Mirror in the Temple

The temple stones were cool beneath Aarav's bare feet as he climbed the final steps. Tuesday evening. The usual time. The usual route through the marketplace, past the flower vendor who always nodded, through the iron gates that sang their familiar creak.

Inside, the evening aarti hadn't begun yet. The hall held that particular silence. Not empty, but waiting. A few others moved quietly in their orbits: an elderly woman circling the sanctum, a young couple standing hand in hand, a child tracing patterns on the marble with one toe.

Aarav approached the main shrine and stopped.

The deity stood draped in deep blue tonight. The color of evening sky just after sunset, before the stars. He looked down at himself. His kurta. The same blue. He'd bought it months ago, hadn't thought about it this morning when he pulled it from the shelf. His hand moved almost without thought, touching the fabric at his chest, a quiet acknowledgment of something he couldn't name.

He folded his hands. Bowed. The woman arranging flowers near the sanctum smiled at him, and he smiled back. That easy exchange of recognition between people who share a rhythm, a ritual.

Then he looked up again.

Something was different. Or maybe nothing was different, and that was what made him pause. The face before him, painted eyes, eternal half-smile, seemed less settled than usual. Not sad. Not troubled in any dramatic way. Just slightly off-center. The way you yourself feel on days when nothing is wrong, exactly, but nothing is quite right either.

Thirsty, Aarav thought suddenly. Looks thirsty.

The thought arrived complete, without preamble. And in its wake, his own throat contracted. He'd been rushing all day: meetings, calls, the long drive through traffic. When had he last stopped for water? Morning tea, maybe. Nothing since.

He swallowed. His tongue felt thick.

We're both thirsty, he thought, and then immediately felt foolish. But the feeling persisted, undeniable as a stone in his palm. He glanced at the sanctum. Back at his throat. At the blue of his kurta and the blue of the evening drape. At the slight downturn of painted lips and the slight downturn he could feel in his own chest.

Not we.

Not both.

The realization came quietly, the way important things often do. Not in thunder but in the space between breaths.

The thirst I'm feeling isn't mine being reflected in you. It's yours being felt in me. Or,

He stopped. Started again.

There is no 'yours' and 'mine.' There's just thirst. And I'm calling it mine because I'm the one noticing it right now.

The woman with the flowers moved past him, her bangles chiming softly. Somewhere in the back halls, someone was lighting lamps. The smell of ghee drifted through the air. Ordinary things. Holy things. The same things.

Aarav stood very still.

He'd been coming here for years. Since childhood, dragged by his mother. Then as a teenager, reluctant and distracted. Then through college, sporadically. And now, regularly again, because somewhere along the way it had become less about belief and more about showing up. Being in the presence of something. Bowing to something. Even if he wasn't sure what.

But today, looking at that painted face in its evening blue, feeling his own throat cry out for water, today something shifted.

Not toward the divine.

Not even recognizing the divine in himself, the way people always said it at satsangs, nodding sagely while explaining that God lives in every heart.

This was stranger. Simpler.

I'm not standing before you, he thought, eyes on the murti. I'm standing before myself. And you're not separate from me. You never were. You're just the part of me that knows it's thirsty before I do.

His chest felt suddenly full. Not with emotion, or not only with emotion. With air. With presence. With the odd, dizzying sensation of being both the seer and the seen, the worshipper and the worshipped, the question and its answer.

He thought of all the times he'd come here seeking. Asking. Please help me with this exam, this job, this heartbreak, this fear. Please show me a sign. Please tell me what to do.

And every time, every single time, the answer had come. Not from the painted lips but from somewhere deeper. A knowing that surfaced in his chest, his gut, his palms. An instinct that felt both utterly his and utterly beyond him.

Because it was never 'him' and 'me,' Aarav thought. It was always just this. Awareness meeting itself. The infinite folded into the particular, looking into a mirror and forgetting, for a moment, that there's no glass between.

The aarti began. Bells rang. Voices rose in song. People pressed forward for darshan, hands outstretched, faces bright.

Aarav didn't move. He stood in his spot, in his blue kurta that matched the evening drape, his throat dry with a thirst that belonged to no one and everyone, his eyes on a painted face that looked back with his own looking.

Tu hi mai, he thought. Mai hi tu.

Not poetry. Not philosophy. Just fact. The plainest fact in the world.

He bowed once more. This time not to ask, not to seek, not even to surrender. Just to acknowledge. The way you might nod at your reflection in a window as you pass, recognizing yourself in the glass, in the world beyond it, in the very act of seeing.

Then he turned and walked out into the evening, where the flower vendor was packing up his garlands and the iron gates were singing their familiar song, and his throat was still dry but somehow that felt perfect too. A small, human thing, a divine thing, the same thing after all.

He stopped at the water tap outside the temple.

Drank deeply.

And tasted copper, earth, mineral. Tasted relief. Tasted the exact thing that the face in evening blue had been waiting for, the thing he'd known without knowing he knew.

Thirst, he thought, wiping his mouth. Mine. His. Ours. The same.

Behind him, the temple bells continued ringing.

Ahead, the evening stretched open, full of blue light and ordinary grace.

And Aarav walked into it, carrying nothing, seeking nothing, full.

After Midnight

"You must be tired," she said.

I wasn't. My mind was racing at 2 AM, every nerve ending firing. The conversation had taken on that electric quality where everything matters more than it should.

We'd been talking about nothing, her dissertation on urban planning, my half-finished novel that I keep lying about being close to done, and whether Chandigarh actually counts as a planned city or just a grid with pretensions. But underneath the nothing was everything. The way she'd type "haha" instead of sending an emoji. The way she'd wait exactly three minutes before responding, as if she were timing it, or maybe just living her life, and I was the one counting.

I'd told her about the Japanese concept of ma, negative space, the interval between things. "It's not the notes," I'd explained, "it's the silence between them that makes music work."

She'd sent back: "So what are we? Notes or silence?"

That's when my brain short-circuited.

"Come to Chandigarh," I typed before I could think better of it. "We'll play hide and seek in the old sector markets."

What the fuck was I saying? Hide and seek? I'm twenty-seven years old.

But I meant it. I wanted her here, wanted to show her the streets I grew up on, wanted to see if she'd laugh at the absurdity of two adults ducking behind chai stalls and calling it a game. I wanted to know if she was the kind of person who'd say yes to something that stupid and beautiful.

More than that, I wanted to test something. Whether she'd understand that hide and seek wasn't really about hiding. It was about the thrill of being found by someone who actually looked. About making yourself deliberately visible while pretending you weren't. About the chase being more honest than the catch.

My last relationship ended because I couldn't explain this kind of thing. Priya would ask me what I was thinking, and I'd say "nothing" because how do you explain that you're thinking about the quality of afternoon light, or the way her voice changed when she talked to her mother, or whether love was just pattern recognition dressed up as fate? She called me distant. She wasn't wrong.

"You should sleep," she replied.

Translation: This conversation is getting too intense, and I need an exit.

I get it. I'd been circling something all night without saying it directly. Dancing around the fact that I wanted more than I should want from someone I barely know. She could feel it. Of course, she could feel it.

"Maybe someday you'll find both," she'd said earlier, when I'd complained about never meeting anyone who was both sharp enough to spar with and soft enough to sink into.

The problem is, I think I already have. And she just told me to go to bed.

Here's what I didn't say: I've been looking for both my entire adult life. My parents have both. My grandfather had it with my grandmother until she died; he still sets out two chai cups every morning, fills both, and drinks both.

But everyone I meet is either all softness with no spine, or all edges with no give. The soft ones bored me within weeks. The sharp ones cut me, and I spend months bleeding out, wondering if pain is just the price of not being bored.

She's different. She'll spend twenty minutes explaining Le Corbusier's failures in Chandigarh's design, then send me a photo of a stray dog she's named Gerald. She quotes Barthes and watches terrible reality TV. She has opinions about everything and holds none of them so tightly that she can't laugh at herself.

Three weeks ago, she sent me a voice note at 4 a.m. She couldn't sleep, she said, and wanted to know if I thought people were lonelier now than before or just more aware of it. Her voice was rough with insomnia. I listened to it six times.

I haven't told her that. I haven't told her a lot of things.

"Good night," I sent back.

My phone screen went dark. Outside, a dog barked, maybe Gerald's Chandigarh cousin. A motorcycle revved somewhere in the distance. The ceiling fan made its rhythmic click with every rotation, the same click it's made since I was twelve years old and couldn't sleep because I'd just learned what entropy meant and couldn't stop thinking about heat death and the universe's long fade to nothing.

I thought about texting her again. Something light, a meme maybe, to reset the tone. But that felt like cowardice. Like taking back something true because it made someone uncomfortable.

I didn't sleep for another two hours.

Instead, I lay there running scenarios. What if she did come to Chandigarh? What if we played that stupid game and she actually hid and I actually looked, and when I found her behind the water tank in Sector 17, we'd both be laughing, breathless, and the distance between us would collapse into something simple and real?

Or worse, what if it didn't? What if the fantasy was better than the finding? What if I've built her up so much in my head that the real version, standing in front of me in daylight, would just be another person I'd eventually find a reason to leave?

When I finally did sleep, I dreamed about markets and streetlights and a game where the rules kept changing, where finding someone meant losing them, and where she was always just around the next corner, laughing at how seriously I was taking it all.

In the dream, I never caught her. But I never stopped looking either.

I woke up at 7 AM to a text from her, sent an hour earlier: "If I come to Chandigarh, I'm hiding in the Rock Garden. You'll never find me there."

My heart did something stupid and hopeful in my chest.

I typed back: "Challenge accepted."

Then I deleted it. Typed: "Bold of you to assume I'd look."

Deleted that too.

Finally sent: "The Rock Garden is cheating. That place is a labyrinth."

She replied instantly: "Scared?"

No. Terrified. But not of the game.

"Never," I sent back.

And just like that, we were playing again.

Parikrama

The Kinnar Kailash plan died over burnt toast on a Tuesday morning. I'd brought it up, Shiva and Parvati's temple somewhere in the mountains, and she'd looked at me over her coffee like I'd suggested we climb Everest in flip-flops.

"Start smaller," I said. "Vrindavan. Mathura. Flat ground. Temples we can actually reach."

She'd shrugged, scrolling through her phone. "Fine. But I'm not pretending to be athletic about it."

Vrindavan hit us like colour and sound thrown against a wall. The lanes were too narrow, the crowds too thick, cows blocking doorways while bhajans leaked from every courtyard. At Banke Bihari, she gripped my arm as bodies pressed close, her dupatta caught twice in the surge toward the deity. When we finally got out, she was flushed and annoyed.

"That was chaos."

"That was devotion."

"Same thing, apparently."

But at Prem Mandir that evening, she went quiet. The white marble caught the colored lights, and the carved panels showed Radha and Krishna in a dozen scenes of longing. She stood in front of one for a long time, Radha reaching, Krishna turning away, and I didn't interrupt.

At Nidhivan, the guide told us Krishna danced here every night with Radha, that no one could stay past dark or they'd go mad. She rolled her eyes, but I saw her look back at the grove as we left, her expression caught between scepticism and something softer.

We ate kachoris at a stall where the oil was too hot and the chutney burned. She complained about the grease, then ordered jalebis anyway. We sat by the Yamuna for the evening aarti, and she leaned her head on my shoulder without asking if I minded.

"This is working," she said, half to herself.

"What is?"

"Not thinking about work. Not checking email every five minutes." A pause. "Just being here."

I kissed her hair. It smelled like incense and sweat.

On Govardhan Puja, the town swelled with pilgrims preparing for the parikrama, the 21-kilometre walk around the hill Krishna had lifted to shield the villagers from Indra's storm. Most hired cycle-rickshaws. Some took tempos. We stood near Mansi Ganga, watching the crowd gather, and I said it before I thought it through.

"Let's walk."

She turned. "The whole thing?"

"Why not?"

"Because it's 21 kilometres, Pratap. And neither of us has walked 21 meters without complaining in the last six months."

"Scared?"

Her jaw tightened. "Don't."

"What?"

"Don't dare me into stupid things."

"So you're scared."

"Fine. We'll walk. And when I collapse, you're explaining it to my mother."

The first stretch was deceptively easy. Morning air, steady rhythm, her hand in mine. A peacock startled from a wall, and she laughed, sharp, surprised, and I caught it on my phone. At Radha Kund, she wanted to stop and watch the women circling the pond with offerings, but I tugged her along.

"We'll never finish if you stop at every temple."

"You're the one who wanted to do this."

"And you're the one who'll complain if we're still walking at midnight."

She didn't argue, but her silence felt pointed.

By eight kilometres, we'd stopped talking much. The sun was high, unforgiving. She'd tied her dupatta at her waist, and sweat darkened the back of her kurti. A sadhu passed us, barefoot and unbothered, and she muttered something about how we were clearly doing this wrong.

At kilometres, we stopped for chai. She dropped onto a bench and stared at her feet.

"What's wrong?"

"Shoes are rubbing."

I knelt before she could protest, setting the chai cups in the dust. "Let me see."

"It's fine, "

"Let me see."

Her sock was damp near the heel. When I pressed, she flinched. I didn't say anything, just unlaced carefully and slipped the shoe off. The blister was small but angry.

"We'll rest," I said.

"We're already behind."

"We're not racing anyone."

She watched me, something unreadable in her face. "You don't have to fix everything."

"I'm not fixing. I'm just looking."

We made it one more kilometre before she stopped mid-step, her hand clamping onto my arm.

"Cramp."

I guided her to a bench under a neem tree. Pilgrims flowed past, chanting, laughing, indifferent to our small crisis. I went down on one knee and pulled her foot onto my thigh.

"People are watching," she hissed.

"So?"

"So this is embarrassing."

"I'm helping my wife."

"We're not married yet."

"Close enough." I removed her shoe despite her protests, working my fingers along her arch until I found the knot. She bit her lip, half from pain, half from mortification. I stretched each toe, then laced my fingers between hers, making space.

"Better?"

She nodded, face burning.

I leaned down and kissed the top of her foot, quick, light, then tickled her sole.

"Pratap!" She jerked back, her expression caught between fury and laughter. "What is wrong with you?"

"You looked like you were about to cry. Had to reset."

"I'm going to kill you."

"Later." I helped her shoe back on, then scooped her up before she could stand.

"What are you doing? Put me down!"

"No."

"People are staring!"

"They'll survive." I adjusted my grip. My arms were already aching. "You're my better half. I'm taking care of that part."

She buried her face in my neck. "I hate you."

"No, you don't."

Her breath was warm against my skin. After a moment, her arms tightened around my shoulders.

I walked. One kilometre. Two. My lungs burned. My legs shook. At three kilometres, I had to stop.

"Okay," I gasped. "Love remains. Breath does not. You're walking now."

As I set her down, carefully, because I was shaking, she looked up at me, her face unreadable.

"No more paranthas for you. You're joining a gym."

"Deal," I wheezed. "How's your foot?"

"Better." She squeezed my hand. "Let me know if you need me to carry you."

"Hilarious."

We walked the rest in near silence, slower now. The path took us past Kusum Sarovar just as the light turned gold. She leaned against the railing, staring at the water, and I stood behind her, my arms around her waist because I didn't know what else to do with them.

"Thank you," she said quietly.

"For what?"

"For..." She hesitated. "For this. For carrying me. For making me feel like, "

"Like you matter?"

"Yeah."

I kissed her forehead. "You do."

She turned in my arms, and for a moment we just stood there, dusty and exhausted and held together by something neither of us had words for yet.

We finished the parikrama as darkness fell, strings of lights marking the path and oil lamps flickering at roadside shrines. When we reached our starting point, she collapsed onto a stone step with exaggerated drama.

"I'm never walking again. My feet have officially retired."

I sat beside her, equally destroyed. "Worth it?"

She looked at me, her eyes tired but soft. "Yeah. Worth it."

Somewhere in the distance, someone was singing about Radha's love, about devotion that looked like madness from the outside.

But when you're in it, I thought, it just feels like this.

She rested her head on my shoulder. I took her hand, lacing our fingers the way I had with her toes.

"When we do Kinnar Kailash," she murmured, "you're definitely hitting the gym first."

"Without question."

"But I'll still expect you to carry me if I need it."

I smiled into her hair. "Always."

The parikrama was complete. But the journey, I knew, was just beginning.

Kill The System: A Dream Vignette

Part I: The Parade of Nations

The cold morning air carried the scent of marigolds and jasmine through the three-storey hollow of the school. On National Day, we weren't just students, we were living stereotypes meant to be broken. Our class had become Punjab itself, wrapped in the vibrant chaos of Phulkari embroidery and the weight of tradition.

I adjusted my turban, feeling the stiff fabric press against my forehead, and looked down at my Patiala salwar, voluminous, pleated, alive with colours that seemed to shout rather than speak. Around me, my classmates moved in their kurta-pyjamas and salwar-kameez, their juttis clicking against the floor in perfect rhythm. Through the windows, I could see other classes: Kerala in their white-and-gold kasavu, Haryana in their robust pagris, Bihar in their simple elegance, each standard a different India, each classroom a different truth.

The drums began. Ta-Na-Ta-Na. Ta-Na-Ta-Na. That relentless Quick March, 120 beats per minute of mechanical discipline, the heartbeat of every school assembly that ever was. It pounded like Michael Jackson's "They Don't Really Care About Us", defiant, steady, impossible to ignore.

The parade began to move, a river of colour flowing through the corridors.

Part II: The Ghost in the Classroom

I should have followed them. But there he was, sitting at the teacher's desk in our Punjab-themed classroom, behind the decorative dhol, beneath posters of the Golden Temple and Bhangra dancers frozen mid-leap. Gandhi. Not the marble statue version, not the poster on the wall, but him, frail, smiling with those deep creases around his eyes, his round metal-rimmed spectacles catching the light, his dhoti impossibly white against the red Phulkari curtains.

The parade drums faded into the distance as I stayed behind.

He looked at me with that warm, impossible smile. His chest was bare under the thin shawl, his pocket watch visible near his waist, and he seemed so small sitting there among our miniature tractors and dried wheat stalks on the window ledges, our Durries covering the institutional floor.

"Why are you alive," I asked, "and not Bhagat Singh?"

The smile didn't fade, but something ancient moved behind his eyes. "Destiny chooses its martyrs and its witnesses," he said, adjusting his spectacles. "Which do you think I am?"

The answer felt like a question pretending to be an answer. I pressed on.

"Why did you create the division of India?"

He leaned forward, and his voice dropped to something almost playful. "Do you know what happens when you tell a secret to ten people? To a hundred? To millions?" He didn't wait for my response. "Secrets become prophecies. Prophecies become truths. Or perhaps..." his eyes glinted behind the round lenses, "perhaps they were always truths, and I was just the one fool enough to speak them aloud."

The weight of that non-answer hung in the air, heavy as the sweet smell of flowers drifting through the windows.

"And the caste system?" My voice was harder now. "Do you understand it?"

"I understand," he said slowly, "that some systems survive because we understand them. And others survive because we don't." The smile returned, sad now. "Which one do you think it is?"

"Then help me kill it," I said, refusing to play his game of riddles. "Kill the system."

Part III: The Chant

The words left my mouth like a match to kindling.

"Kill the system."

I repeated it, louder. The parade drums were still beating outside, Ta-Na-Ta-Na, and somehow my words found their rhythm. Someone else picked it up. Then another. Then the whole class, returning from the parade, poured back in, their voices rising:

"KILL THE SYSTEM!" Ta-Na-Ta-Na "KILL THE SYSTEM!" Ta-Na-Ta-Na

The drums synced perfectly with the chant, that marching beat transforming into something revolutionary, something dangerous. The sound filled our Punjab classroom, spilt out into the three-storey hollow, and echoed off every wall until the entire school was vibrating with it.

But revolution breeds chaos.

Different thinking people started fighting, Kerala arguing with Haryana, Bihar pushing Maharashtra, everyone suddenly remembering old grievances wrapped in new costumes. The stereotypes we were meant to break were breaking us instead.

I had to take control. I had to find the real troublemakers.

"Jatt khara kalla aajo jihne loha laina!" I shouted in Punjabi, my voice cutting through the chaos. Come forth, whoever wants to pick up the iron, whoever wants to fight.

Four figures pushed through the crowd.

From Kerala, white kasavu dhoti gleaming, his movements fluid like the backwaters he represented. From Jharkhand, tribal jewellery catches the light, his stance grounded and dangerous. From Haryana, a massive pagri, broad shoulders, bored eyes, looking for any excuse to prove his strength. And from Delhi, dressed in modern fusion, cocky, there because fighting looked fun.

Part IV: Honey and Steel

The cold air seemed to freeze as we faced each other. The sweet smell of flowers intensified.

But as I looked at them, Kerala in his white kasavu, Jharkhand with his tribal jewellery, Haryana with his massive pagri, Delhi in his fusion wear, I saw it. Four fragments of the same fractured country, each carrying stereotypes they'd been forced to wear like costumes.

Still, the fight was coming. Dreams don't pause for philosophy.

I ran toward the Arunachal Pradesh classroom and grabbed their container of traditional honey. In one swift motion, I threw it across the floor between us.

The honey spread like liquid gold, sticky, slippery, catching the light like a trap and a treasure at once.

Kerala went down first, grace betrayed by the slick surface. Jharkhand followed, jewellery clattering. Haryana, big, bored Haryana, fell hardest, and all three crashed into the water cooler with a tremendous splash, cold water mixing with sweet honey.

But Delhi hung back, watched, and learned. Now he came at me, and in his eyes I saw something familiar: the cleverness that survives by adapting.

I pivoted into the Maharashtra classroom, through Shivaji's forts and warrior traditions. There on the wall: that Maratha dagger with its dark, curved hilt and crescent guard, brass-wrapped grip gleaming. Behind it, a painted tiger loomed.

The blade sang as I drew it, Damascus patterns catching the light.

Delhi stopped, reconsidered. In that moment, we both knew: we weren't fighting each other. We were fighting the roles we'd been assigned.

But he'd committed. He came anyway. Because sometimes you have to act out the symbol before you can understand it.

What happened next wasn't technique. It was pure spirit, pure Shivaji, courage and cunning against the empire. I moved like I'd seen in movies, probably watched before sleeping, my body remembering what my mind had never learned. Each party has a rejection. Each movement is a question.

Delhi went down, not hurt but defeated, sprawling among the Maharashtra decorations. He was laughing, I realised. We both were.

Part V: The Hollow

I walked back to the centre of the school, to the ground floor beneath that three-story hollow. Water dripped from the broken cooler. Honey stuck to the shoes and spread in golden patches. The drums had stopped.

Everyone was looking at me.

They lined the railings on all three floors, Punjab, Kerala, Maharashtra, Haryana, Bihar, Jharkhand, Delhi, Arunachal Pradesh, every state, every union territory, every stereotype we'd worn today. The hollow amplified everything. One voice here could reach everyone.

I raised the Maratha dagger, still in my hand, still catching the light.

"We're killing the system," I said, and my voice carried upward, multiplied by the architecture. "Not the identity. Never the identity."

I could feel them listening, really listening, in that way that only happens in dreams, where words carry the weight of absolute truth.

"The system is the rules and regulations that divide us. The system is the walls they built between states, between castes, between us. The system is every lie they told us about each other, every stereotype they made us believe."

I gestured at our costumes, our decorations, our beautiful, ridiculous displays.

"But this? This is who we are. Kerala's grace, Jharkhand's strength, Haryana's courage, Delhi's cleverness, Punjab's joy, Maharashtra's valour, these aren't the system. These are our identities. These are real."

It was Caesar speaking to Rome, Mark Antony at the funeral, every great orator who ever made a crowd forget their anger and remember their purpose. I wasn't criticising anyone. I wasn't blaming anything. I was just speaking truth, and in dreams, truth has power.

Heads nodded on all three floors. Kerala helped Jharkhand to its feet. Haryana clapped Delhi on the shoulder. The honey was still stuck to the floor, sweet and slippery, but no one was fighting anymore.

"Kill the system," I said one more time, softer now. "But keep everything that makes us us."

The agreement was unanimous. The understanding was complete.

And then, like all perfect dream moments, I was awake.

---

The cold lingered. The sweet smell of flowers and honey stayed with me for minutes after waking. And somewhere in my mind, that drum beat continued: Ta-Na-Ta-Na, Ta-Na-Ta-Na, the rhythm of a parade that never ended, of a speech that would echo in that three-storey hollow forever.

But here's what I didn't say in the dream, what I couldn't say until I woke up: I was terrified the entire time. Terrified that Gandhi's riddles had no answers. Terrified that the honey-slick floor was just a trick that worked once. Terrified that my words in that hollow were just noise, that they'd forget everything the moment the dream ended.

Maybe that's why dreams give us these moments. Not because we're brave enough to live them.

But because we need to know what it feels like. (Author's Note: A dream is just a dream—symbols, not statements. Any resemblance to historical figures or political positions is purely the strange logic of sleep.)