This is Sita..., ... and these are her secrets.

This is Sita Prajapati. She is 26, and she’s a Virgo. She works at a strip club in Miami, where she is called Kali and she is only just 20. She isn’t very good at making friends, and keeps a green snake called Lily in her apartment. She dreams of shifting sand and the sound of lots of little bells jangling in rhythm.

These are her secrets:

She was born a very, very long time ago.

She can do things with her hands that move the tears from your soul into your eyes and down your cheeks. But she does this rarely now, because there are very few people left worth moving to such a state. Soul tears are rare in this time. Soul tears taste sweet and stinging, like honey.

They used to give her honey offerings. Bee-milk, running-gold, queen-water. And breast-milk and moon-blood, and shrivelled foreskin on a pure, talcum altar. Her statues were made by craftsmen who tore out their eyes afterwards so that they would never have to look upon anything less beautiful. Love leads to life, and it was thus that she was worshipped: bringer of life, goddess of love. But her statues and temples and shrines are all gone, buried by the blinding burning desert sand and the season winds. Her people died, as people usually do: some before their time, some after, and some in the right places.

She did not stop, for once you begin dancing the hardest thing is to stop moving. But she slowed, and the power crept inside her to desire’s core: the pounding heart. And where there is life there is hope, and where there is life there is sex. And where there is sex, there is she.

But of course, these are her secrets, and no one knows these things.

She dances, these days, in a place where she is on display as she should be and can siphon off what little power there is in the beer-sodden gazes of the pale men. Green dollar bills in the garter strap, the dark, bone-trembling bass, and the tangible gaze of snared eyes. She holds them all in her hands when she dances.

This, in any case, is what she believes. She may of course be mad. Clinically, irrevocably insane. Her sandy-fingered grip on reality might have been loosened by inhaling too many writhing snakes of strange smoke in the strip club.

But this is true: when she dances, really dances, their eyes are drawn to her like bees to a sweet desert flower.

[PB: Deepti Bhatnagar]