have you forgotten me?
have you forgotten where it started?
all you remember now must be
a brother and sister plotting plans?
a father discouraging her daughter?
two young girls chatting away in the library?
remember the girl paralysed in her darkness?
dont you dare forget her
dont you dare
somehow all of that lead to where i am now
full of regret full of pain
whoever described darkness as black is a liar.
darkness isnt black, you cant see it,
it makes you blind.
as deprived of color it is, the more it swarmed
with agony
with fear
with curses to kill hope
did it make me fear death?
no
it made me fear life,
it terrorised me, my dear friend.
friend.
friends.
mehrin
baba
savitri
anbu
amma
and lastly
aathreya
my aathreya,
ellarume
where are they
are they suffering because of me too?
hearing each of their names, their faces flashing before me, the sound of their voices echoing
from the caves of my memory,
and i was taken back to the summer of 1916 to a brokendown household near the sea,
the prayer sounds from the mosque afar blaring through the windows along with the tinkling of the window chimes,
it was early in the morning and the sea was waking up its waves soothingly,
"rani ji, have some sulaimani tea won't you?, i specially had it made for you,"
an old man in his ragged white thobe from the other end of the room called out to me.
it was baba, mehrin's father, one can sense that his body had slowed way beyond his age
because of his alcoholism
as he sat uncomfortably on the bed,
but his mind and eyes
moved in the speed of light.
"you seem to like the windows, rani ji, do you like the view of this poor neighborhood that much?"
i replied without moving from the window as i watched a cloaked figure walking along the sea shore from a distance,
"there is more to this place than its poverty baba,"
"spoken like a true rani," and i could hear the smile in his voice as he said it,
baba always adressed everyone with ji
and since my name is indira rani, he loved calling me rani.
he would always say that i reminded him of a queen whoose name he couldn't remember.
from the day baba met me, he was fond of me as though i were his other daughter and immensely supported me for everything.
baba would often say,
"you are born to be a rani, because of your way of looking at the world,"
mehrin would add on to say its to do more
with my intellect and craftiness,
YOU ARE READING
a vase of bones
Historical Fictionborn in the wrong era. brought together by their two-edged swords of fate, are three Indian women , who disclose one of the darkest secrets of the colonial government in the 1900's, just to end up creating one of the biggest massacres, the nation...
