binayakchakraborty8
she did not speak. She pressed against me, and her touch was not flesh, but a direct current of nerve impulses, flooding my brain with a light so brilliant it was almost painful. Every dormant synapse fired, every forgotten memory blazed. It was a resurrection of the self. My wife's scream, sharp and terrified from the bedroom, rent the air. The Pari fled, dissolving back into the graveyard mist from which she was spun.
But she came voluntarily, too. For union.
Once, she appeared as a greenish-yellow aura, a pulsing, sentient light. It coalesced into a form with circular, bat-like wings-my Exu Morcego nature reflected back at me. She was Mohni Rani, the enchanter. Another time, she was Sitara, the star. A violet, Virgoan figure with a perfectly cylindrical face, serene and intellectual, holding a slender wand. In that union, the eroticism was not of the body, but of pure consciousness meeting itself in a hall of mirrors.
And what of the ultimate siddhi? Amaratwa. Resurrection. It is the simplest shift of all. To die, you must be present. So, when the moment of death arrives, you simply cease to be present. You slip through the callous a second before the bullet or the disease or the years can claim you. You travel beneath, gather the vital force from the eternal uterine source, and return to a vessel-your own, renewed, or another's. It is not conquering death, but outmaneuvering it. A cosmic game of hide-and-seek.
So, here I sit, a composite of all my selves. The child who escaped a beating. The soldier who escaped a firing squad. The lover who rewrote reality for an embrace. The conjurer who gave form to a goddess. The bat who flies through the pores of creation. I am Haschem and Exu, the foetus of the creatress in a state of divine contemplation, and the old man writing this down.