Chapter 21: Father, Guru, Self

Ishaan reached the twenty-first chapter while slowly turning the pages of his handwritten book, She Who Became My Guru, the paper still carrying faint scents of sandalwood from his earlier morning rituals. Outside his hill home, pine trees whispered in the breeze, and the snow-capped peaks shimmered like sages in silent meditation. The fireplace beside him crackled gently, as if eager to accompany him on this deep inward journey.

The chapter opened like the rising of the moon: gentle, silent, inevitable.

It had been days since that overwhelming night on the moon when Vedika had listened to Ishaan’s soul bare itself. And now, sitting at his modest desk in the lunar observatory—earthlight filtering softly through crystalline windows—he began writing, not for the world, but for himself. Yet he knew someone would read it. Perhaps not today, not tomorrow, but one day—when the need to know overtook the fear of knowing.

Ishaan began not with events but with reflections. “How strange,” he murmured to himself, “that in childhood, the first face of love I knew was Govind’s… and yet, beneath it, was Krishna’s presence. Now I see, beneath both, stood another—silent, unwavering—the soul of Dadaji.”

His fingers moved like a calligrapher’s, slow yet deliberate, as if decoding inner etchings.

He recalled the mornings of his childhood when Dadaji sat on the veranda, reading ancient scriptures, surrounded by silence so thick it felt like a protective aura. “Back then,” Ishaan thought, “I only saw an old man wrapped in wool. But now I realize he wasn’t reading stories—he was living them.”

During those years, Govind had been the storm, Krishna the rain, but Dadaji—he was the unchanging sky.

Ishaan’s pen danced across the page as he began to draw lines between his experiences: love for Govind, his boyish mischiefs echoing Krishna’s leelas, and now, this strange fusion of divine love that shielded him from spiritual downfall. Vedika had once said, her voice almost a prayer, “When you truly love God, your love becomes immune to impurity. It sheds its skin, like a snake shedding desire, until only its essence remains.”

He had smiled at that, but now he understood.

One evening, shortly after the moon mission had given them weeks of otherworldly contemplation, Vedika had asked him while sipping a rare tulsi brew, “Why does your love survive, Ishaan? Even after the storms?”

And he had responded, almost unknowingly, “Because I first loved the divine in a human… and then I saw the divine had always been there.”

He chuckled, remembering how she had tilted her head with mock irritation. “So, is that your secret equation? God plus Human equals Immunity to Madness?”

They had both laughed, but within that laughter was something weightless, ancient.

Ishaan kept writing.

He wrote about Govind’s childhood: how he would climb mango trees and chant self-made couplets about school teachers, how he mimicked Krishna’s butter-stealing antics and turned them into biscuit raids. How, every night, Ishaan would watch him act out scenes from Bal Leela, and how those divine stories—heard daily in their home—had slowly seeped into the soil of his heart.

He now understood: his love for Govind was never merely for Govind. It was a seed watered daily by Krishna’s mythology, unknowingly fertilized by Dadaji’s spiritual gravity. “Childhood,” he wrote, “is not so different, whether human or divine. Only the lens we place on it—purity, myth, mystery—shifts its meaning.”

He closed his eyes, remembering.

It was the day after their celestial confession. Vedika had asked him to sit beside the moon lake, where reflections looked clearer than the objects themselves.

“You know,” she began softly, “your love for Krishna didn’t shift to Myra by accident. It flowed like a river into her because love, if genuine, doesn’t end—it only changes the vessel.”

Ishaan had been silent.

She added, “It’s the same love. The same current. Only, with Myra, you had a face to hold. With Krishna, you had to build that face from longing. And when that longing found a form—Myra—it intensified.”

Ishaan remembered whispering, “But what about the danger? Doesn’t strong love corrupt?”

Vedika shook her head. “Only when it’s not purified by its source. The love that begins in devotion—even if diverted—carries a fragrance that cannot rot. And if one enters physical love with a refined heart, then even passion becomes a teacher, not a trap.”

And that had been a turning point.

In that moment, something in Ishaan shifted. He looked at the moon and realized it was no longer cold—it was a mirror. The pit between two loves wasn’t a fall—it was a bridge.

He continued writing.

Medical science had given him terms: mirror neurons, oxytocin, emotional transference. Puranic wisdom gave him metaphors. But lunar research had given him the experience—the inarguable knowing—that love itself was a medium of awakening.

He remembered Mr. Dutt’s voice, from the old Pine Crest classroom, thundering about “energy never dying.” How strange that those physics lectures now echoed in his spiritual life. Myra, Anjali, even Gagan—each had been frequencies in his inner spectrum. Each had offered reflections, distortions, or amplifications.

And yet, one figure had never left the background: Dadaji.

He remembered the day he found the handwritten letter, locked in Dadaji’s wooden trunk. A letter that wasn’t addressed to anyone but was dated three months before Ishaan’s birth.

It read:

“The one who will carry forward my fire will not be taught—it will awaken in him. May he one day find the moon in his mind, the sun in his chest, and the stars in his breath.”

Ishaan stared at that letter for hours. It wasn’t a prophecy. It was a transmission.

Later, while speaking to Vinod during a late-night tea session back on Earth, Ishaan had casually brought it up. Vinod had sipped his chai and said, “Then your Dadaji wasn’t just a grandfather, Ishaan. He was your seed memory. The beginning of your spiral.”

The phrase struck him like lightning.

Dadaji hadn’t raised him. He had implanted something.

“Father, Guru, Self,” Ishaan wrote in bold across the next page. “In the true journey, they are not separate. The guru is born as father, the self is born as disciple. One grows into the other.”

He remembered Ranjana once saying, “It’s funny how your spiritual side never needed explanation. Like it came coded.”

It had. And that code was Dadaji.

The chapter moved forward, not in time, but in depth.

He described how the mind’s idea of God always lacks form, and how strong love helps conjure that form with such clarity that it becomes real. “That’s why devotion to an unseen divine requires stronger love than to a visible human,” he noted. “It’s like painting without canvas. Only the lover’s gaze creates the shape.”

And when that divine love finds a human host—Myra, Govind, Vedika—it becomes stronger than either could hold alone. Like a dhyana chitra—those focused inner images yogis meditate upon—it gets forged not only from faith, but from memory, longing, and the fire of the search.

As Ishaan finished the final lines of the chapter, snow had started to fall gently outside his window. A slow, graceful dance. The same dance he had seen on the moon—tiny flakes of cosmic dust drifting silently.

He leaned back.

The chapter had ended, but it felt like a beginning.

Outside, the hills were turning white again, wrapping the earth in a blanket of stillness. From his hilltop retreat, Ishaan watched the horizon melt into the mist, feeling the presence of his grandfather, his guru, his self—all as one breath in his chest.

He closed the book and whispered to the fireplace, “Dadaji… I see you now.”

The fire answered not with sound, but with warmth.

Chapter 16: The Ancestors’ Abode

Ishaan reached the sixteenth chapter while scrolling slowly through the weathered pages of She Who Became My Guru, seated on the edge of a boulder near a clear Himalayan stream in Himachal—his native land. The breeze carried the scent of pine and wildflowers, and the hush of the mountains gave the words on the page a living pulse. His fingers paused for a second on the heading, The Ancestors’ Abode, and a strange pull of nostalgia coiled around his heart. The water rippled before him, as if mirroring the grey valleys of the moon. And as he began reading, the line between memory and moment dissolved effortlessly.

Returning to the Moon wasn’t like revisiting a city or an old neighbourhood—it was like stepping into a dream you had once woken up from, only to find yourself dreaming it again, but wiser this time. Ishaan Sharma, now a seasoned veterinarian with a weather-wrinkled gentleness in his smile, stood once again on the soft dust plains of Pitru Loka, where shadows walked slowly and the silence carried songs of the past.

The Moon had changed since his student days at Lunar University, or maybe he had. Back then, his limbs were lighter, his mind more restless, and his heart flared with the intense and nameless flame of longing. Myra. Her image, back then, had been seared into the grey landscape of the Moon like a mantra. It wasn’t just memory; it was meditation. Her soft gaze, her unspoken words, her sudden silences—they had all danced in his consciousness, bathed in lunar tranquility.

Yet even amidst the deep pull of that image, something else had arisen—his Dada Guru. Whenever the image of Myra would intensify in that moonlit solitude, so would the vision of his Guru, standing silent in ochre robes, his eyes like twin moons of ancient wisdom. The Moon, after all, was Chandraloka, the realm of the ancestors, a place where meditating on lineage, legacy, and liberation came as effortlessly as breathing. Ishaan had often felt as if the Moon itself held the contemplative power of thousands of rishis and grandfathers whispering through its valleys.

Now, two decades later, Myra’s image had softened, like a perfume clinging faintly to an old letter. His wife Vedika and children Diya and Ruhan filled the space where earlier only one name had echoed. Yet, as he stepped once again onto the Moon’s surface, he felt the subtle shimmer of Myra returning—not as a woman, nor as a memory, but as a reflection of his own soul. She was no longer someone separate. She had dissolved into the great sacred fluid of his being, becoming part of what he now called awareness.

“Funny,” he once wrote in a margin, “how one who stirred the storm becomes the stillness itself.”

Back then, Ishaan remembered struggling with those overwhelming visions. To still the whirlpool, he had meditated on Govind, his cousin brother who had once lived in their home, an enigmatic figure full of spiritual curiosity. Merging Govind’s moral strength with the image of Myra created a strange alchemy—a divine Yin-Yang. Myra’s gaze turned prophetic; her silence began speaking the truths of the cosmos.

Even his Pine Crest days came back to him. He would often see Mr. Dutt, his old science teacher, in his dreams on the Moon, carrying a celestial blackboard and scribbling formulas that dissolved into Upanishadic verses. Vinod, his intelligent classmate, now a researcher in dark matter, had once joked, “Ishaan, you don’t need a spaceship. You are a spaceship.”

The Lunar University corridors had once echoed with Gagan’s voice, singing retro Bollywood while Ishaan secretly stared out the window, thinking of Myra’s absent presence. Ranjana, his cousin sister, had sent him voice notes back then, filled with homemade advice and cheerful rebukes, urging him to eat well and not let his head get lost “in those Moon books.”

But this return was not merely academic—it was spiritual. The Moon had been officially designated as a psychospiritual habitat, and Ishaan’s posting wasn’t to treat space cows or lunar llamas—it was to explore how ancestral energies affected the psychic health of settlers. He was part vet, part mystic psychologist.

One evening, while examining a Lunar Hawk—an alien-like bird adapted for low gravity flight—he saw them. Far away on the horizon, silhouettes danced. Not human. Not alien. Not ghost.

They were… energy drinkers. Beings that fed not on blood or flesh, but on contemplative energy. They shimmered like dew caught in starlight. These beings relished the deeply meditative aura of Pitru Loka. When Ishaan would sit in dhyana, meditating on the intertwined forms of Guru and Myra, he would feel his thoughts lift like incense, and in those moments, he sensed them dancing—graceful, distant, never intruding, but always feeding. And in turn, they gave back something inexplicable. A deeper stillness. A broader silence.

He recorded these experiences in a log but never sent them to Earth Control. Some truths must grow roots in silence.

Reading these pages now, Ishaan chuckled softly. “Why did I never propose to Myra, despite burning inside?” he had once asked himself.

The answer had unfolded slowly through years.

There were too many walls: cultural, social, and perhaps most formidable—the silence between them. Years had passed without a single word exchanged. Ishaan had once considered breaking that silence, but the imagined effort of convincing her, her family, his family, the rituals, the explanations, felt more exhausting than uplifting.

So he chose an arranged marriage, not because it was easier, but because it was possible.

He had written once: “Why diminish the joy of an upcoming arranged marriage by openly mourning an inaccessible love?”

Still, divine love stories from the Puranas whispered their answers to him. Radha never married Krishna. Shiva married Parvati only after years of austerity. These stories weren’t just stories—they were energy blueprints. Ishaan realized the seers had deliberately embedded love tales in scriptures so that even a flicker of romantic energy could be sublimated into a full-fledged path of awakening. Romantic memory merged with spiritual devotion, and something beyond the two emerged—something powerful and liberating.

He remembered one particular night.

A meditation session had reached an unexpected intensity. Myra’s form appeared before him not as a girl, but as a celestial goddess, her outline flickering with cosmic fire. Then it shifted, merging with the image of his Guru. Myra’s gaze became his Guru’s. Ishaan had cried then—not from sadness, but from awe.

He had understood.

Myra was not outside him.

She never was.

The chapter neared its end. Ishaan lifted his eyes from the page. The sun had dipped low over the mountains, casting orange-gold light through the tall pines. Birds fluttered back to their nests. A cowbell rang faintly from a distant pasture. Somewhere nearby, children laughed, their voices carried on the breeze like echoes from a simpler time.

He let the book rest on his knees and looked up at the sky. The Moon had just begun to rise, its faint arc glowing like a half-drawn smile. He whispered aloud, “Pitru Loka isn’t just on the Moon. It’s anywhere your soul touches its lineage… and bows.”

In the distance, the stream sang its eternal song, as if echoing his prayer: Jai Guru Dev, Jai Myra Dev, Jai the Self that was never separate.

And with that, Ishaan closed the chapter—not just in the book, but in his heart, which had never been broken, only opened a thousand times to newer skies.

He leaned back, eyes distant, memory stirring.

“I still remember the day I decided to leave the Moon,” he murmured to himself. “The medical facilities there—limited, cold, clinical—weren’t enough for an aging body like mine. I was growing old, and strangely, I found myself yearning for the things I once took for granted: the smell of soil after rain, the warmth of sunlight filtering through leaves, even the chaos of crowded streets.”

A smile flickered at the corner of his lips.

“That hunger brought me back. I took early retirement and returned to Earth. Because in the end, no matter how far you travel… home is home, and Earth is Earth.”