The Most Beautiful One

CHAPTER : 1

The sun was setting this evening, and through my window, golden rays dappled lengthy shadows across my room, painting my walls with some quiet magic. I was alone, standing there, weighed down by what had happened in the day, but something felt wrong-something in the air that felt alive, was a secret waiting to be unfolded. I took a deep breath and put words to the flutter inside.

I looked at the way the curtains flowed easily, and the familiar restlessness grew inside me. All this outside seemed pretty far off, rather muffled perhaps, but something was getting tight on the pull towards something deeper. My eyes shut down, and my mind sent itself off in its usual direction-to him, to Krishna. An extremely playful boy with a mischievous stride running through my mind like a breeze. The spark that would never dull with time.

"Krishna," I whispered to myself, like calling out to a friend who had always been there. The name hung in the air, echoing back like a promise. Not just a name but a feeling, a quiet joy that tugged my heartstrings, pulling me into a world miles removed from the noise and routines of everyday life.

I attempted to remember how it all began, how such a simple cartoon could set such a fire in my soul. I was seven; I had matted hair and bright, wide eyes, flipping between channels without much care. And then, as if destiny had intervened, here was he—Krishna, dancing among fields of green, laughing under the wide open sky, his eyes twinkling with mischief and love. It was as if the screen itself was alive, reaching out to touch me, pull me into his world.

Who is that?" I remembered asking the television as my small voice crackled across the quiet room. I didn't know why, but something about Krishna felt familiar. It was like a song that I'd always known but never heard. I couldn't tear my eyes away. The way he moved had magic, a freedom that, from behind the glass of a screen, could only have been impossibly real.

I would run to my home every day, with speed fastening up on seeing my door, plunge my bag on the floor there, without uttering even two words, sink into the sofa, eyes sticking to the bright colors of Vrindavan. The fields, the rivers, the soft sounds of playful flutes, and all told me it was a gentle lullaby to my tender heart. But what lingered with me the most was Krishna's laughter-a laughter that reminded one of sunshine, warm and inviting, and pulled you out of ordinary.

I hardly spoke of it; it was like my little secret. But every night, I lay in bed, clos [.], picturing myself walking beside him, feeling the soft earth of Vrindavan beneath my feet, breathing through the beautiful fragrance of jasmine flowers. I needed no one else to know this or share my reality because, during those quiet moments in bed at night, Krishna was real to me. He haunted the shadows of my dreams, the quiet hum of night, and every flicker of my imagination.

"Perhaps if I think hard enough," I'd tell myself, with each beat of my heartbeat in my chest, "I may be able to call this magic to life." I started to draw him—to the pages of my sketchbook, at least if not to my living reality, full of blue-skinned smiles and mischievous eyes. My walls and ceiling were plastered with the drawings. A secret shrine, each pinned up with a promise to my invisible friend of everyone within my particular view. Sometimes I'd speak to them hoping, maybe that what I was whispering might find its way where Krishna was. It was not about getting out; it was finding the beautiful in the dullest.

I spent hours lost in those drawings tracing each curve, every detail, as if trying to include in it a piece of him that always felt out of my reach. I drew him laughing, running, and playing the flute, and each line was a word, silent dialogue between us. "Do you see me, Krishna?" I whispered to the room, my voice barely over a breath. "Do you know how much I need you here?

Days blurred into days, all indistinguishable from the rest, their date one of identical desire. And those quiet hours—the quiet hours of just before sleep, when the world receded from my mind, and I felt only a gentle murmur. And then, in the evening of one day, something shifted.
The sun was setting and leaving golden light on my drawings, and for a split second, one might almost hear the faint sound of laughter, light and playful, like Krishna himself answered my call.

I froze, my breath stuck in my throat. Was it the product of my imagination? Or perhaps something more—a sign maybe that he was closer than I dared to believe? I did not know, but in the flicker of magic, I felt a spark within me; a whisper said, "This is just the beginning.".

And in the silence of my room, with only my thoughts and the rustling of paper being made, I promised myself something. No matter how long it took or how far I had to go, I would continue to search for him-for that magic that had touched my heart so very deeply. For in a world that often felt dull and predictable, Krishna was my light, my secret, my spark of something extraordinary. And I wasn't about to let it go.