Page 72 - Raffles09_March2022

Her fixer came in carrying a box inlaid with ivory. This only, for one hour, no food or drink, pick-up at five thirty.
Upstairs, she poured the powder into the steaming water. It was pulverised, ashen, but gave off a strong loamy smell. Better not to imagine. He had started to list its ingredients but she’d stopped him, not needing to think about bones or bladders of wild animals. It frothed, the grey powder, in blooms and swaths, intensifying into myriad shades. She undressed. She looked at herself in the mirror with the accommodation of lifelong habit. Then stepped into the bath, a massive clawfoot, so deep you could easily fit three full-grown bodies in it.
Evening. They drove through third-world streets that might have existed anywhere in the world. Between them a tray with a rolled- up chilled face towel, a chilled glass water bottle, a terracotta pot holding fresh-baked croissants. He looked straight ahead as he talked her through the night’s arrangements. Her donation had opened the last doors. They began to climb into mountain, sandstone massif. Thirty years ago, when she’d gotten married, or even twenty, he wouldn’t have been able to sit in the back seat of a Range Rover and so easily not look at her. He would have been distracted by her hand in her lap, pulling her silk dress tight against her thighs; her other hand beside her, throbbing on the cool leather seat.
They stopped. He would wait here, he said.
She entered the eastern gate. Followed the trail of torches past what she knew were the long halls, the black towers looking over the black barays, all suggested and unseen. The dark lintels of great Indra, who granted sleep, riding his divine elephant. It was cold and she was alone, she had paid for the privilege. Eventually she came to the enclosure with the smaller laterite libraries, ghostly in the shadows, and, between them, the stone cistern that unknown workers had – according to instructions – bordered with sage-scented candles, and filled with water that had flowed over the thousand sacred lingas. The story was that this was a temple of transformation.
Long ago, her father had told her, an old king had come here, and stayed for three months, and emerged a young man. Rituals had come into being, had been long since forgotten.
She disrobed and stepped into the water. Nimbused by light, which seemed now to pulse, she was all she could see. But her father was everywhere. She was surprised by the sharpness of her sorrow. She should have come back sooner. Perhaps he had survived, who knew? The realisation ricked something deep inside her: she was older, now, than she’d ever known him to be. And what of her brothers? Perhaps she could get her all-capable fixer to look into it. Now she was in up to her waist, up to her breasts, up to her chin. She felt her skin tightening – the cells of her body perhaps rejuvenating. The blood thudded in her ears. She took a breath, smiling the smile she knew her father had so liked, and forced her head under.
70 RAFFLES MAGAZINE
− EMOTION −