Love Stories From Punjab by Harish Dhillon

Author:Harish Dhillon [Dhillon, Harish]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Fairy Tales; Folk Tales; Legends & Mythology
ISBN: 9789381398999
Google: oRxnDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 9381398992
Goodreads: 1812439
Publisher: Hay House, Inc
Published: 1998-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Three

SASSI PUNNU

It was a dark night – a fitting end to a day that had been marked by darkness. All day, a thick blanket of black clouds had covered the sky and engulfed the earth. Now, as the night drew on, they seemed to wrap the world still closer in their embrace. But Kapil Muni had not noticed the darkness – for him the day had been the brightest one of his life. After long, sterile years, this was the day that his wife Ramba had been blessed with a child.

It had been a difficult birth. All through the day she had laboured and he had been torn between anxiety for his wife and joy at the impending arrival of his child. Then, in the early hours of the night, she had been delivered of a baby girl. He had felt a twinge of regret, for he would have wished for a son to perpetuate his name. But when he had held the infant in his arms, great joy had welled up within him and there had been no room left for misgivings. For a long while, he had permitted himself to savour this joy, then, handing the baby back to the midwife, he had turned to do what he was most adept at doing – casting a horoscope. Very quickly, he made his calculations and drew up his tables, then turned to making deductions. As he did so, a frown creased his brow. No, it couldn’t be. Perhaps his deductions were wrong. He turned to examine the permutation of the stars. Perhaps he had made an error there. He checked and rechecked a dozen times, but he had made no mistake. The stars were fixed in their combination and the deductions he had drawn were as clear as daylight and just as immutable. The stars forecast that his daughter would, one day, bring him shame and there was no remedy, no steps that he could take to thwart this prophecy. No mantras he could chant, no act of piety or charity that he could perform.

He sat for a long time looking down at his calculations, wondering what it was that his daughter would do. It was not difficult to foresee. Where a daughter was concerned, it could only mean that she would be involved in an illicit love affair, perhaps bear an illegitimate child. He knew that this could be avoided. He would bring up his child to trust him, to have faith in him. Should she ever fall in love, he would be the first person she would turn to, and he would be all too happy to give the young couple his blessings.

But what if she were to fall in love with a boy from a lower caste, or even a boy from another religion? He shuddered at the thought. No matter how much he came to love his daughter, he would never be able to accept that.

He was filled with despair. What had started out as the happiest day of his life, suddenly seemed to be turning into the bleakest.

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