by Varsha Ravi
“Don’t whine, muru,” she reprimanded. “I didn’t think this trip would go so long. There are a few packages you must give to the priests tonight before the service—hymns, auspicious times. It is not that far from your apartment, you know. It won’t take long.”
She remembered the temple in flashes, nothing distinct enough to form impressions of its distance and grandeur. She shut her eyes, and said, “Okay, but you better bring back souvenirs.”
Suri could hear the smile in her grandmother’s voice when she spoke. “Anything for my favorite granddaughter.” Then there was a murmur of noise, and the call cut. Suri exhaled, and placed her phone on the pillow.
She wondered what the temple would look like, now that she’d seen gods and felt them. The thought of returning nauseated her; even now, she recalled staring up at cold stone gods as a child and thinking of grave soil and the charred rubber of her infant brother’s pacifier. In her addled, malleable youth, she had smelled carnations and thought they were cut from kerosene.
In the early evening, she dragged herself out toward the living room. Kiran was curled into the couch, painting his toenails bright orange. The sight of it nearly made her smile.
He arched an eyebrow. “Where are you going?”
She fingered the edges of her canvas tote, hesitant. “My grandmother needs me to deliver something to the temple for Theyni tonight. Listen, do you mind coming along?”
“To the temple?” he tilted his head, genuinely confused. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” she said, faking a too-quick shrug. Her mouth was sour with bile. “I don’t want to walk back through the city after it’s dark. And it’ll be more fun to see the festival with someone else.”
Kiran considered it for a moment before twisting the cap back onto the nail polish and quickly blowing on the rest of his toes. He reached for his black coat, offering her a small smile. “Well, I would be a terrible guest if I denied a request for company.”
They walked through the city alone, the late autumn chill piercing through till it struck bone. Suri shivered, and he pulled off his coat as they crossed the street, tucking it loosely around her shoulders. It smelled faintly of tulasi and incense.
She glanced over at him as the light turned green and the cars rushed behind them. “Take it back.”
He snorted, an uncharacteristically inelegant gesture on him. “Do you think I need to be warmed, Suri?”
She resigned herself and pulled the coat closer around her shoulders. It still held a hint of that dry, searing warmth.
Her grandmother’s shop was shadowed, dusty from disuse. Kiran leaned against a rustic, scarred cabinet as she rifled through a stack of packages, looking for the one labeled with the temple’s formal name in her grandmother’s spidery, thin handwriting. She squinted at a similar package, then said, “What do you even do for her, morning after morning? She won’t tell me anything when I ask.”
“Errands, usually,” he said, examining an open book in the dim light. “All of your old chores. Sometimes she will ask for my counsel on auguries, or we will have tea. She’s a wise woman, your grandmother.”
Suri slid three packages out of the stack, double-checking the labels before hugging them to her chest. She glanced over, narrowing her eyes. “Why would she ask you for counsel on auguries? Are you god of prophecy? Have I finally gotten it right?”
The line of his mouth tightened, and for a moment, she thought he wouldn’t respond. Then he said quietly, “I had the gift of prophecy, when I was mortal. I still understand it to a certain degree. That is why.”
The packages nearly slid from her hands. Though sometimes he would make offhand, enigmatic comments, he rarely ever spoke about his life as a human, apart from the stories. And there was always a chance that those were entirely fiction, that she was reading too far into them. She was prone to wishing things into reality in that way, hoping and hoping until, in her own head, there was no doubt she was entirely right.
Kiran closed the book and held out a hand. She belatedly handed over the packages, and he stubbed out the candle with his thumb as they went back out into the twilight.
The soaring, brightly lit buildings of the city slowly fell away, revealing the outline of the hills strewn along the southern edge of the city. A thin, winding footpath twisted out from asphalt and led around the hill.
Distantly, Suri could see the glittering highway, the patchwork knots of suburbs below. But they were so far away they hardly existed, glinting in the waning glow of dusk.
The temple lay at the base of the hill. It had been built quite recently—a little over thirty years ago—but with the help of donations from Enesmati immigrants, they’d built it in traditional stone and marble, and the carved faces of the outer entrance shone. Families adorned in their festival best were crowding around the doors. Even from far away, Suri could hear the laughter and the hymns, smell camphor and blossoms. It attracted and sickened her in equal amounts.
Kiran stood by her on the tar-streaked asphalt, packages tucked into the crook of his arm. His brows were drawn together, just slightly, but otherwise his expression hadn’t changed. He nudged her when he saw her staring. “Let’s go, before it gets crowded.”
“It’s already crowded,” she muttered under her breath as they passed the temple-goers; they were dressed in gold-etched silks, in muslin and glittering jewelry, chattering endlessly to each other as they carried plastic bags filled with cartons of milk and juice.
Carved wooden doors opened into an expansive room, tiled with shining white marble. Small shrines dotted the temple, in each corner and on both sides, wound through with worshippers shuffling through the lines. At the center of the temple, four sanctums stood tall. Each one had an archway flanked by two pillars, carved with intricate designs that varied for each god. Small golden plaques were affixed below the curve of the archways, names written in English, then in archaic Enesmati.
Though the shrines to all four gods were crowded, the two central ones were the most congested. From the entrance, Suri couldn’t see the gods themselves, but she could make out the figures of priests performing a service for a gathering crowd. One held up a bouquet and began to strip off the flowers, tossing them at the feet of the god.
At the center of the temple, space had been cleared off the floor. Interlocking woven mats covered the cold tile and families sat on the edges, cross-legged and anticipatory.
Kiran looked lost, but when she tugged at his arm, he followed her around the crowds and through them until they ducked around the shrines in the back to find the prayer room. The head priest was a regular customer of her grandmother, and he greeted them with a smile. “It is always nice to see you here, Suri. It must have been years since your last visit.”
“Yeah, I think,” she agreed, dizzied by the smoke and noise. Her lungs were filled with soil. Kiran handed her the packages and she held them out, forcing a faint smile. “These are from my grandmother. She’s out of town, but she wishes she could be here.”
“And we miss her dearly,” he returned warmly. He inclined his head toward Kiran, gaze faintly scrutinizing. Fear electrified her for a single, painful moment. If there was anyone who would be able to tell god from human, it would be a priest. Finally, he said, “Are you a friend of Rana’s?”
Kiran’s smile was so thin it was nearly transparent. “Just an errand boy. This is a lovely temple.”
“I suppose it is,” he said, relaxing slightly. He offered them a grin, gesturing toward the main temple. “Don’t let an old man like me take up your night. Go join the festivities.”
They returned; the once-empty mats were now alive as two costumed children play-acted the old myth of Theyni, the story of dawn. An older kid sat by the edge of the mat, singing the hymns that accompanied it, and told the story. Transfixed, Suri lingered by the edge of the rightmost of the main sanctums, labeled in gold with the name Makai.
The memory returned as if it were a nightmare; her grandmother whispering old my
ths to her as a child, Suri’s fingers fisted in blankets as her eyes shone, dazzled by magic and gods and the promise of divinity to those who were kind and worthy. Faith had felt like a promise then.
As in the old story, Ashri and Athrasakhi brought dawn to the world. Ashri, queen of the heavens, rode in her lustrous chariot, symbolized by a cardboard box they’d spray-painted gold and taped silvery wheels onto. The god of wrath knelt in the chariot beside her, allowing his hands to hang out of the cardboard box as they tugged it across the woven mats. The child’s hands were red with finger paints, and he smeared the floor with them, just as the god was said to have stained the sky crimson with blood.
Without thinking, Suri reached up and traced the outline of the pendant on her thin golden necklace, her only relic from her parents. They had bought the pendant for her as an infant, when they had all been alive—the chain they had purchased to go with it no longer fit her, but her grandmother had bought a new one for her when she graduated.
The age-dulled pendant depicted three crossed knives interlocking to create a jagged six-pointed star. Suri had been born in the early morning, just before the sun rose; when she had begun to cry, the sky had been scarlet. Supposedly, that meant she had been born at a sacred time, a sought-after one. Those born under bloody skies were under Athrasakhi’s protection—the pendant, his traditional symbol of war, proved it. He was the guardian god of the Enesmati, the fiercest and the bravest, or so the story went.
Suri seldom thought about the pendant, but she never took it off. It was all she had left of her parents. And, she supposed, looking out over the temple as the hymn came to a close, it was all she had of her birth.
She turned to tell Kiran they could leave now, to apologize for getting lost in reverie for so long, but he was no longer beside her. She had not consciously thought of him as a tether, but now, without him, she felt lost in the chaos of the festival. Asphalt and glass and burnt hair—
Turning back to the concluding performance, she forced herself to breathe steadily. She catalogued her surroundings. The minor shrines were all as they had been, and the main four remained to orient her—Makai beside her, Ashri and Athrasakhi at the center, most likely, and another god at the far left.
When she found him, he was on the outskirts. His head was bent over the altar at the base of the shrine. A golden plaque informed her that it was the sanctum of Avya. From inside, a granite idol regarded her with sharp eyes painted on with ash and turmeric. Abruptly, Suri realized he was trembling.
“Kiran,” she whispered, and, with no small amount of effort, he pulled himself up. In the darkness, he held little to no form. Even the glow of his eyes was dim, thin with fatigue.
As if in explanation, he inclined his head toward the inner sanctum. The movement unsteadied him somewhat, drawn to it as a moth flits toward flame. “I know this. I know I do, from far more than my mortal life. It is just—” he broke off sharply, shaking his head. There was a bite of self-deprecation to his voice when he next spoke. “I told you, Suri. I am useless like this. A shade of a god.”
She opened her mouth to speak, then faltered. He was gazing at the inner sanctum, at the darkness and the fire within, with a peculiar kind of ache, misery diluted by wonder.
Suri had brought him with her to soothe old wounds, so she could step lightly over rough gravestones without fear of cutting her feet. But she had never considered how a home like this, built on dreams and prayers, might scorn those who could not reach for either.
Finally, she managed to ask, “Can you remember?”
Kiran was too skilled at simple deceptions for it to be clear when he was in pain. But Suri knew his face well, had studied it in dreams and in nightmares and in the light of day, and so she saw the fracture lines regardless.
“I cannot remember a single thing, and yet I can still feel the outline of what I’ve lost.” He let out a soft laugh, glass against stone, as he turned away into the light. “Thank you for bringing me here. But I think I’d rather like to go home now.”
The services had not yet ended—Suri thought they might last the entire night, spilling out into the dawn of the next morning. They retrieved their shoes and carried them in their hands, bare feet on cold, glittering asphalt.
They left the temple behind, but even after they had returned to the city, the festival still lingered—in the heady scent of camphor and blossoms that had wrapped itself into Kiran’s coat, and in the too-sharp, humorless corner of his mouth, crooked enough to be a flame.
11
Enesmat
Suri visited the garden every day. It was a daily routine—she would wake and get dressed and, regardless of whether Kiran came by to take her out, follow the worn path up the foothills and around to the garden. Sometimes Kiran was around, tending to the temple or to the garden, and sometimes he was not. But she had never gotten there earlier than him, never seen the brazier empty.
Those brief, stolen moments in the garden were, on some days, the only time she saw Kiran. It was rare if he was able to take her through the city once in a single week. Not that she needed that as much anymore. She had picked up enough of the language; not enough to be fluent, but enough that she could engage in conversation.
It wasn’t until the next letter arrived that Suri realized she hadn’t truly planned to continue in correspondence with her family. The kagha swooped out of the darkness, soundless and bright-eyed, and landed on her wrist unbidden, talons digging into her skin. She stared at it for what felt like an eternity, until the claws broke skin and warm blood began to gush from the wound. The iron smell of it cut through her shock and she stumbled back, leaning against the edge of the aviary window for support.
After she finally worked up the courage to open the letter, she found it disappointingly short uncoded.
S—
K & Q asking for updates. R has made a mistake, and now you have an additional assignment. Priority is still the K—if you cannot complete this, we will understand.
A
P.S. Send me a bouquet of those mountain wildflowers. I have heard they’re beautiful once dried.
The postscript made Suri pressed bloodied fingers to her lips, sick with suppressed laughter and terrifying guilt. Then she reread the note again, and then once more, and the laughter faded, leaving behind only nausea and fear.
If you cannot complete this, we will understand. She could nearly imagine him writing it, that strange dreamer’s smile of his tilting up the corner of his mouth. He would understand, perhaps, but excuses meant little to her mother and father. Failure was failure, whether adorned or not. If she didn’t complete the assignment, there would be consequences.
The mark was a foreign tradesman who had connections with some of the war chiefs. According to the attachment, Rohit had mismarked his paperwork and accidentally sent him classified files. She exhaled a small, bitter laugh through gritted teeth and wondered how Naja would’ve fared if he’d become king.
She cornered the man in his bedroom, clad only in nightclothes. He looked exactly as Anyu had described him—stout, balding, worn with deep furrows of judgment and wrath—but he watched her with terrified shock, as if she was a ghost, an Enesmati demoness. It was not unfamiliar, not to her, but she had spent so much time in this beautiful city she had nearly begun to consider herself something capable of that same beauty, that same wild tenderness.
But she wasn’t, and after she slid the obsidian knife between his ribs, her hands filled with blood until it ripped the air from her lungs and threatened to swallow her whole. Hehyava, susurrations of old ghosts crowding against the walls of her skull. Even after she scrubbed her hands clean, they were stained rose gold.
After that, the matter of writing another letter—of sending it—felt insignificant. This wasn’t her world to love, even if she wanted to. There was no point in dancing around the violence of why she’d been sent here.
She waited until the aviary was empty of trainers and servants and gold-eyed boys, then sent a l
etter full of banal updates, carefully printed descriptions of correspondences between the boy king and his associates. She pressed jasmine buds and wildflower stems between the pages and folded it tight. She could feel the imprint of talons on her wrist after the kagha disappeared from sight.
On the night Kiran took her to see the stars, the city was screaming. It was a kind of pre-festival celebration, Mohini had told her. Not strictly religious in any capacity, but tied into the culture of the festival anyway. The people set small fires across the city, in braziers tucked into alleys and at the corners of the markets, and colored them with powders and sang.
From inside the dining room, she heard none of it, felt none of that distant warmth. Only echoes, ghosts of sounds. The king, glancing up from the meal of stewed meat and lentils, said, “Keep your wits about you. There was a murder in the upper city just recently.”
Suri choked, pressing her napkin to her mouth and turning it into a cough. There was no threat in his words—they felt like a mild warning, a close imitation of genuine warmth. But the memory of it returned; blood on her palms, under her fingernails, in the spaces between her lungs, threatening to take her apart. She twisted her hands in her lap so that he could not see them shake. “I am capable of taking care of myself.”
His mouth tightened. “I am sure you are. Still, it cannot hurt to be careful.”
Oh, but it can, she thought, chewing through bite after bite of tasteless food, spices turned to ash in her mouth. She had taken pains to be careful ever since she’d arrived, and now that same caution had turned her soft and fragile, shattered by even a single death. She shut her eyes, but still the memory remained—dead eyes shining like a trout’s, skin leeched of blood, the faint smell of iron and the fainter one of rot.
She pushed away from the table, only slightly unsteady as she rose to her feet. “I must excuse myself, I feel ill.”
Suri could feel his burnt umber eyes studying her, narrowed in thought. Finally, he waved a hand in acquiescence. “I’m sorry to hear that. Seek out the healer if it grows worse.”