[Disclaimer: All the chapters from now on will contain explanatory notes for important historical events and certain terms which will be marked by (brackets and greyed out words), readers can wish to skip those as it is not compulsory to know all of it. Thank you.]
The first thing that reached Eshaan was the unusual smell.
Acrid smoke which was thick and sharp, laced with the sour sting of dung fires. Eshaan immediately heard the sizzling sound of something cooking, oil and spice mixed with the wide clean smell of a river nearby. His nose felt sharper than before as it catalogued all of this before his eyes could open. The pain had subsided and his mind was tranquil, ready to wake up.
Eshaan opened his eyes, jerked upright and tried to breath but it snagged in his throat. His hands clawed at the rough cotton sheets that scratched against his palms. His hands felt small, almost like a child's. He looked up and saw wooden beams above him that had blackened with years of smoke. A ceiling of packed clay between them.
"Not a hospital," he thought.
There was no electricity and the only light was coming through a narrow window cut in the wall. The sun rays caressed his face marking the beginning of the day. It wasn't filtered through glass - raw sunlight, direct and slightly dusty.
Eshaan sat there for too long, too stiff, afraid to even shift his weight. "It wasn't Nalanda, Not Bihar. Not-"
He tried to sit up but the body moved wrong as if it wasn't his - it was too light. The effort of sitting up which his body had performed ten thousand times without registering, produced almost no resistance. He was upright before he expected to be, swaying slightly, he looked down at himself and his brain simply stopped for a moment, the same way a machine stops when you feed it something it has no category for.
Eshaan actually had small hands, fingers were thin and pale, the wrists barely wider than two of his fingers pressed together. Earlier, he thought he was hallucinating but now he turned his hands slowly. The knuckles were smooth. The veins were faint. There was no callus from years of holding pens and brushes, no small scar on his left index finger from a fragment of excavation stone in his second year of fieldwork.
He was truly in a child's body.
Eshaan knew this, he should've known it was coming - the last things he remembered were the Sanctum and the quill and the darkness that smelled of river water, and somewhere in the space between that darkness and this ceiling he had understood what was happening to him. But knowing and experiencing are two entirely different categories, and right now his body - this body felt like a borrowed one.
"What happened to my original body?" Eshaan thought, he wasn't mentally prepared for this situation even though his mind had attempted to intellectually prepare him.
"His Right Arm!"
Eshaan turned it over with the slowness of a man diffusing something. The forearm was pale and thin and impossibly young. The mark made by the quill was there, but it didn't look like the shapes he'd imagined. The mark looked more like a dark, dried up ink - like a birthmark. He pressed the fingers of his left hand against the mark and it was warm. Warmer than the surrounding skin, the way a healed wound stays warm for weeks after. He pressed harder expecting it to sting but it didn't.
"Alright," he thought. "Alright."
Eshaan sat on the edge of the rough cotton mat and observed the room; it was a small one with a single window. A low wooden shelf holding a clay water pot, a folded dhoti, a small brass lamp with its wick trimmed and dark. A doorway without a door - just a heavy cotton curtain, faded blue, moving slightly in some draft he couldn't feel. The floor was packed earth, smooth and swept. Everything in the room spoke of poverty that was careful, poverty that had maintained its dignity through sheer effort.
Outside the window, the surroundings started to move. Eshaan could hear everything - the first cart wheels on stone, a woman's voice calling out to something, the low bawl of cattle being moved, somewhere in the middle distance the bright sudden ring of a temple bell. No engines. No electricity.
Eshaan was an Archaeologist by heart. He had spent eleven years learning to read the material remains of dead civilizations. He sat in this small room and read it the way he would read a site -methodically, without panic, one observation at a time.
"Packed earth floor - not unusual for modest dwellings well into the medieval period. The clay pot - wheel-thrown, plain, functional. The brass lamp - indicates the family is not destitute, brass was not cheap. The sounds - pre-industrial, pre-gunpowder, the dialect coming through the window is a form of Prakrit-inflected early Hindi that he could date if he listened longer."
Eshaan kept observing his surroundings and this time it was with all of his five senses.
"Eastern Gangetic plain. The river smell was the Ganga - he would stake his career on it. The dialect pattern, the specific cadence of the woman's voice outside, the quality of the light at this hour - he was in Bihar. He was in the Magadha region."
Eshaan couldn't figure out the year even though he roughly contemplated the time period. The body he was occupying was around ten years old.
The full weight of everything landed within Eshaan's mind. The Secret Sanctum - The meeting of those hooded men - Ruins of Nalanda - The quill reacting to him. He took a deep breath as it arrived all at once. He had to digest this enormous, impossible fact that he had reincarnated in the past.
He was here. This was real. The mark on his arm was real.
"Fine," he thought, for the second time in two days or eight hundred and forty-seven years depending on how you counted. "Fine. Let's understand what we're working with."
The curtain moved.
A man stepped through and the room, which was already small, became smaller. Not because he was physically imposing, though he was broad-shouldered and straight backed in the way of men who have carried heavy things for many years. But because he carried the particular gravity of a father who has spent several days not sleeping. His beard was trimmed neat, his dhoti was plain white and clean. Under one arm he carried a bundle of palm-leaf manuscripts bound with red cord.
He looked at Eshaan on the mat and his face shifted immediately and relaxed as if relieved to see his son alive.
"Eshaan." His voice was low, careful, as if the name itself was something fragile.
"The fever broke?" he asked
Eshaan opened his mouth but closed it immediately. This man was his father. He knew this with the same certainty he felt in the Sanctum - it wasn't from memory, nor from recognition but from something that lived in this body and had always known this face.
The man was - Mahesh Shrivastava, A Scribe and Record-keeper in the service of the Samanta[1] of Pataliputra. A man of Sanskrit and careful accounts.
Eshaan - The Archaeologist had never met this man before in his life.
But Eshaan - The Child had known this man his entire life.
"Pitaji," Eshaan said, and his own voice came out small and hoarse - a child's voice, thin and unused, and he had known it would sound like this but knowing had not prepared him for hearing it.
Mahesh crossed the room in three steps and crouched beside the mat, pressing the back of his hand to Eshaan's forehead. His palm was calloused and warm.
"Three days," he said quietly. "Three days the fever held you. Your mother barely left this room." He looked at Eshaan carefully, the way people look at someone they have almost lost and are still counting the pieces of. "How do you feel?"
Eshaan considered the question seriously.
His chest was tight - not with emotion, though there was that too, but physically tight, the lungs of a child who had been ill for three days and who, he now understood, had not been able to make it through as he hadn't been particularly robust even before the illness.
He thought of his own body - his real body - the one he had spent three years slowly building back up after his mother's death. It had taken six months of regular eating with it. The lean muscle, the fieldwork calluses, the back that ached in cold weather from too many hours bent over excavation trenches.
It was all gone and he was starting from nothing. He was a child again - weak and malnourished and it was going to take years to build this body into something capable of what he needed it to do.
"I feel better but," he said carefully. "I'm hungry."
Mahesh's expression softened into something that was almost a smile. "Your mother will hear that and weep with relief." He stood, adjusting the manuscript bundle under his arm.
"Pitaji." Eshaan opened his mouth but stopped.
"What is it?"
"What year is this?" Eshaan muttered softly
Mahesh looked into his eyes and then answered softly, "It's year 1236."[2] Eshaan nodded enthusiastically and Mahesh kept looking at him before standing up.
"Rest a little more. When you're ready, come find me at the record hall. You said you wanted to learn the accounts."
He said it the way a father says something a son has been asking for and that the father has been finding reasons to delay. There was affection in it, and something else - the faint reluctance of a man who loves his work and is not yet sure his son is ready for it.
Eshaan watched his father go and the curtain fell back into place behind him.
He sat alone in the room for another few minutes, the mark warm on his forearm, the city building its noise outside the window. He did the mathematics that he had been avoiding doing since he woke up.
Eshaan was roughly ten years old.
"India followed the Vikram Samvat calendar[3] during the Medieval times so converting it to Gregorian Calendar, this is the year 1178 CE and the month was July since Indians celebrated their new year after Chaitra month which usually falls in March or April." Eshaan thought as he continued calculating the details.
The First Battle of Tarain was 1191 CE — thirteen years away.[4]The Second Battle, the catastrophe, was 1192.[5]The sack of Nalanda was approximately 1193.[6] The Mongols would begin their probe of northern India's borders in 1221.[7]
He had thirteen years before the first crisis point. He had a frail child's body and no money and no position and no power, and he was the son of a clerk, and he had the complete accumulated knowledge of a PhD archaeologist who had spent his entire career studying exactly this period of Indian history.
Eshaan stared at the mark on his arm. You have been chosen, it seemed to say, in the way that marks say nothing but mean everything.
"I know," he thought back at it. "I'm working on it."
He stood up, testing the body's balance, noting the way his centre of gravity had shifted, the way the floor seemed further away and also closer, the way everything in the room was simultaneously smaller and larger than it should be. He picked up the folded dhoti from the shelf and dressed himself with the careful attention.
Then he went to find his father.
---
Mahesh Shrivastava walked like a man who owned the streets he moved through - not with arrogance but with the confidence of someone who knew exactly where everything was and had no patience for obstacles. Eshaan followed him through the lanes of Pataliputra and tried not to look like what he was, which was a thirty-two-year-old man experiencing the equivalent of a very detailed hallucination about medieval Bihar.
The city was nothing like the ruins.
He had walked those ruins hundreds of times - had memorized the foundations, the monastery layouts, the processional paths, the careful interpretive signs explaining what scholars believed each structure had once been. He had developed a relationship with the silence of the place, with the particular quality of its absence.
This was the opposite of absence. This was presence so dense it pressed against him from every side.
The lanes were narrow and loud and alive with a complexity that no historical record had ever quite captured - the specific smell of sesame oil frying over dung fuel, the sound of a woman's sharp scold carrying three buildings in every direction, the way cattle moved through a market crowd with an indifference to human urgency that had apparently not changed in nine hundred years. Boys chased something through the dust. A potter's square held rows of fresh clay cups, their rims still damp and dark from the wheel. A cart with painted oxen horns creaked past, leaving deep ruts in the wet earth.
A sharp pain knifed through Eshaan's chest. It was sudden and tight which made him falter and press his ribs with his small hands. Mahesh noticed immediately, slowing.
"Eshaan." he cried.
"I'm fine," Eshaan said, which was mostly true. He straightened, breathing carefully through the tightness. Lungs. This body has weak lungs. Noted.
Eshaan had learned in the fieldwork years, to treat physical discomfort as information rather than complaint. This was just more fieldwork. Unusual fieldwork. Fieldwork in a body that was not his own in a century that was not his own, but the principle held.
"Father," he said, matching Mahesh's pace again, "why are the merchants marking the grain sacks with red dye?"
Mahesh glanced at him sideways - briefly surprised, then settling into approval. "To show the duty has been paid. Else the same sack would be counted twice, and we would look like fools when the Samanta tallies the accounts." He kept walking. "You noticed that?"
"I notice things," Eshaan said.
Mahesh was quiet for a moment. Then, almost to himself: "Yes. You always have."
---
The record hall was cool and smelled of palm leaves and ink. A dozen clerks sat on low wooden seats, each bent over manuscripts, the scratch of styluses against dried leaf carrying through the hall in a steady rhythm. Light fell in narrow bands through slatted shutters, striping the floor in gold and shadow.
Mahesh set out the palm leaves on the low desk with the deliberateness of a man who has never wasted a movement in his professional life. He explained the system - ward by ward accounts, grain tallies, duty records, land assessments. The Samanta's treasury was organized through this hall, and the hall ran on the precision of its scribes, and the scribes ran on the example of Mahesh Shrivastava who had not made a significant error in eleven years.
Mahesh passed the stylus to Eshaan.
The weight of it was strange. It felt too light, the grip too small for Eshaan's spatial memory of how pens felt. He bent over the palm leaf and copied the row of numbers Mahesh had demonstrated and his hand shook and the lines came out uneven and the ink blotched where it shouldn't.
Eshaan stared at the mess for a moment.
"Eight hundred and forty-seven years of accumulated human knowledge," he thought, "and I can't hold a stylus.
Mahesh leaned over, his shadow falling across the desk. He tapped the leaf with one finger. "You see the gap? That is where you became careless. A clerk without care is worse than a thief, at least a thief only steals once."
Mahesh wasn't being harsh on his son; he was stating facts. "No hand is steady the first time. The leaf teaches you, if you let it. Try again."
Eshaan tried again.
The second attempt was marginally better. The third was worse. In the fourth, he slowed down, stopped trying to write the way he remembered writing, and instead watched his hand as if it belonged to someone else and he was simply offering suggestions. The fifth line was almost acceptable. Mahesh said nothing and stayed silent, letting his son learn at his own pace.
---
The Samanta arrived before the end of the fourth prahar.[8]
Eshaan was crossing the courtyard when it happened, he came around the corner too quickly and walked directly into a broad chest draped in fine cotton, stumbling back two steps, looking up to find a large man with a sword at his hip and the specific expression of someone who is not accustomed to being walked into.
The Samanta of Pataliputra. Eshaan recognized the quality of the fabric, the sword, the two attendants stepping forward from behind. Eshaan saw the entire apparatus of minor feudal power, deployed in a courtyard encounter with him, a clerk's son and it felt as if he was watching a movie scene.
He bowed immediately, deeply, the way the body seemed to know he should. "Forgive me. I wasn't looking where I was going."
The Samanta's eyes moved over him, briefly assessing the frail child barely standing in front of him. Then Mahesh's voice came from behind, as if he rehearsed for this scene,
"Samanta-ji. You honour us with your arrival." And the Samanta's attention shifted, the moment dissolved, and the two men moved together into the record hall as if a clerk's son in a courtyard was already forgotten.
Eshaan stood very still until the door closed.
He had known, in an abstract historical way, that power in 1178 was personal and immediate and could end a man without paperwork or process. He understood it differently now, standing in a courtyard with his heart in his throat.
"That man," he thought carefully, watching the closed door, "controls Pataliputra. He controls my father's livelihood. He controls whether our family eats."
He looked down at his small hands.
"For now."
[1] Samanta is the Indian term used to describe feudal lord or vassal. It's equivalent to a Baron.
[2] According to the Gregorian Calendar it is the year 1178. I chose the year 1178 because it is a turning point in the history of Bihar. The Gahadvala Dynasty which ruled major parts of Uttar Pradesh during this period and the Sena Dynasty of Bengal which ruled over majority of West Bengal were in a tug of war to win over Pataliputra and overall Magadh. During this period, Magadh wasn't under any big powerhouse and was divided in smaller states.
[3] Vikram Samvat calendar was primarily used in Medieval India and was enacted by King Vikramaditya of Ujjayini in 57 BCE. It is a Lunisolar calendar which uses twelve lunar months each solar sidereal year. It is usually 57 years ahead of Gregorian Calendar, except during January to April, when it is ahead by 56 years.
[4] This was the first battle between the Rajput King - Maharaja Prithviraj Chauhan and Muhammad of Ghor that would write the fate of political Landscape of Northern India.
[5] The Second Battle of Tarain was the major shift of Power in the Northern India. The defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan at the hands of Muhammad of Ghor paved the way of Turkic rule in India and marked the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate in 1206 under the rule of Qutb ud-Din Aibak. Delhi Sultanate ruled over majority of Northern India for the next 300 years under different Dynasties.
[6] The sacking of Nalanda and burning of Nalanda University by Bakhtiyar Khalji took place during 1193. Nalanda University was one of the oldest Universities in the world and can be compared to the level of current Harvard and Oxford Universities. Its grand library which was at that time a ten storey or more building was set on fire by Bakhtiyar Khalji and the books burned for three months which led to the destruction of a vast collection of original manuscripts preserved since Ancient Vedic Period and other valuable Knowledge.
[7] Mongol conquest of China and Invasion of India begun in the year 1221 and Ala ud-Din Khalji defeated the Mongol armies and consolidated the Delhi Sultanate. It is believed that the Mongol invasions of India went on for a century from the year 1221 to 1327.
[8] The time in a day is divided into different parts according to the Vedic culture. A whole day of 24 hours is called - Ahoratra (meaning 12 hours of day and 12 hours of night). Prahar is a period of 3 hours it means a quarter of day or night, there are a total of 8 Prahars - divided into 4 day prahars and 4 night prahars. Then there is Ghati and its a duration of 24 minutes. There are a total of 60 Ghatis in each day - 30 for Day and 30 for Night. So, before 4th Prahar here means - just before sunset.