DASTAAN...

Prologue

"But why Dastaan?"

She tried to answer that question. The look of puzzlement across her face keeping his gaze hooked onto her. He smiled that amused smile that always complemented that puzzled look. She walked upto him and leaned over him, her gentle lavender fragrance ensnaring his senses.

"A story, a tale. No! More than that, it is many stories linked into one. No, it's more than that! Actually, all of that and something more. Something more profound, mysterious and encompassing. I don't know how to explain," she muttered. The wonder and exasperation giving her voice a smoky quality.

"Maybe, a saga," he offers, smiling.

And a dastaan it was, their life. A dastaan they lived. Their own Dastaan.

Chapter - 2

He had come back on a stormy night.

She was always there for him it seemed. Waiting. Leaping into his arms out of the blue. Holding onto him with all that was true. That one year of courtship, one year of engagement and one year of marriage. He remembered telling her one night when they lay entangled in each other's embrace, " These three years with you have been the true beginning of my dastaan, the story of my life."

"Our dastaan," she had whispered.

And then the war began and brought with it the year of hell. She supported his decision to serve the nation and became his only thread to humanity while he got sucked into that vortex of destruction. On the days when he saw tiny corpses of toddlers lining the streets, it was the thought of her and of the part of them that grew inside her that kept him going. 

He came back broken in so many ways that he was sure he could never be pieced back together.Now that he thought of it that night the storm wasn't half as violent as the rage storming in his soul.  But then she opened the door and while she stood there with the little whimpering bundle in her hands, he knew he'd found the salve for those hurting jagged ends.

She leaped into his arms, her face wet with tears. His shivering and sobbing  angel. Then she moved back and placed his little girl into his arms and murmured, "Dastaan, sweetheart, look it's your daddy."

And Dastaan looked right at her daddy and reaching up pulled at his nose and smiled. A small bruise on his soul healed and he looked up into her eyes and whispered, "Our Dastaan."