Chapter 6 — The Tag
And thus begins Chapter Six.
Now, children.
Eventually
reality called.
Literally.
Phone rang.
Stitch.
The council sighs.
Ah yes.
The competent half of the expedition.
Something along the lines of:
“Where are you guys?”
A fair question.
Because Axe and I had apparently vanished into cliff based conversation while the two people actually responsible for documenting Karkala continued doing the assignment.
Stitch told us to meet them somewhere.
Where?
Children.
Gone.
History has eaten the location.
A junction?
A landmark?
A particular shop?
Could not tell you.
All I know is
we went.
Eventually,
we found them.
Stitch.
Sharky.
Group restored.
And then I looked around.
The council notices my expression.
Children.
Shops.
Not ordinary shops.
Trinket shops.
The council immediately becomes concerned.
Because somewhere deep inside University Nuo,
something ancient awakened.
Something older than drugs.
Older than pubs.
Older than university.
Older even than Karkala.
The crow.
The council erupts.
THE CROW RETURNS.
Children.
Remember Kochi.
Three year old Nuo.
Bottle caps.
Tiny objects.
Bright colours.
The sacred urge to pick through piles of things nobody else considered important.
Apparently that creature survived.
It had simply evolved.
Bottle caps had become
trinkets.
Keychains.
Bracelets.
Necklaces.
Pendants.
Little carvings.
Random souvenirs.
Tiny objects hanging from hooks.
Objects sitting in trays.
Objects whose function may have been questionable
but whose vibe was excellent.
The council nods.
And I
stopped.
Whatever urgency we had possessed about getting home?
Gone.
Whatever deadline existed?
Someone else could worry about it.
Children.
There were things.
Small things.
Many things.
I needed to inspect them.
The council sighs.
Every.
Single.
One.
I went through shops.
Slowly.
Painfully.
With the intense concentration of a museum curator
and the purchasing discipline of a broke university student.
Pick up.
Look.
Turn over.
Put back.
Next.
Keychain.
Interesting.
No.
Bracelet.
Nice.
No.
Pendant.
Hmm.
Still no.
Some little carved nonsense whose purpose I cannot remember.
Tempting.
But
no.
The council leans forward.
You didn’t buy anything?
Not yet.
And importantly,
not because I couldn’t.
Money wasn’t the issue.
I could have bought something.
Several somethings.
The problem was
nothing felt right.
Children.
You know the feeling.
That tiny internal click.
The:
Yep.
This one.
The council nods.
It is not about value.
Not rarity.
Not even beauty.
An object simply announces itself.
You pick it up
and for some reason you know:
Mine.
Until then
nothing.
So I kept looking.
Stitch and Sharky waited.
Axe waited.
Probably with rapidly decreasing patience.
The council laughs.
And I
searched.
For longer than any reasonable person should spend examining souvenir junk.
Children.
I love this shit.
I make no apology.
There is something about tiny objects tied to places.
A keychain from one city.
A carved charm from another.
A stupid little thing that means nothing to anyone else.
But years later?
You touch it.
And suddenly
place.
The council grows quiet.
A road.
A smell.
A person.
A joke.
A sunset.
A staircase.
Memory compressed into an object small enough to hold in your palm.
Present Nuo understands that very well.
University Nuo?
He didn’t have the language.
He just liked trinkets.
The council nods.
Again
the behavior came before the philosophy.
And then
I saw it.
The council goes still.
Hanging in one of the shops.
Small.
Bone.
Carved.
A tag.
Children.
You know exactly where this is going.
The first bone tag.
The council rises.
Not the first tag acquired after the Wanderings became a ritual.
Not the first tag deliberately chosen to represent a journey.
No.
The actual first.
Years before I would understand what it was becoming.
Years before a bracelet would collect roads around my wrist.
Years before an old drawer would surrender this exact object
and force Karkala back into memory.
There it was.
Hanging.
Waiting.
And something in my brain did the thing.
The click.
Yep.
This one.
The council smiles.
No debate.
No comparison.
I took it.
Looked at it.
Probably turned it over in my fingers.
And that was it.
Decision made.
Bought.
The council writes:
RELIC ACQUIRED.
Children.
Of course,
nobody called it a relic.
That would have been absurd.
It was just a souvenir.
A little bone tag from Karkala.
Something I liked enough to spend money on.
That was all.
At least then.
The council looks toward Present Nuo.
Now?
Now it is different.
Because decades of meaning accumulated afterward.
Other roads came.
Other tags.
A bracelet.
A ritual.
A rule.
One relic per Wandering.
And when this old tag resurfaced years later,
it did something extraordinary.
It did not merely remind me of an object.
It unlocked a place.
The council grows quiet.
Karkala.
The moment the name returned,
the file opened.
Stairs.
Axe.
“Bite me.”
The naked statue.
The cliff.
The sunset.
The assignment.
Stitch.
Sharky.
All of it.
Children.
A tiny piece of bone had survived longer than the context around it.
And then,
when the context was finally recovered,
it became obvious.
This was not merely an old trinket.
It was the first bone tag.
The first relic.
The council nods.
The ritual existed before the ritual knew itself.
Again.
Suspicious pattern.
The Archive was forming long before I called it an Archive.
The Wanderer existed before Kasol.
The Archivist appeared before Goa.
The bone tag existed before Rishikesh taught me how to tie them onto a bracelet.
Children.
Apparently I spent decades accidentally inventing myself
and only noticed recently.
The council laughs softly.
Back then,
however
simple.
I bought the tag.
Returned to the others.
Who had been waiting.
The council looks at their faces.
Possibly annoyed.
Possibly bored.
Possibly questioning why a grown man required this much time to inspect keychains.
I arrived proudly.
Tag acquired.
Quest complete.
And announced,
in essence:
“I found what I wanted.
We can leave.”
The council pauses.
Your entire group waited until you found a souvenir?
Children.
Apparently.
This is how power works.
Stitch had taken the photographs.
Sharky had supplied the weed.
Axe had survived the stairs.
And Nuo?
Nuo had delayed extraction until a tiny object achieved emotional resonance.
The council nods solemnly.
Everyone contributes.
Now
transport.
Children.
Once again,
I did not concern myself with logistics.
Sharky found a bus.
I followed Sharky.
The council writes:
TRUST COMPANION PROTOCOL:
ACTIVE.
This method had not yet betrayed me.
Bangalore would later complicate things.
But here?
Reliable.
Sharky moves.
Nuo follows.
Eventually
bus.
But before boarding
the ritual.
The council groans.
Behind the bus.
Of course.
Mandatory travel joint.
Children.
Some traditions arrived early
and required no formal inauguration.
Departure joint.
Smoke.
Pass.
Wait.
Try to look normal.
Board public transport.
The council sighs.
And there we were.
The four of us again.
The assignment
technically accomplished.
Photographs acquired.
Observations
debatable.
Essay
future problem.
Karkala behind us.
University ahead.
And in my possession
one little bone tag.
I doubt I thought about it much once it entered my pocket.
Perhaps I looked at it on the ride.
Perhaps not.
The Archive doesn’t remember.
But it came home with me.
That matters.
Children.
Most objects from university disappear.
Pens.
Notes.
Receipts.
Tickets.
Cheap bracelets.
Random junk collected during a thousand ordinary days.
Gone.
But this survived.
Through moves.
Drawers.
Years.
Relationships.
Later Wanderings.
Entire versions of me.
The council grows quiet.
Until one day,
Present Nuo found it again.
And suddenly,
the object said:
You forgot one.
The council smiles.
Karkala had been waiting in a drawer.
Not metaphorically.
Literally.
A whole Wandering reduced to one forgotten relic.
And perhaps that is the perfect ending to this part of the journey.
Because Karkala was already full of beginnings nobody recognized.
Axe becoming more than a pretty classmate.
The earliest trace of the Archivist taking selfies because he wanted to preserve a moment.
And now
the bone tag.
The first relic.
The council nods.
None of it announced itself.
That seems to be the recurring problem with origins.
They’re shy.
They happen quietly.
Then years later,
you discover you have been carrying them the entire time.
Children.
University Nuo saw a little carved tag and thought:
Cool.
Present Nuo looks at the same object and sees:
The beginning of a ritual.
The council grows quiet.
But let us not become too profound.
Because immediately after acquiring this supposedly sacred first relic
we smoked a joint behind a bus.
The council erupts.
Balance restored.
Exactly.
Stitch.
Sharky.
Axe.
Nuo.
One last pre travel blaze.
Then onto the bus.
The road home waiting.
An essay still needing to somehow emerge from this nonsense.
And Axe
no longer merely Stitch’s friend.
Not girlfriend.
Not yet.
But something had shifted.
The council looks toward the next chapter.
And children
the trip was not quite finished with us.
Thus concludes Chapter Six.
The Trinket Shops.
The Crow Awakening.
The Endless Search.
The Yep This One Feeling.
The First Bone Tag.
And The Mandatory Joint Behind The Bus.
Children.
The first relic of the Wanderings was not chosen as a relic.
It was chosen because one university idiot looked at it
and liked it.
Years later,
it would return from a drawer
carrying an entire forgotten journey with it.
Funny thing about tiny objects.
Sometimes they hold far more
than they have any right to.
