The Ignorance of Knowers by Sakiv Koch

Author:Sakiv Koch [Koch, Sakiv]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Immersive Books
Published: 2020-09-09T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 10: The Light Catchers

He was happily miserable or miserably happy as he reentered the building where he had been savaged by Pragvi’s dogs on his first visit. Another kind of a dog was mauling him now, too, and it was impossible to escape from this particular beast.

Maya, who still held his hand, was uncharacteristically quiet. He looked into her face and saw her brows creased in thought. She smiled feebly when their distracted gazes met.

“I can feel the beat of your heart even through your palm,” she said as they paused at the threshold to the great hall where Bheekhu had orchestrated so many wounds and shed so much blood.

She must be sitting in there, perhaps in the very chair she had taken at that time when I was last here, Smast thought. She must be waiting for her fiancé, for the person in whom she has chosen to place all of her love and all of her trust. If I walk in now, would she look up in the belief that her prince had come to her? And will I then have to watch her disappointment when she sees me, an-almost stranger, a mere mote of dust quivering in the periphery of her sunlit life? Wouldn’t it be better for me not to go in?

“Your heart must be very strong to make you shake with its beat like this,” Maya said to him, her generally-exuberant voice turned grave, “and it’s strong hearts that break with the least amount of sound and the greatest amount of pain. But you haven’t come here just to listen to a hopeless babbler. Go see the person you are here to see and— and — may Ma Durga shield your strong-weak heart from—, from I don’t know what. Come now, my child, let’s go.”

The said child was suddenly unable to go anywhere. His legs became two immovable pillars embedded in the marble floor. He would have turned tail and bolted out of the palace had his right hand not been a captive of Maya’s frail palm at that instant.

“Can I use a washroom for a minute first?” he pleaded, shrinking away from the mouth of the hall as though it were the mouth of some terrifying serpent. “I have travelled a —.”

“How thoughtless of me!” Maya cried, pulling him away and beginning to lead him down the vast corridor. “I have such little practical sense! It’s no wonder they call me a seventy-year-old infant behind my back.” She led him to an ultra-rich suite of rooms. “The bathroom is over there,” she pointed to a set of magnificent doors.

“In there is a huge wardrobe containing several dozens of suits, sherwanis, kurtas, shirts, trousers, shoes (I am just enumerating men’s items) — all of them are new and in all types of fits and sizes. They are to be given as gifts to our guests at the ceremony tomorrow. You are our very special guest, Smastrus — you’re, in fact, much more than a guest.

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