Chapter Text
"The Maharaja has asked for my hand in marriage."
"Will you accept?"
"I will."
"… So be it."
The bride had hailed from distant lands. They said her beauty was too much to bear and so she had chosen to keep her face covered, but it was not vanity that had captured the heart of the Maharaja. About her was a fervor, a mysticism unbridled.
She wore red the day of the wedding. Golden jewels gathered around her neck, her long, sunlit hair, her wrists, her ankles, wrapped around and around and that clinked richly together when she stepped with her fascinating silence down the path of the parade. The intricate patterns of her skirt befitted the royalty of those who ruled the province and was matched by the weaving Henna which stained her delicate hands that she kept folded in front of those painstakingly stitched patterns on her lehenga. The lace bordered veil draped over her hair was long enough to sweep the ground just behind her feet as she walked. Flowers bordered her path on the dirt, making colorful mosaics of the earth.
She looked upon the crowd, the celebrating, clustering masses, intoxicated on cheer and music—children chased each other in between the legs of strangers—and saw none whom she could recognize, and at last, she looked ahead, eyes possessing the somberness of a dream that had gone on for too long, of something she wished to wake from. With a ghost-like aspect, she drifted forward to step onto the decorated carriage drawn by two great, equally decorated, muscled horses whose hooves prodded at the earth as though in rhythm to the distant drumbeats. This would bring her to the shade of the canopy, draped with red and gold fabrics, where she would be united with her groom: Maharaja and his new Maharani.
They said her tears turned into gems when they fell to her feet.
Thirteen years later, they said the Maharani was taken by the Ganges River.