Veins of Lights

The city of Zarn did not merely exist; it stratified, like an ancient, cruel, geological parable made into stone and skin and sin, where the upper city floated in arrogant, sun-drenched splendor atop the hill, its marble palaces gleaming like polished teeth in a predator's jaw, its gardens exhaling the cloying, perfumed, expensive sigh of jasmine and imported orange blossoms that were as sweet and as artificial as a rich man's apology, while the lower quarter, where I was born and where my mother still kneaded dough with hands as cracked and as lined as drought-stricken earth, festered below in a dense, humid, inescapable labyrinth of rusted tin roofs that hissed and popped under the brutal sun like frying skin, of open drains that stank with a sharp, sour, vinegary stench of decay that clung to the back of your throat like cheap guilt, of air so thick with coal-smoke and the greasy, spitting, ferocious smoke of frying pakoras that you could taste it, bitter and sooty, like licking ash from a dead fire, and the heat was not weather but a physical weight, a heavy, damp, woolen blanket thrown over your face, smothering and relentless, that made my cheap cotton kameez stick to my spine like a second, sweaty, unwashable skin; and in this world, truth was not taught, it was bled, for the doctrine carved in burning gold upon the palace gates declared with absolute, unquestionable, divine arrogance that blood was destiny, that the Zarrins, the golden elite, were born with veins like luminous, molten rivers of light, like threads of liquid sunrise trapped beneath skin as thin and as translucent as expensive rice paper, skin that glittered when they moved, like sun on water, like crushed diamonds dusted on silk, and their blood was not blood but thick, viscous, honeyed light, slow as melted amber, warm as lamp-oil, a light that granted them decades beyond us, that made their touch feel like holding a small, purring sun in winter, while we, the Surkhs, were cursed with ordinary, cheap, iron-red blood, as dull and as common as rust-water, as forgettable as spilled pomegranate juice drying on a dusty floor, blood that stained but never shone, that clotted and crusted like mud and meant our lives were as short and as expendable as mayflies dancing for a single evening over a drain, and my mother, Noor, whose voice was always as soft and as frayed as an old prayer rug worn thin by a thousand foreheads, whose eyes were rheumy and tired and held the weary, cataract-clouded knowledge of a woman who had seen too many of her kin fade early, had one law that was more sacred than namaz itself, a law she whispered into my hair every night while oiling it with mustard oil so pungent it made my eyes water like sliced onions, "Never, ever let the moon read your wrists, Arfa," she would hiss, her fingers, rough as bark and smelling of cumin and flour, yanking my sleeves down with a frantic, desperate violence, "The sun is a blind, merciful king who pities us, but the moon, the moon is a silver-eyed, cold-blooded interrogator, a detective with a white, unblinking eye, it peels skin like paper and forces the blood to confess its secrets," and I, at thirteen, an age where blood itself feels like a wild, rebellious, white-maned stallion rearing inside your chest, kicking against the flimsy fences of caution, laughed at her superstition as if it were a child's ghost story told to keep children from the rooftop at night; and so on the night of the Blue Moon, a night when the moon hung in the sky not as a crescent but as a perfect, swollen, watchful, accusatory coin, so bright and so clinical that it bleached the shadows sharp as knives and made the entire sleeping city look like a corpse laid out under an operating theatre's light, I crept onto our rooftop, which still exhaled the day's stored heat like a panting, exhausted beast, the concrete burning my bare soles like a hot tawa, and the silence up there was not peaceful but pregnant, heavy as black honey poured into my ears, a velvet shroud that smothered the distant, incessant, wounded-crow screech of rickshaws and the sweet, syrupy, jaggery-thick call of the chai-wala below, a silence so absolute I could hear the hummingbird-flutter of my own frantic pulse hammering like a frantic drummer boy trapped alone in a vast, empty cathedral, and with a defiant, foolish, exhilarating intake of breath that tasted of dust and freedom, I slowly, deliberately pushed my sleeves up past my elbows, exposing my brown, ordinary skin to that cold, honest, thief-like moonlight, and for a heartbeat nothing happened, and then the universe inhaled and confessed, for beneath my skin, as if a galaxy had been waiting in my marrow since birth, a light ignited, not gold, not red, but a blue so profound and so impossible it stole my very breath, a blue that erupted and branched and blazed like a river delta of liquid lightning, like veins of captured twilight, like molten sapphire, like the electric heart of a glacier, like a constellation that had fallen from the heavens and become trapped, thrashing and pulsing, beneath my flesh, a light that was as beautiful and as terrifying as a storm seen from underwater, pulsing with a rhythm that was not my own but older, deeper, like the slow, tectonic drumbeat of the earth itself, and it illuminated the fine hairs on my arm like fiber-optic wires and cast an azure, underwater glow onto the cracked concrete, pooling like spilled moon-water, like liquid sky, and at that precise, blasphemous, miraculous instant, from the golden palaces on the hill that looked like they were carved from solid, arrogant sunlight, a sound tore the sacred silence apart, a sound that was heavy as iron and sharp as shattered glass, a sound that was hungry, the Great Bells of Purity, bells that had not rung in a century because there had been no impurity to purge, began to toll with a deafening, discordant, frantic alarm, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM, each clang vibrating through my teeth, through my bones, through the very blue light in my veins, as if the city itself had seen my signal fire, my treacherous, beautiful, sky-colored beacon in their perfect world of only gold and red, and from below, my mother's scream ripped upwards, raw and ragged and ancient, "ARFA! BUJHA DO! EXTINGUISH IT!", a scream that sounded like dry wood splitting, like a soul tearing, and I yanked my sleeves down but it was too late, for the light bled through the cheap cotton like moonlight through paper, incorrigible, undeniable, alive, and on the dark road leading down from the palace, I saw them, tiny at first, then growing, a procession of golden lights descending, like a swarm of predatory fireflies, like lanterns carried by hunters, coming for the girl whose blood had dared to be sky.