Skip to main content

Love in the time of war


“You are so capable of loving.  Yet why do you fight and kill men?”  Briseis asked.

“Fighting is not my choice,” said Achilles having planted a passionate kiss on the ruby lips below Brisei’s lilac eyes.  Her eyes resembled those of a gazelle, serene and pure.  “I inherited it from my father and his father and all the ancestors.  One cannot wish away one’s ancestral inheritance.”

“I wish you could,” said Briseis wistfully.  She had lost her husband, father, mother and three brothers in the war led by Achilles’ people.  She was delivered to Achilles for the nocturnal pleasures of the day’s warrior.

Achilles looked at her as the soldier dragged her along and threw her on Achilles’ bed in the tent.  The gaze and the grace of the gazelle charmed Achilles instantly.  He sat beside her on the bed and wiped away the blood from her ruby lips.  But the lips still shone like ruby.  He smelled her hair.

“You a royal?” he asked.

She refused to reply.  He took his towel, squeezed it in the water basin and wiped away the signs of masculine assault from her silky cheeks.  “You are as beautiful as Helen,” he murmured.

Helen was the cause of the war.  Her beauty was the cause.  Or was it?  Her husband, Menelaus, was a man incapable of love.  He knew only to fight and kill.  To conquer.  He too had inherited war in his veins.  Helen wanted love.  She wanted to grow old with her man and not live in the palace like a priestess in Apollo’s temple.

Women, mused Achilles.  Strange creatures.  They make us mad.  They make us love and they make us fight.  I killed this woman’s husband, her parents and brothers.  My men did.  What’s the difference?  And here I am now falling in love with her. 

Achilles killed the men of her kingdom during the days and made love to her in the nights.  He longed to stop the killing and return to his own kingdom with his love.

“This is what women do to men,” spat out Patroclus, Achilles’ cousin and his bosom friend.  Patroclus walked out with Achilles’ armour and helmet when the latter was in bed with his love.  The army followed him.  Achilles’ armour could not save Patroclus. 

“Please don’t kill Hector,” pleaded Briseis as the news of Patroclus’ killing by Hector transmuted the passion in Achilles’ veins.  “He is my cousin.”

“He killed my cousin,” Achilles gnashed his teeth.

“How many cousins, how many husbands, fathers and brothers have you killed?”

Achilles did not wait to answer.  He had answered that already.  Days ago.  “Kings fight for land, fame or the booty,” he had told her. 

“What do you fight for?”

“A thousand years from now,” he said, “people will speak about Achilles.”

“A thousand years from now even the dust of your bones won’t remain,” she reasoned.

“That’s why,” he said.  “That’s why.”

How much should the women sacrifice for satisfying the egos of men?  The question grew in her heart and became an unbearable burden.  It suffocated her.  We are the toys in the hands of men; they play with us to soothe their tired bodies and minds.

Achilles, her new husband, was fighting with Hector, her old cousin. 

The sun had set long ago.  Achilles had not returned.  Briseis went to the fortress.  She could already see flames engulfing it. 

Achilles lay dying waiting for the flames to approach him and become his funeral pyre.  Briseis took his head in her lap and held him close to her bosom. 

“We will meet again,” he murmured.  “In Elysium.”

Why couldn’t we create the Elysium on the earth?  The answer lay dead in her lap.



PS. I am resurrecting this story for Indispire's latest theme. This and 32 other stories of mine are available in book form: The Nomad Learns Morality.



Indian Bloggers


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Why I won’t vote

From Deshabhimani , Malayalam weekly Exactly a month from today is the Parliamentary election in my state of Kerala. This time, I’m not going to vote. Bernard Shaw defined democracy , with his characteristic cynicism, as “ a device that ensures we shall be governed no better than we deserve .” We elect our government in a democracy. And the government invariably sucks our blood – whichever the party is. The BJP and the Congress are like Tweedledum and Tweedledee though the former makes all sorts of other claims day in and day out. BJP = Congress + the holy cow. The holy cow has turned out to be quite a vampire and that makes a difference, no doubt. In our Prime Minister’s algebra, it is: (a+b) 2 which should be equal to a 2 and b 2 . There is an extra 2ab which is the holy cow. In George Orwell’s Animal Farm , the animals revolt against the human master and set up their own nationalist republic. Soon politics develops in the republic and some pigs become leaders. The porcine

Prelude to AtoZ

  From Garden of 5 Senses, Delhi [file pic] Hindsight gives an unearthly charm and order to the past. There can be pain too. A lot of things could have been different, much better, if only we possessed the wisdom of our old age back in those days. As a writer put it, Oedipus, Hamlet, Lear and a lot of those guys must have thought, “I wish I had known this some time ago.” Life is a series of errors with intermittent achievements. The only usefulness of the errors may be the lessons they teach us. Probably, that is their purpose too. We are created to err so that we learn, I dare to put it that way. I turn 64 in a month’s time. It’s not inappropriate to look back at some of the people whom life brought into my life so that I would learn certain lessons. No, I don’t mean to say that life has any such purpose or design or anything. Life is absurd. People come into your life as haphazardly as vehicles ply on your road or birds poop on your head. Some of these people change the chemist

How Arvind Kejriwal can save himself

Narendra Modi and Amit Shah have a clear vision. Eliminate all opposition. Decimate them or absorb them. My previous post [link below] showed a few people decimated by them. Today let’s look at the others: those who are saved by joining the Bharatiya Janata Party [BJP]. 1. Himanta Biswa Sarma  This guy was in Congress and faced serious charges related to the multi-crore Saradha chit fund scam. He also faced corruption charges related to drinking water supply in Guwahati. His house was raided by the Central Bureau of Investigation [CBI]. Then he switched over to BJP and all his crimes just vanished. It’s as simple as taking a dip in the Ganga and all your sins are forgiven. Today he is the chief minister of Assam. Nothing is heard of all the charges that were levelled against him. 2. Amarinder Singh  This former Captain in the Indian Army was a Congressman until Modi’s Enforcement Directorate [ED] started raiding him, his son and his son-in-law. He put an end to all those raid

The Good Old World

Book Review Title: Dukhi Dadiba and irony of fate Author: Dadi Edulji Taraporewala Translators: Aban Mukherji and Tulsi Vatsal Publisher: Ratna Books, Delhi, 2023 Pages: 314 If you want to return to the good old days of the late 19 th century, this is an ideal novel for you. This was published originally in Gujarati in 1913. It appeared as a serial before that from 1898 onwards in a periodical. The conflict between good and evil is the dominant motif though there is romance, betrayal, disappointment, regret, and pretty much of traditional morality. Reading this novel is quite like watching an old Bollywood movie, 1960s style. Ardeshir Bahadurshah, a wealthy Parsi aristocrat in Surat, dies having obligated his son Jehangir to find out his long-lost brother Rustom. Rustom was Bahadurshah’s son in his first marriage. The mother died when the boy was too small and the nurse who looked after the child vanished with it one day. Ratanmai, Bahadurshah’s present wife, takes her

The Blindness of Superficiality

An Essay on Anees Salim’s novel The Blind Lady’s Descendants Superficiality is a deadly human vice though most people seldom realise it. It is easy to live on the surface of everything from one’s profession to religion. Anees Salim’s novel, The Blind Lady’s Descendants , tells us a story of superficiality as lived by quite many people. Amar, the protagonist of the novel, is 26 when he thinks that life is not worth living. He became an atheist at the age of 13. He had become a half-Muslim at the age of 5 when his little penis was circumcised partly since he ran away in pain during the process. Amar’s atheism, however, is as superficial as most believers’ religion is. What initiated little Amar to atheism is “Dr Ibrahim’s farting fit.” Islamic prayer has to follow many a rule. “If you break wind during namaaz, you break a big rule, and you are to discontinue the prayer then and there, with no second thoughts.” Little Amar was unable to control his giggles as Dr Ibrahim struggled to