I have set down the deaths of heroes and the births of ages, and I tell you that history does not turn on the grand things men build it monuments to. It turns on a breath. On the cold dawn at Tarain in the year your calendars number 1191, it turned on the breath of a single archer, and I — who am condemned to remember every river time might have run — stood at his shoulder where no living eye could see me, and watched the world hold still.
Prithviraj Chauhan's lines had broken the centre, and across the churned field, half-shielded by his fleeing guard, rode Muhammad of Ghor. An archer of the Chahamana knelt in the mud with the king's own order in his ears: the man on the grey horse, before he reaches the trees. He drew. The horn of his bow creaked. The wind, which decides more battles than valour ever has, came up off the river and pressed against the arrow's flight, and the archer felt it, and shifted, by the width of a thumb, the angle of his aim.
Here is where the river forks, and I alone stand in the water of both channels. In one, the wind wins and the arrow drinks the empty air, and a conqueror rides into the trees and out the far side of them into your world — the one you were born in, where Nalanda burns and the centuries go dark. In the other, the thumb's width holds. I will not tell you yet which one his fingers chose. I will only ask you to feel, as I have felt for eight hundred years, how little the whole weight of a civilisation was balanced upon.
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