But he can return home now! She imagined Rishi Ajan living close to her in the resident cottages, resuming his scribe duties. Idhika couldn’t wait to go back and tell all her friends that she had actually found Madhu. Will they even believe that it is here?

It was indeed ingenious of Sanaka to have hidden it away from the reaches of Aranyani, far from the forest of Aranyala. And even then, if someone did manage to find it, like she had, there was no way to reach and extricate the barrels. Idhika opened and closed her eyes, trying to find another companion: an ant, spider or even a bat in the cave. She wanted to check exactly how many barrels Sanaka had stolen. But no hosts responded to her call. How does he do it? Get to it? There’s no animal to jump to. How in the three loks does Sanaka access, let alone move around, these large barrels? What does he plan to do with all this Madhu?

Sanaka had entered the cave only a few seconds before Idhika’s arrival, and without wasting time, after a ‘Namahkrita’, pushed his soul out of the yellow catla to enter the only organism in that cave: Huhu, his ultimate companion.

Vanyasa’s dwellers only ever imagined the crocodile when told the story of Airavata, but having lived it, Sanaka was well aware of Huhu’s existence in the flesh. The beast’s powerful jaws and webbed toes vexed Sanaka and always made him uneasy as a companion. Its massive, plaited tail had a burn mark running across it where Indra’s bolt had struck. Extending to an astonishing size of twenty feet, the animal was a beast of the water so primal that even a son of Brahma questioned his rank in the universe.

Sanaka lay on his belly, within the beast, hidden and unmoving in the shadow of the barrels. That was when he saw a brown tilapia uncharacteristically poking its head out of the water. Despite the fear that the Sabha and Samiti would discover his ploy, Sanaka was only momentarily fazed. That was because a plan had formed in his head. The first step was to slowly lift his tail, all hundred kilograms of it, and adjust the open lid of the barrel. And the second, of course, was to reward his companion with a much-deserved meal.

But before he could pounce on the fish, the tilapia was lost, having sunk back down into the water. Idhika was dying to tell her friends. She left behind the springs, darted through the blue hole and raced to the surface of Pandayam Tal. She flung herself out of the water with much speed—in fact, enough speed to emerge considerably and catch the sight of an eagle up in the sky. Before the fish hit the lake’s water, Idhika’s soul had already jumped to the eagle. That was how she made her way towards the resident huts, where she eventually found all four of her friends around her mortal body.