Eshaan heard his parents talk through the wall.
He couldn't hear every word, just bits and pieces - the mud-brick absorbed too much, and his father's voice dropped when he didn't want even the walls to hear his words. Eshaan lay on his cotton mat in the old house, the darkness completely surrounded him as he listened to the murmur of his parents talking in the main room across the courtyard.
His father's voice came first, low and careful the way it got when he was working through something difficult. Then his mother's voice followed in shorter responses, the kind that meant she was listening more than speaking. Eshaan caught his name twice. The third time he heard it, it came a little softer, and he understood without being able to explain how that his mother had been the one to say it.
He stared at the wooden beams above him and let the sound of their voices settle around him like something he had not known he needed. It felt as if he had somehow returned to his childhood and they were his own parents - well technically they were in this life.
Then he overheard something important, his father said, "Ballal Sen"[1] and his mother went quiet, and the conversation changed entirely.
Eshaan closed his eyes.
"Ballal Sen." The son of Vijay Sen. The Sena king who would press westward into Magadha's remnant territories through the late twelfth century, squeezing from the east while the Ghurid threat built from the northwest. He had written a paper on the Sena expansion in his second year of PhD — forty pages, two peer reviewers, one of whom had called his geographic analysis competent but unremarkable.
Eshaan had the unremarkable geographic analysis memorized down to the footnotes.
He filed every information that he could overhear from the conversation between his parents and kept it in the back of his mind since the details were important but it was not actionable.
'Not Yet', he was one day old in this life. He had a frail body that had nearly died of a fever three days ago and couldn't hold a stylus without shaking. The political situation of Pataliputra in 1178 CE was a problem for a future version of himself who had earned the right to have opinions about it.
"First thing's first" Eshaan thought about what he needed to do. his right forearm was still warm against the cotton. Time was something he was short on and what he needed the most was a body that worked however he wanted it to. Everything else was second.
He was still thinking when he heard his mother's voice drop to something barely above a whisper, and then go quiet, and then the small sounds of the household settling into sleep. He lay awake for a long time after that, doing arithmetic in the dark, before exhaustion settled over him and made him fall asleep.
---
Eshaan woke up before the birds.
The courtyard was dim and cool, the sky above it was still a shade of deep blue which meant it was just before the first prahar of dawn. The courtyard was larger than Eshaan imagined as it held three buildings and a stable. The first was the main house in which his parents lived, second was his - The oldest structure which was used as a storeroom before Eshaan - The Child begged for a separate room for himself and the third was the Kitchen House - a separate small structure at the courtyard's far end, which his mother has organized with a great emotion. He had perhaps woken up an hour before the household did.
Eshaan stood in the centre of the courtyard in his dhoti and looked at his hands. Small and pale in the pre-dawn light. The fingers of a child who had spent most of his short life staying indoors being ill.
"Still couldn't digest the thing, is it real or a dream," he thought.
Eshaan started simple, he didn't want to stress out his already frail body. Squats - the most basic assessment of what a body could do. He managed twelve before his thighs began shaking with an earnestness that was almost impressive. He rested and counted to thirty before performing eight more. Eshaan tried to switch to pushups but his arms informed him rather politely, that this was not currently within the available range of services his body could offer. So, he modified it - knees down, half ranged - and managed to do seven before his elbows gave.
Twenty Squats. Seven Pushups.
He sat back on his heels in the courtyard dust and had a brief, private conversation with himself about perspective and long-term thinking and the fact that every foundation begins with undignified groundwork, and then he got up and did seven more.
By the time the sky had lightened to grey Eshaan had done three sets of squats, two attempts at pushups that a generous observer might have described as partial, which he privately categorized as 'core work'. His limbs were shaking. His chest - always the weak point in this body as the lungs never felt fully robust had been tight in a way he noted and decided to monitor as he would continue with his daily workouts.
Eshaan was somewhat satisfied but it wasn't with the results which were objectively poor but with the attempt of it. He was glad to looked at the problems - this body, these limitations, this gap between what I need and what I have. He was still standing in the courtyard, catching his breath, when the Kitchen house door opened and his mother stepped out.
Uma Mahesh Shrivastava was the woman of this household who woke up the earliest and organized the first hours of every day for years and had the system refined to the point where it required almost no conscious thought. She carried a brass pot in one hand and kindling under her arm. She was deep in thought, already calculating the morning's cooking before she took notice of her son who was standing in the courtyard in the half-dark.
She stopped. Looked at him and noticed the faint sweat on his forehead, the slight unevenness of his breathing, the way he was standing with his weight distributed like someone who had just finished something rather than someone who had just woken up.
She set the brass pot down on the kitchen step and crossed the courtyard and put the back of her hand against his forehead. Her touch was practiced and warm and completely matter-of-fact, the touch of someone who had pressed that hand to that forehead many times over the past few days and was now comparing temperatures with professional accuracy.
"No fever," she said, more to herself than to him. Then, looking at him properly: "What are you doing out here?"
"Exercises," Eshaan said.
Uma studied him for a moment. He was the same frail bodied son of hers who had spent most of his life being ill. She knew this face. She had watched it since before it could hold an expression. Whatever she was reading in it now was being compared against a database of this face across ten years and Eshaan had no idea what was going inside his mother's brain.
"Come inside," she said finally. "Eat something before you fall over."
Uma placed a Kansa plate[2] filled with rice from last night which was warmed, with a small amount of ghee that she measured out carefully with a spoon and a clay cup of warm water with something in it that tasted faintly of ginger and something else Eshaan couldn't identify.
Uma didn't ask him questions while he ate. She moved around the small kitchen doing the morning's work and let him eat in peace, which he understood, in the particular way you understand things about people you have known forever and are also meeting for the first time, it was her way of taking care of him.
Eshaan watched her hands while his mother worked, it was quick and particularly precise.
His mother - his other mother, the one in 2025, the one he never had enough time with, had hands like that. She had been a schoolteacher and she had corrected papers at the kitchen table every evening with a red pen that she held the same way Mahesh had held the stylus yesterday.
Eshaan had been in Delhi when she took her last breath in the hospital in Patna. He was presenting a paper about Ashokan edict distribution patterns.
Eshaan snapped back to reality and looked down at the rice in front of him.
"Stop," he told himself with firmness of someone who had this conversation before and knows where it goes. "She is gone and that grief belongs to another life. This is the life you have now.
Pay attention to what you have now."
Eshaan finished the rice and Uma took the Kansa plate away without comment, and when she turned back to him there was something different in her expression which had the look of a woman who had noticed something and was deciding whether to name it.
She decided to name it.
"You are different," she said quietly, it wasn't an accusation but just true.
Eshaan held her gaze. "I had a long fever," he said.
She looked at him for another moment. Then she nodded and went back to her cooking but the nod wasn't an assuring one and she would return to the question later.
Eshaan sat in the kitchen house and listened to the city waking outside the wall and felt something settle in his chest that he did not have a clean word for. It was not happiness exactly. It was more like the sensation of a door that had been open to the cold for a long time being quietly, carefully closed.
Mahesh found Eshaan in the courtyard an hour later.
He came out of the main house with his manuscript bundle already under his arm, wearing a fresh white dhoti and a yellow angvastram draped over his bare chest. He stopped when he saw Eshaan jogging in the courtyard.
Eshaan stopped and looked at his father. Mahesh met his gaze; His expression moved through several things quickly before settling on something that was not quite approval and not quite amusement but lived in the territory between them.
"You were out here before dawn," he said. It was not a question.
"Yes."
"Your mother told me." Mahesh was quiet for a moment and then spoke again, "Good that you are working on your body but don't stress yourself too much."
Eshaan nodded and took the words as his father's respect towards his efforts to build his weak body.
"I have an errand for you," Mahesh said, shifting the manuscript bundle. "Can you walk to the Senapati's quarters without stopping to rest?"
Eshaan wiped the sweat from his forehead, "Yes."
Mahesh looked at him for a beat longer than necessary. Then he went inside and came back with a sealed letter - palm leaf folded tight and tied with the red cord of official correspondence, a clay seal pressed into the knot. He held it out.
"This goes to Senapati Indrajit. His quarters are near the north gate - the building with the carved horse above the entrance, you've passed it with me before. You give it to him directly, not to any guard or attendant. Understand? And you wait for his acknowledgment before you leave."
"What does it say?" Eshaan asked.
Mahesh's eyes sharpened slightly. "It says what the Samanta requires it to say. Your job is to deliver it, not to read it."
Eshaan nodded once. He had not expected an answer. He had asked because ten-year-old boy would ask, and because the small pause before Mahesh's refusal had told him something useful - that his father knew the contents and was not entirely comfortable with them.
"Samanta Someshwar's response to the Sena threat," he thought, tucking the letter carefully inside his dhoti. "Preparation orders. Possibly conscription numbers. Possibly supply requisitions."
He kept his face neutral and went to find his sandals.
[1] He was the second ruler of the Sena Dynasty of Bengal Region who ended the Pala Empire by defeating Govinda Pala. He was married to Ramadevi, a princess of Western Chalukya Empire which indicates his ties to South India as well. Ballal Sen is the most renowned Sena ruler who consolidated his kingdoms and also conquered Magadh and Mithila Regions.
[2] Kansa is an alloy which is called Bell Metal in English. It is primarily composed of approximately 78% copper and 22% tin and is traditionally used in India for making utensils and is revered for its strength and health benefits.