HOME | DD

Description
My gods have grown stale since you left. How can the saints compare to devas with a thousand arms, a thousand lives, and all this time to waste listening in return for a slice of chilled mango? My saints have always been nameless and unknown, a long line of white-faced men and white-robed women with stories I ought to have learned in school, but I always seemed to miss class for a moth or a bramble or a grazed knee.

Your gods have stories – you painted them across my bed-sheets in the mornings, clicking your bangles and talismans to the beat of beat poetry and monkey tails. Your temple was one piece of carved schist, your idols golden and flower-laced. I thought of my churches, the stiff air and creaking pews, bowing obeisance to a window, a candle, a distant angelic host. Your idols breathed and laughed in incense-filled rooms, mine watched the wisps of smoke trail up to their abode disinterested and unmoved.

But you left all the same, just as I learned all their names, you left all the same. And now where do I go? What house is mine to visit? My gods have grown stale and disowned me, but yours cannot speak my biblical tongue. It was the same with us, my love. We fell in love in the ravine between our cultures, swapping tales of heroism and beauty, of confusion and conflict and revenge – a hundred myths and a hundred legends, and not a word about ourselves. My story is a series of quiet tragedies, yours a constellation of scattered grief; we both have an encyclopaedic knowledge of loss but haven’t got past the first chapter on love.

I gave my love to your gods, hoped they’d pass the message on, but things can get lost in translation. This canyon too cannot be broached, breached, beached.

I have no house but that of my own design, I filled in the details with notes of your laughter – the echo of your gods. My hymns are hummed and without words, a hunchbacked tune laden with hallelujahs and holi. I have become my own priest and disciple, sinner and paragon, within this strange church I have carved for myself. Perhaps now you are my dispassionate saint, perhaps my laughing idol, and perhaps just that sacred space, where I press my forehead and pray that one day I may preach about love with knowledge of its taste.