RagLak 100th AT preparation thread - Page 6

Ragini Maheshwari (nee Gadodia) is the daughter of Shekhar Gadodia and Janki Gadodia. Ragini's mother Janki died when Ragini was a child, and she was brought up by her father Shekhar, and her dadi, Parvati. Shekhar's first love (and eventually his wife) was a woman called Sharmishtha Bose, who he had a love child with, a daughter called Swara. Ragini's grandmother deeply disliked Sharmishtha and held her responsible for Janki's death. Resultantly, she weaned innocent, naive Ragini on hatred, mistrust, and insecurity, borne out of her own loathing of Sharmishtha and the relationship that she shared with her son Shekhar.

Because of this flawed upbringing, and her mother's example, little Ragini grew up with a deep rooted sense of insecurity - and an idea that only first love is real love. It was love at first sight for her when she met her promised husband Laksh - he became her entire world, her very being, the moment she set her eyes on him. Laksh was intended for Ragini, but fell for her sister Swara instead. Swara embodied everything that Laksh had ever wanted in his dream girl, and he was willing to do anything to ensure that he got his happily-ever-after. In his quest for Swara's love, he mindlessly trampled over Ragini's heart, whose love for him knew no bounds, and destroyed her sanity and her very being. So much so that she would have gone to any lengths to have him, and she did. Her obsession and madness, fuelled by Sanskaar Maheshwari's (Laksh's brother) quest for revenge, lead Ragini to do everything under the sun to ensure that her first love remained hers. Ragini and Laksh got married...and so began their tumultuous journey of pain and passion.

In the beginning, Ragini, for Laksh, was a simple tool against Swara, and unwittingly, like many others, he ended up pushing Ragini, weaned on insecurity and mistrust all her life, further down a path lit with hatred and obsession. Ragini, completely consumed by her obsessive, frenzied love for Laksh, set out wreaking havoc on anyone and everyone who seemingly stood in the way of her quest for Laksh's love, even if it be her beloved sister Swara.

When Laksh discovered Ragini's insidious manipulations and bore witness to her madness and her ill-treatment of his family, he decided to break Ragini in the worst possible way - by playing with her emotions and using her body, and leading her to believe that he loved her, before breaking her completely, utterly into tiny pieces. Ragini, utterly happy and content for the first time in her life and blissfully ignorant of Laksh's quest for revenge, began realizing the error of her ways and returned to her innocent, naive and loving ways.

Laksh's pursuit of vengeance blinded him absolutely - so much so that he wilfully ignored what his heart was telling him, that people do change. Laksh listened to his mind over his heart, and in doing so not only destroyed the one person who loved him absolutely and to the point of madness, but also set himself up for more unhappiness - for unwittingly, somewhere along the way, Ragini had broken into his defences and had stolen his heart. Somewhere in the midst of the madness, destruction, chaos and immeasurable pain that Laksh caused, his heart began to beat for Ragini, the same person who he had set out to break. Understanding finally dawned - Laksh finally understood that he could not live without Ragini, for how does one live without one's heart? And of course she could not turn him down, could never turn him down, for how do you refuse your own heart, how do you stop your own breaths?

It is at this point that Ragini stands today - content in the arms of the only man she has ever loved, the only man she will ever love, the one whose name is written on her soul. Beautiful, flawed and damaged, Ragini's biggest strength, as well as her Achilles' heel, is her infinite and fathomless love for her Laksh. Ragini, like Laksh, is immensely damaged and has done terrible, terrible things, but all those things came from a misguided sense of love and hate, and the inability to let go. As the cliche goes, she loved with a love that was more than love. And that fathomless love is the very foundation, the embodiment of who she is. Her sanity, her life essence, her heartbeat, her very breaths. All inscribed with one name - her Laksh.