Her death had always been written in the cards, you know? She just never bothered to pick them up and see the truth that had been there before her all along.

But, I suppose you would want to go back to the beginning; to the time before her death. All of you always want to go back to moment that set the bomb ticking to its inevitable explosion. Well then, it all boiled down to the day she first saw the 'queer' community.

It was the thick stripes of colour painted on their hands and feet that made her sit on the knees  and try to take a better look at the otherwise boring, black and white newspaper that her father held in his hands that Sunday. Everything is so much simpler in the world of a nine year old. People are just people and things are just that — things.

See, the problem was that not everyone was a nine year old and so when Aruna asked her father why she couldn't paint her hands in the colours of the rainbow and march with the women on the newspaper, she was rewarded with an exasperated look. Her dad's wrinkles seemed to get more pronounced and Aruna saw that the paper he was holding was crumpling under his angry hold. Not that she knew what that meant at that time, of course. Aruna had simply furrowed her brow, scrunched her face up to mimic her father for a second, and had promptly forgotten all about the funny expression her dad had made soon after.

Her mom however, knew exactly what the look meant and had tried to diffuse the tension by bringing in the morning tea and biscuits on a pink tray with a smile so wide that it threatened to touch her ears. Aruna remembered walking up to her and poking her cheek until the smile had melted into a frown.

There,  Aruna had thought to herself, now her lips seemed normal.

It was only when she heard the slight swish of a paper being turned that her eyes found the newspaper once again. Her father's index finger seemed to be covering a colourful woman's picture on the front page and Aruna, wanting to see the rainbow again, had found herself walking up to her dad. The next moment she was prying his fingers away from the page and trying to read the crumpled headlines printed in bold black.

Her finger were tracing the letters as she moved her lips; pronouncing each word out in a silent sentence that no one but she could hear, until the letters weren't there anymore. The finger that had been tracing the paper suddenly flew backwards and she let out a scream as a response to the sudden pain she felt. It was second too late for her to realize how it was the tea that had done it. The paper was now drenched and dripping in brown and Aruna could only watch through widened eyes from her place on the cold marble floor as her father dropped the paper on the table beside him, all the while muttering profanities under his breath.

The mutters grew into words she never thought her father would use and she felt herself shivering and curling up just a little more into herself. Her mother made her way to the newspaper and Aruna just looked up at her, watching as she desperately tried to fix it with her trembling hands.

Suddenly she couldn't take it anymore. Her hand was burning and the cold from the marble was creeping into her bones. Her mother seemed to be pushing back tears and her father didn't look like the man she knew. Even the rainbow was brown now. She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth tried not to draw blood.

Everything should be so much simpler in the world of a nine year old. But everyone didn't know that and so, when Aruna closed her eyes in an attempt to block out the reality of her Mom's and Dad's voices, she could feel the cold trail of tears make their way down her face.

It was her fault, you see. She shouldn't have touched the rainbow.

Those moments, I believe were the moments that started it all. They were the moments where the cards began to tilt against her and started to write her story. She just wanted to know the colourful, the 'queer' people but it seemed like everyone, even the cards were against that.