In Their Bones
An Age-Gap Erotic Romance Across Two Lifetimes
Veena Menon is twenty-eight, four weeks out of her viva, and not looking for anything the morning the hillside gives it up: a gold torque, half-exposed in a rain-slumped bank above her parents’ tea gardens in Wayanad.
Within a week there are six institutions on the ridge. Within a month the dating comes back so impossible the laboratory runs it three more times. Not because the people are old. Because of what is in the ground with them. Agriculture ten thousand years before agriculture. Smelted metal twelve thousand years before metal. A burial performed to a code that should not have existed for another fifteen millennia.
Two skeletons. Buried together. Deliberately positioned. And inside the female pelvis, the bones of a foetus.
Dr Julian Marsh is fifty-eight. Grey at the temples, precise, and entirely unprepared for the moment he first looks at her face. He tells her about his wife, thirty years dead. He tells her about a birthmark he has thought about almost every day since and has never once said out loud.
Veena has that birthmark. Same shape. Same place.
When a landslide traps them in a cave, she shows him. What follows is nobody’s accident, and neither of them pretends it is: all restraint coming apart in firelight, beneath an ochre painting that has been waiting twenty-two thousand years for somebody to recognise it.
Then he flies home. Three weeks later, Veena is late. How does their story end? Is their relationship the past or does it have a future?
In Their Bones is an explicit age-gap erotic novelette across two lifetimes, set in the laterite hills of Kerala.
For adult readers. Contains explicit sexual content throughout, a thirty-year age gap, a dark historical thread including an implied execution, an unplanned pregnancy, and an ending that opens a door rather than closing one.
A glimpse beneath the sheets…
Rain had loosened the laterite above the old trail and a section of the bank had slumped. I almost walked past it. Then I saw the curve: a yellow arc against the red soil, catching the light. I crouched. The training: look first. Gold has no business being at that depth in that stratum. It came away into my hand. A torque, hammered flat at the ends and curved. I looked up the bank. There was a cavity at the base of the exposure, and inside it, pale against the red: the transverse process of a cervical vertebra. Below it the top of a second. Below that the beginning of a shoulder. Six years of training and I went backwards onto my heels with a stranger’s collar in my hands.
***
Two skeletons, one female, one male, deliberately positioned, facing each other. Twenty-two thousand years older than they should have been — with agriculture ten thousand years before agriculture and smelted metal twelve thousand years before metal in the ground alongside them. It could not be. Yet, it was. Somebody had buried these two the way you bury people you love, and walked away from the gold. The woman had been eight months pregnant.
I read the email three times before replying. Dr Julian Marsh, Hallam Institute for Human Origins, Washington — whose monograph had been on my desk with the spine broken in three places. On the third day of writing to each other with details of the find, he said he was coming.
He arrived in a hired vehicle from Calicut. Fifty-eight, broad through the shoulders, salt-and-pepper hair, wire-rimmed glasses. Something happened in my body before anything happened in my head. I felt myself go wet — immediately, completely, with no thought anywhere near it — standing in a trench with a trowel in my hand. It had never once done that.
We worked five weeks. Somewhere in the third he told me his wife had been called Lyra, that she had died a long time ago, and that I looked like her.
***
The landslide happened during a secondary survey. Just the two of us above the main site when the rain committed and the slope above the path back gave way. I knew a recess in the cliff face two ridges south, on ground nobody surveys, where I had sheltered for years.
We made it in eight minutes, both completely soaked. Julian found dry wood under the overhang and began building a fire. I moved to the wall. The flat section of pale gneiss I had been touching since childhood without ever being able to explain the pull — close to recognition, like a word in a language I had once known and mostly forgotten. The marks were there. Ochre-red reduced by millennia to the ghost of a stain, and still present: a crescent, a circle with radiating lines, and below them two small figures side by side.
“What is that?” Julian said from the fire.
“Night and day,” I said. “The moon and the sun. And two people between them. These two are holding nothing but each other. This has always drawn me and I have never once been able to explain why.”
***
Around the fire he answered the question I had not asked. He had married her when he was twenty-seven and she was twenty-three, a working musician who did something original with the lyre. Fourteen months. She was twenty-four when she died, in labour. That was thirty years ago.
The arithmetic arrived before I could stop it. He was fifty-eight. I was twenty-eight. “She died two years before I was born,” I said. He did not answer that. He turned his glasses in his hands, absently cleaning them with his wet shirt, and I watched him remember.
“Her hands were seldom at rest. She had this habit of standing with her hands behind her when she wanted me to do something. I knew the fingers were moving. It always made me smile. She asked me why and I never told her it was as if her fingers were pointing to the birthmark—”
He stopped mid-sentence, stood, and walked to the mouth of the cave. When he came back he said: “She had a birthmark. On the underside of her left buttock. I have thought about it almost every day for thirty years and I have never once said that sentence out loud.”
“Do you want to see it?” I said.
He looked at me.
“The birthmark,” I said. “I have one. Exactly like that. Exactly the same place.”
He went very still. The fire between us.
“Veena,” he said, “I don’t trust myself.”
I looked at him across the fire. The rain on the overhang. The painting on the wall above us, faded to almost nothing.
“I don’t want you to,” I said.
I stood, undid my field trousers and pushed them down along with the cotton beneath. Then I turned my back to him and bent forward, my hands on my knees. A sound came from him, low and brief: the sound of a resistance that had lasted days finally giving out.
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