Fiction: A woman in self-imposed exile befriends the pregnant child-bride of a godman

This story can have many beginnings – a thread unspooling and its bearer drawing further and further until she is out of sight and relegated to lores of mothers and grandmothers and their great-grandmothers. We can start with another “she” who bore children before her small body had shed the last of its own childhood, or with a “she” who spent her lonesome days in splendour, surrounded by the opulence of gilded boxes and silvered windows reflecting a queen in name but a pauper in affection. We can even start with a “he”, burdened with early resentment for responsibilities, stuffed as a toddler with preconceptions about those he loves and who nurture him.

This beginning of a “she” is the beginning of the moment with the mountain climbers in the remote forests and verdant valleys of the Himalayas. She is a young woman in her blossoming years who lies breathless on her cot in her family’s hut. The yearnings of a maiden have been discarded for the passionate embraces of lovers. It has only been six months since he arrived in their village – a slightly older boy with rippling muscles and bronze skin, which shimmers and blinds; drops of sweat...

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