Lakshmi Narayan

Once upon a time, a happy rajkumari (princess) and her charmingly in-love prince, fleeing from the elements while out on a picnic, chanced upon a rundown haveli and took refuge there. Unknown to them, it was haunted by the spirit of an unhappy woman who’d been cheated in love and tormented by her lover to the extent that she killed herself in dejection.

Trapped for aeons in this lonely condition, she swore revenge on all lovers, “What I couldn’t have, I won’t let others have,” she swore. So, in many horrible ways, she wreaked havoc on the hapless duo who had dared step into her domain. Till one day, through a quirk of fate, our rajkumari stood face-to-face with the vengeful ghost.

An altercation of “Why’re you doing this to me?” and “Why shouldn’t I?” ping-ponged between the two. At the end of this slanging match, the princess discovered, to her dismay, that the malignant spook was none other than she herself from a previous birth!

Both the princess and the phantom fell deep into thought, wondering how a soul could be caught in its own coils, one half bitter and sad, the other, free and cheerful. Till the Maker intervened and explained that even when a soul is trapped in a limbo, unable to free itself because of its unfulfilled desires, the parent soul continues on its onward journey towards the Light.

Then a day dawns, when the trapped soul is able to un-shackle itself from its worldly yearnings, and merge with the parent soul. And that’s what is called nirvana.

A soul splinters and regroups through several avatars, till the final transmigration, when it becomes one with the Source.
(Excerpted from Fables from Beyond, Authors Upront, 2020)

Journalist, author and animal activist Lakshmi Narayan is a former assistant editor of Femina and former editor of Eve’s Weekly & Flair