Drabbles: 30. Episode XXXI- Return of the Jallad (Pg 95) [Note Pg 98] - Page 39

Originally posted by: sslmay11

It's again a beautiful piece of work. With few words you brought all the emotions that could have played between them. I love the last mischievous lines of Paro...What to know Rudra's thoughts on this...looking forward

The Tempest

The rainbow of glass bangles held no charm for her. She dispassionately surveyed the armful of bandhini dupattas another vendor held out towards her. If the man had looked a little closer, he would have noticed that the lovely young woman he was trying to entice with his wares wore a glassy and unfocused look. She saw everything. And yet she saw nothing.

How could she, when she was miles away and trapped in her own personal hell?

The monthly craft fair was an excuse to distract herself from the daily anguish that she had to live with. The anguish of knowing that the one she loved did not love her. No matter how many times she told herself that she had known all along that he didn't love her-- that he hadn't asked for her heart-- it was a thought that embittered every morsel of food that passed her lips and poisoned every waking moment until she fell into a restless slumber.

What hurt the most was not that he didn't love her. It was that he didn't love her-- that he was capable of love but that she was undeserving of it.

She flitted like a bright butterfly from one stall to another although she knew perfectly well that what she wanted couldn't be bought at any fair in the world.

A grinning man from the nearby tea shop eyed her suggestively, but she ignored him. She couldn't muster the energy to dole out one of her sugar-tipped arrows of sweet but masterful disparagement even.

What was the point? When he doesn't love me? When he doesn't want me?

And then, a familiar, dulcet tone asking for a pair of jhumkas at the stall in front of her pulled her out of her pit of black despair.

In front of her stood the embodiment of everything she had come to despise, hate so bitterly.

Parvati Ranawat.

A corrosive rage gnawed at her stomach, while her lungs suddenly refused to cooperate.

She was drowning.

With a great gasp, she shook herself free and gulped in mouthfuls of the dusty desert air. Her eyes watered and she wasn't sure her legs would support her. Swinging behind a woodwork stall, she knelt down on the ground, trying to stop the bewildering mixture of tears and sick envy brewing within her.

It had been eight and a half years since she had first set eyes on and fallen in love with then Lt. Rudra Pratap Ranawat who had rescued her from a man she had not wanted to entertain.

But all her jealousy, all her hatred, all her rage couldn't crumble that one barbed thought that grated against her heart, reminding her again and again-- eight years; I couldn't make him fall in love with me in eight years.

Laila, today, greeted that thought with as much disbelief and heartache as she would have eight years ago.