Chapter 1 — Objective
I am Nuo, the Unbegun
the silence before stars learned to burn.
And thus begins the Fifth Wandering of the Unbegun.
Varkala.
Now, children.
I have wandered.
The council nods.
Mountains.
Rivers.
Forests.
Hostels.
Raves.
Cliffs.
Cities I had no business being in.
Roads I had no idea where they led.
Places reached through careful planning.
Places reached through absolutely no planning whatsoever.
And through all of this,
I am from Kerala.
The council nods again.
Born here.
Raised here.
Spent most of my life here.
Which means people occasionally assume I know Kerala.
The council begins laughing already.
Children.
An unfortunate assumption.
Because there is one question I have been asked,
again,
and again,
and again.
“How is Varkala?”
The council leans forward.
And my answer has always been the same.
“I have no idea.”
The council pauses.
You live in Kerala.
Correct.
Varkala is in Kerala.
Also correct.
You’ve travelled to entirely different states because somebody mentioned mushrooms.
The council nods.
Unfortunately correct.
You’ve spent days reaching mountain towns,
followed strangers into forests,
ridden questionable vehicles,
and crossed enough roads to construct an entire mythology around being bad at navigation.
Correct.
And you’ve never been to Varkala?
Children.
No.
The council erupts.
I HAD NEVER BEEN TO VARKALA.
Not once.
My entire life.
A place sitting inside my own state.
A place people travelled from across India to see.
A place foreigners apparently knew existed.
A place close enough that visiting it required considerably less effort than almost every wandering I had already undertaken.
And yet
nothing.
The council looks disappointed.
Children.
Sometimes the unexplored world isn’t thousands of kilometres away.
Sometimes it is nearby
and you’ve simply spent your entire life saying:
I’ll go eventually.
Eventually is a dangerous country.
Nobody ever actually reaches it.
The council nods.
Now.
What did I know about Varkala?
Let us consult the archives.
The council opens an extraordinarily thin file.
Ocean.
The council waits.
And?
Ocean.
That’s it?
Children.
That was it.
I knew there was water.
A considerable amount of it.
The Arabian Sea,
presumably doing ocean things.
Waves.
Salt.
Wetness.
The council applauds my geographical expertise.
Perhaps I had seen photographs somewhere.
Probably.
Maybe cliffs were involved.
Maybe cafes.
Maybe tourists.
I don’t remember knowing any of that with enough certainty to count it.
As far as my internal map was concerned,
Varkala was:
Kerala.
Ocean.
End of file.
The council closes the folder.
Pathetic.
Exactly.
And eventually,
this began bothering me.
Not emotionally.
Not existentially.
No weight pressing down on my chest.
No house becoming a cage.
No great urge to escape myself.
The council listens.
And importantly
no quest for chemistry either.
No:
We heard there are mushrooms there.
No:
Someone knows a dealer.
No:
Let us travel across geography specifically to make reality malfunction.
The council looks relieved.
For once.
Children.
This wandering began with something far simpler.
Ignorance.
My own.
Someone would ask:
“How is Varkala?”
And there I would be.
Resident of Kerala.
Wanderer of places.
Supposed collector of roads.
Answering:
“Dunno.”
The council shakes its head.
Unacceptable.
Not morally.
Just personally.
I needed to know.
That was it.
No deeper motive.
At least none I understood at the beginning.
Children.
This is important.
Because hindsight loves lying.
Hindsight sees a journey finished,
finds the lesson,
then pretends the traveller knew what he was doing from the first step.
We rarely do.
The council nods.
Kasol began because I was sad.
Rishikesh began because the weight had returned.
Goa began because we wanted acid.
Kodaikanal began because five idiots heard the word mushrooms and interpreted it as a quest marker.
And Varkala?
I wanted an answer.
The council pauses.
An answer?
Yes.
The next time someone asked:
“How is Varkala?”
I wanted to say something other than:
“I have no idea.”
Children.
Possibly the most responsible objective in the entire archive.
The council applauds.
Character development.
Do not get excited.
The wandering has only just begun.
Now.
There was something else slightly embarrassing about it.
The farther away something is,
the easier it becomes to mythologize.
Kasol?
Mountains.
Unknown roads.
A train journey stretching across states.
Adventure.
Rishikesh?
The Ganga.
Ashrams.
Bridges.
Another distant world.
Kodaikanal?
Misty hills and fungal quests.
Goa?
Well.
Goa was Goa.
The council nods solemnly.
But Varkala was home territory.
Kerala.
My state.
The world I was supposed to understand.
And perhaps that was why I had ignored it for so long.
The council leans forward.
Familiar places don’t feel urgent.
You assume they’ll remain available.
Next month.
Next year.
Whenever.
Children.
We chase the distant horizon
while leaving unopened doors beside our own house.
Not because those doors matter less.
Because we believe we have infinite time to open them.
The council grows quiet for exactly three seconds.
Then looks at me.
Was Nuo thinking any of this?
Absolutely not.
The council collapses.
Children.
Old Nuo’s thought process was considerably shorter.
I haven’t been to Varkala.
That’s stupid.
I should go to Varkala.
The council nods.
There.
Historical accuracy restored.
So the objective formed.
Not healing.
Not escape.
Not drugs.
Not some grand spiritual pilgrimage.
Just
go.
Look.
Find out.
Come back with an answer.
The council writes upon the quest board:
VARKALA.
OBJECTIVE:
KNOW WHAT VARKALA IS LIKE.
The council stares.
That’s unusually vague.
Children.
For the Unbegun,
this was practically military precision.
And perhaps that is already what makes this wandering different.
The previous roads had reasons attached to them.
Heavy ones.
Stupid ones.
Chemical ones.
Varkala did not need one.
I didn’t need to be broken enough to leave.
I didn’t need a substance waiting at the destination.
I didn’t even need the place to promise transformation.
The council grows quiet.
I was curious.
And apparently,
by now,
curiosity alone had become enough to make me move.
The council notices this.
Children.
We will leave that thought there.
No conclusions yet.
The road has not earned them.
For now,
there is only a man from Kerala
who somehow knows more about distant places than a famous little piece of his own state.
A man tired of answering one very simple question with:
“I have no idea.”
And so,
eventually,
I decided to fix it.
The council gathers.
No prophecy.
No sacred geometry.
No mushroom map.
No sadness with purchasing power.
Just a destination that had existed near me my entire life
and a sudden realization that I had never bothered to meet it.
The council smiles.
Sometimes that is enough.
Thus begins the Fifth Wandering of the Unbegun.
Varkala.
The wandering born from perhaps the most dangerous sentence in human exploration:
Children.
“I wonder what it’s like.”
