Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 (18 page)

~ * ~

I wait until Gautam’s breathing slows into sleep, then roll to my feet and ghost into the kitchen, my steps silent on the hard, cool floor. On the way, I switch on the bathroom light and close the door.

The altar is in an alcove set into the kitchen wall. It smells faintly of sandalwood. I reach in to take my flute back from Lord Krishna.

It is gone.

I kneel before the altar, my fingers searching the space under it, the crack between its edge and the wall. They find only incense ash.

“Looking for something?”

Pale golden light washes past me. I turn to see Vikram lit by the open fridge, my flute clenched in one hand. “You thought I would let you have it, after yesterday, or what?” he asks. His voice is too calm. “And you thought that trick with the bathroom light would fool me? I’m not the dumb one.”

I uncoil, coming to my feet fast, and grab for the flute. He holds it over my head with one hand, pushes me away with the other. I hit the wall.

“Come on,” he says. “Give me an excuse to break it.”

I turn on my heel and run for the front door. He follows me, leans over me as I reach for the doorknob, laughs softly into my ear. His breath disturbs my hair.

I need only touch the moonlight one more time. But I doubt he will even let me get downstairs. And perhaps I will not bleed until the ritual is complete. I slump, turn back to our room, drag my mattress over next to Gautam’s, and settle back in. With Vikram’s eyes on me, I pray to the Moon and to Durga to give me time.

My first period starts four days later. As Nani warned me, it hurts.

~ * ~

There once lived, among the Naga people, a girl of surpassing beauty. Her tail looped in long coils and her scales looked new-molted, shining and unmarred. She was alluring even in human form, with hooded eyes and long shining hair like the dark of the moon. The fair hue of her underbelly spread to all her human skin, and she kept the serpent’s grace.

Perhaps she was a princess; perhaps she was a queen. Perhaps she was merely a lovely girl from a Naga village.

Taking human form, this girl would escape her lands and come to ours, seeking music. There is no music in the Naga lands. It is their only lack, and the reason they wear our clothes and dare our world. This girl loved music even more than most, and she risked more, and lost. For she was trapped by a snake charmer, who took her home to be his wife.

So my Nani told me, and there she would always stop.

“What happened to her, Nani?”

“She learned to make rotis and curries and beds, and she learned to eat mice and rats only when nobody could see,” she would say. “She had a daughter, in time, and that daughter had two children. A boy and a girl. And that girl, that Naga’s granddaughter, has in her the magic of our people.”

It seemed incredible, even then. Not that she was other-worldly. No, with her dark knowing eyes in her walnut face and her hair of spun moonlight, that was obvious. What stunned me was that she might once have been young. “Were you really beautiful, Nani?”

She would laugh. “For many, many years. It is only in this form that we truly age, Asha.”

Asha. Hope. She called me that always. I did not understand why; I had been named after music, and she loved music.

~ * ~

Mama found the flute in the back of a cupboard, behind the pressure cooker. She lectured Shruti about caring for the family heirloom, while Vikram smirked, and kept the flute locked up for a week.

Meanwhile, Vikram hid Shruti’s homework. He rubbed soap into her toothbrush. He spilled black ink on her new school uniform. He left cockroaches in her pillowcase. Shruti may as well have been Untouchable in Auntie’s eyes, but Mama was angry, so she cried on Gautam’s shoulder. He was annoyed at first, inclined to shrug her off, but after the cockroaches he got into a shouting match with Vikram and called him a bastard. Auntie heard him.

Shruti took to hiding in her room after school. When Vikram followed her, she started disappearing, up to the roof or into the garden with the flute. But one day the downstairs grannies stopped talking and glared when they saw her, and she realized that Auntie must have told them something. She ran away.

They never found the cobra, nor any sign of it, but Shruti was blamed for every snakebite in the area thereafter. She started playing her music in the early morning, when nobody would see her. Women hawking vegetables were her accompaniment; the neighbors kept away and told their children to do the same.

Her mother stopped talking to the neighbors; Gautam stopped playing cricket with Vikram’s friends. Her father grew solemn and silent. They would not hear ill of Shruti in public.

Three years later the city had a miracle: a boy who was able to pick up cobras without coming to harm. He was on the television, and his parents were interviewed. Shruti’s neighbors argued about whether the boy was blessed by Lord Shiva or Lord Vishnu.

Shruti could pick cobras up, too, but Shruti was far too unsettling to be a miracle.

~ * ~

Mama waits until Papa and Uncle approve of the curry before saying, “Shruti made it.”

Papa glares at her. “And that makes it all right? What shall we say to the young men? She does not talk, she frightens all the neighbors, worms and lizards come to hear her play that damned flute—but she makes a fairly good curry?”

Auntie adds, “When she’s helped at every step.”

Vikram makes a show of spitting the curry out, nose wrinkled.

Gautam looks coolly at him and takes another bite. I look down at my own plate. The smell of ghee and cardamom is cloying. What will my home be like when Gautam leaves—to go to college, to start his own life?

“She’s a good girl,” Mama protests, “and she learns well.”

“Then teach her to speak.”

Mama looks down at her plate, biting her lip.

“She’s unnatural,” says Auntie. “Like your mother was.”

Uncle frowns at her. “That’s enough.”

Papa says, “But she’s right.”

Gautam clears his throat. “How do you think we will do in the test match, Papa?”

I look at them—at my mother trying to make herself small, my brother trying to distract Papa—and I am glad no man will have me. I get up, leaving my food barely touched, and walk away.

“Shruti!”

Papa no longer frightens me. Nani’s eyes can silence him, even when they are in my face. I look at him until he looks away, then turn and leave the apartment.

~ * ~

Ankita Nani’s eyes never left Nana when he was playing his flute. She watched him, unblinking and adoring—as romantic to a child as any Bollywood film. Only when he died, when she told me she was going home, did I see the shadow behind the romance.

She obeyed him, of course, just as Mama obeys Papa. Is every girl a Naga, stolen away to serve her husband?

~ * ~

The wall that runs around the roof bears new graffiti. Bold and elaborate in silvered red, it says VIKR. He has left cans of spray paint under the letters; Vikram does not delay when Auntie expects him downstairs. I pick up the silver, shake it, and draw a slow outward spiral centered on the
K.
When it is big enough I spiral back in, filling in the gaps to make a moon, so that only the huge
V
and the
R
’
s
looping tail still show. I spray one practiced black curve ever the moon: a cobra, its tail extending along the wall.

The roof was mine first.

I pick my way over to the other side. My side. I have to keep to the edges, along the wall, because the rest will not hold my weight anymore.

Cross-legged on the yellow patch of outer wall that I used to call my balcony, I play the music of moonlit gardens and enchantments that can be broken. I face the roof instead of the city so that Vikram cannot sneak up on me, and so I see the cobra raise his head.

He rises till his eyes are level with my own. His body is dappled, liquid motion. He could kill me with one strike, but that is abstract knowledge: my heart does not race, my breath does not shorten. I envy his grace; I do not fear it. Perhaps this is what it means to be
Pishaach.

I play for the cobra and he dances for me, while sunset stains the sky orange and purple behind him.

Vikram comes through the doorway and stops, his mouth a comical O. His eyes slide from me to the snake to his graffiti, and he slips back indoors.

I lower my flute. He will be back. I am not sure how to let the snake know, but when the music stops he lowers his hood and slithers into my shadow. I look down but cannot see him.

I lower one foot to the ground. It touches ground and nothing else. The cobra has vanished.

When Vikram returns with his thugs they see only me, sitting where I should not be and playing the sun down. They come to the center partition to stare at me, at the empty roof.

I smile.

Amit laughs at Vikram. Vikram punches him. Stalks away. The rest leave soon enough.

But I do not dare go home until Gautam comes to find me.

~ * ~

Shruti passed her classes, but only just. She did not have a tutor, as most students did, and many nights she would forget her homework in music. Her teachers were less amused by her doodles every year. At the end of Tenth Standard one teacher told her parents that she was only good for the arts, if that.

Vikram and Gautam spent that summer closeted with tutors. Vikram was preparing for engineering college, and Gautam for Twelfth Standard. Most days, nobody knew where Shruti went. A frown grew between her mother’s eyebrows, and she watched Shruti silently at meals.

Uncle took Papa aside one day. “You will have to decide what to do with her, you know,” he said. “She’s a good girl in her way, but . . .”

“Yes,” said Papa. “But.”

~ * ~

I pause in the doorway to catch my breath, almost coughing at the smoke. Vikram and his gang are on my roof. I could exile them, set the snake on them. But if I did, what would Vikram do tonight?

I dodge an auntie’s venomous glare and slip downstairs to hide under the bougainvillea, where sunlight falls in patches of magenta and the air is thick and sweet with mango and flowering rose.

I take one delicious breath, then pause. The air is too cool and too clean. There is no exhaust underlying the sweetness, no smog. No sound of children from the apartment beyond. The garden has lost its boundaries; when I raise the flute there are a hundred ears listening. I take a step forward, hesitate.

A hand on my shoulder. I twist, ready to strike, and find a bare chest. Skin like polished teak, and the dark smell of earth just after rain. I look up.

He is slender, and the curve of his cheek is a boy’s, but his eyes are clear and old as drops of amber. His hair falls unbound to the middle of his back, and light glints from a silver circlet as he leans down. I should be frightened, and am not, and that tells me who he is.

“Asha,” he murmurs, his lips close to mine, “won’t you play for me?”

I play for him there in the multicolored light, in our tiny section of an endless forest, and he dances for me. Below the waist his body is a snake’s.

He touches me, later, with fingers and lips and coils, making my heart hammer and my breath quicken with something other than fear. I run my fingers over coffee-bean skin, trying to find where it turns into scales.

~ * ~

Naga do not marry.

They may build a home together, raise children together, create their lives together; but their ceremonies are only for birth and naming and death.

They tell a story about this: long ago, when the snake people married, a fair Naga girl was to marry a handsome youth. But at the wedding, with all the village gathered, her musk attracted and maddened the groom’s younger brother, who claimed her for himself. The brothers fought over her, long and hard and viciously, and each died of the other’s poison. In grief and shame the girl ran away, and never was seen again. The snake people have had no marriage since that day, and no true fights in mating season.

But my Nani considered herself married. “Once the gods have been called,” she said, “we cannot pretend that they were not here.”

~ * ~

His lips brush against my neck. “Asha, play for me.” We are in the garden again, among the dappled green scents and shadows, as we have been more often than is wise.

I find my voice. “Why.” It sounds dusty.

“You know I love your music,” he whispers in my ear. My breath catches at his voice, his closeness, his hands on my stomach, his heartbeat against my back; but his words are not the words I want.

I love your voice
, I want to say.
I love the way you move, the way you smell, the nonexistent point where skin becomes scale. I love the way you shimmer between forms, as I cannot and ache to and never will. I love the curves and the planes of your body, and I love your shifting face. I want to know who you are, and that is who I want to keep with me. Do you only love my music?

There are too many words. They jostle and clog in my throat. I shake my head.