Kamal Prasad Mishra
Chapter 1: The Ride Begins
The night air in Chandni Chowk clung to Amal like a memory he couldn’t shake. August’s monsoon rains had dried, leaving behind a warmth soaked in the scent of old spices, frying oil, and time. It was past midnight, yet the city didn’t sleep — it simply sighed in quieter breaths. The streets were damp with leftover life: a chaiwala still pouring from his kettle like it was a sacred act, a woman arranging wilted marigolds on a cart, and a cow that blinked slowly as if it knew secrets older than the stone beneath its hooves. Amal walked aimlessly, one hand brushing against the wall of a centuries-old haveli, the other gripping a nearly empty backpack that held little more than a water bottle, his father’s secondhand wristwatch, and an unopened sketchbook. He was leaving tomorrow. Bangalore, engineering, a scholarship that had become the family’s badge of hope. But every step he took tonight felt like a postponement, a rebellion whispered rather than screamed. Then, at the mouth of a narrow gali lit by a single flickering bulb, he saw it — the rickshaw. Wooden, old-fashioned, its canopy stitched from jute and faded red velvet. And the man pulling it stood with his back turned, long white kurta, hunched shoulders, holding the handlebars like they were extensions of his bones. Before Amal could open his mouth, the man turned around. His eyes glowed — not with menace, but with something unknowable, like fireflies had nested behind his pupils. “Chaliye?” he asked softly. It wasn’t a question. It was an invitation. Amal nodded.
The rickshaw moved soundlessly at first, like memory. The moment Amal sat down, the world outside began to blur — not in speed, but in feeling. The lanes they passed through weren’t unfamiliar, yet they seemed painted from older versions of the city. The sky above wasn’t black but a deep indigo stitched with unseen constellations. Walls breathed. Doors hummed. Baba Rehmat — the name Amal hadn’t heard but somehow knew — pedaled with slow grace, his shoulders swaying rhythmically. The jingling of bells tied near the front wheel sounded too precise to be ordinary. As they turned into a lane Amal knew led nowhere, he leaned forward and asked, “Kahan ja rahe hain?” Baba didn’t turn. “Wahin, jahan se waapas kabhi koi nahi aata poore ka poora.” His voice carried the timbre of someone who had spoken to rivers, listened to books before they were written. The rickshaw turned again, and Amal gasped. They had entered a street he had not seen since he was a child — a lane lined with broken steps, where his grandmother once lived, where he flew kites and heard bedtime stories scented with rosewater and ghee. But how could they be here? That house was demolished years ago. “Memories are more permanent than walls,” Baba said, as if reading his mind. Amal looked out and saw a younger version of himself — barefoot, laughing, running with a red kite. The rickshaw kept moving, slowly, like time was being peeled back rather than passed through. A dog barked in the distance, but it sounded like it was echoing from a decade ago. Amal didn’t feel afraid. He felt…remembered.
They passed under an archway that hadn’t existed moments ago, carved with motifs of stars and lotuses, and the air shifted. Chandni Chowk no longer smelled like Delhi; it smelled like his Dadi’s kitchen. The lanterns hanging from the balconies now burned with a flame that made no smoke and no heat. Baba finally spoke again, his voice floating backward like a prayer caught in reverse wind. “Har kisi ki ek aakhri sawari hoti hai — jis mein wo sirf khud hota hai, aur uske faisle.” Amal wanted to ask more, but his voice had curled into silence. Ahead, the rickshaw’s path split — one lane bathed in golden twilight, another cloaked in blue mist. The ride was just beginning, and already the world he knew was loosening its grip. And for the first time in days, Amal loosened his grip too — on the backpack, the sketchbook, the fear. He closed his eyes, leaned back, and listened to the wheels roll over the stones of memory, unsure whether the ride would take him forward or inward — but sensing, deeply, that it would take him home.
Chapter 2: The Lane of Kites
The rickshaw slowed without warning, its wheels whispering over cobblestones that looked like they’d been painted with sun instead of carved by time. The shadows shifted as though the street lamps had turned into miniature suns, glowing not with electricity but nostalgia. Amal opened his eyes to the sight of a rooftop—his rooftop—not as it was today, cluttered with satellite dishes and drying clothes, but as it had been over a decade ago: open, wide, filled with light and voices. He was no longer seated in the rickshaw. Somehow, without rising or moving, he now stood on that very rooftop, the rickshaw and Baba Rehmat nowhere in sight. The air was dappled with kite strings and sunlight, and laughter rang out like bells over a temple courtyard. He looked down and realized he was barefoot again, wearing a thin cotton kurta a few sizes too large, the same one Dadi used to insist he wear on festivals. A gust of wind teased his hair, and a red kite fluttered past his ear, the same kite he had named Sheru when he was eight. He turned—and there she was. His grandmother, Dadi, sitting on the charpai with a brass bowl of aam papad, humming the tune of Vaishnav Jan To. The city had melted away. In its place, only memory remained — breathing, fragrant, and alive.
She looked at him—not with surprise but with recognition. “Aagaye, Amal? Patang udaayenge?” Her voice was not the one from videos or faded phone recordings; it was full and warm, like clay baking in sun. Amal felt tears press behind his eyes, but in this place, emotion felt too large to be named. Dadi handed him the kite spool—orange silk thread wrapped tight around a wooden charkhi. The breeze pulled, almost impatiently. He stepped forward and felt that old thrill in his chest, the one that had long been buried beneath years of tuition classes, exam anxiety, and quiet loneliness. He threw Sheru into the sky. The kite caught the wind instantly, soaring up as if it had been waiting all these years. Around him, the rooftop became animated with echo-figures—other children, long-gone cousins, neighborhood friends—all distant yet familiar, like pages from a dream. He flew the kite in silence, and Dadi watched him, her silver hair dancing in the wind. Then she whispered, not loudly, but deeply, as if her words were meant for the bones: “Aasman unhi ka hota hai, jo darti ko chhodna jaante hain, beta.” Her words curved through the air, echoing not just in his ears, but across his soul. He blinked—and the kite string snapped.
The sky above, which had been bright and endless, shivered like glass. The kite darted away, tumbling through the wind like a falling memory. Amal chased it—through narrow stone corridors, through a wooden door that hadn’t existed moments ago, through a small arched alleyway that opened into another version of the rooftop. But this one was abandoned. Dry leaves rustled across it. No kites flew here. The charpai was gone, the walls chipped, and the bowl of aam papad lay shattered near the corner. This rooftop smelled not of ghee but of rust and forgotten time. Amal stood still. Something in him ached—not in the way of grief, but recognition. A pain you don’t fight, because you know it belongs to you. Then came the creak of wheels—the rickshaw—returning through thin air, Baba Rehmat now sitting on it instead of driving, gesturing to Amal with a slight nod. “Dard bhi yaadon ka ek rang hota hai,” he said, as if the air itself had spoken. Amal climbed back onto the rickshaw, no questions asked. The red kite floated far away into the dusk like a vanishing future or a memory fulfilled. He did not cry. But something opened in him, and the wind entered like a breath after too many years of holding it in.
As the rickshaw turned from the rooftop and descended into a different lane, Amal clutched the orange charkhi still somehow in his hand, its silk thread frayed but glowing. The buildings around them shifted shape, not dramatically, but subtly—signboards grew older, shopfronts younger, bricks flickered between restoration and ruin. A pigeon cooed above with a sound that seemed to echo from two different centuries at once. Amal knew now that this ride was not bound by geography or physics but by the architecture of his own heart. The stops were not destinations; they were decisions, unmade or misunderstood. Dadi’s rooftop was not just a memory — it was a lesson veiled as a sky. That joy, that forgotten sense of flight, had not died. It had only waited — like an unopened sketchbook, or a song paused mid-line. Baba Rehmat did not speak again. He only rang the bell on the rickshaw once — trrring! — and it sounded not like metal, but like a voice calling across lifetimes. Amal closed his eyes once more as the wheels turned, knowing now that every ride forward would take him deeper inward. And somewhere, in a lane the world no longer remembered, the sky held space for one more red kite.
Chapter 3: The Dusty Sketchbook
The rickshaw curved once more, silently, as if gliding across pages rather than pavement. The air around Amal had grown stiller, heavier, tinged with the scent of chalk dust and old ink. Something familiar pressed against his memory—an itch in his fingers, a faint cramp in his wrist. Baba Rehmat pedaled slowly down a narrow lane that shimmered with strange light, and Amal saw it ahead: the gate of his old school. But it wasn’t just the building he remembered—it was exactly as it had been on that one peculiar Thursday five years ago, when he had forgotten his math homework and stumbled instead into the art room during lunch. The paint-chipped corridors, the cracked terracotta pots outside the principal’s office, the notice board still fluttering with yellowed contest flyers—everything was intact, unchanged by time. The rickshaw rolled to a stop just outside Room 12A. Amal dismounted hesitantly, his feet crunching on sand that hadn’t been there moments before. The door was ajar. Inside, voices echoed like wind through a seashell, words bouncing back and forth through memory. And there, sitting at a table with graphite-stained hands and wide eyes, was a younger Amal — no more than twelve — sketching furiously into a brown-paper notebook, completely absorbed.
He watched himself draw. A surreal scene: a bird-headed boy riding a lion through clouds shaped like fish, surrounded by broken clocks and floating eyes. Lines leapt off the page with reckless freedom, undeterred by the constraints of symmetry or logic. Behind the younger Amal, a familiar figure loomed — Mr. Sahay, the stern math teacher with a penchant for humiliation. “What is this nonsense?” he barked, grabbing the sketchbook. The boy flinched. Amal flinched too. He remembered the burn of shame as the drawings were ridiculed in front of the entire class, dismissed as “useless fantasies.” He remembered retreating into silence that day and packing the sketchbook away for good. But now, from the hallway of this half-dream, Amal could see something he hadn’t noticed back then: his younger self’s eyes were not afraid. They were lit with a quiet fire, a defiance that had not yet been extinguished. When Mr. Sahay stormed out, tearing the page in half, the boy didn’t cry. Instead, he reached into his bag and began drawing again — the same scene, reimagined, even more vibrant. Amal felt something stir inside him, an ache and an admiration — for the boy he used to be and the courage he hadn’t realized he once possessed.
Suddenly, the art room darkened, the scene flickered like an old projector reel, and the walls bled into the rickshaw once again. Amal sat down slowly, dazed, the torn page now inexplicably resting in his lap. The pencil lines shimmered faintly, as if drawn in moonlight. “Tumhara sach to kabhi gaya hi nahi,” Baba Rehmat said softly, not looking back. “Usne bas chup rehna seekh liya.” The rickshaw moved again, this time through an alley that smelled of rain on old textbooks. Amal closed his eyes, the sketch pressed against his chest like a forgotten letter. He remembered now how, after that day, he had hidden his drawings behind math worksheets, doodled in margins instead of canvases, and convinced himself that being practical was more noble than being passionate. But it hadn’t been nobility. It had been fear. Fear of judgment, of mediocrity, of disappointing those who had never learned to dream beyond survival. And now, in the stillness of this journey, with only the creaking of the rickshaw and the rustling of paper as his companions, Amal felt the weight of that silence crack. Not with guilt—but with understanding. That version of himself — the wild-drawing, wonder-filled version — had not died. He had only stepped back, waiting for the door to be unlocked.
The rickshaw emerged into another street, empty but lined with thousands of blank canvases — hung like drying clothes, waving gently in a wind that smelled like turpentine and fresh hope. Baba stopped without being asked. “Aakhir har sawari ka ek manzil hota hai. Magar kuch raaste sirf andar se dikhte hain.” Amal stepped down. His hand trembled slightly, but he reached into his backpack and pulled out the sketchbook he’d carried for years but never filled. He flipped to the first page — blank, expectant. Then he gently placed the torn childhood drawing inside it like a sacred offering. A breeze passed. One of the canvases ahead fluttered wildly. Amal picked up the pencil Baba offered him without a word. It felt light and eternal. And in that moment, under a sky tinged with impossible colors, surrounded by the ghosts of every dream he’d ever buried, Amal took the first stroke — not just across paper, but across the future. The rickshaw waited in the background, patient, knowing this ride was not over yet — only deepening.
Chapter 4: The Market of Echoes
The air shifted again — gently at first, like silk brushing across skin, then more insistently, with a scent that wrapped itself around Amal like an old shawl: rosewater, brass polish, and wet earth after the first monsoon rain. Baba Rehmat didn’t ring his bell this time. The rickshaw simply turned a corner Amal didn’t recognize, and the world folded open like a page from a forgotten book. Gone were the honking scooters, the tangled wires, and neon shop signs. In their place rose the Delhi of stories, not memory — a wide cobbled bazaar glowing gold under oil lamps, canopies of colored silk strung from rooftop to rooftop, and narrow alleyways lined with traders hawking spices, perfumes, ink pots, and parchment scrolls. Yet nothing was loud. The market hummed, but not in sound — in resonance. It breathed. As the rickshaw creaked forward, people turned to look at Amal: men in jamas and sherwanis with calligrapher’s fingers, women in odhnis trailing patterns of the sky, children chasing shadows that flitted up walls like painted birds. Some faces seemed oddly familiar. One seller of miniature paintings looked up from his stall and smiled. “Raghubir ka pota?” he asked gently. “Bilkul usi ki aankhein hain.” Amal stared, mouth dry. Raghubir — his great-grandfather — a name only mentioned in whispers, a man who’d once painted for the Mughal court but died unknown, unrecognized, his art lost to time. “Kaise…?” Amal began, but the rickshaw kept rolling, and time no longer cared for questions.
They entered a courtyard where the walls bore faded murals — figures of gods and humans, beasts and birds, tangled together in celestial dance. Amal stepped off the rickshaw instinctively, drawn toward a crumbling arch where a young man stood, palette in hand, painting with strokes that moved like prayer. He looked like Amal. Not just similar — eerily, impossibly identical, except for the faint ink marks trailing up his forearms like vines. “He remembers,” Baba Rehmat murmured, not as explanation but as truth. The man turned to Amal, eyes filled with a recognition too deep to be surprise. He dipped his brush in a color Amal couldn’t name — it shimmered somewhere between ochre and memory — and gestured for him to come closer. Amal watched as he painted on the stone wall: scenes of a village, a river, a boy flying a kite, a grandmother at a window. They were his memories — not reimagined, but perfectly preserved, as though this man had been watching Amal’s entire life from the shadows of stone. “This place,” Baba whispered, “does not store what was. It stores what mattered.” Amal touched the wall. The paint was still wet. “But how is this here?” he asked. The man who looked like him smiled. “Because you are.” And with that, he stepped back and began to vanish — not dissolve, but dissolve into the wall, like the memory of a dream slipping into bone. Only the brush remained on the ground, warm to the touch.
The rickshaw bell chimed again, deeper this time, like a gong from inside a temple no one had entered in generations. As Amal returned to his seat, a wind rose through the market — not loud, but wordless, carrying sighs and half-uttered names. Faces blurred. Lights flickered. And yet, in that moment, Amal felt not fear, but anchoring. As if something inside him had clicked into place — an echo finally answered. He looked down and found that his fingers were stained with the same vine-like ink marks as the man from the mural, as though art itself had chosen to remember him through bloodline. “So it wasn’t just imagination,” Amal whispered. “It was inheritance.” Baba said nothing. But the air nodded. Around them, the market began to fade — not vanish, but retreat gently, folding into itself like a map being rolled up by time’s own hand. The murals disappeared, the courtyards dissolved into shadows, and the bazaar was once again just a lane. But Amal carried it now — not as myth, but as marrow. The brush he’d picked up now rested in his lap, its bristles dipped in color that didn’t exist in the real world. Yet somehow, he knew it would write the truth anyway.
As they emerged back into the twilight streets, Amal no longer saw the rickshaw as a vehicle. It was a vessel — a memory ferry, a truth bearer, a time machine bound not to logic, but to longing. He clutched the brush, his fingers pulsing faintly with warmth. Around them, Old Delhi seemed to breathe slower, as though recognizing what had been remembered. The real magic wasn’t that he had seen his ancestors — it was that they had seen him, still carrying the thread of something ancient and unfinished. Amal leaned back in his seat, and Baba Rehmat offered him a rare glance, his glowing eyes softer now. “Aage ka raasta yaadon ka nahi, faislon ka hai,” he said. “Taiyar ho?” Amal didn’t reply. Instead, he opened his sketchbook, still blank but for that one torn childhood drawing. And then, using the brush, he made a single stroke — one line, curving upward like a breath taken after years. The street ahead branched again — one road wrapped in darkness, the other in impossible color. The rickshaw rolled forward, and Amal, for the first time, didn’t look back.
Chapter 5: The Theatre That Never Was
The rickshaw veered left into a cul-de-sac bathed in dim, amber glow, its entrance arched like a theatre proscenium. The air smelled faintly of greasepaint, old curtains, and jasmine garlands dried on makeup mirrors. Amal squinted—there was no road now, just velvet. Beneath the rickshaw’s wheels stretched a long maroon carpet lined with flickering lanterns that hovered just above the ground. As they moved forward, shadows leaned in from the sides — elongated silhouettes of clapping hands, masks both tragic and comic, pages with dialogues scribbled in the margins. Ahead stood a grand, half-ruined theatre, floating on silence, its columns cracked, its name missing from the signboard, as though it had never officially existed. But Amal knew this place. Not from photographs or stories — but from inside himself. It was the school auditorium, reimagined and expanded, where auditions for a play called Dhoop ke Tukde had been held in Class XI. Tanya Kapoor had begged him to try out for the lead role. She had even handed him the script, eyes blazing with belief. But he hadn’t gone. That day, he’d told her he had a science practical. The real reason: fear. Of being seen. Of failing.
Now, the stage lights flared to life before him. Baba Rehmat nodded silently toward the theatre, and Amal stepped off the rickshaw, his legs suddenly heavy, like they were carrying two versions of himself at once. Inside, the seats were full — but not with people. Each row held his unsaid words, his unopened letters, his unread poems. The audience was made of possibilities. On stage, the set was already dressed: a courtyard bathed in golden light, a painted tree, a bench where two characters were meant to fall in love. Amal watched as the play began without him. Tanya walked onto the stage, radiant in a simple white kurta, her presence magnetic, voice resonant. She turned, speaking lines she was never meant to say alone: “And what is love, if not the waiting that never ends?” She paused, looked beyond the audience, and locked eyes with Amal in the wings. Her gaze did not accuse, but it held a quiet ache — not for what was, but what could have been. And then, to his astonishment, she broke the fourth wall. “Why didn’t you come, Amal?” she asked — not in anger, but in mournful curiosity, as if she too had waited all these years in this unreal theatre, performing an unfinished scene.
Amal stepped onto the stage, trembling. The audience — his silences — leaned forward. Tanya handed him the missing script. But when he opened it, the pages were blank. “You never wrote it,” she whispered. “So we never got to act it.” A hush fell. Then suddenly, the entire stage bent — not physically, but atmospherically — like gravity had become emotion. Props faded. The tree peeled its painted bark to reveal real branches. The bench cracked open, revealing hundreds of folded paper swans — her signature origami. Tanya faded too, slowly, becoming smoke, dissolving into the very role she had once hoped he’d join her in creating. Amal stood alone. All that remained was a paper swan floating down into his hand. He held it like a relic. The theatre walls crumbled without noise, and the lights dimmed with the gentleness of an exhale. He whispered her name once, and it seemed the walls echoed it not as memory, but as regret laced with affection. He understood now — some choices aren’t wrong, only incomplete. And some people aren’t meant to stay, but to awaken.
As he exited through the silent auditorium door, the rickshaw was waiting. The paper swan sat in his lap like a companion. Baba Rehmat glanced at him and said nothing, as if he too respected the sanctity of this moment. The silence between them was the quiet of acceptance — not of surrender, but of grace. As they rolled back into the labyrinthine lanes of Old Delhi, Amal realized something profound: that life wasn’t just made of decisions taken, but of echoes left behind by the ones we couldn’t. The theatre that never was had not vanished; it had finally taken a bow. Amal pressed the swan into his sketchbook beside the mural sketch and the brushstroke, each page now a testament not to mastery, but to memory. Somewhere above, a spotlight flickered once before dying. The city folded back into itself, and the ride continued — slower now, deeper, towards what waited next in the darkened wings of his soul.
Chapter 6: The Clock That Ran Backwards
The rickshaw turned again, this time onto a lane lined with clocks. Not shops — clocks. Dozens upon dozens of wall clocks hung from exposed brick, grandfather clocks leaning against crumbling facades, wristwatches suspended midair as if stitched to the very fog. And they all ticked — not forward, but backward. The ticking filled the air like a spell being spoken in reverse. Amal stared as they passed beneath a stone archway engraved with the word “Samaygriha,” a word he did not recognize, but somehow understood to mean House of Time. The rickshaw rolled into a courtyard glowing with golden dusk, though he knew night had already fallen in the real world. At the center of the courtyard stood a massive sundial, casting no shadow. And there, sitting cross-legged before it, was a boy — maybe fourteen, dressed in an old wool blazer, clutching a sheaf of papers. His hair was neatly parted. His eyes were narrowed, fixed on the strokes of a pen he held awkwardly in one hand. Amal gasped. It was his father.
But this was not the man Amal had grown up with — not the rigid, rule-bound government clerk who believed in stable jobs, quiet dinners, and responsibilities over rebellion. This boy was unsure. There was a restlessness in his fingers, the way he doodled between math problems with flowing script — calligraphy — not words, but ornate curves and swirls that danced off the page. Behind him, a harsh voice barked, “Raghav! Time waste karna band karo. Yeh likhne se naukri nahi milti.” The voice belonged to Amal’s grandfather — a man Amal had only seen in black-and-white photographs, always in starched shirts, always unsmiling. The boy Raghav froze, then silently slipped the calligraphy into his bag, covering it with an exam guide. The adult voice echoed: “Zindagi ek ghadi hai — waqt barbaad karoge, toh sirf pachtawa milega.” The clocks around the courtyard shuddered. One by one, they began to rewind rapidly — calendar pages tearing backward, trees shedding leaves that floated up instead of down. Amal looked around in disorientation, yet something inside him stilled. His father had once been… like him.
A younger Amal now stood beside the boy Raghav, invisible, watching. Raghav opened a drawer under the sundial and pulled out a rolled parchment. He unrolled it to reveal a long-forgotten dream: a page filled with intricate Devnagari script in gold and indigo, drawn not for anyone else, but for himself. The word at the center was “Swarajya” — not in a political sense, but personal: the right to self-rule. Amal’s breath caught. His father had wanted to become a master calligrapher. But when had the ink dried in his life? When had the pen become a ledger, the letters become resignation letters? Amal now understood why his father never spoke of his own youth — not because he forgot, but because remembering hurt. In that courtyard, a clock in the shape of a heart cracked open, gears spilling across the floor. The boy Raghav gently picked up a gear, turned it in his palm, and closed his eyes. Around him, all the clocks stopped — and the world stood still. Amal reached forward, almost instinctively, and placed a hand on the boy’s shoulder. For a moment, time did not matter. Only memory did.
The rickshaw’s bell rang again — softer this time, like a lullaby. The clocks resumed their ticking, but now forward, as though acknowledging that what was lost had been touched, if only for a moment. Amal climbed back in, heart full, thoughts echoing. He held in his lap the calligraphy scroll that had somehow traveled with him — Raghav’s lost page of “Swarajya.” Baba Rehmat, without turning, spoke for the first time in what felt like hours. “Baap bhi kabhi beta hota hai. Aur har beta kabhi apne baap se bhi zyada khwabon se bhara hota hai.” Amal looked out at the retreating lane, no longer with judgment but with reverence. His father’s silence was no longer a wall, but a wound — one Amal now honored. The sketchbook in his hand felt heavier now, fuller. Its pages did not yet contain drawings — but they contained inheritance. Not just of blood, but of sacrifice, longing, and the ache of what might have been. The rickshaw rolled on. And Amal, watching the world unravel into new realms ahead, whispered to himself: “Maybe it’s my turn now — to not let the ink dry.”
Chapter 7: The Street of Whispers
The rickshaw turned again, slower now, not like a vehicle but like a prayer entering the mouth of silence. The streets around them thinned until even the night seemed to hold its breath. Baba Rehmat’s face remained turned forward, his glowing eyes casting twin halos on the fog ahead. Amal felt it immediately — this lane was different. It was narrower than any before, carved out of shadow rather than stone. No lights lined its walls. No shopfronts flickered. No sky peeked through. And yet, it pulsed — softly, like a heartbeat. The walls rose high on either side, ancient and smooth like river-worn marble, and from within them came the first whispers. Faint at first — like cloth brushing skin — then words, phrases, scattered, incomplete. “You’re not good enough,” “What if you fail?” “They’ll laugh,” “Why don’t you speak?” “Not worth it.” Amal looked around, startled. The whispers weren’t from the world. They were from him. His own voice, aged and layered, playing back every sentence he had thought but never dared to say aloud. He tried to ask Baba something, but his throat tightened. This street had rules. You couldn’t speak — only listen.
As the rickshaw moved deeper, the whispers intensified. Now they weren’t just doubts — they were versions of Amal. One sketched obsessively and tore each page. One stood on stage and forgot his lines. One wore his father’s uniform and looked lost behind a government desk. They walked beside the rickshaw, ghost-like but solid, eyes pleading. Amal tried to turn away, but the lane wouldn’t let him. This was not punishment — it was reckoning. The walls began to hum, now forming sentences he never spoke aloud — not to friends, not to Tanya, not even to himself. “I wish someone told me it was okay to be scared.” “I miss Ma’s songs at night.” “I’m afraid I’ll become like him.” “I want to draw, even if no one claps.” Amal’s vision blurred. These weren’t accusations. They were confessions — sacred and personal. A part of him felt raw, peeled back. But another part — the one he usually kept quiet — sat upright for the first time in years. The whispers weren’t taunting. They were waiting.
The rickshaw came to a gentle stop. Ahead lay a mirror, tall as the sky, yet completely fogged. Baba Rehmat stepped down and placed a single diya at its base. Amal followed, his heart thudding not in fear, but in awakening. As he stood before the mirror, it slowly began to clear. What he saw wasn’t one version of himself — but many. A kaleidoscope of potential. The boy with the red kite. The teenager sketching in margins. The adult silenced by expectation. The friend who never said what he felt. The artist. The coward. The wanderer. All looked at him. Not in blame — but in invitation. “Speak,” whispered Baba. “Speak for the first time where only truth listens.” Amal inhaled. Then slowly, unsurely, he said aloud: “I am scared.” His voice cracked. But the mirror held it, accepted it. “I want to live by my hands, not just my name.” A pause. “And I don’t know how, but I want to try.” As he spoke, the street grew warmer. The walls stopped whispering. Instead, they began to listen. And in that silence, Amal’s voice — the real one, unfiltered — echoed like music. The mirror glowed faintly, then faded into stardust.
When he returned to the rickshaw, something in him had shifted. He wasn’t lighter — but more complete. The versions of himself didn’t vanish. They simply walked back into him, like memories returning home. Baba said nothing, but there was a new softness in his stillness. The lane behind them sealed itself, as if satisfied. Ahead, a faint chime rang in the darkness — not mechanical, but human, like an anklet dancing. Amal clutched his sketchbook tighter, feeling the pulse of his voice still humming in his fingertips. The ride continued. But now, Amal rode with himself, not away from him. The city slept, unaware that somewhere within its ancient heart, a boy had finally spoken his name to the silence — and been answered with peace.
Chapter 8: The Broken Payal
The wheels rolled gently now, as if the rickshaw were moving not on a street, but across the surface of water. The air shimmered, fragrant with a scent Amal hadn’t smelled in years — jasmine soaked in almond oil. It wrapped around him like an old lullaby, familiar and warm. Ahead, the fog parted to reveal a courtyard bathed in moonlight, where the shadows of neem leaves danced like memory over stone. Baba Rehmat halted without a word. The moment Amal stepped down, the rickshaw disappeared behind him, as if this stop wasn’t a part of the journey — but the destination of something unfinished. The courtyard opened into a small house with pale green doors, one of them hanging slightly loose at the hinge — a sound he remembered vividly from long ago. He walked barefoot past the tulsi plant in a brass pot and pushed open the door. Inside, the world was hushed and still — not abandoned, but waiting. And there, beside a low wooden cot, folded carefully on a white cotton sheet, lay a pair of small silver payals. One of them was broken. Just like that day. Just like the last time he saw her.
His grandmother — Maayi — had died when he was nine, her departure too sudden, too confusing for a boy who still believed stories could protect people. On her last day, she had promised to teach him how to make garlands, how to tell when rice had just started to sing in the pot, how to tie a kite string so it never loosened. But life had taken her away before lessons could be given, before partings could be understood. He remembered the hospital smell, the white curtain, the nurse who wouldn’t look him in the eye. But here — in this space that memory and longing had rebuilt — he heard anklets. Not both. Just one. Soft, rhythmic. And then he saw her. She stepped in from the next room, not young, not old, not ghost, not dream — simply present. Maayi, in her soft yellow cotton sari, a red tikli on her forehead, her smile untouched by time. “Tui ekhono roj eto boro hoye gechis?” she said in her lilting Bengali, then laughed. Amal’s eyes filled, but he didn’t cry. He just fell into her arms, where time stopped. In her hug, he became nine again — and also nineteen. Her hands were small, calloused, and real.
She led him to the woven charpai, made him sit, and placed the broken payal in his hand. “Tui shunechis na tokhon. Eto shobdota toke dakchhilo,” she said. He remembered now — the sound of the payal that had broken on the morning of her heart attack, the one he had ignored while drawing, assuming it was just another trinket falling. He had blamed himself for years — absurdly, silently — as if he could’ve saved her had he run when he heard the sound. “Bachara jeta bujhtey pare na, seta niye dosh niye thakbey keno?” she whispered. “Ami chole gechilam amar shomoye.” She cupped his face. “But tui ekhono ekhane achish, aar eta boro kotha.” Her voice was not scolding. It was cleansing. She pressed the broken payal into his palm and it glowed faintly — not magically, but with meaning. “Shob kotha bola lage na. Kichu bhalobasha oimnei thake — bhanga thekeo boro hoye.” (Not every love needs words. Some grow larger from the brokenness.)
The moonlight dimmed a little, as if knowing this visit had reached its final note. Maayi rose, kissed his forehead, and walked back into the other room — which slowly vanished into soft mist. The house dissolved gently, like a sweet left too long in water. Amal stood alone in the courtyard, now empty, holding the single broken payal — his first talisman of love. The rickshaw reappeared. Baba Rehmat waited, not asking questions. As Amal sat down again, there was something different about him. Not lighter. Not heavier. But whole. He tucked the payal into his sketchbook beside the paper swan, the torn drawing, and the calligraphy scroll — each artifact no longer just memory, but meaning named and honored. The lane behind him vanished. Ahead, new mist gathered. Baba finally turned, his voice no louder than breath: “Pichhle mod par prem tha. Agle mod par tu khud hoga.” Amal closed his eyes. For the first time in his life, his hands were full of fragments — and he no longer feared dropping them. He was learning how to carry them like fire, like prayer, like becoming.
Chapter 9: The Gate of Paper Doors
The city shifted again — not abruptly, but like an inhale that never released. The rickshaw rolled gently now through a passageway lit only by lanterns folded from paper. Their glow was soft, flickering, delicate — and each one bore a hand-written phrase, some in ink, some in charcoal, some just indentations pressed into the fibers. Amal leaned closer to read them: “What if you had stayed?” “What if you had said yes?” “What if you had tried?” The lanterns pulsed with every thought he had buried over the years. Baba Rehmat said nothing, but the silence between them was thick, reverent. The rickshaw finally came to a halt before a strange sight — a massive gate made entirely of paper, dozens of layered sheets, flapping lightly in a wind that didn’t exist. Each sheet bore a scene: a version of Amal’s life that could have been. Amal as an engineer. Amal as a teacher. Amal married to Tanya. Amal sitting behind a desk in a Delhi office, half-smiling. Amal alone, drawing in a Himalayan hut. Amal standing before a class of art students. Amal failing. Amal thriving. A hundred selves, each painted in detail, each silently waiting.
He stepped off the rickshaw and approached the gate. The paper rustled. One of the sheets fluttered loose and landed at his feet. It showed a version of him who had never taken this ride — who had ignored the old rickshaw-wallah, chosen the cab to the train station, and left for college with a packed bag and a folded soul. That version of him was already asleep in a hostel bunk, dreaming of nothing. Amal picked up the page, heart aching, and tucked it into his sketchbook. Not to mourn — but to remember. He walked along the gate, each panel brushing against his shoulders like veils made of choices. Then he found it — a narrow opening, not clearly marked, but quietly present. Through it, he saw a path lined with blank canvases and pages fluttering on strings. No scenes, no scripts — just possibility. A voice rose behind him, gentle but firm. “Kya tu likhega apni kismat, ya bas kisi aur ki likhi padhega?” It was Baba Rehmat, speaking not as a guide now, but as something older — a witness, perhaps, to every soul that had stood here before and turned back.
Amal turned toward him, emotions rising like a storm held in skin. “What happens if I go through?” he asked. Baba didn’t answer. Instead, he walked to the gate, touched one of the paper doors, and it melted into light. “You begin,” he said. “Not again — but for real this time.” Amal stood frozen. He looked back down the road they had traveled — the art room, the echoing theatre, the Market of Echoes, the Clock Courtyard, the Street of Whispers, Maayi’s courtyard. So many pieces of him had been handed back. And now he stood whole, but the road ahead asked more. It asked action. Amal clutched his sketchbook. Its pages felt alive. The payal, the brush, the paper swan, the torn drawing, the calligraphy — all nestled together like chapters of a story not yet written. He stepped toward the opening. The wind picked up. One paper door whipped toward him and clung to his chest. It was blank. But in the corner, the faintest ink lines had just begun — from his hand.
He stepped through. The paper didn’t tear — it transformed. Light bathed his vision, not blinding but warming. Ahead was no clear path — only space, vast and open, humming with waiting. The rickshaw did not follow. It remained behind the gate, and Baba Rehmat smiled for the first time — not with his lips, but with his eyes, which flickered like galaxies. “Jahan manzil apni hoti hai, wahan rickshaw nahi chalte,” he whispered. And then, slowly, both rickshaw and rickshaw-wallah faded into ink, swirling gently upward into the lanterns, which now floated free into the sky like fireflies. Amal stood at the threshold of becoming. Alone — and completely accompanied by everything that had made him. He did not look back. Not out of pride, but because his eyes were too full of what lay ahead.
Chapter 10: The Last Ride (And the First Step)
The world beyond the paper gate was neither city nor dream. It was a vast space shaped by intention, shifting with each breath Amal took. There were no roads now — only echoes of footsteps that might be. Canvases hovered in the air like silent witnesses, and every time Amal thought of a possibility, a faint brushstroke appeared in the ether — not drawn by him, but because of him. He walked slowly, sketchbook in hand, now heavier than any bag he had ever carried, not with burden, but with the weight of truth. Each step forward released a memory behind him — not discarded, but planted like a seed. He paused before one blank page suspended midair. It shimmered faintly, waiting. Amal opened the sketchbook, placed it gently below the page, and held his grandmother’s broken payal in his left hand while sketching with the brush in his right. The first lines were uncertain, but bold. A boy holding a red kite. A girl folding paper swans. A man disappearing into a mirror of his younger self. His father’s hands turning into calligraphy. A rickshaw glowing under moonlight, the driver smiling like time itself. A city remembered not through maps, but by love.
As he drew, the wind picked up, not to erase but to carry. Pages fluttered open around him, and from them rose faint music — fragments of lullabies, theatre monologues, whispered confessions, kite-flying songs. The air shimmered with emotion. Amal closed his eyes, breathing deeply. He no longer needed the rickshaw. It had brought him as far as it could — across time, grief, guilt, memory, ancestry, and identity. This journey now required only him. Somewhere behind him, in that other world where the real Delhi still breathed and blinked under yellow lights, the clock on the wall would be inching toward dawn. The train to the college town would be leaving in two hours. His bag would still be packed. His mother would still be sleeping lightly. But Amal was no longer the boy who had walked out of that house hours ago. He had not just traveled through a city — he had walked into himself.
He turned. For a moment, the paper gate behind him shimmered — showing a faint silhouette of Baba Rehmat, rickshaw still, head bowed. Not in farewell, but in blessing. Then, with a final breath, the gate folded into a single sheet of white, which flew upward and vanished like the last page of a story. Amal walked forward until he reached a narrow staircase cut into air itself. Each step rose as he stepped. At the top was a door. Not grand. Just wooden, unpainted, waiting. He touched the knob. Before opening it, he looked down at his sketchbook, now filled with pieces of soul. He smiled. Then, with no fear, he stepped through the door — into a blinding, golden light that felt neither hot nor cold, only beginning. The world did not greet him with applause or revelation. It greeted him with silence — and space. The kind of silence that artists pray for. The kind of space where creation is holy.
Back in the waking world, Amal opened his eyes. He was sitting in the same rickshaw, but this time, outside his home. The sky above was deep blue — just before sunrise. Birds had started to stir in the neem tree. His bag was still where he left it on the porch. Baba Rehmat was gone. No rickshaw remained — just faint wheel marks in the dust, leading to nowhere. Amal stood, breath trembling, heart beating differently now. He walked to the front gate and looked once more at the street — the ordinary street, suddenly magnificent. Then he turned, opened his sketchbook, and drew a single, wide arching line — a horizon, curving upward. It didn’t need a label. It didn’t need a caption. It was not a dream. It was departure. The last ride was over. The first step had begun.
The End.
