Epilogue..
80 years later...
A gleaming, dirt road meandered through the face of the moonlit plain, gently sloping from the rocky foothills of Vindyas Mountains down to the sea of twinkling orbs of lights, that signaled the presence of human habitation. A lone figure, barefoot and wearing tattered clothes walked uphill with weary, heavy steps. His overgrown hair caught the night breeze and flapped wildly even as drops of blood trickled from his weather beaten, leathery forehead and ran down his face, unchecked.
A smile played on his lips as he talked to himself, with an incongruent air of unconcern that perhaps only a mad man can manage. Ridiculed, stoned and banished from civil society, he trudged up the windswept path towards the foothills, not knowing where his feet were taking him.
Without warning, a silver fork of lightning ripped through the black velvety sky to reveal the burnished red sand stone facade of the Anand Vilas Palace as it perched proudly on a rocky cliff. Slowing down, he raised his eyes and gazed at a dark, desolate wing of the palace, while the wind howled around him.
"Mohi...Mohi...", the disconsolate wind whispered to him, causing unexplained tears to run down his suddenly stricken face. His body trembled because the whole air around him seemed to be shuddering with umimaginable grief and each gust of the wind tortured with pain. He had chanced upon a phenomenon that kept people away from the palace at nights.
A century old incessant echo, a century old yearning , a century old love...
Like innumerable people before him, this man had no idea or understanding about what he had chanced upon; his crippled mind could not comprehend the true nature of that powerful disembodied emotion, that had suddenly assailed his heart and soul. All he could feel was his own responses to it. His quivering heart, his streaming eyes, the shudder of the heavy air surrounding him and the disconsolate, relentless wail of the wind. Innumerable people before him had felt the same.
The cry of a grieving, tortured soul, disembodied since almost a century, begging for some reprieve...for hope...for succor...for love...for Mohini...
As another flash of lightning lit up the sky, the man raised his face upwards and whispered just a single word.
Mercy.
As he sped away from the palace, his barefeet silent on the dirt road, something changed in that night. The wind slowed even as it's tortured wailing transformed into a whisper, it's yearning into anticipation.
Anticipation laced with hesitant stirrings of hope.
Mohi?
The air stilled, holding it's breath, listening attentively as the sweet notes of an invisible nightingale ascended to the heavens once again.
Like a prayer.
And then, without warning, without any kind of preamble, the skies burst open and water poured down from it, accompanied by a thunderous, ear-shattering din of drumming rain drops.
The tortured air, the wailing wind mingled with water, grief mingled with reprieve and together, they fell onto the parched, thirsty earth causing warm scented vapor to rise from it.
Like the sigh of a lover who finally become ones with it's mate.
Dear readers,
Hope you liked it...and hope I was able to keep my promise of not letting the story end on a note of despair..:)
Biting nails, while waiting for your feedback...
Love,
Jenny..
Edited by IPK007 - 11 years ago
Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi 2
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