River Of the Soul

Deep Sleep…

She was back by the riverbank. The ancient banyan stood as it always had, its roots twisted into the earth like the hands of time itself. The river murmured its endless song, gliding past the worn stone steps that led into its embrace. She had been here before—perhaps in another lifetime, or perhaps only in her dreams.

She felt like Rosanna Spearman, gazing at the water as if it held her fate. The river was both a mother and a grave, just as Sita returned to the earth, she too would one day dissolve into the river’s depths, carried away in its silken current.

She dipped her toes in. A tiny black fish nibbled at the dry skin of her heels, a quiet offering, a silent cleansing. She smiled. The river had always been her home—gentler than the vast, untamed sea, yet just as knowing. She held within her the secrets of the land, the whispered stories of plants, of fish, of herbs that healed and winds that carried scent and memory alike.

Sundari…

The name floated in the air, a whisper on the breeze, a call from the water.

Sagara was not the Lord. She was.

The moon rose, pulling at the tides, at her very being. She felt the surge, the longing to reach out, to embrace the child that was never hers. But even as she stretched toward it, something pulled her back. The ebb and flow, the endless rhythm of holding on and letting go.

How strange a river is, she thought. Always itself, always changing. The water that touches the shore is never the same, never still, never lingering. Yet the river remains. It widens and deepens, carving the land as it moves. Even the mightiest rivers—the Nile, the Ganges, the Yangtze, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the great grey-green Limpopo—once began as trickles, flickering streams before they grew into forces of nature.

And what of people? What of herself?

Was she like the river? Always moving, yet always herself? Did she surge forward, cascading over rocks in restless fury? Did she meander, slow and deliberate, tracing paths unseen? Was she sometimes parched, a dry riverbed cracked with longing, waiting for rain? Or did she spill over her banks, overflowing with too much—too much love, too much grief, too much life?

Would she, in time, widen and deepen, shaping the world as the river shapes the land? Or would she let herself be dammed, confined to narrow channels, flowing only where others willed her to go? Would she allow herself to become a canal—useful, predictable, controlled? Or would she insist on her own course, carving valleys in her wake?

She let the river answer.

Perhaps that was the secret it held—that time was an illusion. That the river was at its source and its mouth all at once. At the waterfall and the ferry, in the ocean and in the mountains. That past and future were mere reflections on its surface, while only the present truly existed, flowing forever onward.

She closed her eyes and let herself drift.

The river would carry her where she needed to go.