Heaven's Edge Read Online Free PDF

stopped it for her, if only I could. Nirali was not the one I wanted to talk about. I wondered what would happen if I kissed her. Would the world change then, at least for us? At that moment all I wanted from my life, from everything around me and before me, coalesced into her. I remember a sort of haze that rippled with her every breath. My father’s ghost, Eldon’s shadow, my disjointed past and all the corruption around us receded from my mind as I gazed at her. I realised that all I had been looking for was there in front of me. I tightened my lips, as though that alone would be enough. Then, unable to stop, I kissed her. I could only think of touching her lips. Supplanting that air warmed by her breath with the lightest brush of my thinnest skin. Nothing else.
    She kissed me back.
    The hours moved swiftly then. I wanted time to slow down with her; speed up when I was without her. Change its nature to coincide with ours.
    The very next evening she took me beyond the ash rocks where the stone-curlews used to nest. She showed me the path of the moon and lit a fire on the beach between three coconut palms and a bunch of lime trees. She threw nutmeg and ola leaves in the flames and let the smoke clothe her. I watched her bow, like a magician, into her own pubis andvanish briefly, singing, into a floating veil. My arms ached as they ache even now; in the small of my back a muscle was stretched taut. Smoke compressed the breath in my lungs, and I choked for the want of her skin around me, her voice inside me, her heart’s beat next to mine, changing mine.
    Within just days I felt I had known her for ever; her eyes, her mouth, her arms wide open, encircling, echoed everywhere. ‘Come with me,’ she murmured even in her cloud-warmed sleep. Taking my arm – eager to go, eager to hold – she walked me to the beach under a sky of laughing stars. She drew runes along the edge of the ocean dragging her toes in the warm, wet sand. She talked and talked to me, constructing a citadel of hope. I told her about my grandfather’s Eden and she said that she had heard that there was once a whole region full of butterflies and flowers – Samandia – but nobody went that far into the blighted south any more. ‘You’ll have to find somewhere else,’ she said ‘make your own Eden.’
    â€˜I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not his I want, but ours.’
    When we made love, my life rocked. She’d trace with her fingers the seams of my legs, the ridges of my back, my deepest wishbone rising like a swallow, and I would touch hers rippling under a skin strained by the notes of a mangled melody.
    The next day she held me close and told me, ‘I want you to see what they do to control us.’
    We had to walk two kilometres up the coast to get to the place she wanted to show me: a charred shell of a house with the ground around it black and full of cinders.
    â€˜I knew the family that lived here,’ she said. ‘They were meant to grow only bitter gourd and radish for the market,but they had young children and got some sugarcane going. It was against the rules. One day the military came and saw the boy eating sugarcane. They tried to catch him to beat him, but he ran away. The soldiers couldn’t find him so they burnt the whole place down.’ She led me to where some new shoots were growing through. ‘But they can’t win. Look, the cane is coming up again. It will be taller and sweeter and give us all strength.’
    â€˜What happened to the family?’ I asked.
    Uva stared down at the ground. ‘The boy got away, I guess.’
    Back on the beach, later, she brought out a perfectly shaped mango from a cotton sack. ‘Try this beauty I stole from a District Commander’s garden. From a very old protected tree. Even they – their leaders – know the best comes from what is to be found, no? Not forced.’ She cut the mango into two