Chapter 12: The Departure

The dusk wind had quieted.

Ishaan sitting cross-legged under the Peepal tree, eyes closed, face turned towards the sky now painted in deep amethyst hues. The poem had left his lips like a sigh from the soul. That leaf he had held had long blown away into the silence, yet its weight still lingered in his palm like a message from the past.

And with that soft pull only memory can give, Ishaan found himself drifting backward again.

It was late March. The school bell had rung its last for the session. Pine Crest’s red-brick buildings shimmered in the late afternoon heat. Mango buds were bursting open, and the seniors had already vanished into the folds of exam halls.

But Ishaan Sharma, for once in his life, wasn’t among them.

He sat alone beneath the old deodar tree behind the staff room, the same place where Myra once laughed about Anjali’s obsession with overboiled tea and where Vinod would mimic Mr. Dutt’s booming speeches with unmatched accuracy. Gagan had stopped asking why he wasn’t showing up for exams. Even Mr. Dutt, with his stern concern, had only patted his shoulder and said, “Life has different tests, Ishaan. Don’t worry about the ones printed on paper.”

And Ishaan had smiled. That strange smile he carried since the dream.

Something in him had uncoiled. Something that would never rewind again.

“You’re not coming?” Myra had asked one afternoon, her tone half-casual, half-not. They were at the school terrace, feet dangling over the edge.

“To the exam hall?” he replied, feigning ignorance.

“To… life,” she said, after a long pause.

He looked at her. Really looked.

She wore that sky-blue kurta again, the one with tiny mirrorwork dots that flickered in sunlight. Her hair was loosely tied, a few strands escaping onto her cheek. There was something unspeakably beautiful in her restraint.

“I don’t know,” he finally said. “Maybe this year I’ll stay back and… just listen to the wind.”

She laughed, but her eyes didn’t.

“You sound like a sadhu.”

“Maybe I’m becoming one.”

They sat in silence, only the birds filling in the spaces their hearts couldn’t.

Myra was leaving for college. Delhi. Psychology Honours. Anjali had already started preparing her farewell speech in the drama club. Ranjana was busy with pre-med coaching. Gagan was buried in his IIT dreams. Vinod had cracked every mock test Pine Crest had thrown at him.

And Ishaan?

He was floating somewhere between worlds.

He would walk to school, attend classes without speaking. He would sit through poetry lectures and forget to take notes. Sometimes he would be found staring at the school wall like he was waiting for it to open up and speak.

One day, while drawing the Chakras absentmindedly on the back of his notebook, Mr. Dutt walked up to him and said, “You know, Ishaan, not every spiral leads upward. Some carry us inward. That too, is a journey.”

Ishaan had nodded slowly. He hadn’t told anyone that sometimes, even in broad daylight, he felt as if he was watching everything from behind a soft veil—as if he had died and come back, but hadn’t quite remembered how to live yet.

The last day before her departure, Myra didn’t meet him. Not in school. Not by the deodar tree. Not even on the road where they sometimes shared roasted peanuts during winter walks.

There was no goodbye.

No letter. No message. Not even Anjali knew why.

For a week, Ishaan kept checking the school gate.

Then he stopped.

“You okay?” Gagan had asked once, tossing a cricket ball up and down in the field.

“Define okay,” Ishaan smiled, lying on the grass.

“Still writing poems to the wind?”

“These days, even the wind is quiet.”

Gagan lay down beside him. “I miss her too.”

They didn’t say who.

They didn’t need to.

At home, his cousin Ranjana watched him with gentle suspicion.

“Bhaiya, did you take something?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know. You just… don’t look real anymore.”

He grinned, ruffling her hair. “Maybe I became a dream.”

She shook her head, muttering, “You’re becoming weirder than the sadhus on YouTube.”

Yet even she noticed how he no longer snapped at taunts, how his eyes stayed soft even during arguments. How he would sometimes sit still for an hour, doing nothing, saying nothing, not even meditating—just being.

The exam results came. Ishaan had officially failed.

Principal Madam called him into her office.

“Ishaan, you’re a bright boy. What happened?”

“I think,” he said with a peaceful smile, “I passed in something else this year.”

She looked at him, baffled. Then sighed.

“Come back next year. We’ll keep your seat.”

He bowed slightly. “Thank you.”

That summer, he walked barefoot more often. Sat under trees. Watched ants build their tiny homes. Spoke to flowers. Once he even wrote a letter to the moon, folded it into a paper boat, and left it in the village stream.

He wasn’t lost. He wasn’t broken.

He was just… tuned to another frequency.

Years later, when Myra would write her first research paper on altered states of consciousness, she would unconsciously describe Ishaan without naming him.

And when Ishaan would read it online, decades later, he would smile.

A strange ache and peace would rise in him again, as always.

But by then, he would understand:

That some departures are really initiations. That not every silence is an absence. And that sometimes, the Guru leaves not to abandon you—but to make space for your real becoming.

Back under the Peepal tree, Ishaan opened his eyes.

A koel called out.

The wind stirred the leaves above.

He was not that boy anymore.

But the journey of that boy still lived within him—not as memory, but as light.

A departing light that had never truly left.