Skins

Part Six.

It was uncanny coincidence. Not fate. Not fortune. Not Shakespeare. In Siddhanth’s mind, a saga between logic and faith played out.

Maybe I’d seen her before, doesn’t the brain recreate everything it’s ever seen during sleep?

But if I’d seen a white woman like that, surely I would have noticed?

You’re tired, you were hallucinating.

His arguments flickered so fast, like the pages of a book, they began to blur into one. In between them all were glimmering black rosary beads and thin, flittering cotton. He broke out into a run, passing shopfronts, broken-down patches of tin and sparse grey-green weeds, and the spotless, white-washed, strawberry-sweet Lady of Lourdes. He stopped to admire its irony. A Catholic church in the pulsing jungle heart of India. Where Holi stained everything with tradition. Latin didn’t fit here, nor did the blue-eyed Virgin Mary.

‘Are you here for Mass?’

He wheeled around and dropped his chillies. His arms hung limply by his sides.

‘Oops,’ she said. ‘Let me grab those.’

She gathered the chillies in folds of white cotton and tipped them into Siddhanth’s hands. He attempted a smile, but stalled. The space between his muscle-movements was white. He wasn’t thinking coherently anymore. Her hair shimmered like midday heat on the bitumen.

‘Do you speak English?’ she said.

‘Yes, of course, I don’t speak anything else, actually—,’ his stomach grabbed itself and twisted.

Her cheeks rose when she smiled.

‘Come on in, Mass is soon,’ she started towards the entrance, beckoning to him with her hands.

‘I-I don’t know.’

‘Suit yourself.’

She laughed. Her southern-hemisphere English accent put a “w” in strange places and made her enunciate her vowels with a little more force than necessary. It was a sweet laugh. High, tinkling, like a slightly off-tune harp.

‘I’m not Catholic,’ Siddhanth said.

‘You don’t need to be Catholic to walk into a Catholic church. You don’t need to be anything to walk into a Catholic church.’

Siddhanth took a step back. ‘I’m Hindu,’

The young woman smiled and turned to face the church. Siddhanth thought, with a peculiar accuracy, that her character was an irregularly shaped patchwork of person. She acted with a mixture of bookish enigma, an old, English, eloquent melancholy, a wide-eyed faithfulness, and a frantic, arrogant youthfulness that contradicted the other parts of her.

‘Divinity,’ she began, as if quoting a book ‘comes in many forms.’

A hollow, floating bell-sound signalled the beginning of Mass. It was a sad sound. A pretty sound. The Sorrowful Mysteries, not the Glorious, nor the Joyful. It rippled through the street the way a motherless child wandered. Here, there, here again. It didn’t stay in one place.

It made Siddhanth feel sick.

 ‘You’re very welcome here,’ she said. Her back was turned, her white neck craned to the side to see him. Her eyes were the colour that led Eve into temptation.

Siddhanth watched her run to the steeple with white cotton billowing around the limestone, full of the morning and warm air. 

He walked away clutching his blue-green chillies and a tough, inchewable thought, indigestible to all, incomprehensible to most. It had occurred to him before, but not in this fashion. Mottled light, patterned with Gabriel and Mary stained his footsteps. The shadows in his oiled-wood skin pooled pictures of Matsya, first avatar of Vishnu, a great fish. Swimming deep in the collarbones of a believer of It All.

Siddhanth chuckled. The time for logic had come and gone, and in any case, it didn’t apply now. He walked Bangalore barefoot and wild. He changed like the monsoon winds.