A week or so ago, a thought entered my head. It was about fruits. About their shape actually. Most of them are vague spheroids. Somewhat rough on the outside, even spiky sometimes. The man who first thought of biting into an apple or a pineapple must have been on the brink of desperation. Either that, or they weren’t very discerning back then and ate everything with utter abandon.

But as any detective worth his/her hat and overcoat would tell you, exceptions are the answers to all life’s questions. Think unwieldy fruit. Think exception. Aha!

Kashyap the tortoise slowly made the curve and stepped into the well-lit shallow waters just south of Bharatvarsha.

This side of the sea seemed calmer than the Lankan side, where his ancestral home was. Life there had been steadily growing hard to bear. He had found the bickering among the sea-serpents too much for his old heart to bear. The last straw came when some of the bulkier daityas took to living under water. As if their stench was not enough, they kept complaining about the salinity levels.

The tenth day of the battle of Kurukshetra. Darkness has long since fallen. On the battlefield, there are two warriors still, next to each other. One is a Pandav, the first one; the other is a Kaurav, the last one. They are silent, each fighting himself, both painfully aware it is a losing battle.

“Stop this war,” Bheeshma puts all his might into the words. They come out as a croak. He is as comfortable as a man impaled on a hundred arrows can expect to be. But every now and then, a pain much more discomforting sears through him and makes the arrows seem like bliss.

Dashrath held the grape against the light filtering in through the playhouse curtains. It looked almost transparent. After making sure he had the undivided attention of baby Rama sitting on his left thigh, Dashrath moved it to the young prince’s mouth.

Rama opened his mouth wide. Dashrath quickly put the grape in his own mouth and chewed into it with an overdone show of relish. Rama gurgled with laughter.

The king took another grape and did the same, teasing Rama to the last moment and then throwing the grape into his own mouth. Rama laughed again and opened his mouth wide.

The squirrel was old. He was older than most squirrels he knew, a fact that didn’t rest easy on his heart. On the brighter side, the gods had blessed him with the monkey’s friendship. The monkey prepared crushed walnuts for him. Things worked out nicely.

The squirrel had parts of the day it looked forward to. When the birds returned at sunset from their day’s foraging, they told him of all the things they had seen as they flew over Himavat and beyond. One of the younger birds came to him every day and stayed for hours, chirping away without a pause about what her day was like. When she tired, the squirrel told her many stories from back when he had been young and had roamed the land. She listened with patience (she preferred talking to listening) until her mother sang to her from above that it was time to nest for the night.

Lakshman had a bad feeling about this. He looked grimly at Vibhishan. If he were ever to be vocal about the way things were being done, he told himself, now was the time.

“So we throw rocks into the sea?” he asked in as measured a tone as he could manage.

“Yes my dear brother,” said Rama. He could see Sita already. “The mighty sea god Varun has assured me they will float.”

Float indeed, thought Lakshman. He could imagine his brother, himself, and bits and pieces of the vaanar sena crying out for help to each other as they floated away in different directions in the sea, all sitting on separate rocks.