The blindingly bright lights brought Anahita back to that
day, three hundred plus days ago, when she learned how to live a life.
And, like most life-changing events, she never saw it
coming. One moment, the choir’s best singer, Afriel, was sentenced to vitam silencio, which meant his lovely
voice would never be heard in song ever again. In the next moment, Anahita had
raised her own voice in protest, and, in the third moment, she fell.
She took an instant to fall, an instant that could be
measured in eons. She saw Afriel’s shocked face looking down at her and then,
it became Roberto’s face. Of course, she didn’t know his name was Roberto then,
he was just a face she didn’t know but one that seemed kind and welcoming.
He would bring her home that night and she would later learn
that his shock was caused by his finding a naked girl right outside his
apartment building. And that the said girl possessed the most angelic face on
earth (Vogue opined) and the most
heavenly body (was how Elle put it)
in history.
She didn’t understand their fascination for her physical
form, since everyone looked like her “back home” (Roberto never liked it when
she said “up there”). And she couldn’t understand how they could take all these
in stride, the dealing with bodily functions every day, the human imperfections
that stained everything beautiful, and the messiness of emotions that pushed
everyone to a state of misery, in one form or the other. It very clearly
demonstrated to her why heaven was heaven and why everyone wanted to go there.
