Prologue

1 months ago

proteeti

@sambhavami

July 18, +71

Priye,

The years outrun me. The countless hours spent on the bank of mother Ganga haunt me. Miming these incessant waves, ever so eager to slip through my fingers, my selfhood eludes me. Bloodied, bruised, I think not of my mother. By fate's cruel turn, even her visage was cruelly taken from my thoughts.

I feel the grains of time in my bones now. Gritty as the sand that falls. But blood is all I see, even as I turn the hourglass.

Time has been kind to me. I never died at the edge of a sword. Undefeated. Unnoticed. Invisible. No! Not completely invisible, my love. You saw me. One day, I shall see you again. All that I have written has been for you. Just you. Even the passages I wrote so carefully, relishing every turn of my quill, or the words jotted down in a hurry along the margin of a balance sheet, and the ones that I wrote before you graced my life. All of it, even unknowingly, was for you (and me).

Alas, you never read. And I never read it to you. It was a nice story. About you and me. About my best friend (yes, that one!). Alas, I never read it to him either. He would've loved it. Or hated it? I could never tell.

I had even named it...some fifty years in the past. What a fool I was. What conviction I had, to have written- The Thief's Mahabharata.

Nevertheless, I wrote to you. 

Because you wouldn't answer me. Because, you wouldn't be there, smiling at me, resting on the empty bed, every time I came home. I hope you have a good reason (other than the afterlife).

Now I must say goodbye (for now). For this story is someone else's burden. The parts about us? Well, that's just ours to keep.

See you soon,

Your Sanjaya

---

With some effort, the old man picked up the last stack of loose papers on his desk. Kneeling beside the fireplace, he lovingly placed the stack in the arms of the dancing flame.

Caressing the papers one last time, he walked out of the bejewelled room, red ink from his quill still soaking into the silken tablecloth.