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.