Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati.....
The City of the Ancestors was not a city in any earthly sense. It existed in the liminal space between the last breath of memory and the first syllable of legend. Its spires were made of solidified twilight, its streets paved with the echoes of final words. Here, the souls of the great and the forgotten awaited their turn in the cosmic cycle, their stories their only currency.
In a quiet quarter, where the light was the soft grey of old parchment, stood a library. Its shelves stretched into infinities, holding not books, but orbs of gently swirling light—each one a complete, unvarnished life. This was the Archive of Lived Truth. Its keeper was a soul who had no name here, known only as the Chronicler.
He was a man of quiet demeanour, his form nebulous, shaped by the collective expectation of what a 'keeper' should be. His days were spent cataloguing, cross-referencing, and sometimes, soothing the agitated orbs of lives that ended in trauma. He had heard the whispers of kings and beggars, saints and sinners. He was impartial, detached. Until the day his orb arrived.
It descended not through the usual channels, but like a falling star, tearing a brief, golden gash in the perpetual twilight. It came to rest on his main desk, pulsating with a low, insistent light. It was not the cool blue of a pacified life, nor the angry red of an unresolved one. It was gold, shot through with veins of deep amber sorrow and brilliant, diamond-hard loyalty.
The Chronicler reached out, and as his essence touched the orb, he knew.
Karna.
The memories did not flood him; they were him. The weight of the sun-kavacha, the sting of mud on his face, the grip of Duryodhana's hand, the feel of the string of Vijaya, the crushing emptiness of the abandoned infant, the serene finality of the arrow's strike. He was the Chronicler, and he was also Karna. The paradox should have shattered him. Instead, it settled within him with a heavy, undeniable truth. His detachment was a lie. He was not just an observer of stories; he was one of its most pivotal, aching chapters.
He spent what felt like an aeon simply sitting with his own life-light. He witnessed his actions from the outside: his harshness to Draupadi, his unwavering support of a corrupt cause, his moments of breathtaking charity, his silent sufferings. The impartial Chronicler within him judged; the Karna within him wept and raged. For the first time, the Archive felt not like a repository, but a prison.
His routine was shattered. He found himself drawn to the sections concerning the Mahabharata war. He observed the orbs of those whose lives he had touched. He saw Bhishma's orb, a complex tapestry of duty and cold regret. He saw Arjuna's, a brilliant, chaotic swirl of divine favour and crushing guilt. He saw Duryodhana's, a dark, dense knot of envy and genuine, twisted love. And he saw the smaller orbs—the common soldiers, the charioteers, the cooks—all extinguished in the conflagration he had helped fuel.
One day, a gentle presence manifested beside him. It was the soul of an old woman, her form glowing with the soft pink of a life spent in simple kindness. She was one of the countless millions, her name irrelevant. She looked at the orb of a young foot-soldier from Anga, cut down by Bhima's mace on the sixth day.
"He was my grandson," she said, her voice like rustling leaves. "He joined the army because he loved his king. He spoke of you, you know. Not as a god or a hero. He said you once stopped your chariot to ask his unit if they had been paid for the month. He said you remembered his captain's name."
The Chronicler-Karna felt a pain sharper than any weapon. "I led him to his death."
"You led him," the old woman corrected softly. "Where he went was the destiny of kings and fools. His light is at peace. He died proud." She touched his nebulous arm. "Even here, Chronicler, we choose which truths to hold. I hold the truth of his pride, not his pain."
Her words planted a seed. The Archive was a record of everything—every thought, every deed, every consequence. But what was the truth of a life? The sum total, or the chosen resonance?
He began an unorthodox project. He started to gently coax connections between orbs. Not the grand, causal links of history, but the subtle threads of feeling. He linked the orb of the Brahmin he had cursed with that of a later moment, where that same Brahmin's grandson used the gifted gold to start a school. He wove a thread from his own moment of insulting Draupadi to the later, unshakable strength she found, a strength that became a legend in its own right. He connected Duryodhana's childhood memory of feeling overshadowed by the Pandavas to his own moment of being offered a kingdom.
He was no longer just cataloguing. He was curating. He was trying to compose a deeper truth, one of interconnectedness, of pain transmuting into unexpected legacy, of flaws generating their own antidotes.
This drew attention.
A being of immense, serene power appeared in the library. His form was stability itself. Yama Dharmaraja.
"Chronicler," Yama's voice was like a deep gong. "You are interfering with the pristine record."
The Chronicler bowed. "Lord of Dharma. I am not altering the record. I am… annotating it. The truth of an event is not only in the act, but in the echo."
Yama observed the newly woven tapestry of light around Karna's own orb. He saw the threads leading out to hundreds, thousands of others. He saw the curse leading to a school. The insult leading to a queen's resilience. The loyalty to Duryodhana leading to a folk-tale of friendship that would inspire poets for millennia.
"You are imposing a narrative," Yama stated.
"I am discovering one," the Chronicler countered, a flicker of Karna's old defiance in his tone. "The Archive shows us what happened. But we souls need to understand why it matters. We are not data points. We are stories. And stories are defined by their connections."
Yama was silent for a long time, his gaze moving over the intricate web. "You are arguing for compassion over purity."
"I am arguing that compassion is a form of purity," the Chronicler said. "The naked fact is I supported adharma. The connected truth is that my support was born from a lifetime of denied adharma against myself. Does it excuse it? No. Does it explain it? Yes. An archive that does not explain is just a ledger of crimes and accidents."
A hint of something like a smile touched Yama's stern lips. "You have become more than your station, Chronicler. Or perhaps, you have finally stepped into it fully. The soul known as Karna was always a nexus, a point where countless fates converged and diverged. It seems that quality persists."
Yama extended a hand. A new, blank orb, larger than the others, appeared. "Very well. We shall have a new collection. Not the Archive of Lived Fact, but the Annex of Understood Lives. You will be its librarian. You will curate these connections. You will show the souls who come here not just the cold record of their deeds, but the tapestry their life helped weave—the unintended kindnesses, the pains that forged strength in others, the love that persisted even in error."
It was a monumental task. An eternal one. The Chronicler felt no dread, only a profound sense of rightness. This was his next dharma. Not as a warrior, not as a king, but as a weaver of meaning.
He set to work. His first major exhibit was his own life. He did not shy from his mistakes. He displayed the moment of Draupadi's insult in stark clarity. But from it, he drew threads—to her unwavering resolve later, to the laws protecting women that would be strengthened because of her outrage, to the millions of women who would hear her story and find their own voice. He showed his loyalty to Duryodhana, and threads flew to the concept of friendship itself, to ballads sung in villages about the friend who stood by the friend, flawed as they were.
Souls began to visit the new annex. A warrior consumed by guilt for those he killed saw how his death had allowed his enemy's son to return home to a family, breaking a cycle of vengeance. A mother who died grieving a stillborn child saw the ripple of her lost love inspire her husband to found a hospice.
The Annex did not offer forgiveness; that was not its purpose. It offered context. It offered the solace of connection, the understanding that no life, however small or flawed, was an isolated event. It was a thread in a vast, beautiful, often tragic, but endlessly interconnected fabric.
One day, a particularly luminous soul entered. It was Draupadi. She went straight to the display of her own life, observing the threads that sprouted from her moments of agony. She stood for a long time before the thread that connected the dice hall to Karna's orb. She reached out, not to the thread of insult, but to a smaller, subtler one he had woven—a thread from that moment to a later one, where Karna, alone in his tent on the eve of war, stared at his hands, a flicker of shame crossing his face for the first time.
She turned to the Chronicler. "You show his regret."
"It was there," the Chronicler said, his voice his own, yet layered with Karna's resonance. "It was small, and it was late. But it was true."
Draupadi nodded slowly. "Truth is rarely simple." She looked at him, really looked. "You have found a strange peace, son of Surya."
"I have found a purpose," he corrected gently. "To help others find their own peace through understanding. The arrow is fired. We cannot stop it. But we can trace its flight, see what it stirred in the air, what it inadvertently nourished when it finally came to earth."
Draupadi offered a slight, regal nod—not absolution, but acknowledgement. She moved on, studying the tapestry of her own epic.
The Chronicler returned to his work. The library of lost facts was immense. But his annex of understood lives was growing, thread by thread, connection by connection. He was no longer Karna, the tragic hero. He was no longer just the Chronicler, the detached keeper.
He was the Librarian of the Lost, helping the departed read between the lines of their own stories. In the silent, grey eternity of the City of the Ancestors, he was weaving a tapestry of light from the threads of their sorrows and their joys, proving that even in the aftermath of epic tragedy, meaning could be curated, connection could be found, and no story, not even the most painful, was ever truly alone. His own golden orb, now at the centre of a sprawling, radiant web, finally pulsed with a light that was not just brilliant, but deeply, profoundly warm.