Aru Shah and the End of Time

by Roshani Chokshi

  Aru tossed the ball form of Vajra in the air and caught it with one hand. “Let’s do this.”

  But even as she said the words, a thread of misgiving wrapped around her rib cage and squeezed tight.

  They stood up and began silently walking between the ponds, ducking the low-hanging incense burners. Aru knew, deep in her bones, that this was where the Kingdom of Death ended: on the brink of new life. The atmosphere felt like that of a crowd holding its breath with anticipation. The light on the pearly walls was ever-shifting, ever-changing; the colors never settled on one shade, always glimmering with new potential. Like life starting anew.

  Aru took a deep breath. They had made it through the kingdom.

  Now the question was: Could they get out?

  Can You Give Me Better Hair on the Way Out?

  It’s challenging to shoulder all the stuff you get from the Kingdom of Death.

  Dee Dee (Mini’s Death Danda) kept popping out of its compact form and turning into a gigantic stick. Twice it almost put out Aru’s eye. She was beginning to think the weapons had a sense of humor. At random times Aru’s weapon, Vajra, liked to shift into lightning-bolt form and zip across the sky before turning into a ball and bouncing in front of her. Aru imagined it saying, Throw me at a demon! Do it, do it, do it! I wanna play. Squirrel!

  “I’m not really even sure of all the stuff this thing can do,” said Mini, shaking the danda.

  Aru raised her eyebrow. That danda stick belonged to the god of death and justice. It had probably beat up its fair share of demons and also punished a bunch of souls. And now Mini was shaking it like a remote control that had stopped working.

  “Maybe it’s like a video game, and you get to access more powers and levels once you complete something?” Mini guessed.

  “Well, we got one demon, shopped at a magic Costco, and made it through the Kingdom of Death….What else does our video game magic want?”

  “Maybe to defeat the real demon?”

  “Oh, yeah, true.”

  Mini awkwardly cradled Dee Dee. “Aru, do you think these weapons are a sign that they like us?”

  Aru didn’t have to ask who they were. She meant their godly fathers.

  “The danda is his most precious possession,” reasoned Mini. “He wouldn’t just give it to someone he didn’t care about, right?”

  “I’m sure he cares,” said Aru. “Just, you know, in his own way? In the stories, the Dharma Raja took the form of a dog and kept Yudhistira company at the end of his life. Yudhistira refused to enter heaven without him. I think it was some kind of test? If your soul dad is willing to become a dog just to keep you company, that means they like you at least a little bit.”

  Mini grinned. “I like the way you think, Shah.”

  Aru dramatically flipped her hair over her shoulder, which was a bad idea, because it was still damp from whale spit and ended up smacking her in the eye. Smooth.

  “Do you think it’s the same for Lord Indra?” asked Mini.

  Aru eyed Vajra, who was happily bouncing beside her in a way that reminded Aru of someone excitedly nodding. If her mom could care from a distance, why not her dad?

  “I hope so,” said Aru after a moment’s pause. “My mom told me it was Indra who taught Arjuna how to use all the celestial weapons. He even tried to sabotage Arjuna’s nemesis.”

  That reminded Aru of the mom at school who’d gotten banned from the library after tearing out certain pages in books just so her kid’s rival classmate couldn’t do his research. (The librarian had screamed, Book murder! And now all the parents were scared of her.) Indra probably would have approved of that kind of sabotage.

  “And he gave you his famous lightning bolt,” added Mini. “He must care.”

  The thought made Aru smile.

  Once they were away from the Chamber of Pools, they turned the corner toward the violent sounds of machinery. A large archway was emblazoned with the sign:

  REMAKE, REBUILD, RELIVE!

  REINCARNATION MANUFACTURING SERVICES

  This, Aru guessed, must be where souls were fitted for new bodies and new lives.

  A spiderlike creature made of clockwork and gears scuttled by. It took one look at them and started screaming.

  “BODIES!” it shouted. “Out-of-commission bodies running rampant!”

  Another creature, this one shaped a bit like a small dragon with fuzzy wings that trailed on the ground, bustled past. It wasn’t made out of clock parts; it was furred…brindled like those dogs that stood watch outside of the Kingdom of Death, and its eyes were a warm shade of gold and slitted at the pupil like a cat’s.

  “How’d you get in?” asked the furred thing. “Rogue souls are—”

  “Rogue souls?” repeated Aru, delighted in spite of the weirdness surrounding them. “That’s a great name for a band.”

  “Band?” said the clockwork creature. “Did you hear that, Wish? They’re banding together! We’re going to be overrun. Forced into that awful samsara cycle of lives! As punishment! This is what we get for thinking that scaly orange skin and fake hair could keep that former demon out of elected office. It’s all your fault—”

  “We’re not banding together,” said Mini. “We’re just trying to exit. But, um, we want to stay in these bodies. Please?”

  “Who are you?”

  Aru grinned. This was the moment she had been waiting for all her life. In school, the teachers always asked instead: What’s your name? Now, finally, she could say her dream response to Who are you?

  “Your worst nightmare,” she said in a deep Batman voice.

  At the same exact time, Mini said, “We’re the Pandavas,” before adding, “Well, we’ve got their souls, at least. In us.”

  “Mini, you keep making it sound like we ate them—”

  “Pandavas?” interrupted Wish.

  The dragonlike creature and its companion reeled back in shock. Wish circled them, snuffling.

  “That makes sense,” said the clockwork creature. “Heroines usually are the Kingdom of Death’s worst nightmares. They’re always barging in, waving scraps of metal around, and demanding things. No manners whatsoever.”

  “Excuse you!” said Aru. “What about heroes? I bet they’re just as bad as heroines.”

  “It’s a compliment! Heroes rarely have the guts to demand things. Usually they just sulk until a magical sidekick feels bad for them and does all the work while they get all the credit.”

  “So this is how reincarnation works?” asked Mini. “With machines and stuff?”

  “No words in any language can pin down exactly how life and death function. The closest we can come is by explaining samsara. Are you familiar with the concept?” asked Wish.

  “Kinda. It’s like the life-and-death cycle,” said Aru.

  “It’s far more complicated than that,” said Wish. “As you live, your good deeds and bad deeds are extracted from karma. Along the way, the body is subjected to the wear and tear of time. But the soul sheds bodies, just as the body sheds clothes. There is a goal, of course, to leave all that behind, but sometimes it takes people many, many lifetimes.”

  “And who, exactly, are you?” asked Mini.

  “Ah, we are the things that make a body what it is!” said Wish. “I am unspent wishes.”

  “Is that why you’re covered in”—Mini peered more closely—“eyelashes?”

  “Ah, yes! Sometimes, when people find a tiny lash on their cheek, they hold it tight, make a wish, and then blow it away. Those unspoken yearnings of the heart always find their way to me. They make my hand soft when I’m pouring a soul into a new form.”

  “And I am Time,” said the clockwork creature, sinking into a graceful bow on its insect legs. “Like any part of Time, I am hard and unyielding, the heavy hand that shapes the vessel.”

  “You’re Time?” asked Aru. “Like the Time?”

  “We’re supposed to be trying to save you!” said Mini. “You should probably go into hiding or something.”

/>   “What a quaint notion, child,” said Time. “But I am just one part of Time. I am Past Time. You see, there are all kinds of Time running around. Future Time, who is invisible, and Present Time, who can’t hold any one shape. Pacific Standard Time is currently swimming around near Malibu. And I think Eastern Standard Time is annoying stockbrokers on Wall Street. We’re all quite wibbly-wobbly. If what you say is true, I am merely one part of what you must save.”

  Aru tried to sidestep them. “Well, umm, then we better get to it?”

  It was impossible to see what lay beyond the two creatures. It seemed like a tunnel, but every time she looked away from it, she couldn’t remember what she’d seen. It made Aru think she wasn’t supposed to see it.

  “Not so fast!” said Time. “Can’t let you out without your giving us something! You must pay!”

  “Pay?” repeated Mini. She patted her pockets. “I—I don’t have anything.”

  Aru scowled. First, nobody had appreciated her Batman joke. Second, why did they have to keep paying for things? They were the ones going to all the trouble to save everyone else, after all! Rude. Her hands formed fists at her sides.

  “Why should we give you anything, anyway?” she demanded. “You do realize we’re doing all this to save you.”

  Time rose up a little higher on its insect legs.

  Oh.

  Time could be a lot…bigger than she imagined. It just kept growing until it was the size of one of the pillars from the museum. She had to tilt her head up just to see its featureless face regarding her.

  “Did I just detect a trace of impertinence?”

  Mini stepped in front of her. “No! Not at all! That’s just how she talks! She’s got a medical condition. Um, Type One Insufferable-ness. She can’t help it.”

  Thanks, Mini. Thanks a lot.

  “You must leave behind something of yours in order to get out,” insisted Time.

  The spider creature grew even taller. It was clicking its front legs together, steepling them like hands grown impatient from waiting.

  “Sorry,” said Wish, daintily licking one of its paws. “Rules are rules, although…good karma can let you out, if you have any.”

  “What, like good deeds?” asked Aru.

  She took a careful step back, and Mini followed her example. Time was looming vast and terrifying before them. Click, click, click went its slender legs on the marble floor.

  “Er, I take my neighbor’s dog on walks?” started Aru.

  “I floss my teeth twice a day!” said Mini.

  “Prove it,” said Time.

  Mini hooked her fingers into her cheeks and pulled. “Rike zish?”

  “Not good enough…” said Time.

  Mini started laughing hysterically.

  Can we fight our way out of Death? wondered Aru. Her hand slipped into her pocket, reaching for Vajra, but something else met her fingers. She fished it out:

  An ivory-colored token.

  The same one Chitrigupta had handed to her what felt like a lifetime ago. She turned it this way and that, watching the little good deeds she had done throughout her life shimmer on the surface.

  “Wait!” shouted Aru, holding up the token. “We’ve got proof!”

  Mini dug into her backpack and pulled out hers. “It’ll show you I flossed. I swear!”

  Wish padded forward, took the token between its teeth, and bit down on it. Then it did the same to Mini’s. It turned to Time and said, “It rings true.”

  In one blink, Time shrank until it stood eye level with Aru. “You may go, then, daughters of the gods.”

  There was no way Aru was going to hang around another moment for a second invitation.

  “Great!” said Mini with fake cheer. She pressed a bit closer to Aru.

  “Yes! This was…such a treat.” Aru edged past them. Wish and Time simply watched the two of them inch toward the exit. “See ya later!”

  Time bowed its head.

  “Inevitably.”

  People joked about the afterlife. They said things like Don’t follow the light! But there was no heavenly glow here. Yet, somehow, it was still bright. It burned with something else, whiting out the setting around them.

  All Aru remembered when she crossed the threshold was a curious sense of bemusement. As if she had done this before, and never quite wanted to, but submitted to it all the same. It was kind of like getting a shot: a necessary evil. And it was also a bit like a dream, because she couldn’t recall much about the place they’d left behind. One moment it was there, and the next moment it was not.

  With every step she took into that tunnel between life and death, sensation washed over her. Sensation that belonged to memories. She remembered impossible things, like being cradled and held close and told over and over by her mother that she was loved. She felt the pinch of her first loose tooth from so many years ago. She remembered how she had once broken her arm after swinging from the museum elephant’s trunk and felt more surprise than pain. It hadn’t occurred to her until that day that she could ever get hurt.

  Aru blinked.

  That single blink felt like hundreds of years and no time at all.

  When Aru opened her eyes, she and Mini were standing in the middle of a road. A couple of cars had been left running, doors still open, as if their drivers and passengers had fled in a hurry. A few feet away, Aru heard the cracklings of a television coming from inside a tollbooth.

  Mini turned to her.

  “At least it’s not a parking lot?”

  The TV Started It

  Aru flexed her hand and Vajra changed from a ball to a glowing circlet around her wrist. It looked really cool. Too bad she didn’t know the first thing about what to do with it. Other than throw it at people, obviously.

  Mini tried to turn the Death Danda into a staff, but it apparently didn’t feel like it. “Come on!” she whined, banging it a couple times on the ground.

  Aru wondered whether this was what great warriors of yore did: hit their weapons and hope they started working right.

  They walked to the tollbooth. The television was on, but no one was inside. The whole road looked as if a bunch of people had gotten out of this place as quickly as they could without looking back. She glanced at the TV, which was blaring the news:

  “Reports are coming in about an airborne virus sweeping through the Northeast. Experts have been able to follow the trajectory from its point of origin somewhere in the Southeast, likely Georgia or Florida. Is there anything else you can tell us about the virus, Dr. Obafemi?”

  A lovely woman with a tower of twisted braids smiled into the camera. “Well, Sean, at the moment we don’t know how the disease is being spread. It seems to be jumping from place to place. There was an outbreak in Atlanta. Then it hit a strip mall area north of Houston. In Iowa, we think the epicenter was a supermarket. It’s not acting like any virus we’ve seen before. Really, all we know is that the victims are unresponsive, as if sleeping while wide-awake. They are always found in a position as if the virus attacked quickly and caught them off guard—”

  “Hence the name: the Frozen Syndrome!” The anchor laughed. “Too bad we can’t just let it go, let it go. Am I right, Doctor?”

  The doctor’s tight smile could have cut glass. “Ha,” she mustered weakly.

  “Well, that’s it for updates. Next, we’ll go to weather with Melissa, and then Terry for ‘Is Your Cat Obese?’ Stay tuned—”

  Aru muted the television. Taking a deep breath, she glanced at her palm. The Sanskrit number had changed. Now it looked squigglier but still, thought Aru, like the number two. At least, she hoped it was. She held up her hand to show Mini:

  “Does this mean that we’ve got one and a half days left?”

  Mini studied her own palm, then bit her lip.

  Don’t say it.

  “One.” Mini looked up. “This is our last day.”

  One last day.

  Aru felt like someone had wrapped sharp wires around her heart. Her mom was de
pending on them. Boo was depending on them. All these people, she thought. She shuddered, remembering the word the doctor on TV had used: victims.

  Mini seemed to know what she was thinking, because she placed her hand on Aru’s shoulder.

  “Remember what Lord Hanuman said? At least all these frozen people aren’t in any pain.”

  Yet.

  Aru hadn’t forgotten what the Sleeper had threatened. She and Mini only had until the new moon (one day more…) before he would stop them from ever seeing their families again. And Boo would remain caged forever—if he was even alive.

  But a few things the Sleeper hadn’t expected had come true:

  They’d found their way into the Kingdom of Death.

  They’d awakened their weapons.

  And most important:

  They now knew how to defeat him.

  Mini seemed to be thinking the same thing, because she sighed. “We’re going to fight him, aren’t we?”

  She didn’t say this as she might have before, with cowering and shrinking. She said it as if it were an unpleasant chore she was still going to honor. Like Today I will take out the trash. Another necessary evil.

  Aru nodded.

  “We know how to find him. He said that all we have to do is summon him with his name, but what about fighting?” Mini asked. “All we have are Vajra and Dee Dee, which I don’t even know how to use….”

  Aru glanced at the desk where the television stood. The toll collector had a couple of knickknacks littered across the surface: a unicorn with its wings outstretched and a tiny clay bear. They gave Aru an idea.

  “We’re going to have help, Mini.”

  “You know, every time you say something like that, I keep expecting light to burst around your head,” said Mini. “Or really dramatic music to start playing.”

  At that moment, the television decided it no longer wished to be mute. Mini flinched, and Dee Dee morphed from a compact into a staff just as a man dressed up as an Elvis impersonator sang, “You ain’t nothing but a bad mop, breaking all the time!”