Timeskip: 12 years
These twelve years do not pass evenly. They compress, expand, fracture, and harden around certain memories while allowing others to dissolve into indistinct haze. For Aadhi Yogi, the years between ten and twenty-two did not feel like a gradual unfolding of youth but like a disciplined march toward something unnamed yet inevitable. Grief, which had once been a raw and restless companion, slowly altered its texture; it no longer clawed at him in the night nor erupted into sudden bursts of anger, but it remained present in quieter forms, shaping his decisions with an almost architectural precision. If childhood had been interrupted, he did not attempt to retrieve it. Instead, he stepped forward deliberately, as though making a silent vow that whatever had fractured in his family's history would not be met with resignation.
Academically, his progress startled even those who had come to expect seriousness from him. While peers navigated adolescence with experimentation and distraction, Aadhi navigated it with an intensity that bordered on ascetic. He excelled in history, archaeology, and biological sciences, disciplines that allowed him to examine the human past not merely as narrative but as evidence. The Mahabharata, once a bedtime story, had transformed in his mind into a layered cultural memory, a confluence of myth, history, and possibility.
By the time he entered university, his path had narrowed with startling clarity. He chose paleoanthropology, drawn to the study of ancient human remains, skeletal markers of migration, trauma, adaptation, and survival. While others found the discipline morbid or abstract, he found it intimate. Bones, after all, were the last testimonies of lives once fully lived. They carried within their density the story of resilience, violence, disease, and endurance. They did not lie; they endured. In them he sensed a strange parallel to his own family's whispered history—a lineage said to carry both survival and curse within its marrow.
It was during his undergraduate years that he first encountered serious research concerning the submerged structures off the coast of Gujarat, often associated with the ancient city of Dvārakā. Marine archaeological expeditions had retrieved stone anchors, pottery fragments, and structural remains from beneath the Arabian Sea, fueling debates that oscillated between cautious scholarship and cultural fervor. To many, these findings represented national pride or mythological validation. To Aadhi, they represented something more personal and more dangerous: a bridge between epic memory and material evidence.
When he proposed, as a graduate student, to focus his research on paleoanthropological analysis of human remains associated with coastal settlements linked to late Bronze Age and early Iron Age western India, several professors regarded him with skepticism. The field was complex, interdisciplinary, and fraught with political and religious sensitivities. Yet his academic record silenced most objections. He demonstrated not only intellectual rigor but an unusual stamina for meticulous work. While others sought broad theses with quick publication potential, Aadhi chose a narrower and more demanding path: correlating osteological evidence from coastal burial sites with migration patterns and possible displacement events that could correspond to catastrophic coastal submergence.
His work demanded long hours in laboratories where the air smelled faintly of preservatives and dust, where skeletal fragments were catalogued with reverence rather than sensationalism. He studied cranial measurements, dental wear patterns, isotopic markers indicating diet and mobility. He trained in marine recovery protocols, spending weeks aboard research vessels where divers descended into murky waters to retrieve fragments of a civilization long surrendered to the sea. Beneath the surface, visibility was limited, currents unpredictable, and yet the submerged structures carried an eerie stillness, as though waiting to be acknowledged.
was no longer, for him, merely a mythic city reclaimed by the ocean; it was a site of inquiry, a puzzle whose fragments demanded disciplined assembly. He approached it not as a believer seeking validation nor as a skeptic seeking dismissal, but as a researcher determined to extract clarity from ambiguity. His thesis evolved into a bold yet carefully argued proposition: that certain coastal populations in western India exhibited osteological and isotopic signatures suggesting abrupt displacement events consistent with rapid environmental change, potentially aligning with cultural memories of submergence preserved in epic literature.
Completing such work would typically require years of incremental study, yet Aadhi compressed timelines with relentless focus. Scholarships were secured, grants obtained, collaborations established with marine archaeologists and historians. He rarely attended social gatherings; when invited, he offered polite refusals. His mother, observing from a distance, recognized the familiar pattern of intensity but did not discourage it. She had long sensed that his drive was not fueled solely by ambition but by something older, something he had inherited rather than chosen.
By twenty-two, he had completed his doctoral dissertation—an achievement that startled his academic community. His PhD defense was not theatrical; it was precise, controlled, and devoid of arrogance. When questioned about the implications of linking archaeological data with epic traditions, he responded with careful nuance, emphasizing methodological caution while acknowledging the importance of interdisciplinary dialogue. He did not claim to have proven the Mahabharata; he claimed only to have identified patterns worth further exploration. Yet beneath the scholarly restraint lay a personal undercurrent: he was not merely studying Dvārakā; he was approaching it.
The early completion of his doctorate was interpreted by colleagues as brilliance or obsession. For Aadhi, it was neither. It was declaration. He had grown up under the shadow of a death that felt patterned, under whispers of lineage and unfinished narratives. By accelerating his academic journey, he was asserting agency against whatever unseen current had shaped his family's past. If there was a burden attached to his bloodline—real or imagined—he would confront it not with superstition but with evidence, not with resignation but with inquiry.
On the day he received his doctoral degree, dressed in ceremonial robes that contrasted sharply with the laboratory attire he had grown accustomed to, he felt neither elation nor relief. Instead, he experienced a quiet alignment, as though a piece of an internal architecture had settled into place. His mother attended the ceremony, her eyes reflecting pride softened by lingering grief. His grandfather, older now and frailer, could not travel but sent blessings through a handwritten note that spoke of perseverance and destiny in equal measure.
Later that evening, alone in his apartment, Aadhi opened the notebook he had once hidden beneath his mattress as a child. The pages were yellowed, the questions scrawled in uneven handwriting. He read them slowly, recognizing in them the origin of his journey. Why do patterns repeat in families? Can destiny be altered? If some Yadavas escaped, what distinguished them?
He added a new line beneath the old questions: Evidence precedes belief.
The ocean off the coast of Gujarat continued its eternal rhythm, waves advancing and retreating as they had for millennia. Beneath its surface lay stone, sediment, and the possibility of answers. Aadhi understood that academic accomplishment alone would not resolve the unease that had accompanied him since childhood. But it had armed him with tools—methodology, discipline, credibility. If there was truth hidden within drowned cities and fragmented bones, he now possessed the means to pursue it.
And in pursuing it, he was no longer merely a grieving child or an overachieving scholar. He was, whether he acknowledged it fully or not, stepping into the role his name had foreshadowed: a torchbearer willing to descend into the submerged corridors of history, carrying both the weight of lineage and the stubborn conviction that understanding, once achieved, could alter even the most ancient curse.