Page 39 of A Thousand Painted Hours

He pressed the back of his hand to my thigh, and I dropped my hand to let him enfold it. The steel of his kara rested against my inner wrist. The contact gave me a focus, his warm palm, the hard bracelet. “We shall write letters, hundreds of them.” He nudged me with his elbow. “Thousands.”

I smiled reluctantly, as he meant me to. “Thousands?”

“Hundreds of thousands.”

“I will miss you desperately.”

“I am here now.”

I looked at his face, which had become even more dear, and lingered on each detail. The wings of his brows, the thick sooty sweep of his lashes, the shape of his mouth. I had drawn him hundreds of times, drawn his face and parts of his face, his eyes, his nose, the sweep of his hair from his temple, the bend of his lips. I’d sketched his hands and throat, his wrists and toes, dusty from sandals. I’d drawn his figurein motion, riding a horse or throwing a rock, or bent over a book. I could not imagine how I would even live without the sustenance of his presence.

As I gazed at him, I saw tears spring to his eyes. “I shall miss you like the moon.”

His tears gave me tears, and if we had been elsewhere, I would have kissed him, but we could not. Not here.

“Meet me at our place,” he said, meaning the pond.

“When?”

“In an hour.” His expression grew serious. “My father is sending me to school a week early because he’s traveling that way. We leave tomorrow.”

“No!” My heart squeezed so hard in despair that I thought it might stop entirely.

He traced the edge of my inner wrist. “I suspect that they know our secret.”

I thought of my mother’s warning that I would not have the life here that I had spun in my mind. “I fear you are correct.”

“An hour, then,” he said. “I will be waiting.”

It was early afternoon, and hot. I waited until everyone was napping, then slid out the kitchen door and ran for the path to the woods. I’d never traversed it on my own, but after so many visits over the years, I knew the way intimately. By the time I made it to the pond, I was sweaty and disheveled. Tanveer was there already. He held out a hand, and I closed the distance between us, leaning my head on his chest, his hands on my back. “Let’s not spend this short time grieving, Elsie. For today, for these hours, we shall forget everything, and swim, and make love, and eat together.”

“Yes, one small beauty.”

“Ours,” he said.

I turned to let him unfasten my buttons, and slid out of my shift. He shed his turban and tunic and trousers, even his undergarments. It made me dizzy to see him so completely, and my fingers itched. “Is it terrible that I want to draw you like that?”

He stretched his arm out to the sides, offering himself. “I am yours, to do with as you will.” He inclined his head. “I do wish you would join me.”

So I shed the last of my undergarments, too, and stood in the sunshine as God made me. “I am not thinking of drawing you,” he said with a faint roughness.

“Let’s swim.” I dashed into the water, wanting to wash away the sweat of the walk.

He dived in beside me, and with clean, sharp strokes, moved across the pond to the waterfall. He bobbed beside it, brown shoulders gleaming in the sunshine. An explosion of joy burst through my entire being, filling my veins and organs and bones with light—that I was alive in this moment, with Tanveer, and the sky of India over us, and this body of water where we had learned to swim. I glowed with the feeling, and pressed every detail I could gather into my soul, and then I swam to him and flowed around him, chest to breasts, and legs and arms, my hair and his teasing our skin.

He maneuvered me into the cold stream of the waterfall. I gasped and screeched, then wrestled him into it, laughing. We circled and swam, and then, as a single being, swarmed toward the beach and the cloth he’d spread out on the sand, and there in the sunshine, we tangled again, and explored, and touched every inch of skin, buttocks and bellies and thighs. We explored with our hands and our mouths until we had gathered as many moments as we could, and lay in sated silence, side by side, skin to skin. “As long as my feet carry my body through this world,” he said in Hindustani, a language so much more romantic than English, “I will love you entirely.”

I looked into the depth of his eyes, feeling our souls meld. “We are woven together now, light and dark, hope and sorrow,” I said in my own language. “I will love you until my last breath.”

We were so young, so fierce, so deeply in love. Is any love truer than first love?

Back down the mountain, we hid in the trees, kissing once more and once more, weeping in disbelief that it had come to this, that we would not meet again for who knew how long. “Write to me,” he said.

“I shall.” I pressed my tender lips to his, breathed in the scent of his skin one last time. A jagged tear burst through my chest. “When will we see each other again?”

“I don’t know. We cannot depend on it, Elsie. Our lives are splitting now. You will go to England, and I will stay here, and this is what we will have.”

I heard the truth of his words, and grief ripped through me. “I hate this,” I said. “That someday this will be some faraway memory.”