Chapter 1: The Palace

Siddhartha lived in a palace with walls so high he could not see the sky beyond them.

His father built the walls when Siddhartha was born. Three rings of walls, each taller than the last, painted white in the mornings and pink in the evenings when the sun hit them a certain way. Guards walked the top path. Peacocks nested in the gardens between the second and third walls. Inside the innermost wall, where Siddhartha lived, everything was soft.

His father was a king. The palace had one hundred rooms. Siddhartha slept in a bedroom with silk curtains. He ate rice with saffron and meat cooked in butter. He wore clothes that never scratched. Musicians played in the courtyard at noon. Dancers moved through the halls like water. There were fountains that never stopped running.

Nothing in the palace was broken.

Nothing was old.

Nothing hurt.

Siddhartha's father had rules. Strict ones. No one with gray hair could work in the palace. No one with scars. No one who coughed or walked with a limp. The guards checked every servant at the gate. They turned away anyone who looked tired or sick or sad.

The palace was perfect.

Siddhartha woke in clean sheets. He ate fresh mangoes for breakfast. He studied in the library. He practiced archery in the courtyard. His arrows hit the center of the target so often that the servants stopped watching.

At night, he lay in bed and stared at the ceiling. The ceiling was painted with stars. They did not move.

His wife, Yasodhara, slept beside him. She was beautiful. She was kind. She loved him in the way people love when they have never known anything else.

Siddhartha lay still and listened to her breathing. He could hear the fountain in the courtyard. He could hear the peacocks in the garden. He could hear the guards walking on the wall.

He could not name the feeling in his chest.

It was not pain. Pain was not allowed in the palace.

It was not hunger. He had eaten well.

It was something else. Something that sat beneath his ribs like a stone he had swallowed without meaning to.

In the mornings, he asked questions.

"Father," he said one day at breakfast. "What is outside the walls?"

His father set down his cup. He smiled. "Nothing important."

"I would like to see it."

"You have everything you need here."

Siddhartha looked at his plate. Mango slices arranged in a perfect circle. Rice so white it looked like clouds. He ate one bite, then another. The food tasted like always.

That afternoon, he stood in the courtyard and watched the guards on the wall. They walked the same path every day. Back and forth. Back and forth. They never looked down at him.

He thought about climbing the wall.

He thought about the view from the top.

He thought about what his father would say.

He went to his room instead.

Yasodhara found him there, sitting by the window. The window looked into the garden. The garden had flowers imported from kingdoms he had never visited. Red ones. Yellow ones. White ones that bloomed only at night.

"You're quiet today," she said.

"I'm always quiet."

"More than usual."

He did not answer. She sat beside him. They watched the flowers.

That night, he dreamed of walls. In the dream, he climbed the first wall and found another behind it. He climbed that one and found a third. He climbed all three and stood at the top, looking out.

The view was the same as the view looking in.

When he woke, his son was crying in the next room. Rahula. Seven months old. His face red and wet and angry. Yasodhara went to him. Siddhartha stayed in bed.

The crying stopped.

The palace was quiet again.

He stared at the painted stars on the ceiling and wondered why they bothered him. They were beautiful. They were meant to be comforting.

But they were not real stars.

And he had never seen real ones.

The feeling in his chest was still there. It had been there for months. Maybe years. He could not remember a time when it was not there.

He sat up. The silk sheets slid off him. The room was cool. The air smelled like jasmine from the garden.

He stood and walked to the window.

The flowers were white and open. The peacocks were asleep. The guards were walking their path.

Everything was perfect.

And perfect, he realized, felt exactly like nothing at all.

He pressed his hand against the window frame. The wood was smooth. No splinters. No cracks. Even the wood in the palace was too perfect to be real.

His father had built a world with no rough edges.

But Siddhartha had edges inside him that wanted something to catch on.

He did not know what that thing was. He only knew it was not here.

The next morning, at breakfast, he asked again.

"Father, I want to leave the palace."

His father did not smile this time. "Why?"

"I want to see the city."

"There is nothing in the city that we do not have here."

"Then it should not matter if I see it."

His father was quiet for a long time. He set his cup down. He folded his hands. He looked at Siddhartha the way a man looks at a lock he is trying to pick.

Finally, he nodded.

"You may go," he said. "But you will take guards. And a chariot. And you will return by sunset."

Siddhartha felt the stone in his chest shift. Not disappear. Just shift.

"Thank you," he said.

His father did not respond. He stood and left the table. His footsteps echoed in the hall until they did not.

Siddhartha sat alone. He finished his mango. He drank his tea. The servants cleared the table.

The peacocks called in the garden.

The fountain ran.

The guards walked the wall.

And somewhere beyond the walls, in a place he had never seen, there was a city full of people who did not live in silk rooms.

Siddhartha did not know yet that leaving the palace would be the simplest thing he ever did.

He did not know that coming back would be impossible.

He only knew that the painted stars on his ceiling were not enough.

And that, for the first time in his life, he was going to see what real ones looked like.

The stone in his chest did not feel lighter.

But it felt, at least, like it might finally have a reason to be there.