Parvati felt an overwhelming restlessness. The haveli was quiet now since most everyone had gone to bed. She quietly tiptoed to the stairs leading to the haveli's roof, not wanting the Rakshas to know. She wanted to be alone.
Alone! She stopped midway up the stairs holding the wall for support as if someone had punched her. She was alone wasn't she? Alone in this world! Undeniably, irrevocably alone!
She plopped down on the floor of the roof, thoughts swirling in her mind like the desert dunes tossed by the relentless winds of the Thar. The sky above glittered with a million stars but all Parvati felt was darkness.
Alone! How painful and cruel the word was. She was no one, she meant nothing to anyone. She didn't belong .. not to a village and not to a family. Not a soul to call hers, not a soul called her theirs.
Fate had deemed it fit to take her parents when she was too young to understand its cruelty and she had been alone since then. True, she had lived with Maamisa for a while, been happy with Nandhini Jija. But everyone understood the transiency, like river water held in one's palms. It quenched but ultimately you had to let it go. The Thakurain had been kindness itself but that was her nature. Parvati had pinned her hopes and dreams on Varun but again Fate had intervened in the form of the Jallad. Parvati was alone yet again. Maithili, Sunehri, Baapu Sa even Kaaki Sa only scratched the veneer of loneliness with their love or hate. She even envied Rudara his pain and his angst. He had his misguided reasons for his hate, he had reasons to fight for or against. What did she have? Nothing..Nothing could fill the deep dark pit eating away at her soul.
For the longest time Parvati sat there on the terrace her throat choking with anguish that weighed her very soul. She was reminded of a lone tree in the desert. The winds had twisted it over time, its misshapen trunk and whipped bark a testament to the battle of one child of Mother Nature pitted against the other. She felt like that tree. Alone, as the sands of time and winds of destiny tried to break her. She didn't want to fight alone, she wanted to be part of a family, a grove through which the winds whispered their song. She wanted more than anything to belong - to be a daughter, a sister, a lover, a wife, a mother. She wanted a label, an identity.
But Bholenath had deemed it fit to pit alone her against a World harsher than the barren wasteland of the Thar. But she was tired of fighting - for whom and for what was she fighting? She wanted to give up, broken like the old tree would be one day. She would lie there alone on the desert sands feeling their chill seep into her bones while being smothered by the serene darkness of the desert sky, welcoming the release her soul already craved!
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