Destiny's Flowers

Kajoli Khanna

Description

Destiny flowers ushers us through the journeys of urmilla, Pema and atish, who unwittingly find their destinies intertwined. Urmilla is an art Restorer whose mission to revive priceless artworks in the fort of Jodi is overturned by a brutal and puzzling midnight assault. To unravel the mystery and conquer the paralytic fear that ensues she embarks on a spiritual voyage. Under the garb and demeanour of a Buddhist nun, Pema conceals a past that forces her to question her ethics as she wrestles with the burden of her deeds. Atish is the indulged hero of a slum, who achieves the ‘unattainable’ but cannot hold on to his good fortune. He must plunge into troubled waters, face the consequences of his cowardly actions to prove himself. As the characters are thrust in each others’ paths a story full of surprises unfolds. Frailty and courage, generosity and meaningless, grace and effrontery appear in the most unexpected of places. We savour three unique perspectives, as the novel takes us from a fairy-tale fort in a financial mess to a class clash in a Bengali household; From the soothing environs of Buddhist monasteries to the cacophony of the overpopulated slums.

Sujets

• Buddhist
• Idioma bengalí
• NUN
• Deeds
• Rudeness
• Meaningless
• Buddhism
• PAST
• Generosity
• Frailty
• Art restoration
• Consequence
• Question
• Spirituality
• Fear
• Ethics
• Assault
• Fairytale
• Mystery
• Slum
• Journey
• Artwork
• Destiny
• Finance
• Cacophony
• Grâce
• Fortune
• Romance
• Courage
• Voyage
• Fiction
• Bengali

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 27 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9788194110958
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Destiny’s
Flowers
After a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the Delhi University, Kajoli Khanna moved to Switzerland, where she completed a degree in Fashion and Interior Design. Having consummated varied design projects in Delhi, she began to work with the Ashraya crèches for underprivileged children in 1997, and also studied to be a counsellor at the Banjara Academy in Bengaluru. She has since continued to work extensively with a number of institutions for underprivileged children in Delhi and Himachal Pradesh. She has also published another book: Afterbirth and Other Stories .
 

 
ROLI BOOKS
This digital edition published in 2019
First published in 2019 by
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Copyright © Kajoli Khanna, 2019
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eISBN: 978-81-941109-5-8
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To my family and friends,
whose support and understanding
have made this book possible.
 
The human brain is seventy-five percent water.
The properties of liquid water are this:
it holds its temperature longer than air; it is adhering and elastic;
it is perpetually in motion. These are the tenets of hydrology;
these are the things one should know
if one is to know
oneself.
From About Grace by Anthony Doerr, 2005
 
1 Mila
The silhouette is bending towards her with arms stretched, its giant hands reaching for her throat. Coarse fingers enclose her neck in a powerful grasp; thumbs wobbling on the cartilage of her larynx secure a footing and press down, flattening her windpipe, detonating pain, blocking the flow of oxygen to her lungs. She struggles, twisting her head, nails digging into the flesh of his wrists, sucking on air. Suffocating with her mouth agape. He holds her down effortlessly, tightening his grip. Her heart ticks like a bomb timing the death of her neurons. She is losing consciousness slowly, the carbon dioxide in her blood gaining force. Her hands have lost their fight and claw sporadically; features tinged purple are bulging out of her face. The tussel is over: a deluge of darkness ends her life. Limp as a rag-doll she lies, a livid pulse leaving her motionless form.
Suddenly, her eyes spring open. She finds herself in bed, flat on her back, wide awake. Luminous dots and squiggles interfere with her vision, blood surges through her veins thrashing at her sanity, but she must take control of her quivering limbs and calm the storm devastating her brain. Stifling the urge to sit up and keeping very still she allows her eyes to circumnavigate the room. Caliginous shadows play havoc with her imagination. There are no hands around her neck, yet fear churns bile into her parched mouth; she is terrified the smell of his flesh will invade her nostrils. She turns her face slowly to the right, then to the left, eyes scouring the shadows. The weight of her head scrunches the feathers inside the pillow; they sound like electrical wires shorting. Nothing materializes, definitely not the silhouette of a man.
This savage intrusion disrupts her dream world nightly. There are no variations in the nightmares. Relentlessly, they make sure Mila will not forget the night she had woken to find a strange man standing at the foot of her bed. Despite this, she has managed to make no untoward movement that might have alerted the intruder should he have returned. A tiny whistle, a wheeze of relief, escapes through her nostrils. She needs to improve upon her breathing techniques, though, if she is to outwit the man who has destroyed her equilibrium. “Improve,” she snorts, flinging the bedclothes aside and sitting up, impatient. She needs to improve upon the petrified quality of her life. Shed. Reject. Break free of this foul situation. Snapping the switch of the overhead light on, she waits for her body functions to return to normal and yet, she cannot resist taking a quick scan of the illuminated surroundings. It has become a reflex action.
The clean-cut lines of her accommodation in the Buddhist Cultural Centre come into focus. Both white wooden doors guarding the exit to the balcony and the entrance from the hallway are shut, as are those of the cupboard built into the wall. The door leading to the bathroom is ajar, from which a funnel of light streams into the room ensuring Mila does not sleep in the dark. The bamboo desk is lined up against the creamy yellow wall, the tall-backed chair in front of it stands at an angle, just as she had left it. The sofas flanked by armchairs sit undisturbed like monks deep in meditation. Inside the room all appears to be in order but somewhere a thundering thump echoes with an eerie regularity. Ears on full alert, she listens. It is the sound of her heart pounding its involuntary song of fear.
He had left fingerprints, blood, the imprint of his tobacco-stained lips planted on the rims of beer bottles he had emptied down his throat – blatant reminders of himself scattered boldly across the surface of her suite in The Cottage. He had known the Fort of Joji and its sister hills dotted with villages and the occasional town didn’t have experts who could lift the prints, let alone match his face to his DNA; that the constables in their khaki uniforms and Nehru topis would clod-hop through the rooms botching up vital evidence instead. Every second photograph in the police roster resembled the man Mila had snatched glimpses of, his features blunted by the light of a torch, hidden by the shadows a full moon creates. Her midnight visitor had escaped, leapt from the precipice behind the building, tumbled down the rocky mountainside with naught but bramble and bush to prevent him from falling into the ravine below. Nothing clicks into place. A bushel of obscure motives and fragments of a bizarre encounter remain. Disruptive and frustrating.
Through the windows of her bedroom, 14 feet high, the moon had made a grand appearance that night, creating silvered silhouettes, giving gloomy spaces enough light for an action-packed drama to take place. The bounder had strutted about, not afraid of getting caught, jerking his inflated chest, boasting about his voyeuristic talent. He had watched her in broad daylight and at night, noting her habits, recording her movements, declaring he had entered The Cottage more than once whilst Mila had sat imprisoned by her nakedness on the bed.
“How did the blackguard manage with the mali working in the garden, the guard at his post and the servants indoors? Did he drug the guard, bribe the servants?” the inspector asks tapping his staff against his leg. He suspects “an inside job”. Interrogations had followed with cursory beatings. They were looking for a man with a gash on the left side of his face and a network of scratches on his body. The cacti and bush could not have been kind.
“No crime on the plateau has turned us into vegetables. Morning drills and afternoon tea can hardly keep a police force on its toes. But the scoundrel cannot slip between my fingers,” inspector Chirag Din asserts with conviction, adjusting the position of a painting that hangs with others on the wide column between two bay windows; and steps back to admire his handiwork. The three oval portraits hang in perfect symmetry against the wallpaper patterned to resemble white lace spread on baby blue satin. The face of the third maharani is no longer lopsided.
The inspector is a tall, middle-aged man with skin burnt brown by the mountain sun. He has jet black hair that sits in neat waves around his sizeable skull and square face, out of which bristly black brows, heavy-lidded eyes and a pair of fleshy lips protrude. His nose, surprisingly, is small and snubbed. Brooding black eyes droop inside creased rims and lips tinged grey by the use of nicotine turn down towards a robust chin. The flesh from his cheeks drops in folds to his jaw, which merges with a short neck flanked by burly shoulders and great arms attached to a wide chest that descends to a thickening waistline and broad hips braced by a pair of muscular legs, all of which contribute to his brick-like shape; but he is quick on his feet and sharp in the brain. Though his carefully enunciated words emerge in a leisurely drone, they are well pondered upon – for he is a precise man who likes his affairs to be in their proper place. He is not pleased with the awry angles the incident presents; unanswered questions stick like knives in his organized gut.
The table top lamps have been turned on. The light from numerous bulbs tucked into posies of white tulips on the chandeliers, too bright for Mila’s sleep-deprived eyes. Three whorled blown glass fantasies hang from the ceiling, with curling stems of cobalt blue enriched by white flowers, orange buds and grey leaves, specially crafted in Murano to match the colour scheme of the drawing room, light up its stretched dimensions and the heart of Maharani Chanda Bai, for whom The Cottage (in truth a neo-classical mansion) had been built. Several rooms in the palaces of the Fort of Joji support many branched illuminators such as these. Custom-made in the tiny island of Italy to highlight the theme of a chosen area, they had left the restorer spellbound. This evening, however