Scared of what wrath her thought might bring upon her, she became desperate to rid her mind of it. And in her desperation she thought of it more. Her mind imagined it for her. Without warning, it recreated her little thought into an imagery of vivid shapes and sounds. And what she saw sent frigid currents running down her back. Almost immediately little goosebumps burst out all over her fair arms making her skin feel taut. She felt scared yet oddly her nipples hardened and she felt slightly dizzy. Yanking out her hand from her panties she jumping off her bed frantically. She began pacing up and down her room trying hard, her hardest, to think of other things. Like when Anoushka was born, how the baby had bawled and how her mother, cradling the little Anoushka in her arms rocked her silently to sleep. She tried to think of her father driving in the new sedan through the gates of their house. She tried to think of happy things, of good things, yet the mind tenaciously held on to her thought like a child would a candy. No matter how hard she laboured, Vijaya couldn’t extricate the vision of herself urinating on the idol kept in the prayer room off her mind and it’s blasphemous eye.

She bunched both her wrists and struck the sides of her thighs violently. Jumping up and down she stomped the floor for a good few seconds, yet the thought wouldn’t go. Rushing to her table she flopped down and shut her eyes. She tried to imagine the idol sitting before her, decorated beautifully in flowers, redolent in the fragrance of incense and surrounded by devotees, many devotees, loving devotees, their heads hung and hands folded in concentrated prayer. Her lips began moving frantically, as she sought forgiveness from the deity for her ghastly vision. Hands folded she pleaded with her deity earnestly, apologising to him with a face screwed up with intensity. She waved her head slowly from one side to another to effectuate the intensity of her prayer, a range of supplicating expressions running across her beautiful face. Anybody else in the room would think that Vijaya, sitting at her table was begging, passionately to this invisible entity for mercy or for forgiveness for something ostensibly quite horrendous that she had committed. This would, of course, occur as an afterthought to the notion that poor Vijaya, must have gone quite mad.

Nevertheless, this imaginative trip did help a little. She saw the God nod his head and smile. He then raised his hand in a gesture of blessing and spoke in a stentorian yet gentle voice than seemed to boom from everywhere. He said;

“Fear not, little one. I am not angry at you. Although I do not understand the cause for such an imagination, you are forgiven. You have incurred no divine retribution young one. After all, it was I who invented teenage and puberty, I, who composed hormones, I….”

Vijaya brought her wrists down on the table hard and gritted her teeth. Damned mind.