Significance? It is visual proof of Meera's Citizen status, but also allows the Provosts to monitor her
Fate? It was removed during the events of New Dreams
First Appearance? Elysian Dawn
Author's Inspiration? A variation on the bindi
As one of the first Citizens of Shiva, Meera Singh was of great importance to the Provosts, the Terran regents of that planet. Female Citizens wear a shindi, a sparkling silver disc set in their foreheads. It is made of crushed Shivan diamond, and stores and transmits information. Meera sees the shindi as an honour.
“I am granted the
right to wear the shindi on my forehead as a mark of my status. As a Shivan, I
have no need and no desire to leave this planet. If I ever did, my citizenship
would be rescinded.”
She shivered and touched the shindi on her brow. It was
perfectly round, glinting with the sparkling gems known as Shivan diamonds.
Meera's mother Diya has mixed feelings. She is pleased with her daughter's status, but she sees the shindi as a symbol that Meera belongs more to the Provosts and Shiva than to her family.
In solidarity with her
daughter, Diya had taken to wearing a traditional bindi herself. Its red hue
signified her status as a married woman, but Meera’s was a permanent adornment,
attached by the Rose Provost when she was a babe in arms. Diya herself had worn
earrings since babyhood, and she supposed
the affixing of the shindi was no more barbaric than shooting a
metal bolt through a baby’s tender lobes, but it still went against her grain
that she was not consulted or allowed the right of veto. With the shindi
glittering in her fine coffee-dark
skin, baby Meera was marked apart from
her family forever.
You can read about the shindi in
About the Blog
Sally is Sally Odgers; author, anthologist and reader. You can find you way into her maze of websites and blogs via the portal here.(Sally is me, by the way.)
The goal for 2017 was to write a post a day profiling the background behind one of my books; how it came to be written, what it's about, and any things of note that happened along the way. 2017 is well behind us, but I ran out of year before running out of books. As of June 2018 I STILL hadn't run out of books, but many of those still to come are MIA by which I mean I don't have copies and remember little about them. There are more new books in the pipeline, and I'm certainly showcasing those, but in between times, I'm profiling some of my characters, places and objects. Thank you so much to everyone who's come along on this journey so far!
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