fire

Pain just licking the edges of my consciousness..


like the rough almost rash left behind on my soft skin from the stubble on his jaw... took me back to the crazy days we’d shared as children... competing against each other.. I determined to not let my femininity get in the way of the prize.. he equally determined to show me that he was better than me at just about anything.. we’d climb and race and wrestle and shout our way across the day.. and at the end, both exhausted curl up in each other’s arms till parents’ calls could no longer be ignored..

Then we’d have to face the anger that came forth from the deepest set fears of parents.. an anger that masked their deep rooted concern for our “future”.. in any other scenario we would have been betrothed as children.. maybe even married off and then left to compete in our childish games… maybe.. but then I would have had to be confined as only the married girls are.. I couldn’t have competed against or sworn at my husband.. but I digress..

As I said… maybe they would have gotten us married just to get rid of their worries about where we were or what we could get upto while playing unsupervised… but ofcourse they couldn’t.. we belonged to the same gotra.. we lived next door to each other in the same village.. the khap had forbidden us to be anything but playmates… our parents knew that well… they had watched peers being strung up in the banyan tree near the khap meeting place.. they had watched children of forbidden marriages grow up as orphan beggars on the streets of the village.. they wouldn’t have dared think about our marriage..



But we did..

As the games of childhood grew into desires of adolescence.. as we began to really see how different our bodies were.. a difference that excited us, enticed us… we fell in lust just as easily as we’d loved each other.. I was his life, he was mine... there was never a thought of any other for us.. whenever I was teased about going to my sasural.. I always thought of the door of his house opening to welcome me.. he only ever dreamed of me bringing him rotis and lassi on a hot day in the field..

The groves that had seen many a game of hide and seek also gave us a place where we hid from the rest of the world and spun our own dreams..



Till one day they saw us…

And all hell broke lose..

My parents promised that I would be married off outside the village within a month.. that was the only reason the khap didn’t cut us into pieces right there in the grove.. I had besmirched the family honour, they said.. only my father somehow insisted that killing me would not clear his name.. his stand against the village then was how my life didn’t end that day..

I pleaded and cried… from next door I could hear the echo of the same whipping stick- sound.. almost as if they both rose and fell in a rhythm with each other.. in the dead of the night I heard his broken whispers at my window.. how he had been left loose I don’t know.. I had been fettered to the wooden beam by the same thick rope that bound the big bull in his pen… he managed to crawl in undetected.. maybe the gods smiled upon us just then.. we crept away with the sunrise…

The tortuous trek to the police post 15 miles away, and then two days of pleading with the sahib there that we knew what we were asking for, that we were both old enough.. they told us to stay near the police station and not even try to contact our families if we wanted to live.. we took the blessings of the babu- sahib who sat in the courthouse to marry..



And then the gods stopped smiling.. a member of the khap saw him and guessed I would be where he was.. the mob descended on out little hut with the setting sun…and they set fire to it.. I was inside… he was dragged outside to be beaten and to watch as I burned.. we wouldn’t be allowed to die together… we couldn’t burn in the same pyre.. I watched from behind flaming walls as they sheathed their swords in his body…

as he fell to the ground and blood began to run… they spat at the spreading stream and began to walk away..

And he stirred.. silent, watching for their return.. and then he crawled into the flames to me.. I pushed with all my strength till the chair that was my captor fell to its side and I could drag it on the ground..

We managed to be in the same pyre… they wouldn’t be able to separate us now..

I smiled at him as the sting from the fire turned into a raging burn… our eyes never left each other.. with my last breath I told him I loved him.. and gave myself over to the darkness that would deliver us from the fear we had lived under forever..