How does water ever become fire? How does the cold, ever flowing spirit of life become the ravenous, blazing and gluttonous inferno of knowledge? It never did, it never would. The problem with the selection of words is that those dry, transparent thoughts are weighed by the insatiable hunger for adjectives.

Zoom in to a world, a country, a city, a place and a person. An eternally controlled stream of spirituality, flowing from the tightly wound tresses of Shiva, annihilating sins on its way, was her. Gyan, our main protagonist standing on the steps leading to Ganga is a simple human being wondering at the beauty of the nature, rather than the complexity of life. Ganga, authorized by Vishnu, controlled by Shiva and distributed by Bhagirath, was the quintessential hero of the story. A crossing between the unknown and the known was a thin brook with a few steps to it. Gyan was looking at the sun settling for its night’s rest. Gyan speaking to himself, which he rarely did, ‘If I had a boat, I wouldn’t need to swim, if I had a camera, I wouldn’t need to revisit my memories and if I had deep waters, I would need to gobble up the sun.’

Before we move ahead, I guess you need to understand Gyan. Or maybe just a few adjectives or adhesives to his character would work. Gyan isn’t the deeply doleful blues song that a writer would write to give it depth or make it relevant. Gyan, a 25 year old adult with a strong interest in astrophysics and a general tendency to travel during his free time and spare money. Yes, he definitely gets poetic at times but never goes to the unknown realms of confusion. But I do have a strong urge to ask questions to people who write these days? How should I give my character traits or qualities to make it more relevant? How do I make him or (politically correct) him/her sound deeply philosophical and more often common?

Return to the scene of Ganga gobbling up the sun. The long rows of wooden boats anchored to the bank and the men clad in some orange coloured suit, covered in vermillion or grey ash was a sight to behold. Gyan went up to one of those sages and sat beside him. He looked at the bearded man and it wasn’t a look of scorn. It was of pure curiosity. He asked for a rudraksha mala and wore it on his hand.

‘Son! This will protect you from any unfortunate event and provide you peace. You should also be aware as you are young, educated adult that this will reduce hypertension, blood pressure and increase your confidence’, recited the orange draped sage while Gyan was busy admiring the way the mala fitted on his slender wrists. Little did Gyan know that this Ten faced Rudraksha had the power to pacify all the planets in the solar system. He curled his fingers to form an eyehole and started scanning the vivid imagery at display here. He was a person who could raster scan life component wise. Array of boxes, light collimated through his soft curvature of fingers and a million pixels of effective life. Array 1 – A white goat clad in a brown colored human sweater. The goat was standing near a heap of flowers which were probably discarded after some religious ceremony. The goat had two small horns and little puff of hair at his chin. Array 2 – A middle aged man sitting idle in his wooden boat. He held the rows of the boat but he wasn’t moving them. He had a pensive look on his face. Array 3 – The Sun with all its grandeur, slowing down after a hard day’s work. Providing the perfect backdrop of orange and violet hue to a woman banging her clothes on the steps of the ghat was the egoistic Sun, drowning with his ethos. Gyan rasterising this holy land was just another explorer trying to dissect the myth from reality but unlike most, he was sure of his illumination. Gyan opened Notes on his phone and scribbled something he had been working on recently. “Is feeling detached from the mortal world a sign for religious submission? Here, you don’t find truth hidden in the carved walls of temples or Ganga soaked bodies, here you don’t find spirituality intermingled with your self and neither do you find absolute salvation. These narrow paths which lead to narrower galis to these gentle steps are just staggering. Every morning, I see fires smoldering and I see Ganga taking it in. I don’t see divine vision, I see beautiful mornings. Light through my eyeholes, sound through their drums, bells and cymbals, is the city of Kashi.”

Friends. Gyan certainly made a lot of friends because of his candor and goodness. He never left a chance to call up or text his friends to talk about something. He wasn’t an extrovert by any means but he liked sharing his life instances with his closed ones. Some he would call at night, some would pick his calls at any hour of the day (even if that meant losing sleep), some wouldn’t. He had come back to the lodge he was staying at and had a good warm shower. He looked in the mirror and admired his strong shoulders and handsome face. He liked to compliment himself a lot and sometimes it strayed on the edges of narcissism. He had a friend. The name isn’t necessary but surely it was bit of an Instagram name like Heart’s Thief. He believed in the appearance of life and that meant the physical appearance of things while she always argued that emotion gave life some verisimilitude. She helped him become a more complete human being. Gyan always appreciated her whenever he could but he wasn’t satisfied with his efforts.

What is fastness of friendship? Twinkling stars, red, blue and white. These things twinkle because of the atmosphere and not because of the pulsating nature. I have been inept at describing to you the various networks of Gyan and it’s too incoherent. I haven’t developed his relationships with his friends. Does that make him a less of a human being and me, more of an arrogant ass? His problem didn’t lie in his approach to friendship, his problems lied in his fidelity. His words were weighed time and time again with the leviathan called Political Correctness. He couldn’t keep his correctness accurate every time and he spoke out bluntly. Notwithstanding the emotion, the jury sometimes labeled him as “too callousing.” Did he care? Certainly not.

The story changes location and setting. People who were furniture are cast out and people who helped him further are part of his journey.

‘There are a few stages before which you can actually board a seat on the space shuttle. Astronaut training is very difficult but it’s not disheartening. You would have to go through some stages like Vehicle Mock up training, Training in Microgravity, Buoyancy Laboratory, Precision Air Bearing Lab, etc. I know it’s a tough profession but not an impossible one. Okay, any more questions now?’, asked Gyan. He was part of the Space Shuttle Mission and was conducting the press conference.

‘As you are team of 10 astronauts with different religious background, do you have any differences?’

‘No.’

‘Are you planning to accommodate more women in this mission as you only have two females in your team right now?’

‘No.’

‘What about the environmental impacts and the money allocated from the budget for this mission?’

‘Next question.’

‘Are you worried about the reentry?’

‘No, he smiled.’

Gyan, aged 31 was heading out of the press conference with no sign of apprehension or confusion. His bold confidence was easily hiding a few of the wrinkles on his shirt. The lack of political correctness did not reflect his true emotions. Worrying about the gender ratio and how many houses would be without electricity wasn’t his cup of tea. He worked his way through this bureaucracy on his merit and demanded the same from everyone. Just like John Galt, he too wished for his Galt’s Gulch. A true paradise without the red tape and excessive concern for one’s neighbor. Was he correct in his approach? I ask you this question. Do I need to make him normal?

A few weeks after the press conference and it’s apparent bad reception, Gyan texted his friend HT(Heart’s Thief).

‘Have you read the newspapers, seen the kind of media coverage these days and especially looked within the social media posts?’, he asked agitatedly.

‘I have and it’s quite a world we are living in’, she said.

‘It’s not about the news that I am worried about but it’s the tonality that worries me. People are picking apart people with the usage of wrong adjectives and wrong language. A young Muslim girl, surviving a terrorist scare has been campaigning for the women empowerment. But what do we see the Western television portraying it as? Rather than commending her work, they are comparing the normal Muslim culture and her activities. Pointing out the stark differences and creating a huge divide between the nation and that girl. The media would never be burned down, nor will any of the social media posts but someday that girl will be burned. It’s so easy to differentiate people through their actions, it’s so easy to filter out their nationality or caste but it’s so difficult to integrate a person with full fidelity in its society. It’s a shame.’

‘That is so true and I am quite interested with this tonality thing you brought up. I will surely have a read on this’, she said.

Roll back the reel and you can see a younger Gyan troubled with emotions. He looked out of the window and wondered, ‘This is not fair.’ He was sitting in a bus and going back to his college. How can I miss the most important emotion every human being feels? The feeling of love, the need for a companion, the constant miasma of a heartbreak and the absolute ecstasy of newfound love. Even our Gyan got lucky in his life with someone absolutely beautiful. Her name was Samashti (complex). Effervescent, full of good vibes and the quintessential love our hero finds. She wasn’t complex or depressed about anything in life and that’s why Gyan found so much joy in her. But sometimes life isn’t fair and nor was she. Asking the rain laden clouds, ‘What is fidelity? I tried my best and yet somehow she eludes me.’

So what is fidelity? Is it just the act of being loyal to someone your whole life? We all believe in surges of passion and impulses, even Gyan did (probably does) but fidelity is a choice that you have to make. Make that choice again and again, unflinchingly in spite of the thousand temptations and obstacles. No relationship has a continuous emotional peak but it’s a series of waves to the crescendo. Fidelity is that wave which lets you ride to the top and come back to the bottom without ever leaving the field.

But at times, people are tired of waiting and have waited too long for apologies. Gyan made a choice to fall in love and he set himself up for the most predictable of calamities.

After following his journey for almost three decades, I feel there’s a need to look further into Gyan’s mind.

‘What if our universe is composed inside a sphere? What if it’s composed of two anti de-Sitter hemispheres joined at the centre line with some celestial glue and we live in the equatorial plane experiencing no negative curvature? As nothing exceeds the speed of light, we wouldn’t be able to communicate with the parallel planes or more precisely universes in the sphere’, commented Gyan on one of his favourite YouTube channel’s video. His workday consisted of working through the complex equations of Einstein and working out the geometry of space time. He loved the solar system but more than that he loved the concept of gravitation. The way it warped spacetime and affected the trajectories of particles with mass. Whenever he got some free time, he read books and occasionally scribbled down his thoughts. But you must be wondering how is this any different? How is this describing his state of mind? That’s his fidelity to himself. He keeps true to the image he projects. If you tried entering his mind, you will enter a void. Empty space. Null set. All the emotions and all the data is printed on the surface. Just like an anti de-Sitter space, the information rests on a holographic surface. Do you need depth in character? I believe you need glasses for that.

I believe our story has digressed a lot with its protagonist eating too much footage. What kind of coda do you need? What is an appropriate ending? A nerve bending twist or a moralistic, tedious platitude? Maybe let’s end with the simplest literary device. Gyan always yearned for knowledge and that’s what he worked hard for. How does water ever become fire? On the banks of Ganga, he was just another explorer with an eyehole scanning for his subjects.

I have inadequately written this story and have unintentionally put the protagonist on a pedestal. But the need to be completely understood, respected and accepted by the milieu is what lifelong seduction can look like. Not every protagonist can have a wounded backstory and yet the cohort demands self actualization. As disappointing as it may sound, he only ever fended for basic necessities, resources and knowledge.

Just like love in a ballad,

Faithful, obstinate, eternal,

So was his passion,

Waxed in fine old dust.

His words true to himself,

And when read, simple and sweet.