The school was nothing.
Just four rooms behind a dharamshala in Old Delhi. One chalkboard per room. No benches. Slates and floor mats for students. The air smelled of dust, lime, and boiled gram from the street vendor who doubled as a lunch provider.
But Vikram stood in its corridor longer than most passersby would have.
Because this school had 96 children. Three teachers. Two junior clerks.
And one headmaster.
Mohanlal Kaul.
Fifty-four years old.
Educated in Lahore under the British missionary curriculum.
Fluent in Latin, proud of his English. Wore a woolen coat even in Delhi heat. He taught science from worn-out handbooks printed in London and discouraged children from reciting shlokas aloud during breaks.
Vikram had watched him for weeks.
The man wasn't cruel.
But his words were.
"You're not ready for reasoning yet."
"This is why your race never ruled itself."
"This is a classroom, not a temple."
He didn't hit. He didn't shout.
But he trained compliance. He praised imitation.
And worse, he made it look modern.
So Vikram walked in.
As a parent.
Not his own child, of course. That would be too neat.
He borrowed a name, a shawl, a slow gait. Posed as Raghunandan Mishra, textile trader from Hathras, seeking admission for his "younger cousin's boy."
He introduced himself to the clerk.
The clerk called the headmaster.
Mohanlal arrived with an ink-stained collar and a polite smile.
Vikram shook his hand.
Three seconds.
Inside his mind, Vikram found exactly what he feared.
Advanced British Pedagogy
Intermediate Bureaucratic Delay Tactics
Beginner Sanskrit Literacy (suppressed)
Memories of praise from Christian missionaries
Contempt for "rural parents"
But also… doubt.
In the back of his mind, Mohanlal sometimes thought of the old prayers.
Of his grandmother who taught him Ramayana stories before he ever saw a printed book.
The feeling had been buried. But not dead.
Vikram knew better than to kill him.
He'd rewrite him.
That night, while the headmaster slept, Vikram entered again.
Not just to delete.
But to reshape.
He removed five specific memory sequences:
The day his English teacher mocked Sanskrit texts
The moment he decided to pursue missionary scholarship
The joy he felt when a British officer praised his handwriting
The pride of passing over Hindi-medium applicants
The dream of sending his son to Oxford
In their place, he planted new sequences — lightly drawn, softly sketched:
A dream of teaching Vedas beside science
A visit to Kashi where a saint asked him what "truth" meant
A boy reciting a shloka with clarity that moved him
A fear that Bharat's children were being trained to obey, not build
These weren't lies.
They were possible truths.
And possibility was the most powerful illusion.
The next morning, Headmaster Mohanlal began the day the same.
But something shifted.
He didn't interrupt the boy reciting a verse aloud in recess.
He paused when he read aloud, "Britons brought civilization to the savage world."
He looked at his own palm, as if unsure of whose fingers he carried.
By week's end, he asked the Sanskrit teacher — normally sidelined — to add 20 minutes of dharmic ethics to the morning bell.
By month's end, he submitted a request to the Education Board:
"Proposal to allow regional history and native scriptural stories into weekly readings."
It was denied, of course.
But he tried again.
And again.
Until the file disappeared.
Vikram didn't need him to succeed.
He only needed the other schools to notice.
And they did.
Three more headmasters in Delhi.
Two in Lucknow.
One in Banaras.
One in Indore.
Each one connected over time.
Some replaced.
Some restructured.
Some remembered their faith from childhood, awakened by simple nudges.
Not every school was taken gently.
Some had to be reshaped from the outside.
In Hathras, the teacher running a boys' hostel had beaten a child for refusing to learn Bible passages.
Vikram didn't erase his memory.
He replaced the man altogether.
Disappeared him through a chain of Sthirakaya operatives.
Replaced him with a school clerk named Devdas, whose only crime was loving the Mahabharata too much for British taste.
Devdas was linked. Skilled.
He had:
Intermediate Curriculum Management
Advanced Oral Recitation
Master Bhakti Literature Analysis
Within a month, the children sang verses before meals.
Through Magicnet, Vikram kept a separate space now — a school thread cluster.
It held skill orbs for:
Vedic Ethics
Upanishadic Logic
Practical Arithmetic
Basic Astronomy
Yoga Instruction
Kalaripattu Warmups
Script Reading: Devanagari, Tamil, Kannada, Grantha
These were copied, edited, combined, and planted slowly — into teachers, tutors, temple priests turned educators, even street performers hired as literacy anchors.
Each was tested.
Each was adjusted.
None knew they were part of a larger web.
But every week, more children sat straighter.
More shlokas rang through walls once stuffed with English rhyme.
More parents asked where to enroll their children "to learn the old way."
And above all, Vikram did not issue manifestos.
He wrote nothing down.
No declaration of a new board.
No banners.
No reforms announced in public.
Only curriculum change by memory, school by school.
And when British officials sent an inquiry to the Delhi Education Office asking:
"Why are Hindi and Sanskrit readings increasing despite centralized guidelines?"
The file was returned stamped:
"Unverified rural variations. No centralized pattern. Request closed."
Vikram read the report.
Folded it.
And smiled.
The British taught in buildings.
He taught in minds.
And minds remembered.