Nabin Desai
1
The air in Nalanda carried a kind of hush, as if time itself had slowed to accommodate the weight of its history. Dr. Rhea Sen stepped off the dusty SUV, adjusting her dupatta against the sun’s fierce glare, and looked out at the crumbling red-brick ruins of the ancient university. Her breath caught—not from exhaustion, but awe. Despite the relentless July heat, she felt a chill ripple through her spine. Nalanda had been a name in her textbooks, a place she’d imagined between brittle pages and archived microfilms. Now it stretched before her like a silent witness, half-asleep beneath layers of earth and time.
Her driver, a teenager with headphones slung around his neck, dumped her duffel bag beside her and drove off without a backward glance. The thud of the engine fading was replaced by the chirp of unseen birds and the hum of cicadas. She pulled out her phone. No signal.
“Typical,” she muttered, reaching into her jute sling for the printed letter from the Archaeological Manuscripts Office. Her assignment was simple in theory: oversee the digitization of preserved manuscripts, some of which had never been studied before, and send reports back to Professor Gopal Iyer in Delhi. In practice, she already anticipated bureaucratic walls, hesitant caretakers, and heat-induced fatigue.
“Dr. Rhea Sen?” a voice called.
She turned to find a tall man in a khadi kurta, a brown shawl carelessly looped around his neck despite the heat. His eyes were steady, unreadable. The kind that didn’t flinch easily.
“Yes,” she replied. “You must be Mr. Mishra.”
“Arvind Mishra. I’m the lead archivist here.” He extended a hand, formal and dry.
“Pleasure. I believe we’ll be working closely over the next few weeks,” she said, forcing a polite smile.
He didn’t return it. “I was told you’d arrive tomorrow.”
Rhea arched a brow. “I prefer arriving before deadlines. Helps in mapping out the work.”
“You won’t need to rush. The manuscripts have waited over 800 years. Another day wouldn’t have hurt them.”
She blinked, caught off-guard by the deliberate coolness. “Still, it helps to begin assessing what needs restoration before the scanning begins.”
Arvind’s gaze didn’t waver. “We don’t restore what isn’t broken.”
They stood in silence, the ancient bricks around them radiating late afternoon heat. Rhea cleared her throat. “Perhaps you can show me to the archive building?”
He nodded stiffly and began walking. She followed, heels crunching against gravel, the sound unnaturally loud. As they moved past rows of meditation cells and vine-draped stupas, she caught a glimpse of a rusted sign: Manuscript Repository – Entry Restricted.
“Why restricted?” she asked.
“Because some histories were never meant to be reopened,” he replied.
Rhea felt her historian’s instinct flare. That was precisely the kind of sentence that made her want to dig deeper. She didn’t come all this way to tiptoe around ancient ghosts.
As they reached the tall iron doors of the archive, she felt something shift—not just in the air, but within her. It wasn’t just history waiting here. It was something… unfinished.
And she was here to finish it.
2
The inside of the manuscript repository was nothing like Rhea had imagined. She expected a sterile space with temperature controls, LED lighting, and catalogued drawers. Instead, she found dim yellow bulbs flickering under high wooden ceilings, the air thick with the scent of aged paper, camphor, and mustard oil. Stacked wooden shelves groaned under the weight of scrolls and palm-leaf folios wrapped in red and ochre cloth. No glass cases. No barcodes. Just silence, age, and the invisible pressure of unseen eyes watching over centuries.
Arvind Mishra stood near a wooden desk, unwrapping a bundle with practiced care. Rhea stepped closer, pulling out a small notebook.
“This section houses manuscripts primarily in Sanskrit and Prakrit,” he said without looking at her. “Many are philosophical treatises. A few are student notes. Some might be nothing more than correspondence between scholars.”
“Perfect,” Rhea replied. “We’ll need to start with the ones that are most fragile. Can we identify them by visual deterioration?”
“I’ll decide which ones are safe to handle,” Arvind said curtly. “This isn’t a scanning bureau. It’s a temple of knowledge.”
Rhea narrowed her eyes. “With all due respect, Mr. Mishra, I’m not here to damage anything. My team is trained to handle rare manuscripts. Our goal is preservation through access. Digitization ensures that these texts don’t die with the paper.”
He glanced at her, unimpressed. “Some texts were never meant to be accessible.”
Rhea felt her patience wobble. “That’s not your decision to make.”
“It’s not yours either.”
Silence crackled between them like dry leaves underfoot.
Before she could reply, an older woman entered with quiet authority. Her silver-streaked hair was tied back neatly, and she wore a cotton saree with a faded blue border. “I see introductions have gone well,” she said with a soft smile.
Arvind exhaled. “Rhea, this is Meera Thakur, the principal of the local school and… an old friend of the archives.”
Rhea extended a hand. Meera’s handshake was warm, calming. “You’ve chosen a powerful place to dig for the past,” she said. “But remember—history isn’t always written in ink. Some stories survive in whispers.”
Rhea smiled. “I’m open to whispers. But first, I need the ink.”
Meera’s laughter broke the tension. “Well said. Arvind, let her see the Section Five shelf. There’s something there that’s been confusing even you.”
Arvind hesitated but gave a reluctant nod. “One scroll. But she doesn’t open it without me.”
As Rhea followed him through narrow aisles, she noticed the odd way he glanced at certain bundles—almost like they were alive, like they held secrets too dangerous to unfold. He reached a shelf near the far end and pulled out a small bundle wrapped in faded indigo cloth. No label. Just a brittle wax seal.
“This was found buried inside a wall during renovations,” he said. “We’ve never fully read it. It’s not part of any known scripture.”
Rhea’s heart quickened. She held it gently, feeling the fragile pulse of time within.
“What do you think it is?” she whispered.
Arvind stared at the seal. “Something someone wanted to forget.”
And with that, he turned away—leaving her holding a ghost.
3
Rhea spent the evening in the school library, its windows thrown open to let in the warm breeze that carried the faint scent of tamarind and woodsmoke. With a magnifying lens in one hand and the scroll laid carefully across a cotton-lined desk, she began deciphering the delicate curves of the script. It wasn’t formal Sanskrit. It was Prakrit—vernacular, flowing, intimate. And unmistakably… personal.
Lines unfurled in front of her like verses of a half-remembered dream. “To the one whose eyes still haunt the morning silence… I write from the shadows of the Mahavihara, where chants rise but your voice lingers louder…”
She sat back, stunned. This wasn’t a treatise. It was a letter. A love letter.
Meera entered with two steel tumblers of tea. “Still at it?” she asked, placing one beside Rhea. “You’ve been in here since sunset.”
Rhea didn’t look up. “This isn’t scholarly correspondence. This is personal. Someone—Ayu, I think that’s his name—wrote this to a woman named Devika. He describes her smile, her herbal remedies, her defiance of temple walls.”
Meera’s eyes sparkled with recognition. “Devika… that name is still sung in village ballads. A healer, they say, who lived in defiance of caste. She taught women to read, to tend their own health.”
“And Ayu?” Rhea asked.
Meera’s expression shifted. “A monk. Or maybe a student who never fully took vows. His story never survived in song. Only hers did.”
Rhea looked down at the scroll again. “He writes like he never meant anyone else to read it.”
“That’s what makes it real,” Meera said gently.
Later that night, Rhea met Arvind on the temple steps near the ruins. The moon lit the grounds in silvery light, and the silence of the Mahavihara felt even heavier under the stars. She handed him a translated excerpt.
He read it slowly, his eyes scanning each line without expression. “So. Love in the last days of Nalanda.”
Rhea nodded. “You think it’s romantic fantasy?”
“I think it’s dangerous,” he replied. “It shifts the narrative. Scholars will latch onto it. They’ll twist it into something it’s not.”
Rhea folded her arms. “Or maybe it’s exactly what it is—a human voice from history. Someone who loved. Who feared. Who lived through the fall of knowledge and chose to write about… her.”
Arvind looked at her for a long moment. “And do you think that matters more than the knowledge he didn’t write down?”
“Yes,” she said softly. “Because without love, what are we even preserving?”
He didn’t answer. But he didn’t walk away either.
The next morning, when Rhea arrived at the archive, she found Arvind already there—wearing gloves, laying out a second scroll she hadn’t seen before.
“No label. But found with the first,” he said, without looking up.
Rhea stepped closer. Together, in silence, they began to read.
Somehow, in that quiet space between past and present, a guarded alliance began to form—inked not in signatures, but in shared breath, ancient letters, and the fragile unfolding of trust.
4
Dust drifted like incense through shafts of morning light as Rhea and Arvind worked side by side in the manuscript room. The atmosphere had shifted. Their silences were no longer cold. Now they hummed with thought. Words were exchanged sparingly, but gestures flowed with ease—a hand passing tweezers, a finger tracing an unclear glyph, a glance confirming a translation. They were no longer opponents. They were—tentatively—collaborators.
The second scroll was more fragmented, but unmistakably from Ayu. His tone had shifted. The lyrical longing of the first letter was now tinged with apprehension. “Devika, the skies turn grey with omens. Word spreads of horsemen beyond the forests. Our masters still chant sutras, but I feel the crack beneath their rhythm. I fear what silence may come.”
Rhea felt a tremor in her chest. This wasn’t just romance—it was witness. Ayu had recorded not only his love but the approach of destruction. She turned to Arvind. “He knew. He sensed what was coming. And yet, he stayed.”
Arvind’s jaw tightened. “Because of her.”
“Because of love,” Rhea corrected gently.
They paused as Meera entered, carrying a bundle of leaf-wrapped sweets. “You two have discovered the rarest thing in academia—agreement,” she teased.
Arvind allowed himself a smile. “Don’t get used to it.”
Meera set the sweets down, then looked at Rhea. “You should visit the village shrine tomorrow. There’s an old mural—hidden under limewash. Some believe it depicts the last teachers of Nalanda. And a woman with a basket of herbs.”
Rhea’s eyes lit up. “Devika?”
“Possibly. Or the idea of her,” Meera said. “Here, memory is not always literal. But it’s always honest.”
That evening, Rhea sat by the ruins alone, notebook in lap, sketching symbols from the manuscripts. Her thoughts drifted to Delhi, to her ex-fiancé—a fellow historian who once told her she was “too emotionally involved with dead people.” She had laughed at the time. Now she realized how wrong he was.
Emotion wasn’t a weakness in history. It was the bridge between fact and meaning.
A voice broke her reverie. “You’re drawing on sacred stone, Professor Sen?”
She turned. Arvind stood a few steps away, holding a thermos. “Only in graphite. And I’m not a professor yet.”
He sat beside her and poured two cups of tea. “Then allow me to offer graduate-level forgiveness.”
They both chuckled.
“I’ve been thinking,” Rhea said, “Ayu’s letters—they’re more than personal. They challenge the perception of Nalanda as purely ascetic. Maybe scholars here were more human, more conflicted.”
Arvind nodded slowly. “I was raised to believe in the purity of the Mahavihara. But perhaps purity was never the goal. Perhaps it was balance.”
He looked at her, more open than ever before. “Why did you come here, Rhea? Really?”
She hesitated. “To find voices lost to time. And maybe… to find a part of myself I thought I’d left behind.”
The breeze picked up, stirring the trees behind the ruins.
Between two cups of tea and fading sunlight, history had stopped feeling distant.
It had become—once again—personal.
5
The morning brought a strange stillness to Nalanda. Not the usual peaceful quiet, but a heavier pause—as if the ruins themselves were bracing for something to be unearthed. Rhea sat hunched over a newly uncovered scroll, its palm-leaf pages held together by delicate thread and time. Arvind stood behind her, arms crossed, gaze fixed on the text, which even he had never dared to open. The script was hurried, ink smudged, the edges burnt.
It was a final entry. Ayu’s voice was more urgent now, stripped of poetic flourish:
“They have come. The smoke rises beyond the forest line. Teachers continue their lessons, as if words can hold back fire. I have buried the letters. I will stay. For her. For this place. If this is the end, let it be with ink on my fingers and her name in my thoughts.”
Rhea froze. Her breath caught between awe and grief. “This… this was written the day of the invasion.”
Arvind’s expression darkened. “Bakhtiyar Khilji’s men set fire to Nalanda. Thousands of scrolls burned. Monks were slaughtered. And Ayu… he knew it was coming.”
“He stayed for her,” Rhea whispered.
“And in doing so, lost the chance to warn others,” Arvind added, his voice flat.
Rhea looked up at him. “You blame him.”
“I question him,” he said. “He was a scholar, perhaps a teacher. His silence may have cost hundreds their lives.”
“Or maybe,” Rhea said softly, “his voice—these letters—survived precisely because he stayed. Maybe not all knowledge comes from survival. Some comes from sacrifice.”
Arvind turned away. “Romanticism makes for poor history.”
“And fear makes for poor compassion.”
The silence between them returned, now heavy with emotion neither dared name.
Later that afternoon, Meera took Rhea to the village shrine. Hidden behind layers of whitewash and soot was a fading mural. With careful brushing, they revealed faint figures—rows of monks under trees, scrolls in hand, and at the edge, a woman holding a small pot and standing defiantly outside the temple gates. Devika.
“She was never part of their order,” Meera said. “But she healed many. And she taught women to read when it was forbidden. To some, she was a rebel. To others, a saint.”
Rhea touched the mural lightly. “And to one man, she was home.”
That night, under a moonless sky, Rhea sat outside the archive building. Arvind joined her without a word, sitting beside her on the stone steps. For a while, they simply listened—to the wind rustling the trees, to the calls of night birds, to the breath of the ruins.
Finally, he spoke. “My brother died here. In this building. He was cataloguing manuscripts. There was a collapse. He was alone.”
Rhea looked at him, stunned.
“I stayed. Took his place. Preserved what he loved. But I stopped opening anything new. I thought… maybe silence was safer.”
Rhea reached for his hand. “But silence doesn’t heal. Stories do.”
He didn’t pull away.
And in that moment—between grief, guilt, and the ghosts of 1193—a new story began to write itself.
6
The monsoon clouds loomed low the next morning as Rhea, Arvind, and Meera stood at the edge of an overgrown courtyard near the oldest stupa—its bricks worn, moss-covered, partially swallowed by roots and time. Locals whispered that the stupa had once contained sacred relics, but Meera’s hunch was different. A retired monk had once told her that the site had been used as a hiding place when the Mahavihara was threatened.
“This part wasn’t on the site map,” Rhea said, brushing aside a curtain of creepers as she stepped into the dark hollow. Water dripped somewhere, echoing like a heartbeat.
Arvind followed her in silence, holding a torch. “The foundation here is unstable. Be careful.”
At the far end of the stupa’s interior, behind a cracked wall niche, lay a cavity barely large enough for a man to kneel in. Something glinted—copper. Carefully, Arvind reached in and retrieved a sealed canister, its surface etched with Buddhist motifs. He ran his fingers over the engraved lotus. “Preservation-grade metallurgy… it survived the fire.”
With bated breath, they opened it.
Inside, wrapped in layered cloth, lay a bundle of manuscripts—smaller than the earlier scrolls. Their condition was miraculously intact. And among them, one letter was different. Bound with red thread and sealed with a wax stamp—the same mark Ayu had used.
Rhea gently lifted it. The seal was unbroken.
Meera exhaled. “If this is what I think it is… it was never sent.”
Rhea nodded. “A final letter. A goodbye he never had the courage to deliver.”
Arvind looked away. “Then perhaps it should remain unread.”
But Rhea couldn’t resist. “We’ve come this far.”
“Exactly,” he said sharply. “We’ve come too far. Not every page needs to be turned.”
Meera placed a hand on his shoulder. “Sometimes, the unread stories cause the loudest silences.”
Rhea took the letter and placed it on a clean cloth. She stared at the seal—not as a historian, but as a woman. This wasn’t just an artifact. It was grief, longing, and memory frozen in wax.
“Then we read it together,” she said.
That night, in the archive room under the soft flicker of lantern light, they unsealed the letter.
It was shorter than the rest. And heartbreakingly human.
“Devika,
I chose silence when I should have spoken. I chose wisdom over warning. Love over truth. I do not regret loving you. But I regret not fighting harder for us—for our place in a world built on division.
They will come tomorrow. I feel it. I will stay.
If these words find you, know this—my soul was never in the chants. It was in your laughter.”
No one spoke for a long while.
Rhea blinked back tears. “He buried it with himself. Not out of fear… but as a vow.”
Arvind’s voice was low. “Then perhaps it was meant for her alone. Not for the world.”
“And yet,” Rhea said, looking up, “we are the world now.”
Lightning cracked in the distance. Rain began to fall.
And in that storm-lit moment, the past no longer felt buried.
It had returned—wet with memory, raw with truth, and achingly alive.
7
The rain hadn’t stopped for two days. It poured over Nalanda’s ruins, washing vines clean and stirring the scent of old stone. Inside the manuscript room, Rhea sat at the long wooden table, Ayu’s final letter lying open before her. The words swirled in her mind like the storm outside. She had transcribed it, translated it, and now stared at the choice that lay before her.
If she published this letter—this confession of love and guilt—it would alter centuries of academic understanding. The revered image of Nalanda as a fortress of ascetic purity would soften, take on a more human shape. Ayu’s words weren’t just literary—they were revolutionary.
Arvind stood across the room, arms folded, watching her with quiet intensity.
“He never meant this to be public,” he said finally.
Rhea looked up. “He also didn’t mean for it to stay buried under bricks for 800 years.”
Arvind’s jaw tightened. “History isn’t just about what we uncover. It’s also about what we respect.”
Before Rhea could respond, the door creaked open. Professor Gopal Iyer entered, folding his dripping umbrella with theatrical flourish. His kurta was damp, his spectacles fogged, but his eyes sparkled with expectation.
“Well,” he said, “I heard you found something significant. Let’s see it.”
Rhea hesitated. “It’s a personal letter. Not a treatise. But… it changes things.”
Iyer read it in silence, lips moving slightly. When he finished, he leaned back, almost triumphant. “This is gold. Love in the shadow of collapse? Guilt layered over monastic silence? We publish it. We lead with it. The press will love it.”
Arvind stepped forward, voice like steel. “You knew. You sent her here not to digitize—but to dig out this.”
Iyer didn’t flinch. “History needs a story, Arvind. People don’t read about dates and doctrines. They read about hearts that broke and stayed beating.”
“And if that heart never wanted to be heard?” Arvind shot back.
Rhea interrupted softly, “This isn’t just about Ayu. It’s about what we choose to remember. And how.”
Silence followed. Even the rain outside seemed to pause.
Later that night, Rhea sat with Meera in the school’s tiny courtyard. She spoke quietly, more to herself than anyone else.
“Is it betrayal to share something someone buried with such care?”
Meera smiled gently. “Or is it devotion to let it breathe after all these years?”
And in that moment, Rhea decided.
The next morning, she uploaded an anonymized version of Ayu’s letter to the UNESCO archive, stripped of names, but faithful to emotion. The final paragraph she left untranslated—offered only in original script, a silent echo of the past for those who could read between lines.
When she returned to the archive, Arvind was waiting. He didn’t speak. Instead, he handed her a bundle of pressed leaves tied with string.
“Herbal notes,” he said. “Devika’s. My grandfather preserved them. Quietly.”
Rhea took them, stunned.
“And now?” she asked.
He met her gaze. “Now… we begin again.”
And for the first time, there was no past between them.
Only possibility.
8
The sun cast long shadows over the Nalanda ruins as the final day of the digitization project drew near. A quiet reverence filled the air, as if the ancient stones themselves knew that something momentous had occurred. Aditi stood at the edge of the excavated hall, the golden light bathing her profile in warmth. In her hands, she held the translated letter they had discovered—the 12th-century testament of love, devotion, and rebellion that had brought her and Dev together. The weight of history pressed upon her, but it was not a burden. It was a responsibility—and a gift.
Dev joined her in silence, slipping his hand gently into hers. For a long time, neither spoke. The rustle of leaves and the distant chant from a monastery formed the soundtrack of their stillness. Then Aditi turned toward him, her eyes reflecting gratitude and awe. “We’ve rewritten a piece of history, Dev. And we’ve done it with care.”
He nodded. “And we’ve honored it. That’s what matters most.”
The night before, they had decided to submit the letter for publication, along with a scholarly paper that placed it in the context of Nalanda’s final days. But they had also chosen to omit certain personal details of the monk and the courtesan—details that were deeply intimate and perhaps best left with the ruins themselves. It was not a concealment, but a form of respect. Some stories deserved to whisper forever between bricks, not be shouted in books.
At the farewell gathering, Aditi was approached by a senior professor from Delhi who praised her work and offered her a prestigious position in the capital. She glanced at Dev across the courtyard, who was deep in conversation with a group of local students. Her heart ached with the decision she knew was coming.
Later that night, under the same banyan tree where they had first argued over preservation methods, she told him. “It’s a dream job,” she said, “but it means leaving Nalanda. And you.”
Dev looked into her eyes for a long time, then smiled gently. “You have to go, Aditi. That’s what Nalanda was always about—carrying knowledge forward, not just keeping it here. And I’ll be here, continuing what we started.”
Tears pricked her eyes, but she smiled through them. “Then maybe Nalanda’s not a place. Maybe it’s a promise.”
In the months that followed, Aditi moved to Delhi, but her bond with Dev only deepened. Their paper was published to acclaim. Universities across the globe reached out to digitize their own archives, inspired by the Nalanda model. Aditi returned often, each time greeted not just as a scholar but as a guardian of memory.
And the letter—the ancient, trembling scroll that once whispered secrets between lovers—was placed in a climate-controlled case at the Nalanda museum. Its final lines inscribed on a plaque read:
“Even if time erases our names, may it never erase our truth.”
As visitors filed past, reading the translated lines, none knew the full story behind them. But Dev and Aditi did. And that, they believed, was enough.
___
