H – Home (Garuda Chapter 2)

This is the second part of an ongoing short(?) story. I’d recommend reading the first part here before jumping into this one.

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Naga was only six, she was the youngest of five girls. She hated everything about her life. Her sisters were cruel, her mother was constantly disappointed and her father was, at best, absent. She was sitting by a little pond in the middle of the forest behind her house staring into its depths. She loved looking at the water and her greatest desire was to see the ocean. She used to love sitting by the pool next to the Jasmine tree in her front yard but it annoyed her mother. Her mother would yell at her for being lazy, for simply sitting around and not helping her sisters. She didn’t want to be around her sisters, they scared her and they were always pranking her. She had enough scratches and gashes all over her because of these ‘pranks’. Her only solace was Vinata but she couldn’t openly spend any time with Vinata. Her mother hated it more than anything and if she ever caught Naga with Vinata, that would mean no dinner on a good day or the cane on a bad day.

Vinata had found this little pond as a meeting spot for the both of them. They could spend as much time together as they needed – as long as her mother didn’t notice Vinata’s absence. She never noticed Naga’s absence. Today had been the same as any other day. She had been woken up by one of her sisters kicking her in the shins, fighting with another for the bathroom, outracing yet another sister for breakfast and dodging nerf bullets from another. Naga was getting pretty good at getting around all these traps (as she liked to think of them) to reach her destination, Vinata’s delicious breakfast. She didn’t know any other six year old kids and so she had no idea this wasn’t normal. She was being home schooled unlike her older sisters who got to go to school. Naga wasn’t complaining because it meant six hours of freedom from her sisters’ incessant torture and Naga could escape into the forest just before her sisters returned.

It was almost time for her father to return home so she pulled herself away from the pond, brushed her skirt and started making her way back home. It wouldn’t do to get home after her father. She had messed up though, gotten lost in her thoughts and lost track of time. She looked up at the sky, she could tell the time just by shadows cast around her. No shadows meant she was very late. Her father did not like Naga being out in the dark, it doesn’t behoove a good girl to be out and about at that time of the day. She suddenly had the strangest feeling, like something was pulling her, calling out to her and if she didn’t hurry, she would lose something precious. Naga ran as fast as she could, jumping over the broken branches and rocks on the forest floor – she was familiar with every leaf, every root and every little being in that forest. She felt safe and at home in the forest. She felt terrified and uncomfortable in her house.

She attributed this feeling to her fear of upsetting her father. He had been in a bad mood all week and she didn’t want to anger him any further. But when she got closer to her house, the feeling overwhelmed her and in the most pleasant way. Naga hadn’t felt happiness like this, she was only six but she felt some ancient joy awaking deep inside her. She crossed the driveway, stepped over the threshold and beheld the only person that would ever matter to her.

To be continued in I