THE SQUARE PEGS AT VARANASI GHAT

 

The sun was an orange ball hanging over the Ganges, its light reflecting off the ripples like thousands of tiny floating lamps. Advait sat on the cold stone steps of the Dashashwamedh Ghat, his heart heavy with the kind of modern-day exhaustion that sleep cannot fix. Amidst the swirling incense and the gathering crowds, his eyes were drawn to an elderly couple sitting just a few feet away. They looked like any other retired couple finding solace in their golden years - quiet, unassuming, and weathered by time.

The man, Arun, wore a simple checked shirt tucked into neatly pressed trousers, his face a map of lived experiences. Beside him sat Arunima, draped in a crisp cotton saree, her silver hair adorned with a fresh ring of jasmine that scented the air around them. To Advait, they looked like the typical middle-class pair, perhaps living on a modest pension and navigating the slow twilight of their lives. He expected them to be staring blankly at the river, lost in memories of a bygone era.

But as Advait watched, the illusion of the "typical" elderly couple shattered. Arun reached into his pocket and pulled out a top-of-the-line smartphone with a practiced flick of his wrist. He not only took a photo, but he adjusted the exposure and framed Arunima against the shimmering water with the precision of a seasoned photographer. He moved with an agility that defied his age, crouching slightly to get the perfect angle.

Arunima did not shy away or look confused, but she posed with a regal, effortless elegance, her smile radiant and genuine. A moment later, her own device chimed. A sleek, latest-model phone appeared out of her leather sling bag. She handled the device with incredible ease and confidence. She answered a video call, her voice warm as she greeted her son and grandchildren in London. Advait sat stunned at the pro level confidence of navigating the interface without a single moment of hesitation.

As the sun dipped lower, the couple began filming each other, laughing as they captured selfies with the ancient temples in the background. Advait was hooked. In a world where most young people are glued to screens in isolation, these two were using technology to amplify their togetherness. Their happiness was not just a facade, but it was a visible, vibrating energy that seemed to shield them from the chaos of the crowded ghat.

Driven by a sudden, desperate need to understand their secret, Advait hesitantly struck up a conversation. He complimented their spirit and asked the question that had been gnawing at him: "How are you both so genuinely happy? Most people your age seem overwhelmed by the world today, yet you two look more alive than I feel." Arun looked at him, his eyes crinkling with a kindness that felt like a warm embrace.

"Happiness is not something you find sitting under a tree, son," Arun said, his voice steady. "It is something you create, piece by piece, every single morning." He looked at Arunima, and then back at Advait. "The world will always try to tell you who to be. But the most important lesson we learned is this: Do not try to fit yourself into others. A square peg never fits in a round hole, and trying to force it only breaks the peg."

Advait felt a sting in his eyes. He thought of his own life - the corporate ladder he hated, the social expectations he suffocated under. Arunima noticed his silence and added, "We spent years trying to be the 'perfect' couple for the society. In our younger days, I was told to be a silent shadow, and Arun was pressured to be a ruthless provider. We were miserable because we were living someone else’s script. We were square pegs bleeding because we tried to fit into round holes."

Arun nodded, his expression darkening for a moment as he recalled their "down" years. "There was a time, decades ago, when we lost our first business and nearly our home. I was drinking to forget, and Arunima was fading into a deep, dark depression. We were together, but we were miles apart. We were following the 'traditional' path of suffering in silence because that’s what was expected of our generation."

"We realized that if we did not change, the darkness would consume us. We stopped caring about the neighbors’ whispers and started caring about our own souls. We embraced our quirks, our love for tech, and our own way of viewing the world. Once we stopped trying to fit in," Arunima whispered, "we finally started to fly. That was the first step toward this happiness you see today."

Confused by the contrast of their lifestyle, Advait asked why they came to the ghat every day if they were so modern. "To preserve and nourish our roots," they replied in unison. Advait gestured to their expensive phones. "But you are so high-tech! How do the roots fit in?" Arun smiled deeply. "Tradition and technology can go together, Advait. But remember - Only tradition breeds the discipline that makes life meaningful. Without that discipline, technology is just a distraction that will eventually drown you."

Advait then asked about their incredible synchronicity. They seemed to move as one soul in two bodies. Arunima reached out and gently touched Arun’s hand, a small gesture that carried the weight of decades. "Love does not require words alone," she said softly. "It is felt through the heart. It is about investing attention even when the other person is boring and giving care when they are at their worst," saying this she winked at Arun.

She shared a story from a few years back when Arun had suffered a stroke. For months, he was not able to speak. "In that silence, we learned the true language of love," she said. "It was not about the poems or the promises, but it was about the way I held his hand and the way he looked at me. It was the touch, the concern, and the absolute refusal to let go when the world got dark. You have to invest time in each other long before the crisis hits."

Arun added, "Advait, even we have had our share of ups and downs, terrible fights where we did not speak for days, and moments where we thought we had nothing left to give. But we overcame them because we chose to see each other as individuals, not just as 'husband' or 'wife.' We gave each other the space to be human, to fail, and to grow back together."

As the bells of the Ganga Aarti began to ring, the sound vibrating through the very stones of the ghat, Advait felt a profound shift within himself. He had come to Varanasi seeking a miracle from the gods, but he had found it in the lives of two ordinary people who had mastered the extraordinary art of being themselves. They were modern yet rooted, tech-savvy yet disciplined, and most importantly, they were free.

The couple stood up, ready to immerse themselves in the prayer, their faces lit by the first flickers of the massive brass lamps. Advait watched them, feeling a sense of clarity he had not known in years. He realized that his life was not a series of mistakes, but a collection of "round holes" he needed to stop trying to fit into. As he bid them goodbye, he knew he would never forget the square pegs of Varanasi.

THE BLOODY PIGMENT

THE BLOODY PIGMENT.....

"Arjun's Prism" a exclusive "By Invitation Only" art gallery nestled in a narrow lane of Versova covered by the swaying Palm trees and facing the Bombay sea. The gallery was pristine white, but "The Creation of the Womb" felt like a bruise on the wall. It was a chaotic swirl of deep crimson and oily blacks, pulsating with a strange, wet energy that made Aditi’s stomach turn. To her, it looked like a surgical nightmare which was bloody, visceral, and raw. It was something that should have been hidden away in a dark basement. But Advait stood frozen, his eyes glazed as if he were looking into the face of a long-lost lover, he was literally sinking into the wet layers of the canvas.

Arjun, their college friend, beamed with pride, though his smile did not quite reach his eyes, he looked exhausted, as if the art were draining him. "He’s a genius, Advait," Arjun whispered, his voice sounding hollow and metallic in the quiet room. "Balram doesn’t just paint; he captures things... things that don't want to be caught." Aditi felt a sudden chill crawl up her spine.

"I will buy it," Advait said as if had been hypnotized. "It's for 85000.00 Advait," Arjun smirked and said. "Don't worry," Advait replied without taking his eyes off fromthe swirls. The swirls seemed to be drowning him. Aditi was surprised, "Advait you would pay 85k for this blotch?" Advait looked at him with his red pupils glowing. Aditi stepped back afraid. Although the price tag of Rs. 85,000.00 was a drop in the bucket for them, but she would have paid double just to have the canvas burned and the ashes scattered in the sea.

"Advait you should meet Balram as he would hand over the painting to you, that's his way with the clients" Arjun said. The meeting with Balram took place in a cramped, windowless back room that smelled of turpentine and rotting flowers. Balram looked as if he had been hollowed out, his skin color was of old parchment and his fingernails stained with crusty red. When he shook Advait’s hand, Aditi noticed that his grip did not just hold him, but it seemed to cling, his long fingers wrapping around Advait’s wrist like a vine. He was "off" in a way that defied logic, moving with a jerky, unnatural grace which made her pulse race and a strong desire to run away from that room.

"You feel it, don't you? The pull of the origin?" Balram's voice  sounding like the dry leaves dancing on the stone of a grave. Advait nodded slowly, his usual sharp wit and skepticism replaced by a hollow, haunting devotion. He was not just buying a painting, but it appeared he was surrendering to it, his eyes tracking every movement of Balram’s stained hands. Aditi tried to pull him away, but Advait’s skin felt unnaturally cold, his muscles rigid and unresponsive to her touch, as if he was turning into stone.

As they spoke, the air in the room grew heavy and thick, making it hard for Aditi to breathe, and the air in the room smelled faintly old blood. Balram began describing his process of painting, talking about "life-blood" and "the bridge between the seen and the unseen," his eyes never leaving Advait’s. Every word felt like a spiral being woven into the air. Aditi could not make out any sense of his talks, to her horror, Advait did not just agree to buy the first painting but he signed a contract for three more, his signature was shaky, jagged, and unrecognizable on the paper. 

That night, "The Creation of the Womb" hung in their bedroom, and the silence of the house became deafening and predatory. Aditi lay awake, watching the crimson oils shift, the shapes on the canvas seemingly rearranging themselves when she blinked. She could hear the faint, rhythmic thumping coming from the wall, a heartbeat, slow, wet, and heavy. Beside her, Advait breathed in perfect sync with the painting, his chest rising and falling in a terrifying, mechanical rhythm. He was no longer dreaming his own dreams.

Within a week, Advait began to change physically, his vitality leaking out of him like water from a cracked jar. He stopped eating, his face had turned pale and the skin  had lost it's luster, mirroring the translucent complexion of Balram. He spent hours staring at the wall where the three new paintings were supposed to be hung, he would  whisper to the empty space in a language which Aditi could not understand. When she tried to scream for help or call a doctor, her voice came out as a raspy, thin whistle, as if the air was being sucked out of her lungs by an invisible, hungry force.

The second painting arrived at midnight, delivered by a silent Arjun who refused to look Aditi in the eye and fled before she could speak. It was titled "The Severing," and it depicted a figure that looked remarkably like Advait, his shadow being peeled away from his body by a dozen clawed, translucent hands. It was then Aditi realized that Balram was not just painting fantasies but he was painting a countdown to her husband's disappearance, documenting the theft of Advait's soul in oil and pigment.

By the time the third painting was due, Advait was a mere ghost in his own home, a hollow shell of the man she loved. He no called out Aditi's name, his eyes reflecting only the dark, swirling void of the canvases which lined their walls like open wounds. Aditi found the contract in his study, and her heart stopped when she touched the paper. The ink was not black but a fading, metallic brown, the exact color of dried blood. The "price" was not just the money they had paid, it was a total transfer of essence from the living to the canvas.

On the final night, Balram appeared at their door without being called, his presence bringing a freezing fog into the house. He did not need a key, the house seemed to open for him like the wound. He walked into the bedroom where Advait sat cross-legged on the floor, his skin now the same parchment-gray as the artist's. As Balram touched the final canvas, Advait’s body simply collapsed like an empty suit of clothes. The painting was no longer empty; it showed a man trapped behind a layer of oil, his face pressed against the surface, screaming in a silence that would last forever.

Aditi was pained and afraid with the turn of events. Overcoming her fear and driven by desperation she grabbed the heavy brass lamp in the room and swung it at the final canvas, expecting the fabric to tear. Instead, the surface felt like rubbery flesh, absorbing the blow with a thud. Across the room, Balram did not even flinch, he simply turned his head with a slow, predatory grace, his eyes now glowing red. "You cannot break what has already been integrated, Aditi," he whispered, his voice deep, slow and vibrating through the air in the room. "Advait is not in the room anymore. He is the pigment. He is the medium. He is finally eternal."

Panic gripped her, and she ran for the front door, her mind racing toward the only person she thought could help. She scrambled to her car and sped toward Arjun’s apartment, her hands shaking so violently that she could barely steer. She banged his apartment door till he opened it, sobbing, begging him to call the police or some kind of exorcist. But as she entered his living room, the air turned ice-cold. Arjun was sitting at a large mahogany table, bathed in the flickering light of thirteen black candles. He was meticulously cleaning a set of silver brushes, his face devoid of the warmth she had known for years.

"I knew you would come here, Aditi," Arjun said, his voice devoid of emotion. He stood up, and for the first time, she noticed the symbol branded into the hollow of his throat, a twisted, umbilical knot that matched the signature on Balram’s paintings. He was not a victim of the art but he was the scout. "Do you think a man like Balram finds his subjects by accident? He is the Hand, but I am the Eye. I find the souls with the right frequency, the ones hungry enough, like Advait, to let us in."

Horror enveloped her as Arjun revealed the truth: they were members of The Gilded Shroud, an occult tribe that believed true immortality could only be achieved by trapping living consciousness within "The Eternal Gallery." Arjun had spent years befriending them, waiting for the moment Advait’s internal spark was bright enough to harvest. "Every painting Balram finishes feeds the tribe," Arjun explained, stepping closer. "We don't just take lives; we preserve them in a state of perpetual, conscious equilibrium. Advait is part of something much larger now. He is the foundation of our Master’s next work."

Suddenly, the shadows in the corners of Arjun's room began to thicken and stretch, taking the jagged shapes of the figures from "The Severing." Aditi backed away, but the door behind her slammed shut and the locks turned by themselves. From the darkness, Balram stepped out, carrying a fresh, blank canvas that seemed to pulse with a faint heartbeat. "The contract Advait signed had a hidden clause," Balram spoke with a coarse voice, his stained fingers twitching with excitement. "A soul is never complete without its mirror. He is calling for you from inside the red oil, Aditi. He is lonely in the dark."

The two men closed in on her, their movements synchronized like a well-rehearsed ritual. Aditi now realized with terror that her repulsion toward the painting had not been a warning to save Advait, but it had been the very thing that marked her as the perfect "contrast" for the collection. As Arjun held her arms with a strength that felt supernatural, Balram dipped a brush into a jar of dark, viscous fluid. As the first stroke of wet paint touched her forehead, she felt her bones begin to soften and her voice dissolve, her reality narrowing down to a single, terrifying point of oil and canvas.

The transition was not a sudden snap, but a slow, agonizing dissolution of her physical form. Aditi felt her skin turn into a thick, tacky substance, her screams muffling as if she were being submerged in heavy syrup. Inside the canvas, the world was a distorted nightmare of smeared colors and suffocating heat. She found herself standing in a landscape made of dried leaves and flowing ink, where the sky was a bruised purple and the ground vibrated with the collective moans of a thousand trapped souls. Then, she saw him - Advait was standing a short distance away, his body translucent and flickering like a dying candle, his eyes wide with and devoid of the sparkle.

They reached for each other, but their hands passed through one another like smoke. "Aditi," he whispered, the sound vibrating through the very fabric of the painting. "We are not just art... we are the fuel." As they huddled together in the crimson gloom, the "sky" above them peeled back like an eyelid. Through the transparent layer of the varnish, they could see the "Real World" magnified and distorted. Balram and Arjun stood over the canvas, their faces looming like giant moons. They were laughing, their voices booming like thunderclaps that vibrated and shook the very foundations of the painted world.

Aditi realized that the only way to fight back was to manipulate the medium they were trapped in. She discovered that by focusing her intense rage and grief, she could make the paint around her boil and shift. She reached into the "ground". the deep, dark pigments of the lower layers and began to pull at the strokes Balram had laid down. If they were the paint, then they were also the weapon. She grabbed a streak of sharp dried oil and felt it harden into a blade in her hand. "Advait, help me!" she cried. "If we can't leave, we will tear this world from the inside out!"

Together, they began a frantic, rhythmic assault on the boundaries of their prison. They did not just move but they tore at the brushstrokes, ripping through the "Creation of the Womb" and bleeding into the neighboring canvases. They surged through the painted landscape of the damned, causing the paintings on the walls of the physical room to blister and weep. Outside, Balram’s triumphant smile vanished. He watched in horror as his masterpieces began to liquefy, the expensive oils running down the walls like melting wax. The "perfect" subjects were no longer behaving as  they should have instead they were a riot of color and fury.

The gallery air turned toxic as the scent of the occult oils filled the room. Arjun tried to stabilize the canvases, his branded throat glowing with a flickering light, but the power of two souls acting in unison was too much for the ritual to contain. The frames began to crack under the pressure of Aditi and Advait’s combined will. A sharp tear appeared in the center of the final painting, and instead of more paint, a cold, unnatural wind began to howl from the breach. The "Gilded Shroud" had never accounted for a love that refused to be curated.

With a sound like a gunshot, the final canvas exploded. The force of the spiritual decompression threw Balram and Arjun against the white walls, pinning them there as the swirling, angry pigments engulfed them. For a second Aditi and Advait stood in the center of the room, their forms glowing with a blinding, divine light. They were not fully human, and they weren't quite paint but they were something new, a powerful energy born of the canvas. As the gallery began to burn with a fire that consumed only the art, they turned toward the insane cultists, ready to show them what "eternal life" truly felt like.