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...
I had died the tiniest death, I spied the catch in your breath, Out out, out out, out out
~I Look In People's Windows, TaylorSwift
Fawn
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She didn't think she had ever known one person to be quite so... fawn-like. Not a grown-up person, at the very least.
Well, maybe once. A wife of the King of Anga. She had wondered how her rosy countenance was ever supposed to survive the association with the Kaurava court. Maybe it had. Maybe it hadn't. She genuinely could not bring herself to care much.
But it was different when it came to a woman meant to share a lifetime with a man who she loved so entirely. Who loved her so entirely.
Her energy was fed by theirs, whatever that meant. She could feel it after every moment that her eyes held that of one of her husbands, at the end of every day and night in their presence. And she believed that theirs was equally fed by hers. It was some greedy symbiosis, a wordless game of giving and taking with no measure or degree and ceasing to exist individually. And by the gods, they were all ruthless players.
But she didn't seem like one. Maybe she needed to grow into one? Wasn't that how humans functioned? Slowly blooming and growing into one version of themselves and then another - she wouldn't quite know. Her children did, she was sure, and she watched them evolve with a rapt fascination that may or may not have been quite staple of motherhood.
But she wasn't ashamed of it.
She remembered that when she had held her first child for the first time, that unending haze of pain had somehow dissipated from her mind, disappeared as if it had never been there. She could have been dead then and she wouldn't have cared. As long as that small bundle of untouched bliss was safe in her shaking arms.
And she had been in utter rapture of his every breath since then. She had realised, since then, that it had been foolish of her to think that she would never love another with the intensity that she loved her husbands with. Even her sakha. She loved that child even more. So much more that it almost made her feel guilty. And the next year she held another boy and she knew that she loved him just the same. It did not matter who his father was, even though she loved him so steadily. She knew that she would love all her children just as completely. And that she would watch them all with equal rapture. Them and their evolution.
This possibly wasn't quite the norm, she had realized when she had observed the way the Yadava princess's interaction with Abhimanyu began losing the edge of fascination as the years rolled by. Mothers weren't in such utter rapture of their children, she had realized as she had yet been unable to let go of the absolute wonderment she felt everytime she watched her own body change to welcome her children into this world that she still couldn't quite grasp herself.
