“Um, no. I mean, yes,” I hedged. “I mean, uh, what’s a narrative again?”
“Narratives are stories,” explained the tiger. “Haven’t you noticed some story slippage?”
And then Bunty’s image flickered again. I saw, in a flash, the old woman’s face, then the tiger’s, the old woman’s, the tiger’s.
“Oh, geez. What is going on here?” I whispered, mostly to myself.
“Why can’t a tiger become a vegetarian?” squawked Tuni, obviously impatient with the turn the conversation had taken.
“Not now, Tuni—” I began, but the yellow bird cut me off.
“Because they can’t change their stripes!” The bird flew nervously around my head. “Let’s get out of here, Princess, before this beast decides we’d be a purr-fect meal!”
Bunty sniffed. “It’s really ridiculously rude to discuss someone in their presence. You’re worse than the Anti-Chaos Committee.”
I wasn’t sure what an Anti-Chaos Committee was, but had something more important to ask about. “Okay, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, I had noticed something. This swapping-of-stories thing. Do you know why it’s happening?”
“I don’t know why the stories are getting mixed up.” Bunty looked thoughtful. “All I know is there have been several brazen breaches in nature’s normative narrative threads. There seems to be a conscious collapsing of complexity, a dumbing-down of diversity, a melding of multiplicity.” As Bunty said these long words, I was distracted by another one of those blue butterflies, wafting slowly by.
“I don’t understand what any of that means,” I finally admitted.
“Don’t ask that granny-eater any more questions!” Tuntuni yelled. “We’ve got to go find your moon mother before she rises in the sky!”
My old friend Tuntuni was right. We’d already delayed too long. It was time to go. But when I got back into the auto rikshaw, the tiger got up and padded over in our direction, as if they wanted to come with us. Tuni put up a wing. “Oh, no, Professor Tiger, you’re not invited.”
“But I can unquestioningly help you on your quixotic quest!” roared the beast. “To find your matrilineal ancestress, the moon!”
“Princess!” squawked Tuntuni in my ear. “Be reasonable! If they look like a killer and sound like a killer, what’s to say they aren’t a killer? What if the tiger only wants to help because they want to eat your moon mother or, worse still, us?”
I knew that what Tuni was saying was the sensible thing, but it still felt bad to be stereotyping Bunty in this way just because they were a tiger.
“No offense, Bunty,” I said finally, “I think it’s better if we part ways. You find your way into your right story, and we’ll find our way back to ours.” Then, thankfully, the auto rikshaw started. I gunned the engine and drove away.
I couldn’t help but feel guilty, though, as Tuntuni, Tiktiki One, and I left the tiger shaking their head in our rearview.
Almost right away, I regretted leaving Bunty behind. Because the scenery passing by was so weird, I knew that the story-smushing thing was happening again, and I wished the smart tiger was with us to help me understand what was going on.
Within minutes of leaving Bunty, I saw, jogging along the side of the road, a wedding party. There were four dragonflies bearing the sticks of a house-like palanquin on their shoulders. Inside the palki was a little doll dressed as a bride, sandalwood decorating her face and her red silk sari pulled modestly over her head, under a shola pith tiara. Next to her palanquin, riding on a rocking horse, was a little groom doll dressed in white dhoti panjabi with a pointy bridegroom’s topor on his head. Bringing up the rear of the wedding party was a motley dancing crew: some frogs with mushroom umbrellas over their heads, some giant ants, and an elephant and a horse prancing around on their rear legs.
I was reminded of a bunch of Bengali nursery rhymes I’d heard from Baba, like one about an elephant and horse dancing at a wedding, but before I could ask Tuntuni about it, I saw who else was dancing in the wedding party. A plump stuffed bear with a tub labeled Hunny and a sweet little piglet in a striped shirt.
“Well, that doesn’t seem right,” I muttered. The bear and piglet were definitely characters from a totally different set of cultural stories.
“Don’t be so judgy about grammar,” sniffed Tuntuni. “So what if the bear doesn’t have a great sense of spelling? He’s a bear after all.”
I drove on, not bothering to explain to my bird companion that it wasn’t the bear’s spelling of the word honey that was bothering me. Why were so many stories from different cultures mashing up like this?
We hadn’t gone but half an hour when something else weird happened. It was almost sunset, and I was getting more and more worried about ever getting my moon mother’s attention before she rose in the sky. Tuni and I were calling and calling to her, our heads turned upward, which is why I didn’t notice—until it was too late—the sticky white strands covering the road like a huge spiderweb. I swerved the auto rikshaw hard and ended up driving us into a ditch.
“Hang on!” I yelled.
“Second accident in a day! There go your rikshaw insurance raaaaaaaaates!” shrieked Tuni as we crashed, the auto landing with a metallic screech down in the ditch.
“You okay?” I rubbed my head where I’d slammed it into the side of the vehicle. The front of the auto rikshaw was all crumpled, and there was a big metal piece sticking out of the bottom. (An axle? That’s a car thing, right?)
“Oh, my wing! My beak! My poor handsome head!” groaned Tuni. “Princess, if you had a driver’s license, I would tell them to revoke it!”
The gecko just sat there, blinking at the both of us.
I managed to get myself out of the beat-up, sideways auto and then limped off to look at the stuff blocking the road. The path in front of us was covered in white stringy goo. It looked like we were at summer camp and someone had decided to pull a prank by decorating our cabin with crisscrossing string. The string wasn’t just across our path in the road, but threaded through the groves of thorny trees on either side of it. There was something about this that felt like a setup. Immediately, I took out my bow and arrow and looked this way and that.
“Keep your eyes peeled for trouble,” Tuni hissed, again sounding like he’d escaped from some old-timey movie about a hard-boiled detective.
I made a motion like he shouldn’t talk. Then I used two fingers to point to my eyes, before scanning my fingers out over the landscape around us.
“What is that? Do you think we’re in some kind of police show or something?” Tuni scoffed, totally not bothering to keep his voice down.
I rolled my eyes. My birdbrained friend was so annoying. Ignoring Tuni, I continued to scan the roadside, my weapon at the ready. It didn’t take us long to see where the string was coming from. A few yards away from where I’d crashed the rikshaw, a woman sat by the edge of the road. She was spinning the threads, which flew off her spindle as if by magic, coating everything in sight. She lifted her head as we approached, but she didn’t exactly look like she was about to attack us or anything. On the other hand, there was something odd about her. I mean, what were the chances of bumping into yet another old woman so soon on our journey?
I put down my weapon. “All right, Bunty!” I laughed, striding toward the spinning granny. “I know it’s you!”
“Take off that wig already!” Tuni added, dive-bombing the old woman’s gray hair and trying to pull it off with his beak.
The only problem was, the old woman’s hair didn’t come off. “Stop that! Who are you and why do you hurt a helpless old woman?” she shrieked, almost knocking over her magic spinning wheel.
“Wait, Tuni …” I was starting to get a bad feeling about this.
“Who are you?” The old woman moved her head in my direction, and I realized she probably couldn’t see me, as her eyes were coated in a white film.
“You can’t fool us, tiger!” Tuntuni yelled, dive-bombing her hair again. Th
is time, even Tiktiki One got in on the act, climbing up to the old woman’s white-sari-clad shoulder, then flicking its tongue at the woman’s wrinkled face.
“Stop! Stop! Why do you hurt me so?” the pathetic old lady cried, sounding so real that my stomach dropped about a thousand feet.
“Tuni! Tiktiki One! Hold on! Halt!” I went to pull the bird and lizard off the granny. “That’s not Bunty!”
“Let me go!” Tuntuni squirmed in my hands, his claws aiming at the old woman’s face. “I’ll rip that cheap mask off! I know it’s the tiger under there!”
“What do you demented dilettantes think you’re doing?” The voice coming from behind us was way too familiar. I turned around to see Bunty the tiger bounding toward us from the direction we’d left them. “Stop assaulting that spinner! Stop mauling that matriarch!”
Tuni did that cartoon thing where you look at one person, then the other, then back at the first. His little yellow head swiveled from Bunty to the old woman to Bunty again. And then he retracted his claws with a horrified expression.
“I’m so sorry, you sweet old, darling, dearie grammy,” he burbled, flying around her head and trying to smooth down her hair with his wings. “You just keep on spinning and forget this ever happened.”
As Tuni said the word spinning, however, the old woman’s spinning wheel suddenly flickered. It transformed from a wooden wheel spinning the sticky white threads, to a spinning toy top, to a giant salad spinner spitting out glistening strings like they were a bed of leafy greens.
“Oh!” the old woman shrieked. Then she rose from her seat, and suddenly, she flickered too. Her white sari transformed into some dirty patchwork robes and her gray hair into a crooked jet-black bun on the side of her head. Her neck was loaded down with shell and bead necklaces, and her bare feet were thick with dust. In one hand, she held a one-stringed ektara, and with her other hand, she played a small drum that was strapped over her shoulder.
“I am no grandmother!” the woman shouted. “I’m a Baul khepi, a crazy one, a mystic minstrel whose life is dedicated to that which is more powerful than us all!”
I knew Bauls were wandering singers who made music and lived on donations, not bothering with the normal social rules like living in one place or having a job. I thought about the khepi’s words and figured they must be some kind of a riddle, like so much in the Kingdom Beyond Seven Oceans and Thirteen Rivers.
“Your life is dedicated to that which is more powerful than us all,” I murmured. “Is it love?”
“No, no, I know this one!” said Tuni, waving a wing in the air like he was in a classroom. “It’s snacks!”
“No, the answer is obviously death!” volunteered Bunty, gnashing their teeth.
Tiktiki One just blinked, flicking out its rubbery tongue to eat some mosquitos. I guess its answer was hunger.
“Silence!” the khepi shrieked, lifting her small one-stringed instrument in the air. The dried-gourd base of the ektara glowed as if reflecting her own emotions. “I wasn’t asking for answers! It was a metaphor, you doofuses!”
“Well, you could have told us that before we started guessing,” said Tuntuni, but the bird’s words got quieter by the end of the sentence. The woman raised her glowing ektara even higher in the air. As she strummed the one string with her finger, the instrument not only made its twangy sound but seemed to generate some sort of energy force field around it that made the Baul khepi glow like a meteor. “I may enjoy sitting in forests and spinning stories in my spare time, but I can still smite you for your insults!”
“No, no, no need for smiting!” I assured the furious woman, trying to back away as quickly as I could. “We’ve already been smote this week. I mean, smitted. Smook?”
“Definitely!” added Tuni, flying backward even more quickly. “We’ve totally fulfilled our smitings quota! We’re all set! No need to put yourself out!”
Tiktiki One just click-clacked its tongue, which could have meant anything, and Bunty the tiger gave a little shrug. “Regardless, I was not with these ignoramuses, Your Baulness! Indeed, I am hardly acquainted with them! Never even seen them before!”
The spinner-slash-mystic-minstrel ignored all this and squinted at me, halting her playing as she did. “Wait a minute, I recognize you. You’re that Moon Girl, aren’t you?”
“I’m Kiranmala—the daughter of the moon,” I said hesitantly.
“She’s an old friend of mine, your mother,” said the khepi. “She too is a wanderer, never the same, not attached to the illusions of this earthly life.”
Wasn’t that the truth, I thought. I just wished my moon mother could be a little more attached to at least one thing in this earthly life—me. But still, she was the only one who could help me right now, and maybe this mystic could help me find her. “Do you think you might be able to help us get my mother’s attention?”
The Baul woman thought for a minute, her eyes now clear and shrewd. “Why?”
“It’s a bit of an emergency,” I said, noting how low the sun was now in the sky. “I have to get to New Jersey, rescue my friend Lal, and then make it back here to help stop Sesha from taking over the Kingdom Beyond.”
“Fine, fine.” The singer nodded. “All very noble and worthy of you. There will be a price, though.”
“Oh, all right, take the tiger!” Tuni indicated Bunty with his two wings. “You drive a hard bargain, Ms. Khepi, but if you must have your price, there it is!”
“Not remotely amusing,” said Bunty, snapping their teeth in Tuni’s direction.
“Well, you can’t blame a bird for trying,” Tuntuni sniffed.
“I don’t need a tiger! I just want you to gather up my lost story threads, you fools!” the woman roared. The salad spinner was, I noticed, still spitting out strings of sticky white thread even without the khepi operating it. “Or I will smite you such a smiting as you have never been smote before!”
“Very well, then, as I’m apparently superfluous in this situation, I will skedaddle. Most delightful to meet you all. Best of luck with the story strings and all that,” said Bunty, backing slowly away.
“All of you must help!” shrieked the minstrel. She pointed her ektara at the animal, making streaks of fire leap from the instrument’s strings.
“I say, really, that seems hardly necessary …” began Bunty.
“You dare defy me?” the Baul woman shrieked. In response, her ektara sent out sparks at Bunty’s feet, and the tiger had to jump to get out of their way. Then she clashed her small finger cymbals together, and the waves of sound reached out to slap at the poor animal’s ears. Bunty yelped and jumped, rubbing at their singed fur and sore ears.
“I’d be delighted to help!” Bunty yelled. “I was just saying to Princess Kiranmala—I mean, this young person I’ve never met before, how much I enjoy gathering up slippery threads of whatever that is scattered stickily all over the sylvan forest scene.”
Now that I knew we’d be gathering them, I cautiously eyed the endless threads wound all over the forest. “What did you say these were? Story threads? Why are they tangled like that?”
“Do you want to waste time asking me questions, or find your mother?” the Baul woman responded, and so I busied myself, along with Tuni, Tiktiki, and Bunty, in gathering the glowing white threads from the thorny trees.
It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. The strings were sticky and slippery, and near impossible to get a hold of. It grew dark—though with no illuminating moon yet in the sky—as we gathered the woman’s lost story threads, and my hands were raw and bleeding from getting cut on the thorn trees.
Finally, we were done. It wasn’t pretty, but the glowing, sticky threads were disentangled from the trees and in a big pile in front of the patchwork-wearing khepi. She sighed when she saw them and played a little tune on her ektara:
The story threads are twisted, torn
And no new stories can be born
Smooshed together stories same
Uniqueness gone, in chaos�
��s name
Before I could ask the Baul woman what the song meant, or more importantly, how she was going to get my mother’s attention, her face began to shimmer and transform yet again.
The Baul woman swirled around and around, dancing like a spinning top herself. The colors on her multicolor coat melted into one, growing brighter and brighter until they were just a pure silver light that lit up the night. I watched, mesmerized, as the body of the Baul woman disappeared into the growing brightness. Bunty, Tuni, and even Tiktiki One dived for the ground, bowing low. Only I stayed standing.
“Hello, daughter.” My moon mother’s voice was like bells on the wind. Her light illuminated the dark forest so that it looked like day. Her presence had made the animals freeze in place and time. Even the trees seemed to hold their breath before her.
My mother was dressed a bit like the Baul minstrel had been—but in a white sari shot through with beautiful silver threads, her dark hair on the side of her head in a bun bound with jasmine flowers. The minstrel’s ektara was in her hand too—and I couldn’t be sure if the Baul had always been my mother or if this was one of those story-smushing situations again.
“Mother!” I reached out my hand, but my flesh touched only her transparent energy. Where we made contact, I felt filled with energy and power. Even though I’d been frustrated with her before, now I felt myself glowing in her presence, as if from the inside out.
“Mother, I don’t know what’s going on with all these story threads getting tangled.” I pointed to the pile of glowing threads still at her feet, and the salad spinner still spitting out glowing string. “But I’ve come to ask you about something else—if you could make me a wormhole through the fabric of space-time to the other dimension.”
“Oh, is that all?” My moon mother’s laugh was tinkly and sweet. “Most daughters just ask for an after-school snack or a little allowance.”
“Or a cell phone,” I added, wondering for a second if Ma and Baba would finally let me have one if my moon mother gave it to me. “I know. But for now, the wormhole would be awesome.”
The Chaos Curse Page 4