Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  Zahril, who she would never hurt if she woke up from a nightmare, her body flooded with unwanted toxins.

  Zahril, who could never quite get rid of the warmth in her garnet-black eye.

  Night frayed the edges of the sky. Aasha pushed open the ivory door to her private villa, nestled amongst the fruit orchards of Bharata.

  Zahril, she thought, who—

  And then she stopped.

  Because Zahril was standing right before her.

  For several long moments, Aasha couldn’t match the sight before her. There were the recognizable things in her room … the silk rug, and the pitcher of water that had somehow caught a mango blossom in its water. Those things made sense. But Zahril? Standing in her usual garb of cotton pants and a dark tunic? Aasha felt as if her sorrow had finally reached its breaking point and that her mind had hauled this illusion from the depths of her dreams.

  “I understand why you did it,” said Zahril.

  Her voice was ice.

  Aasha braced herself.

  “That doesn’t make it easier for me.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Aasha.

  “Sorry for what? Sorry that you followed orders that kept you and your monarch and the kingdom alive? Sorry that you … felt something?” Zahril laughed. But it was a hollow sound. “I taught you how to see and smell and touch and taste and listen.”

  Aasha nodded, unsure of where she was going with this.

  “I taught you that the senses are more than what they seem. That they deceive. That they…” and at this, she hesitated. “They must sometimes be looked past. Or at least, seen through.”

  Aasha held her breath.

  “You were willing to try,” said Zahril.

  Aasha stepped closer, convinced that this reality would shatter the moment she exhaled. But it didn’t. She was close enough that she could see the sheen of light curving off Zahril’s cheek. Close enough that she could study the crescent formed by her wide lips.

  Zahril’s eyes met hers. “I can too.”

  So simple.

  Three words.

  They were not the three words that Aasha so often dreamed Zahril would say. But it was like seeing with one’s hands and listening with touch. It was a confusion of senses made glorious by their unexpectedness. It was … a way of understanding—and, perhaps, forgiveness—that was the only true magic Aasha had ever experienced. It filled her like a light.

  She reached out, taking Zahril’s hand, folding it between her own.

  * * *

  Sometimes words draw out conclusions.

  Other times, one must infer through the senses. And that was what Aasha did now. She studied the sloping curve of Zahril’s lips, not pressed tight with sadness … but determination. She listened to the sound of her breathing: tight and short. A thing of nervousness. She felt the velvet-skin of her palms pressing into her own, harder than she needed to, as if to say I am here. I don’t know how … but I am here. She tasted the salt of her own mouth, as if it had filled to the teeth with unshed tears. She smelled the mint that Zahril must have chewed on her way here. And from all this, Aasha drew her conclusion. This was not an end, but a beginning.

  Her answer was a wordless agreement …

  A smile.

  Given and … returned.

  ROSE AND SWORD

  PRESENT

  Ten-year-old Hira would rather eat her own hand than listen to another minute of her sister’s wedding preparations. First of all, there were too many people in the palace of Bharata-Ujijain. Which meant that she, along with her parents, the reigning raja and rani, had to stand for hours at the threshold of the palace entry and greet people that Hira had never heard of.

  What she really wanted to do was sneak outside and go to her grandfather’s study. He had kept so many stories there. Stories that not even her grandmother or parents had read. Sometimes there were little notes written in his hand. Hira liked to imagine that it was a secret conversation they were having together.

  Hira’s grandfather had been dead for years and she had never even met him. But she didn’t feel so terrible about this because it was not as if Meghana had met him either. Not that Meghana cared.

  In the past few months, Meghana barely thought of anything with all the bridal preparations swirling around her. She was too distracted. Nowadays, her sister was always leaning out of windows, sighing. She didn’t want to play anymore. Not even when Hira pretended to be a vanara and wore a fake monkey tail and ran around the palace apartments shrieking about theft and blood deeds that must not go unpaid. Not even when Hira pretended to eat an apple (to which the cook had painstakingly applied gold flakes so that it looked like something out of her grandmother’s stories) and turn ever so slowly into a great, big beast. One of the nursemaids had even made her a headpiece with bent pieces of iron from the blacksmith’s quarters so that it looked like she had antlers! Meghana did not care.

  And if her sister did not care, then neither did she. But sometimes … sometimes her heart ignored her wishes.

  Last night, Meghana was directing her servants as to what they should pack in the chests that she would take to her new home. Hira felt her heartbeats snag together. Her sister was leaving. Just as their sister before them, Chandra, had left. It had not been so hard then. Chandra was sweet-natured and sang so beautifully that Hira imagined the stars leaned out of the night sky if only to hear her better. But Chandra had never played with Hira.

  When Hira had seen her sister packing up those heavy, ornate bridal chests, she had only wanted to help. So she had collected her most precious toys: the fake apple with the burnished rind that turned little girls into little beasts, the glass bird with the bent wing that her grandmother said held a beautiful story, a bronze fox mask that turned one of them into the legendary Clever Fox Prince, and a jewel-bright silk cobra that the girls pretended would always know the difference between a truth and a lie. Hira had gathered them all together and then placed them into her sister’s treasure chest.

  When Meghana came into their rooms that night, Hira could hardly sit still. She wanted her sister to praise her. To be touched at the thoughtful gifts that Hira was parting with. Perhaps even for Meghana to invite her to come stay at the new palace …

  But when Meghana had opened the chest and looked at Hira’s gifts, she stood there. Her eyes widened, then turned glossy. And then, right as Hira stood up eagerly to point out all the different toys, her sister had kicked over the chest. It thudded painfully on the ground. The toys, once neatly wrapped in gauzy fabric, tumbled out. The apple scraped against the toy sword, the silk cobra unraveled, and the glass bird’s bent wing caught against it. It was a silent riot until the glass bird shattered on the marble. Hira cried out. The candlelight stuck to the jagged edges. And even though Hira had not been injured, she felt inexplicably cut.

  “What is wrong with you?” hissed Meghana. Her shoulders shook. “Why would I take that with me? Do you have any idea how … how…”

  But Meghana couldn’t even finish her thought. She sank into a chair, glowering.

  “Get out, Hira! Just, just go.”

  Hira hadn’t waited another moment. Shame chased her shadow out of the room. She didn’t even care that tiny splinters had somehow dug into her heel. She felt nothing at all until she finally stopped running.

  That night, Hira slept in the blacksmith’s study. Unfinished swords and blunted arrowheads lay all around her. Weapons dangled from the ceiling. The forge had long gone silent, and yet she could smell the echo of fire. For some reason, the smell of iron and fire and glass always comforted her. It was how her grandmother smelled. Like a strike of lightning.

  Now, Hira swayed a little bit on the threshold. Her father reached out and caught her, frowning.

  “Are you well, my child?”

  Her mother took her face between her hands. Hira tried to avert her eyes, but her mother was too fast. Within seconds, she had sussed out her secrets in that eerie way of mothers.

  �
�Why don’t you take a break, hmm?” asked her mother. “Go give your Dadi-Ma some company. She might not miss these functions, but I am sure she must be lonely.”

  Hira tried not to bolt. She didn’t have to be told twice to spend time with her grandmother instead of all these stuffy guests. Her father laughed, before sneaking her a candy with a conspiratorial wink. Her grandmother said that he was a lot like his father. Always managing to steal a handful of sweets when no one was looking and never getting scolded because his grin made you feel like you were in on the secret too.

  “But come back before the feast!” shouted her mother. “Don’t you want to say good-bye to your sister?”

  “No!”

  Hira shot a look over her shoulder. It was rather poisonous, and she might have gotten in trouble … but no one ran as fast as Hira.

  She was out of the threshold, down the hall, and darting through the chambers within moments.

  Her grandmother once said she got that from her grandfather.

  “Running fast?” Hira had asked.

  “No,” she said, raising her eyebrow. “Mischief.”

  Hira knew that she was near her grandmother’s quarters when she was finally out of earshot from the rest of the raucous wedding guests. Here, it was quiet. There was a small, burbling fountain in the strangest courtyard that Hira had ever seen. The hilts of swords glinted in a tangle of flowers. Meghana said that the old gardeners were still loyal to the memory of the former emperor and so they would add new swords. But Hira believed they truly grew out of the ground. That perhaps if she pulled one out ever so slowly, she would see silvery roots breaking off from the tip. Beneath wrought-iron arches fashioned into the shapes of birds with impossible wings and maidens dancing from spire to spire, sweets hung like impossible fruit.

  It was Hira’s favorite place in the world.

  Hira paused to grab a tiny silver bowl of syrupy gulab jamun and was halfway across the courtyard when she doubled back and grabbed an extra bowl. Just in case. Cut-quartz lanterns swayed across the ceiling of her grandmother’s chambers. She had lived here ever since she had ceded the throne to Hira’s father when Meghana was just a baby. One day she announced that she had done all she could do, and that it was time to make room for the new generation.

  Her father said that some courtiers had wanted the old queen to leave Bharata-Ujijain and spend the rest of her days in religious exile. They said that she should be seeking penance in the great forests beyond. But the old queen had laughed off the notion.

  “Penance?” she had famously declared. “After enduring the courtly politics of this kingdom for nearly a century, I am certain even the gods will agree that I have been through quite enough.”

  And that was that.

  When Hira stepped over the threshold of her grandmother’s living room, she heard a sharp gasp on the other side of the room.

  “You’re not supposed to be here,” said her grandmother imperiously.

  Hira’s shoulders fell. First Meghana, and now not even Dadi-Ma didn’t—

  “Which makes me all the more delighted that you managed to sneak away,” said her grandmother, winking. “Were you painfully bored?”

  Hira nodded.

  “Did you grab a sweet on your way inside?”

  Hira nodded once more.

  “Did you get one for me too?”

  Hira grinned, and ran forward. She dropped off the bowl of sweets and then embraced her grandmother. Her grandmother held her tightly. One warm hand on Hira’s shoulder blade and one cold hand against the back of her head.

  “Let me see,” said Hira, curling up beside her.

  Her grandmother laughed and held out her hands.

  Hira had never seen anyone else with hands like her grandmother. Her left hand was a warm brown the color of toasted spices. Her knuckles looked like the knobs of a tree, plump veins running across them like roots. But her right hand?

  Her right hand was made of glass.

  It was smooth and always cold to the touch. It made Hira think that while the rest of her grandmother was in one place, sometimes her hand belonged to another world altogether. Maybe in that world it was cold and there was a crust of frost on the ground. Maybe the other hand had just turned up its silver palm to catch one of the flakes before her grandmother had need of it in their kingdom.

  But while it amused Hira, her grandmother’s lips pressed into a line. It was the face she made whenever some memory caught her. And then, for the span of one blink, it was as if her grandmother were somewhere else entirely.

  “Is something the matter?” asked Hira.

  “Just a memory,” she said with a faint smile. “The older you get, the more memories feel a bit like old battle scars. They will ache for no reason until you ease them away.”

  Hira frowned. “How do you do that?”

  Her grandmother folded her strange hands in her lap.

  “You relive them. You savor both the sorrowful and the sweet. You make peace with it, and as you do, you let it go, and it can have no power over you for a spell.”

  Hira glanced up at her grandmother. She was seated by the fire even though the afternoon sun blazed high in the sky. A silk shawl was pulled tight around her shoulders. Her hair was completely white, and thinned in some places so that Hira could see patches of her shiny, brown scalp. But no matter how old she seemed, her eyes were a lively and lustrous black.

  “You will understand one day,” said her grandmother. “Perhaps you will even think back on this day with some mixture of bitter and sweet. After all, your sister is leaving. I remember that day.”

  “You had a sister?” asked Hira, shocked.

  Of all the things her grandmother had spoken of, her sister was not one of them. Hira tried to imagine her grandmother as a young girl … but she couldn’t. She’d seen the portraits, of course. Everyone had. Portraits of her grandparents, with her grandmother in her battle armor and her grandfather clutching a handful of scrolls. Where her grandmother’s gaze was intense and grave, her grandfather always looked as if he was about to laugh.

  “I have a sister,” she corrected. “She is still alive. In fact, she looks like Meghana. Or perhaps Meghana looks like her. They are rather similar, you know. Beautiful and curious, with a touch of something rather mysterious about them. On her wedding day, I was miserable. Cried all night.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “She married a king from a faraway land that we all must one day visit.”

  That sounded a little strange, but Hira thought better than to point that out. Sometimes her grandmother said strange things. Sometimes she could not even remember the story she was telling, and so Hira would have to tell her the story from the beginning just to find out what happened next.

  “And you never saw her again?”

  “I saw her. Once.” Her grandmother rubbed absentmindedly at her glass hand. “And I will see her again. I will see many people again. Perhaps soon, I suspect.”

  “Can I come?” asked Hira.

  Her grandmother snorted. “No.”

  “But why not? Mother and Father are busy, and Meghana … Meghana hates me. She doesn’t want to see me ever again.”

  Her grandmother was silent. “Is that so?”

  Hira nodded. And then, when faced with her grandmother’s regal silence, she told her everything that had happened. Down to the broken glass story bird.

  When she was finished, she waited for her grandmother to agree that Meghana had been cruel. But instead, her grandmother said:

  “Have you ever considered that perhaps Meghana is scared?”

  “Scared?” asked Hira, snorting. “Never.”

  The women of Bharata-Ujijain did not get scared. Besides, Meghana was—used to be, corrected Hira silently—daring. It was a well-known fact amongst the women of their family that they were immune to poison. No one was quite sure how. It was rumored that it had something to do with the small, blue star that each Bharata-Ujijain girl was born with. Her g
randmother said that it was a gift from a friend who had long since left this world.

  Meghana used to make a show of it by kissing serpents and laughing when they snapped at her.

  Her sister was wild.

  Invincible.

  She would never be leveled by something as foolish as fear.

  Her grandmother eased back against her cushions. She called for her water pipe, a nasty-smelling thing that Hira didn’t quite care for because it turned people’s teeth black.

  “I rather like how it makes my teeth look like blunted fangs, don’t you?” her grandmother had once said when they were little, baring her grin and snapping her teeth as if she were some forgotten monster. Then she would pretend to snap at them one by one because they were so delectable that she could not help but gobble them whole.

  “I remember being very scared before my wedding,” she said. “And it puts me in mind of another queen’s wedding. She was very scared. Just like me. Just like, perhaps, Meghana. Though we all have different reasons for our fears.”

  There it was.

  That faraway cast to her voice, as if it took all of her strength to pull it away from whatever memory she was living in. When her parents heard that cast, they would frown and call for the court physicians. But when Hira or Meghana heard it, it was a sign:

  Dadi-Ma was about to tell a story.

  “Why?” asked Hira, curling closer.

  “Because the queen’s bridegroom was about to die.”

  THE EXTRAVAGANCE OF NORMAL

  Gauri stared at her hands. One glass, one flesh.

  Her hands were usually a cause for curiosity, but last night they had been the center of celebration. In preparation for tomorrow’s wedding ceremony, Gauri had been sequestered in her apartments. Musicians and dancers had been brought in to entertain her and her female guests. And as the encroaching night pared the sun to a thin band of gold, an artist had been brought in to adorn her hands with henna. Well, at least one of them. No matter how hard the man tried, the paste refused to stick to the glass hand. It slipped off without drying. Her right hand would always be a cold and Otherworldly thing, not that Gauri minded.