Tyaag

२

The river ebbed at her feet.

A stream of waterfall cascaded from the stygian valley of her hair.

The droplets teetering at the edge of her sharp collar bones before abandoning the contours of her body to form a commune with the ripples that flowed around her in wordless whispers.

It was as if the water carried secrets that could quench her dessicated mind but chose to torture her anyway, chose to show her no mercy.

Instead it mocked her with the illusion of reverence, the echo of the sky above kneeling in faithless worship.

Meera grew up listening to her father recite verses from various vedas and puranas.

He firmly believed that a child's mind was an empty vessel and to fill it with futile tales like panchatantra would pervade the young mind, leaving little to no scope for them to acquire the kind of sagacity one needs in order to become extraordinary.

She grew up with a certain sense of belief that was ingrained in every cell that merged together to give birth to her heart, her mind.

An unwavering credence her father ploughed her psyche with; that she was born to be honored because she carried the same essence of feminine energy in her bones that was the very soul of the universe itself.

He told her that the personification of the supreme being who creates all matter that is conscious, the one who is infinite like the heavens above, the one who is eternal as the wheel of time is Devi.

The cosmos and all that is divine is nothing but her copious manifestations.

He would look into her dark eyes, reaching out to her with his gaze as one does with open arms.

In the semblance of chanting those hymns, he'd tell her, "In woman is the form of all things, of all that lives and moves in the world. There is no jewel rarer than woman, no condition superior to that of a woman."

He told her, "By you this universe is borne, by you this world is created, by you it is protected."

Meera clung to those words like an infant clings to its mother's breast.

She made those verses her religion and built a shrine for all that was holy inside of her.

She still remembered the day when after one of her fathers many lessons, she felt his gold colored eyes gazing at her, basking her in the warmth of an early sunrise when he spoke the words that will come back to her in subsequent years that followed, first as a prayer and then as a haunting echo of a lie that died a slow, agonizing death.

"You are Devi and Devi is you."

She had believed him then. He had given her no reason to be doubtful of her place in the world.

But it was the world and its people who often crippled a woman's ability to believe in herself.

Meera grew out of the embrace of naivety that cloaked her mind when she was young.

She recognized the fact that the holy scriptures which asserted the belief that women were cardinal beings carrying the primordial essence of cosmic energy, that proclaimed feminine power as the fundamental principle of all creation also insisted that the goddess doesn't reside in women who were capable of sin.

She started to question her faith when the world began to threaten her existence.

She couldn't understand why all girls were celebrated, worshipped even but only until a certain age.