Asterias, From Dawn To Dark

Do you know what Asteria means?
It’s Greek for Star. And another word for my being consumed with fairlylores and skyverse 🙂

Chance encounters with two extremely beautiful, hardworking women; different generations, different fields of work but three things in common – sparkling hazel eyes, innocent yet contagious smiles, and childish eagerness to pose for a photograph.

Aunty (pardon my forgetfulness of her name) in the first pic vends freshly churned buttermilk for the devotees visiting the Ekveera Devi temple.

8kms from Lonavala, this temple is believed to have been built by the Pandavas during their exile. It’s a tough ascend of 500 rickety steps up the mountain.

While I was gasping for every breath after about 100, this beautiful woman in her sixties, was up there, fresh as the mountain breeze, selling chilled buttermilk, undeterred by the blazing sun who seemed too stubborn to set even past 5.

The wrinkles on her face were the crevices on the rocks behind her; both telling untold tales of years of hard work, tough life, yet standing tall and proud of everything they are.

She climbs these steep, dangerously smooth, stone-hewed steps every day to make a living.

With the way she calls out to passersby is difficult not to pause for a little chat while her chilled buttermilk soothes a weary soul. Smile never leaves her cherubic face, not once, neither does she whine about life being difficult and all. She’s just happy in her space. And her eyes, they’re as if the sun was flirting with them, as if to endorse their vividity, as if to compete with their luminescence…

This is the sweet face of Komal. Why do delicate girls always have the name Komal, I wonder. This pretty young lady in her early twenties works with Mastiff Grand La Villae, a naturesque resort in Lonavla where we stayed for a day.

She’s the only woman server in a team full of men. And the only vivacious and vibrant one with an acute sense of hospitality and extremely diligent in her work.

On the day of Valentine’s, this dainty little girl was on her feet from dawn until midnight, working tirelessly to make our day, smiling throughout. She was like a butterfly fluttering by, a moment here, a moment there, suggesting menus, balancing trays.
But her light, hazel eyes…those were a poetry waiting to be recited aloud, with deepest emotions there can be!