# The Manuscript of the Firefly: 1 There is a certain melancholy in watching the world grow smaller with each passing year. Not the world itself, of course—the world remains vast, indifferent, eternal. Rather, it is the realm of what strikes us as miraculous that shrinks. Wonder, that luminous faculty which once lit up every corner of our childhood, dims with the accumulation of knowledge and experience. We learn the names of things, catalog their properties, understand their mechanisms—and in that very understanding, we lose the enchantment they once held. I think of the firefly, that humble insect I chased through summer evenings as a boy. Then, it was pure magic: a small body that had learned to carry starlight in its abdomen, a creature that wrote brief alphabets of gold across the gathering dusk. I did not know the word bioluminescence. I knew only rapture. Now, at an age when most things have been explained to me, when I can recite the chemistry of that glow, the evolutionary advantage it confers, the precise mechanics of attraction and signal—now the firefly visits me sometimes in dreams, and I cannot say with certainty whether I have gained knowledge or surrendered something irreplaceable. This manuscript is an attempt to recover what I have lost. Not by forgetting what I have learned, but by standing in that narrow space between knowledge and wonder, where the light still flickers uncertainly, and we are not quite sure whether we understand the world or only think we do.

The firefly knows it will never be the sun.

Yet it burns—because if it did not burn,

it would not be a firefly at all,

only darkness lingering.


This writing did not come from a book's page or a writer's desk. No publisher's eye has fallen upon it. It arrived in the darkness of night, in the glow of a phone, in small messages written face-pressed to a pillow—some sent, some never sent, some written only to be erased. Like a firefly writing itself into the night with its own body—whether anyone reads it or not—this manuscript is that writing. Light inscribed, kept in darkness.


The one it was written for is not a name; it is a feeling. That person whom we have all, at one time or another, found—on a book's page, in a crowd, in the timbre of a voice—and then could never forget for the rest of our lives. Perhaps they read this manuscript, perhaps they did not. But for the one who wrote it, every word was an ignition; again and again, a whisper into the dark—I am here.


This is no love story. A love story asks for two. Here there is only one—a solitary firefly, a solitary light, an unfulfilled yearning that waits for no answer, only burns—for if it did not burn, it would cease to exist at all!


One.

Courage—or Looking Down from the Mountain's Edge


I have spent nearly the whole day writing to you, in my mind.


See how simple that sentence is? Yet behind this simplicity lies a day's worth of battle—myself against myself. All day I gathered words, arranged sentences, broke them apart, arranged them again—the way dewdrops gather on a leaf—in silence, drop by drop, unseen, but by morning suddenly there it is, the whole leaf soaked through. I too have soaked through—with unwritten words.


In the end, I found the courage to write it for real. But somehow my hand trembles, my palm sweats, and something inside my chest does what happens when someone looks down from a cliff's edge for the first time. There is fear, yet not looking becomes impossible. There is an intoxication in that downward gaze—the intoxication of danger, of beauty, of doing something irreversible. Writing to you today feels the same—a leap, and before you take it your knees shake, but after you've jumped, you think: why didn't I do this sooner?


I have known you for only a few days.


A few days. By the world's measure, nothing—gone in the blink of an eye. But by the heart's measure, in these few days I have lived through an entire lifetime. These days I have come into the world for only one reason—to return again and again to your words—for nothing else. All noise fades to blur, all timelines become meaningless—only your words remain vivid, as if in a dark room only one candle burns, and the moth is drawn to that light. The moth knows it will burn. Yet it comes. Because the moth has no power to say no to the way the light calls.


I did not know that mere words could uproot a person from their depths like this—that letters on paper could seep into blood, circulate through veins, alter the rhythm of the heart itself. I used to think: words can be read, enjoyed, set aside. But reading yours, I understood—some words are not read; they happen. They happen like earthquakes. You did not write—you triggered an earthquake.


But something even more than that—the sound of your voice.


The other day I heard you speak. I tell you truthfully, I wept. Why I wept, I do not even know—the way one doesn't know why the smell of rain makes the heart ache, why a stranger's melody catches in your throat, why the crow's call at dusk pinches something inside your chest. Some tears have no traceable source. They are like groundwater—no one knows where they come from, but suddenly they burst through the earth, and everything around grows wet.


I have wept before while reading books.

I read an autobiography of love once and wept—written by a foreign woman, about two people who loved each other in a time, in a country, where that love had no room to survive. All love had ended, yet it hadn’t ended—like the residual warmth beneath the ash of a dying fire, ready to ignite if someone blows upon it. I read another book and wept again—a man had written the same love differently, in another language, from another continent—as if two people stood on opposite banks of the same river, both gazing at it, but the waters had separated them forever.

But those tears came from the pages of books—indirect, filtered, passing through the sieve of letters. There was a distance there—a glass wall between reader and story; you could see it, but not touch it. The tears that came when I heard about you were direct—without any medium, without walls, without the refuge of language. Your voice shattered that glass.

That you are lighting the way for thousands of lost people—leading groping souls by the hand toward light in the darkness—well, if nothing else, I can offer you gratitude from the deepest depths of my heart. I don’t possess many things in this world. But everyone has the right to offer thanks—beggars and kings alike. I took that much.

I don’t know if you’ll read this. So many messages, so many people—what significance does a single drop have in an ocean? Does the sea know which drop carries whose tears, whose waiting dissolved into brine? I feel no sorrow at this, no resentment either. That I could write to you—that is enough. Just as a river knows the ocean won’t distinguish it among so many waters, yet it still flows—because flowing is its nature, not its destination. A river doesn’t flow for the ocean; it flows for itself—because if it doesn’t flow, it dies. I am the same—if I couldn’t write to you, something within me would have withered, something whose name I don’t know.

And you know, writing to you also fulfilled an old dream of mine.

Since childhood, I had wondered—couldn’t I write a letter to one of those few people who have made the world beautiful with words? Couldn’t I tell them—I couldn’t sleep for three days after reading that particular line of yours, I couldn’t accept the ending of that particular story of yours, I know a character you created better than I know myself! But I never wrote to any of them—some have left this world, some are so vast that they cannot be reached, like stars that can be seen with the naked eye but cannot be touched by hand.

In the end, this letter went to you.

On behalf of all the unwritten letters in the world, on behalf of all the unspoken words—this one letter was written to you. And is that not enough?

May God never grant to someone who has kept so many souls safe, who has pulled them from the depths of darkness into light—may He never grant them suffering equal to the suffering they’ve absorbed from others. You are a sponge of a person—drawing in everyone’s water, absorbing everyone’s pain, but who wrings you out? The water pooling inside you—who drains it? Or do you remain wet, damp your whole life long, and call that wetness dryness?

I sincerely wish that you laugh—magnificently, for no reason, from the deepest depths of your heart—the way the dawn call to prayer comes, gentle and unbidden…without pressure or expectation, arriving simply because it must arrive, whether anyone hears it or not.

Two.

Sunlight—or standing at the edge of language

Good morning. How are you?

Two words.

‘How are you?’—the world’s most ordinary question, yet also the world’s most profound—depending on who is asking, whom they’re asking, and what stirs within their chest at that moment of asking.

I just finished reading what you wrote. The moment I reached the end, it was as though sudden sunlight came pouring through the window—that first light of morning, the kind that doesn’t make you squeeze your eyes shut; rather, it makes you want to open them wider. Even if it burns, it doesn’t matter; I want to see that light. Some light is like that—it doesn’t arrive at the eyes; it strikes straight into the heart.

I had thought perhaps you would never read it. I had made peace with that silence, arranged it carefully inside myself—the way people keep old letters in a trunk, knowing they’ll never open them again, yet unable to discard them. Because to throw them away is to let the letters die, and with them that time, that person, that very feeling. But you read it—and what I feel now, I cannot tell you in words.

Language has its boundaries. When you reach that edge, words stop short, turn back, and say: ‘From here, you must go alone. This is as far as I can take you.’ This joy lies beyond that boundary—where words cannot reach, only silence can, only a long breath can, only a smile can—a smile that no one seeing it would understand, why I’m smiling, but I will know.

Three.

Puchka—the vastness hidden in the trivial

I’ll buy you puchka at some street corner.

Such a trivial promise, isn’t it? Puchka—from a roadside stall, twenty rupees, that small round thing dunked in sour-spicy-sweet water. What is there in it? But think about it—the world’s most beautiful moments are made of just such trivial things. Someone falls in love over shared tea, someone becomes a friend in the rain, someone says something at a street corner eating puchka that stays with them for life. Within the trivial, vastness hides—the way a tree hides inside a seed.

When? Where? Any alley in the city, any afternoon. If you wish, today itself.—See how ready I am, how impatient. As though I have spent my whole life waiting for this one moment—to make this one invitation. An afternoon of tangy sweetness, a trivial excuse, a small ‘yes.’

This cruel midday heat has become lovely to me today.

How strange! The heat that annoyed me yesterday fills me with joy today. The dust of the street feels good, the sweat clinging to my skin feels good, the rickshaw’s bell feels good, even the child’s cry drifting from the neighboring house feels good—because that too is the sound of life, and today life itself feels good. There is such peace within that sleep is coming—that sleep which comes only to the very happy, in the afternoon, without reason—the way a cat sleeps in the sun—no worries, no destination, only warmth and safety.

You know, I recognize this feeling. It’s called grace—an unasked-for blessing. No one wished for it, yet it came. A feather fell from the sky into someone’s lap, and they sit there with that feather, smiling.

I pray to God—you know—that somehow, someday, I might lighten your heart a little.

Perhaps it’s an impossible wish—the way a firefly might think it could do the work of the sun. Can a firefly become the sun? No. But a firefly can do something the sun cannot—in the darkness of night, when the sun is absent, the firefly gives a little light, and seeing that light, the traveler understands: darkness is not forever. I want to be that firefly in your night.