Of love and beyond..

She ran her fingers through the pages. The words were smudged, like trying to hide an age old secret. The waters of the Yamuna had seeped through every page of the book Kaahini was trying hard to decipher. She aimlessly blew hot breaths over the moist pages, waiting for the black ink to rephrase themselves into meaningful words. She waited like a child waiting for the blob of ice cream he had just gulped to refill in the cone in his hand. She grew restless, the mess on the ochre pages looked like a string of black pearls lying astray on the golden sands, the value of which could be known only when they could be stringed together. She took off her blue dupatta covering her bare neck. She always wore a dupatta to cover the unexplained black scar on the right side of her neck. She gently wrapped the brown book in it. She held to it tightly, like a mother guarding her wounded child and took her new found treasure home.

He was the Poet. The best in the kingdom. He captured the moon beams in his pages and reflected the sun rays in his words. He could see the wind and talked to mountains. Lifeless words danced with splendor in his poems. The Maharaja adorned him with the rarest of jewels known to man kind each time The Poet wrote a new piece of priceless poetry. He was a master in the war of words and his praises were sung beyond the boundaries of a hundred kingdoms away from the city of Mathura. He always sat on the banks of Yamuna and looked into her calm spirit. The thoughts in the blue waters of the Yamuna were transformed into magical verses of love and hate, of struggle and fight, of kindness and virtue, of divine and evil, of war and victory with the black ink he always loved writing with.

Kaahini had found the book buried in the rusty sands on the banks of the Yamuna. That morning when she had come to fetch water from the lifeline of her village, she was mystically drawn to the brown lump of what looked like the finest leather of times. She instantly had dropped the pot she was carrying and had picked up the book. She hurriedly turned the pages, not knowing what she was looking for. She could make nothing out of the black lines that seemed to be filled in the book. She simply took it home, but her greenish charcoal eyes always seemed to gaze on the table where she had kept it.

The first thing he noticed about her was her eyes. They were a charcoal green. There was a mystery in them he longed to discover. He watched her from a distance. On the banks of the divine Yamuna, he watched her dance to the rhythm of the silver waves. She was Jwala, the daughter of the new milk man of the village. Like fire, her passion for dance burnt in her every move. On the banks of the river, with the moon and the stars as her spectators, she danced. She was unaware of the human eyes that had fallen in love with her every stance, with her every move. The poet quickly had taken out a brown book, the cover made of the finest leather. This book would be his soul. The saga of his love. Blue dolphins emerged from the glistening waters of the river. Jwala looked at them and laughed in delight. The sound of the ringing bells of the Shiv Mandir seemed to echo her laughter. She turned in that direction and saw the Poet. Even in the dim of the raw evening, one could see the pink of the rose rush into her cheeks. She ran away in the direction of the Mandir.

In the evening Kaahini went to the banks of Yamuna with the book. She gently placed it on a boulder. Today, along with the moon and the stars, she had a new spectator. She quickly started dancing. Like a peacock dances on arrival of the grey cloud over the horizon, she danced. Being the daughter of a milk man she could not afford to go to dance classes that most of the girls went to. Three dolphins dived out of the waters of the river as if to catch a glimpse of her. She laughed in delight. The bells from the Shiv Mandir started ringing. The evening Aarthi had just begun.

The next day, the Poet and the Dancer had finally met. When one form of art meets another, love is bound to happen. Over the next few months, they met each evening at the same place. While her body took forms of invariable poses of grace and divinity, he furiously wrote verses of unquestionable essence of love and art in his book. They appreciated what each of them had for another; art had united them in the universe they had created for themselves. One evening when in a moment of pleasure, her fingers had intertwined with his; she had felt the power of creation that they had held. He had felt the poignancy of love she had for him. When her breath had become his, he had come to know that all these days he had just breathed, but had never lived. When his heart pound with hers, she had discovered that all these days she was just a lamp. Today she had been lit.

Kaahini had felt a deep bonding with the book. All these years, she longed for love, for warmth, for a companion All this she felt in the warmth of the pages that were more than two hundred years old. She was drawn to it like flies to a celestial flame. When she ran her fingers through the pages, she felt like her fingers had intertwined with the Creator. When she brought the book close to feel the fragrance of an ageless memoir, she could feel a passionate breath mingling with hers, when she held the book close to her heart, she felt her heart pounding in rhythm with another, like dance to music, like ink to poetry…She felt an united passion that transported her through eons, her soul drawn to the invisible life in the book. It was like a known secret being unfolded in different ways, a known maze winding towards multiple destinations, a known love reigniting the passion…

It was the time of war. The treasures were looted, women were raped, children were killed, men were taken captive. None were at the mercy of the foreign invasion. The soldiers eyed Jwala on that young night. When the Poet and the Dancer were in their own world, unaware of the real world they lived in, the soldier had dragged her from behind.  He had harshly held her face down to his. The poet could win only a battle of words. The pen was no match for the swords at that time. He knew his time had come. With the last stroke of his black pen, he quickly wrote in his brown book and threw it into the waters of Yamuna. The river swallowed it in an instance; a treasure more precious then the pearls of the Mahasagar of Bengal. Jwala was in tears. Her eyes shown like lamps on water. Unable to succumb to the pleasure of another man, she snatched the sword from the soldier and slit her throat on the right side. The poet ran to her withering body. The sword glistened with her pure blood. He kissed the sharp blade and pierced it through his heart. As two human bodies fell on the banks of Yamuna, blood filled the chaste waters. Silver had turned into molten iron. Life had danced for the last time on the verses of love. It was however not the end.

Kaahini was feeling the last page of the brown book. The scar on the right side of her throat hurt badly. After a minute her eyes fell on the last few lines of the book. The black ink was mysteriously in red. She made no sense of it at all, but the line had moved every bit of her body.

“Beyond the world of right and wrong, beyond the world of love and peace, beyond the world of life and death, there exists a world. Someday we’ll meet each other there”

She lifted her eyes and looked at the stars, where it all had been written.