Skins

Part Fourteen.

Siddhanth felt the ceasefire. He leaned his spine against the windowframe and tore away the sarong nailed to it. Yellow sunlight assaulted the dankness of his room. The pug on his bed raised its gleaming black ears, eyes bulging bright in the sudden sunshine.

He walked out of the house without closing the door. Without shoelaces tied. Without shoelaces at all, for matter of fact. His ideologies frozen in battle. In search of the solace to his unrest. But it was more personal than that. More significant. The Solace to his Unrest.

He ran through the market, past the women dotted in vermillion. The ones who sold the freshest vegetables.

He knocked on the Lady of Lourdes' heavy wooden door.

A white hand slid around the door as it opened. Green eyes followed. There was no going back. The ink was on the paper. The knife in the flesh. The fire had touched the kindling.

'Are you here for Mass? Oh.'

The detonation almost suffocated her in unbreathable Indian air. She inhaled, the V-shape in her neck standing out against her skin like slivers of water down a long white back. She opened the door further.

'Would you like to come inside?' she said.

'No, I really shouldn't. Uh...'

She stepped outside on whiteslippered feet and closed the door behind her. It padded shut gently.

Siddhanth's throat was lodged with his own shrapnel. He swallowed it down.

He stood outside a Catholic church with a tall white girl, shaking with holy blood stained between his teeth. He trembled.

'What is God?'

'Why are you asking me?'

He hissed out a reply. 'Dreams. I met you before I met you,' his chest heaved. 'I... What is God?' his mouth widened like a wound.

'God is not one thing or another, no? Isn't It All different from one person to the next? Doesn't perception change? No one can answer that question.'

Her voice quivered through the morning.

Siddhanth looked up at her, hysteric words behind his tongue. He wanted to cry. He wanted to live out the violent prophesy behind his lambent eyelids. He balled his fists together and twitched his nose.

Her confusion made him falter. A greeneyed doe in the headlights. Heavy breath caught in the yellow light filtering through fig tree branches. She stepped towards him.

'What have you seen?' she whispered.

Siddhanth bounced frustratedly on the balls of his feet, eyes glistening like glass, face tight with the tense ceasefire. The wait.

'You.'

At that moment, it became obvious. It was fate. Fortune. Shakespeare. He slumped his shoulders and breathed deeply. Matsya's waters hollowed his collarbones.

'I'm Siddhanth,' he said, extending a hand. She shook it.

*

He sat with her and a group of ragged children, mangy, worm-ridden, with poverty in their smiles and fiscal obliviousness in their eyes, until mid-afternoon. He smiled at them and spoke broken Hindi and Kannada. He peeled their oranges.

She laughed with him and let the children touch her white cotton. She passed her rosary around. She recited tiny slices of brittle wisdoms.

'For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.'

He was her most eager questioner. She his most eager answerer. The children their most eager, yet slightly dazed, audience. They left laughing.

The ceasefire seemed, at that point, to be permanent. His oiled-wood skin shone like shoeshine. White, even teeth kissed the air.

But the Sorrowful Mysteries lingered on her rosary.