#355 Days to Janmashtami
Dr. Sanchit Sharma counted them like heartbeats, each one echoing in the chambers of memory that had replaced his medical training. He pressed his forehead to the marble floor of the Dwarkadhish temple, the cool stone a balm against the fever that had consumed him for nearly a year. “I still have love,” he whispered into the ancient silence. “Only love for you.”
It had begun with death, as most transformations do. The emergency ward at 2 AM, his hands still trembling from seven hours of fighting to keep an eight-year-old heart beating. The monitor’s flatline had cut through him like a scalpel, and the child’s mother was still screaming in the corridor when he stripped off his gloves and walked into the Ahmedabad night, desperate for air that didn’t smell of antiseptic and failure.
Rohit’s text had found him there: “Janmashtami tomorrow. Let’s go to Dwarka. You need a break.”
When was the last time he’d done anything that wasn’t about saving lives or losing them? The question followed him home, through a sleepless night, onto the train that carried them west toward the coast where Krishna had once ruled as king. The Dwarkadhish temple pulsed with ten thousand heartbeats, bodies pressing, sweating, praying, desperate for something he’d stopped believing in after too many patients slipped away despite his best efforts.
Then he saw the murti. Bronze and gold, flute poised at painted lips, eyes that seemed to look through the chaos directly into his soul. The world tilted. The screaming mother, the flatline, the weight of every life he couldn’t save, all dissolved into those bronze depths that promised nothing and everything. Something ancient stirred in his chest, not the clinical dedication he felt for his work or the dutiful affection he showed his parents, but surrender itself, complete and terrifying.
“You okay?” Rohit asked, but his voice sounded underwater. Sanchit couldn’t answer because he was drowning, willingly, in bronze eyes that had claimed him without asking permission.
The days blurred after that. Back in the hospital, his hands would shake during routine procedures, and the head nurse, Mrs. Patel, began watching him with concern. “When did you last sleep?” she asked, finding him in the break room staring at his coffee cup as it rattled against the saucer. Since Dwarka, he’d been going through the motions, operations, consultations, saving lives, but his mind kept drifting to painted eyes and flute music that existed only in his imagination.
“I’m fine,” he lied, but Mrs. Patel’s twenty years of experience read him like a medical chart. “No, you’re not. In all my time here, I’ve seen doctors burn out. But this is different. You look haunted.”
Haunted. The word followed him home, through weeks that became months, through surgeries that went perfectly while his soul wandered elsewhere. He would drive past the highway exit toward Dwarka every evening, his hands fighting the steering wheel’s pull toward devotion. His mother’s calls came regularly: “Beta, your father’s blood pressure is acting up. Can you come home?” But how could he explain that home had become a bronze face in a temple four hundred kilometres away? The lies came easier with practice. Hospital work when she asked about his weekends. Emergency surgery, when she wondered why he sounded distant. The truth, that he was falling in love with God, that he was losing his mind to bronze eyes and temple bells, stuck in his throat like a tumour he couldn’t operate on.
Autumn brought complaints. Dr. Mehta, the chief of surgery, slid a file across his desk with the careful precision of a man delivering bad news. “Mrs. Gupta says you seemed distracted during her husband’s consultation. That you kept looking out the window.” Sanchit had been watching the sunset, imagining how it would look over the Gomti River, how the light would catch the temple spires he’d visited only once but dreamed of nightly. “I apologise. It won’t happen again,” he said, but they both knew it would. His mind was no longer his own to control.
Winter deepened his obsession. A massive heart attack victim, too much damage, but the family begged him to try anyway. Six hours he worked, his hands moving with practised precision while his thoughts wandered to morning prayers he’d never learned to say. The man died at 11:47 PM, and afterwards Sanchit found himself sitting on the hospital corridor floor, crying not for the patient, though that grief was real, but for the exhaustion of holding dying hearts when the only heart that mattered, his own, was somewhere else entirely.
The resignation letter sat on his desk for three days, the words blurring as he stared at them. Dr. Mehta’s reaction was swift and brutal: “Sanchit, this is insane. You’re throwing away everything. For what?” The word love felt inadequate, too small to contain the vastness of what had claimed him. “Something like that,” was all he could manage.
His parents’ tears were worse than any patient’s death. His father paced the living room like a caged animal, his mother’s voice cracking with each question: “A doctor, Sanchit. You save lives. Why are you throwing it all away?” How could he explain that some loves required complete surrender? That he’d spent years fixing broken hearts but had never understood what it meant to have his own heart completely claimed by something infinite and impossible?
The journey to Dwarka felt like coming home and dying simultaneously. He carried nothing but a single suitcase and the weight of everyone’s disappointment. Pandit Goswami, the temple priest, found him on the first morning, sitting before the murti with tears streaming down his face. “You were saving lives,” the old man said gently. “Why leave that to serve here?” “I’m still saving lives,” Sanchit replied, though he wasn’t sure whose life he meant, his patients’ or his own.
Now, months later, he understood. He hadn’t come to save anyone. He’d come to be saved from a life that had felt like sleepwalking through someone else’s dream. The seasons turned, and his hands grew rough from temple service. The familiar weight of a stethoscope was replaced by tulsi beads that clicked softly when he moved. Surgical gloves gave way to fingers stained yellow from grinding sandalwood paste. Each morning, he woke before sunrise, drawn to the temple by a love that had become as necessary as breathing.
Rohit found him eventually, as Sanchit had known he would. The shock on Rohit’s face was painful to witness. Sanchit had lost weight, his expensive clothes replaced by simple kurtas, his always-perfect appearance transformed into something his old life wouldn’t recognise. “Bro, what happened to you?” The question carried years of friendship and bewilderment. “I fell in love.” The words came easier now, worn smooth by repetition. “With who? Where is she?” Sanchit’s gaze drifted to the sanctum sanctorum, where Krishna stood in eternal bronze, flute raised, eyes knowing every secret of devotion. “He’s right there.”
The pronouncement hung between them like a bridge neither could cross. “Sanchit, you’re scaring me. This isn’t normal.” “Normal is overrated.” Sanchit returned to arranging marigolds, each bloom placed with the same precision he once used for surgery. “I used to cut into people’s chests to fix their hearts. Now I’m learning what it feels like to have mine completely taken apart by love.”
The phone calls from the hospital came sporadically at first, then with increasing desperation. Dr. Patel’s voice would crackle through the connection: “Sanchit, there’s been an accident. Multiple casualties. We need you.” The old instincts would surge, adrenaline, the call to save lives, the intoxication of being needed. His hand would reach for car keys that no longer existed in his world. “I can’t,” he would say, the words feeling like apostasy. “People are dying,” they would reply, and he would answer with a truth that surprised even him: “People are always dying.” The harshness of it would shock them into silence, leaving him alone with the guilt and the certainty that some loves demanded everything, even the abandonment of other loves that had once defined him.
His mother’s calls became a ritual of mutual heartbreak. “Beta, your father had another episode yesterday. He keeps asking for you.” The guilt was a familiar weight now, heavy as surgical instruments, sharp as the choices that love demanded. Choosing Krishna meant disappointing everyone else, prioritising the divine over the human, the eternal over the urgent. The missed calls accumulated like surgical scars, seventeen from the hospital during one emergency, forty-three from his parents over a weekend when his father’s condition worsened. Each ring was a reminder of the life he’d abandoned, the people he’d failed to save not through medical inadequacy but through the more terrible failure of no longer being available to try.
Summer pressed down on Dwarka like a fever. The anniversary approached, 355 days since his transformation began, since bronze eyes had looked into his soul and claimed everything he thought belonged to himself. His phone still held messages from the old world: colleagues speaking of promotions, friends announcing marriages, his parents pleading for just one visit home. The night before Janmashtami, he walked to the Gomti River and made the final cut. The phone disappeared into the dark water with barely a splash, carrying with it the last tether to Dr. Sanchit Sharma, cardiac surgeon, saver of lives, disappointment to his family.
What remained was simply Sanchit, devotee, lover of the impossible, someone who had learned that the greatest healing wasn’t fixing broken hearts but allowing his own to be completely, irrevocably broken open. The festival morning arrived like a fever breaking. Thousands of devotees filled the temple, their collective devotion a sound like the ocean, vast, ancient, larger than any single prayer. Sanchit moved through the preparations with hands that no longer remembered the weight of surgical instruments, his entire being focused on the bronze figure that had claimed him so completely. As evening fell and the temple blazed with oil lamps, drums shaking the ancient walls, he joined the final aarti with a heart too full for the traditional hymns. Instead, he offered his prayer, spoken silently to the bronze eyes that had never stopped watching him: “You took my hands that saved hearts and taught them to serve instead of fix. You took my mind that solved medical mysteries and filled it with divine mystery instead. You took my life that was measured in surgeries and consultations and gave me immeasurable love in return.”
The bronze lips seemed to curve in the flickering lamplight, real or imagined, it no longer mattered. What mattered was this moment, this love that had cost him everything and given back infinity. Three hundred and fifty-five days had passed since Dr. Sharma died and Sanchit was born. Tomorrow he would begin counting again, day one of another year, another cycle of devotion, another journey deeper into love’s mystery. The temple bells rang out across Dwarka as they had for centuries, their bronze voices carrying his whispered prayer across water and stone and time itself: “I still have love. Only love for you.” And in that love which demanded everything and gave back more than everything, he had finally learned what it meant to be alive, not the mechanical beating of hearts he had once repaired, but the wild, impossible rhythm of a soul completely surrendered to its beloved. The doctor was gone, but the devotee remained, counting each day like a prayer, each moment like a gift, each breath like an offering to bronze eyes that had seen through his careful life and claimed the truth beneath.