Desi Iliad

[toujours_nigel]

So I've gone and dropped out of the aubigbang challenge. It saddens me, but meh. This doesn't mean I'm dropping the story, it does, however, mean I can snippet at people who aren't my long-sufering beta theotherrimi , and/or dearlyderanged , who always gets roped into these things.

So, entirely without context (because I'm mean like that)

And most he had been terrified of Tarini Thakurain, for all his mother’s reassurances that she would love him like her own. At nine, one is grown enough to no longer remain eternally in the antarmahal, but yet welcome enough no gossip ceases at your entrance. She had been meant for greater men—the Raja of Kashmir, some said—but she had been blemished, and they had only found Parvat Rai for her, and he, older than her father, had fathered no sons on his first wife, and now a widower had been grateful for such a treasure as Tarini. It had done nothing to take away the whispered stories about Tarini Chachi, or the way—he has seen, though she’d had a son, when first he saw her—women clutched their children to them around her, and stowed away their pregnant betis and bahus. Seven of her sons had died—she’d killed them some said—and the eighth had been born weak.

Nobody knew what she had done to turn the weakling into Akhil, who never lost a race or a fight, nor fell ill, nor failed to hit a target. Some whispered of changelings, Pramila of witch-craft, and his mother, herself devout—dark circles under her eyes bright in her sunken face, praying that he would not pay for his sin of murder—spoke of prayer, and the gift of gods to a woman so deprived. He—at nine, and eleven, and thirteen—had thought this terrifying, distant aunt a Ganga, birthing gods and helping them slip the mortal world. At thirteen, at fifteen, seeing the hard lines on her face, and the gentle sorrow in her steps and her eyes resting on her son, and her husband’s solicitous manner, he thought her Devaki, imprisoned in a distant tower by her kin—by her brothers proud of their blood and power—birthing sons to her husband and watching their infant bodies turn swiftly ash.

And Akhil in his mother’s changes had gone from powerful, distant Bhisma to Kanhaiya, mischief lit in his eyes and tilting his mouth.

“What are you thinking of?” Akhil rumbles, low in his throat like a thunderstorm or a growling dog, and Phalgun twitches in his sleep and settles back to his snore.

“You,” he says, and watches Akhil offer up a pleased smile, eyes and teeth glinting in the moonlight.