अन्तः अस्ति प्रारंभः।
The end is the beginning.
A caterpillar dies, to birth a butterfly. Water evaporates to rain down. Dead carcasses fill the stomachs of vultures.Life gives way to death and death to life. In a vicious circle of different karmas...
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Mihira was a woman who knew more dead people than the living.
It was an easy realisation, one that had always been her reality, one that she hadn't ever questioned. When she was younger, she knew a man, jaded and gruff.
Mihira was barely ten when she first met him, her eyes blazing and righteous anger in her as she threw him a large log of wood so he could protect himself against some weird creatures that Mihira could not name even now. The creatures of night, people called them. Their maws were larger than an average child, had rows of teeth sharp enough to cut bone right through.
The man somehow saved himself, and came back to hand her the wood. At first, he spoke in some language Mihira wasn't familiar with. She had only ever known Marathi and Sanskrit, and some of Arabic and English. Only enough to survive.
"What's a child like you doing in this area?" He had asked her in Marathi. His tone was suspicious and irritated, which served to annoy Mihira.
Snottily, in what she now recognised was a rude tone, she had replied,"Saving you from dying, wasn't I?"
He had stared at her face for a while before chuckling at her. Something made her think that he wasn't the type of man to be amused easily. "Thank you, gracious lady, for saving me. I am Samar Veer. And you are?"
They became sort of friends. Mihira's parents hated him. Samar Veer would come and go and they wouldn't meet for weeks on end, but when he came back, he would tell her stories of gods and goddesses and divinity and blood. He would tell her of war and art, and he would tell her of wars that were decided and happened in rooms, not battlefields.
Her parents only allowed him to meet her because her uncle advocated for him. He would usually never call her by her name, citing that even the air had ears and he wouldn't risk her name getting out of his mouth.
"Someday," Samar Veer had told her one day, after telling her of the strategies of war,"you'll see men you never want to see. You'll see men on the other side of the war who are more monsters than men. And you'll have to befriend them. War knows no morals. Neither should warriors. The warrior's only rule, is to survive, kid. Whatever you must do, your survival is the goal you must fulfill."
Mihira, a slip of a girl, eleven at the time, had frowned at him. "But, dada, why would I even think of befriending those men? I would rather die."
Samar Veer patted her head indulgingly. "You don't have a reason yet. You will. And you'll do anything for that reason."
The day Shaili was born, when Mihira was twelve, she understood what Samar Veer meant. Mihira had her reason now.
Samar Veer took one look at her, her tshirt stained with the baby's spit, the scent of some talcum powder that she'd stolen for Shaili on her, the infant sleeping in Mihira's bony arms and he gave her the only smile which could be described as melancholy.
