The Kamandal sat between them on the desk in the morning light.
Eshaan looked at it for a long moment. It wasn't from fear as he had made his decision if his secret was really revealed. It was somewhere between the seventh night of lying on his mat thinking about the note and the eighth morning when he had skipped breakfast and walked to the temple with the specific purpose of knowing was Acharya Kripa knew.
It wasn't the decision of whether to reveal the birthmark that was taking time, it was a lingering question within Eshaan.
He looked up from the Kamandal to Kripa's face, the old scholar was waiting with the patience of sixty years behind his eyes and decided to ask the question.
""If I show you what it truly is," Eshaan said quietly, "what do you intend to do with what you see?"
Kripa remained still for a moment. Then something in his expression shifted not out of surprise but more like recognition. It was the look of the man who was waiting for the right question and is genuinely glad that Eshaan put it forward.
"Nothing," he said. "And everything."
He unfolded his hands on the desk and looked at them for a moment. It was the hands of a very old traveling scholar, thin and mapped with the lines of six decades of manuscripts and roads and temple courtyards.
"I am not the guide to the Peacock Bearer," he said. "I have always known this, but I made it my mission to find him with what I have, sixty years of understanding what the mark means and the particular misfortune of having been born in a century that needed the Bearer and did not have one." He looked at Eshaan.
"I intend to do with what I see exactly what a man in my position that can do is nothing that changes what you are, and everything in my power to ensure that what you have will be the best possible chance of becoming what it needs to become."
There was a pause with everything, and Eshaan couldn't make out the cryptic language of this old Sage.
"I am might not be the person you seek, Acharya," Eshaan finally announced.
"I am not your king," Kripa argued. "Nor your master. And I will not own what I see this morning but, I will carry it as a sacred trust, and I will take it to my cremation ground and nowhere else." His voice was completely level. "I just want to have made peace with finding Aryavarta into a capable hand before dying, that is what I intend to do with what I see."
Eshaan looked at him for one more moment and checked the architecture of the answer against everything he had observed about Kripa across two meetings, the precision of the note, the subtlety at the dinner table, the sixty years of courts and archives and the specific quality of a man who had spent his entire life in service to something larger than himself.
Eshaan gradually extended his right arm across the desk, forearm upward and the birthmark facing the light.
Kripa lifted the Kamandal with both hands.
He tilted it slowly and carefully as if he was handling a thing more important than the existence of the universe itself. A thin stream of Ganga water caught the morning light as it fell, and it touched Eshaan's forearm at the centre of the mark.
For a moment nothing happened but slowly, just the way dawn changes the sky from darkness to gradually into something that you cannot identify the precise moment it becomes something different, Eshaan's mark also began to change.
The vague dark shape that his mother had called unusual since his birth and his father had explained away as a birthmark of uncommon form, began to resolve like a text written in invisible ink finally responding to reveal itself. And what emerged from beneath the surface appearance of an ordinary birthmark was something that had been there the entire time.
The birthmark changed into three layers of different symbols. The innermost layer had the etching of a quill with its second layer as the chakra wheel and the outermost layer was the eight pointed star.
It wasn't as Eshaan remembered feeling it in the Secret Sanctum. It has changed its design in the morning light, the lines rans deep-blue-green, the colour specifically like a peacock's near. The eye of the peacock feather was visible at the quill's centre. The barbs of the feather spread outward from the quill's spine across Eshaan's forearm, each one was precise and luminous and the whole quill was glowing with a light that was not the lamp's amber and not the morning's gold but something that seemed to come from inside the skin itself.
It was beautiful.
Eshaan looked at his own forearm and felt something he had not felt since the night in the Sanctum - the sensation of the Quill's presence, not as a warmth this time but as a recognition.
As if the mark and the water and the morning and the sixty years of Kripa's searching had all converged on this exact moment and the mark itself understood that it had been found.
Across the desk, Kripa made no sound.
He was completely still with his hands on the Kamandal, his eyes on Eshaan's forearm and his face was a scene to behold. Eshaan and Kripa himself never imaged that he would be able to find the Peacock-bearer. He wasn't prepare for this incident to occur in his lifetime on this Earth.
The tears flowed freely but quietly. There was no dramatic sound of weeping or contortion of the face. Just tears moving down the deep lines of a face that had waited sixty years for this exact morning and had, somewhere in the last decade, stopped fully believing the morning would come.
Eshaan watched and said nothing because he did not know what to say at this exact moment. And some moments did not require witness or commentary, they needed only to be allowed to be what they were.
After a long moment Kripa set the Kamandal down on the desk with both hands, carefully.
He folded his palms together and bowed to Eshaan. It wasn't the slight inclination of a scholar acknowledging someone nor the courteous bow of a travelling sage to a household that fed him.
It was a full bow, his white head dropped towards his folded hands and his thin shoulders curved forward. He had never bowed like this in front of the kings or respected man but God, because none of the kings had the quality, this ten year old boy in a plain dhoti has.
Eshaan sat very still and did not know what to do with any of it. He wasn't a great man or scholar or a sage and this man who had the knowledge and experience of the world was bowing before him like someone bows to the God. The gap between him and Kripa was that of between a child who has just born into the World and haven't experienced a bit of it and a person who has known the world before Eshaan even existed in this time.
Eshaan decided to let Kripa have his moment and remained quiet.
"I will promise and offer you three things," Kripa said as he straightened up and snapped over from his divine moment.
Eshaan nodded.
"The first is silence." Kripa looked at his folded hands. "What happened in this room this morning will go with me to my cremation ground. Nobody, not even your father will know about any of this. You have my word on this, and I have given my word to very few people in sixty years and broken it to none."
Eshaan decided to believe in Kripa, not completely but partially and he gave a short nod in approval.
"The second is this." Kripa leaned forward slightly. "Everything I have learned in sixty years, the texts, the archives, the libraries that are not in any catalogue, the scholars and traveling sages who move between courts carrying knowledge that never gets written down, all of it will be available to you. I am not offering to stay in Pataliputra. The road is my residence and I am too old to change that now. But wherever I go I will be your eyes in the world of ancient knowledge. Whatever I find that is relevant to what you carry I will find a way to send word."
He paused. "You are still a child, and the world is much larger than Pataliputra and most of what it contains that is useful to you is not here. You will need someone moving through it and I will become that bridge between you and the World."
Eshaan immediately thought of the Nine Unknown Men and how their forefathers must exist before them and that holds true even in this timeline. He had the complete knowledge of his World because everything was available on Internet but, in today's primitive world.
"Yes," he thought. "I will need someone experienced by my side who will be moving as my eyes and ears throughout India."
"The third thing," Kripa said, and his voice shifted again becoming quieter and careful once again.
"The Peacock Bearer does not work alone," Kripa said. "The ancient texts were consistent on this. Krishna has Arjuna, Chandragupta had Chanakya and later bearers had their own supporters."
"The Bearer turns the wheel, but the wheel is large, and no single pair of hands can hold it through the full turn. You need a guide. Not a general because you will find many. Not an advisor either but something more specific."
Kripa continued, "Someone who understands how systems work at their deepest level. How mathematics describes reality. How the structure of a civilization is not metaphor but architecture which can be designed, built, corrected and expanded."
He looked at Eshaan steadily.
"I know one living man who understands these things at the level you will need. Only one. And I have met him many years ago, at the observatory in Ujjayini, where he has spent his life mapping the movement of the cosmos and the movement of numbers with equal precision. He is sixty-four years old and he will not live forever." Kripa paused. "His name is Bhaskaracharya."
The name landed in Eshaan's mind and exploded like a missile fired from a fighter plane.
"Bhaskaracharya." He had heard this name before and of course he knew who Bhaskaracharya was, every historian of medieval India and scholars of mathematics knew the name. The man who had written the Siddhantasiromani, the Lilavati and the Bijaganita.The greatest mathematical mind of the medieval Indian world.
The man who had understood calculus six centuries before Europe. The man who had invented the Chakravala - the cyclic wheel method for solving equations that no other civilization would rediscover for five hundred years.
"The Chakravala," Eshaan thought, and felt the resonance of a connection clicking into place. "The wheel method. Invented by the man Kripa is sending me to find."
The Wheel of Dharma. The Chakravala. The same word. The same image. The man who had mathematically described how cycles turned was the man who was going to teach the man who would turn the civilizational cycle.
He was either looking at coincidence or at the specific humour of a universe that arranged its symbols with considerable precision.
"He is currently in Ujjayini," Kripa continued. "At the Vedha Shala - the Observatory. He does not leave it often and he does not welcome interruptions easily. But he has a genuine itching to meet unusual minds, and his daughter Lilavati could attest to this, if you were ever to meet her."
"He taught her mathematics when the world told him that widows did not have a life to live without a husband." Something moved in Kripa's expression. "A man like that will know what he is looking at when he looks at you."
"He will not live past 1185." Eshaan muttered. He knew about the lifespan of Bhaskaracharya because he had read about his works and his life, and Kripa confirmed it with his next words.
"He might not have long before he leaves this world," Kripa said quietly. "I do not know this with certainty for I am not a physician. But he is suffering from something incurable." His eyes were steady on Eshaan's face. "You are in Pataliputra and Ujjayini is many days journey towards the west"
"You neither have resources nor any means of making that journey."
Eshaan let the truth sink in him while Acharya Kripa continued, "Find a way to travel and reach Ujjayini before it's too late and tell Bhaskar what you have, not Everything but you will know how much to tell him when the time comes, and He will do the rest."
"Seven years before Bhaskaracharya dies, I must find a way to reach Ujjayini before the end of this year."