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...
Your braids like a pattern Love you to the moon and the Saturn, Passed down like folk songs, The love lasts so long.
~Seven, Taylor Swift
Glint
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
"Hush, my love.", she cooed as she picked up the sniffling baby from the crib. He would start crying in about another minute if not held, cradled to her chest.
His bubbling cries simmered down the moment he was cocooned in her warmth again, and he clutched the soft fabric of her plain, silken angavastram in eager fists. He was hungry, clearly, and she didn't need any more indication of it through wasted tears and cries that tore at her heart, as she carefully unlaced her blouse with one hand.
Eager snuffles filled the air as the baby started suckling, his hand reaching out to touch the comfort of his mother's skin as his eyes fell closed.
She smiled down at his little face, her finger reaching out to carefully trace the gentle lines of his face - his nose, the little dip above his pouty lips. Wonderment filled her, just as every time she looked at any of her children.
She made this, she created him inside her body. Unconsciously gave shape to his every little feature, gave breath to that tiny, rising and falling chest. She could hear his fluttering heart, and run her fingers through that little tuft of dark curls covering his head. She held all that within her womb for months.
She would kill for him, die for him, just as she would for her other two children. She would let this all-consuming love that she felt every time she so much as thought of them take her breath away and she would simmer in the glory of it forever.
She carefully lowered her mouth to his forehead, cautious so as to not disturb his meal, and pressed the gentlest of kisses. His skin smelled of new life, and her, and him.
The other person who would kill and die for him. His father who had given him his curls and his eyes and his strong grip. And maybe his earnest love for her.
She smiled to herself.
She had no mother. She remembered nothing beyond the fire - the comforting burn of the flames dancing on her skin, running through her blood, giving her skin and bones and breath. It was an impossibility and yet here she was. Here her brother was.
But she wasn't so gullible as to believe that the fire made her. She wasn't a gem to be forged in fire or a piece of clay to be burned and shaped. Fire ran in her veins, in the shimmering gold that streaked through her blood, but fire cannot possibly have made that.
No, fire brought her here, and shut the door behind. So tightly that she could see nothing beyond it, nothing beyond the nights where she woke up sweating with the image of sakha's and her brother's laughing, crying eyes behind her eyelids. So much light and so much darkness and an ocean of fire in between.
