Beyond the Boundaries | Chapter-2 The Falling

A few weeks had passed since Anay left the flower at the witch's door, and summer had quietly settled in. The flowers were blooming more than ever.

Nobody was talking today. No gossip, no laughter, no teasing. Everyone at the farm had slipped into their own world, lost somewhere between the softness of the petals, the richness of the fragrance, and the gentle sway of the flowers in the breeze. As if the flowers had cast a spell of their own.

Anay smiled to himself. This is what makes this village special, he thought. No matter what else is happening in life, everyone has their flowers to go back to, the flowers that smile back at you. That's enough to keep the peace.

You know that meditative feeling when you've been doing the same thing for a long time, and your muscles take the load off of your mind. Your hands start working on their own? Your mind floats free, untethered, wandering wherever it pleases. That's where Anay was.

Wandering through that warm, sunshine, his mind suddenly stumbles to the realization that he will have to become the village chief someday. He would have to carry the responsibility for the village's harmony and growth. For the first time, he truly felt the weight of what his mother had built. The paths, the temples, the court decisions, the people who came to her door at all hours—the days and nights she had quietly given away without asking for anything in return.

He imagined taking her on a walk through the village one day, pointing to what it had become, and saying this is yours. But he already knew how she would respond. She would smile, wave it off, and say it was simply a duty assigned to her by Anay's grandfather, that every duty deserves to be done truthfully, and that truthful duty is the truest form of devotion. He had told her these things before. He knew her answer by heart.

He then wondered what he would change when his time will come. He looked around at the fields, the calm, the people. Everything felt perfectly in order. His mother had left nothing undone. Perhaps his duty would simply be to protect what she had made, to hold it steady and not let it fall. Maybe that was enough. Maybe that was everything.

His thoughts drifted further, and somewhere in that drifting, the witch surfaced in his mind.

He hadn't really thought about her in weeks. Summer at the flower farm left little room for anything else. Large orders of flowers have to be sent out of the village and everyone has to play their part. His sleep had become less of a journey and more of a charge, close your eyes, wake up, work again. The dreams had gone quiet, he hasn’t been able to pay attention to them.

But now, thinking about her, something new caught his attention.

He didn't know her name.

Not just him—no one did. Everyone in the village simply called her the witch. That was it. That was all she was. He found it deeply strange, like a missing piece that no one had noticed was missing. He starts to wonder what her name might be or does she even have one.

The silence broke when a voice called across the field. "Anay! We're all taking a break for lunch, come join!"

He looked up, momentarily startled, like someone pulled out of sleep. He gestured that he was coming and walked over, the question still turning quietly in his mind.

What is her name?

He joined the others as they settled in a circle on the ground, eating and talking the way they always did: gossips, stories, jokes, laughter bouncing between bites. Nobody liked to eat alone in silence. That lunch hour had its own rhythm.

When they got up to head back to the fields, Anay asked, as casually as he could: "Does anyone know the witch's name? Everyone just calls her the witch, but she must have one, right?"

They all looked at each other. Nobody knew. The question hadn't even crossed their minds before. They were intrigued, no one thought about her even having a name.

"It doesn't matter what her name is," one of them finally said. "What matters is that she's a witch. Witches don't need names. They don't have an identity. They're just... a witch."

Anay nodded slowly but said nothing. He didn't know how to argue with that. He wasn't even sure he wanted to, not yet.

But the answer settled uncomfortably inside him and stayed there.

They finished work and headed home. Anay walked back in near silence, still thinking about the name. Or rather, the absence of one.

He thought about going to her house and simply asking her directly. As reckless as that sounded, he reminded himself that he had already left her a flower and nothing bad had happened. He still remembers his mother’s description of the witch which is what stops him, he would not wanna confront a witch in the night. However, in the morning it doesn’t sound like a bad idea, he thinks to himself.

He went home, had dinner, and went to sleep.

He woke up smiling.

He could feel it before he was even fully awake, a warmth running through his whole body. She had come back into his dreams after weeks of absence. This time, he saw the banyan tree clearly, unmistakably the same one at her house. But the fear that used to live at the edges of that dream was gone. There was only happiness. Pure, uncomplicated happiness.

He lay there for a moment, not wanting to move.

"Look at you, smiling like that on your bed. What's the good news?"

His mother was standing at the door. Anay's smile vanished immediately. He straightened up and said, rushingly, "I'm not smiling. I just woke up. I need to get ready for work."

His mother smiled, that quiet, knowing smile of hers, and said nothing. She had always given him room to live his own life, the way her own parents had given her that room. She didn't dig, didn't push. She simply left space and trusted him to fill it when he was ready.

He got dressed and headed out, but instead of turning toward the flower farm, he found himself turning toward the jungle road.

The decision had made itself.

The sun was bright and the flowers were everywhere. There wasn't a single shadow of fear in him. He checked to see that no one was watching, then slipped onto the narrow path into the trees.

A few steps in, he wished he had brought a flower. But it was too late to go back, someone would see him, and then he wouldn't be able to return. He looked around as he walked, and spotted a Jimsonweed plant along the path, heavy with fruit. He paused.

Datura. He remembered it from Shivratri: milk, flowers, and Datura, all offered together to Lord Shiva. If Shiva accepts this with the flowers, maybe she will too, he thought. He already gave her a flower last time. Perhaps Datura was the right offering for today.

He plucked the fruit and tucked it under his arm, and kept walking.

After some climbing and quite a bit of lost breath, he finally arrived.

In daylight, the place looked completely different.

The trees and bushes wrapped around the small hut like arms. A garden full of flowers that he hadn't noticed in the dark surrounded the whole space. It looked like a tiny, quiet version of the village below, same beauty, same care, only more isolated. More still.

He looked around for any sign of someone. There was none.

The joy he had carried all the way up there wobbled. What if no one even lives here? What if she's long gone and this was all just an abandoned house and a strange dream? He thought about stepping inside the hut to look, but he couldn't bring himself to do it. Partly his mother's warnings. Partly something else, a worry that if the witch was real, entering without permission might upset her. That felt like the wrong way to begin.

He sat down on the ground to catch his breath and clear his head.

As he sat there, looking at the banyan tree, the dream came back to him. Not just the image, the feeling. The tone of his own voice when he spoke in that dream. The ease. The comfort. The way the words came naturally, without effort.

He decided to speak like that now.

Half-hoping, half-uncertain, he called out toward the hut: "Are you there? I've come to meet you. If you're there, please come out."

He waited.

The gate opened.

A young woman stepped out in a blue saree, her expression caught somewhere between surprise and confusion. The moment she stepped out a sweet fragrance poured into the air around her, sweet and layered and almost impossibly rich, as if a thousand flowers had decided to breathe all at once.

Anay went completely still.

She didn't look like anything he had been told to expect. No horns, no claws, no terrible teeth. She was beautiful in the way that makes you forget how to think, her face sharp and fine, her eyes a deep brown you could fall into, her long black hair catching the light like water moving in the sun. She wore the blue saree like it was made specifically for her wrapping her perfectly. Each step she took toward him felt like something choreographed, her anklets chiming softly, the waist chain shifting gently with each movement.

Anay could not stop taking her in. He wasn't even aware he was staring.

She broke through it: "Who are you? And what do you mean you came to meet me? You know you're not supposed to be here."

He had no idea what to say. He was caught off guard and overjoyed and a little panicked all at once. Without thinking, he stepped forward and held out the Datura fruit he had brought—and bowed.

She stared at it. Then she started laughing.

Not a polite laugh. A real one, coming in waves, barely under control.

"Is this some new method to get rid of the witch?" she managed between breaths. "Did you bring this poisonous fruit for me to eat and die? Do you want me gone like everyone else down there?"

"No! Not at all ... I a.." Anay fumbled for words. "I brought it as a gift. I was going to bring flowers, but it was too late, and I didn't want anyone to see me coming here, and then I saw this on the path and I thought on Shivratri, everyone offered Datura to Lord Shiva, so I thought maybe um..."

She waved her hand and smiled, her laughter settling. "I'm only joking. Relax." Then something shifted in her expression. "Anay. Is that you?"

"The flower at my door," she said. "That night, I heard voices outside the hut, someone calling your name. I waited until everyone was gone, then opened the door and found the flower." She tilted her head slightly. "I spent some time wondering who Anay was and why he left me a flower like that." She paused. "You know you shouldn't have come here, right? It's been years since I've seen anyone. Why did you come? Do you not know about the abandoned witch of the village?"

"I know," Anay said. "But you kept coming in my dreams. So I decided to come and meet you."

She laughed again, softer this time. "Coming in your dreams? That sounds like something. Have you ever gone into someone else's dream?"

"No," Anay said. "I'm not a witch. I can't do that."

"Exactly," she said, nodding with a small smile. "That's why you're allowed to live down there in the village. This place up here is a bit more... witch only."

"But you don't look like a witch," Anay said, before he could stop himself. "You look like an angel."

She raised an eyebrow. Then, without a word, she lifted both hands to either side of her head, curled her fingers into two little horns, and pulled the most terrifying face she could manage.

"Do I look like one now?"

Anay burst out laughing before he could stop himself. It was the last thing he expected from someone he had spent weeks being afraid of. She held the expression for a second longer than necessary, completely straightfaced, then broke into a grin herself.

"An angel with her wings cut," she said, dropping her hands and growing quieter, "is not so far from a demon."

Anay felt that sentence land somewhere deep. The clarity of it, the way she held the truth of her situation without bitterness or self-pity, just plain understanding, reminded him of his mother. That same quality of knowing exactly who you are and why the world is the way it is, without flinching.

She gestured him to come inside.

He hesitated for just a second. But after everything he had seen and heard in the last few minutes, the fear he had carried up that hill was completely gone. He followed her in, and they settled together on the stone ledge around the banyan tree.

Up close, her fragrance was even stronger. It was warm and sweet and everywhere.

"Tell me about this dream," she said. "What happens in it?"

He told her everything, every small detail he could remember. The banyan tree, the position he sat in, the way she was sitting above him, the sound of her voice, the giggling. He described all of it.

When he finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I think I understand why you felt I was in your dream."

She stood up and disappeared into the hut. "Just a minute."

She came back holding a comb, sat back on the stone ledge, and asked: "Where do you usually sit in this dream?"

He pointed to a spot on the ground. "Around there. Looking up at you."

"Do you mind?" she asked.

He felt a flash of shyness, there was something almost unbearably real about recreating it with her right here. But his heart was racing in the best possible way, and none of it felt strange anymore. He went to the spot and sat down, looking up at her.

"How am I sitting?" she asked.

He described it, and she adjusted slowly, repositioning herself piece by piece: one hand on her knee, ankles resting on the edge of the stone ledge, hair behind her, one hand on the stone ledge support her, head tilted forward.

When she finally matched it, she looked him in the eye.

And giggled.

It was exactly the sound from his dreams. The same tone, the same lightness, the same warmth. Hearing it in real life, sitting exactly where he always sat in that dream, looking up at her in exactly the right light. It was complete. Like something that had been waiting to happen had finally happened.

Anay felt it all at once: the widest smile of his life, warmth moving through his whole body, a ticklish, weightless feeling like he had let go of something heavy without even knowing he was carrying it. He couldn't look away from her eyes. The whole thing still felt like a dream, but a dream he was afraid to blink in, in case it ended.

She tilted her head and smiled at him. "Are you sure you came here to meet me? Because who exactly did you meet, if you don't even know my name? Were you going to call me the witch forever?"

Anay blinked.

He had forgotten. He had completely, entirely forgotten the whole reason he came up here in the first place. Her name—that was the whole point of this visit. And he had just... not asked.

"I'm sorry, I completely forgot uh..." he said politely. "What's your name?"

"Rayya," she said.

He turned the word over in his mind, wondering what it meant—

"It means fragrant breeze," she said.

He smiled. Of course it did.

The sun had climbed high above them now. If he didn't leave soon, someone would notice his absence and start asking questions. He told her he had to go, but that he would come back. He wasn't afraid of her, not even slightly. And he didn't want her gone, the way the others did.

She looked at him for a moment. "I hope you stay the same, Anay." Something behind her eyes had softened, but there was something careful there too. Careful and a little tired. "The others tend to change their minds quite quickly."

He nodded, and left.

If it had been up to him, he would have stayed at that banyan tree for the rest of the day and talked until neither of them had anything left to say. But he had to leave, and he knew it. He didn't want this first meeting to be their last.

So he started down the hill, through the jungle path, back toward the village. And as he walked, his mind stayed entirely up there with her, her eyes, her hands, her face, her hair, the smile, the voice, the fragrance.

He kept chanting it softly to himself, the whole way home.

Rayya-fragrant breeze. Rayya-fragrant breeze.

Still smiling. Still a little ticklish. Still feeling, somehow, like the whole world had shifted very slightly into a better position.

End