Ujjayini, 1179 CE
Three weeks into his probation, a boy Eshaan had never spoken to appeared beside the water channel.
"Acharya wants you."
"Now?"
The boy nodded.
Eshaan glanced at the channel. A green ribbon of algae still clung stubbornly to the stone. He then glanced at Devendra who didn't even look up as he said,
"I'll finish it." Devendra simply dragged the scraper through the water again.
"You don't have to."
"I know."
Eshaan and Devendra had developed an understanding over the weeks that suited each of their needs without meddling or exchanging the words much and this was what made their bond a special one in Eshaan's eyes, who himself looked for a quiet time in the Vedha Shala.
Eshaan once again nodded to Devendra before he rinsed his hands, wiped them on his dhoti, and followed the messenger across the observatory. As he reached in the inner dormitory, he expected to be taken to Bhaskaracharya's chamber. Instead, they stopped outside a smaller room tucked behind the main study.
As Eshaan entered, he noticed there were no shelves overflowing with palm-leaf manuscripts. No wide window opening to the morning sun. Only two oil lamps, a low wooden table, and two cushions placed opposite one another.
Lilavati was already waiting.
She didn't look up when he entered.
"Sit."
He lowered himself onto the cushion across from her. For a few moments she continued arranging the blank palm leaves before her until every edge was perfectly aligned. Only then did she speak.
"My father has decided there is no reason to wait until your probation ends."
Eshaan remained silent.
"You'll come here after the evening meal. Three nights each week."
"Which nights?"
"I'll decide."
She finally met his eyes.
"And no one on the lower terrace is to know."
"Why?"
"Because the rules apply to everyone." She answered without hesitation.
"The other probationers believe they're being judged by the same standard. If they hear one of them is receiving private instruction from Acharya's household, they will stop believing that."
"They may be wrong." Eshaan argued.
She drew one of the blank leaves from the stack.
"But they would no longer be unfair."
Eshaan understood it without another word that reputation, once questioned, rarely returned unchanged.
"I won't tell anyone."
"I know."
She slid the leaf across the table followed by a wooden stylus.
"Now prove that the angles of a triangle equal two right angles."
Eshaan reached for the stylus but was interrupted by Lilavati immediately which made his hand pause.
"Not the proof you've memorized. I want your proof."
Eshaan went on to discuss the proof with Lilavati before she was satisfied and permitted him to write it down and record it.
The first few evenings scarcely resembled lessons. Lilavati never began by explaining a theorem or demonstrating a method. Instead, she placed a problem before him and waited. If he wandered into a dead end, she let him wander a little farther before asking a single question that forced him to retrace his steps. More often than not, the answer had been in front of him all along; he simply hadn't looked at it from the right direction. When he proved that the angles of a triangle equalled two right angles, she read through every line without comment before sliding the palm leaf back across the table.
"Again."
He frowned. "Is it wrong?"
"No."
She tapped one step with the end of her stylus.
"You reached the conclusion too quickly."
He looked down at the proof.
"You remembered where you were going." Her gaze remained on the leaf. "I want to know whether you understand how to get there."
She drew a neat line through the construction involving parallel lines.
"Not this way."
For a moment Eshaan considered arguing that the proof was perfectly valid. Instead, he picked up another leaf and began again. It took him most of the following session to find a different route, and when he finally laid the finished proof before her, Lilavati gave the smallest nod before moving on to the next problem without a word of praise. Approval, he discovered, was measured less by what she said than by what she no longer found necessary to correct.
Her corrections were always the same—brief, exact, impossible to argue with. She never covered a page with annotations or rewrote his work for him. If a line of reasoning was careless, she circled it. If a conclusion rested on an assumption he had failed to justify, she wrote a single word in the margin.
Why?
Nothing else.
Not incorrect. Not prove this again. Simply Why?
Before long, Eshaan found himself dreading that word more than any outright mistake. A wrong answer could be discarded and attempted again. Why demanded something more uncomfortable. It meant the answer itself was acceptable, but the thinking behind it was incomplete, and there was no remedy for that except to sit in silence and think until the missing step revealed itself.
By the fourth session, the problems had changed. Lilavati placed a fresh bundle of palm leaves between them, unmarked by any title or commentary.
"This isn't from any treatise you've read," she said. "My father is trying to refine a method for calculating the moon's true position—not where the tables predict it should be, but where an observer will actually find it in the sky. He's close, but there's something in the method that refuses to fit." She paused for the first time that evening, studying him as though weighing whether to continue. "He won't tell me what it is. He wants to see if I discover it myself."
"And you're telling me?"
"I'm telling you because you're going to help me look."
She pushed the leaves towards him.
"And neither of us is going to tell him you did."
Eshaan lowered his eyes to the calculations. Whatever lay on those pages was far removed from elementary geometry. He recognised enough to understand that he had just been invited into work that mattered, and enough to know he had no business feeling pleased about it. Without another question, he picked up the stylus.
The discussion carried on long after the lamps should have been trimmed. Outside, the observatory had fallen quiet, but neither of them noticed. Lilavati grew more demanding the longer they worked, not less. She challenged every conclusion, questioned every shortcut, and dismissed answers that rested on intuition rather than demonstration. It reminded Eshaan, unexpectedly, of Kripa's lessons in meditation. The old monk had never accepted stillness that came easily. If discipline faltered the moment it was tested, then it had never truly existed. Somewhere during the second hour, while retracing the calculations for what felt like the tenth time, Eshaan stopped looking for an error in the numbers and began looking at the assumptions beneath them. One of them had survived unquestioned for so long that no one seemed to remember it had once been a choice rather than a fact.
He pointed to it.
"I think... it begins here."
Lilavati leaned over the manuscript. For a long while she said nothing.
Then she exhaled quietly.
"That is either remarkably fortunate," she said at last, "or you've done exactly what you did in front of my father."
She did not explain. but instead, she copied a few lines onto another palm leaf, folded it once, and set it aside separately. When she finally looked back at him, her expression had returned to its usual composure.
"You'll mention none of this."
"I haven't."
"Not to Devendra."
"I won't."
"Not to anyone on the terrace."
He nodded.
She gathered the remaining leaves into a neat stack.
"Good."
Eshaan kept his word to Lilavati.
For the next few weeks, three evenings out of every seven belonged to the little room behind the main study. He left after the evening meal, returned long after most of the probationers had gone to sleep, and spoke of it to no one.
No one confronted him about his absences, but the rhythm of the terrace changed all the same. Eshaan noticed it first in Nirvaan. Whenever the senior student crossed the lower observatory during the evening rounds, his gaze lingered on Eshaan a fraction longer than before. Eshaan guessed it to be merely thoughtful instead of suspicion.
Nirvaan never asked where Eshaan disappeared to. That, more than any question, told Eshaan he had noticed. Nirvaan observed first. Questions, if they ever came, came later. Devendra was the only one who spoke of it.
They were walking back from the kitchens one evening, carrying empty water buckets between them, when he asked, with the same plainness he brought to everything else,
"Where do you go three nights a week?"
Eshaan looked ahead.
"I can't tell you."
Devendra walked on for several more steps without replying. At last, he gave a quiet nod.
"Then I won't ask again."
He never did.
After that, Eshaan noticed small things. On the evenings he disappeared, the water channel was always clean by the time he returned. The tools had already been put away. Their section of the terrace was ready for the following morning, though no one ever mentioned who had finished the work. Devendra simply did it, then behaved as if nothing unusual had happened.
There was no expectation of thanks, no attempt to remind Eshaan of the favour, no quiet satisfaction at having earned one in return. It was simply how Devendra chose to help.
Eshaan had met very few people like that.
He carried the kindness with him all the same, storing it away as carefully as he stored every other debt he intended to repay, even if he had no idea when the opportunity would come.
"So, what's going on, Eshaan?"
A familiar voice pulled out Eshaan from his thoughts of whatever has happened in the past few weeks. He opened one of his eyes to peek at the individual and to his surprise it was Bhaskaracharya. Eshaan immediately sprung up from the place where he was laying.
"Nothing Acharya. Just thinking about the time that flew by in a swing."
Bhaskaracharya nodded and a smile crept up his lips as he gestured for Eshaan to take a stroll. They both simply walked quite a while before Acharya broke the silence.
"You don't seem happy; Lilavati's lessons don't entertain you I guess?"
"No... No... Nothing like that."
Bhaskaracharya burst into a chuckle. "Tomorrow is a very special night for us."
Eshaan looked puzzled. "What do you mean Acharya?"
"Tomorrow is a partial Eclipse, and so the whole Vedha Shala would be in an uproar."
"Something special?"
"Nothing of sorts but in the coming days, I might need you by my side so be ready."
Bhaskaracharya patted Eshaan's head before making his way to the upper dormitories towards his chamber while Eshaan stared blankly at the retreating figure of Acharya.
"What is to come? Life has become a template for me, and I have forgotten my actual purpose of meeting Bhaskaracharya" Eshaan sighed heavily as he retreated to his bed before the night darkened.