Winds of Hastinapur by Sharath Komarraju

Author:Sharath Komarraju [Komarraju, Sharath]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

Kali lay back on the ferry and watched the blue-black sky littered with stars. She held the oars with a light grip and allowed the boat to float at the mercy of the current. With the moon high up in the sky, and after the rain that had come down in the evening, the Yamuna was expectedly calm and pleasant, playing to the whims of the north breeze.

Her eyes grew heavy, and as was her habit she tried to locate the image of the fish in the night sky. Her father had once told her that the best time to find constellations in the sky was after the moon had gone down. On the clear nights that he took her out on the sandy banks of the Yamuna, she was only keen on rushing up and down the film of mud that the river left in her wake. But he would drag her over to the dry areas, lay down on his back, seat her on his stomach and take her hands in his to trace patterns in the sky. Once he pointed out the shape to her, she would see it clearly, as though the stars had invisible white lines joining them. Then a wave would crash against the bank and she would look away, only to look back at the sky to find the pattern gone forever.

She had never been able to find the constellation of the fish. Her father had told her it was one of the harder constellations to find, and it needed patience – much like catching real fish did. She knew the general location in the sky where the shape was supposed to stand with respect to the pole star, but it was hard to find a shape when there were no lines joining the dots. Her father had also said that the best way to find the fish in the sky was to let it find you. You just stared and stared at the stars, neither searching nor probing, and when you least expected it, it would jump out at you and look you in the eye – and once you found it that way, it would be impossible not to find it whenever you looked.

But then her father said so many things; not all of what he said made sense. For instance, he told her that she had a brother who now ruled over a kingdom to the west by the Rocky Mountains, a kingdom which fought with a fish on its flag. He was her twin brother, her father said, and that she was destined for bigger things too, like her brother.

But had that been anything more than a doting father’s wish for his daughter? The boat swayed in the midnight air, and an old song of the fishermen came to her lips. Eyes still closed, she gripped the ends of the oars and began rowing, one stroke forward, one stroke backward, and she sang.

When the question arose in her mind

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