Inner Courtyard

Part 1: Srivatsan’s Perspective I saw her on the mountain temple steps at that hour when the sun, having climbed enough to clear the eastern wall, entered the courtyard with full right over stone, brass, and prayer. Until then, the morning had been occupied with ordinary sanctities. Bells had been sounding from within. Camphor had sublimed in brief white submissions. Women in wet-bordered sarees moved past with flower baskets cupped in their palms. The granite still held a little of the dawn in its lower shade, though the upper steps had begun to warm. I had climbed up with the rest, carrying on my face, a thin, dutiful smile which family expectations so often required of a man who would rather have been elsewhere. She was wearing a saree. The pleats fell close and disciplined from her waist, and the border, whenever the breeze stirred it, replied in small flashes of gold before settling again against her. One end had been drawn over her shoulder, but the hill wind would not leave it in peace. It kept lifting the edge of it and laying it back; Perhaps the morning wind developed a troublesome fondness for her. The sunlight touched her forehead first, lingered there for a brief and golden instant, and then descended over her face with delicacy. I do not know what happened first in me. Whether the blood rose and then the face burned, or whether the face burned first and summoned the blood after it. I only know that the heat came over me so suddenly that I had to lower my eyes for a moment, ashamed of my own body for proclaiming what I had not yet even admitted to myself. It was not the sun that had set my face aflame. When I looked again, her eyes had lifted from the brass plate in her hand and passed once over the courtyard. They were pitch-black, and held their own quiet lustre, gathering resplendence from somewhere within and displaying it there. They moved across the setting with a composure that made the world seem worthy of observing in patience. Her lips were too richly made for indifference. Even at rest, they seemed to withhold more tenderness than a man could safely look at. A strand of hair had escaped near her temple and moved lightly whenever the mountain breeze found it. She did not raise her hand to set it back. That omission had in it more beauty than most deliberate arrangements ever achieve. Around her the temple continued in all its rightful motions. I had gone through life with a dry and serviceable unbelief, one sufficient for examinations, timetables, and all the lesser embarrassments of modern intelligence. Yet standing there, with my pulse behaving without discipline and my face burning in a manner no hill sun could be blamed for, I found that some habit of irreverence had given way. By a mere sight! Thank God indeed, I thought, though I had never before used the phrase except in carelessness. There before the sanctum, among bells, smoke, silk, and mountain light, I stood like a fool newly admitted into religion, thanking the Creator under my breath for having once, in some hour of unusual satisfaction, made her. Priests passed with brass lamps. Someone split a coconut below. A child cried because a monkey had stolen prasadam from his hand. Yet none of these things retained proper proportion once she had entered my sight. The whole courtyard had become, without consulting me, a setting made to worship her. —— The point of this multipart series is for my dear readers to embody different characters situated at different architectural corners of the a Temple courtyard, but all of whom are awfully dissimilar, and will be connected to a central crux. You can expect disorder and mayhem, love and sincerity, or maybe even something heart-wrenching. As I’m writing, feel free to reach out to me if you wish for me to write about anything. Also, yes, of course it had to begin with a romantic’s perspective, sorry about that XD.