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The year after the world didn't end, Parvati found feminism, waiting for her where it had been waiting for her all her life.
"Where?" Padma asked, waspishly. "In a gift-wrapped box in your underwear drawer?"
"No," Parvati said, stung, "in books."
It had been Hermione's fault. "How long are you gone?" she had said, and Parvati had noticed she looked different, the hair forming the usual curly cloud, but the lines of her face had been pared to minimalism, to elegance, by war. Parvati had known her at eleven; here, today, in this quiet afternoon, the last of the summer greenery resplendent in the garden, there was nothing of childhood left in her face.
"Over the winter," Parvati had said, sipping her tea slowly, watching the sun come out behind the window. "Maybe for longer. My parents are already there; it's been so unsafe to travel, all these years, and now, well." She shrugged. "They never said, but they were missing home."
"India," Hermione said, reverently. "I'm jealous."
"Don't be," Parvati said, more sharply than she'd meant to, and then softened. "No, I want to go, I missed it, too. But, here, I'm a grown woman, I fought in the war. There it's all... you know. Chaperones, and men to take you places. It's not right."
"Didn't know you were such a feminist," Hermione had said, lightly, and changed the subject beyond denial or affirmation. But some of Hermione's books were in the pile, now.
"Anyway," Parvati said, "you've always said I'm a silly Gryffindor who never thinks about anything enough. I thought you would be pleased I was thinking."
"I am," Padma said, and the sun was shining down on her still, serious face, and she said nothing else.
The year after the world didn't end, Padma found faith where it had been waiting all her life.
"So, you went to the temple every month before now because you were an atheist?" Parvati asked, with asperity.
"No," Padma said, and then, thinking about it, "I used to… know. Now I believe."
There hadn't been a flash. There had been an ordinary Tuesday and an ordinary street full of people and cars and bullock carts and opportunistic monkeys, and an ordinary roadside temple; she had stopped, she had shaken off her shoes, she had taken prasad, she had rung the bell. And she had looked up into the hot, sweet sun and thought, with the final note of the struck bell, there is truth and strength and beauty, and in me, the seeds of all that there is.
She had taken up her wand and said nothing more, and watched the Patronus fly into the brightness of the sky.
Parvati said, "I know."
Holi dawned fast and clean and hot, and the energy of the crowds crackled beneath their skin. "Come on!" Padma shouted, running down the stairs of the old house and throwing the doors open to the day, and Parvati watched her run, saw her as though for the first time - the grace and fluidity of her body, the smooth brown of her skin glowing with the sun - and with the mirror of that strength, that beautiful grace, swung her arms and opened her palms in ecstatic libation.
"I hate you," Padma said, a moment later, through a haze of red paint.
"I hate you too," Parvati said, cordially. "Now catch me!"
Padma caught her - after running through the door and down the street and over the water and back and up the stairs and down the stairs and out under the sun. The paint ended up in her hair and in her mouth, tasting pleasantly non-toxic and green. "Gotcha," Padma said quietly, grinning, and Parvati blew paint fountains.
They sat there, out of breath and bespattered, and watched the people filter past - red, green, purple, saffron. A teenage girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen, was lingering behind a group of boys, surreptitious in her bare feet. "Nithin!" she shouted, sudddenly - the boy turned, and she transformed him, with a swift application, into a vision of gold.
Padma laughed. "For one person at least, he's a god," she said.
Parvati said, "Do you think, if there had been no war, we would have... you know." She waved her hands, taking in girls and boys, sunlight, joy.
Padma nodded. "Probably."
Parvati snorted. "Where are our gods?"
"Inside ourselves," Padma said, and poured some paint down her neck.
