Skins

Part Twenty Two.

'What the fuck did I ever do to you?'

The sky didn't reply.

He uncurled his spine against a brick wall and cried. When people began to stare at a grown man squatting against a wall, crying, purple powder in his coarse black hair, he rose and walked calmly. No one saw his tears through the colour. Siddhanth had little idea where he was going, and quite frankly he didn't care. He slowed and let an old grief come back to him, the same as in her letters. His collision memoirs. His scars.

Two blocks away, she hopped on one foot to remove her shoes. Cotton fluttered around her pristinely like sunlight. Her thoughts, once white, as one expects of a white woman, were thickly caked in spices and colour, saffron, turmeric, henna. She slipped her woven shoes off her feet and dropped them on the road, running flat, blister-footed, unsure of why, unable to stop. Her eyes stung with powder greener than her eyes. As though they were offended by its brilliance. She blinked it away, wiped her eyes on her wrist and sprinted on. The street underfoot jolted a bone-bruising rattle.

Siddhanth stopped completely, stock-still in the middle of Holi while the joyfulness rushed around him. A rock in a river. A European woman dressed in clean white cotton ran furiously towards him, her arms swinging like her life depended on it, her green eyes hard and blazing like hot glass.

She stopped before him. Still taller, but milder and more lined in beauty. Her hair was darker, lanker, tied back from her face. She held a fist of red powder, and with a fluid movement, splattered him with it. She laughed.

Siddhanth plunged his own handful of indigo from a passing vendor and slung it over his shoulder. She squealed, coughed unbreathable air and dusted herself off, but the damage had been done. Violent purple-blue stains ran along her cotton.

Her eyes looked the same as they had when she was eighteen years old.

In amongst the frantic laughter of Holi, they made their own peace with the world. With It All. God. Maybe God. Maybe not God. They kissed each other and murmured what their skins had prevented. In the first place, that is. What had happened was irrelevant now. She pressed her teeth against his cheek and kissed the corner of his mouth. His eyes. The dimple on his dark bottom lip, even though he flinched away. The hollows in his collarbones. Where his ear met his jaw. With every meeting of their skin, a growing realisation that they had found each other fueled a more vivacious passion. He hoisted her hips up and she greeted the sky, laughing, covered in colour, alive to the tip of every nerve in her body.

Siddhanth's secrets in his lambent lamp-lit eyes rested underneath two pairs of eyelids that night. Wherever Solace was, (in between the pages of a book? Underneath her blue-stained cotton?) he had found it. It was somewhere in her person, but he couldn't put his finger on where. He rolled over and gathered her back into him. He touched her hair tenderly, almost like a mother. Her lips rolled to meet his ear, and she whispered her sweet eloquences to him. She kissed his face and he pulled her on top of him. Sitting on his lap, she finished what their skins had prevented, moving rhythmically with her white legs around him, crying, grabbing at him. Loving of him what she could. There was no desperate, youthful fire, just the slow coals that came with ten years of parting. With the church hatred. He held her torso against his. Cupping her white breasts in Holi-stained hands. He guided a nipple into his mouth, took her haunches and slipped further into her. He bit her shoulder and pressed a sandpaper cheek against her. Rocking to a sad, human rhythm, some old, foetal heartbeat. Their pace quickened, her breathing sharpened and the sounds he made grew primal and louder. A knot that she had tied for him slipped and he collapsed. Her knot of the same kind was tied as firmly as ever. The veins on his neck stood out as he kissed her. His hands strayed further. She caught fistfuls of his hair, still freckled with lilac, and with his hands he untied a knot he created. He turned her over and lay with his head against her naked chest.

'I'm not leaving,' she said. Her lungs rose and fell as she spoke.

'Good.'

She propped herself up on her elbows. 'What does thomara mere lal mean?'

'You are my love.'

She smirked.

'Hey - did you say that on purpose?'

'Of course I did, I hate the cliché,' she lay her head in the crook between his shoulder and neck and breathed, 'I'm still the same missionary bugger you met when you were twenty.'

'That seems ironic, given we just--,'

'Oh, bloody hell, Siddhanth.'

She smiled into his skin. A lovely, hardedged smile. He held her hands and kissed them. The violent revelations in his dreams seemed irrelevant now. Whether Matsya swam in his collarbones, or the Magdalene flickered into her eyes, it didn't matter. In the end, it was all the same divinity. In sweet Milano air or unbreathable Indian. Ganesha. Jesus. What was the difference? They had their skins. They had each other. They had It All.