The children had a dozen small reasons to be afraid.
They sat on their heels in a rough semicircle beneath the neem, eyes bright in the dusk. One held a chipped terracotta bowl; another clutched a strip of cloth as if it were a talisman. They whispered and watched the man on the cot the way people watch a lamp on the verge of going out—half hoping, half certain it will fail.
He twitched.
A shoulder jerked as if struck by a remembered blow. His brow creased; he mouthed a sound like someone trying to hold half a phrase and losing it. Little beads of sweat mapped dark paths down his temples. For a long moment the children only watched, breath held like a wire. Then one of them, braver than the rest, leaned forward.
"He's having a bad dream," she said in a tiny voice.
"He's fighting in his sleep," another whispered.
"He's old," the first child said finally, as if that answered everything.
They did not know the truth: that the man's body was remembering two kinds of storms at once—one from a lifetime of slow decay, the other from a fresh violence in the road's mud. His skin had the thin look of someone who had been away from steady food. His chest rose and fell, stubborn as an animal refusing to give up.
Chotu sat closest. He had not slept the night before; he had kept watch and changed bandages until his hands ached. He rubbed water across the stranger's forehead with the careful motions his mother had taught him. The man's eyelids fluttered and for a second something like a smile tried to dare the curve of his mouth, then failed.
The stranger's lips formed a word that didn't come out clean. The children heard it and leaned in, as if a name might be the spark that made the dream stop.
"Raghu—" the man muttered, half-sound, half-memory.
Chotu's hand stilled. He did not know the name fully, only that an old woman in the courtyard had said it earlier. The word fit the place the way a borrowed pot fits a shelf; it made him think of the road and the way carts creaked at night.
Then the dream changed.
Where the neem's shadow had been, light folded into a bright white that hurt his eyes. A sound like a high bell—sharp, clinical—shredded the village hush. He saw faces bent over a rectangle of light: small bright panes where thumbs moved like mice. He smelled something that burned not like wood but like white cleanliness. Children sat in seats while walls held up lists. Men argued with papers that had the authority of law but none of the weight of living.
The images did not come in order. They stacked: a ledger, a hand blotting ink, a teacher who taught children to recite and not to ask, a market where a trader measured grain and wrote numbers into a book, and the slow shrinking of things that mattered—the music of festivals, the rough laughter in alehouses, the slow, private rituals people used to keep themselves steady.
In the dream the man was older, old enough that his hands shook, and he had watched this corrosion happen like a man watching a leak run its way into a wall. He had argued in small rooms with men who wore the same politeness as leopards. He had tapped out letters, pushed petitions, shown ledgers where numbers had been made to lie. People had smiled politely and then filed their signatures. He had not been violent. He had believed that careful speech could bind anger into sense. The world, he had thought, could be mended with patient insistence.
The bell changed again. The white light became a small oil lamp, its wick bobbing. The antiseptic smell thinned to the smell of boiled lentils and cow smoke. A nurse's whisper became the soft croon of an old woman calling children home. The nurse's gloved hand was now a callused hand that offered bread.
Sound and place folded into each other. The edges of time frayed. Clinic and temple overlapped like two panes of glass set at a wrong angle; neither was clear without the other. The old man in the dream—if he could be called an old man in both lives—felt the two pull at his chest and could not decide which pain to follow.
The modern scenes condensed into three facts that lodged in him not as dates but as truths he had learned the hard way: a trading company had used its trade to set itself above rulers; an emperor's command had thinned when money no longer followed it; and a region's surrender had begun not with banners falling but with ledgers opening. Each image pressed into him like a lesson burned into a palm.
He did not wake with full knowledge. He woke with the knowledge of patterns—how power slips when people pay for protection and then lose the habit of asking why they pay. He woke with the shape of decay rather than a map of names. It was enough.
When he opened his eyes properly, the neem leaves trembled in the early wind. The children's faces turned toward him—bright, earnest, an odd kind of hunger in their eyes. They looked at him as if he were a story they had been told and had finally reached the page where something happened.
He tried to move. For a second he was the old man with a stubborn will. He eased his shoulder down and pushed at the cot with the sort of thought that has learned to make small, useful motions. He wanted to sit. He wanted to stand. He wanted to say a word that would place himself in the world again.
His left side rebelled. A hot flare of pain ran from ribs into shoulder and he gasped. The motion that should have been simple—push, shift, breathe—turned into a small avalanche. He made it half upright and then the room spun in the kind of slow, blue way that warns a man: do not trust your legs.
He came down like someone losing a plank beneath his feet. Wood thudded; children stifled cries. Chotu lunged and caught one elbow, and two women jumped forward and took the rest of him as if their arms were trained for that very moment.
"Arre… easy , You're still hurt," one of them whispered, though he had not yet a right to the name. The word landed on the man like a net and did not feel entirely false.
For a long minute they held him and fussed and spoke in low words of comfort and inventory: cloth, poultice, warm water. He felt them as a tide: hands that smoothed, voices that told him he was not alone. Pain and gratitude braided together and his breath slowed.
The children pressed forward again, braver now that their fear had arms behind it. One of them asked in a voice too small for his face: "What did you see, sir? The city?"
The man tried to answer. He found he could not neatly place the thing he had seen into the small categories the children knew. He could have said, perhaps, that he had dreamed of a place where numbers ruled more than hearts. He could have said that he had watched a slow theft where names were turned into sums. Instead he let the idea come out like a stone skimming water.
"Times change," he said, the voice rough. "Ways change. People forget why they learn."
Chotu's face folded into puzzlement. The children tilted their heads. No one in the circle knew the word for the shape of the danger he carried. They only knew that what he said had the sound of warning, and also the faint comfort of order.
He closed his eyes also, not to sleep but to focus the small light he had. Memory hummed in him—methods not weapons: how to keep a trader's eye sharp, how to read a clerk's pause, how to ask a question so that it opens instead of blinds. He felt the things he could teach like tools warmed by his palm.
He looked once more at the strip of cloth tied to his wrist—the gift the chief had handed him earlier—and he smoothed it with his fingers. It was a small thing, but it reminded him that his work could begin from smallities. He had no army. He had no claim. He had only questions to give away.
He opened his eyes, and the dawn light cut a path across the courtyard.
Violence is loud, he thought, and then another thought came, as sharp as a new blade: Ignorance waits. It does not rush; it lingers, patient as a root.
He did not know how long he would have. He did not know the names of those who would later speak of battles and heroes. He only understood this: if he taught them how to see the counting behind the commands, they might learn to hold their own lives like something precious—and perhaps, in time, the ledger would learn to show a different story.
He pushed his hand into Chotu's and let the boy feel his grip—a weak pressure, but his. The children leaned in like students at the first lesson. They did not yet know they were students.
The man who had once watched a civilization forget took the first small breath of a new life and let the long work begin.