The Beginning

When I was eleven, I asked my father for a pair of roller skates. We were standing outside a small shop, the kind with dusty glass and metal shelves packed too tightly with things no one really needed. The skates hung near the entrance, bright and impossible to ignore. I had been staring at them for days. “Dad,” I said, trying not to sound desperate, “why won’t you buy them for me?” He looked at the skates, then at me. “It would hurt you,” he said. That was it. No explanation. No softness. Just those four words. At eleven, I didn’t understand how adults hid fear inside simple sentences. I only understood what I wanted. And I wanted those skates badly. I loved skating. I was good at it too—good enough to believe I was meant for it, good enough to imagine myself flying down roads I had never even been on. But we didn’t have much. We had the kind of life where wanting something and getting it were two completely different worlds. So for years, I convinced myself he was lying. I thought he just didn’t want to buy them. I thought it was about money. I didn’t know then that some refusals come from love. Back then, I had another dream too. I wanted to be a singer. Not the kind of dream children say out loud and forget the next week. I mean I wanted it with my whole chest. I wanted stages, lights, the silence before the first note, the feeling of being heard by people who had never known my pain. Somewhere inside me, music felt like freedom. But life has a cruel way of rearranging a boy before he even becomes a man. Dream by dream, it started stripping things away. And in the place where music once lived, another hunger began to grow. I had to become rich. Not comfortable. Not stable. Rich. Richer than anyone around me. Rich enough that my parents would never have to look at a price tag and sigh again. Rich enough to give them every comfort life had denied them. Rich enough to make suffering feel like a story from another lifetime. That became the dream that swallowed all the others. I was good at school—very good. Math and physics came naturally to me. Numbers made sense even when life didn’t. Teachers liked me. Some admired me. People said I had a good voice. Some said I had eyes that made me look older than I was, eyes that carried more than a boy should have to carry. I graduated from St. Xavier’s with one of the highest grades. I lived in a hostel. I followed rules. I worked hard. I gave the world exactly the version of me it liked best: disciplined, intelligent, promising. From the outside, my life looked almost perfect. But the truth is, my story had started fighting me from the day I was born. I came into this world at 9:45 in the morning on January 13, 2002. The birth was supposed to be normal. It wasn’t. Mistakes were made during delivery—mistakes that would leave marks on me long after the room was cleaned and the doctors moved on to the next patient. My mother says those mistakes affected my right hand. In childhood, it made certain movements difficult. Even now, after hard MMA training, I sometimes feel that old weakness flare up again. Not always. Just enough to remind me that the body never forgets what pain teaches it first. But that was only the beginning. A few days after I was born, my eyes turned yellow. At first, no one knew what it meant. My mother was still a teenager. My father was young too. They were barely old enough to understand life, let alone death. They looked at me with fear they didn’t know how to name. Then one Tuesday afternoon, my grandmother from my mother’s side came to see me. The room was dim. The air smelled of oil, milk, and worry. She leaned over me, looked closely at my face, and her own changed instantly. “Sima,” she said sharply, turning to my mother, “you have to take him to the doctor immediately.” My mother froze. “Why? What happened?” “He has jaundice,” my grandmother said. “And it looks serious.” That was the moment panic entered the room. They rushed me to a hospital ten kilometers away. Ten kilometers doesn’t sound like much when you are healthy, when you are grown, when your life is not quietly slipping out through your skin. But for a newborn, for frightened parents with no money and no power, it might as well have been another country. By then, I had stopped eating. My body was growing weak. The doctors took one look at me and said I needed to be taken to Bir Hospital in Kathmandu. Immediately. It was late at night by then, and the cold had sunk deep into the Terai. My parents searched for bus tickets, but there were none left. I imagine them standing there under weak lights, exhausted, terrified, holding a baby they didn’t know how to save. Then my maternal grandfather stepped in. He didn’t waste time. He took us to the airport and somehow got us on a flight to Kathmandu. To this day, I don’t know what strings he pulled, what favors he asked for, or what fear he swallowed to stay calm. I only know this: without him, I might not have survived. I was admitted to Bir Hospital for a month. A month. For a newborn, that is not time. That is war. My body was too small to understand the fight, but it fought anyway. Blood was given to me. Fluid had to be taken from my spine. Needles, machines, hands, voices, white walls, exhaustion, tears—my first month in this world was not an arrival. It was a battle for permission to stay. And when I was finally discharged, my mother was told something no mother should have to hear. He will be weaker than other children. His immunity will be low. He will need to be handled with care—in his food, in his routines, in nearly every part of his life. Maybe that should have made me fragile. Maybe it should have made me afraid. Instead, somewhere deep inside me, it built something else. Something hard. Something stubborn. Something that refused to disappear. “Pow. Pow.” The sound of gloves slamming into flesh cracked through the gym. Sweat ran into my eyes. My lungs burned. The mat beneath my feet felt hot through the soles of my body. Around me, men grunted, circled, collided, hit, fell, got back up. The whole room smelled of sweat, leather, and effort. Pain lived there openly. No one tried to hide it. “Aarav, slow down,” coach shouted. I stepped back half a pace, chest rising and falling. “I know your punches are hard. I know your kicks are hard,” he said, pointing at me. “But pace yourself. Don’t rush.” I nodded, wiping sweat from my face with the back of my glove. “Okay, coach.” A few seconds later, Eric’s voice cut in from the edge of the mat. “Aarav, get his back and do the rear naked choke.” I looked at him and nodded once. “Okay.” My partner came at me again, breathing heavier now, slower than before. I slipped to the side, moved behind him, and climbed onto his back in one clean motion. My forearm slid under his chin. My other hand locked behind his head. My legs hooked around his waist. Then I squeezed. He tried to fight it at first. Everyone does. His hands clawed at my arm. His body twisted. His breathing shortened. Panic rose through him in waves I could feel against my chest. Then— tap. tap tap. I let go immediately and stepped back. He dropped to his knees for a second, catching his breath. I stood there, my own chest heaving, sweat running down my neck, my right hand throbbing faintly from the strain. “Thanks, Eric,” I said. He nodded. “It’s almost eight. Class is over for today.” Fourteen years had passed since I asked my father for those roller skates. Now I was in the United States. Life had changed so much that sometimes it felt like I had lived three or four different lives inside one body. I had become tougher. Sharper. Less innocent. Maybe less human in certain ways. And it had already been five years since I had last seen my mother and father. Five years. Long enough for memories to become dangerous. Long enough for guilt to harden. Long enough for love to start feeling like distance. Life has never felt the same to me. I have known heartbreak. I have known loneliness. I have known the kind of silence that presses against your ribs when no one in the room really knows who you are. I have watched old dreams die quietly inside me. Even love no longer feels simple. It feels like another battlefield—beautiful from far away, brutal up close. The singer in me is gone. The softer boy I once was is gone too. And all that remains is a question that follows me everywhere, like a shadow that refuses to detach. What have I become? Is this what I wanted? Is this what my parents wanted? Or is this what Krishna wanted for me? My mother used to tell me, “Never stop believing in Krishna. And never forget where we started.” One day after work, I went to the library near my home. I liked that place. Maybe because no one demanded anything from me there. Maybe because silence in a library feels different from silence anywhere else. Softer. More forgiving. It gave me room to think. Room to breathe. That afternoon, I picked up Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami. As I flipped through the pages, one line caught me and held me there: “No truth can cure the sorrow we feel from losing a loved one.” I stared at it for a long time. What a writer, I thought. Then I heard a girl’s voice near the librarian’s desk. “Do you have any books by Chetan Bhagat?” There was something about the voice that made me look up instantly. Soft. Clear. Familiar in a way that made no sense. I turned. She stood by the counter speaking to the librarian, brown-skinned, around five foot four, with dark eyeliner framing eyes that seemed too alive for a quiet place like that. There was nothing loud about her beauty. It didn’t announce itself. It arrived quietly and changed the atmosphere anyway. She was beautiful in the most dangerous way— the kind you notice once and then keep noticing. And the strange part was, I didn’t know her, it sure felt like I did moment ago. But I wanted to. Not just because of how she looked. It was deeper than that, quicker than that. A pull. A curiosity. A sudden sense that something had shifted the moment her voice entered the room. I stood up and walked toward the desk. My heart was beating harder than it should have been. “I read one of his books a month ago,” I said, looking between her and the librarian. “They should have it.” Then I turned fully toward her. For the first time in a very long time, something inside me felt awake. “I’m Aarav,” I said. She looked at me and smiled. “I’m Prekshya.”