She cupped her hands and collected water in it and offered it to Dariush. He drank the water from her hand in a single breath. Seeing Dariush happy made her face go red. When he drank water from Vidhi’s hands, he noticed the whiteness of her palms that sent vibrations into him, but he immediately overcame the sensation by looking at the spring. The surface of the falling water was like a mirror that captured its own beauty. Dariush moved two steps ahead and stood below the falling water. He was completely drenched. Vidhi was smiling at him. He kept enjoying the water falling on him while standing under the spring with his eyes closed. When he opened them, the sun was at the meridian looking at him. Its rays were brighter now. The caterpillar was still enjoying the warmth.

Vidhi’s face shone and looked reddish and bright in the sunshine. Dariush looked at her and said that the water was cold and if she wished she could also bathe. She said she didn’t want to because she would immediately catch a cold in the chilly water. In reality she wanted to bathe and drench herself with Dariush, but she could not express her intent. Unknowingly, she tried to avoid that passion. Perhaps, that day Vidhi was not aware that when a passion is suppressed and thrown into the dungeons of the soul, some day it drips out in a more ambiguous and fiery form from the surface of the body. A desire doesn’t die, it simply transforms itself. She might have refused to bathe but at that very moment her desire, which she had been hiding for so many days, started churning within her. She kept thinking why so many streams burst within her in Dariush’s presence. When she had held Dariush’s hand in the thorny bushes, suddenly a spring had burst within her whose water had a unique smell of its own and Vidhi was aware of it. But she did not know that the smell of the springs that burst from the soul was that of the soul itself and carried with it an intoxication and ecstasy.