Radha-Ramanahari

Radha-Krishna | by Miasmicnectar

Radha feels the thin film of sand quietly grind and shuffle beneath her feet as she moves across the cold cement floor. The household was quiet as she steals away from it in the dead of night. She had nothing more to lose now. Even her demons had let her down this time around.

She invokes her namesake as she quietly open the creaky old, steel gate, asking for blessings on her journey. Sounding almost like a plea, from one woman in love to another. She lifts the edge of the tattered sari she chose to wear for inconspicuousness and runs into the night, almost flying as the cold air tries to slap her awake from this maddened trance. But she stops for nothing and no one in her determined dance of limbs and hair, with her destination firmly in sight.

She passes the old millers dam and remembers a childhood gone by too soon for her to have the answers she would need on this journey tonight. Moonlight flickering on the shallow pool of water, they would dance until they would hear voices calling them home. Just two innocents, just a girl and a boy melting into their reflections, not realizing that fate would lead them on a cruel path from that moment on. That was 14 years ago. She would go on to marry him and stand by him and carry his children in the pit of her belly for nine months at a time. She would continue her life of quiet desperation because she chose familiarity over fear.

Not on this night, though. Tonight she was free. Heading towards a promise unfulfilled. Towards betrayal and discovery. She was running away from the lie she was living, from her inability to admit that she had made a mistake. She was running from the safety of cold arms to the warmth of unknown ones. She could not survive the long, lonely nights alone. Her one weakness. The fatal flaw in the grand design of her life. The one the goddess didn’t posses. The other Radha was patient, never knowing when Krishna would return to her. Living through the pain of him marrying other women and still continuing to love. The love struck Job of Hinduism.

Some creature of the night shrieks and flies over her head, making her pause for a moment in shock and awe. She was at the bridge at the end of the village now. Beads of cold sweat began to form as a result of the clashing heat within and the cold night around her. The air hits the liquid clinging to her body to cool her down as wild strands of hair now flicker in the breeze, all seeming to head in one direction now; the direction she came from. The long tresses he so loved. The untameable locks her babies would cling to as she suckled them.

She hears a shuffling in the shrubbery nearby and startled, she turns around hoping it was him. It wasn’t. She loved how his dark skin would glow in the night, almost blue under the moonlight. Her Krishna. The one she couldn’t wait for unlike the goddess who was ready to wait lifetimes and more. It was now or never ever. She couldn’t go back. Wouldn’t. How could she, when she had finally tasted the heat and passion of this god-like man, go back to the mundane, coldness of a man who had no clue how to express his love? But what of your children? A voice from within seemed to be asking. They are his. Not mine. I carried them, birthed them and handed them over as his possessions. You are making excuses Radha. She sighs, not knowing how to answer her own questions. She had made a decision, she would stick to it.

Over an hour had passed since she came to the place he had promised to come take her from. The medicine man who had walked into her village, making all her contemporaries swoon inwardly. None would dare let it show, but Radha knew. The flushed cheeks, the half closed eyes. He would talk to them and they would listen to nothing. He would talk of his adventures through the world and they would sit there, listening to his voice, enwrapped in his postures. Imagining. Always imagining. She would not merely listen. She would hear the words. And he had chosen her. Over all others, it was her bed he had come to. Her arms he collapsed into in the heat of desire, longing to name every lock of her hair and every part of her soul. Longing to claim it as his own. And now she was here to let him. To let him take her where he will, to be his companion and lover on adventures still unnamed.

She bundled up her sari upto her thighs and squats on the floor. The noiseless night was no companion for an impatient woman. She drew careless shapes in the dirt with her fingers, letting in reach into her nails, blackening them, all the while imagining what it would be like to walk through this world with him.

And so she waited. And waited. And waited.

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