Chapter 261

|| #5: Reader Realm ~ Beginning What Set them Free ~ ||

As was instructed in the letter, we left the refuge of the Inn, said our goodbyes to the InnKeeper with assurances that we would convey to him everything that happened and then, together, ventured out into the open land and towards the rundown fortress in the Northern valley.

When we arrived at our destination, we were spellbound by the splendour of the dwelling. Though in ruins with nothing more of the fortress left standing except, the tall archways stood unscathed, mounted on glorious stone pillars and lofty curves that were entirely engulfed in moss and winding creepers.

The ground was littered with soft grass and an occasional throw of timid flowers. A fresh brook trickled down the stony path that once must have been the corridor that led to a chief chamber.

As was expected, the Lady in the Dark Hood was waiting for us, her lips curving to a sly smile, as she sat on a rock beside the nearest archway and watched us tramp down the hill to assemble before her, a safe few feet away.

She waited until we had sat scattered on the grassy lawn, and then spoke in a clear, cascading voice, "Whether you doubt my intentions or stand unchanged in your conviction of me, I am pleased to see that your admiration for the tale has not failed to bring you to this scene cited in the epistle I last wrote." She paused a moment, the reason for which I do not know, before continuing, "Perhaps one of the many great stories of a very famous playwright might cross your mind as you listen to the tale I about to recount. And maybe, some of you may think of other stories you have heard of, with situations similar to this."

"Wait a minute!" interrupted some brave mouth from the crowd, "Are you going to tell us a different story?"

"What is this all about?" someone else asked.

"This cannot happen," said another, "We want to know what happened to Lord Arnav and Kushi and the rest of their family."

"What's happened to Anarkali? I hope Ram takes her out of the basket. How cruel of that villain to dump her like that!!"

"Why do you always wear Dark Robes? Can't you try a brighter colour like yellow or blue?"

The Lady in the Dark Hood seemed amused by the gush of queries but she slowly lifted a hand as though to silence the crowd.

I was baffled to find it worked. Everyone turned silent, expectant to hear each of the questions answered.

"You will remember I had revealed myself to the four inside the caving chamber," she said, relating to the last chapter, "Because it was time."

"Time for what?" I asked.

The Lady in the Dark Hood didn't glance in my direction but politely afforded a reply, "Time for them to know the truth and to be truly free at heart."

"So you told them the story?" I asked, "Of the past?"

The Lady in the Dark Hood nodded to the ground and was about to say something when someone even braver retorted, "What ridiculousness! You were wasting time telling stories at a crucial point when a child had been kidnapped and the rest of them were trapped in a demolishing Castle?"

The Lady in the Dark Hood looked straight, presumably in the direction of the person who'd spoken, though no one could see where she was looking exactly, what with the hood covering the upper part of her face.

"I may not have the power to stop Time, but I can certainly slow it," she said, "And that is what I did that night. It would take hours for me to tell the story and I needed to be sure I wasn't bringing them any risk. But most importantly, they had to KNOW."

"And did they?" asked an interested heart.

"Oh yes they did," the Lady in the Dark Hood smiled, "Just as you will."

A hush fell over the crowd as they waited for her to begin.

She took a deep breath and said, "The story I am about to tell you is one that really happened. And as we all know, the greatest love stories are found amidst the greatest wars."

And then as we listened, she began to narrate.

The Past- Roughly 50 years ago

Chapter 340: How It All Began

This story that you've matched your hearts to love did not, as it may have seemed, commence in Arhasia at all. In truth, the story began, a long time ago, in the heart of a remote village in India.

During the time the British East India Company first ventured its dubious prospects onto the Indian shores, there lived, somewhere in the Northwest Centre of the Country, two families of high prestige and renown.

One was the Malik family, headed by Rajendra Singh Malik who was a famous gold merchant and his gold business was so flourished that it attracted a lot of foreign figures to his lavish lawn.

The other was Veer Varma who was a great landowner with acres and acres of crop fields to his title and numberless names of villagers as his tenants.

The Maliks and the Varmas were the richest families in that little territory. They were distant neighbours: their residential estates separated by the huge chasm of a river over which was located the village market and other minor establishments of the village.

The presence of the Village right between the mansions of the Maliks and Varmas served a more imperative purpose than merely curtaining two essential territories: the village was a shield set in the very epicentre of possible feuds (and yes, there had been MANY feuds; so many that history ran out of books to record them in) for the Varmas and Maliks were ancestral enemies. The families had looked upon each other as perpetual nemeses and had for SO LONG as oldest memory can recall that the village and the two families had long forgotten what had caused the rift between their families.

Yet, the bitterness of the forgotten dispute only thrived in its ignorance and the more generations that appeared, the more embittered they were toward each other.

Now, for our story, we need not go way back to the time of the great-great-Gulshazir Malik or the great-grand Pithulak Varma.

Our tale begins in a time when Rajendra Singh Malik was managing the Malik estate and the ancestral gold merchandise, and Veer Varma owned the vast lands of the village and had half of the village-folk working in his fields for convenient wages.

The villagers both respected and feared the two aristocrats. These noble men were, occasionally, found to be kind-hearted but were, otherwise, so firm in their decisions that it sowed panic in the hearts of the people. Especially because one's decisions were always made to spite the other and, sometimes, in their desperation to wreck the other's interests, they would overlook the necessities of the people.

Rajendra Singh Malik had lost his wife in her second childbirth but she had left him two sons to carry on the Malik tradition: the eldest and the most learned was Raoul Singh Malik while the youngest, believed to be the most reckless boy in the Village, was Devananda Singh Malik.

Rajendra didn't worry about the upbringing of his sons for he had enough wealth to lavish in their growth and they were not void of a maternal figure. His own mother, the boys' grandmother, Sreelatha Malik still survived and, despite her age and failing health which prevented her from managing the house in the way she used to in her youth, she spent all the residual energy and voice she had to monitor the boys, taking care of their needs and bestowing her devotion over them.

Age derailed her helpfulness but the youngest, Dev as he was called, remained her favourite. She was faithful in her attentions to the eldest too but it was no secret to the family and servants alike that Badi Dadi Sreelatha loved Dev best, her eyes lighting up as she listened to his tales of mischief, and the easy defence she accorded to Dev when his nuisance ran the risk of admonishment by his ever-busy father.

Rajendra Malik, on the other hand, lauded his eldest, finding promise in the young boy's ready intellect. Hoping to handover the heritage and the family title to his eldest, Rajendra Malik took special care to accord extreme attention on the first than on his second.

Dev was secretly disheartened by his father's disregard for him but, by time, the young lad learnt that there were reasons his father reserved himself from the youngest. Apparently, Dev had his mother's deep brown eyes and, adding to the fact that she was no longer existent, Dev had also been the reason why his mother had not survived, having died in her ill health after giving birth to him.

However, as was in his nature that was most liked by his Badi Dadi, Dev knew life could be wasted with mind set on lingering sorrows. He undertook, in his father's absence, to go about the village with the other miscreant boys and make play and ploy of every place he and his little troop set foot upon.

To assist him and to encourage his mischievous treats, he had the company of his lawful aside, his right-hand, if you must say.

Much to the dislike of his father who set rules that Malik boys were not to mingle and maintain camaraderie with the children of servants, here was Dev set out to wreck all the rubrics of his conservative father.

His right-hand was none other than PrakashPrakash, the only son of the Malik cook. The doubling of the name is not without cause, for, after his wife bore him six daughters, the elder Prakash was so overjoyed when he learnt that his seventh was a son that he named him after himself. Hence was the seventh lad named PrakashPrakash, trailing his father's name after his own.

Dev and Raoul, despite the differences in regard from their father and Badi Dadi, were bonded brothers.

Raoul felt protective of his little brother and would come to Dev's defence when he was being reprimanded by their father. Dev, in turn, admired his big brother and felt his fraternal pride surge every time anyone spoke in appraisal of Raoul.

Which happened a lot, for, Raoul Singh Malik was perfection personified: handsome, studious and ambitious. Not only was he his father's favourite and the most capable heir to the family heritage, the village girls swooned when sighting him or contemplating his chivalrous mannerisms. No man was as courteous as him in his approach to women. If he was walking by, he would willingly offer to help the older women of the village to carry their things from the market to their homes. Young girls longed to catch his eye, wishing he would turn his head and notice them as he passed. But Raoul preferred to spend more time in his mansion, looking after the matters of the family business. If Raoul was not in the village or his house, he was certain to be in the Academia,' the nearby town library, poring over the numerous books that resided within the wide archives of that scholarly heaven.

No wonder Dev worshipped his brother like a devotee would a god. In fact, Dev looked up to his brother more than he did his father.

On the contrary, Dev was everything that his brother was not. While the elder Malik boy sat at a desk, poring over his books and filling his head with formulas and philosophies, the younger Malik boy would frolic all over the Village and the Market, prodding, pricking and prying into prohibited places.

Dev was mischief incarnate and, with a permanent smirk on his face, this local trickster spend his time annoying the shopkeepers and teasing young boys and girls alike. In every meaningless venture, he was supported by his closest ally, PrakashPrakash who was believed by all to be the stupidest boy in the village.

Dev despised work, cursed the function of learning, preferred to wander lazily about in the market and frequently found cause to earn the ire of his father.

But he loved his grandmother and cherished the moments he got to sit by her side, listening to her sing folk songs and tell of the curious lores of their ancestral uncles and aunts.

When our story begins, Dev is barely ten, Raoul is fifteen and they are students of the Village school which was a one-room school that catered to the education of all those children of the village who could afford to be learned.

To reach the school, you had to first walk through the noisy market, taking care to not lose yourself in the morning crowd or be lost in the sights around you which ultimately made you forget all about reaching school on time. Once you've crossed the market, you had to pass over a thin bridge which was built over a stretch of the vast paddy fields that was irrigated in knee-deep water. Ofcourse, some boys had no care for getting their feet wet and preferred sloshing through the itchy green paddy field, feeling the wet mud under their soles and the cool water at their knees, while the modest village girls, with their neat pigtails tied lovingly by their mothers, clutched their black slates in one hand, lifted the sides of their long skirts with the other hand and scampered over the bridge that met with the wide grassland in the middle of which was the wooden structure that the Village festooned as the School.

Ha! You may have wondered why I mention the girls at this juncture of our story which appeared to have been about the Malik boys, but some of you may have guessed it already.

Curious to coincidence it may appear, but the archenemy of Rajendra Singh Malik, Veer Varma and his wife Vandhana had a daughter, their one and only child. Their daughter, Chandraki, is nearly ten at the point our story commences.

As much as Veer Varma and Rajendra Singh Malik were enemies, so were their children. The parents of either house were distasteful of the idea of sending their children to learn in the same school that the offspirngs of their inherited enemy were coming to learn, but the aged schoolmaster was optimistic and he assured the parents that he would see to it that the children were seated in the best but the farthest possible benches in the schoolroom so that probable tiffs, mirroring the majors of the past, could be avoided among the little masses.

However, you know how it is with kids. You can never bottle their extreme passions, for they are exceptionally expressive and would throw tantrums if it means showing disregard to the opposed, in doggedness, to get what they want.

The schoolmaster struggled to teach the two dozen fold of little heads in the cramped little room, all of varying ages and requiring variance in subjects and levels to be taught, but the one worry in his mind was always the worry that accompanied the villagers who watched the students make way to school through the market every morning.

Will the Malik boys and the Varma girl, who took two different routes to get to the Village, find themselves in a spot that led them to ignite a flare that was always in danger of exploding?

And will they, by a look or frown, when the schoolmaster's back is turned or his attention elsewhere, find cause to start a fight and end up beginning a national war between the Maliks and the Varmas?

So far, no such severe disputes had found time or place to be fashioned and, if there had been any little ones, the schoolmaster had readily intervened and settled it.

But the fear always lingered in his aging heart because the three were his best and worst students: Raoul, the oldest in the class, was his cleverest and wisest student; Chandraki was his quickest student, her skills at mathematics unrivalled, but she was a fiery one and easily short of temper; and Dev was the worst specimen of all. He cared naught for his books and had entirely abandoned his practice on the slate and, with his idiot friend PrakashPrakash (who didn't even know the vowels), he disturbed the rest of the class, making outlandish noises and playing with the insects they had trapped and kept alive in matchboxes.

But little did the schoolmaster know that what the villagers and he feared, would soon happen. And the first time it happened was neither in the Market nor in the schoolroom.