Skins

Part Seven.

Crickets' voices swelled through the village. Heavy, humid night painted everything darkblue and grey. A man in his thirties unhooked a phone from its cradle and dialled a foreign number. The line crackled and a voice like gravel answered.

'Hello?'

He didn't reply. What she was doing could ruin a girl. And a man. It could collapse their delicately optimistic worlds. His red hair clung to his scalp like doubt.

'Romero, she's done it. I told you this would happen,' he hissed down the receiver.

'What?'

'Sitting by the altar, carrying on like a child.'

There was a silence thick with smugness.

'And she's gone native.'

'What do you mean?'

The man shrugged despite his conversational partner being nine thousand kilometres away. 'She's a girl, no self control. I wouldn't be surprised if she's gone off-- hello? Hello?'

The receiver wailed a hollow, neverending tone. He rehooked it and dialled again. The same unpleasant noise greeted him.

'Damn it.'

He kicked the wall, a little harder than he had meant to, stumbled slightly and walked away, neck deep in the night except for his flaming hair.

*

Siddhanth's lambent beauty had lost its lustre. He walked alone. The deep, breathing hollows in his collarbones were shallow. His dark, oiled-wood skin seemed thinner. It All had taken its toll.

Siddhanth looked at his world in a strange fashion. One part of him waved the red flag of revolution, denounced his Malayalam, burned the Vedas and thrust his fist in the air in violent protest of tradition. The other part of him swirled around in nowhere, where nothing existed and everything retained its original form. Where he touched the face of Brahma. He switched between these ideologies often; and his outlook was unpredictable from one day to the next. When he burned with fiery modernism, he walked straight-backed and laughed a woodchime laugh. When his eyes fell into shadows of traditional faith, he spoke to no one. He allowed it to control him. He felt it through every nerve in his body. He walked Bangalore and played guitar mediocrely.

When he met her, in her white cotton and holding a black rosary between pale fingers, the split between himself widened. Her ignorant certainty confused the balance between modern values and old, time-honoured morals.

When she left, his faith collapsed.