The Promised Queen

𝑜𝓃𝑒

Ridhima

Home. Home is a feeling, a place where you feel like you belong. A place where everything feels familiar and comfortable. It is not just a house or a town or city. You belong to your home as much as it belongs to you.

Today, I was back at my home. The feeling is beyond anything I had ever imagined. Even the air that touched my face during the auto-rickshaw ride here felt like it was welcoming me back. My heart swelled with joy when I realized the same twists and turns of the roads that I still remembered by heart. Even though everyone I saw till now were complete strangers somehow, it felt like I could recognize each one of them.

My happiness is proof that three years could not make me forget this place. Three years is merely a flash of time now that I look back. No number of years could make me feel foreign to this place. No number of years could make me forget...

Him.

"Madam ji, are you going to pay or not?" The auto driver asked in his high voice, breaking me out of the reverie that I was about to slip into. I now realize that I was so lost in admiring the scenery of my hometown that I had no clue that we were already at the destination.

"Yes, how much is it?" I asked, bringing my attention back to the present.

I stepped out of the auto after clearing his dues and was about to start walking when the auto driver peeked his head out and looked at me with enquiring eyes.

"Are you a news reporter as well?" He asked.

"What? From which angle do I look like a news reporter to you, bhaiya?" I joked at him, signaling to the stale clothes that I was still wearing from my long hours of travel. My hair was holding onto dear life in the bun I had tied this morning at the airport washrooms with the only hair clip I could manage to find.

"Yeah, you don't seem like one..." The auto driver nodded. "But since you were headed to the Raj Palace, I only imagined you were one of them. They have been camping here since last night, for god's sake. It's not like they are real princes or anything-"

"Hey!" I quickly defended. "Don't speak about the Royal family like that. They are very kind and-"

"Yeah right." The auto driver scoffed. "I will speak nicely if they give me a reason to. Those arrogant bastards..."

I stood there gaping as the auto-rickshaw took a U-turn and disappeared along the same path that we had drove to reach here.

The way this man spoke was shocking to me. It is still clear as a day in my memory how fondly the people around here spoke of the Raj Palace and the princes. Even though they were no longer in any position of power and the entire place was a part of the democracy, the people still looked up and admired the people living in the Raj Palace because of all the good things they had been doing for them in the past years.

Convincing myself that the driver was just an anomaly, I clutched my trolley bag and dragged it across and towards the place that I had been yearning for all this time.

The Raj Palace. It was as beautiful as the name suggested. The large Palace stood in the center of the town Suryagarh and boasted of luxurious living spaces and gardens bigger that entire houses. The huge corridors that echoed with footsteps of servants and doors that needed two people to be pushed open. Paintings that were as big as me when I was ten years old, framed in gold and silver. I remember the names of the horses that were kept in the stable, the particular white one that I had learnt horse riding on. I can smell the kitchen as big as a house itself, cooking six different types of food for six different people. The Raj Palace was the kind of place you dream about.