The trail behind the ashram climbed through a jagged throat of red stone before opening onto the northern shoulder of the mountain.
Here, the salty wind off the eastern sea met the cold, thin drafts spilling down from the upper ridges.
The sal trees grew thick and stubborn in this hollow.
Their trunks rose tall and straight, with furrowed grey bark that looked like dried river mud, crowned with heavy clusters of leathery green leaves.
On a flat clearing of hard-packed earth near the edge of the grove lay the work left for him: a massive mound of felled sal trunks, cut into waist-high rounds and stacked like giant stone wheels against the face of the cliff.
Vidhar dropped the butt of the Kuthara (woodcutter’s axe) into the red dirt and stood gasping for air.
Even carrying the heavy tool up the half-mile incline had made his thighs burn.
His cheap rubber sneakers offered little grip on the loose gravel; twice his feet had slipped, forcing him to catch his balance by throwing his weight onto his stinging palms.
He wiped a streak of cold sweat from his forehead with the wool of his sleeve and examined the wood before him.
Sal was not soft cedar or dry mountain pine.
In his college town, he had seen old temple pillars carved from sal timber—wood so dense and heavy that carpenters complained it blunted their finest steel saws and refused to rot even if left in monsoon mud for fifty years.
The sap inside the cut rounds had dried into hard, yellowish beads of crystal resin that smelled faintly of camphor and wild honey.
“Look at the grain, boy, don’t look at the size of the log.”
The dry, raspy voice did not come from the trail below.
Vidhar looked up.
Perched comfortably upon a low branch of a wild fig tree overhang was Kakbhushundi.
The great mountain crow tilted his glossy black head, preening a feather on his left wing with casual, unhurried insolence.
“You followed me up here just to sit and watch?” Vidhar muttered, shaking out his aching wrists.
“Watch you?
Of course I came to watch,” the crow replied, his ancient thoughts rustling inside Vidhar’s temples like dry leaves shaken in a wind.
“It is not every day an immortal crow gets to see a scholar from Kalyug try to cut ironwood with raw meat for hands.
The Guru (spiritual teacher and preceptor) gave you a simple task: split until the blade feels light.
You haven’t even lifted it off the dirt yet.”
Vidhar took a slow, deep breath, pulling the cool mountain air into the bottom of his lungs.
He rolled a thick round of sal timber—at least two spans across—into the center of the clearing, standing it upright on its flat base.
He planted his sneakers wide on the gravel, bent his knees slightly as he had once seen woodcutters do in the northern valleys, and took hold of the tamarind-wood handle.
The moment his fingers clamped down, the raw, peeled skin on his thumbs sent a sharp shock of pain straight up into his elbows.
He gritted his teeth, hoisted the twenty-pound iron head over his right shoulder, and swung it down with all the strength in his arms.
Thunk.
The sound was dull and hollow, like an iron spade hitting wet clay.
The axe did not split the log.
The crescent edge bit barely half an inch into the yellowish heartwood and stuck fast.
A jarring vibration traveled straight up the wooden shaft, rattling Vidhar’s wrist bones and sending a shooting ache into his shoulders.
Vidhar cursed under his breath.
He put his sneaker against the side of the log and yanked on the handle.
The wood gripped the iron like a vise.
He had to rock the axe back and forth three times, tearing his open blisters wider, before the blade popped free with a dry squeak.
“Pitiful,” Bhushundi cackled from the fig branch, hopping twice along the bark.
“Truly pitiful!
You swung that tool like an angry washerman beating a wet blanket against a river stone!
Did you listen to a single word the son of Jamadagni spoke to you beside the fire?”
Vidhar stood over the scarred log, his chest heaving, his palms leaving faint red smudges of clear fluid and blood upon the wood of the handle.
“I swung it with all my strength,” Vidhar panted.
“The wood is like solid rock.”
“Your strength is nothing, boy!” the crow barked, his voice turning sharp as flint.
“You are trying to fight the wood with your anger.
You raise the axe thinking, ‘I must split this so the son of Bhrigu doesn’t mock me.’ You swing it thinking, ‘My palms are burning.’ You are fighting three battles at once, and the wood simply sits there, laughing at your scattered wits.”
Vidhar closed his eyes.
He felt the cold breeze on the back of his neck. New chapters come out on g.com first.
He smelled the dry, sweet incense lingering on his clothes from the morning Havan Kund (sacred fire pit).
In his mind, he heard again the calm, terrifying rumble of Parashurama’s voice:
If you look at the thousand arms, you die…
You look only at the single hollow where his neck met his collarbone.
When the center is still, the axe moves on its own.
Vidhar opened his eyes.
He stopped looking at the mountain of logs behind the stump.
He stopped calculating how many hours were left until the sun reached midday.
He lowered his gaze to the single cut round of sal before him.
It was not a flat block of wood.
It was the cross-section of a living thing that had grown on this mountain for eighty winters.
In the center, where the sap had dried dark, ran a series of tight, concentric rings.
Radiating out from the heart was a hairline crack—no wider than a fingernail—running toward the outer bark.
That was the line.
That was the grain where the tree itself had decided it would yield.
Vidhar stepped back.
He did not grip the tamarind handle with tight, panicked white knuckles; he relaxed his fingers, letting the rough wood rest securely against the hollows of his hands.
He straightened his back, pulled his breath deep into his abdomen, and fixed his eyes upon that single hairline fault in the grain.
He raised the Kuthara above his head.
This time, he did not throw his shoulders forward in a clumsy lunge.
He simply let the immense weight of the iron head begin its fall, guiding it with his wrists, allowing gravity and momentum to draw the heavy crescent down in a clean, vertical line.
Crr-aaack!
The iron wedge struck the hairline crack with a sharp, ringing report that sounded like a dry branch snapping in winter.
The force did not rattle his bones this time; it passed straight through the iron into the wood.
The thick sal round split cleanly down the center, the two halves falling outward into the red dirt with a heavy, satisfying thump, exposing the pale, clean, fragrant grain within.
Vidhar stood frozen for a second, his breath suspended in his throat.
The axe had not stuck.
The handle had not jarred his wrists.
The weight of the iron had done the work, while his body had merely served as the guide.
“There,” Bhushundi muttered, the mockery completely gone from his tone, replaced by a quiet, ancient gravity.
“You found the grain.
Now do it five hundred more times without letting your mind stray to the tea shops of your city.”
Vidhar did not answer.
He kicked one half of the split round aside, stood up the remaining piece, found the radial line of the grain, and raised the axe again.
Crack.
The morning slipped away into a rhythm of iron, breath, and falling wood.
Lift.
Exhale.
Fall.
Split.
Whenever Vidhar’s thoughts wandered—worrying about his family in the future, wondering if he would ever find a way back through the rift, or feeling the fiery sting of the open blisters on his hands—the axe would falter.
It would strike an inch off-center, glance off the hard bark, or bite into a knot, sending that familiar, sickening shudder through his arms.
Each mistake acted like an immediate correction.
It forced him back to the ground beneath his feet.
It forced him back to his breath.
He worked through the pile piece by piece.
His breath fell into a deep, regular cadence that matched the distant rhythm of the waves below.
He no longer counted the billets.
He no longer looked at the sun to check the hour.
There was only the hairline fault in the heartwood, the downward arc of the iron, and the clean, sweet scent of split sal timber filling the hollow.
By the time the sun climbed directly overhead, burning the last shreds of cloud from the peak, sweat had soaked Vidhar’s woolen sweater through to the wool. Read this novel at g.com for the best experience.
His arms felt like leaden weights, his trousers were smeared with red earth and sticky yellow resin, and a neat, towering wall of split firewood stood stacked beside the cliff face.
He lowered the axe, leaning on the handle, his head hanging down as he drew long, trembling breaths of sea air.
“Enough.”
Vidhar jumped.
Bhagavan Parashurama was standing at the edge of the clearing, beside the wild fig tree.
He made no sound when he walked; despite his colossal size, the gravel did not shift beneath his bare feet.
The sage stood with his arms folded across his ash-smeared chest, his fair skin gleaming like white stone in the midday sun.
Over his right shoulder, the white threads of his Janeu (sacred thread) stirred lightly in the coastal wind.
His deep, dark eyes swept across the stack of split sal logs—each piece cut straight, following the natural grain, piled neatly with the bark facing outward against the mountain rain.
The Gurudev (revered preceptor) walked over to the chopping stump.
He picked up one of the split billets, turned it in his broad palm, and ran a calloused thumb across the smooth, sheared grain.
“The cut is clean,” Parashurama said, his voice flat and even.
“The wood did not shatter from blind rage.
It opened because you found where the tree was already willing to part.”
The giant set the log down upon the pile and looked directly into Vidhar’s face.
“Hold out your hands, boy.”
Vidhar hesitated, then slowly raised his palms, turning them upward.
They were an ugly sight.
The skin over his thumbs and the bases of his fingers had torn completely open; clear fluid, dried sweat, and smears of dark red blood were crusted over the raw flesh, coated in black dust from the iron handle and sticky yellow resin from the sal wood.
His fingers trembled with an involuntary, exhausted flutter.
Parashurama reached to his own waistband, where a small pouch made of cured deer-hide hung from a loop of forest vine.
From it, he pinched a quantity of fine, dry grey powder—not wood ash, but a compound of pulverized medicinal bark and crushed river minerals—and dusted it liberally across both of Vidhar’s open palms.
The sting was immediate and ferocious.
It felt as though boiling oil had been splashed across the raw meat.
Vidhar gasped, his knees buckling, his fists wanting to clench shut in instinctive defense.
“Keep them open!” the Gurudev commanded, the rumble of his voice pinning Vidhar to the spot like an iron bolt.
“Pain is only a visitor, boy.
If you close your hands around it, you invite it to live inside your marrow.
Let the medicine do its work.”
Vidhar forced his trembling fingers to stay flat.
Within five agonizing heartbeats, the violent burning sensation peaked, broke, and dissolved.
A sudden, astonishing coolness—like mountain snow melted with camphor—spread across his palms.
The bleeding stopped instantly.
The torn, inflamed edges of the broken blisters darkened, contracting into a dry, tough, leathery crust that felt firmer and thicker than the soft city skin that had been peeled away.
Vidhar stared at his hands in disbelief.
He closed them slowly into fists; the skin stretched, but it did not tear.
The raw throbbing was gone, replaced by a tight, resilient coolness.
“The first hide must peel away before the leather can form,” Parashurama said, turning back toward the descent path.
“A man cannot draw the great bows of the Treta Yuga with hands that have only stroked parchment.
Tonight, the sea winds will bring a storm against the cliffs.
We need ten bundles of dry kindling from the bamboo hollow before the clouds cover the sun.”
The sage did not wait.
He started down the trail, his long strides carrying him down the rocks with effortless grace.
From the fig tree, Kakbhushundi gave a single, satisfied croak, launched himself into the blue air, and circled once above the grove before gliding down toward the ashram.
Vidhar stood alone in the quiet clearing for a moment.
He picked up the heavy Kuthara, swung it up onto his shoulder, and found that his palms no longer cried out in pain against the tamarind wood.
The axe did not feel light yet.
But it no longer felt like an enemy.
He shouldered the iron and followed the footprints of his Guru down the mountain.