tree, but it carries the same life. You are not Karna. His story ended here, with honour and peace. You are Vasu. You carry his essence—his skill, his strength, his loyalty—but you are your own man. The stonecutter of Anga. The builder."
The last piece of the void clicked into place, not with the roar of revelation, but with the quiet sigh of acceptance. He was not a king reborn. He was a ripple. The warrior was gone, but the hand that could create remained. The giver of kingdoms was gone, but the builder of foundations remained.
He stood up. The hollow feeling in his chest was gone, filled now with a solid, quiet certainty. He bowed to the sadhu, to the altar-stone, to the field.
He walked back to Anga, not as a pilgrim, but as a man returning home. The journey felt lighter. When he arrived, the city was the same, yet utterly different. He saw now the legacy not just in ballads and friezes, but in the very stones of the gates, the straight roads, the just laws. He saw the living legacy in Vrishasena's just rule, in the people's enduring pride.
He went back to the quarry. Mahesh the foreman cursed him for a deserter, then put him back to work with a grunt. Vasu picked up his hammer and chisel. The stone before him was for a new well in the poorest quarter of the city.
Tap-tap-tap.
This time, each strike was not an attempt to remember a forgotten shape, but to release the one within. He was not carving a memory. He was carving a future. He was Vasu. He had been found by a river, shaped by a quarry, and would build a city. And in the patient, solid truth of his work, in the unspoken kinship with a king who glanced at him with puzzled eyes, in the quiet satisfaction of a cornerstone well-laid, the Surya Putra finally, truly, found his rest. Not in glory, but in grace. Not in the epic, but in the earth.