Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati...
In the heart of Anga, where the land grew soft and the air heavy with the scent of wet earth and blooming lotuses, flowed the River Varna. It was not a mighty river like the Ganga, nor a holy one like the Saraswati. It was a working river, broad and slow, its brown waters carrying clay to the potters' yards, fish to the nets of fisherfolk, and irrigation to the rice paddies that fed the kingdom.
To the people of the riverside village of Varnapuri, the river was mother, provider, and sometimes, tomb. They knew its moods—the playful sparkle of the dry season, the sullen, swollen roar of the monsoon, the quiet, patient flow of winter. And they knew its stories.
The oldest story, told by grandmothers to children under the banyan tree, was of the Sun-Born Prince. Long ago, they said, a basket of light had drifted down this very river. Inside was a baby boy, clad in golden light, crying not with hunger, but with a sound like a lost bell. He was found by a charioteer and his wife, Radha, who loved him as their own. The river had given them their prince, Karna. And the river, the story went, remembered.
Young Mohan, the potter's son, loved this story. He would sit on the muddy bank, shaping his own clumsy clay figures, and imagine the tiny boat of light bobbing on the water. He felt a connection to the lost prince that was deeper than legend. Mohan had been born with a twisted foot, which made him slow, unsuited for the work in the fields or the lively dances at festivals. His world was the riverbank and his father's wheel. In the prince who was found, not born, Mohan saw a reflection of his own feeling of being out of place.
"Mohan, stop your dreaming and bring more clay!" his father, Gopal, would call, his voice not unkind, but etched with the weariness of a man who saw a fragile future for his son.
One year, the rains did not come. The sky was a relentless, bleached bowl. The rice paddies cracked like old pottery. The Varna shrank, revealing bones of its bed—slick grey stones, the skeletons of old fishing boats, and a landscape of mud that hardened into geometric despair. The village was thirsty, hungry, and afraid.
The elders decided to perform an ancient ritual, the Jal-Yatra, a walking prayer along the river's course to plead with the river goddess, Varnadevi, for mercy. The entire village would walk for three days, from the source spring in the hills to the village shrine. Mohan, despite his foot, was determined to go. He would carry a small clay pot, his own humble offering.
The journey was arduous. The riverbed was a scar in the earth. On the second afternoon, under a hammering sun, they reached a wide, deep bend in the river, now just a vast expanse of cracked, baked mud. This was a place of old power, where the banyan trees were ancient and silent. The head priest, Panditji, an old man whose eyes were the colour of the river in flood, called for a halt.
"Here," he said, his voice a dry rustle. "This is the Surya Kund, the Sun-Pool. It is said the basket caught here, in an eddy of light. This is where our story began. Our plea must be strongest here."
The villagers formed a circle. They chanted, they poured their few precious drops of water onto the parched earth. Nothing. The sky remained empty. A wave of hopelessness washed over them. Mohan saw his father's shoulders slump.
Feeling useless, Mohan wandered away from the circle, his bad foot dragging in the dust. He stumbled over something half-buried in the mud—not a root, but something smooth and curved. He knelt and dug with his hands. It was a piece of pottery, but unlike any he had seen. It was a fragment of a bowl, thick and strong, glazed not with simple slip, but with a beautiful, weathered terracotta that held a memory of fire. And on it, etched before firing, was a symbol: a simple, elegant sun with twelve rays.
His heart hammered. He had seen this symbol only once, carved on the plinth of the old, ruined watchtower on the palace road. It was the personal mark, they said, of King Karna. A maker's mark.
He looked around. The cracked mud here was different. It wasn't the loose, grainy soil of the bank; it was smooth, almost polished in patches, and it dipped in a perfect, wide circle around the Surya Kund. A potter's eye saw what others did not: this was not a natural pool. This was a klin-site. An ancient, enormous one.
He forgot the chanting. He scrabbled on his knees, digging with a frantic energy. He found more fragments—a spout, a handle, the curved shoulder of a large jar. All thick, all impossibly strong, all with that sun-mark.
The stories rushed back, but not the grand ones of armour and arrows. The small ones. The whispers. The king who would walk among the potters. The king who knew the clay of Anga was the best for storing grain, for it breathed. The king who, in the first year of his rule, had ordered a thousand great jars made to store seed-grain for famine times. The great Karna-Kalash project.
It was said the project was never finished. War had called him away. The jars were lost, forgotten.
Mohan stood up, holding the sun-marked shard aloft. "Panditji!" he cried, his voice cutting through the mournful chants. "Look! It's not a pool! It's a workshop!"
The villagers gathered around, puzzled. Mohan, who was rarely listened to, spoke with a new authority. He pointed to the smooth clay bed. "This was puddled and trampled! A clay-preparation ground!" He pointed to the circular depression. "This is where the kiln was! A giant one! See how the earth is still fired?" He held up the shards. "These are from the great jars! The king's jars!"
Panditji took a shard, his old fingers tracing the sun. Understanding dawned in his river-coloured eyes. "The story… it is not just that he was found by the river. He worked with it. He understood it. The river gave him clay, and he gave back… security."
A new idea, fragile as a new pot, formed in Mohan's mind. "The jars… if they were to store grain… they had to be buried. To keep the seed cool and dry." He looked out over the vast, cracked expanse of the riverbed. "They wouldn't be in the village. They'd be here. By the water. Safe."
Hope, a dangerous and delicate thing, flickered in the dry air. Gopal, Mohan's father, stared at his son as if seeing him for the first time. "Where, son? If you were a king, where would you hide a hundred giant jars?"
Mohan closed his eyes, thinking like a potter, like a king protecting his people. Not in the deep channel where floods would scour. Not on the high bank where thieves might look. In the bend. Where the silt deposited. Where the earth was deep and soft. Under the very place where the river had given him life.
He pointed to the inside of the wide bend, now a football field of solid, baked mud. "There."
It was back-breaking work. They had no tools but their hands, sticks, and desperation. They dug under the cruel sun. Hours passed. Just as doubt was turning to despair again, Thud.
A hollow sound, different from stone.
They dug faster, revealing not mud, but a dome of terracotta, vast as a small hut. They cleared the earth from its rim. There, large as a cartwheel, was the sun-mark, proud and clear. With a collective heave, they pried off the sealed lid.
A sigh of cool, dry air escaped. The villagers peered in. The jar was filled to the brim not with grain—the grain was dust after a century—but with seeds. Thousands upon thousands of hard, dry, preserved seeds. Different sizes, different shapes. Rice, millet, barley, lentil, pumpkin, bitter gourd, mango stone.
It was a treasure more valuable than gold. A bank of life.
A cry went up, not of joy, but of profound reverence. They found another jar. And another. Dozens of them, buried in a grid under the riverbed, a secret garden of potential hidden by a thoughtful king.
But the river was still dry. The seeds needed water.
As the last jar was uncovered, Mohan, exhausted, sat by the great sun-marked lid. He placed his hand on the symbol, the maker's mark of the lost king. He thought of the boy in the basket, the king at the potter's wheel, the warrior who died far away. He wasn't a hero from a song. He was a man who knew the feel of clay, who planned for a future he would never see.
Tears, the first moisture in months, welled in Mohan's eyes. One fell onto the sun-mark on the lid. Then another. They were not enough to water a seed, but they were an offering.
A deep, subterranean groan echoed through the earth. From the very centre of the excavated Surya Kund, where the kiln-fire had once burned, a dark patch appeared in the mud. It spread, dampening the dust. Then, a trickle, clear as crystal, bubbled up. Not a flood, but a steady, insistent spring, welling from some deep aquifer unlocked by the disturbance, or perhaps, by the recognition.
The villagers watched, breathless, as the trickle became a stream, finding the old course, winding its way down the cracked bed of the Varna.
Panditji turned to Mohan. His voice was full of awe. "The river remembered the king. And you, my boy, remembered the river's true story. You are his son today, more than any warrior."
The Varna did not return to full flood that day. But the spring at the Surya Kund never stopped. They rebuilt the channel. The seeds from the Karna-Kalash were planted in the first revitalised fields. The village was saved, not by a miracle, but by a legacy of practical care, rediscovered.
Mohan never walked without a limp. But he no longer sat alone on the bank. He became the keeper of the Surya Kund spring and the head of a new pottery, specializing in making strong, sun-marked seed jars for all of Anga, reviving the old designs from the shards. He taught that the river's gift was not just water, but memory—the memory of a king who was, in his heart, a potter and a planner.
Years later, when a travelling bard came through, singing of Karna's charity with gold and jewels, old Gopal would shake his head and point to the fields of golden wheat, fed by the steady river, grown from seeds a century old.
"He gave more than gold," Gopal would say. "He gave us a second chance. And my son," he'd say with a pride that warmed like the sun on clay, "was the one who learned how to read the river's memory."
And on the bank, Mohan would smooth the rim of a new jar, press the sun-mark into the wet clay, and listen to the river flow—a slow, patient, remembering sound. The heroism of preservation, he thought, was quieter than the heroism of war, but its roots ran deeper, sustained by the humble, enduring earth, and the water that never forgets.