Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  Her beauty made me ache.

  But not for her.

  Nritti reached for the princeling. The princeling reached for her. Music fell through the air. Golden-throated sparrows collapsed into dew. Silver-tailed fish shivered into feathers. I could breathe the air and it tasted like relief.

  “A dance for lovers,” said Gupta, jabbing me with his elbow.

  The princeling and Nritti whirled off and into the stage, leaving her alone. Alone with her chin perched in her palm, an arch smile stretching her lips. But I knew her smile. The details of it had somehow emblazoned itself into my bones so that I couldn’t smile myself without feeling the weight of her grin propping me up. The smile she wore now was only a memory of how a smile should look.

  Gupta grumbled, and I was shoved forward.

  “Move, fool.”

  I moved. And when I walked to her, I certainly felt like a fool. A crowd watched as I cut a path to her. She hadn’t noticed yet. Her gaze was distant and unfocused. A comet’s tail left a trail of smoke across her shoulder. Today, she was dressed in all her finery. Thin rings of beaten gold and amber circled her wrist. A delicate chain of silver bells fell across her waist.

  “Who is he?” whispered a naga.

  His would-be mate shrugged, her cobra hood flaring out so she could gossip in privacy.

  “Not a demon,” whispered an asura to the yakshini with sea-foam hair.

  “Not a human,” she replied.

  I felt the silk of the hood tickling my neck and drew a sigh of relief. In this way, at least, I was safe from their gaze. No line flanked her vendor stall, and yet she had returned to rearranging night fruit and sprucing up the plate of sample slices. When she felt my shadow across hers, she spoke without looking up:

  “I’ve poisoned all the fruit, so think twice before you…”

  She looked up and stared.

  “Poisoned fruit?” I asked. “What a romantic thing to sell on this momentous occasion.”

  A corner of her lips quirked into a grin. I felt it in my bones.

  “I am certain there is at least one lover out there who will thank me.”

  “The unfortunate thing is that I believe you. But if you did such a thing, then I would have to work on a holiday.”

  “We can’t have that.”

  Why did I thrill when she said we? I and you were thin, solitary words remade by her lips the moment she spoke we.

  “No,” I said, savoring the next words, the unshaped wonder of them: “We can’t.”

  She looked behind me, and the smile slid off her face. I followed her gaze to see a small crowd milling from the outskirts of the stage where couples leapt and danced.

  “Dance with me,” she said. Commanded.

  And I nodded dumbly. As if I could do anything else.

  Her hand rested on my shoulder and my thoughts splintered at her touch.

  “I almost didn’t recognize you with that hood on,” she said.

  I spun her in a circle and a constellation slipped from her wrist to her elbow.

  “I would have worn it the first time we met if I knew it would make you laugh.”

  “It makes me laugh only because you look ridiculous,” she said. “And I can’t tell what you’re thinking or feeling when it covers your eyes.”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to know. Maybe I am intentionally obscuring my feelings from view.”

  She looked at me, her gaze suddenly hooded. At first, I thought she would speak. But instead, she sipped on her lower lip and turned from me. The music fell thick and honeyed around us. I spun her again. But she did not come back to me. She frowned, like she was remembering something.

  “I thought I’d see you here, but perhaps not under so strange a disguise. They said the Dharma Raja was looking for a wife,” she said lightly. Too lightly. “I suppose my rejection has finally sunken in. Did you think I wouldn’t recognize you with a hood?”

  “Those rumors were started by my advisor, Gupta.”

  “The same one who taught you how to speak to a woman?”

  “The very same.”

  “That almost explains it.”

  But there was still a frostiness to her voice.

  “He started it because I came to see you in the grove and you weren’t there. Gupta thought you would be here. I only came here for you.” She fell quiet, but she looked up at me. Her expression, for one sliver of a moment, was unguarded hope. “Do you truly think I meant to disguise myself from you? That this hood would be enough to hide my identity?”

  She crossed her arms.

  “It only exposes your jaw and lips,” she said. “That’s hardly enough to recognize.”

  “That’s implying there’s nothing memorable about the lower half of my face. My lips are certainly memorable.”

  She moved closer. Or I moved closer. Or the music had grown so greedy that it ate away the distance between us.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said. Lightly. Mockingly. But there was something uneven in her tone.

  The music made me bold. I slid my fingers into her hair. Her hair was cold silk against my palm. Her eyes fluttered shut. Then opened. And I knew what the unevenness in her voice had been: want.

  “Would you like to?”

  I waited for the moment of waiting, but it never came. Without answering, she tipped forward. Her fingers tapped a secret rhythm across the nape of my neck before she pulled me to her. Her lips met mine. No, not met. She was not capable of something so gentle. Her lips conquered mine. But I didn’t mourn my loss for long. I braided my fingers in her hair, fire edging my thoughts when she sighed against me.

  In that strange lightlessness that belonged to closed eyes, I thought I could see inside myself. Whatever was inside me was no stage like the one upon which we danced. Kissed. What was inside me could not fit beneath the sky even though it was lit up by an inferno of stars. Her lips opened beneath mine. She tasted the way she looked—like wonder and cold, velvet shadows and hidden paths beneath too-dark woods. She tasted like the edge of imagination, like the shadows of a new idea, which chases away your thoughts and leaves you lost in dreams.

  I was lost.

  But as long as it was with her, I never wanted to be found.

  6

  NIGHT

  The kiss changed everything and nothing.

  When we emerged from that strange stage, no one commented. No one saw. The whole world turned joyously selfish and curled inward. We left the Night Bazaar behind, hands entwined. We didn’t speak of Teej—mere weeks away—or what the kiss meant. We had torn a chunk of that enchanted silence from the stage and carried it within us like a talisman, something to ward off every worry.

  “Will you come back tomorrow?”

  “And the next day. And the day after that.”

  I bit back a smile. “For how long?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  * * *

  Every night, he visited me. And every night we walked to the moon-mirror throne, which was not quite a throne, but all that a throne should be, and got lost together. On the third night we walked through an enchanted desert where the mirages took on the forms of fantastical bodies of water—ice braided along a ravine, quartz-clear puddles shot through with small violet flowers. The mirage promised cold, clear water. But at a single touch, it was nothing but singed weeds and dry sand.

  “It’s maya,” I said. “Illusion.”

  “They say that is all the world is.”

  “How pessimistic you are,” I teased.

  “What do you think?”

  I had not realized until I met the Dharma Raja that I had a favorite question. But now I did. And this was it.

  “I think it’s utterly wrong to say that the world is nothing but illusion. They say that Night is just an illusion of a new tomorrow and a story not yet written. And, as you know, I am very real.”

  I laced my fingers through his, smiling at the shy grin that slipped onto his face.

  “Perhaps,” he said thoug
htfully. “But if there is anything I have learned at your side, it is how every sight is open to a thousand and one interpretations. So perhaps the world is a bit of illusion after all. We simply choose which mirage to see, and draw meaning and stories from that.”

  This was another thing I had not expected about the Dharma Raja. He liked to think through problems. He was stubborn. But more than anything, he wanted to question things.

  “Perhaps,” I allowed.

  “That reminds me,” he said, withdrawing his fingers from mine. “I made you something.”

  He reached into his robes and drew out a small glass orb. Light sparked and whirred within it. He tossed it into the air and the small crystal orb unfurled, spreading tendrils of light over us until we stood in a room full of stars. He reached out, grasping the stars between thumb and forefinger, like they were nothing more than glass beads waiting to be plucked and refashioned. One by one, he stole the false stars out of their false sky until he fashioned a small headpiece in the shape of a glittering sparrow. He slid it into my hair, and the false sky peeled back to reveal the desert.

  “I have given you the moon for your throne, an impossible garden, and now stars to wear in your hair. As I promised,” he said softly. His eyes cut to mine. “And I always keep my promises.”

  I had not kissed him since that evening in the Night Bazaar, even though I wanted to. I couldn’t stand the thought that maybe each kiss would tease away something precious, something I wasn’t ready to give. Nritti’s words floated back to me: What does he want from you? I didn’t know. Worse, I was beginning to suspect that whatever it was, I would give it. That small truth left me exposed. Almost resentful.

  He stood before me, his hand outstretched, stars nestled in his palm. And we both knew this was not just a gift. What he offered me was soft and glittering, inflexible, and it wasn’t just stars.

  It was his heart.

  He fixed his fathomless black gaze on me, the same gaze that brought kings to their knees and snipped a season in half. But what I saw was this: I saw that when he walked beside me, some alchemy transformed my voice and thoughts to gold. When we spoke, the world bent beneath our views and adjusted itself accordingly. When we imagined, infinity became something I could grasp. When he touched me, I felt charged with possibility, as if every dream tucked inside me had been chiseled out by his hand. When he looked at me, it was like drawing breath for the first time.

  Unease flickered across his features. Guilt squeezed my chest. If I stayed silent any longer, I would hurt him. And the thought of that chilled me. Perhaps he suspected that my silence meant that I was rejecting him. But that wasn’t the truth at all. When someone offers his heart, you could not give anything less in return. My silence came not from my reluctance to give away my heart, but from the shock of knowing that I already had.

  Here is mine, I thought, closing the distance between us.

  His unease melted into hope. Then awe. He gathered me to him, and kissed me. And between our bent heads, the starry sparrow fluttered silver wings and took off into the air.

  Here is my fear and my wonder, my hopes and my doubts.

  Here I am.

  7

  NIGHT

  There were only two weeks left until Teej. And still, we hadn’t quite found the words to lay meaning to what had happened. To what we wanted. Sometimes, when no one was there, I tried out the words in my head, feeling out their unfamiliar weight and texture: queen of Naraka. Consort. Beloved. Friend. Sometimes, I whispered them aloud and thrilled in the sparks of light that danced up my spine.

  That night, he appeared as usual. He touched my hair lightly, as usual. But then, unusually, he looked behind my shoulder to the untamed silver orchard and the dream fruit weighing each bough. The whole grove was lit up with the scent of wind-fallen fruit, the bruised and over-sweet fragrance of wanting gone to waste.

  “You no longer sell them.”

  “I have decided to stop,” I said. “Permanently.”

  I’d made the decision a while ago. The Night Bazaar would have to find a new way to dream. I’d sent Uloopi all of the last batch. She would have been furious with me for not telling her, but hopefully the remaining fruits would appease her. I sent along a small note: To dream and dream, and dream some more. One day, I hope they pale before your reality.

  Her reply: There better be more where this came from.

  The Dharma Raja leaned against a tall poplar, his thumb worrying at his lower lip. Once, I might have thought it was a contemplative gesture. Now, I recognized it as mischief.

  “Before, you seemed quite determined to change every mind of the Otherworld. I recall you making a very impassioned speech about only having the ability to tell a story with a voice. Now how will you change the world without a piece of fruit?”

  Teasing fool. I twisted my hand and a tiny river pebble soared to his head. He dodged it with a lazy swipe of his hand. And then he tossed it back to me, only this time it became a stone bird that hopped across my shoulder before collapsing into smoke.

  “I learned a new way of storytelling,” I said primly.

  “I noticed,” he said, nodding at the grove.

  Over the past weeks, I had changed things. The orchard had fallen to neglect, but I had tied its silver boughs and strung a net of pearls between the trees. Ruined, dark things squirmed in the net. Caught nightmares. The other week, I had coaxed a well to hollow out the earth. The Dharma Raja sensed it for he leaned his ear toward the direction, as if he could hear all the things whispered in the water—good portents and well wishes. In the well’s reflection, the stars churned and pinwheeled above, never keeping the same shape. I hoped that it would remind people who drank from its water not to believe in the first thing they saw.

  “I was wondering when you’d come to realize this,” he said. “Most storytellers are already familiar with this tenet.”

  “And that is?”

  He moved toward me gracefully.

  “That the best story is shown. Not told.” He grinned. “I could’ve told you that. I’ve been practicing that for years.”

  He was right. It both delighted and annoyed me to no end. I wanted to make a difference, to be seen as more than I was. All this time, I had been so caught up in what the Otherworld thought. I had lost so much time trying to push my thoughts and self onto them, but it made no difference because they were just words without meaning. If I made the Dharma Raja see the world differently, then he let me see myself differently. I was enough unto myself. I would not let myself be held back by what anyone thought. And that was what I wanted to coax into life with these dream wells. I wanted someone to look inside of them and see something else. It was different from dream fruit because it knew it had no desire to last beyond the veil of sleep. It was simply an idea. A nudge.

  “You could have advised me from the beginning to show more and tell less.”

  He arched an eyebrow. “Would you have listened?”

  “I would’ve very convincingly pretended.”

  He laughed. And I caught his laugh in a kiss.

  * * *

  A week before Teej, Nritti and I sat side by side—as we always had—our feet scraping at the bottom of the river, toes digging into the bank in search of gold. Ever since I stopped going to the Night Bazaar, she would find me here in the red hours between sunset and true night. Sometimes, Vanaj would come with her and then the three of us would play shatranj—Nritti and Vanaj on one side, me on the other. Most of the time I lost, but I felt like I was winning every time Nritti laughed or grinned. Today, she was doing both, even though Vanaj could not visit with her this dusk.

  “You’re glowing with love,” I teased. “It’s beginning to hurt my eyes.”

  She laughed, and the bells strung through her braid shook with mirth. “There’s that viper tongue. I was wondering where it went. You’re so … kind around Vanaj.”

  “It’s only for your sake. I had to provide one wonderful thing about you. Me. There’s n
ot much reason to like you, what with your horrific looks and grating voice.”

  Nritti gracefully fluttered her hand. “You are most merciful.”

  “And beautiful,” I added.

  “And beautiful.”

  “And charming.”

  “Let’s not get carried away.”

  I laughed. “So. Where is your smitten lover?”

  Nritti blushed.

  “There’s something I want to show you,” she said, hesitantly. She drew out a delicate golden necklace strung together with black beads. I breathed in sharply. A mangalsutra. It was the piece of jewelry that defined a married woman. “We pledged ourselves to one another in the gandharva tradition. He went to ask Lord Indra if he could take me away from the court.”

  I think she knew all that I couldn’t say because she reached for my hand. As always, I was struck by our differences. Already, the red of sunset had begun to peel back … revealing rose-tinted smoke sky and rain-cloud skin. Hers was the sun as seen through water, an Otherworld dream of gold and light. But our differences were only in looks. I felt her heartbeat pulse against my skin. And I knew that no matter what changes would come, we would always be sisters.

  “I’m not leaving you,” she whispered.

  “I would never stop you.” And I meant it. Nritti may not have believed in me the way the Dharma Raja did, but she loved me and she supported me the best way that she knew how.

  “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?