Write ✍️ by Parmod Kumar Prajapati.....
At the highest point of the ruined city of Angapuri, where the wind smelled of old stone and forgotten rains, stood the Tower of Dawn. Its top had been shattered by some forgotten calamity, leaving a broken crown of masonry open to the sky. Within this crown hung a single, enormous bronze bell. It was black with centuries of patina, and no clapper hung within its silent mouth. It was known as the Karna-Ghanta, the Bell of the Sun's Son. Legend said it had not been struck by human hands in over three hundred years. Not since the day its maker, the king himself, had left for the war that did not end.
The tower and its bell were the domain of an old, half-blind bell-warden named Rohit. His sole duty, passed down through his family for generations, was not to ring the bell, but to ensure it was never rung. He swept the guano from its great shoulders, he checked the massive, rusting iron chains that suspended it from the crumbling beams, he warded off treasure-hunters and foolish youths who thought its ringing might summon forgotten power. The city below had moved on. It was a bustling, pragmatic place now, trading in silk and spices, its new temples dedicated to more modern, manageable gods. The bell was considered a relic, a tourist curiosity. Rohit was its lonely, stubborn priest.
He knew the story, of course. The standard one. King Karna, in a fit of his legendary generosity, had commissioned the greatest bell in the world to hang in his city's highest tower. It was to be rung only in moments of supreme joy or dire peril for the kingdom. It was cast from the melted-down gifts of a hundred grateful petitioners, mixed with bronze from his own chariot fittings. On the day it was raised, they said, he had struck it once himself. The sound was so pure, so deep, it was not heard with the ears, but felt in the bones. It made the river stand in waves and the distant hills echo for an hour. Birds fell silent for a day. Then he had ordered the clapper removed. "A bell that is never rung," he had reportedly said, "holds all possible sounds within it. It is a reservoir of silence for a noisy world."
Rohit thought this was philosophical nonsense. A bell's purpose was to ring. This one was a beautiful, useless weight. His great-grandfather had told him a different, more private story, whispered in the family. A story of a flaw.
One evening, a man climbed the thousand worn steps to the broken crown. He was not a tourist. He was a shilpi, a master sculptor from the south, named Arun. His hands were stained with stone-dust and his eyes held the keen, assessing look of one who understood form and stress. He had heard of the legendary bell and came to see it, he said, for its artistic merit.
Rohit, wary, allowed him to inspect it. Arun walked around the colossal bronze form, his fingers not touching, but measuring the air an inch from its surface. He noted the exquisite, faint relief work—not gods or kings, but scenes of daily Anga life: potters at wheels, farmers sowing, fishermen casting nets, a king walking among them, his face in profile, indistinguishable from the others.
"The craftsmanship… it is peerless," Arun breathed. "But the patina… it hides something." His sharp eyes caught what Rohit's half-blind ones could not: a hairline fracture, a flaw in the casting, running like a delicate, sinister vine from the bell's crown down its shoulder. "This bell," Arun said, his voice hushed with a sculptor's horror, "is under immense stress. The metal is fatigued. The chains are rusted to a thread. The next big storm, a particularly strong gust of wind… it could crack. It could fall."
Rohit felt a cold dread that had nothing to do with his duty. It was a deeper fear. The end of a vigil. "What can be done?"
"It must be taken down. Carefully. Or reinforced with a support frame. It will be expensive. It will be difficult." Arun looked at the old warden. "Or… we could let nature take its course. It is, after all, just an old bell."
"No," Rohit said, the word leaving him before he could think. It wasn't duty that spoke. It was the whispered family story. "It is not just a bell."
That night, under a gibbous moon, Rohit told Arun the other story. The one not in the ballads.
"My great-grandfather was an apprentice in the bell-foundry," Rohit began, his voice blending with the wind in the tower. "He said the king was there every day. Not as an overseer, but as a worker. He carried ingots, he fed the furnace. On the day of the final casting, there was a… an accident. A crucible was overfilled. Molten bronze threatened to spill, to ruin the mold and kill men. The king… he did something no one could explain. He didn't shout. He walked to the searing flow, and he placed his hand on the lip of the crucible channel. My great-grandfather said his skin did not burn. A golden light, like captured sunlight, glowed from his palm and stemmed the flow, guiding it perfectly into the mold."
Rohit pointed to the hairline crack Arun had seen. "But the moment of power passed. The heat, the strain… it left a weakness in the metal. A memory of that saved, but desperate, moment. The king knew. He looked at the perfect, cooling bell and saw the hidden flaw. He smiled, a sad smile. He said, 'So it holds my failure, too. Good. A thing that is only perfect is a lie.' That is why he removed the clapper. Not to preserve 'all possible sounds.' But because he knew the bell was fragile. Its one true ring would be its last. It would shatter. And the sound of that shattering… he said it would be 'the truth of Anga.' Whatever that means."
Arun listened, his cynical artist's heart pierced by the tale. He looked at the bell anew. It wasn't a relic. It was a captured moment of sacrifice and imperfection. A king's vulnerability frozen in bronze.
"We must save it," Arun said, his decision made.
They worked in secret. Arun designed a delicate, elegant cage of forged iron that would fit around the bell's shoulders, supporting its weight without obscuring its artistry. Rohit petitioned the city council for funds, speaking not of legend, but of civic heritage and tourist revenue. They granted a pittance. The rest came from Arun's own savings and Rohit selling his few valuables.
The work was nerve-wracking. Any sudden shift could be catastrophic. As they prepared to lower the bell into its new support, a summer storm gathered on the horizon. Not a gentle rain, but a vengeful gale, the kind that had toppled spires before.
"We must wait," Rohit said, fear in his voice.
"If we wait, the storm will do what we are trying to prevent," Arun countered, his face set. "We do it now."
They worked as the first thunderheads blotted out the sun. The wind began to howl through the broken tower. As they eased the final chain, the heart-stopping crack of aged metal sounded. One of the ancient, main support chains snapped. The bell lurched, tilting violently. The hairline flaw groaned, widening visibly.
"It's going to fall!" Rohit cried.
Arun, thinking only of preserving the art, threw his weight against the bell, a futile human gesture against tons of falling bronze. Rohit did not think of the bell. He thought of the story. Of the hand on the crucible. Of the flaw that was a memory.
He did not try to catch the bell. He did something inexplicable. He turned his back to the tilting giant and slammed his own frail body, his shoulder, against the iron support frame Arun had built, shoving it with all his strength into the path of the bell's fall.
The bell struck the iron frame with a sound that was not a ring, but a deafening, metallic scream. The impact reverberated through the stone tower. The flawed bronze, struck not by a gentle clapper but by the shock of its own salvation, did not shatter.
It sang.
The sound was unimaginable. It was not one note, but a chord containing within it the scream of molten metal, the sigh of a tired king, the laughter of potters, the weeping of a river, the twang of a bowstring, and the silent, empty sound of a sunlit sky after a battle. It was the sound of a flaw accepting its purpose. It was the "truth of Anga"—not a triumphant fanfare, but a complex, beautiful, painful, and enduring resonance.
The wave of sound pulsed outwards, visible as a ripple in the rain-lashed air. It swept over the city. In the marketplace, haggling stopped as every heart莫名 felt a pang of forgotten pride and sorrow. In the new temples, the modern gods on their altars seemed to momentarily still. A potter, shaping a jar, felt his clay suddenly center itself with a will of its own. An old woman telling a story to her grandson forgot her words, her eyes filling with tears for a king she had never known.
The sound lasted only seven seconds. Then it faded, leaving a silence deeper than any that had come before.
In the tower, the dust settled. The bell rested securely in its new iron cradle. The flaw was now a visible, proud, dark seam on its surface—no longer a secret, but a scar that had sung.
Arun picked himself up, stunned. Rohit lay on the stones, his shoulder bruised, a smile of utter peace on his face. He could hear again. Not the silence he had guarded, but the echo of the song now inside him.
The bell never rang again. It didn't need to. Its one true sound was now part of the city's substance. People began to call it the Undying Bell, not because it wouldn't fall, but because its single song had been a summary of a life, and life, once truly expressed, does not die.
Rohit still tended the tower. But now, pilgrims would climb the steps, not to see a silent relic, but to stand in the presence of the bell that had sung its flaw. They would place their hands on the cool bronze, over the dark scar, and some claimed they could feel a faint, remembered vibration—the echo of a generosity that included failure, of a strength that admitted weakness, of a king who was not a distant sun, but a man whose greatest act was not giving away gold, but sharing his own fragile humanity, cast in bronze and saved by the desperate, loving weight of a faithful warden.
The Undying Bell held no more possible sounds. It had released its one, true, magnificent note. And in doing so, it taught the city that the most powerful resonance is not that of perfection, but of a saved and celebrated flaw, ringing across centuries.