Dear friends,
Thank you so much for your wishes..I was so..so..touched...I will reply to all of you personally soon.. :) I'm not able to reply to all the PMs and scraps yet...I will...when life settles down a bit..
Both my girls( baby and big sister) are doing well...and as I tell my Arnavji we are extremely fortunate that both of them inherited their mom's 'calm' genes..😛
Love you all and see you sometime in January...
Here's the teaser I'd promised...(I'd written it before the baby:)
Teaser for the second half of the story...:)
Another place...
The clouds arrived in a billowing deluge accompanied by lightning flashes and distant rumble of thunder. Soon the entire sky was overcast and cool gusts of breeze sprung out of nowhere. The heart-shaped leaves of the money plant creeper broke into a frenzied dance making a soft tapping noise against the whitewashed verandah wall.
The pages of a note book long forgotten on a worn out cane chair fluttered open...
"When life becomes an existence,
and existence, a candle,
a smoldering stick of incense...
To light..
To perfume..
To burn into nonexistence...
Another time...
Like a serpent, the blue and white train slithered across the monsoon-lush plain rhythmically rolling from side to side. Skirting around undulating hills, passing by waterlogged paddy fields, crossing bridges over swollen rivers. Villages with mud-houses, hamlets and slums with graffitied walls, desolate platforms of unknown stations , neverending array of electric poles and cables...all flashed past the train windows whilst rain thundered and bounced off of the curved roof and ran down the window panes in thick, relentless streams.
Leaning against the doorjamb, Arnav let strong winds ruffle his hair into disarray. The train had slowed down for no apparent reason, as had the rain, and the clouds cracked allowing sunshine to escape in columns of golden vapor.
With his eyes soaking in the slowly shifting landscape, he puffed a cigarette desultorily. It was a guilty pleasure he'd struggled against for years and had last renounced at the time of Aarav's birth. That had been his longest perod of abstinence which had lasted for over four years.
His face was serenely contemplative but a slanting beam of sunlight illumining his features revealed evidence of a hard life. Echoes of choices, ripples of vicissitudes, blaze of ordeals. Yet, despite it all there was determination in his bloodshot eyes, indefatigably in his tired shoulders, resolve in his firmly set lips. The whole had emerged greater than the sum of all parts and bore testament to the invincibility of the human spirit.
Even after giving up his job and traveling through three continents in the past twenty days...his resolve hadn't wavered.
"I will find you, Khushi", spoke a steely voice in his heart even as the train shuddered and clanked into an unexpected halt in the middle of remote countryside, "Even if you're hiding in the furthest corner of this world, I will find you".
He was a modern-day knight on a mission but it was a mission with a difference. The dragons he had to slay, dragons he had to rescue the fair-maiden from were all inside her own mind.
* Please take a moment to listen to this song. It fits the upcoming track perfectly. I love this song...and maybe if someone were to ask me at gunpoint (hypothetically speaking) what my fav Hindi song was...this would be it. It gives me so many feelz!
[YOUTUBE]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvzpPTMFNUQ[/YOUTUBE]
So this was a glimpse of light that awaits us at the end of the dark tunnel...we're in right now...(story-wise) The dark tunnel will continue for a while...but only as long as strictly necessary! Thank you so much for your faith and patience...:) "The bud might have a bitter taste but sweet (very sweet!) will be the flower" :D
See you soon,
Jenny :)
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