All characters in sexual situations are 18 years or older. Enjoy.
Please read a few lines about the Hindu deity mentioned like Rati, Kubera and about Yakshas/Yakshini to understand this mythical story better.
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Standing at the Fiumicino airport lounge area, I surveyed around looking desperately for two middle aged Indian ladies but it was tough to identify anyone in the sea of people wearing masks. My elder sister nonchalantly sat nearby, wearing her ever present headphones listening to some crazy stuff as usual.
Finally, I saw two saree wearing ladies come out from the washroom and I was relieved to say the least, as the flight announcer had called out our names two times by now.
"Ma, how many times have I told you and Mausi (aunty in Hindi) not to go absent when it's boarding time!" I nervously shouted at them as we quickly ducked into the connecting duct to the entry of our flight, possibly escaping at the final moments before a full blown COVID struck Italy and the rest of Europe.
As I relaxed into the seat and the in-flight announcements were being made, I remembered what a nightmarish last two months have been for our family.
Let me introduce myself and the rest of the people before I continue to talk. I am
Surya
, 19 years studying medical at the La Sapienza Uni at Rome where my father and my uncle worked as doctors. We have been staying in Rome for 10 years now and I need to admit, in a way I was happy to be away from Europe.
See, people may wish to be in foreign locales and beautiful European towns, but the situation for a gangly Indian kid in his teens wasn't very rosy to say the least. I won't go into the bullying details in the schools and in the neighborhood as they didn't mean much, but what they did was to push me closer to nature. I got attracted to the silent and accommodating greens and wished to have a big orchard plantation around me when I make my own house.
I used to hear stories of how my mother's family had a huge mansion in their local village surrounded by majestic sal and ashoka trees as well as a thousand different fruit plants as well, and it was a long-standing dream for me to visit that place. My dream would be a reality soon.
My mother,
Sunanda
is 39 years old and it's such a travesty that she lost her brilliant doctor husband to this pandemic at such a delicate age. She's a strong-willed lady though and the day she got the news, she became larger than ever before in my eyes. She called for
Anweshi
, my 20-year-old elder sister and me, and we talked it out as maturely as we could, planning for what lied ahead. After a short deliberation, she wanted us to go back to her village and take up residency there, until this pandemic blows over.
It can take a year or two maybe, and then we can plan again.
When it rains it pours ...
Only a day after my father had passed away, my uncle started to show aggressive breathlessness symptoms at the hospital and while working with the patients we lost him as well.
Sulagna
, my forty-year-old aunty, and elder sister to my mother, was a jovial lady and always brought good homely Indian food to us even in the tasteless Mediterranean. I couldn't imagine what losing her husband would do to her and I just prayed our family survives as probably many others stricken by this chaotic virus. We informed their only daughter,
Sweta
, eighteen years old, studying Botany in Dehradun, a north Indian hill town. She also decided to skip studies for now and move in with us as news was just arriving of the virus going to hit India and we all felt it secure in a secluded out of the way small village in the borders between Odisha & Jharkhand.
I looked forward to meeting Sweta as I felt closer to her than my own sister, partly due to our mutual love for all that is green and brown. We had kept in touch all these years when she had gone back to India to study, by sending samples of unique plant seeds and making them grow.
After two changes of flights from Rome to Delhi and then onwards to Kolkata and a train journey to Balasore and a local bus travel from Balasore, a coast town in Odisha to the highway entry point of our village in Hatibari range, we finally made it after 2 days of hectic journey.
The whole area of our property could be approx. 7 acres with a sloping mountain range towering behind our mansion. The house looked at least a century old, made of stone and sal wood and looked majestic, although not being looked after properly, after the death of my grandfather 7 years ago.
We reached the place at almost twilight and there was a post man who took us to our homes. We are the feudal lords of this village as well as surrounding many scores of villages and the villagers looked upon our arrival as a source of encouragement and delight and many had gathered on the roadside just to see the foreign returned owners. The villagers in Hatibari are mostly tribals who are semi educated and work in local betel farms or teakwood factories owned by our family. In total the postman informed us that there are about 500 houses dependent on our family directly in the ten surrounding villages near us and our granddad had entrusted all his duties to him until the legal heir ever arrived in his ancestral place.
In the long term, my mother intended to develop the villages and make it a tourist location with our experience and money.
The house was built in a rectangular shape or L shaped and the roof was typically held up by high gables as a response to the heavy monsoons in the region.
An open verandah separated the kitchen from rest of the house so that fire accidents can be avoided. There were walled shelters with roofs for cattle in the courtyard. The doors and windows were small. Their frames and panels were made from sal wood. Both the vertical and lateral load-resisting systems are made from stone frames patched with thick cement.
The front face of the house had a large living room, kitchen and a dining room and the back wing had five bedrooms in total. All the bedrooms had attached bathrooms and were lined up to open to the courtyard where cows and hens were stayed. There were 5-6 guard dogs who roamed the territory to protect the cattle from foxes and jaguars who roamed the local forests. We also asked the postman to provide some security guards with guns who will also protect the place as we had grieving ladies with us who needed to feel safe.
I observed a large bunch of huge tall sal trees to the northern side of our property below the mountain range and planned to visit it soon. They were visible from the courtyard and a cold breeze generally flowed in from that side.
In a few days we settled into our new home as best as we can. We setup a hot water system from the local well by drawing it to a overhead tanker and installing geysers. We paid for & set up a broadband facility in our village and provided connections to many other important villagers houses as well. We also setup inverters and gensets to ensure round the clock electricity supply as the area as renowned for being cutoff during the monsoons.
We occupied the bedrooms in the order of first for me, second for my elder sister Anweshi, third for Sweta and the last two were converted into a single larger room for the two sisters who didn't feel safe in single rooms.
We needed one or two full-time servants as the house was too large to manage, but the villagers somehow feared to stay in our house. So, we rotated as part time cleaners and cooks.
During the first few nights of our stay, I didn't sleep well. There were a lot of nightly forest sounds I wasn't accustomed to, and later I found out, so did the others.
