Love and Beauty

3 years ago

Ramya

@Ramya_98

Carrying her husband on her back, Hidimbaa soared to the endlessness of the skies as they both bade goodbye to his mother and brothers. Their proximity caused her breathing to grow tense yet she kept flying higher and higher. She could sense his awestruck smile at all the exquisite sights they beheld together from those heights and she too gently smiled to herself in silence.

Having flown long enough, she chose to land on the peak of a magical mountain. She let him down and advanced towards a nearby stream. Then she bowed low, cupped her hands and splashed its clear and soothing water onto her face. As she rose and turned to look at him again, she saw him eyeing her with some unmissable keenness.

Bheema gazed long at her. She, a damsel, dark-skinned, demure and delicate. Her eyes lined with kohl, her hair gathered into a neat bun and adorned with jewels, her palms colored with henna. Yet, he knew it was a guise, a guise she wore to satiate him.

"Hidimbaa," he exclaimed as he swiftly walked towards her, "show yourself to me."

For a few moments, she was evidently reluctant. Terror struck her with a stormlike force as she envisioned his horrified expression at having seen her true form. She shivered a bit but he at once held her hand in reassurance and she managed to relax slightly.

Then, much to his surprise, she started to grow taller and taller until she was only an inch or two shorter than him. She snapped her fingers and he took a few steps back as a mystical, white smoke began to emanate from her. He rubbed his eyes quickly and as he opened them, what he saw set his heart racing at a pace that surpassed that of the finest and most well-bred of steeds. 

She stood before him now, her skin as dark as a serene dusk nearly closing in on the night. She had enamouring thick brows and eyelashes and her tresses, voluminous and wavy were left open to fall all the way down to her knees. She was clad in robes made of the barks of trees and animal hides and they highlighted all her curves. She had broad shoulders that made her somewhat manly and so did the hair on her arms and legs that had never been tended to but those traits could only succeed in making her more mesmerizing to him. 

To him, she was just as wild as the fierce forests she roamed so fearlessly. She was wild and she was raw and she was simply magical like a night studded with a million stars. It was only in that moment that he knew what love meant and what slipping into it madly was like.

Yet, something about her did earn his disapproval and displeasure and that was the fact that she was peering at the ground as if forbidding her eyes to meet his. He stepped forward again, grabbed her chin and stared into her eyes so intently that in the middle of the night, her cheeks were overcome by shyness and began to bear resemblance to a bright red morning sun. And as he stared into her eyes, her eyes were of a woman who had lost herself helplessly to the inexhaustible bounties of love.

"You are absolutely beautiful," he professed as he ran his fingers through her hair. 

In embarrassment and in the delight of her real self being called beautiful by the one she loved so peerlessly, she burrowed her face into his chest and he took a moment to absorb the enchantments of the ambience she had brought him to. There were mighty, shady trees, perhaps a thousand years old, there were streams and waterfalls that nature had crafted in great luxury and there were exotic birds and rare flowers with intoxicating scents. Yet, none of it was as beautiful as her, he concluded to himself.

‌"Let me make all of you, mine," he whispered to her, slowly pulling her into an embrace.