It was the first day of Raja Sankraanti, or Pahili Raja as we call it in Odia. My cousin had barely brushed her teeth. The swings were tied, mango leaves strung like green commas above them, betel leaves resting on every threshold. And yet, she refused to be festive. Her wide-legged pajamas hung loose like her mood. I found her curled near the corner of the verandah, the towel beneath her crumpled like a wilted hibiscus. Her hair was uncombed, and her feet bare—no altaa tracing the sun onto her soles, anklet-less as if to protest her body’s untimely betrayal. I didn’t say anything. Just sat beside her, let her shoulder lean against mine like the side of a slowly ripening fruit.

When I got my first period, I remember hiding my underclothes under the mattress, like they were evidence.

I remember not knowing who I was mourning. I wanted to tell her that. But instead, I asked if she’d come lie down on the park grass with me. She gave me the look teens give—where disdain and curiosity share the same nose, as if eye-rolling were a language older than speech. And for a brief moment, I stood stirred, struggling to accept that this was truly happening. It felt as if my coming-of-age-turned-actual-adult-who-deals-with-real-life-adult-shit dream of meeting my thirteen-year-old self had just come into existence—sulky, skeptical, and secretly longing to be understood.

We went anyway. And there we lay—two women stitched by blood and an awkward love, cheek to cheek with the earth.

A little breeze whispered through the jamun trees, carrying the cool wet scent of monsoon’s breath just before arrival. My dupatta crinkled beneath me like an old letter. She told me about the summer solstice. That it was coming soon, on the 21st. That the day would be long enough to swallow us whole if we let it. “And still,” she said, eyes half-shut against the sky’s wide yawn, “it’s a Saturday, you’ll still have work.” She was right. In corporate, even the longest day on the planet would fall short if it falls on a weekend.

But, soon as the sun began to graze upon our skin, I wanted to tell her that time only stretches when you’re looking for ways to shrink yourself inside it.

The swings creaked in the background, girl after girl shrieking joy into the air like temple bells. My cousin remained quiet, watching a line of ants move past her elbow. “It hurts less now,” she whispered. “Not just the bleeding. Everything.”

Later, when we walked back home, she washed her feet but didn’t wipe them dry. The wetness left marks behind her—small, temporary, sacred. She didn’t need the altaa. I looked at her again and realized she was already past the doorway she thought she was still approaching. She wasn’t a little girl anymore. But she was also not a woman yet. Just something beautiful in between. Something I too once was and detested being it at that point in time.

An old wives’ tale says even the earth menstruates once a year.

And each time I hear it, I can’t help but stop and ponder: does even mother nature get reminded at her cousin’s wedding that her biological clock is ticking? That her body, burdened with what we keep feeding her, is running out of time? Has she been missing out on weddings to rid herself of nosy relatives? Does she turn up the volume of brown noise on her phone when the said relatives start talking? Does the petrichor regulate her mood?

Each time the questions linger inside my chest for far too long, I pluck them, one by one, and scrunch them inside the flowers which I then weave into garlands and hang them on the door-frame situated at the entrance of my home. “Welcome to my Heart,” I say. It’s mostly a clutter, except when the chime of my mother’s occasionally adorned anklet and the smell of freshly sizzled fritters slowly drift into every corner. Then, you’d know that a celebration is drawing near.

Mother says Raja is a celebration of fertility—a festival spanning three days of rest, of soil allowed to breathe without seed or plough.

And us—actually upon reassessing, we were not two, but three lying together in the verdant embrace that day: the ripening earth, my little sister still in the middle of becoming, and the woman that I have slowly metamorphosed into, that I’m merely beginning to understand years after trading my blush of age for it, only to emerge from the girlhood older, triumphant and exhausted—seemingly reborn. Just the three of us cradling in this kinship, navigating life and its idiosyncrasies, all while celebrating our tenderness in our own ways.

Even the dirty ground, she said, felt like a prayer rug if you lay long enough. Even her pain, I wanted to tell her, would one day become a kind of worship.