Onsra

It was the first day of the Spring Festival. Ardent breaths interwove with the thousands of tiny bamboo reeds of the flute, tumbling off into music and onto the warm breeze like running ribbons, up into the cool bracken of the mountain forests. Rituals bloomed in a fragrant proliferation of drums and dances and cries and colourful silks.

He was standing at the back of the crowd on the other side of the performance, under the crisp sun. His eyes diverted away from the performance, as he made intermittent, almost sneering comments to his friend. This wasn’t his life anymore, she thought, remembering the excitement they used to share about the Spring Festival as children. His mind was probably half way over the mountains by now, tousled in with the music on the breeze, on its way towards Calcutta. He was beginning university there in the new year. I’m going to be learning in the same halls as some of India’s greatest minds, he’d told her. Surely though, these minds had been sparked and moulded by the philosophies of their ancestors, similar to the ones we’ve learnt about and celebrated all our lives, she’d thought. She’d wanted to question him on it; she hadn’t though.

In the evening, there was a huge bonfire on the outskirts of the town, as is customary on the first night of the Spring Festival. They performed rituals of purification, prayed for blessings from their gods and cooked meat and rice cakes in a huge feast for the entire community. They ate, chatted and danced by the undulating tiger stripes of the fire. Smoke and secret thoughts prowled threw the crowd. Her butterfly compass pointed her to him.

As the elders returned to their homes, the young people stayed and kept the bonfire roaring with grass and crops. Some were at the beginning of adolescence, and were still learning how their limbs and laughs slotted in with one another’s. Others had fully grown up together, watching their shadows draw longer and longer over each other’s with each passing bonfire. For many, this marked the beginning of a process of detangling, as they pursued new lives interstate. She thought she felt the weight of his peacock eyes on her, but maybe it was a trick of the light. She never knew with him.

As midnight sunk into the rambling calls of the nightjars, wild chatter turned to doleful phrases, falling into dust and dying embers; resting in the hollows of old friends. She walked past him, and he looked near her with faraway eyes. She decided to sit down.

Do you feel like you're closer to an upper or lower world? He asked her.

She thought for a moment. I feel grounded to this earth.

I feel suspended. He answered.

They talked about when they were children. He liked the crowds, she liked the dancers. She told him she was performing at the festival tomorrow. He took her by the arm and they walked amongst the undergrowth.

They made love in a field of marigolds. He ground her willing, pestled limbs into a giving mortar of warm earth, smearing her thighs with a golden paste of sweat and summer flowers. Their moans merged with the cicadas’ dirge, reincarnating the ancient rituals of their ancestors and the primal urges of their species and their final, otherworldly insectile forms, in humid, Hericlitean flux. It purified.

He came and watched her dance the next day. Her limbs lay next to the breeze; they pointed her true north. Afterwards, they talked about university for a while, then they parted.