The Destined Path of Water Chapter 5: Chapter 5: The Boy Who Looks at Rivers

Read chapter 5 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Sae | Age 11 The thing about a beautiful thing is that it does not leave you alone. I had tried, in the months after the festival, to put it somewhere manageable in my head. To file it next to other things I did not fully understand and move on. I was reasonably good at moving on. I was eleven and there was school and food and friends and the ordinary loud business of being alive, and for long stretches of time I was completely inside all of that, not thinking about anything except what was directly in front of me. And then I would be sitting in class or eating dinner or doing nothing in particular and it would come back without asking permission. The green of the hills from that height, every shade of it at once. The waterfall catching the light like it was made of something other than water. The river below, small from up there, a silver line someone had drawn through the valley and forgotten to erase. And beneath me, vast and unhurried, the slow breathing of something that should not have existed and did. I could not make it smaller. Every time it came back it was exactly as large as it had been the first time. I had not told anyone. This was not a decision I had made so much as something that had simply happened. The first few days after the festival I had thought about telling my father, had even started sentences in my head, practiced how they would go. But every version of it sounded wrong when I heard it in my own head, too large or too strange or too certain, and I did not know how to make it sound like something a person could just say over dinner. So I hadn't. And then enough time passed that not telling became its own kind of normal and I stopped thinking about telling at all. I just thought about what I had seen. The temple on the hill was not far. An hour by road, less if you went through the hills directly, which I was not supposed to do alone but which I had worked out the route for anyway, the way you work out things you are not supposed to need. I had gone back twice already, once in October when the rains were still finishing and the hills were very green, once in January when everything was dry and pale and the waterfall was thinner than I remembered. I went again in March. The path through the hills was steep in places and I had to use my hands on the rocks in one section, pulling myself up, my school bag shifting on my back. I had told my mother I was going to Arjun's house. Arjun was a reliable alibi, the kind of friend who would back up a reasonable story without asking too many questions, which was most of what I needed from him. The temple was quiet this time of year. A few priests moving through the complex with the unhurried purpose of people who have the same things to do every day. An old woman sitting near the main shrine with her eyes closed. Pigeons on the roof making their small complaints. I went to the ghat where the river came down. The waterfall was there, white and constant, falling from the rocks above into the pool below and then running out through the channel toward the valley. I sat on the flat stone near the railing, the same stone, I was almost certain, where I had sat after and looked at the water for a long time. I did not know what I was looking for exactly. I had not known the other times either. Some sign, maybe. Some evidence that what I remembered was real and not something my falling brain had invented to make the fall less frightening. Though I had not been frightened. That was the part I kept coming back to. You did not invent something warm and calm and unhurried when you were afraid. Fear invented teeth and dark and impact. It did not invent this. The water moved the way it always moved, indifferent and continuous. I took the necklace out from under my shirt and held the bead in my palm. It had been ten months since the festival and I still could not explain the necklace. Nobody had come forward to say they had put it on me. Nobody had recognised it or asked about it. M