Twenty Years Hence: The City's Transformation
A generation had passed. Children who had grown up in Dvaraka's refined policies were now parents and leaders themselves. The city was not perfect—no city ever is—but it had acquired a character that visitors from distant lands came to study. Scholars wrote of it; merchants spoke of its stability; young idealists arrived hoping to learn how to build something similar in their own lands.
The garden at the center had expanded; entire districts now incorporated its principles of accessibility and shared space. Schools had multiplied; literacy was common among all classes, not just the wealthy. The youth councils had become a training ground for an entire generation of leaders who understood power as a temporary trust, not a permanent position.
Pradyumna had become the primary governor—his initial caution about expansion had evolved into a wisdom about measured growth. Aniruddha led the council of trade and knowledge, his innovative bent finding expression in structures that pushed Dvaraka toward new possibilities while preserving its core values. The city had two leaders where once it had needed one, because the work of governance had been distributed across institutions rather than concentrated in persons.
Krishna, now truly elderly, spent much of his time in the garden, sitting with anyone who sought him—not for decisions but for conversation. Young people came to learn; elders came to remember; he sat among them like a well that had learned to let others draw water. He had become a treasury of stories rather than a source of commands.
The policies that had seemed radical in those early years—equal rationing during scarcity, merchants working in partnership rather than extraction, soldiers bound by codes of conscience—had become simply "how Dvaraka did things." The revolutionary had become routine, which is the truest measure of success.
Yet as Krishna watched the city from his seat in the garden, he felt something more than satisfaction: he felt completion. Not because everything was solved—new problems always arose—but because Dvaraka no longer needed him to solve them. The city had internalized the practices; the people had become the guardians of their own flourishing. He had come to build a city, and he had succeeded by making himself, eventually, unnecessary. It was the kind of victory that only the deepest wisdom recognizes.