A MAHABHARATA RETELLING
~~~
All the other flowers in the garden were brought up to envy the rose. Maybe shun it even. And admire it, too.
Unusual ways. Too-red petals, too-sharp thorns, too-sweet fragrance.
If only each flower did not have a mind...
And I'm still a believer, but I don't know why I've never been a natural, all I do is Try, try, try
~this is me trying, Taylor Swift
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She had been waiting for a while now. Quite a while. It was past midnight and something told her that he would not be here tonight.
Just like almost every night for the entirety of the past year.
Sometimes she wondered if it was a completely lost cause. If she should stop waiting altogether. But then she saw the moon, how the cloud kept it covered for a very long time before gently gliding away to expose its glory after a long wait, and she waited again.
It had been a whole year since Princess Valandhara's marriage to the mighty second Pandava - the warrior whose name elicited boundless fear in the minds of his foes - Bheemasena. A whole year of waiting.
She remembered the day she had first seen him.
It had been during his conquest of her homeland, her father's kingdom, and her father had surrendered Kashi to the Pandavas at the sight of the glorious warrior. It had been natural, too. The entire Aryavarta had seen what kind of a heaven the Pandavas had turned the hellish Khandav into, and they wanted that same magic to work on their own kingdoms too.
At least, most of them did. Whichever monarch could put the welfare of his own kingdom above his own pride and ego, did.
Because, it was so much better to be the vassal of a great empire than to be the independent monarch of a failing kingdom. Better for the citizens.
Her father had promised subordinate allegiance to Indraprastha and as a token of that promise her hand in marriage had been offered to the great Bheemasena. Her entire family had been over the moon with joy.
They had said that the mighty Bheemasena, despite his towering stature and the great might of a hundred elephants in his arms, his skin of molten gold and lotus eyes of sun-tinted honey, was wrapped around Draupadi's fingers. There was nothing he would not do for her.
Her giggly girlfriends had scoffed and scrunched their eyebrows at the thought. Her mother had made her go through a thousand different beauty regimes. Her tutoress had made her learn a hundred different skills that she supposed an efficient lady of the house should possess. Her father had even introduced her to tidbits of the politics of Aryavarta.
All of this so that she could garner some of the mighty warrior's attention away from his second and most beloved wife.
And then only, after an entire month of grooming and the Pandava prince's rather restless stay in Kashi, had she been introduced to him, face-to-face. And she had just stood there in ossified silence.
