Chapter 7: The Physician of Mālakā
Pāpi walked westward.
He did not walk with urgency, nor did he hesitate. He simply continued forward with the quiet persistence of someone who had already experienced many endings. The land of Aṅga stretched endlessly before him, wide and uneven, stitched together by dirt paths, grazing fields, ancient forests, and small villages that appeared like islands of smoke and human voices in a vast sea of green.
The greatest difficulty was not the journey itself, but the language.
Pāpi could not properly understand the speech of the people around him. Their words reached his ears broken and distorted by unfamiliar accents and rhythms that belonged to an age far removed from the one he had known. Still, he could understand fragments. From their tone, gestures, expressions, and silences, he could grasp perhaps thirty or forty words out of every hundred.
That was enough.
Enough to know when someone was angry.
Enough to recognize when someone was lying.
And enough to understand when someone was suffering.
The journey took him more than fifteen days on foot.
The sun rose and set countless times. His small feet gradually hardened, and his body slowly adapted to the long journey. Hunger came, but it did not weaken him. He ate whatever fruits he found along the way—guavas, mangoes, berries whose names he did not know—and drank from streams and ponds. Whenever he encountered the Gaṅgā, he drank from her waters as well.
At night, he slept beneath the open sky. Sometimes beneath trees, sometimes beside rocks that still retained the day's warmth.
He rarely dreamed.
There was another interesting matter as well. Since his body had been created from medicinal and poisonous plants, insects such as ants avoided him, while small animals like frogs seemed to instinctively keep their distance. Even mosquitoes appeared unwilling to approach him.
Pāpi found this rather convenient.
Along the way, he encountered three villages.
He never entered them. He merely observed them from a distance.
In the first village, he saw a house whose roof had collapsed after a heavy rain. By morning, several men and women had gathered around it. No one argued about payment. No one asked whose responsibility it was. They simply worked together, laughing, passing tools around, and sharing water while repairing the damaged roof.
Pāpi watched silently.
In the second village, he saw something entirely different.
A man of a lower caste had been dragged into the middle of the road after being accused of impurity. He was forced to bow while several people shouted verses about dharma—verses that, judging by their behavior, they themselves did not understand.
Nearby, a higher-caste man struck another person in anger.
Instead of being condemned, he was praised for his "discipline."
Pāpi watched the scene without saying anything.
His heart did not race.
His fists did not clench.
So this is normal.
He had seen much worse in Kali Yuga.
Back then, people hid their cruelty behind laws and customs.
Here, they hid it behind the name of dharma.
Yet the third village showed him something different.
A woman suddenly fainted in the marketplace. The moment she fell, strangers rushed over to help. One person brought water. Another found a piece of cloth and used it to shade her from the sun. No one demanded payment. No one asked what caste she belonged to. No one even asked who she was.
They helped simply because she needed help.
Pāpi stared at the scene for quite some time.
In Kali Yuga, such kindness was rare enough to be remembered.
Here, it was so ordinary that nobody thought it worthy of mention.
That difference remained in his mind.
On the sixteenth day, Pāpi finally saw Mālakā.
It was a modest village without walls or guards. The houses stood close to one another without seeming crowded, and thin trails of smoke rose gently from cooking fires. Fields surrounded the village, carefully tended by the people who depended upon them.
Pāpi did not enter immediately.
Instead, he watched.
For another five days.
He observed from the shade of trees, from the edges of fields, and occasionally from behind huts whenever someone happened to pass nearby. Nobody paid attention to a small child with quiet eyes, and that suited him perfectly.
By the end of those five days, he had counted ninety-seven people.
All of them were śūdra.
Farmers, potters, laborers, craftsmen, and others who survived through physical work.
Yet there was an unusual sense of order within the village. There was no obvious fear, and disputes were relatively few.
The village chief was a man named Ākāśa.
He was not particularly imposing, nor did he possess an intimidating voice. Yet whenever he spoke, people listened. Not because they feared him, but because they trusted him.
Then there was Madhu.
The only physician in the entire village.
He was old—perhaps eighty, perhaps eighty-three. His body was thin and slightly bent by age. When he was sitting idle, his hands sometimes trembled. Yet the moment he began treating a patient, those same hands became steady as stone.
Madhu had never married.
His house was small, and his possessions were few.
Yet people were willing to wait several hours just to receive treatment from him.
He also taught three students—Avi, Nath, and Dhanu—passing down his knowledge of physical medicine, including herbs, roots, bodily balance, and, most importantly, patience.
Every morning without fail, the old physician entered the nearby forest to gather medicinal plants.
Pāpi observed all of this carefully.
And then he noticed something else.
Near the path leading toward the river lived a large dog.
It was old, strong, and covered with scars. It had no master, guarded no particular house, and yet it treated the riverbank as its own territory. The children avoided it, while the adults respected it.
Pāpi looked at the dog.
Then he looked toward the path Madhu took every morning.
A plan slowly formed inside his mind.
The next morning, Pāpi approached the dog cautiously.
He picked up a small pebble.
It was not large enough to injure the animal.
At most, it would annoy it.
He threw it.
The pebble landed beside the dog's paw.
The dog's ears immediately stood upright.
It looked at Pāpi.
Pāpi looked back.
The dog growled.
Pāpi picked up another pebble and threw it even closer.
The growl became deeper.
A third pebble struck the ground beside its leg.
"Woof!"
The dog finally barked.
It was loud, offended, and furious.
Pāpi turned and ran.
He ran toward the path Madhu usually took while searching for medicinal plants.
He ran straight toward a large neem tree.
Behind him came the sound of furious paws striking the earth.
Good.
Pāpi reached the tree and climbed with all his strength.
Just in time.
The dog leapt upward, its jaws snapping shut only a breath away from Pāpi's leg.
Unfortunately, his dhoti was not so fortunate.
With a triumphant tug, the dog tore away a long strip of cloth.
Pāpi clung tightly to the branch.
His heart pounded.
Not because he was afraid.
But because of something far more important.
My dignity has been injured.
For a moment, anger appeared in his eyes.
Then calculation replaced it.
And then came the performance.
"WAAAAAH!"
Pāpi began to cry.
Not softly.
Not politely.
He cried as though the heavens themselves had abandoned him. His wails were loud enough to echo along the river path, and tears streamed down his face as if he had suffered the greatest injustice known to mankind.
The dog barked once more.
Then it sat beneath the tree and looked upward with an expression that seemed to say,
What is wrong with this strange little creature?
Several minutes passed.
Footsteps finally approached from the distance.
An elderly man's voice soon followed.
"Hey! Go on! Shoo!"
Madhu appeared on the path with his walking staff in hand, his breathing slightly uneven from hurrying over.
The dog glanced at the old physician.
Then, apparently deciding that its work was finished, it turned around and trotted away.
Madhu watched it disappear before turning his attention toward the tree.
Then he froze.
A child was clinging to one of its branches.
His clothes were torn, his face was covered with dust, and tears streamed down his cheeks. His dark eyes were bright and clear despite his miserable appearance.
Madhu's heart immediately tightened.
"What happened to you, child?"
Pāpi answered with another loud sob.
"Come down, little one," Madhu said gently. "Don't be afraid. Come down first."
Pāpi did not move.
Madhu asked where his parents were.
The child cried harder.
He asked where the child had come from.
The crying became even louder.
Madhu's mouth twitched.
This child certainly knows how to cry.
After asking several more questions and receiving nothing except increasingly pitiful sobs, Madhu finally sighed.
"All right, all right. Enough crying."
He removed his own upper cloth and carefully wrapped it around the child's body before reaching up and lifting him from the tree.
The moment Pāpi was safely in his arms, his crying gradually weakened.
Madhu looked down at the child.
The old physician did not know who he was.
He did not know where he had come from.
He did not know why a three-year-old child had been wandering around the riverbank alone, nor why a dog had torn away half his clothing.
Most importantly, Madhu did not know that this seemingly helpless child had been observing Mālakā for five entire days.
Nor did he know that the child had come here because of an order given by Mahādeva Himself.
Madhu merely saw a lost and pitiful child.
So, without asking any more questions, he tightened his grip around Pāpi and began walking toward his home.
And thus, without realizing it, the old physician carried both a child and a trial into his house.
Chapter End