I was a young boy when I left Vrindavan for

the first time. Did I know it would be the last

time I would see those glades, the rivers, the

pastoral wonderland of my childhood? Yes, I

did. I am supposed to know it all. But it did

not matter.

It never does. I have all that is past within

me, yet I cannot dwell there. Instead, I look

towards the tomorrow, which, too, in my

case, is just another past. But I have the

strength to stand in my today and walk

towards a future that I know of and will to

occur as it must.

I knew this was the last time the bosoms that

embraced me would only hold love. Of

course, I would always be loved, but those

that came into my life after the Vrindavan

years would know me as a warrior, a king.

They would never give me the comfort of a

carefree, mindless, casual love.

The King of Mathura had sent me an

invitation, and I accepted it with a weird

sense of pride. Knowledge never does

dampen the exuberance of youthful pride. I

am what I am. And still, the adulation,

adoration, and acknowledgement of human

accomplishment is something I thrive on.

The strange thing about being acknowledged

is that the place the acknowledgment comes

from is intrinsic and vital to the feeling one

gets upon receiving the acknowledgement. I

would rather be admired by those that have

the spark within them. The spark of

brilliance. Of confidence. Of power that they

wield over their fellow creatures. Imagine

yourself walking through a jungle, and

suddenly in front of you, there is a tiger in all

its majesty. And the tiger, having laid eyes

upon you, allows you to stroke its marvellous

sinewy body. At that moment, imagine a

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butterfly, pretty, enchanting, lands on your

overstretched finger. It's the tiger's

submission that you will always recount and

revel in. The kiss of the butterfly was

beautiful, perhaps achingly so. But the glory

of the tiger, the taming of a spirit so cruel,

strong, and wild, is what you crave in your

heart. The moral code by which such souls

live matters little to me. I don't care for

codes. Mere earthly entanglements are

created by those who cannot achieve all they

aspire for. I admire achievements in the pure

materialistic sense.

And so it was with that sense of pride in

being acknowledged by a king that I said yes

to the invitation to visit the splendour of

Mathura and set forth, aware that it was all a

part of a sinister design. The King was

human and caught up in the web of a self-

fulfilling prophecy. The prophecy would be

his downfall, ruining an otherwise illustrious

name.

Kans wasn't a bad king. Maybe he wasn't a

good one, either. Kans was a king. And he

wanted to remain one, like any other king.

The misfortune of Kans's ignominy lay in a

prophecy. A prophecy that had proclaimed

his defeat and death at the hand of his sister's

son.

And since he heard that one malicious

statement delivered with all the accents of a

runic curse, Kans was obsessed, possessed.

It is human nature to want to defeat death,

and Kans embraced it all too zealously. His

once loved sister was bound and shackled. A

princess locked up in the deepest dungeon of

Mathura. The stuff that made up fairy tales

and folklore. Kans waited desperately to be

guilty of a horrifying sin, the killing of one's

sister's child. There were so many stories of

how he was already guilty of killing every

child born to his sister. And yet, there were

rumours of the two who survived. In that hell

hole, destiny and fate connived and saved not

one but two lives. How they did it is a tale

too fantastical to be true. But I believe it

because one of those lives was mine.