Pranab Sinha
Chapter 1
The compartment rattled like an old memory — uneven, persistent, and vaguely nostalgic — as the Doon Express cut its way through the northern plains, carrying Digvijoy Guha through the thick, velvet silence of early morning. He sat by the window in a second-class sleeper, wrapped in his rust-coloured shawl, watching the countryside smear into a painter’s blurred stroke. A flask of lukewarm tea trembled slightly on the steel fold-down tray beside him, untouched since Saharanpur. Above it, tucked into the mesh netting, a book of poetry by Agyeya and a leather-bound diary silently waited to be opened, but Digvijoy had written nothing in weeks. The pen he always carried — a heavy silver Waterman gifted by a former editor who now lived in exile in Toronto — lay deep inside his jhola, weighed down more by meaning than ink. In the opposite berth, an elderly couple slept with peaceful abandon, their heads rhythmically nudging each other like sunflowers seeking light. The woman clutched a thermos in her sleep, as if guarding something precious, and for a moment, Digvijoy envied that kind of devotion — physical, enduring, real. Outside, mustard fields rolled past in undramatic splendour, interrupted by occasional temple spires and neem trees holding silent court over the land. A thin boy with a red sweater and chai kettle walked past, shouting half-heartedly, “Garam chai, garam chai,” but his voice was barely above the train’s hymn. Digvijoy didn’t look up. His gaze was fixed on the brown carton box wedged under his seat — inside which, tightly sealed in a brass urn, were the ashes of his mother. It had taken him six months to act on her last wish. Not because he didn’t want to honour it — but because he didn’t know how to. She had written in a wavering hand on a pale blue inland letter: “If I go before you, take me to Haridwar, but quietly. No priests. No chants. Just you and the river. Let the Ganga take the rest of me.” He had folded that letter over and over until the corners wore thin like his breath. The night she died, he was in Bangalore, covering a bureaucratic corruption scandal that never made it to print. The guilt never left him. It stood now, silently beside him on this journey, wearing her white cotton saree and her scent of boroline and burnt rice.
Haridwar greeted him not with the mystic fanfare he imagined, but with the heavy smells of sweat, milk, smoke, and dust. The station was a mosaic of noises — brass bells from a distant rickshaw, the cries of porters, temple chants playing from a cheap radio, and the odd foreigner clutching Lonely Planet with visible anxiety. Digvijoy stepped off the train with his canvas bag and the carton, his limbs stiff, his mind fogged by fatigue and a strange sense of impending reverence. He took an auto without bargaining to an ashram he’d read about in an obscure blog post — the Ganga Nivritti Ashram, run by a retired railway clerk named Bhola Sharan Das, who had once, it seemed, renounced both the Indian Railways and his wife in the same summer. The auto stopped near Subhash Ghat, beside an old archway choked with bougainvillea. Inside the ashram, a courtyard breathed slowly under a jamun tree, and faded whitewashed rooms lined the square like tired monks in silent retreat. Bhola Das, now a wiry man with cataract eyes and the voice of a retired tabla player, gave Digvijoy the key without asking questions. “Room 7. Morning tea at six. Don’t feed the monkey near the tulsi plant. He bites.” The room was bare — no mirror, no fan, no calendar. Just a khatiya with a red mattress, a bucket, and a brass figurine of Nandi looking up at nothing. The river was just thirty steps away — a narrow ghat with mossy steps, unfrequented, cradled between two shrines whose bells rang out of sync. Digvijoy stood by the edge as the sky began to melt into pink. He saw a man performing Surya namaskar on the opposite side, and a dog sleeping with divine detachment under a trishul. The Ganga here didn’t roar or glitter. It whispered. As if inviting not worship but conversation. He sat on the cold stone step and placed the box beside him. He didn’t cry. He didn’t chant. He just sat. And as the wind lifted the hem of his shawl, he whispered, almost involuntarily, “Ma… I’m here.” The river made no reply. But a leaf floated past at that exact moment, unhurried, as if carrying her acknowledgment.
The following days blurred into each other like ink soaked in water — shapeless yet stained with feeling. Digvijoy would wake before sunrise, bathe in cold water, sip bitter tulsi tea, and walk along the ghats aimlessly, never speaking unless spoken to. He didn’t visit the famous Har Ki Pauri. The crowds repelled him — their phone cameras, their rehearsed devotion, their hurry to wash off sins as if they were stains. Instead, he found refuge near a half-abandoned ghat where a blind man sang Kabir bhajans under a peepal tree. The man, named Lallan, had skin like tree bark and wore a mala of mismatched beads. His voice was gravel wrapped in honey. It was not trained, but it touched something unspoken. Digvijoy didn’t introduce himself. He simply sat on the nearby step every morning and listened. After a week, Lallan handed him a cup of chai without a word. That was their first exchange. Words came later, sparingly. “You write?” Lallan asked once. Digvijoy nodded. “Still?” Lallan tilted his head, smiling. “Not really,” Digvijoy admitted. “Maybe you’re waiting to forget first,” Lallan said, staring at nothing. “Writers need to forget who they are before they remember what they see.” That night, Digvijoy opened his leather diary for the first time. He didn’t write an essay or a reflection. He simply wrote a line: “Water remembers everything. I’m the one who forgot.” Then he fell asleep with the diary open on his chest, a dog curled up near his feet like a living comma between silence and dreams.
On the eleventh day, he walked barefoot at dawn to a shrine where no one prayed. It was built under an ancient banyan, with only a chipped idol of Shiva inside and offerings of dust and forgotten flowers. He carried with him a folded page — a letter he had written but never sent to his daughter, Tuhina, now nineteen, living with her mother in Mumbai. He had tried to be a good father after the divorce, but the road was paved with guilt and silence. The letter was raw, filled with truths too heavy to speak: his regrets, his anger, his apology. He had kept it for over a year. That morning, he placed the letter beneath the idol, touched his forehead to the stone, and walked away without looking back. There was no sign, no epiphany. Just the wind, the ringing of distant bells, and the river that kept flowing, as it always had. Back at the ghat, he sat beside Lallan again. The singer didn’t ask what he had done. Instead, he began a new bhajan — one Digvijoy hadn’t heard before. Its refrain, loosely translated, meant: “I came empty, and I will go empty. The river will carry what I dare not.” Digvijoy closed his eyes and let the song wash over him. For the first time in years, he felt the air move through his chest not as obligation, but as breath. He didn’t need to write it down. The river would remember it for him.
Chapter 2
Digvijoy awoke to a pale orange light seeping through the louvered wooden shutters of Room 7, the air still faintly scented with last night’s incense and the river’s ancient breath. The sounds outside had not yet crescendoed into the chaos he associated with pilgrimage towns — instead, there was a languid rhythm to the waking world: a conch shell from a temple nearby, the braying of a donkey two lanes away, and the quiet swish of a broom across the stone corridor as Bhola Sharan Das swept leaves into slow spirals. Digvijoy sat up slowly, reaching for the flask left outside his door. The tea was bitter and overboiled, but warm — and oddly grounding. He sipped it, watching dust particles dance in the sunbeam that cut across his bed. The brass urn stood on the small table beside his diary, both untouched. He hadn’t yet decided when or how he would let the ashes go. There was something indecent about doing it too soon, as if he were rushing through goodbye. Yet keeping them too long made the silence between them louder. He walked down to the ghat barefoot, the flagstones cool and gritty beneath his soles. A thin mist still hung over the river, and the Ganga flowed like a mother half-awake — unjudging, unbothered by names or offerings. He found himself whispering again: “I’m still here, Ma.” The river didn’t reply, but a mynah bird landed near his foot, pecked once at a flower petal, then flew away — as if to remind him that even small things find closure.
By midday, Haridwar had stirred fully. The lanes buzzed with the cacophony of a hundred small faiths — chants from loudspeakers, the clanging of temple bells, and the hawker calls selling malas, vermilion powder, plastic tridents, and framed gods with neon halos. Devotees moved in swirls, like drifting petals on the surface of belief — some came barefoot with solemn faces, others arrived in noisy tourist groups, clicking selfies in front of temple gates. Digvijoy weaved through them like a ghost — not quite part of this dance, not yet detached either. He ate at a roadside dhaba — two puris, aloo sabzi, and a bottle of warm water — and sat alone in the corner, notebook unopened beside his plate. That’s when he noticed the boy. Maybe twelve years old, with a torn sweater and eyes older than any priest’s. The boy swept the floor after every customer without a word, his thin arms mechanical, his face unreadable. Something in his silence made Digvijoy pause. He gestured for an extra plate, split his puri in half, and offered it. The boy stared at him, expressionless, then accepted it without a word, ate, and returned to sweeping. No thank you. No gratitude. Just survival. Digvijoy thought of his own daughter, Tuhina, at that age — fierce, opinionated, questioning everything. They hadn’t spoken in over two years, since his last visit to Mumbai ended in yet another argument about his absence, his excuses, his inability to say sorry without sounding like a headline. That evening, as dusk softened the edges of buildings, he walked to the far end of the ghat, sat with his pen, and wrote just two words: “I’m trying.”
Night in Haridwar was a theatre of lamps and echoes. The air thickened with ghee, smoke, and jasmine as the famed Ganga Aarti began at Har Ki Pauri. Though he had avoided the crowds until now, something compelled Digvijoy to observe it — not as a participant, but as a witness. He stayed across the river, watching from a quiet bend. Thousands had gathered, faces upturned, palms pressed, some weeping, some recording. Priests stood in synchronized motion, circling massive brass lamps, flames rising like wings. The chants filled the air with vibration — not merely sound, but a texture, a thrum that wrapped itself around the bones. Digvijoy didn’t pray. He simply stood still, his arms crossed, his jaw tight. It was overwhelming, theatrical, yet undeniably powerful — the kind of spectacle that mocked skepticism while feeding it. The river caught the light and tossed it back as shimmering fireflies on its surface. At one moment, he felt the urn in his bag grow unbearably heavy. It was as though the ashes inside — his mother’s, her memories, her last words — were responding to the ritual across the water. But this wasn’t their farewell. Not here, not yet. He turned back before the final bell rang and walked along the quieter alley that led to his ashram. On the way, he passed a beggar sleeping beneath a banyan, covered in a shawl of old newspapers. One of them bore his byline — an article from years ago, yellowing and damp. He stared at it for a long second, then walked away faster, haunted not by anonymity, but by the permanence of what no longer mattered.
That night, as the ashram settled into sleep, Digvijoy lay awake beneath a patch of moonlight streaming through the cracks in the ceiling. He thought of the stories he used to write — stories with fire and bite, exposés that once won awards, shook ministers, and cost him three job offers. But those stories had also hardened him, made him cynical, and over time, exhausted. Somewhere along the line, he had begun to fear softness. The vulnerability of feeling things too deeply. The act of mourning — not just death, but change, silence, the slow erosion of connection. Now here he was, lying beside a brass urn like it was a sleeping child, afraid to let go not because of what he’d lose — but because of what it would reveal in him. He turned to his side, pulled the diary close, and finally uncapped the pen. He didn’t try to compose a travelogue, or a tribute, or a clean narrative arc. He simply wrote in uneven lines across the page: “Grief is not thunder. It is a quiet river that moves through the chest. It wears down the rocks of ego. Slowly. Quietly. Until all that’s left is breath.” He signed it with a dot. No name. Then he closed the book, blew out the lamp, and let the darkness hold him — gently, like water cupped in the palm of the divine.
Chapter 3
The mornings in Haridwar had begun to enter Digvijoy’s body like slow, warm breath — silent, habitual, and strangely reassuring. Each dawn, he followed the same rhythm without consciously choosing it: wake before the light, rinse his face with a brass lota at the courtyard pump, sip on Bhola Das’s over-steeped tulsi tea, and make his way barefoot to the lesser-known ghat by the peepal tree. The place was never crowded — just a handful of locals, a few sadhus wrapped in silence, and the same blind man seated at the base of the tree, singing Kabir bhajans to the river like someone addressing a beloved who’d never left. Digvijoy had first noticed him on his second day, but it wasn’t until the fourth morning that he stopped walking and sat nearby. The man’s voice was untrained but textured — weathered like driftwood, yet resilient. He wore a dhoti, a torn shawl, and a mala of uneven rudraksha beads, and his eyes, though vacant, flicked gently with every note as if tracking the music inside his mind. He sat cross-legged with a small ektara resting on his lap, his fingers dancing on the string with practiced intimacy. No one interrupted him. No one joined. It was not performance; it was presence. Digvijoy found himself returning to that spot every day, sitting on the same step, his journal on his lap but always closed. The singer’s name, he later learned through the ashram caretaker, was Lallan Yadav — a man who had once driven trucks in Bihar until an accident took his sight and left him with nothing but songs.
One morning, as the fog was still clutching the ghats like an old lover, Lallan paused mid-verse, turned slightly toward Digvijoy, and said in a calm, almost amused voice, “Babu, you always listen but never speak. Is your silence heavy or hollow?” The question, thrown without malice, hit Digvijoy like a hand gently placed on an old wound. He smiled, unsure how to answer. “I used to speak too much,” he replied, his voice unused, rough-edged. “Now I’m trying to listen.” Lallan nodded, plucking the ektara string once. “Then you’re in the right place. The river doesn’t care for noise.” They fell into an easy rhythm after that — not conversation, but companionship. Some days they exchanged brief observations: the way the wind shifted, the odd way tourists spoke to monkeys, the news that someone had tried to wash their scooter in the river. Other days, they said nothing at all. Lallan would sing, and Digvijoy would sit still, sometimes writing single lines in his journal, sometimes sketching half-formed thoughts, sometimes just watching the reflection of the tree in the rippling water. It became clear that the bhajans Lallan sang were not rote — they came from some deep well of memory and meaning, each verse carrying layers of anger, joy, longing, and peace. One bhajan in particular repeated itself often, its refrain haunting Digvijoy’s mind: “Mann lago mero yaar fakiri mein…” — My heart finds joy in a life of renunciation. The irony wasn’t lost on him. He had renounced nothing. Not fame, not ego, not guilt. But perhaps that was why he was here — to learn how to begin.
One afternoon, while returning from the market with some incense and postage stamps, Digvijoy found Lallan sitting alone, not singing. He looked stiller than usual, his ektara resting beside him like a sleeping animal. Digvijoy approached cautiously and sat beside him. After a few minutes, Lallan said, “I had a son once. His name was Rajeev. He drowned during the Kosi flood fifteen years ago. They never found the body. Sometimes I think he’s part of this river now. That’s why I sing here. Not for the gods. For him.” Digvijoy felt something inside him loosen — a quiet grief he didn’t know he had permission to share. “My mother died six months ago,” he said, the words coming out more easily than he expected. “I wasn’t there. I was reporting on a story that no one remembers now.” Lallan turned toward him, his blank eyes somehow more aware than sighted ones. “Then you’ve come to the right current,” he said. “This river doesn’t judge. It just carries what we give it.” That evening, Digvijoy didn’t return to the ashram right away. He sat on the ghat long after sunset, listening to the echo of the day’s last bhajan still vibrating in the air. He thought of how grief has no fixed form — how it can be sung, swallowed, scribbled, or silenced — but never really erased. He opened his journal and wrote: “Maybe the river remembers not because it wants to, but because it must. The forgetting belongs to us.”
That night, Digvijoy had a dream unlike any he could remember — not surreal, but clear and grounded. In it, he stood waist-deep in the Ganga, facing the shore, holding his mother’s urn close to his chest. But when he opened it, instead of ashes, thousands of paper letters flew out — each one in his handwriting, addressed to people he had never written to: his daughter, his ex-wife, old friends, a man he wronged with a false story, his editor, and finally, himself. The river caught them gently, unfolding them into water like petals. As he woke, a breeze moved through the cracks in the wooden shutters, carrying the scent of wet clay and burnt camphor. He sat up, heart still beating faster than usual. A kind of clarity settled over him — not about what to do next, but about why he had come. This wasn’t a trip. It was a laying down. A letting go. But not yet. Not today. He reached for his diary and wrote the first page of what would become an unsent letter to Tuhina: “You may never read this. And maybe that’s fine. But I wanted to tell you about a song I heard by the river. It wasn’t mine, but I felt like I had written it. And maybe, in some other life, you had sung it to me.” The ink bled slightly on the paper from the humidity, making the words softer, blurred at the edges — like the memory of a voice you once knew by heart.
Chapter 4
The mornings had begun to blur, as if the river’s soft murmur was loosening the glue that held Digvijoy’s calendar of emotions together. He no longer checked the date or counted the days since his arrival. There was only the light — pale and smoky at dawn, golden and alert by late morning, flickering and weary by evening. On the twelfth morning, something in him stirred before the temple bells. He rose earlier than usual, didn’t wait for Bhola Das’s tea, and walked toward the northern edge of Haridwar, where the city thinned into jungle and silence. The air was colder here, the river darker and deeper. There, under a canopy of banyan roots and stillness, stood a crumbling shrine half-swallowed by nature. The idol inside — an old Shiva, missing part of his trident and his jaw — seemed less like a god and more like a witness. Moss covered his torso. Pigeons nested above. Flowers had long stopped arriving. Digvijoy stepped inside with quiet reverence, carrying a folded page tucked inside his diary. It wasn’t poetry, nor a journal entry. It was a letter — to himself. One he had written years ago but never dared read again. In it were lines like: “You are not your name, nor your bylines. You are the boy who cried when he saw a crow limping. Don’t forget that.” He knelt slowly, the stone floor biting his knees, and placed the letter beneath the idol’s feet. The act wasn’t ritual. It wasn’t release. It was something simpler — like leaving behind a coat that no longer fit. He stayed there for a long time, breathing the mildew and incense, until the light through the broken arch began to move. When he stood, he didn’t look back.
On his way back to the ghat, the streets were still waking. Shopkeepers poured water in front of their stalls. Old women fed cows in silence. A dog chased a crow that refused to fly. Everything was ordinary and luminous. Digvijoy stopped at a tea stall near the bridge. The owner, a cheerful Garhwali man with skin like worn leather, poured him tea in a steel glass and said, “You look lighter today, babu.” It startled him. “Lighter?” he asked. “Yes,” the man smiled. “As if you left something behind that was holding you down.” Digvijoy didn’t answer. He just smiled faintly, sipped the sweet tea, and stared into the steam. Back at the ghat, Lallan was singing again. The same bhajan from the day before — “Jheeni jheeni beeni chadariya…” — Kabir’s ode to the body as a finely woven cloth, fragile and temporary. But today, it sounded different. Not sadder, not happier — just more complete. Lallan finished the verse, rested his ektara, and said, “You let go, didn’t you?” Digvijoy met his blind gaze with surprise. “How do you know?” Lallan smiled. “I don’t need eyes to see what the river already knows.” Then he reached into a cloth bag and handed Digvijoy a stone. Small, smooth, warm from the sun. “Keep it. For when the weight comes back.” Digvijoy closed his fingers around it, feeling its solid, wordless truth. He nodded. No thanks. Just silence.
That evening, a soft rain fell. It wasn’t enough to soak the earth, only to perfume it. Digvijoy stood by the ghat with his shawl draped over one shoulder, watching the river swallow the drops without complaint. The city lights shimmered across the water like nervous fireflies. Somewhere, a conch blew, and temple bells rang in erratic chorus. But closer to him, a couple sat holding hands in quiet prayer, their foreheads pressed together — not begging, not bargaining, just being. He turned away and walked slowly along the bank, each step softer than the last. For the first time, he noticed a tree near the bend whose bark had been carved with dozens of names, dates, initials inside hearts — tiny memorials of love, longing, and time. He paused there, took out his pen, and wrote a small symbol — a spiral. No names. No message. Just a curl of ink, like a river circling back on itself. As he stepped away, a sudden gust of wind blew through the peepal branches above, dropping a single leaf onto his shoulder. He picked it up, placed it in his journal, and walked on — as if the moment had asked for nothing more than presence.
Later that night, under the flickering yellow bulb of Room 7, Digvijoy lit the incense he had bought in the market — vetiver, his mother’s favourite — and opened his diary again. He didn’t write about rituals or rivers or grief. He wrote about a street boy sweeping crumbs into a corner, about a blind man who saw too much, about a temple that forgot how to expect offerings. He wrote about weight — how it shifts, hides, returns, and sometimes vanishes without ceremony. At the bottom of the page, he scrawled: “I’m not healed. But I’m hollowed. And maybe that’s the beginning.” The smoke curled up toward the ceiling and disappeared. He watched it until it faded. Then he placed the stone on his bedside table, blew out the lamp, and let the darkness do what it does best — hold everything without asking for a name.
Chapter 5: Conversations with Ghosts
Sleep, once a reluctant guest, now came to Digvijoy in slow, deep waves — not with dreams of fire or collapse as before, but with quiet laps of soundless water and the sensation of being carried. He had begun walking farther each morning, past the outer ghats where the pilgrims gave way to silence and stray cows. One morning, fog still hanging low like an unfinished thought, he wandered into a cremation ghat. It was not the grand, ceremonial site visited by devotees, but a quieter place, used by locals without means or fuss. The air here was filled with smoke not from incense, but from burning sandalwood and wet cloth. A boy no older than sixteen was lighting a pyre with a cracked torch. The silence wasn’t eerie — it was reverent, the kind that absorbs all judgment. Digvijoy sat on a stone platform a short distance away. No one asked who he was. The dead didn’t mind observers. As he watched the fire rise, he thought about all the versions of his mother — young, fierce, fragile, opinionated, tender — and how the urn in his bag held not just her remains but the weight of every unspoken sentence between them. The words they never shared. The apologies unsaid. The “I forgive you” that hung between years. He reached into his journal and scribbled: “Grief speaks not in screams, but in familiar silences.” Then, below it: “We mourn not just the person, but the unfinished dialogue they took with them.”
That evening, while sitting beside Lallan as the sun melted into the river like burnt ghee, Digvijoy felt the urge to speak of his mother — not the dutiful, proud Bengali woman others knew, but the girl she must have been before she became Ma. “She once skipped school to watch a Dev Anand film alone,” he said suddenly. “Got caught and scolded. But never regretted it.” Lallan laughed, “Then she lived.” Digvijoy smiled. “She had a habit of humming when she cooked. Off-key. Always Rabindrasangeet.” The words came like water breaking through a dam — memories, not monumental but intimate: the scent of burnt sugar when she tried to make payesh, her handwriting in his report cards, the way she sighed while combing her wet hair. He didn’t know what made him open up that evening — maybe it was the bhajan Lallan had just sung, or the way the light had hit the ripples, or maybe it was just time. Lallan listened with the same attention he gave to the river — eyes closed, head tilted. “You see her more clearly now than you did then,” he said. “The dead don’t become less real. They become more patient.” Digvijoy nodded slowly. For the first time, the ache inside his chest didn’t feel like pain. It felt like a place. Like a room in his memory finally dusted, finally lit.
The following night, a power cut plunged the entire street into darkness. The city quieted unnaturally, as if holding its breath. Digvijoy stepped out onto the ashram’s rooftop and stared at the stars — clearer than they’d ever seemed in Kolkata. It was then, without warning, that the past arrived in a rush. Not as memory, but as conversation. He imagined her voice — not ghostly, but familiar, calm, direct: “You kept your distance, Diggi. Even as a child. Always hiding behind your words.” He smiled, replying aloud, “You taught me to protect myself.” Her voice softened, “Yes. But I also wished you’d let me in more.” He blinked at the sky, not embarrassed by the tears. “I didn’t know how. I still don’t.” The wind brushed past his ears like a whisper. “Then try. Not for me. For you.” The conversation ended as quietly as it had begun. But something shifted. Not a resolution, but an opening. That night, he wrote the first paragraph of what might become the essay he hadn’t meant to write. He titled it: The River That Remembers Everything. It began: “We don’t come to Haridwar to forget. We come here to unlearn our forgetting.”
The next morning, as the city stirred from sleep, Digvijoy returned to the river with a folded page in his shirt pocket — a letter addressed not to his mother, or Tuhina, or himself, but to the river. He didn’t read it aloud. He simply dipped it into the water and let it go. The ink bled instantly, the words disappearing like breath on glass. Behind him, Lallan began a new bhajan — unfamiliar, slow, almost a lullaby. Digvijoy didn’t recognize the words, but he didn’t need to. The river moved, the song lingered, and the ghosts — now no longer strangers — watched quietly from the trees, from the light, from the silence they had gently carved in him. Later that day, he would walk to the post office and send a small package to Mumbai. Inside was a letter for Tuhina. At the bottom, he had written: “You don’t have to reply. But if someday the silence feels heavy, know that I once sat by a river and finally learned how to speak to it.”
Chapter 6
The morning began with wind — not gentle, but assertive, as if the sky itself had something to say. Curtains danced in the windows of the ashram like anxious birds. Bhola Das cursed the monkeys for pulling down a line of drying dhotis, and somewhere, a conch shell sounded as if in response. Digvijoy rose without hesitation, dressed in silence, and took the urn — the brass one, worn and warm from days beside his bed — in both hands. Today, there would be no deliberation, no delay. He didn’t tell Lallan. He didn’t say goodbye. He walked alone through the early streetlight glow, past shuttered stalls and stray dogs curled like commas in the corners of closed temples. His feet took him to the same narrow ghat near the abandoned banyan shrine, where the river was always quieter, as if whispering only to those who came without performance. The wind stirred the water’s surface into trembling silver threads. Digvijoy knelt on the stone steps, placed the urn beside him, and stared at the current. He didn’t chant. He didn’t close his eyes. He simply spoke in a voice he barely recognized as his own: “Ma, this is not an ending. It’s a return. You gave me everything. I only learned how to carry it too late.” Then, gently, he opened the lid and let the ashes fall into the water — not all at once, but slowly, like flour through fingertips. The river took them with no resistance. No grand moment. Just movement. As they disappeared, a leaf landed softly beside the last wisp of grey, curled like a signature, then floated away. A warm gust brushed his neck. Digvijoy closed the lid, stayed seated, and did not cry. He had done what she asked. Not in ritual, but in reverence. Not in ceremony, but in truth.
Afterwards, he didn’t return to the ashram immediately. Instead, he wandered. Haridwar, in its noiseless corners, held endless metaphors, and now he was seeing them all — a child tracing the edge of a puddle with a stick, an old man stringing jasmine garlands alone, a dog howling at nothing in particular. All of it was life, and all of it was loss. He stopped near a temple he’d never entered before — small, painted a fading ochre, and guarded by a sad-looking goat with a cracked bell around its neck. Inside, no pujari sat. No offerings lined the ledge. Just a sculpture of Nandi, covered in dust, eyes gazing toward nothingness. Digvijoy sat in the corner and watched the light shift on the floor through a broken lattice. There, he took out his journal and began to write. But this time, not reflections. He wrote a story — not journalism, not grief, not memory. A story of a river that forgot everything except a boy’s voice. It flowed from him like breath. By the time he looked up, the goat was asleep, and the temple bell swayed gently in the wind. He left a coin at the door — not for blessings, but as a small act of gratitude to the stillness that had held him.
When he finally returned to the ashram that evening, Lallan was waiting at the ghat, as if he had known. “Did you speak to her?” he asked, not turning. Digvijoy sat beside him. “Yes. But I think the river replied louder.” Lallan smiled faintly. “It always does. We’re just not quiet enough to hear.” They sat in companionable silence for a while, the river glowing under a shy moon. Then Lallan said, “Do you know why I sing the same bhajan so often?” Digvijoy shook his head. “Because I don’t remember all the others anymore,” Lallan said, chuckling. “Age has erased them. But this one — this one stays.” Digvijoy nodded slowly. “Sometimes forgetting is mercy.” “Sometimes it’s punishment,” Lallan added. “But mostly, it’s just time doing what it must.” As the night deepened, Digvijoy felt no urge to go inside. He stayed seated on the step beside Lallan, watching a candle float down the river, its flame steady despite the current. It felt like an answer to a question he hadn’t dared to ask. A soft yes in the language of water.
That night, back in Room 7, Digvijoy didn’t light incense or open his journal. He lay down with the window open, letting the wind and the distant hum of temple bells lull him. In the corner, the stone Lallan had given him rested beside a folded page — a printout of the story he had just written. He would send it to a magazine, perhaps anonymously. Or perhaps not. But publication no longer felt like the goal. Expression was. He thought of Tuhina. He had received no reply. But now, that too didn’t sting. Maybe silence was also a kind of healing. The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was the echo of his own voice earlier that morning, speaking to the river with no one watching. And in that memory, he didn’t feel hollow. He felt full — not with resolution, but with release.
Chapter 7
Three mornings after the ashes had met the water, Digvijoy found himself once again at the post office, the same one with its faded blue door, crooked clock, and dusty fan that made more noise than air. This time, he held no letter — at least, not in the usual sense. The one he had written to Tuhina remained in his diary, folded twice, never sealed. Something in him kept hesitating. Not from fear of her rejection, but from the realization that some messages aren’t meant to arrive. Some are written just so the heart remembers how to speak. He stood in line anyway, out of habit, watching a child draw circles on the floor with her sandal. The postmaster, a lean man with translucent eyebrows and a cracked wristwatch, looked up at Digvijoy and said, “You again?” It wasn’t unkind, just observant. Digvijoy smiled. “This time I’ve come to post nothing.” The postmaster grinned. “That’s the best kind. No returns.” Digvijoy nodded and walked away, the unsent letter still pressed to his chest. Outside, a group of students passed him, chattering about missed trains and hostel food. Life was moving on, fast, careless, like a younger sibling in a hurry to outgrow everything. He let it pass. For the first time, he didn’t feel left behind.
Later that day, he returned to the quiet corner of the ghat where Lallan always sat. But the space was empty. The ektara rested on the step, alone. Digvijoy waited a while, watching the river, unsure whether to worry. A boat passed carrying a widow and her two sons, all dressed in white, their silence more potent than wailing. Time moved differently at the ghat — not linear, but circular, like breath. Just when he was about to leave, Lallan appeared from the lane, walking slower than usual. “You’re early,” he said. Digvijoy smiled. “You’re late.” They both chuckled. Lallan sat down, picked up the ektara, and began tuning it, though he did not sing. After a long pause, he asked, “What does your daughter call you?” The question startled Digvijoy. “Nothing, lately.” “But before?” “Baba,” he whispered. The word felt unfamiliar in his mouth now, like a piece of cloth taken out after years and finding it no longer fits. Lallan strummed the ektara once and said, “That’s a river too. A name.” Digvijoy nodded, eyes stinging unexpectedly. “I wasn’t the best version of it.” Lallan smiled. “We never are. That’s why it matters when we try again.” That night, Digvijoy returned to the ashram and took out the letter. He read it aloud once, to the walls, to the fan, to the darkness. Then he tore it gently into strips and placed them in a small copper bowl. He lit a match and watched the pieces burn, curl, vanish. It didn’t feel like loss. It felt like beginning again.
The next morning, something unusual happened. A young girl, about eight, approached Digvijoy at the ghat while he was scribbling in his journal. “Are you the man who writes in the blue book?” she asked. He looked up, startled. “Yes. Why?” She pointed toward the banyan tree. “My grandmother says you speak to the river. She says the river listens to you.” Digvijoy smiled, not sure how to respond. The girl sat beside him, cross-legged. “Can I ask the river something too?” “You don’t need me for that,” he said. “But yes. You can.” She closed her eyes, whispered something too softly to hear, then looked at him seriously. “How long does it take for the river to answer?” He considered this. “Sometimes, the same day. Sometimes, many years. Sometimes, never. But it always hears.” She nodded, satisfied, and skipped away. Digvijoy sat stunned by the encounter. Later, he told Lallan about it. The old man chuckled. “Children know more about faith than we do. They just haven’t learned to doubt yet.” That evening, Digvijoy walked to the market and bought a blank diary — a small one, with a green cloth cover. On the first page, he wrote: For questions we don’t know how to ask. He left it beneath the banyan tree near the ghat, unmarked. The next day, a second page had writing on it — a question scrawled in a shaky hand: Where do people go when they stop being angry?
That night, the city was noisy again — loudspeakers blaring bhajans, wedding processions on the main road, a cricket match playing from ten different stalls at once. But in Room 7, Digvijoy heard none of it. He sat with the lamp off, listening only to the wind through the shutters and the far-off lull of the river. He thought about the letters he’d never sent, the arguments he never finished, the silences that had once swallowed him whole. They no longer had power. Not because they had been resolved, but because he had learned to live beside them — like scars beside veins. He turned to the window and whispered into the night: “I am here. I am listening.” Whether it was to the river, his mother, or himself — he no longer needed to decide. He just needed to say it. And he had.
Chapter 8
The days had begun to stretch gently now, like a shawl pulled tighter over tired shoulders. The urgency that had once stalked Digvijoy’s steps — to perform, to release, to be done with it — had receded. There was no more agenda. No ritual left unchecked. The ashes were gone, the journal had thinned, the city had become familiar. What remained was presence. Each morning he still went to the ghat, but now he came not with questions, grief, or ink, but just with breath. Lallan continued to sing, sometimes the same bhajan, sometimes another. Their conversations grew fewer, but deeper — not heavy, not confessional, just rooted. It was on such a morning that Digvijoy noticed a woman sitting three steps below, sketching in charcoal on torn paper. Her face was angular, sun-bronzed, with wide, deliberate eyes. She wore no vermilion, no thread of mourning, but her eyes carried a weight he recognized. For days, she sketched the river, the trees, the backs of pilgrims — never their faces. One day, he finally asked, “Why no faces?” She didn’t look up. “Because everyone’s face carries a lie. But backs — they show the direction.” Her name was Megha, a schoolteacher from Uttarakhand who had taken a break from work after her brother’s suicide. She said it simply, like reporting weather. That evening, they sat beside the river and shared an aloo tikki without ceremony. No comfort. No therapy. Just two strangers briefly leaning against each other’s silence.
Over the next week, Megha and Digvijoy found themselves meeting often — not by plan, but as a rhythm. They spoke of books, not people. Of rivers in other places, not the one in front of them. One day, she showed him a sketch — a boy standing at a river’s edge, back turned, holding something glowing in his palms. “That’s not him,” she said, referring to her brother. “That’s me. Letting him go.” Digvijoy took a long breath. “I wrote a letter I never sent. To my daughter. I let it go too.” Megha nodded. “Sometimes we write for the silence to read.” That evening, as the lamps of the Ganga Aarti painted the river gold, Megha said, “I leave tomorrow. School reopens.” Digvijoy didn’t ask for her contact. Neither did she offer. Instead, she handed him a small sketch — of a man walking alone by the river, not sad, not smiling, just still. “This is you,” she said. “Or the version that stayed.” He watched her disappear into the mist of the railway station the next morning, her scarf trailing behind her like a farewell not needing words. He didn’t feel the old stab of abandonment. He felt witnessed. And that, sometimes, was more sacred than being loved.
That night, something strange happened. For the first time in weeks, Digvijoy dreamed not of his mother, not of the river, but of himself — younger, thinner, laughing freely. He was in a train compartment, surrounded by unknown faces, scribbling on a notepad and reading aloud. His audience was listening. The laughter was genuine. And most of all — he was not afraid. He woke with a start and sat up, breathing heavily. The dawn had not yet come, but he opened his journal, struck through pages of earlier drafts, and began again. This time, not a tribute to loss or a meditation on faith, but a story — fictional, alive, breathing. A character with rage and humor, a setting far from Haridwar, a conflict not rooted in grief. By the time the sky turned saffron, five pages were written. It was messy, wild, unsure — but it was him. The storyteller returned not like thunder, but like a monsoon cloud gathering weight over time. He closed the journal and placed it beside Lallan’s stone. Then he laughed — not loudly, but enough for the walls to echo. In that laugh was life returning — hesitant, fractured, but stubborn.
That evening, Lallan sang a bhajan Digvijoy had never heard before — low, rhythmic, almost playful. “What’s this one?” he asked. “A Kabir song about the soul getting bored,” Lallan replied. “Even the spirit needs a change of view sometimes.” Digvijoy smiled. “Then maybe I’ll go home soon.” Lallan nodded. “Not to leave this. Just to carry it back.” On his way back to Room 7, Digvijoy stopped by the tree where the green diary lay. Pages had filled up — questions, doodles, even a folded chocolate wrapper. He added one line at the bottom of a page: “We come to the river thinking it will wash us. But sometimes, it teaches us how to carry the mud better.” That night, he sat by his window and watched the stars without longing. The pain was not gone — it never would be — but it had become manageable. Like the stone in his pocket. Like the sketch in his bag. Like the unfinished story waiting to be told.
Chapter 9
The station smelled of boiled peanuts, rust, old rain, and chai. Digvijoy sat on the worn wooden bench beneath the large, yellow signboard that read Haridwar Junction, the name already fading in the middle. His bag was lighter than when he had arrived — the urn was gone, the thick bundle of past newspaper cuttings had been torn and scattered like dried leaves, and the letter to Tuhina had turned to ash. But a new notebook sat neatly folded between his clothes, one page filled with a story he had begun two nights ago. The train to Howrah was due in twenty-seven minutes. He watched the digital clock above the tracks blink its red segments with mechanical certainty. Around him, people rushed and fretted — porters whistling, children crying, pilgrims bargaining for samosas, and distant temple bells echoing over it all. Yet, Digvijoy was still. Not calm. Not conflicted. Just still. In the rhythm of that railway station, there was something sacred — a kind of purgatory, neither where one came from nor where one was going. A boy selling tea walked past him, paused, and said, “Babu, you want?” Digvijoy nodded, accepting the small paper cup with both hands. He sipped it slowly, like one might sip a memory that doesn’t ache anymore.
When the train arrived — blue coaches yawning open, people spilling out with luggage and complaints — Digvijoy rose, slung his bag over one shoulder, and approached the platform edge. He looked at the coach number, found his seat — B3, upper berth — and stood before the open door. He saw the dusty window, the iron rods, the plastic fans whirring inside. Then, just as his hand reached for the handle, he stopped. Not from fear. Not from doubt. But from a small, intuitive whisper: “Not yet.” He stepped back. Let two other passengers climb in. Watched them disappear. Then turned and walked slowly back through the crowd, past the stalls, out the gate, into the late afternoon that hung over Haridwar like a sigh that hadn’t yet been released. He returned not to the ashram, but to the ghat. Lallan was there, humming to himself, his ektara resting beside him like a tired animal. He didn’t ask anything. Just nodded as if he’d known all along. “The river has more to say,” Digvijoy said softly. “And I’m not done listening.” Lallan smiled, and together they sat in the soft orange light, watching the sun slip gently behind the hills, leaving the water glowing like brass.
That night, Digvijoy wrote more than he had in years. The story that had begun as a short idea expanded into a voice — a protagonist named Iqbal who ran a second-hand bookshop in Shimla and found a journal in the pages of a banned poetry collection. It was fiction, but it pulsed with truths he hadn’t known he carried. The words didn’t come easy, but they came steady, like the river after a flood — changed, clearer. He paused once to light the vetiver incense his mother used to keep on her dressing table. Then he picked up the green cloth-covered diary from beneath the banyan tree and flipped through the new entries. One question read: “Can sorrow turn into colour?” Another: “Why do grownups forget how to talk to trees?” Digvijoy smiled. On the last page, someone had scribbled: “The river taught me not to wait for answers, but to ask better questions.” He added one of his own: “What if staying is also a journey?” He folded the book gently and placed it back, like returning a prayer to the altar of the world.
Days passed, though he didn’t count them. The world began to lean back toward the ordinary — sounds of schoolchildren returning, the postman’s cycle bell, the scent of jackfruit frying at Bhola Das’s tea stall. Digvijoy began helping around the ashram — carrying sacks of rice, mending a leaking faucet, repainting the entrance sign with small, careful strokes. It wasn’t dramatic, but it was movement. One evening, a young journalist from Delhi came to stay at the ashram — full of ambition and restlessness, scribbling notes at the aarti, recording Lallan’s bhajans. She recognized Digvijoy. “You’re the one who wrote that infamous exposé on the river mafia in Bihar, right?” He paused. “I was.” “You stopped writing?” she asked. “No,” he said after a moment. “I just changed who I’m writing for.” She nodded, unsure what to make of it. That night, he began a letter — not to Tuhina, not to his past, but to himself. It began simply: “You are allowed to begin again, even without permission. Even without applause.” And for the first time in a long time, he didn’t feel like a man escaping. He felt like a man returning. Not to a place. But to voice.
Chapter 10
The day of departure, when it finally arrived, felt like any other. No trumpet of endings. No omens. The air was warm, dry, touched with the scent of marigold and camphor. Digvijoy packed slowly, folding his clothes as if wrapping time itself — the shawl that had carried his grief, the journal that had caught his truths, the stone from Lallan, now smooth from months of being held. He paused before placing the green diary into his bag but stopped. Instead, he returned to the banyan tree, now sunlit and dappled with shadow, and left the diary on its familiar ledge. A final note inside read: “Let this tree remember. I am going forward.” The train ticket in his shirt pocket had today’s date printed clearly. This time, there was no hesitation. He walked to the ghat one last time, where Lallan sat in the shade, stringing beads on a thread, ektara resting like a sigh beside him. “So it’s time,” Lallan said. Digvijoy smiled. “The river says so.” Lallan nodded. “You’ll forget this place sometimes. But it will not forget you.” Digvijoy took a deep breath. “And if I lose myself again?” “Come back,” Lallan said, handing him a folded paper. Inside it was a line from Kabir: “The drop is never lost. It just forgets it was the sea.”
The train pulled out gently, and the window scene blurred into fields, cows, quiet temples, then towns and finally cityscape. Digvijoy sat by the window, not writing, not reading — just watching, as if his gaze itself was unlearning how to expect conclusions. He thought of Tuhina — her absence was no longer a wound, just a silence he now understood how to sit beside. He thought of his mother — not in grief, but in gestures: her fingers curling dough, her sharp jokes about men who wrote but didn’t listen, her soft cough before sleep. Memory had ceased to be a museum. It had become breath. At some point during the ride, a child in the next berth asked him if he was a writer. “Sometimes,” he replied. The child didn’t ask more, simply accepted the answer as true. Digvijoy opened his journal, not to begin a new essay or novel, but to draw. He sketched the curve of the ghat, the ektara’s silhouette, a single stone beside rippling water. The image came out shaky but honest. He dated it. Then wrote beneath: “Here I became real.”
When he stepped off at Howrah station, the city met him not with horns and dust and rush, but with memory — that particular scent of the Hooghly, the clang of metal tea cups, the voice of a man shouting “Taxi!” in that unmistakable Bengali tone. Everything had changed, yet nothing had. The city still pulsed. The city still pulled. But now, he walked slower. He smiled at the rickshaw-wallah without flinching. He noticed a street dog limping and bent down to feed it a biscuit. At home, the lock turned stiffly, as if reluctant to let him back in. But once the door creaked open, the air inside welcomed him. Books gathered dust. His plants had half-withered. But the house hadn’t forgotten him. He poured water into the tulsi pot, then made himself tea the way his mother had taught him — two spoons sugar, always stir clockwise. As it boiled, he sat by the window, the same one he used to stare through when he felt lost. Now, the view was no different — same tangled wires, same peeling paint on the opposite building. But the man looking at it had changed.
That night, he submitted his new story to a small magazine — not under a pseudonym, not with expectation. Just offering it, the way one offers a diya to the river: sincerely, quietly. Then he sat at his desk and began something new — not fiction, not memory, but a book that had lived inside him for years, waiting for his silence to ripen into clarity. The River That Remembers Everything. He did not rush. He did not force the words. He wrote the first line as he had once whispered to the water: “We come here not to forget, but to be remembered differently.” And as the fan spun overhead, as the page filled, as the night deepened — he did not feel alone. Not haunted. Not heavy. Just present. As if somewhere deep inside, the river now flowed quietly through him. And always would.
___
