Star Daughter

by Shveta Thakrar

  She broke off in midsentence, her eyes widening.

  Before Sheetal could dodge, stubby fingers closed around her chin and yanked it down. She wanted to die. If Vaibhav or Bijal happened to be watching, they’d probably tell everyone at school she had lice.

  Her auntie clucked her disapproval. “Dikri,” she whispered in Gujarati, “your roots—” Without pausing, she switched to English, as if that would somehow keep anyone who might walk by from understanding. “Your roots are showing.”

  “What?” Sheetal wrenched away even as her pulse sped up. Not possible. She’d just dyed her roots. Radhikafoi was being paranoid. She had to be.

  “This is no laughing matter!” Her auntie grabbed the dupatta from around Sheetal’s neck and tried to put it on her head instead. “If someone were to see—”

  Sheetal barely evaded her. “Radhikafoi, people are staring.”

  “Fine!” her auntie snapped, draping the dupatta back over Sheetal’s shoulders. “But you need to get your condition under control as soon as you get home. We have Maneesh’s engagement party this weekend!”

  Sheetal nodded, two thoughts hammering through her mind. Had the dye really not taken? And had anyone else seen?

  Oh, gods, had Dev seen?

  He kept talking about wanting to hear her sing and writing a song for her. He was way too close to her secret as it was.

  The secret that made her blood thrum in time with the heavens.

  Maybe she should tie on the dupatta like a headscarf, even if it made her look like a village girl. If anyone saw—if they suspected . . .

  This was why, as her auntie always reminded her, she couldn’t let herself be noticed at school, why she could never give anyone a reason to look too closely, why she would always have to hide.

  Even though part of her wanted to let it all show.

  Another guest came up to Radhikafoi, and Sheetal seized the chance to duck into the restroom across the hall. She met her panicked reflection in the mirror and stared. And stared some more.

  It was impossible. She’d dyed her hair a deep, durable, normal black three nights ago. And yet tonight, right at her scalp, were the beginnings of roots.

  Shimmering, sparkling, defiantly silver roots.

  The fear she’d shoved down welled back up.

  What was she going to do if the dye didn’t work anymore? White hair was one thing; some people turned to bleach to get that look. But shimmering silver? Not so much. Nobody’s hair glowed.

  It was as if her hair was resisting being disguised.

  The silver voices swept over Sheetal again, stilling her thoughts. Her heart leaped in response.

  Like an invocation, the melody resounded within her, eerie and ethereal. Only a ceiling, at most a roof, separated her from her birthright. All she had to do was step outside, the music promised, and it would be hers. Her fingers grasped for phantom instruments, primed to dance over newly tuned strings.

  Her voice bubbled up in her throat, so close to cresting over her lips.

  Someone opened the restroom door. “Sheetal?” Minal called.

  The sound of her name spoken over a flushing toilet, unwelcome as ice water, broke the spell, a brutal reminder of where Sheetal was and the roomful of people just outside. She clamped her mouth shut.

  “You never came back,” Minal pointed out. Her eyes narrowed. “It’s the song again, isn’t it?”

  Instead of answering, Sheetal hugged her. “I’m fine. Thanks for checking on me.”

  The final chords of the silvery song lingered on her tongue like a layer of frost, and she rushed to swallow them. They would have to wait. As much as it hurt, she would have to wait.

  She pressed her hands to her face, shutting everything out for the span of a couple of breaths. Then she rearranged her part to bury her pale roots, doused the light flickering at her core, and stepped out into the hallway, ready to play at being ordinary again. Just as normal and human as Radhikafoi and Dad and the whole world expected her to be.

  Radhikafoi never talked about her sister-in-law, as though silence could scrub the memory from Sheetal’s heart and, more importantly, from her DNA. Her distasteful “condition.” As though what her auntie refused to accept didn’t exist.

  But no matter how hard Sheetal tried to hide it, no matter how much Radhikafoi wanted to deny it, she would always be half a star.

  Always.

  2

  An hour after fighting off Radhikafoi and faking her way through the rest of the party, Sheetal lay back on the cool grass behind her house. Alone at last—just her, an industrial-size bag of cheese puffs, a rolled-up hoodie for a pillow, a reading light, and a library book.

  She turned the page and realized she hadn’t absorbed a single word of the previous chapter.

  Oh, who was she kidding? If she wanted to read, she’d be nestled in her bed under a pile of blankets, not in the backyard sneaking glimpses of the stars over the top of her book.

  Her inner fire hadn’t ignited like this since before her mother left. She’d thought she was safe—until tonight, when she’d almost started singing in a public restroom. A restroom!

  She shuddered and plowed into the cheese puffs. If Minal hadn’t found her in time . . . If Dev had heard her . . .

  And her hair! Her own hair had betrayed her.

  Why?

  Overhead, the stars glittered in their usual patterns. Constellations, asterisms, clusters. The lunar mansions, where the moon’s twenty-seven wives lived. Sheetal traced the faint lines of her relatives’ faces, the flow of their glimmering tresses. As a kid, she’d known all their voices, strung together like pearls in a cosmic necklace. The memory flickered within her, a silver-toned, subtle language that had little to do with human speech.

  Twinkling among them, of course, was Charumati. In Sheetal’s eyes, her mother burned more brilliantly than the others in the blue-black heavens, almost too vibrant, too visible.

  Sheetal stuffed her face with more cheese puffs and chewed really hard.

  If you lopped it off at just the right place, her parents’ romance could be a fairy tale: Charumati, eager for adventure, had abandoned her place in her nakshatra, her royal house, and descended to Earth because she’d thought human lives looked glamorous and exciting. And who had she met there but astrophysicist Dad, who’d made a career out of studying the stars?

  He liked to say it was love at first conversation, a love made of inspiration and dreams and enchantment.

  In the fairy tale, they met, they married, they had Sheetal, Dad solved a huge problem in his field, and the three of them lived happily ever after.

  But life wasn’t a fairy tale, and unfortunately for Charumati, the time when humans believed in magic had passed. Except for a few handfuls of dreamers here and there, mortals had built themselves a new fantasy, a boring one where they already knew everything worth knowing—all empirical evidence and explicitly defined labels. Anything else was foolish superstition and couldn’t possibly exist. There wasn’t room for her mother in a world like that, and so she went home to the starry court.

  Leaving Sheetal with nothing but these occasional scraps of melody that both soothed and starved her.

  Superstition? Tell that to my hair, she thought, Radhikafoi’s aghast face looming in her mind. She gingerly probed the top of her head with orange-dusted fingers. A strand came loose in her hand, its tip gleaming bright as frost.

  How was it silver again? Why was any of this happening? Why tonight?

  Her chest pulled as taut as a harp’s strings. She gulped down a breath and trained her eyes on the celestial canopy above her, picking out the various nakshatras. Ashvini. Svati. Vishakha. Satabhishak. Pushya.

  As if she’d invoked them, the stars began crooning down their ragas in voices as glossy and polished as a favorite dream. Their essence suffused the sky in light and song. Until she’d first tried to share them with Minal when they were six, Sheetal hadn’t realized that only she and Dad could see the faces in her nak
shatra, let alone hear their music. No one else.

  The balmy night sky draped dark folds over her like a jewel-studded shawl. She tried to fight its spell, to fight its song, even as the spark at her core flared in acknowledgment.

  “Listen,” the stars murmured. “Listen.”

  She slowly relaxed, her muscles loosening. The part of her that had never stopped waiting for her mother to return wanted to listen. It had never stopped longing for Charumati’s gentle touch on her head, had never stopped dreaming of her mother’s warm hugs, of her sparkling stories and her shimmering smile. I miss you, Mom.

  As Sheetal sank into the starry song, sipping it like silver wine, it spread through her body, illuminating her veins, the secret chambers of her heart. It felt like reaching into lore and legend and yet-untapped reservoirs of dreams. She was close to understanding, so close. . . .

  Her hands tingled.

  “Nice night,” Dad remarked, jolting her out of her reverie. He’d changed out of his kurta pajama into chinos and a T-shirt. “Saying hi to your mom?”

  Sheetal leaped up, her breath coming in gasps. She must not have heard the sliding door.

  Normally she loved having Dad around. But right now his easy presence felt jarring, a false note that sent hairline fractures through the delicate spun glass of her link to her constellation—to her mother. The astral melody receded from her grasp.

  Without the silvery chimes to keep it at bay, her suspicion came flooding back. Why? she wondered again, feeling the carpet of grass under her bare feet. Why were the stars calling to her? What did they want?

  One corner of Dad’s mouth turned up. “Or maybe you’re thinking about somebody else?” He started humming a familiar tune, but deliberately off-key.

  Sheetal froze. “Oh, my gods, Dad! Stop!”

  Dad mangled a few more lines. “What, you don’t think I sound like Kishore Kumar?”

  Her face burned as hot as the new-lit flame inside her. “Can we, I don’t know, not talk about this?”

  “But I love this song. Don’t you?” He hummed it again, exaggerating the notes.

  “Dad!” If only she could sink into the lawn and disappear the way her appalled eyebrows must have vanished into her hair. “What. Are. You. Doing. Please stop.”

  Still keeping a straight face, Dad helped himself to a cheese puff. “Don’t tell me I need to invite the Merai clan over for Scrabble night just to keep an eye on you.”

  Sheetal wished she could zip her hoodie up over her face. “Radhikafoi told you, didn’t she.” Not that there was really anything to tell. It wasn’t like she and Dev had been making out in public.

  And ew, she did not want to be thinking of making out with anyone while Dad stood two feet away.

  Dad chuckled. “No, but you just told me yourself.”

  Here came the no-boys, no-dating lecture. But Sheetal knew how to throw him off. As a kid, she would ask Dad what he saw when he watched the heavens, and he always said the same thing: Your mummy.

  Tonight, still overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of the starsong, she whispered, “Aren’t you tired of missing her? Mom, I mean?”

  “I hear her, dikri,” Dad said simply. “I’ll never be tired of that.”

  “How, though?” Sheetal stared at him. “She’s gone.”

  “I hear her,” Dad repeated. “I hear her singing. It’s as beautiful as the day we met.”

  “I don’t understand.” He’d never told her that before. Her chest tightened in confusion and hurt. Did he hear Charumati more often than Sheetal did?

  Dad looked up at the sky, and his gaze went soft. There it was, the murky gray sorrow they’d both gotten so good at keeping from anyone else. “You’re going to be seventeen soon. Growing up.”

  “In four days.” Sheetal didn’t know what else to say. Maybe it didn’t matter how much Dad could hear her mother. It didn’t make her not being there any better.

  “Chakli,” Dad said, pulling Sheetal to him. “My little chakli. You know I love you, right?” She buried her head in his chest. He smelled like shaving cream and security.

  For a minute, she let herself forget that she wasn’t his little sparrow anymore, let herself forget all her questions, all her doubts. She just let herself be in the past, when everything was the way it was supposed to be. Summer days wading into the ocean at Point Pleasant with Dad, but only up to her waist so her hair stayed clear of the salty surf, while her mother knelt on the shore to chat with the seagulls.

  Or Friday nights ordering pizza and playing Trivial Pursuit, which Charumati somehow always won. She’d reject the pizza as too greasy, but she couldn’t get enough of human trivia and politics, to the point that Dad took to calling her an undercover spy for the stars.

  Of course, all that had screeched to a halt when she left. Though seven-year-old Sheetal had pleaded for Dad to keep playing with her, he’d stashed the game away in a closet and given her biographies instead.

  They were mostly about physicists. But it wasn’t like science could teach her how to be half a star.

  Or how to keep her stupid silver roots from glowing like a beacon for the entire banquet hall to see. Ugh—she so didn’t want to tell Dad about that, but if she didn’t, Radhikafoi definitely would.

  Sheetal stepped back from the hug. “Dad, my hair. The dye—I don’t know what happened.”

  “Say what?” he asked, his voice calm. His just collecting data scientist voice.

  The story poured out of her. Something like alarm flitted over Dad’s face, but when she looked closer, he was only frowning. “Just try another box. It was probably a bad batch.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Sheetal said. Too bad her tingling palms didn’t agree.

  Dad had glanced up again to where clouds were rolling in, concealing the stars from his sight, and melancholy spread over his face. After Charumati left, well-meaning aunties and uncles had tried to set him up with other women, insisting Sheetal needed a mother and he needed a wife. He’d politely but steadfastly refused every single potential match. Sheetal knew there would never be anyone for him but her mother.

  “Dad—” she began, wanting to reach out but not sure how.

  “Almost seventeen. You’re still too young for boys,” he said sternly, cutting her off. “Don’t think I forgot.”

  Sheetal’s sympathy dried right up. Gods, he really had no clue. Half the desi kids she knew dated, even if they did it behind their parents’ backs.

  But that wasn’t the point. Something bizarre and kind of scary was happening to her, and here Dad had gotten hung up on making sure she didn’t date. “It’s not like Dev saw. No one did!”

  Dad shook his head, still staring up into the night. “No, Sheetal. You’re my daughter, and it’s my job to keep you safe. No boys at least until you finish high school, understood? I want you to promise me.”

  It was so unfair. Why wasn’t he listening? “Dad!”

  Iron entered his words, a warning not to push him any further. “I mean it.”

  Sheetal managed not to sigh out loud. “Fine.”

  Her heart twisted. Even if he was being totally unreasonable, she hated lying to him.

  Dad rubbed his forehead. “Good.”

  It wasn’t good at all, and Sheetal really didn’t like how he could be okay with all this. With Charumati abandoning them to fend for themselves. With Sheetal having to hide. She gesticulated wildly at the glittering firmament with its landscape of stars and shades of blue and black, and anger erupted from her like lava. “You can’t wait for her anymore, Dad. You know that, right?”

  The second the words were out of her mouth, she wanted to snatch them back.

  When Dad spoke, it was clipped. He rolled up the bag of cheese puffs. “Bedtime. For both of us.”

  Crap. Why had she said that? It wasn’t as if she meant it. Feeling like a jerk, she chased after him into the shadowed house.

  Dad didn’t say anything else until they’d reached her room. “Don’t forget to brush your te
eth.” He pressed a quick kiss to her forehead, then disappeared down the hall.

  Alone, Sheetal crumbled. The stars blinked through her bedroom window, but their song had gone quiet. She wanted to know what she should do, why her roots were showing, why her own music swelled so urgently against her rib cage, a chorus of shining pewter notes chiming for release.

  But Dad couldn’t answer those questions. Only the stars could.

  Tossing under her sheets after four movies in a row had all failed to grab her, Sheetal knew the night was toast. Even after she’d put down her tablet, she left the light on. She couldn’t stop thinking of how the starsong had sucked her right in, how close she’d come to . . . something.

  Worse, the hole in her heart she’d so carefully cemented over ten years ago was cracking open again.

  She tore at the skin by her thumbnail until a drop of blood appeared. I’m not afraid, she told herself, trying hard to believe it. I’m not.

  Her gaze wandered over the familiar things in her room: the baby dragon plushie; the desk weighed down with scented candles and clippings of gourmet recipes she’d never make; the turquoise shelves crammed with novels, biographies from Dad, comics from Dev, collages, Post-its scribbled with inspirational quotes, and framed pictures of her with Minal, with Dad, even with Radhikafoi, Deepakfua, and her bratty cousins; the glow-in-the-dark stars Minal had stuck on the ceiling as a joke.

  Think about those things, she ordered herself. Count sheep. Whatever. She even tried replaying Dev’s song from the party in her mind like a lullaby. But the astral melody only chimed alongside it in her thoughts, its gossamer strains a perfect score to his lyrics. Her palms tingled, and the flame at her core shot up.

  And there goes sleeping.

  She reached over and dug her phone out from under a half-read biography about the mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. A couple of taps, and Minal’s recording appeared, showing a grinning Dev onstage. As his voice floated from the phone’s speaker, Sheetal’s insides went all bubbly. He was seriously good—good enough to go pro if he wanted. And, okay, it didn’t hurt that he was seriously nice to look at, either.