Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati...
Deep in the southern forests, where the Sal trees grew so thick they drank the sound, there existed a hermitage that was not on any map. It was known as Moksha-van, the Grove of Release, and it was a refuge for those who had fled the world of names and deeds. Its master was an ascetic known only as Gautam, a man whose past was a closed book, his eyes holding the stillness of a mountain lake at dawn.
One monsoon season, a violent storm tore through the forest, uprooting ancient trees. In its aftermath, the hermits found a man lying broken in the mud of a swollen stream. He was near death, his body a tapestry of terrible, half-healed wounds and fresh trauma. His face was gaunt, his hair matted with blood and leaves. They carried him to the hermitage.
For many days, he hovered between life and death. Gautam himself tended to him, applying poultices of healing herbs, chanting quiet mantras. When the man finally opened his eyes, they held a vortex of confusion and pain. He had no memory. He knew how to breathe, to swallow, to stand, but he knew not his name, his home, or the source of the deep, aching hollow in his chest. The only thing that felt familiar, an anchor in the sea of his amnesia, was a sense of immense, unshakable resolve. A feeling of a promise made, a line drawn in the soul.
Gautam named him Avirat, the Unwavering.
Avirat recovered slowly. He took to the life of the hermitage with a quiet intensity. He performed the most arduous tasks—hauling water, chopping wood, repairing huts—with a strength that belied his scarred frame. He spoke little, listened much. But the other ascetics noticed strange things. Avirat could not bear the sound of dice being cast (a travelling merchant's game had sent him into a silent, trembling rage). He was fiercely protective of the hermitage's few women, treating them with a deference that bordered on reverence. And once, when a young brahmachari was struggling to bend a new bow, Avirat had, without thinking, taken it from him, strung it with effortless, muscle-memory grace, and fired an arrow that split a falling leaf in two—before staring at his own hands in bewilderment.
The hollow feeling in him yearned for something. It wasn't for family, or wealth, or power. It was for a person. The feeling was of a star searching for its constellation.
One day, a group of troubled pilgrims arrived at Moksha-van. They were from a border village, caught in a vicious land dispute with a local landlord's son, a cruel man named Jarasand. The landlord's men had stolen their harvest, poisoned their well, and threatened their children. The village headman, an old man named Vasu, pleaded with Gautam for advice, for intervention, for any shred of dharma.
Gautam listened, his face serene but sad. "We are men of peace here. We have renounced violence. We can offer you shelter, prayers, but we cannot raise a hand in anger. Perhaps you must submit, or perhaps you must flee."
A collective despair settled over the pilgrims. Submission meant slavery. Flight meant starvation.
Avirat, who had been silently tending the fire nearby, stood up. His movement was not loud, but it carried a sudden, physical weight that silenced the grove. All eyes turned to him.
"No," he said. The word was quiet, but it fell like a stone.
Gautam looked at him, surprised. "Avirat? This is not our path."
Avirat's eyes, usually clouded with forgetfulness, were suddenly clear and sharp, the colour of a winter sky. "There is a path before dharma, and a path after it fails. When dharma is silent, someone must speak for those who cannot." His voice, though unused to speech, carried a forgotten timbre of command. "I will go."
"You are one man," Gautam said gently. "And you have sworn no vow to these people."
"I have sworn a vow," Avirat replied, and the certainty in his voice shook him as much as the others. He didn't know what vow, but he felt its iron grip around his heart. "To stand against the strong when they oppress the weak. That is the vow. It is… the only thing I am sure of."
Against Gautam's advice, Avirat left with the villagers. He did not take a weapon. He took only a staff of solid Sal wood and the rough clothes on his back.
The village was a picture of misery. The fields were scorched, the people cowed. Jarasand, a man with the eyes of a bored predator, laughed when he saw Avirat. "A hermit? Have you come to preach to me about karma?"
"I have come to tell you to leave these people alone," Avirat said, standing between the villagers and the landlord's thugs. "Return what you have stolen. Dig a new well. Then go."
Jarasand's laughter died. He gestured, and four of his men advanced.
What happened next was not a fight; it was a revelation. Avirat moved with a preternatural economy. He was not brawling; he was disarming. His staff became a blur, striking wrists, knees, and pressure points. He moved through the men, his every motion precise, controlled, and utterly without malice. He disabled them in moments, leaving them groaning on the ground, their weapons scattered. He hadn't broken a single bone, but he had broken their will.
Jarasand stared, his face pale with fury and fear. "Who… what are you?"
Avirat looked at his own hands, then at the fallen men. A memory-fragment pierced the fog: the feel of a bowstring, the controlled chaos of a battlefield, the imperative to subdue, not slaughter. "I am a man who keeps his promises," he said, his voice low. "Now. The grain. The well."
For a week, Jarasand's men, under Avirat's watchful eye, returned the stolen grain and laboured to dig a clean, deep well for the village. The villagers watched in awe. Avirat did not celebrate. He stood guard, his silent presence a shield. At night, he did not sleep in any hut. He sat under the village banyan tree, as if standing a solitary watch.
On the final day, as the new well was consecrated, a travelling katha-vachak, a storyteller, arrived at the village. He was welcomed with food and water. In the evening, by the communal fire, he began to recite. He chose, as many did, a passage from the great war. He spoke of the seventeenth day. Of a great warrior, abandoned by fate, his chariot wheel stuck in the earth. Of his enemy, poised to strike. And of the warrior's final, magnificent words.
"And the great Karna," the storyteller intoned, his voice rising, "stood tall in the face of death. He lowered his bow. He said, 'The codes of war forbid an attack on a warrior who is distracted, who is without his chariot. Remember your honour, Arjuna!'"
Karna. The name hit Avirat like a physical blow. The hollow in his chest roared. Fragments of a thousand dreams—golden armour, a friend's hand on his shoulder, a weeping woman in a forest, the smell of sandalwood and sorrow—coalesced around that name.
The storyteller continued. "But Krishna, on Arjuna's chariot, replied: 'And did you remember honour, Karna, when Draupadi was insulted? This is not just a war of codes, but of consequences.' And so, Arjuna fired the fatal arrow."
The villagers sighed, the familiar tragedy washing over them.
But Avirat stood up. Everyone turned. His face was ashen, but his eyes blazed.
"That is not the point," Avirat said, his voice no longer that of a quiet hermit, but ringing with a king's authority.
The storyteller blinked. "I… I recite the sacred text, honoured one."
"The text records the action," Avirat said, stepping into the firelight. He seemed taller. "It does not record the vow." He looked around at the villagers, at their attentive faces. "Don't you see? The question of honour was a diversion. The real story is the vow. He stood by Duryodhana, a flawed man, because Duryodhana gave him honour when the world gave him only mud. That was his vow. It was a stupid vow! A tragic vow! But he kept it. To the very end. He valued loyalty above consequence, above even his own life."
He was breathing hard, not from anger, but from the agony of remembering. "We remember him for his charity, for his skill, for his tragedy. But we forget his core. He was a man of his word. Even when his word led him into darkness. That unwavering… that…" He clutched his chest. "That is the vow. The unbroken vow. It was the only thing he truly owned."
He turned and walked away from the fire, into the darkness beyond the village. The people were silent, stunned. The storyteller simply bowed his head, as if in the presence of a living commentary on his own tale.
Avirat walked until he reached a cliff overlooking the forest. The moon was high. The memories were returning now, not as a flood, but as a sobering, painful dawn. He remembered it all. The loneliness, the gratitude, the battles, the mistakes, the final, serene release on the field of Kurukshetra. He remembered his death.
He was Karna. And he was not.
He had died. That story was complete. This… this was something else. A resonance. An echo of the core principle that had defined him, stripped of its specific history, its personal attachments. He was the Vow incarnate. The unwavering principle of loyalty itself, given a second form to walk the earth, untethered from its original, flawed object.
He understood now why he had no memory. The universe had given him a clean slate, to see if the core quality—the fidelity, the unwavering resolve—could exist without the baggage of the past. Could it be applied wisely?
He had just defended a village. That was good. But he had done it with the same single-minded intensity with which he had once defended a corrupt cause. The quality was neutral. Its morality depended on its application.
Gautam found him there at dawn. The old ascetic looked at him, and in his wise eyes, Avirat saw that Gautam had known, or suspected, all along.
"You remember," Gautam stated.
"I am not him," Avirat said. "I am… what was left when the man was gone. The promise without the promiser."
"And what will you do with it?" Gautam asked.
Avirat looked out at the waking forest, at the village below where people were drawing their first water from the new well. "He made a vow to a person, and it blinded him. I have the same… engine within me. But I have no person to bind it to. So, I will bind it to an idea. Not to a Duryodhana, but to the principle he failed: justice for the powerless. I will be the vow that stands in the gap when dharma sleeps."
Gautam nodded slowly. "A vow to protect, not to possess. A loyalty to the ideal, not the individual. It is a harder path. A lonelier one."
"Lonely," Avirat agreed, a ghost of Karna's old, wry smile touching his lips. "That, I remember how to do."
He did not return to the hermitage. He became a wanderer. Not a hermit, not a king, but a kshetra-pala, a field-guardian. Stories began to spread of a nameless, scarred man who would appear in places of oppression, who could not be bribed or threatened, who fought with impossible skill but never killed, who always asked, "Where is the debt of honour?" and "Who is without a voice?"
He was a rumour, a corrective force, a living reminder.
In a tavern, years later, a bard would sing of the great Karna's tragic loyalty. A traveller in a worn cloak, sitting in the shadows, would listen. When the song ended, someone might ask the traveller his opinion.
The traveller would take a slow drink, his eyes distant. "Loyalty is a fire," he might say, his voice rough with roads. "It can warm a home or burn a kingdom down. The man in the song… he never learned to tend his fire. He let it consume him, and all he wished to protect." He would place a coin on the table. "But the fire itself is not to blame. Only its direction."
And he would walk out into the night, a solitary figure, the embodiment of an unbroken vow, still searching for the right thing to which he could be eternally, unwavering true. He was the lesson of Karna, walking. Not the story, but its moral, armed with a staff and a memory of what happens when a promise becomes a cage. His was the vow that had learned, and in learning, had been set free to serve not a king, but kindness itself.