It was over. The unthinkable thought, the undoable done. What remained in the removal of any reason was that limbo, that calm after the act and before the consequences. The horror came slowly, in the way sound crept back into the room like an incoming tide. Her hand trembled on her rosary. She pressed the beads to her chest and lifted the string over her head. What Siddhanth found ironic, unnecessary, was that she hadn't taken it off before that moment. It had dented his skin like a forceful reminder of the wrongness of it all.
For a densely empty moment, she stared at the glistening black beads. Siddhanth touched her face and a sliver of a smile crossed her mouth. It didn't extend to her eyes.
'Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.'
She spoke the last line aloud. Siddhanth watched her movements, the quiet, well-practised shapes of her lips, how she held each bead between her fluttering white fingers. And her forlorn eyes. She looked like a wounded, greeneyed doe.
'Amen,' Siddhanth said.
They didn't discuss what had been done. Instead, like true intellectuals, they discussed everything that hadn't been. With knots in their stomachs, they laughed airless laughs and poked fun at each other's' accents. She rolled an 'r' aggressively, edging closer to his face. He kissed her. It wasn't the angry kiss he'd bottled and corked in his dreams. He'd lost that now. Siddhanth decided, with the final hopelessness of a man being led to the gallows, that the time for frustration had come and gone. Instead, while he could, he held her with delicacy, like a child, even though she was taller than him. He looked at her like porcelain that had slipped from his hand but not yet reached the ground. Her obliteration was inevitable. He was watching something precious break, in slow motion. It gave him a perfect view of every spidery flaw widening until the whole of her collapsed.
'Siddhanth?'
He loved her sweet, pseudo-English accent.
'Yes?'
'I'm leaving Bangalore in three days.'
What dropped in his stomach wasn't his hopes. He wasn't being led to the gallows anymore - the chair he stood on had been kicked out. He opened his mouth and closed it again. He couldn't speak. The tension coiled around him like rope.
'I'm going to a little agricultural town. I-I don't remember its name,' her voice wavered dangerously. 'I'll write to you. Ironic, isn't it?'
He kissed her.
'The irony's in the geography. Not us.'
With a huge, shuddering breath of unbreathable Indian air, she cried. Her eyes turned greener than usual. She apologised profusely, and Siddhanth rocked her, still strangled by invisible cords, to a sad, human rhythm. Her breathing tautened her skin, and he felt her ribs undulate against his. He stroked her loosely curly flaxen hair and wrapped it around his fingers. Her breathing slowed, and it wasn't until her matted eyelashes began to cast shadows on her firmly round cheeks, that Siddhanth realised she was asleep.