The first name I recognized came when I was four years old.

  It was early morning, and the mist still hung low in the fields outside our hut. My father was sharpening his bde on a whetstone, humming something off-key. My mother was blowing air onto a fire, trying to coax the fme into life. The smoke curled upward, catching in the gold of the rising sun.

  That’s when a soldier walked past our gate and said it.

  “Bhishma returns today. From court.”

  The moment I heard it, something tightened in my chest. Not fear. Not excitement.

  Recognition.

  A name like thunder wrapped in silk.

  Bhishma.

  The one who vowed never to marry. The one who gave up everything. The one whose silence cursed an entire generation.

  The name hit me like a hand on my shoulder from a world I thought I’d left behind.

  And in that instant, I remembered it all. My grandmother’s voice. My childhood bed. The stories she used to tell me when the fan died and the lights went out. Her hands on my hair. The way she said “Bhishma” like it was both blessing and burden.

  But this wasn’t her voice now. This wasn’t her story.

  This was him, and he was real, and he was alive.

  And I—Avyakta—was a child in his city.

  The Body I Was GivenI was born with dark skin, lean arms, and hands that looked too small for a sword. My father, Suryadatta, served in the standing army beneath the command of Bhishma himself—a loyal, proud, mid-ranking soldier. Respected. Not feared.

  My mother, Padmavati, came from a lesser noble line long fallen out of political relevance. She had gentle eyes and hard fingers. She spoke little and worked constantly, but when she looked at me, she often paused longer than she should have.

  They raised me with discipline. Not cruelty. Not indulgence. Just the kind of love that knew the world didn’t care about feelings.

  By the time I was three, I was standing straight. By four, I was watching men train with sticks and spears, copying their movements with a twig. My father noticed. He gave me an old, sand-weighted wooden sword to py with, but I didn’t py. I practiced.

  And I listened.

  To every name.

  To every whispered phrase.

  The Second NameI was helping my mother gather water when I heard it.

  Two women near the well were speaking excitedly, voices hushed but eager.

  “It’s true then,” one said. “Queen Kunti has given birth.”

  “A boy?” the other asked.

  “Yes. A son. The eldest.”

  “What do they call him?”

  “Yudhishthira.”

  I dropped the bucket.

  The sound of the wood hitting the stone rim echoed louder than it should have. My mother turned sharply, scolded me gently, but her voice was far away. I was already gone—pulled inward, spiraling into something old and heavy.

  Yudhishthira.

  The firstborn of Kunti. The son of Dharma. The future king.

  I had heard his name a thousand times before—but always in past tense. In stories. In verses. In old Mayam on warm nights beside an old woman whose voice cracked by candlelight.

  But now the name wasn’t a story.

  It was a birth announcement.

  The first line of an epic that hadn’t been written yet.

  And that’s when it hit me: I wasn’t living inside a myth. I was living before it.

  The Mahabharata wasn’t a book anymore. It was happening.

  And I was in it.

  Keeping It QuietI didn’t speak of it to anyone.

  Not to my father, who would’ve thought me strange.

  Not to my mother, who might’ve worried the boy she bore was cursed with odd dreams.

  Instead, I started watching more closely.

  I listened to how the nobles spoke of Bhishma—with reverence, yes, but also with fear.

  I studied how the soldiers changed their tone when speaking of the royal house. Who they respected. Who they distrusted. How often the names of Dhritarashtra, Pandu, and Vidura surfaced—and how the air shifted slightly each time.

  I stored it all.

  And that night, when I was alone in the courtyard, I found a sharp stone and scratched a few words into the hard-packed earth beneath the neem tree.

  Bhishma lives.Kunti has given birth.Yudhishthira is real.The story is starting.

  And then I stopped.Because something deeper, colder pressed against my chest.

  If the story is starting… does it mean I already know how it ends?

  Memory vs. WorldIn my past life, I had studied the Mahabharata from a distance—both as myth and metaphor. In the safe confines of a cssroom, it was a story of right and wrong, fate and choice, glory and ruin.

  But here—inside it—it was different.

  There was no music when Bhishma entered the city that week.No aura. No holy light.

  Just a man—tall, pale-skinned, white-bearded, sitting upright in a heavy chariot. His expression like stone. His eyes scanning crowds not as a king would, but as a soldier checking terrain.

  The people bowed. The priests chanted. But I saw it.

  He looked tired.

  Not physically. Spiritually.

  The man who had vowed celibacy and powerlessness for the sake of his father’s desire was now holding an empire together by the weight of his silence.

  In that moment, I stopped seeing Bhishma as a character.

  He was a man trapped by a choice everyone praised, but no one would’ve made themselves.

  And I—I was born into the world he had created.

  The First LieThat night, as I y in my straw mat beside the hearth, my father sat sharpening a small bde. He was humming again, slightly off-key.

  “Did you hear the news?” he asked suddenly. “Kunti’s son is said to be calm. Born under an auspicious star.”

  I didn’t look at him.

  “Do you believe in fate?” I asked softly.

  He stopped humming. Thought for a long moment.

  “I believe in duty,” he said. “Fate is for kings. Duty is for the rest of us.”

  I didn’t answer.

  Because I knew that wasn’t true.

  Fate didn’t belong to kings. It dragged everyone down with them.

  Marking the BeginningA week ter, I made my first scroll.

  Not with ink or palm leaf—just old cloth and charcoal, tied with twine stolen from a tool basket.

  I began writing what I remembered. What I saw. What I heard.

  It wasn’t history. It wasn’t prophecy.

  It was something between the two.

  “They are calling him Yudhishthira now. But they do not know what he will carry. Or what he will lose.

  Bhishma watches, still as a stone. Drona has not yet arrived. Karna is out there—born, but not yet burning.

  I am a child. No one sees me.

  But I see everything.”

  And at the bottom, I wrote:

  A Story She Told Me – Now Seen.

  That was the beginning of the Avyakta Gita.

  Not a scripture.Not a counter-epic.

  Just a record of what was left out of what would one day be sung.

  The names I knew had returned. But they had brought with them weight I didn’t understand as a child.

  Now I would carry it.Not as a hero.Not as a warrior.But as a boy who remembered the story—and now had to live through it, knowing how it ends.