I was a young boy when I left Vrindavan for
the first time. Did I know it would be the last
time I would see those glades, the rivers, the
pastoral wonderland of my childhood? Yes, I
did. I am supposed to know it all. But it did
not matter.
It never does. I have all that is past within
me, yet I cannot dwell there. Instead, I look
towards the tomorrow, which, too, in my
case, is just another past. But I have the
strength to stand in my today and walk
towards a future that I know of and will to
occur as it must.
I knew this was the last time the bosoms that
embraced me would only hold love. Of
course, I would always be loved, but those
that came into my life after the Vrindavan
years would know me as a warrior, a king.
They would never give me the comfort of a
carefree, mindless, casual love.
The King of Mathura had sent me an
invitation, and I accepted it with a weird
sense of pride. Knowledge never does
dampen the exuberance of youthful pride. I
am what I am. And still, the adulation,
adoration, and acknowledgement of human
accomplishment is something I thrive on.
The strange thing about being acknowledged
is that the place the acknowledgment comes
from is intrinsic and vital to the feeling one
gets upon receiving the acknowledgement. I
would rather be admired by those that have
the spark within them. The spark of
brilliance. Of confidence. Of power that they
wield over their fellow creatures. Imagine
yourself walking through a jungle, and
suddenly in front of you, there is a tiger in all
its majesty. And the tiger, having laid eyes
upon you, allows you to stroke its marvellous
sinewy body. At that moment, imagine a
Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.butterfly, pretty, enchanting, lands on your
overstretched finger. It''s the tiger''s
submission that you will always recount and
revel in. The kiss of the butterfly was
beautiful, perhaps achingly so. But the glory
of the tiger, the taming of a spirit so cruel,
strong, and wild, is what you crave in your
heart. The moral code by which such souls
live matters little to me. I don''t care for
codes. Mere earthly entanglements are
created by those who cannot achieve all they
aspire for. I admire achievements in the pure
materialistic sense.
And so it was with that sense of pride in
being acknowledged by a king that I said yes
to the invitation to visit the splendour of
Mathura and set forth, aware that it was all a
part of a sinister design. The King was
human and caught up in the web of a self-
fulfilling prophecy. The prophecy would be
his downfall, ruining an otherwise illustrious
name.
Kans wasn''t a bad king. Maybe he wasn''t a
good one, either. Kans was a king. And he
wanted to remain one, like any other king.
The misfortune of Kans''s ignominy lay in a
prophecy. A prophecy that had proclaimed
his defeat and death at the hand of his sister''s
son.
And since he heard that one malicious
statement delivered with all the accents of a
runic curse, Kans was obsessed, possessed.
It is human nature to want to defeat death,
and Kans embraced it all too zealously. His
once loved sister was bound and shackled. A
princess locked up in the deepest dungeon of
Mathura. The stuff that made up fairy tales
and folklore. Kans waited desperately to be
guilty of a horrifying sin, the killing of one''s
sister''s child. There were so many stories of
how he was already guilty of killing every
child born to his sister. And yet, there were
rumours of the two who survived. In that hell
hole, destiny and fate connived and saved not
one but two lives. How they did it is a tale
too fantastical to be true. But I believe it
because one of those lives was mine.