In the Shadow of Crows Read Online Free Page B

away. I had never seen such beauty without vanity. It quickened my heart. It silenced my self-consciousness. She glanced at the floor to veil her own blush, then back at me to reveal with her dark, kohl-stained eyes that we had shared a secret intimacy.
    I made my way towards her through what had suddenly become an empty, silent room. I could hear nothing but a pounding in my ears. I could see nothing but a shy and tender smile I knew that I would kiss.
    At midnight, we wandered away from the house to talk without interruption and to escape the fierce disdain of friends who would never find it possible to forgive me.
    Priya was intelligent, but shy. Self-possessed, yet vulnerable. She made me laugh. She made me laugh a lot.
    We walked back holding hands and sucking on humbugs from my pocket, indifferent to the threat of a chill, hair-flattening drizzle. “Can I phone you?” I asked, above the clamour of twenty-five at breakfast, above yet more Stranglers and The Jam. “I’ll have to ask my father,” she replied.
    It was not the response I had anticipated.
    She put a hand to her mouth and giggled at my silence.
    â€œIt’s just that he’s never let me see a boy before,” she confessed. “And I don’t know if he’ll approve of a white one!”
    ***
    Bindra had been walking since before dawn.
    As she had pushed through the towering dhatura she had repeated the name of Shiva, to whom these plants with their hanging, trumpet flowers were dedicated. She had walked so far that lush jungle had become scented pine and dark oak. Where there had been bamboo thickets, scarlet poinsettia and rhododendron, there was now maple, birch and knee-high cardamom, their soft leaves brushing against her legs and sweetening the air of the bindra ban deep forest, after which she had been named. And as she walked, Bindra sang softly to warn the Punyajana , the Good People who live in trees and plants, that she was passing through their world.
    Bindra gradually climbed the steep path to the cave temples. She gave a handful of bhui-kaaphal wild strawberries to the docile sadhu , who had watched her difficult, rolling approach. The wandering ascetic looked her in the eyes, then narrowed his own, as though with misgiving.
    â€œFunny old man,” she giggled to herself. “He surely recognises me. I’ve met him in these hills for years!” She turned to sound the bell above the gateway, to wake the deity within. She did not see him toss the sweet, red fruit to the floor.
    Bindra crouched down and eased herself into a crevice in the rock face. Before her stood the row of lingams . She touched her head, mouth, heart and pubis in pranam , reverently saluting the divinity in all life, of which she recognised herself as but one expression. From an old medicine bottle in her bundle, she poured a little goat’s milk over each of the stone-cut symbols of universal union. She laid an offering of large, white dhatura flowers and then belpatra leaves from the woodapple tree that she had collected on her slow ascent. Both were favourites of Mahadeva, as the androgynous Paramshiva was better known in the Hills.
    â€œ Aung namah Shivaya ,” she softly sang to the Lord of Yoga, Lord of the Mountains. “Shri Sakha, my Supreme Friend, your lingam reveals the stability of the cosmos. May I recognise that same stability within myself,” she began. “May I understand better that there is no separation, no difference between you, the universe, and clumsy little me.”
    â€œE!” a gruff voice shouted from behind her.
    She turned with a start. Silhouetted against the sky beyond the entrance of the temple crag stood a Bahun priest. She had heard that a Brahmin had been recently posted to the cave temples. His job, it was said, was to wean the villagers away from their ancient, unorthodox, mountain traditions.
    â€œCome out here, where I can see you!”
    She waddled on her haunches,