Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati....
They called the field Kuru-Patal, the Hell of the Kurus. For twelve miles in every direction, the earth was different. It was not fertile. It did not welcome seed. Wheat grew stunted and bitter. Trees, if they grew at all, twisted into agonized shapes, their leaves a perpetual, sickly yellow. The wells dug here yielded water that tasted of metal and memory. It was a place of ghosts, not the kind that wailed, but the kind that sank. Their sorrow had seeped into the soil and poisoned it.
The nearby villagers avoided it, crossing themselves with gestures older than any god. They said the ground remembered the weight of a million dying men, the iron tang of blood, the crack of breaking bones, the final whispered names. They said it was cursed by the very concept of war.
Only one man lived on the border of Kuru-Patal. His name was Moksh, which meant 'release', a bitterly ironic name given by parents who died in a famine, hoping for a better destiny for their son. He was a gaunt man in his forties, with eyes the colour of the field's dusty earth and hands that were more root than flesh. He was a gardener. Or, more accurately, he was a man who gardened where gardening was an act of madness.
His hut was a slapped-together thing of mud and salvaged timber. His plot was a hundred paces square, carved stubbornly into the blighted margin of the great field. For twenty years, he had tried to make things grow here. For twenty years, he had failed. He planted pulse. It rotted in the ground. He planted gourds. The vines sprouted, then blackened and shriveled as if scorched by an unseen fire. He planted hardy, thorny desert shrubs. They lived, but they grew inward, their thorns turned on themselves.
The villagers thought him a harmless fool. Children dared each other to throw stones at his hut. They called him Bhumi-Pagal, the Earth-Madman.
Moksh didn't care. He had a memory, not his own, but one passed down from his grandmother, who had it from her mother. It was not of gods or kings, but of a moment of mundane, heartbreaking kindness.
"At the height of the war," his grandmother would whisper, her voice like dry leaves, "the great armies were camped, chewing the land to mud. A small boy—my mother's brother—wandered from our village, starving. He crept into the Kaurava camp, drawn by the smell of food. He was caught stealing a handful of barley flour. A soldier raised a whip. But a man stopped him. A tall man, with eyes tired of looking at death. He wasn't in royal armour that day, just simple clothes. He took the flour from the boy's hand, then went to his own tent. He came back with a full bag. Not just barley. There were dates, and jaggery. He gave it to the boy and said, 'The hunger of a child is the only true defeat in war. Go. Tell your mother the war will not take this from you.' That man," she would say, her old eyes gleaming, "was Karna. The Surya Putra. Before the world broke him, and before he helped break the world."
That story was the seed in Moksh's soul. If a moment of kindness could exist here, in the heart of the machine of slaughter, then perhaps kindness could also return. Perhaps the earth could be persuaded to remember something other than blood.
His methods were not those of a farmer. He did not just till and sow. He listened. He would lie on the cracked ground, his ear to the soil, for hours. The villagers swore they saw him do it, and crossed the road to avoid him. But Moksh wasn't hearing voices. He was feeling vibrations—deep, old, trapped vibrations of pain. The ground thrummed with it, a subsonic dirge.
One day, his spade struck something that wasn't stone. He dug carefully. It was a shard of pottery, but unlike any he'd seen. Thick, strong, with a faded, painted line of ochre. A soldier's mess plate. He cleaned it and placed it not on a shelf, but at the corner of his plot. A marker.
The next week, he found a rusted arrowhead, its lethal point bent. Then a bronze buckle, shaped like a lion. A single, crumbling leather sandal. A small, broken clay horse—a child's toy lost in the camp. Each find, he treated not as trash, but as an artifact. He cleaned them gently and placed them at intervals around his garden, like boundary stones. He began to speak to them, not as a madman talks to objects, but as a host acknowledging guests. "You were a man from Avanti," he'd say to the buckle. "You liked lions. You must have been brave." To the toy horse: "You were loved. I am sorry you were lost."
He wasn't gardening soil anymore. He was gardening memory.
He changed what he planted. He gave up on food. He planted flowers. Not any flowers. He planted Kashaya, the Sorrow-Flower, a fragile, grey-petaled bloom that was said to grow on graves. He planted Rakta-Kamal, the Blood Lotus, not for its name, but because its roots were tenacious. He planted Shami, the ironwood tree, sacred to the fulfillment of vows. He watered them not just from his bitter well, but with rainwater he collected in clean pots. He sang to them, old planting songs from his grandmother's time, songs that had no heroes, only seasons.
For three years, nothing changed. The sorrow-flowers died. The lotus roots rotted. The Shami sapling turned to brittle kindling.
Then, in the fourth year, a single Kashaya plant survived. It didn't thrive, but it didn't die. It put out one small, grey, perfect flower. Moksh wept when he saw it. It was the first beautiful thing Kuru-Patal had produced in centuries.
The flower lasted a day, then wilted. But the plant lived. The next year, there were two.
News, as it does, trickled out. The madman on the blighted field had grown a flower. A pilgrim, a scholar of forgotten histories named Shanti, heard the tale. Intrigued, she made the arduous journey to the edge of Kuru-Patal. She found Moksh on his knees, whispering to a small patch of struggling Blood Lotus.
She watched him for a long time before approaching. "You are trying to heal it," she said, not as a question.
Moksh looked up, startled by a voice that wasn't his own. "I am trying to give it a different memory to hold."
Shanti was a historian. She carried scrolls and maps. She sat with him that evening in his hut. "The earth remembers everything," she said. "But memory is layered. You have uncovered a layer of objects. But the pain is deeper. It is in the chemistry of spilled life, in the psychic shock of countless violent ends. You cannot plant over a scream."
"Then what?" Moksh asked, despair creeping in for the first time. The one flower had felt like a promise. Now it felt like a taunt.
Shanti unrolled a map. It was not of kingdoms, but of the battle. She pointed to positions, divisions, the ebb and flow of the eighteen days. "The greatest concentration of death," she said, her finger tracing a central line, "was here. Where the final, climactic duels took place. Where the great heroes fell. Bhishma's bed of arrows was to the north. Here," she tapped a spot, "is where Abhimanyu was killed. And here," her finger moved a fraction, "is where Karna fell."
Moksh stared at the spot. It was a mile into the field from his hut.
"The earth there holds the deepest trauma. The shock of a solar force being extinguished. If your gardening is to mean anything… that is the ground you must till."
It was a terrifying prospect. Venturing into the heart of the field, where even birds did not fly. But the seed of his grandmother's story sprouted again. The hunger of a child is the only true defeat.
"Will you show me?" he asked.
Together, they walked into Kuru-Patal. The air grew heavier, the silence more profound. The very light seemed stained. They found the area Shanti's maps indicated. The ground was not different to the eye, but Moksh felt it. A deep, cold thrumming, a vortex of silent anguish. He fell to his knees, not in prayer, but in overwhelm.
Shanti placed a hand on his shoulder. "What will you plant here?"
Moksh had no seeds left. He had only the story. He closed his eyes and spoke it aloud, there on the blood-drenched earth. He told of the hungry boy, the raised whip, the tall man with tired eyes, the bag of barley, dates, and jaggery. He poured the story into the ground like water.
When he finished, he had an idea. Not of planting, but of exchanging.
He returned to his hut. From his small stash, he took his last handful of precious, sweet jaggery. He returned to the spot. He dug a small hole, not to plant, but to bury. He placed the jaggery in the earth, a direct, tangible echo of the king's gift. "You gave sweetness once," he whispered to the memory in the ground. "Let the earth remember the sweetness, not just the blood."
He did not plant a flower. He simply covered the jaggery and left.
Weeks passed. Then, one morning, Moksh saw a hint of green on the spot. Not a flower he had sown. A plant he did not recognize. A tender, soft shoot with tiny, silvery leaves. He cared for it, protecting it from the harsh sun with a screen. It grew slowly, stubbornly. It became a low, spreading shrub.
In time, it bore fruit. Not large fruit. Small, hard, green berries. They ripened to a deep, luminous gold. Moksh dared to taste one. It was not sweet like jaggery. Its flavour was indescribable—complex, with a hint of sorrow, a burst of unexpected warmth, and a final, clean aftertaste like forgiveness. He named it Karna-Phal, the Fruit of the Son.
He did not hoard it. He began to give the berries away to the very villagers who had mocked him. Hesitantly, they took them. They ate. They reported strange dreams—dreams not of battle, but of quiet moments: a soldier sharing water, two enemies binding each other's wounds under a truce flag, a musician playing a flute in a lull between clashes.
The berries did not erase the past. They reframed it. They forced the memory of the field to include not just the rupture, but the myriad small acts of humanity that had persisted even within it.
Moksh's garden began to change. The sorrow-flowers now grew in clusters, their grey somehow softer. The Blood Lotus bloomed, its red not garish, but profound. The Shami tree, once stunted, now reached towards the sun, its branches strong.
People began to come, not to gawk, but to sit. They would bring their own small offerings—a pinch of turmeric, a sprig of tulsi—and bury them at the edges of the field, speaking names of ancestors lost to wars old and new. The blight began to recede, not everywhere, but in a slow, green wave emanating from Moksh's plot and from the golden-berry shrub at the heart of the field.
Years later, a very old Shanti returned with a delegation of scholars. They took samples of the soil, tested the water from Moksh's well. The metallic taste was gone. The earth was healing.
One scholar, a rationalist, scoffed. "It is simply natural remediation. The toxins have finally broken down. The man is just a fortunate fool in the right place at the right time."
Shanti led him to the golden-berry shrub. She picked a single berry and handed it to him. "Taste the science," she said.
The man ate it. His cynical eyes widened, then grew distant. He sat down heavily on the ground. After a long time, he said, "I saw my father. He died in the border skirmishes. He was… smiling. He was whittling a toy for me." The rationalist wept.
Moksh, now an old man himself, simply tended his garden. He was no longer Bhumi-Pagal. He was Kshetra-Rakshak, the Guardian of the Field. He understood now. He wasn't just growing plants. He was a gardener of consciousness, tending the memory of the earth itself. The greatest charity, he realized, was not giving gold, but giving a story back to a place that had only known the ending. The jaggery in the earth had been a seed of context, and from it grew a fruit that allowed the past to be digested, not just regretted.
The field of Kuru-Patal would never be fertile farmland. The scars were too deep. But it became something else: a living memorial. A place where the dominant note was no longer the scream of death, but the quiet, persistent hum of life stubbornly, kindly, insisting on a different narrative. And at its centre, a shrub with golden berries testified that even in the bloodiest ground, if you listen for the story of a single act of kindness and dare to replant it, something miraculous and bittersweet can take root. The Gardener had not conquered hell. He had simply planted a garden in one corner of it, and the hell, in its own slow, earthy way, had begun to respect the fence.