The Priest's Widow

DAKSHAYANI

A 19-year-old Brahmin girl who was supposed to die the day her husband did.

They stripped every colour off her and lit the pyre. And in front of the whole town, she refused to walk into it.

"A girl who says no once will say no again". So they buried her alive instead. A hut behind the house, no salt in her food, and that is all she should be until she leaves this mortal body."

HIM

The new priest of the temple, the mortal who connects the people of their town with the god.

But there is blood under his nails which others mistook for the sacred Kumkum.

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Just like my heart, the rain drenched the ground of the path my feet were dragged along.

He walked in, he who always held his eyes directly on me, those soft eyes that held the hardness of something, and he leaned down to me slowly, meeting my eyes once again.

Then he reached and took hold of his thread that ran across his upper body. The sacred thread, the one thing on a Brahmin's body that says what he is, that no man on that street would give up for anything in this world, and he snapped it, the thread mixed with turmeric and kumkum, still warm from lying against his skin. And he leaned in and knotted it around my neck. On a widow's neck.

The first colour anybody had allowed on my body since my husband passed away, and it came from a man who had just torn it out of his own religion.

"She is mine now," he said. "Touch her and answer to the God you came here to pray to."

He put his hand under my arm and lifted, and I came up off that floor like I weighed nothing. And I felt it.

The shaking. All the way down his arm and into me, where nobody else could see.

A man with God behind him does not shake.
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Will he protect her, or was she only ever his cover?
Will she survive the truth about what he really is?
Or will they ruin each other before the town gets the chance?