KRISHAVYAYAM

17. Betrothal

Somedays, she did not know who she was.

The muse of being a definite personality, a human to begin with, was bewildering and exasperating in the same moment. Krisha thought of herself as some flickering miniscule vitality, compelled to revolve within a fixed set of vibrations and emotions she was at ease with. A bit of disbalance, and she came tumbling down the colossal throne of her deceitful mind which wove fabrications more intricate than the spells of a priest pronounced to invoke pristine divinities. The fyrgebraece were only cacophony for those days, and then she buried herself to feel alive again.

[You did not put faith in me. You did not bat an eye at the agony that arises in me. You did not care enough. You cared too much. It's not that deep. It is deep and we were so young after all, how could I expect someone who barely knew the world to acknowledge the fondness between us?

You did not put faith, and you call it love. You still call it so, enchantress, and yet I trust you with a blade on my throat.]

She wasn't foreign to the implicit trepidation flurrying across Kanha’s enchanting visage. In fact, she knew him better than he himself did. His stance of feigned sangfroid was fooling everybody but her. He tucked the flute in his waistband and clasped his hands together neatly, dark irises staring far into the yonder as plenty of entourages came to their aperture and a beguiling smile curled his pink lips. They were going to celebrate the betrothal today. The art of reading his eyes, the ability to pick up the most subtle emotions in one and all had been her ruination. Had she been a tad bit ignorant, perhaps then restlessness wouldn't have been her acquaintance.

A nausea rose in her and all the Princess was willing to do, was to turn to her heels and run. Run till her legs pounded and her feet bled and jagged scars came to be inscribed into her bones. An evidence that she had paid enough for the cataclysm she brought along. Run till she could breathe no longer and reside with the roots of the roses they had planted together with so much of a deified proximity, she had grown too sinister to even linger around. Perfectionism was a venom. She, a serpent.

[I wish the best for you. I wish to be good enough. I scourged for a utopia you could not promise and I cannot reach out to. Nobody told me I was blighted but my mind did. The villain of our fairytale is the time or is it me? What is this blood blooming in my heart— has the forelsket been slaughtered?

I did. I did. I did. I nourished the weed of avidity for so long that I have loved it for perhaps, longer than I have desired you. Though, I adore you enough to let you go. I have loved you enough to not share you with haunting possibilities.

I stabbed the butterflies and smeared the ashes of who I was on my head with such forbearance, you have declared me god.]

Regardless of all the adversaries, when their eyes met, in an anomaly nothing else seemed to come to encircle the bouts of intelligence and tear the curtains that perhaps hinder their vision to look into the future, which they had refused to see without each other. Maybe it was immaturity they fancied, but then did the sun and the moon not die alternately each day to see the other live?

“You belong with me,” the silvery dark moon murmured to her, slightly bending to mimic her petite height. She dipped her head with a near flirtatious smile, casting inebriating sideway glances that once again wounded him with cupid’s arrows. “Not to me, because you are not my possession. Mine in the way the petrichor is mine, the sky is mine, the glimmer is of the stars. Your ups and downs are mine, in the way I am yours. Wholly and by the depth of our souls we promise to be each other's, the pedestal of the nascent of our marital joy.”

The golden hued compassion of the cosmos stood in the center of the princely queue, eager to greet the guests who had come to grace the divine matrimony. Panchala was embellished with crimson blooms and alabaster lotuses hitherto, roistering the youngest one’s fortune and her beloved. The chariots of multiple aristocrats from around the subcontinent and many allies cantered by the edge of the lofty vicinity, along with them carrying Princess Vijayaa of Madra who was the wife of Sahadeva and Guru Drona along with his son Ashwatthama.