Nude-Muse Magazine Magazine

The image arrived without ceremony, which was perhaps why it lodged so deeply in her mind, a small luminous rectangle in her palm, glowing with the borrowed bodies of a dozen strangers who had decided, in the blue hour of some far-off morning, to walk through their own landscape as if they were the landscape and not merely creatures moving across it. They stood there in the photograph, half-dissolved into mist and bare tree, unashamed, almost casual about it, the way a river is casual about being water. Sharleen stared at them for a long moment, her thumb hovering over the glass as though it might be warm, and then she clicked away with the quick, guilty motion of a woman who has been caught reading someone else's letter...more>

The haveli had been built to contain a woman the way a temple contains fire: in carved stone, behind screens, under the watchful eyes of ancestors. In the morning pavilion, where intricately carved arches and pillars threw lace-like shadows across polished marble, Shakti stood at twenty-one years old like a bright blade laid across a bed of silk. Her dark hair was pulled back from a face so pretty that even the strictest aunt could not find fault with it, only with what she might do next; a small white flower rested in her hair, and traditional gold jewellery glinted at her throat, wrists, and nose...more>