Between Oppression and Innocence.
The days had blurred into a rhythm I never expected to understand as a newborn.
Wake. Feed. Sleep. Cry. Repeat.
But beneath the mundane cycle of an infant's life, something else was happening. Something that made every moment feel like walking across a knife's edge in the dark.
It had been exactly one month since my naming ceremony. Thirty days of watching my parents move through their lives with practiced caution, their eyes always alert, and their movements deliberate. Thirty days of learning what it truly meant to live under oppression.
The village seemed peaceful on the surface. Farmers worked in the fields. Children played in the dust. Smoke curled from chimneys. It looked like any other rural settlement in the conquered lands of India—a place where life continued despite the Great Holy Albion Empire's iron grip.
But beneath that peace was a current of fear.
The fear that came from living a lie. From hiding something fundamental about yourself every single waking moment. From knowing that if you were caught, if your secret was discovered, you wouldn't just die—your entire family would burn with you.
My mother had explained it to me once, though I was just an infant and couldn't possibly understand the words. Or so she thought.
It was night, and the household had settled into the rhythm of sleep. My father had eaten his dinner quickly—the habit of a man tired from a full day's labor—and collapsed onto the bed beside me, his breathing deepening almost immediately into the heavy slumber of exhaustion. His arm lay protectively across my tiny form, even in sleep.
That's when my mother came, and lay down beside me on the opposite side. My father didn't stir. His snores continued their steady, reassuring rhythm—the sound of a man too worn out to wake.
My mother's hand found my chest, and she began to gently pat it in a slow, rhythmic motion. Her touch was warm, deliberate, grounding. This wasn't just a mother soothing her child. This was an act of intimacy, of trust, of desperation.
She leaned close, so close that I could feel her breath against my tiny ear. When she spoke, her voice was barely a whisper—the kind of whisper that only a mother and child could share, the kind that dissolved into the night air like mist.
"Listen, Shaurya," she began, and there was something in her voice that made me understand this wasn't casual conversation. This was a lesson. A warning. A prayer disguised as words. "Mana is in everyone's blood. It flows through us like breath, like heartbeat. It's part of what makes us alive, what makes us us. But the Albionians... they took that away from us."
She paused. Her hand stilled against my chest for a moment, and I felt her trembling slightly. Not from cold. From fear.
"They said magic is dangerous," she continued, her voice hollow. "They said only they could be trusted with it. So they made a law: any Indian who uses magic without permission dies. Not imprisonment. Not exile." She swallowed hard. "Death."
The word hung in the darkness between us like a blade.
"Your father..." Her voice cracked, and I heard the tears in it before I saw them. "Your father breaks that law every single day to keep us safe. Every time he uses his power, he risks everything. His life. His freedom. His ability to ever be safe again. And you..."
She pressed a kiss to my forehead, her lips soft and desperate against my skin.
"You will have to learn to do the same. Or learn to hide it so well that no one ever knows. Do you understand, my baby? Do you understand what it means to be born into a world that sees your very nature as a crime?"
Her words faded into silence as she continued to pat my chest. Slowly, her breathing began to match mine. Her hand grew heavier against my body. The trembling stopped. Sleep claimed her, pulling her under with the weight of exhaustion and sorrow.
But before sleep fully took her, a single tear rolled down her cheek and fell onto my face like a tiny raindrop. She didn't wipe it away. She just lay there, holding me, protecting me, teaching me in silence the truth that no child should ever have to learn.
I lay awake in the darkness, my infant mind processing things that no newborn should understand.
The fear in her voice. The desperation in her touch. The absolute certainty that discovery meant death—not just for her, not just for my father, but for all of us.
This world can be far harsher than my previous one, I thought with a clarity. And it's not going to get easy.
In my past life, I had fought politics with politics, corruption with exposure, power with speeches and promises. I had believed that words mattered, that truth would win, that good intentions could change systems.
I had been naive.
I had died for that naivety, bleeding out in a forest while the world moved on without me.
This world—this magical, dangerous, oppressed world—demanded something different. It demanded survival before ideology. It demanded secrecy before rebellion. It demanded that I understand, from my very first days, that simply existing as what I was could be a death sentence.
My mother's words echoed in my mind: learn to hide it so well that no one ever knows.
That meant learning to suppress who I was. Learning to deny the very essence of my existence. Learning to live a lie every moment of every day.
But sorry, Mother. I can't leave you and Father like this.
I swear I'll free you. I swear I'll free Father. I swear I'll free everyone in this land.
The vow formed in my mind with the certainty of iron. It was a dangerous thought, the kind of ambitious thinking that had cost me my life before. But I was different now. Stronger. Reborn. And this time, I wouldn't just dream about change.
This time, I would make it happen.
I clenched my tiny fist, and as I did, I felt it.
A pulse of warmth. A shimmer of golden light at the edge of my perception. A presence that was both foreign and utterly, completely mine. It lasted only a second before I lost control of it, before it slipped away like water through my fingers.
I would have to learn to hide it.
Or I would have to learn to use it so well that no one would dare try to stop me.
My father slept beside me, his protective arm a weight across my tiny body. My mother lay on my other side, her tears already drying on her cheeks, her breathing deep and even in sleep.
They had given me safety. They had given me love, protection, a family that would die rather than see me harmed.
But I couldn't stay hidden forever. I couldn't live in fear forever. I couldn't let this empire crush everything and everyone I loved.
I would learn. I would master this power. I would understand everything about this world.
And when the time came—when the Albion Empire, or the Collector, or whatever other forces were circling in the shadows—came for me, I would be ready.
I would not die helpless like I had before.
Not this time.
Not ever again.
It's been nine months since I was born. Now I've grown considerably since then. I could finally move around freely—although I can't crawl much because this darn little body is so fragile and uncooperative. Moving my limbs felt like commanding a puppet with tangled strings.
In these nine months, there was so much that happened. So much chaos. So much invasion of my personal space.
First, there were tons of people who came to visit. And damn them, every single one of them seemed to have made it their life's mission to pinch my cheeks and kiss me as if I were the cutest creature in the whole world. By the hundredth kiss, I was seriously considering whether babies could develop an immunity to affection through sheer exposure.
"Oh, look at him! So precious!"
"Come here, beta, let me kiss your forehead!"
"Those cheeks! Those sweet, kissable cheeks!"
I wanted to scream. I'm a thirty-year-old man in an infant's body, not a doll! But all that came out were gurgles and cries, which only encouraged them more.
And in these months, my Dadi (father's mother) and Nani (mother's mother) both came endlessly and gave me baby massages. It was a traumatic experience.
Not the good kind of massage. The aggressive, bone-crushing, "I'm going to knead you like dough" kind of massage.
"This will make his bones strong!" Nani would declare, digging her weathered fingers into my tiny body with the enthusiasm of a baker working with bread dough.
"Yes, yes, massage is very important for babies," Dadi would agree, equally enthusiastic about my suffering.
I wanted to cry out that they were literally trying to reshape my skeleton through sheer force, but of course, I couldn't. So I did the only thing I could—I cried. Actual, real tears streaming down my face. But did they notice?
No.
They just cooed at me. "Oh, he's expressing himself! Such an emotional child!"
Emotional?! I was experiencing a little hell, and they thought I was being cute!
After the massage came the bath—which was somehow both a wholesome experience and the greatest trauma of my life, one that would continuously haunt me.
Cold water. Aggressive scrubbing. Soap in places that should never have soap. The humiliation of being completely helpless while strangers—well, family, but still—washed every part of my tiny body.
This is worse than assassination, I thought as my mother scrubbed behind my ears. At least death was quicker.
After the bath, my mother would get me ready—dressed in clean clothes, my hair carefully combed (when I had enough hair to comb), my face wiped clean. I couldn't understand even now just why she made me "ready." Ready for what? Ready for whom?
But the answer came soon enough.
One afternoon, her friends and cousins came visiting, and the moment they saw me, they descended like a flock of birds.
"Oh my God, he's gotten so big!"
"Look at those eyes! So aware!"
"Kamla, he's absolutely adorable!"
They made me blush—literally made my cheeks turn red. I couldn't control it. My infant body had betrayed me with its involuntary responses. I didn't know if I should feel happy as a man or feel guilty. I was seriously stuck between those two emotions, so I just ignored it and enjoyed the moment of basking in their affection.
At least they're not pinching today, I thought hopefully.
But then one of her friends—a woman with a mischievous glint in her eye—leaned toward my mother and whispered something. I couldn't hear the words, but I could see the conspiratorial smile.
"What if we put a frock on him?" the friend suggested loudly enough for me to hear. "A little baby girl's frock! I bet he'd look absolutely precious!"
I glanced at her intensely. With all the force a nine-month-old could muster, I glared at her with the full weight of my adult indignation.
But damn her, she ignored me completely. She didn't even have the decency to acknowledge my murderous stare.
And then—the real betrayal happened.
My mother started thinking about it.
Actually considering it.
"Oh, you know," Kamla said thoughtfully, tapping a finger against her chin, "I've actually wanted to do that for a while. But Raghav didn't let me. He said absolutely not, the boy should be left as he is. But..." She glanced around, as if checking to make sure my father wasn't about to burst through the door. "He's not here today. So let's do it!"
No, No, Noooo! I thought in pure panic. You are not the Kamla I know! You have changed! All the pinching and kissing were not enough—now you want to dress me up like a doll?!
The friend clapped her hands together with glee. "Okay, leave it to me! I'll make sure to make him look like the most cutest girl!"
Damn you! GIRL?! I was screaming internally. I'm a MAN! The hell with girl! I'm a MAN!
I was cursing that friend so intensely in my head that I was surprised my infant body didn't spontaneously combust from the sheer force of my indignation.
But resistance was futile.
They surrounded me—my mother, her friend, her cousins—closing in like predators who had finally cornered their prey. There was nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. I was completely at their mercy, trapped in a body that couldn't even crawl properly.
"Okay, Shaurya, hold still," my mother cooed, already reaching for something behind her back.
No, No, NOOOOOO! Help me, FATHERRR!
This was going to be my second major trauma in this new life. And unlike the first trauma (the one involving assassination and reincarnation), this one was entirely self-inflicted by the people I loved most.
What followed was a blur of fabric, ribbons, and what I'm pretty sure was child-sized makeup. They worked with the efficiency of a team that had rehearsed this exact scenario in their nightmares.
"Look! He's blushing even more now!"
"Oh, the dress is perfect on him!"
"Kamla, he looks absolutely adorable! Like a little angel!"
I was not an angel. I was a man. A grown man. And I was being subjected to the most humiliating experience of either of my lifetimes.
The dress was pink. Painfully, aggressively pink. With ribbons. Of course there were ribbons.
And then—horror of horrors—they brought out the mirror.
I looked at my reflection and wanted to cry. Actually cry. Not the infant cry, but the deep, soul-crushing cry of a man watching his dignity die in real time.
I looked like a princess from a children's storybook. A tiny, helpless princess with big eyes and rosy cheeks and a dress that cost more than my dignity.
My mother was laughing so hard she had tears in her eyes.
"Oh, Shaurya! You look so beautiful! Doesn't he look beautiful, everyone?"
The chorus of agreement was deafening.
I wanted to curse them all. I wanted to remind them that I had vowed, just nine months ago, to free this entire nation from oppression. That I carried divine power in my soul. That I was destined for greatness.
Instead, I was being paraded around in a pink dress like a porcelain doll.
This is what I get for being reborn as an infant, I thought bitterly.
The price of a second chance was apparently measured in humiliation.
To be continued....