The moonlit alleys were a tone lighter than black, and in that silence punctuated only by barking dogs, Idhika did not sleep. Although the letter was one of many she’d received over the years, this one played on her mind.

Idhika’s mother, Shakuntala, had been the Eka of the valley two decades ago. She’d given birth to Idhika only a few days before the Mahayatra. Leaving her daughter behind, she had led the perilous journey with her husband, Rishi Ajan—one of the other Souls of Samsara that decade—but had eventually perished due to its unforgiving terrains. Grieving, Rishi Ajan had returned to Vanyasa to raise his daughter. But six years later, he was exiled for an unspeakable sin against the valley: the theft of Madhu.

To this day, Idhika despised him for it, for ruining their lives and leaving her without a parent. Like all the others, this letter too would have gone up in blue flames had it not been for the mention of Shakuntala. It offered Idhika an answer to the question that had always plagued her: how exactly had her mother died on the Mahayatra?

Rishi Ajan had always dodged the question, and Idhika had only one clear memory remaining of when she’d asked him—on the fateful day of his exile. Idhika shut her eyes tightly as if she could shut out the memory—it pained her greatly to recall it.

She was a wisp of a six-year-old running through the thin warrens of Vanyasa, her long uncombed hair sticking to her face. She reached a fork in the path where a gathering of women spun khadi. She realized she was lost and broke down in tears. The little girl wept, not for her father, who could take her home, but for her mother, whom she’d never known.

Idhika knew she would get no more sleep. She stood up and looked at the empty spaces in her hut, which had once held two beings. Now there was one charpai instead of two, and her father’s palm-leaf shelves were empty, his writing stool and utensils broken and piled into a corner.

She approached the few palm leaves that still lay tucked to the side and dusted them off. A pankh emerged from between them. Smudges of ink faintly coloured her fingers as she walked towards the threshold with the pankh in her hand.

She was awash in the shaft of moonlight that snuck into her hut. It fell at an angle through the gateway that allowed Idhika to roughly calculate the number of hours until sunrise. Mulling over unanswered questions, she was lost in memories again.

That day, a lost Idhika did finally find her way back home to her father. Ajan had made a successful return from the Mahayatra and was now a well-versed scribe of the Dwitiya Tier, who spent most of his life doing research, but to Idhika, he was her father, her world. She spent a lot of time in the hut surrounded by him and his work—thick bundles of palm leaves dedicated both to the history and lore of the valley.