The Lie That Looked Like Hope

I told no one about the sadhu or the spiral stone. It lay hidden beneath the floor mat in a cloth pouch, warm sometimes without reason. A few nights later, as the sky darkened with monsoon clouds, I heard my father speaking with our neighbor, Achar. Their voices were tight with worry.

The floods had ruined half the grain stores. Achar said some of the wealthier landowners might close the village granary and hoard supplies "until the gods smile again." My father was silent, but I saw the lines in his face deepen.

"We'll manage," he said after a while. "Bhadrak's smart. Maybe one day he'll help us climb a step higher."

Achar laughed – not cruelly, but with that tired sound adults make when they don't believe the future can really change. "A potter's son dreaming of ladders, eh?" he said. "Let's hope the world listens."

I stood just outside the window, invisible behind the curtain of rain, and clenched my jaw. I wanted to believe him wrong. I wanted to believe my quiet promise to the stars still meant something.

And I did something dangerous.

That night, I whispered a lie. A small, shaky one.

"Our family is favored by a wandering rishi."

It wasn't said aloud. Just a thought, a whisper in the chamber of my mind, while the fire cracked and the spiral stone sat nearby.

The next morning, everything changed.

A messenger came from a merchant caravan halted near the riverbank. The man said his master – a Jain trader from the west – had been told in a dream that he would find safety and blessing in a potter's home in this village. He brought sacks of rice, three jars of ghee, and new shoes for my brother.

He stayed for a single night, quietly chanting prayers by our door. Before leaving, he placed a copper coin in my hand. "Tell the sage who watches you that I am grateful," he said.

My parents were astonished. They asked if the gods had answered some prayer they forgot to offer. But I said nothing.

Later that night, sitting alone beneath the neem tree, I stared up at the stars and felt something cold in my chest. The lie had worked. It had brought hope, even comfort. But I could not pretend it was harmless.

I had called upon the image of a rishi that did not exist. I had used faith like a tool. And though the results fed my family and gave us strength, I wondered: was this how it began — the slow weaving of noble deceptions?

The spiral stone stayed warm in my pocket.

I told myself I would not lie again until I understood what kind of truth I wanted to live by.

The rains did not stop for three weeks.

The world narrowed to the sound of dripping thatch, the scent of wet mud and smoke, and the persistent groan of swollen rivers. Goats bleated uneasily in their sheds, and the hens refused to lay. Even the village dogs lay curled like forgotten mounds in corners, lifting their ears only when thunder cracked too close. Fields drowned. Clay refused the hands of potters. And men became quiet.

I sat on the edge of our porch, chin in hand, staring into the haze that turned the sky to melted silver. The spiral stone sat hidden in my satchel beside a small wooden tablet I had carved with the numeral for five hundred twelve — the number of raindrops I had once counted before I fell asleep. That had been a childish game. Now, every sound of rain felt like a ticking of time beyond my reach.

Inside, Mother stirred gruel over the hearth. Kittu was singing some nonsense rhyme under his breath, tapping pebbles together as if commanding some small universe of his own.

And I? I was caught between stillness and a restless pull — as though the monsoon had awakened something in me, something that couldn't grow in dry sunlight.

It began with a dream.

Not a vision, not a miracle. Just a quiet dream.

In it, I stood before a black tree, leafless and burning from within. It didn't consume itself, just glowed faintly from the inside, like embers trapped in bark. Around me were voices. None hostile, none kind. Just voices. Whispering.

"How do you hold the truth?"

"With both hands or with none?"

"What burns is not the lie, child. What burns is its silence."

I woke with sweat behind my ears and the taste of ash in my mouth. Kittu was asleep beside me, one leg tossed over mine. Outside, the rain murmured as if trying to remember a song.

I lay there for hours, thinking of the black tree. I had never seen one like it, not in the hills nor the markets nor the scriptures. But it felt real. Not from this world, but a mirror of it — as though some part of me, too, was burning softly from within.

Was I slowly becoming something else?

Later that week, a cart arrived — battered, dripping, dragged half by bull and half by a man who looked more bone than muscle. The cart belonged to Sire Valmiki, the travelling scribe. He had returned.

Valmiki was old — not in years perhaps, but in wear. His skin looked like parchment, and his eyes always squinted as if the sun had never quite shown him its true face. He had once taught the Brahmin boys how to write Devanagari with a reed pen and crushed flower-ink. I had watched from behind the granary fence, memorizing strokes in the dust.

This time, he came not to teach but to deliver records — taxes, grain counts, a message from the palace of Hastinapura. But when he saw me under the awning of the grain house, he paused.

"You're the quiet one," he said.

I bowed.

"You still watching what others don't?" he asked.

I nodded.

He crouched beside me. His knees cracked like dry wood. From the folds of his robe, he pulled out a clay slate and traced a few letters with a stick of charcoal.

"Read this."

I stared. I did not want to. Not openly. Not in the village square.

But I looked. And I read. Slowly, not fluently. But the words came: "Rain is not a punishment. It is a cleansing. To those who hold their breath too long, it feels like drowning."

Valmiki did not smile. But he seemed satisfied.

He stood and handed me the slate. "Keep it."

And just like that, he was gone, wheeling his cart through puddles, vanishing into the blur of wet streets.

I stared at those words for hours.

Was that what the rains were doing? Cleansing? And was I one of those who held breath too long?

Three days later, I followed the old trail behind the mango grove — the one that led to the ruined shrine. The rains had broken much of it. Roots had clawed their way from beneath the earth like fingers rising in despair. Statues lay toppled and face-down in the soil. The shrine had been to Surya, they said, once. But time had no patience for forgotten gods.

I went there not to pray but to be alone.

To think.

The black tree from my dream stayed with me. Not terrifying. Not welcoming. Just… watching. I didn't understand why, but I kept drawing it — on leaves, on clay bits, even in the ash on our hearthstone. Each time, the outline got simpler. Until it was just a shape: trunk, branches, and a hollow at its center.

I sat beneath the half-standing arch of the shrine, slate in hand. I traced the spiral symbol from the stone the sadhu had left. Around it, I added the tree. Beneath it, I wrote two words in broken Sanskrit: Satya Maya. Truth. Illusion.

My power — whatever it truly was — had not returned since the last lie. Or perhaps it had and I had not dared to use it. But the dream, the spiral, the rain — they had begun to feel connected. As if my silence was not enough anymore. As if the world wanted me to speak, not to myself, but through myself.

I closed my eyes.

The shrine was silent except for wind and water. No miracles. No gods. Just breath.

I whispered into the hollow air:

"I am still here."

The rain paused.

Just for a moment. A single breath. And then returned.

But in that moment, I felt something inside me shift — not power, not a vision. Just… acknowledgment.

As if something had listened. Not agreed. Not blessed. Just… heard.

The days that followed passed like old reeds floating down a canal. Slow. Soft. Browned at the edges.

I began noticing things again. The way children stepped around frogs in the road. How Kittu no longer asked questions about the moon but instead traced constellations in mud. How my mother hummed a new song — unfamiliar, minor-keyed — when she thought no one listened.

I listened to all of it.

And for the first time, I began to understand that this life I led — even in its humility — was made of many truths. Not grand ones. Not woven through fate or gods. But truths, nonetheless.

Like:

"A fire that burns quietly still gives warmth.""A pot can only hold what it's shaped to hold.""Even rainwater tastes sweet when offered with love."

Truths I did not need to bend with my gift. Truths that were already true.

Was that what the sadhu meant?

Was I so eager to change the world with lies turned real that I had forgotten the truths already breathing around me?

One night, while the house slept and Kittu mumbled dreams in his sleep, I crept to the edge of the cattle pen. I brought with me the spiral stone and a folded strip of cloth.

On the cloth, I had written a sentence.

It was a lie. Not cruel. Not powerful. Just odd.

"The birds of the forest know my name."

I did not whisper it. I did not approve it.

I just set it down beside the stone and waited.

Nothing happened.

Not at first.

But just before dawn, when the sky was still ink and the stars were blinking their last, a sound came.

Not words. Not speech.

Just a small trill.

Then another.

Birdsong.

One, then two, then seven.

From the mango grove, from the neem, from the rooftops and fence posts.

It wasn't a miracle. Birds sang every morning. I knew that.

But that morning, they sang differently.

They didn't scatter when I stepped into the courtyard. They didn't flinch. One even landed on the branch above me and cocked its head.

I stood still.

The spiral stone felt cold in my hand.

I did not make the lie true. But something had happened. Not through force. Through invitation.

And I remembered what the sadhu had said:

"Not by those who hate lies… but by those who use truth like a weapon."

What if this was the answer? That power did not always come from using my gift. But from choosing not to?

What if restraint was the higher dharma?

And so, I did not speak that lie. I folded it back and buried it in a hole beside the blackened stump near the shrine.

Instead, I whispered a promise.

"I will not force truth. I will listen to it."

The rains ended a week later. The clouds dispersed as if answering an unseen call. The sky turned blue again. Bright. Empty. Beautiful.

Life resumed its rhythm.

The fields steamed under new sunlight. Our clay was softer than before. The kiln burned clean. Mother's cough had eased. Kittu's eyes shone when he showed me the bird's nest he found behind the shed — three eggs, speckled, breathing with possibility.

I walked the same roads. Carried the same buckets. Spoke the same tongue.

But I was not the same.

Something had grown in me — not a power, not a truth.

A hollow.

The hollow of the flame.

A space that did not need to be filled to burn.

A space where silence could echo, and echoes could guide.

And in that hollow, I was no longer only Bhadrak the potter's son. I was the Listener. The Watcher.

I did not need to speak a truth every day.

But when I did… it would matter.