“And what else?” Kaushal prompted.
Urjit made an annoyed sound. “I apologize for my discourteous remark yesterday.”
Sheetal had forgotten all about that. “Don’t give it another thought.”
She tried to swerve around them, but Urjit asked, abashed, “Might there be any more?”
“No, but I might still have some other snacks. I’ll look.” Sheetal pretended not to notice the way Urjit’s face lit up at that, beaming silvery warmth all around him, until he caught himself and snuffed it out. “Anyway, I have to go. I’ve got my next lesson.”
Kaushal walked her to the exit. “He truly enjoyed that chevdo, as did I. It reminded me of my childhood.”
“I’m glad,” Sheetal mumbled, mentally going over her schedule for the rest of the afternoon. “Hey, how much do you know about the star hunters?”
“Very little. Why do you ask?”
She shrugged. “No reason.”
“Listen, you should know that it also took me some time to gain a handle on my powers. It is a difficult process for those of us who began like this. However, with time, it becomes exponentially simpler.” Kaushal gestured to himself. “All of it does.”
But Sheetal didn’t need his sympathy. She just wanted to go. “I’m not staying,” she pointed out, “so it doesn’t matter.”
“Ah,” he said, visibly deflating. “I suppose not, then.”
21
“I thought we would rehearse in here today,” Charumati said, unlocking her suite of rooms. Her enigmatic smile shone as bright as the starlight tresses that tumbled down her back.
Confused, Sheetal followed her mother inside. She had to grin at the hues that fell outside the sidereal color scheme of silver, black, and blue. They were small things—subtle accents like a scarlet cushion, a green fairy-tale compendium, a purple candy dish—just enough to show Charumati hadn’t forgotten her time on Earth.
“Hey, I made this for you!” Sheetal recalled, picking up the candy dish. She’d sculpted it in second-grade art class and then carved two interlocking horseshoes on the side before glazing the whole thing in a pretty aubergine.
Something in her chest softened. She’d thought Dad had accidentally thrown it out.
“I have always prized it.” Charumati’s lips brushed Sheetal’s cheek. “Come. Your practice dilruba waits within.”
They passed through one more set of doors at the back of Charumati’s apartments, and what she saw there made Sheetal forget everything else.
Moonlight lotuses bloomed from the pond’s crystalline waters, frosting the air a familiar silvery white. Like with so many of the rooms Sheetal had seen in the palace, the night sky served as a ceiling, making the water sparkle as if it were studded with diamonds.
“You have a pond?” Sheetal whistled.
“Every nakshatra has its own crop of moonlight lotuses.” Charumati beamed with pride. “It is what mortals might refer to as ‘waterfront property.’”
Peace rolled over Sheetal as she knelt by the pond, soothing as the whisper of the dark water against the shore. She felt the tension draining from her muscles, felt her heartbeat slowing in time with the astral melody. Her mouth curled into a dreamy smile.
Charumati beckoned to her from beneath a trellis overgrown with twinkling blue, black, and silver rosebuds, not far from the water’s edge. A moonlight lotus blossom glowed from behind her ear, highlighting the plain wooden dilruba at her side. She looked every inch the shining queen among her flowers, preparing to be serenaded.
My mother, the fairy tale, thought Sheetal, and maybe it was the moonlight lotuses, or maybe she was tired, but she couldn’t muster up the anger she’d felt just that morning.
Inhaling the flowers’ heavenly fragrance, she tackled her warm-up exercises, even the stupid lip trill, as earnestly as she could. She leaned the dilruba against her thigh, and Charumati pushed her shoulders back. “No slouching,” she chided.
Sheetal brought the bow to the strings and called the bhajan to mind. It was a gorgeous devotional song composed in the sixteenth century by the mystic poetess Mirabai to celebrate her love for Lord Krishna, but as Sheetal silently tasted the lyrics and tried the accompaniment, she knew it wasn’t right.
If she was going to win this competition—if she was going to save Dad—she couldn’t choose any old song. She needed to draw on her own anguish, her own confusion, to sing a song that would make the listener feel.
And she knew just the right song, the song Dad had played on a loop after Charumati had left. The song her mother had sung to him when she’d said goodbye. Sheetal wasn’t supposed to be there—Charumati had already put her to bed for the last time—but she’d slipped out and sneaked over to their bedroom, where she’d gone for comfort so often. Her mother had left the door ajar.
Sheetal hadn’t totally understood that Charumati was leaving them, not until she heard her sing the old Lata Mangeshkar film song “Tu Jahan Jahan Chalega.” Sheetal had watched enough older Bollywood movies with her parents to understand Hindi and even a dash of Urdu, so when her mother, radiant in the gloom, had pressed her cheek to Dad’s and crooned how, whatever direction he turned, her shadow would always be with him, how he should not mourn her, how her tears would always be there to stop his, she caught it all.
Even as Charumati had sung those words, she’d wept. “Watch over our Sheetal,” she’d whispered, kissing away Dad’s tears.
Sheetal had fled to her room before she could hear Dad’s reply. Mommy couldn’t be leaving. No. It was a bad dream. She’d burrowed under the covers and counted the floating shapes on the insides of her eyelids until she finally fell asleep.
When she woke up the next morning, it was just the two of them in the big house. Just her and Dad.
“You can’t keep a star from the sky, chakli,” he’d tried to explain, his reddened eyes ringed by bruises. Sheetal had refused to believe him. No one had made her mother leave, but her mother had done it anyway.
Sometimes she wondered if the song had been a curse. Dad had said it was Charumati’s music that had brought the two of them together, after all—her music and a slow dance in an empty parking lot.
“Ready, dikri?” Charumati asked now.
All the old sorrow, the crushing abandonment, the unbearable loss, threatened to submerge Sheetal, to drown her, moonlight lotuses notwithstanding. She surrendered to it, letting it carry her into the song. Her bow swept along the dilruba’s strings, evoking a sound like melancholy, like grief. Like a sundering. The pain poured out of her in gorgeous poetry, a lover begging her beloved not to give up on life simply because they must part.
Sheetal remembered every bit of Dad’s silence, of her own loneliness. Of her self-doubt—what had she done wrong? She remembered how still and empty their house felt without its heart, as if no one who lived there would ever breathe again.
“My shadow,” she sang, the lyrics wringing out everything she’d worked so hard to suppress, “my shadow.”
The final notes of the dilruba trailed off, and Sheetal opened her eyes. She hadn’t even realized she’d closed them. She was panting, sweating. She let go of the bow and took a huge breath.
Charumati had pressed her slender hands to her heart. She watched Sheetal with wide, desolate eyes. “That song.”
Sheetal leaned back against the trellis, studying this woman who was at once so familiar and also a stranger, the ethereal star princess of wonder tales, sylphlike and made of magic. Her mother’s fey expression didn’t match the crack in her voice when she’d uttered the word song.
A small, ugly pleasure welled up, matching the small, ugly voice that whispered how Sheetal had known it would wound Charumati. How she’d wanted it to.
She’d wanted Charumati to hurt the way she’d hurt Sheetal. To make her sorry.
Her bow flew into motion, the dilruba’s strings and the astral melody asking the question she couldn’t. How could you leave me behind? You’re my mom!
The musi
c was an ambush, an indictment, a plea. It smashed over Charumati like a tsunami.
Her mother scrubbed away a tear. It was such a human gesture that even though she was sitting right there, Sheetal missed her so dearly it felt like she would snap in half.
“I wanted you to have your life with your father.” Charumati unhooked the lotus from behind her ear and offered it to Sheetal. “I could not, I would not cheat you of that. Even if it meant I must watch you from afar.”
The starry melody rang out with her grief, raw and bare.
Holding the lotus close, Sheetal wondered who the stars turned to for wisdom. “But what about you?”
Charumati selected a blue rosebud from the trellis and stripped it of its petals, as if playing he loves me, he loves me not. “Sheetal, leaving you behind was the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Your father always understood we were existing on borrowed time.” She tossed the petals into the air. “Yet how was I to tell you that? How could I ask you to choose?”
“What do you mean?” Sheetal asked cautiously, her palms burning, icy fear singing thin, high notes in her veins.
“I would never have left you, had I the choice. But I did not. Every star, whether of the royal houses or not, has an aspect that—” Charumati tapped Sheetal’s solar plexus. “Your core. You can feel it, yes?”
The area beneath her mother’s fingers flared, as though someone had ignited a silver sun there. “Yes.”
“That is the part of you that illuminates the darkness. We are always connected to our positions in the sky, even as we move around and talk and live.” Charumati broke the contact between them and gripped the pallu of her sari. “One cannot stay away from it as long as I did. I began to break.”
Dad had said something like that, Sheetal recalled. Her anger sputtered. “But—but—you never even came back to check on me!”
Charumati’s discomfort distorted the starsong. “I was a fool,” she said. “Your foi persuaded me you would never be able to blend in among the mortals if I constantly pestered you with my presence.”
Radhikafoi was the one who’d kept them apart? Sheetal clutched at her moonlight lotus, her fingernails carving crescents into its petals the same way her mother’s words hacked at her heart. “Gods! Why is she always interfering in everything? Can’t she just leave me alone?”
“She is no villain.” Charumati held up a hand to stave off Sheetal’s objections. “She wished to protect you, as did I. I do not fault her for that.”
“Yeah, well, I do,” Sheetal said. She was never going to forgive Radhikafoi. Never. “I could have had you all those years instead of . . .”
She trailed off. There were no words to explain what it had felt like, being abandoned. Unwanted. Alone, with no one to guide her.
Charumati lowered her head. “I will never stop regretting having left you. Never. It was the greatest mistake of my life.”
Sheetal’s eyes blurred with tears. She hadn’t known how hungry she’d been to hear that. “It wasn’t okay. You messed up, Mom, and maybe it’ll never be okay.”
Her mother went still. “Do you mean that?”
“No! I don’t know. I thought I was fine with it, but—I’m not. I mean, you say you’re not ashamed of me, but you left me.” Sheetal poked her ragged cuticle, shame warming her. “I . . . I needed you to be my mom.”
The distance between them was as vast as a galaxy and as microscopic as a photon. How could mere words possibly cross it?
“Ah.” Charumati toyed with a stray wisp of gleaming hair. “What if I could be there for you now?”
Sheetal was sorting through too many layers of anger and betrayal to answer, and underneath them all huddled a trembling thing she wouldn’t expose to anyone, let alone the person who’d hurt her.
She mulled over her mother’s words. It wasn’t a cure. It definitely wasn’t going to fix everything.
But maybe, said that trembling thing, that part that had never stopped missing her mother, it could be a start.
Charumati grasped Sheetal’s hands, the lotus a lantern between them. “I cannot make up for the past, yet perhaps I can assure our future.” She waited until Sheetal nodded. “You will return home with the blood. I am certain of this. But let us speak of a moment beyond that.”
Sheetal frowned. “Huh?”
“Your nani intends to close the gates between the worlds once more. She would see no more interaction between stars and mortals. Worse, she has many convinced she is right.”
“Wait, she doesn’t want to see me anymore? I thought she wanted me here.”
“The inverse, my daughter,” Charumati said, releasing her. “She would keep you here for good.”
Considering Sheetal had already assumed as much, having her guess confirmed had no right to sting as much as it did. She buried her nose in the moonlight lotus’s silky petals.
“We have all seen the harm that mortals wreak on one another. Her younger sister, my masi, was assaulted by one. Yet I believe I have conceived—”
“Back up a second. Her sister?” No wonder Nani had refused to discuss her.
“Ojasvini, yes.” Even Charumati’s dismay was delicate. “That vile man imprisoned my poor masi and bled her for profit.”
Dev’s vision washed back over Sheetal, every gruesome detail. It couldn’t be a coincidence. “The first star hunter. I saw it.”
How achingly sad—Ojasvini’s fate had been so awful that almost no one spoke of her anymore, not even the history books. To only live on in that grisly memory . . .
Charumati tilted her head, and her hair flung silver starlight over the dark grass. “Did you?”
Sheetal stared out at the star-glittered water. Everything she thought she knew had turned in on itself like a kaleidoscope, the pieces tumbling over one another until they formed an entirely new picture. She’d had a great-aunt. Dev’s and Jeet’s forebear had known and tortured that great-aunt. What were the odds?
Astronomical, she was sure—a pun Dad would appreciate. And yet here they all were, the sidereal song swelling and shimmering around them like stardust. As briefly as she could, she explained how she’d witnessed the memory.
“Ah.” Charumati nodded, unfazed. “Bridging hearts. It is a revealing act, an intimate one.” Her way-too-perceptive look made Sheetal want to gag. Not even the moonlight lotuses could ease the nausea.
She punched the loose soil down with her fists. “Ugh, can we get back to your masi, please?”
“Nani rescued her sister, but Ojasvini was never the same. In the end, she left the court, and Nani’s grief warped into hatred of the mortals who would permit such violence.” Her mother’s smile was anything but happy. “So you see how my breaking the taboo against interaction with mortals might not have sat so well with her.”
Sheetal had to admit she would probably want to close the gates after that, too.
Not that she was going to let Nani do it now. “So what happened to that guy? Please tell me he didn’t just ride off into the sunset.”
A peal of laughter like a bell escaped Charumati. “Hardly. Your nani, shall we say, meted out justice—with the same blade he had used on Ojasvini.”
Mind. Blown. Nani was a badass. Sheetal was kind of freaked out and impressed at the same time.
Charumati waved her hand, bangles tinkling. “About a century ago, House Revati convinced House Dhanishta to reopen the gates separating our worlds on the grounds that keeping the realms apart was doing more harm than good. But it was all to spite Nani. Just as it has now selected Jeet as its champion. Nani is determined to overturn House Dhanishta’s judgment.”
“So how do we stop her?”
“As I was saying, I have conceived a plan.” Charumati stretched out a long leg until her toes dipped into the water. “Our power of inspiration is strong. Combined, our houses could put an end to mortal self-destruction.
“Tell me, dikri, what have you dreamed for your world? What would you change?” Her words were a soft breeze from far
away, but her notes in the starry song rang out solid, even resolute.
What would Sheetal change? So many things. An end to war, for starters. And hunger. And . . .
“I met some of the women your foi works with.” Pain rippled through Charumati’s voice. “I saw the scars, both of the body and of the spirit, from the abuse they endured. Imagine if the men and women who inflicted that abuse carried this light in their hearts. Imagine if the entire mortal world did. Imagine if everyone lived from their highest potential, and all people were safe and kind to one another. Nani would have no reason to close the gates to that world.”
Chills ran down Sheetal’s spine. “That would be like magic.”
“Bingo.” Charumati laughed. “Your father taught me that word on one of our first dates. If only all mortals were as sweet and considerate as he.”
A world full of people like Dad. Sheetal could picture it perfectly, down to the smallest detail. Wasn’t that the world society should be striving toward? Peace and harmony? Compassion and kindness? Generosity and equal distribution of resources?
“But we can’t make them be like that,” she argued. Could they? “What about free will?”
“If you witnessed a rabid animal attacking a child, would you not intervene?” Charumati spread her palms, and bands of starlight swirled from them to the rosebuds on the trellis. They bloomed in response, petals unfurling like prayers. “They behave this way because they know no better. If they woke from their sleep, they would not.”
Of course Sheetal would intervene. “You’re talking about enlightenment.”
Charumati leaned close and kissed Sheetal’s temple. Her quiet urgency flowed between them. “Yes. And above all, you, my daughter, would be safe. Free to move at will and in full sight between the realms. Since you were born, I have dreamed of nothing else.”
To have Dad and Mom both, Earth and Svargalok. To never need to hide again. It sounded too good to be true.
But what if it wasn’t?
Sheetal dipped her own feet into the cool water and listened to the shifting tones of the sidereal song, its sparkle in her veins in that moment like the ceaseless serenity of the cosmic dance. “How would this plan of yours work, if you need the whole court for it? It’s not like Nani and Nana would just sit back and say, ‘Okay, go ahead and railroad us. We’re cool with it.’”
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