Skins

Part Twenty Two.

She sat in her wicker chair, comatose in old memories. The box still in her lap, dullbrass Jesus on his black crucifix in her hand. Until that morning, she had huddled away from an ideology of glorious returns, she had promised herself to dwell sadly on the past, but never physically revisit it. The time for that had come and gone.

She jumped from her chair in a sudden wave of thought. It seemed so obvious. So ridiculously obvious. The time for Solace could not come and go. Solace didn't work that way. In fact, Solace grew more noticeable with passing time. She gripped the chair's arm nervously.

In her movement, the leather box clattered to the floor and brittle paper scattered about her bare, freckled feet.

That day, she telephoned the airport. The cheapest seat money could buy, her breath rattled by fumes in the luggage from ten years prior. The airport smelled the same; like new carpet and cigarettes. She wore white cotton and took a hemp bag containing two items; the leather box of letters, and her old, woven slippers. She wore no shoes on the plane. It wouldn't be a long trip.

She remembered how she huddled with her knees against her chest, ten years ago, on a plane to the very same place, smug with achievement and a romanticised, heroified image of her deeds etched into her mind. How hesitant Father Romero had been to let her go. She laughed then, patriarchy slicked underneath rose-coloured eyelids. He was a man, but she was the Magdalene herself. She saw God through the guise of the Father and the son, no more. She remembered how the other priests had blessed her, old, malleable hands on her forehead, smiling at the girl who would surely serve them well.

They weren't wrong, she thought. But they weren't right.

What she didn't realise, sitting with her legs crossed (a bad idea on an airplane, but she cared little) in the March rain, was the impeccability of her timing. Perhaps it was fate. Or Shakespeare. Perhaps it was Matsya, swimming deep in the oiled wood collarbones of a believer of It All.

*

The need to run possessed him. Siddhanth sprinted through Bangalore, the grooves of his feet blue and orange. Jacaranda peppered through his hair.

He wasn't caught between manhood and boyhood anymore. He'd cut the threads that dangled between them. His shoulders had broadened, his arms thickened, but his eyes remained delicate and effeminate, with long, curled over eyelashes. He had the same wild look about him now as he did when he was twenty years old, but the veins on his neck stood out like slivers of water trickling down a long white back.

Holi enveloped everything, but he still ran. Past the Lady of Lourdes. As much as he wanted to stop, to relive, to hear again 'Are you here for Mass?' he continued, the shadows in his collarbones steepening, his beliefs in It All climbing to the same unaffordable heights as Father Romero's. At the very least, his were liberal. They didn't end here or there, with Latin or Hindi. Missionaries splattered in colour laughed among the locals. Still he ran.

On the other side of the district, through ten blocks of suffocating laughter and light, a woman ran towards the same point as he did, as though drawn to it. Like a moth, except with more urgency. Without the idleness. Her white cotton remained white. She cut through India without ever appearing to take notice of it. Her green eyes, those which patriarchy had slicked itself so well into, stared a blazing stare ahead. To nowhere. With love. From nowhere. Her letters fell behind her in a flurry of old words. Holi flecked everything around her, rising in fists of fluorescence. Older people coughed and spluttered on the powder. She didn't. The air here was unbreathable. She flared her nostrils, hitched her skirts and ran.

When Siddhanth could run no more, he grabbed his knees, squatted down and panted. The shadows in his collarbones lessened. The waters in which Matsya swam in shallowed. His breath returned. He felt foolish for having allowed his faith to overcome him. He grabbed at his hair and gasped. Ten times this had happened. Ten times. He looked up into the sky, hazed in sheer, glimmering orange, and yelled to the sky,