Chapters 18-19: The sound of hearts breaking
Heartbreak :Heera: The most beautiful heart of all is the one that can still love even while it bleeds, and especially after its been broken into thousands of pieces.
Heartbreak :Akbar: When a heart breaks a substance spills out like cement and pours through the bloodstream, hardening everything. In time, I know my heart will mend and the rock inside will crack and crumble away. But for now I'm as solid as a column. And alone I stand.
Lashykanna,
I have been writing this one in my mind for over 2 weeks, and on the laptop for days, in parts, for I did not really know how to say what I wanted to say. For the sound of hearts breaking is the most unbearable sound in the world, and this diptych has made it echo and re-echo thru my consciousness ever since the first part came out. And not even the anger against Akbar that I felt after reading the second part has been able to drown out that awful sound.
I must confess, straight out, that I am not impartial in this. Akbar might well have had his reasons for doing what he did. He might well have had, as far as he could see, no real choice but the one he took. But I cannot help feeling that he did not look hard enough. Or did not know how to get what he wanted without leaving Heera feeling humiliated and ashamed of herself.
It was not a question of their having a life together, for that was clearly impossible. So it followed, as the night follows the day, that he had to make her leave him, and for good, with no looking back, no lingering hope that this parting need not be forever.
This, however, need not have been accomplished with a sledgehammer blow. His rejection of the essence of their relationship - which was what it amounted to - was not limited to feigned ignorance of what had happened between them the day before. It also - and this was far worse - amounted to an implicit denial of all else that they had shared over the last several days, the very things that had compelled Heera to seek that unusual, indeed audacious farewell meeting with him.
This wholesale denial that there had ever been anything between them was clearly meant to leave her no way out but to retreat in her turn, and thus to spare her even worse sufferings. But that did not make it any the less of a brutal blow.
Oh Heera, my Heera! As if all that she has had to go thru thus far was not enough, she now has to first suffer the terrors of the damned while it seems that Akbar is no more. Then, after a nearly unbearable physical struggle with his weight and the water*, when she is limp with glad relief that she has managed to save him, comes something unexpected, magical, and irresistible.
A whirlpool of unfamiliar, exquisite emotions that flood thru every nook and crevice of her being as Akbar, only half conscious and thus free of the constraints of the waking state, caresses her face and takes her in his arms.
Heera's whole heart and mind are as if newly awakened to the intoxication of these hitherto unknown feelings. To a sense of belonging together with him, of needing him, of feeling safe and protected from every ill wind in his arms, that almost paralyses her with its suddenness and its strength.
No one could have put this across with more delicately, with more acute perceptiveness than you, Lashykanna, when you write:
...when she let her guard down and let herself be swathed by him, when she ignored the voices and let herself hear his beats, it was an epiphany like none other.
This was the sanctuary, the refuge that she had been referring to. A place within his strong arms, where no one else could bring her harm. She clutched the arms that were enveloping her, immersed in a comforting feeling of safety that she did not want to leave behind.
______________________________________________________________
* Your description of that whole process, my dear, is, in one word, magisterial. I have rarely read a passage so evocative: so full of fear and near despair, of indomitable courage that will not accept defeat, of a desperate need to save what she cannot bear to lose. Marvellous!
______________________________________________________________
And then, like a thunderclap of doom, comes this. The one thing that Heera would never have expected from the Khan Sahib. A complete distancing of himself from her. A turning away, cool and remote and final. A door being shut in her face, irrevocably, with a large sign on it : No Trepassing.
A blow that shattered - no, not Heera's hopes for them to have a life together, for she is too much of a realist to dream such impossible dreams, given her present situation and her heavy responsibilities towards all those who depend on her.
Nor just a blow that shattered her heart. Though the sound of her poor heart breaking must have been audible, not just to Akbar, but to the others with the ears to hear it, like Gauri, watching her friend and mistress helplessly, her own mind numbed by nameless forebodings and dawning fears.
It was a blow - and this was the unkindest cut of all - to Heera's self esteem. The most painful of all, in the self-condemnation that it triggered, the sense of shame, so natural in one raised so carefully and traditionally, for having seemed to have behaved in a manner inappropriate in a young woman of her birth and breeding.
Shame for having let a man who, it now seemed, had never felt for her anything of what she felt for him, come so close her in mind and body.
He had made her no promises, true, and so he could not be accused of being a cheat.
But what then of his behaviour the day before in the canal? What did that mean? He might not remember it, but what of the unmistakable tenderness that he had shown towards her? Was that too fake?
What also - in fact even more inexplicable and hurtful - of his wholesale denial and dismissal of everything else that had passed between them, unspoken, true, but none the less real for that?
If he could sweep away all of that with cool indifference and a chilling air of detachment, what did that say about him? Not just about what he felt or did not feel for her, but about how he perceived her? Did he see her as someone who could be trifled with, made the object of casual gallantry?
Heera may not have posed these last, corrosive questions to herself just yet, but they are unavoidable, and they will haunt her day and night in the weeks ahead in Bansi. And the searing hurt that will eat away at her from inside, like acid consuming flesh, is perhaps the worst thing Akbar could have done to her. For this, despite all his own sufferings, I cannot find it in my heart to forgive him.
No, not the worst. That is still to come, when Heera finally discovers, as she must, that her Khan Sahib is the right hand man of the Shehzaade, the one charged with delivering the farmaan, and Parnagarh, to him by any means fair or foul. Then her heart, and her world, will literally crumble around her , and might well bury her in the rubble of her hopes, her trust, her faith in a man she had grown, almost unknowingly, to love.
There can be no self-hatred so great as that which will consume her at that moment of revelation. My heart grows cold even as I contemplate it.
Oh Heera, my poor, darling, trusting, innocent Heera!
Yes, you, Lashykanna, and many others, exasperated by my wholesale condemnation of Akbar, might well ask: But what else could he have done? Well, let me tell you what he could have done.
He could have apologized for taking what would have seemed like liberties with her the day before in the canal, while adding that everything he had done, and every word that he had not spoken but which she must have understood regardless, were nothing but a reflection of what he felt for her - the respect, the admiration, indeed adoration for a woman of her courage, her intelligence, her refinement and her beauty.
But they belonged to different worlds, and there was no place for him in hers. He would never wish to do anything that might lower her standing in her world. Nor did he have anything to offer her of what she deserved, above all stability and a secure life. There were things he was not at liberty to share with her, but they had no future together, and to no one was this more painful than to him.
Thus, in her interests more even than his, it was necessary that they part forever, with no looking back. He would not presume to think that she felt for him anything like what he felt for her, but if that was indeed so, he begged her pardon for having inflicted this unwarranted pain on someone for whom he had such high regard. He hoped that she would find it in her heart to forgive him.
He should have said all this from a safe distance, looking into her eyes only fleetingly. At the end, he should have turned and left the room. Finis.
Now this would have had the same end result, but it would have left Heera feeling warm about the heart because of what Akbar had confessed about his feelings for her. Plus she would have been spared not only the pain of, as she would see it, unrequited affection for a man who did not reciprocate it, but the searing sense of shame at having betrayed her principles and her upbringing because of her love for him, and the humiliation of having been thus summarily rejected by a heartless cad.
OK, this is it, my dear. I do not suppose even one percent of your devoted readers will agree with me, but I stick to my stand regardless. See how strongly I have come to feel for your characters, and this covers both Heera and Akbar? I want to hold poor Heera close and comfort her and tell her that everything will come all right I the end. And I want to kick Akbar's rear end nice and hard, and I do not care if he is eating his heart out either! I suppose I will come round to forgiving him eventually, but that is not quite yet, I am afraid.
Oh yes, I forgot to put in one very important point. I absolutely loved the totally unexpected passage about Akbar practicing mounted archery in the forest, and besting those three grey wolves thru the sheer force of his personality. The segment I am quoting below is superb, in both the imagery it evokes and its content. Especially the marvellously terse last para.
Their glassy eyes came alive under the light of the moon - alive with a cold flash of carnivorous spite as they glared at his tall figure. He returned their glares with the same intensity - his dark eyes arrogant and dauntless.
The wolf-pack snarled and frothed at the rider, as though ready to attack. But the man wouldn't react, however intimidating their low growls got. Eventually, when they couldn't sense any fear in him, the pack started making their unwilling retreat.
They had to. The wolves had recognised that this man was not prey - he was another predator. And like it or not, they had to accept the fact that the forests probably belonged as much to him, as it did to them.
Your very interesting note on Mughal mounted archers was fascinating.
Shyamala Periyamma
Edited by sashashyam - 8 years ago
Members Lounge
Book Talk
658