AnjaniManda8
Aranya Maithili Kamble had never wanted much from life beyond the quiet pleasure of old things. She liked histories best when they were fragmented-when they asked to be pieced together slowly, patiently, with ink-stained fingers and unanswered questions. That, more than anything else, was why she had chosen archaeology. What could be more thrilling, she had once thought, than standing at the centre of every forgotten scandal, every erased devotion, every silence that history had deliberately kept?
Instead, she spent her days cataloguing broken pots and arguing about ancient drainage systems.
Three years into the profession, she was painfully bored.
She blamed the films. The books. The romantic lies that had convinced her archaeology was anything more than slow, meticulous disappointment. There were no quests, no revelations-only sunburn, paperwork, and ruins that refused to speak.
The Vaishnavata monastery in the northern foothills of the Sahyadris was no different. Old. Modest. Historically important, yes-but emotionally inert. Aranya sighed as she crouched beside what had once been a monk's sleeping alcove, absently brushing dust from the stone wall.
Her brush struck something solid.
She paused.
and a palm-leaf slipped into her hands-almost as if the gods themselves had grown weary of her complaints about an unremarkable profession-her life, her fate, and every carefully maintained inch of her sanity would begin to unravel in that very moment, as her eyes fell upon a single name:
Anurag Syamantakam.