Death and Night--A Star-Touched Novella

by Roshani Chokshi

  “I will always send word. I will visit often. I will sing your praises to the stars and back.”

  I laughed, but my throat felt tight with tears. “Oh, please don’t sing. Has Vanaj heard your voice? He’s already blind, Nritti.”

  She held my hand a little tighter. “Besides, you will have someone to pass your days with.” She looked at me slyly. “And your nights.”

  My cheeks heated beneath her gaze. I had told her a little about the Dharma Raja and his visits. But she had never met him, and I had never divulged his identity. With Teej approaching, I couldn’t help but think of Nritti’s original advice. What did he want from me?

  I had been courted before, but no one had gone to such lengths to know me. No one had dared me to dream of more for myself. No one filled me with dreams of my own. I’d come close to telling him on many nights, but couldn’t. I hadn’t forgotten that he had asked for a bond without love. Every time I imagined his rejection, my heart stuttered.

  “He has never said he loves me,” I said quietly.

  “But you think he does?”

  I nodded.

  “Do you love him?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “When you are with him, what do you see?”

  I closed my eyes, thinking of his presence. He was the burning thing in my heart, a caught flame that challenged and inspired me. He was the winged thing in my soul, something carrying my dreams aloft and freeing me from the ground. He was the nightmare of night, the tragic ending to a love story, the shadow over the cremation ground. My memories summoned him—night and smoke, embers and wings. I would not have him any other way.

  Nritti’s voice fell to a hush. “You see, sister? That is your answer.”

  Some insipid voice at the back of my head whispered to me anyway. And in its echoes, all I heard were my doubts. My fears. Vanaj had already given Nritti a mangala sutra. He had declared his love and married her in the manner of the gandharvas. Whereas the Dharma Raja had never once offered me that commitment. He had never once said that he loved me. But he gave you the moon for your throne and a garden unlike any in all the realms. He gave you stars for your hair and offered his heart in his palm.

  I felt Nritti’s hand smooth the hair away from my face.

  “Sister. You are courageous and clever, creative and compassionate. But your doubts will ruin you if you let them. Choose happiness. Choose love.”

  Soon after, she left. And it was just me and the yawning sky and the pale stars shuffling sleepily into place. There was only one week left until Teej. All this time, he had yet to name what this was. The Dharma Raja had stated his intentions ages ago, but intentions change. Change was the only thing that could be counted upon. I knew that better than most.

  For hours, I stood in the glass garden. Touching the tips of the crystal flowers and palming the diamond-paned jasmine vines. Every cool brush of the glass reminded me that what I felt was real. When I touched the glass, something crystallized within me. I loved him. I knew that now. And I wasn’t going to wait around for him to tell me that’s how he felt too.

  Tonight I would tell him. I prepared the grove, arranged my hair. I waited, my heart full to bursting, my mouth brimming with all things I wanted to say. Needed to say.

  But he never came.

  8

  DEATH

  I had lost myself. Sometimes I didn’t think I’d drawn breath until her lips touched mine. Sometimes I saw the world as she did, and it was no longer an old and creaking thing, but a song I had not been able to hear until now. I told myself it was nothing more than the perfect companionship. Devoid of love but full of understanding. And every time I told this to myself, I thought the whole palace of Naraka shook with laughter. I ignored it.

  For the past few days, I had imagined the world as it might be and not as it was. I had collected souls and spun them into new forms. There had been no need to visit the Tapestry. Until now.

  The moment I stepped into the room, it sensed that I had changed. And like any beast that sensed weakness, the threads pushed and pushed until they broke into my thoughts. They rummaged with cloth fingers, ignoring my protest and fury. They spoke over me with taunts, dragging a noose of my past around my neck until I was yanked into a memory I never wished to revisit:

  The Shadow Wife wore my mother’s face. She crouched by my side, grabbing me by the shoulders.

  “Do you know what you’ve done?” she asked.

  “I’ve done nothing but tell the truth. Something you should have done years ago.”

  I had been younger and more foolish then, eager for justice. My mother had been missing for centuries. Some said that the Sun Palace was so bright that the light could cut you if you weren’t careful. Some said that the light had cut my mother, splitting her heart right down the middle and blinding her heart to the love she should have carried for the child she left behind. I never asked why she left or where she went. When I was younger, I thought I had not loved her enough and that was why she left. When I grew older, I saw how love was sometimes not the tether but the whip. The thing that made you run far and fast and never return.

  “You exposed me. But every truth comes with a price,” said the Shadow Wife.

  I would never call her Mother. I would never call her Lady Chayya. I would never speak her name.

  “You don’t frighten me.”

  She tilted her head to one side, worrying her lip the way my mother did when she was considering something.

  “But love frightens you. Love and the loss of it frightens you, doesn’t it?”

  I said nothing.

  “You should have learned from the beginning that when someone leaves, it is because nothing was valuable enough to make them stay. You were not enough. For this, boy, I curse you. And with this curse, I bind your heart. The woman you give your heart to will leave you just as the Lady of the Wind left your father. And the heartache you feel now will be nothing to the loss of her.”

  The Tapestry taunted the words over and over. I reeled back, and the cloth fingers that had carded through my memory like so much silk suddenly crumpled and fell limp. My breath rattled in my lungs like the dead. I left the Tapestry behind me, determined to sort out my thoughts when Gupta appeared carrying a bundle of parchment roses.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Getting the palace ready, of course!”

  “For what?”

  “For her,” he said, rolling his eyes. “It needs to be fitting for a queen. You already made her that garden, but I thought she might like something a little more intellectual. Look!” He tossed one of the parchment roses into the air and it opened into a mouth, shouting out snippets of Gupta’s reports:

  It really comes down to opposable thumbs.

  And:

  There is something rather grotesque about pearls. Why does anyone like them? It is spit. Congealed spit.

  “You can’t be serious,” I said. “You expect her to walk through a garden of reports?”

  “It’s better than what you did! You gave her a garden of glass. That is actually hazardous to life.”

  It struck me then. Gupta was preparing for her to come here. Because he assumed she would become the queen of this kingdom. I turned slowly on the spot, staring at the halls where she might walk down, the mirrors where she might pause to consider a strange reflection. The dining table where she would sit across from me. The bedroom where I would sleep by her side. And as I imagined these things, the truth of the Shadow Wife’s curse took hold.

  If I fell in love with her, I would lose her. Maybe she’d come here and hate this place and leave. Maybe she’d realize that she couldn’t stand the thought of eternity with me after all. The Shadow Wife’s curse was true. I had felt it press itself into my bones the moment she spoke, and there it stayed, biding its time. Waiting until I fell in love.

  The only difference was that I could stop this before it ever started. I could spare us all a world of pain. Even if it broke me.

&
nbsp; “I’m sorry,” said Gupta. “It’s not a hazard. If she likes your garden, then who cares?”

  “She … she can’t come here.”

  Gupta stepped back, stunned. “What? Why?”

  Because I am dangerously close to falling in love.

  “It won’t work.”

  “I thought you said that if it couldn’t be her, you’d have no one?”

  “I did say that. I choose no one.”

  “But you love her…”

  “Don’t say that,” I said under my breath. “Don’t say those words. I don’t love her. I can’t love her and I won’t love her.”

  Gupta raised an eyebrow. “You do realize you have little choice in the matter.”

  “I have control over life and death, but not love?”

  “Yes.”

  “I made a mistake. I see that now.”

  “Why are you doing this?” he demanded.

  Because I’d already lived this. Under a shadow, I’d known a cursed existence and emerged into a cursed life.

  “I’m cursed,” I said.

  Gupta knew that, but I’d never told him the details until now. Over the years, he liked to guess what the curse was. Lack of personality was his favorite guess. When I finished telling him, he stared at the ground.

  “I still believe there is a way around this,” he said. He spun a pen in his hand, which meant that he was about to rummage through the archives and find a solution. “But even then, what does it matter? You already love her.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, even as something sparked and tugged within me.

  “If you can’t see it now, then perhaps that is the true curse.”

  He turned, leaving me standing in the middle of the palace. I couldn’t move from this spot. Moving meant that I had to put an end to something I liked far too much. Night came and went, and still I could not find the will to end what I had known. For the briefest space of time, I knew what the Tapestry had first taunted. A jewel no one else possessed: our time together. A door within reach: her arms around my neck.

  A soul claimed: my own.

  When the next dusk fell, I moved. I commanded my feet to move and they did not question me. But I could not command my thoughts to fall still.

  Death was not always inevitable. But pain was. And right now, I couldn’t see beyond the shape of that pain opening inside me. It wasn’t that I could not control myself around her. It was that I had no desire to. Beside her, the world seemed impossible with wonder.

  When I stepped through the final gate of trees, there she was. Burning like a star. She softened and then frowned. One look and I knew how impossible it was to live without her. I could exist without question. But live? Think, dream, create?

  All those things I had learned in her presence. For a crazed moment, I wondered whether someone could survive on the threshold of love, like leaning over the lip of a cliff. Or would the lure of the fall always prove too great? Maybe I would risk it. For her. But then she stormed toward me and her next words pronounced me cursed:

  “I love you.”

  Time stammered. Or I stammered. It didn’t seem to matter because she just continued talking:

  “I want to be with you because I love you. Not because I need you. I don’t,” she said, gesturing with her arms at the number of dream wells she had set up and the dream fruit that had gone to waste on the trees. “You inspired this, but I did it on my own. And I know I could do more at your side, but that’s not the reason I choose you—”

  “Wait,” I said. I felt like I was choking on the word.

  “And yet what I can’t understand,” she continued, “is why you insist on a bond with no love. I think you love me too.”

  “I don’t.”

  She raised an eyebrow. No lip biting. No harsh intake of breath. Nothing but a raised eyebrow.

  “Yes, you do,” she said calmly.

  “Why is everyone saying that?”

  “And I’ve also figured out why you refuse to say it aloud,” she said. “I know who you are.”

  “So you’ve guessed what that curse is, have you?” I asked, the words coming out crueler than I expected.

  “Not fully. Tell me.”

  “If I love you, you will leave me. And it will cause me great pain. That is the curse.”

  She stared at me and then she disappeared on the spot. I stood there, stunned for a couple of moments. And then I heard her voice behind me:

  “There. Curse fulfilled. You loved me. I left. I will imagine in my infinite vanity that it caused you pain.”

  “You’re not taking this seriously.”

  “Why should I?” she retorted. “How many people suffer a cursed life simply because they didn’t know how to listen to what the curse meant? Her curse was nothing more than the risk we take to live each day. All I hear is your cowardice.”

  “I am not—”

  “You’re scared,” she said. “I am too. But I would rather live in fear than live without love.”

  “I’m sorry I’m doing this to you…”

  “You are not doing anything to me. You are doing this only to yourself. If this is what you choose, then so be it.”

  For the first time, her resolve shook. She would not meet my gaze. She reached into her hair, tugging on the little sparrow fashioned of stars.

  “Fear is like a curse, Dharma Raja. Like a curse, it lays down lines where none should exist. It squeezes your thoughts into a pattern until you become convinced that there is no other way to see. But I choose differently. I wish I could say the same for you.”

  Once more, she left. But this time, she did not return.

  9

  NIGHT

  When he didn’t show up the first night, I wasn’t sure where I should go. Nritti would always welcome me, but I didn’t want to intrude on her and Vanaj with my pathetic tale of rejection. I needed someone with experience, which was how I found myself in the city of Nagaloka.

  Down here, the kingdom of the nagas was cold and miraculous. Glossy seaweed wrapped around the turrets, sea roses bloomed down paths of pearl and salt stones. Everything glowed from the small drifting silver thuribles that lit up the city with moonlight. Beautiful naginis showed off their new gems or sharpened fangs and twice I heard their seductive singing through a flurry of waves. It was the thick of night, and her kingdom was nearly empty. Everyone let me pass without question. I walked through the palace until I found Uloopi at the end of an emerald hall. Her face looked a little pinched from the recent flurry of stress, but she grinned the second she saw me.

  “Dream fruit?” she asked.

  “Hello to you too.”

  “What brings you here?”

  “Either delusions of love or the confusions of securing it.”

  “You know I hate seeing you sad, but I do love a good drama.”

  Uloopi and I walked—well, I walked, she glided—to a courtyard strung with seashells. Night was different under water. The waves took on an eerie texture. Almost feathered.

  At Uloopi’s prodding, I told her about the Dharma Raja. About the visits where he had promised me a throne, but not his heart. I told her about how each visit was a lesson in wonder, why I had abandoned the dream fruit in search of something more.

  “I forgot how little you know,” she said, reaching for my hand. “And I do not mean that in terms of your intellect, my friend. I think I know why your Dharma Raja refuses to utter those words…”

  “He is not mine.”

  Uloopi raised one bronze shoulder. “He wants to be. And you want him to be. Therefore I am calling it as I see fit.”

  “But—”

  “Do you want to know or not?”

  I nodded.

  And she told me the rest of the tale of the Shadow Wife and the cursed boy.

  * * *

  When he visited me, I was ready. I was armed with knowledge far greater than his past. Knowledge was powerful, but it was made powerful by the person who held it and spoke it. Knowledge
was little more than footsteps pressed into the earth and called a “line” so repeatedly that the act of telling made it true. But I knew better. Perspective propped up the world on stilts of belief. I knew that better than most. And now I had to convince the Dharma Raja.

  When I finally saw him, something in me unfastened. Here was someone who would have given me a kingdom and a throne without the expectation of my heart or my bed in return. Here was someone who saw me as no one ever had. When he looked at me, he didn’t see night but the potential it brought: dreams and songs not yet sung, potential and creation.

  Uloopi’s and Nritti’s words surrounded my heart and I spoke nothing but truths. I wasn’t afraid of being scared. Life was too long for that. But the more I spoke, the more he curled in on himself. Over and over, I laid my heart bare.

  Over and over, it crumpled.

  * * *

  A day and a dusk. A day and a dusk. A day and a dusk.

  I was losing track of it all. I was sitting in the middle of my garden of glass when the trees rustled. Hope plucked at my bones, playing me like an instrument until I thought my whole body was singing. But when I looked up, it was not the Dharma Raja standing at the edge of the horizon, but Nritti.

  “Have you no smile for me, sister?” she asked, beaming.

  But one look at my face told her everything. She ran to me then, her arms soft around my shaking shoulders.

  “What do I do?”

  At this, she lifted my chin. “Go to Teej. If he doesn’t come, then you know that you have lost nothing but time. And we have plenty of that to spend without consequence.”

  I nodded, but the truth was that I did not want to spend time without consequence. I had glimpsed something more, a purpose that I was beginning to unlock day by day. The visitors to my dream wells had doubled and tripled in the past couple of days. Little by little, they were remembering the images I had spun. Little by little, my voice was being carried out into the world. The Dharma Raja’s words floated back to me: We could rewrite the world, you and I.

  I didn’t need him, or anyone, to rewrite the world. But beside him, I had felt as if there was a world for me alone. A place that lived at the seams of my heart and grew there, wrapping glass vines around my bones and burying stars in my heart. It was a place of quiet and creativity. And if I had the choice, I never wanted to be without it.