Tamashagar

 

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I, bewildered nightingale, wander around in the mountains,
Because my fiendish stepmother killed my brother
And buried him under the narenj tree in our garden.   

fragment

It was not until the nightly hours, when I, drunk and confused by the delicious fragrance of the flowers of the narenj, heard whispers and the spring breeze petted my feathers softly and made them go up and down, that I realized that I had become a nightingale and had my nest on a branch of the narenj tree in our garden. The tree that took my brother.
I was tired, exhausted.
Had I flown to faraway places, above landscapes far from here? I remembered the mourning for my brother and the never-ending stream of tears that came.
Now I
'm sitting here, in this beautiful narenj, while his voice is caressing my ears. A soft murmur speaks of the love of his stepmother for him and the hatred that replaced it when she did not get her way, and of his secret love for the beautiful Nahal, the girl next door. The murmur sounds like the sweet melody of a babbling brook but it tells time and again the tragic story of the stepmother who was in love with him and her harshness, how she killed him and buried him under the tree.