Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  SECOND BLUSH

  It was not hard for Gauri to find Vikram’s name in that grove of forget. It called to her. His name dangled playfully from its iron branch. First, it flashed silver, and then it transformed, turning pale, losing its sheen, before stretching into Vikram’s favorite object in the world:

  A scroll.

  But there was no writing on the enchanted scroll. Gauri did not know whether to bring the name to her ears or hold it to her heart, but the moment she touched it, the paper shuddered. Words bled across the page. The words looked like no language that Gauri had ever seen. This was a calligraphy that did not belong in any earthly realm because it was destiny crimped into letters. The words shifted, living and supple as skin, and Gauri understood that this is what the horse had meant when it declared that the names did not show a destiny. It was like fate flexing a new muscle. A suggestion. A path. A peek of what might happen should the bearer of the name return to the land of the living.

  She did not read the words so much as she lived them.

  They snuck into her mind, spreading across her vision:

  * * *

  Gauri and Vikram stood at opposite sides of their bedroom. Outside their window, the moon had waned to a sliver. Lamps burned low. The silk sheets had been pulled back in invitation, but neither of them made any move toward it. Vikram leaned against the wall. His truth-telling necklace, Biju, lay against his throat. A warning in yellow topaz. Gauri did not lean against anything. She stood with her arms crossed, still as a statue. The room was grand, but it was not so large that it should feel like a realm of its own. And yet, in that moment, it did.

  “I spoke in jest,” said Vikram carefully, as if he were speaking to an infant. “Perhaps you might have heard of this bizarre human development known as humor?”

  “Don’t talk to me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like I have clouds stuffed in my brain.”

  “See, I wouldn’t mind that. Perhaps it would give you some damned levity.”

  Gauri’s mouth flattened to a line. “Sovereigns are not known for their levity. They are known for their solemnity. For their respect to the art of ruling.”

  “Laughter and respect are not mutually exclusive.”

  “They are when it is said at my expense!” she shouted. “You humiliated me.”

  “You are overreacting!” said Vikram, taking one step forward.

  Gauri took one step back. “You criticized my military strategy.”

  “On the contrary, my beastly wife, I praised it,” said Vikram. In the past, the nickname had a touch of sweetness to it. But now, spoken in fury, the words seemed to have curdled in his mouth. He practically spat them out, and Gauri bit back a flinch. “I said that the only way that our militia could win a war any faster is if they kept your favorite dessert behind enemy lines.”

  “Everyone laughed.”

  “Because it was charming! We were speaking to our advisers, and it made you seem somewhat human for a change.”

  “I don’t like that.”

  “You don’t like anything.”

  Gauri dug her heels into the ground. “That isn’t true.”

  “You don’t like it when I laugh…”

  “Again, not true.”

  “Very well, you don’t like it when I make others laugh. You think it, what was it that you said last time? Ah, I recall now. It cheapens our social strata and undermines our rule.”

  She bit her lip. And then, very quietly, she said: “I like it when you make me laugh.”

  “But that isn’t enough, is it?”

  “I just don’t see why you cannot keep your charm to matters outside of court.”

  “It’s who I am,” he said. “You have freed yourself of needing your people’s love, but that does not mean you have to be so cold.”

  “It keeps me impartial.”

  “Just this morning, the gardeners told me that they had orders to move the Garden of Swords and Sweets into the courtyards of our residential quarters. Is that true?”

  Gauri lifted her chin. “Yes.”

  “Are you ashamed of what I made for you?”

  “No!” she said, her eyes widening. “Of course not!”

  “Then why would you hide it from people?”

  Gauri was silent for a few moments, and then she said: “Aasha.”

  “Aasha doesn’t like it?”

  “No, Aasha … Aasha has been reading people for me. Reading their desires. And spying too. No one wants to see me and think of a girl freshly in love. They want to see someone resilient, and it is too raw. They ask questions. Why the swords, why the sweets, and I do not owe anyone a piece of my heart.”

  “Is it truly that bad to reveal that you even have one?” shot back Vikram.

  Gauri scowled and strode forward.

  “Don’t act as though you’re somehow better than me,” she said. “Have you forgotten that I’m a woman?”

  “On the contrary, most nights that is a fact I usually savor.”

  She scowled.

  “You can wear your heart on your sleeve and be called benevolent. You can sing and dance and be called artistic. But me? No. If I show emotion, I am called weak. If I do not keep myself at a distance from my own court, then they will think they have power over me. I have done this before, and I know how it is. Just because I hide some part of my heart doesn’t mean that it means any less to me. I am not you.”

  “And I’m not you!” said Vikram. “I can’t act as you do, and I refuse to. I do not imagine your burdens as anything light, but you’re asking me to be someone I’m not.”

  “Fine! Be yourself! But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  Whatever playfulness lingered in his gaze vanished. “So what you are saying is that you do not like me. Is that right?”

  He raised his eyes to Gauri. His gaze held a challenge.

  Fight me. Fight with me. Tell me that isn’t true.

  But her eyes only hardened.

  Vikram’s jaw clenched. After awhile, he sighed. He walked toward her. At the same time, Gauri rocked forward on her heels, longing plain on her face. She wanted this to be forgotten. She wanted to not explain herself, and instead have it assumed that of course that was not what she meant. But instead of reaching for her, Vikram snatched a pillow from the bed.

  “Since my presence is so offensive, I’ll remove myself.”

  He left.

  And she did not follow.

  * * *

  The scroll with Vikram’s name seamed shut abruptly.

  Gauri was left with the taste of that fight burning in her throat. It had not come to pass, and yet it was unquestionably real to her. This was a truth, and she was forced to look down its throat:

  They would fight.

  Then again, they had always fought. She wasn’t entirely sure that they could help it. In the end, they always caught fire. When they collided—thoughts and dreams or lips and limbs—those sparks didn’t just burn, but cast light. In the stateroom and surrounded by their courtiers, their fiery ideas burned down to the essence of each, combining along the way and gaining strength like some metallurgical alloy. And outside the stateroom … well. No inferno compared.

  Yet, here was the underbelly of all that heat.

  Here was the proof that they would not be invulnerable from their own flames.

  And somehow … something marvelous reared up in the aftermath of her guilt.

  Relief.

  Even though their words were cruel. Even though the air crackled with unfinished fury. Even though she still felt the echoes of that anger … It had not stolen what lay beneath all of that, like some half-sunken jewel.

  Love.

  At least they fought. At least they faced each other with flames. At least they had not preferred the darkness of indifference.

  And it was with this knowledge that Gauri reached for his name. The paper melded to her fingers, turning into a necklace that she then strung around her neck. The
enchantment of his name burned cold against her throat, and she welcomed it. For a moment, it was as if his hands were at her shoulders, her back pulled against his chest. She tilted her head to one side, and felt the ghost of his stubble against her neck, his cheek pressed to hers.

  The memory of a fight that had not come to pass still burned. She still fizzed with anger even as she walked out of that grove, and indignation chased her footsteps. But she welcomed this.

  She welcomed not knowing what would happen next.

  She welcomed this because what she knew was worth any unknown.

  Gauri looked around her. The grove was still teeming with people. Some of them grabbed at the names, refusing to look at the contents, before sprinting down the line of trees and disappearing into what could only be the exit of the gate. Others hung the names back onto the branches, though a touch mournfully. But most people just stood there. Frozen. Holding the contents of a future that seemed a warped reflection of the present, and weighing its worth.

  She did not wait to see what they would decide.

  The horse, Kamala, had promised that it would find her no matter which side she chose.

  Gauri started walking. She walked past the shade of strange branches, and past the names that called out to her, some of them sullenly and some of them longingly: Manosh and Ilavati, Yasmin and Savitri.

  Eventually, the grove of names gave way to a barren expanse. There was no light, and yet it was not dark. Overhead, no constellations whispered of destiny. No clouds bore witness to the battlegrounds of her own heart. She left behind this gate with no ceremony and once more found herself staring at the edge of another hall.

  At the entrance of the threshold, Gauri felt Vikram’s name burning at her throat.

  It was as if this act—of taking his name regardless of what she had seen and carrying it over this threshold—worked a magic of its own. In her mind’s eye, a new scenario bloomed, one that had all the immediacy of just happening.

  And in it, she saw the aftermath of their quarrel, and her heart broke.

  * * *

  The Garden of Swords and Sweets had been delicately uprooted and placed in a reclusive spiral far from the eyes of the courtiers. Vikram may not have verbally spoken to her in days, but the garden served as its own missive. Every day, fresh sweets dangled from the trees, painstakingly knitted in gossamer bags so as not to draw the attention of hungry insects or clever birds. A dagger with a jeweled hilt had “grown” near the foot of an acacia tree, and in a bramble of purple berries, Gauri found an arrow quiver ornamented in chased silver.

  But he did not seek her out at night, even though the door to the bedroom was kept a demure width ajar. And he chose to take his meals alone. Even when they held court, he did not acknowledge her any more than he would a potted plant standing in his path. No longer did he furtively brush his thumb over her knuckles. He did not catch her eye and grin slyly until her thread of thought or conversation was entirely broken.

  He was the picture of decorum and distance.

  The very embodiment of what she had asked.

  And Gauri hated it.

  Every day she walked past the garden he had built her, and every day a new restlessness reared up to join the restlessness of the past. Vikram’s message was clear:

  Your move.

  Very well, she thought.

  Gauri planned in secret. This plan made her skin itch. She did not do things like this. She could barely bring herself to compliment her own reflection out loud, and yet she suspected that Vikram would not accept anything less than a raw piece of her heart.

  Nearly a week of full silence between them had passed when she cornered him in the hall one evening. The moonlight danced through the cut stones of their residential quarters. He froze, looking this way and that before he realized it.

  “Did … did you trap me?” he asked. He might be angry with her, but he couldn’t quite hide that he was reluctantly impressed.

  “Yes.”

  “Someone told me they had found an ancient scroll and strange light was pouring off the pages.”

  “Someone answers to the bribery of royalty,” said Gauri, shrugging.

  “Bribery?” repeated Vikram. “The oh-so-noble-my-own-shadow-refuses-to-fraternize-with-other-shadows queen resorted to cheap bribery?”

  She nodded.

  “On any other day, that might have been proof enough that you love me,” said Vikram. But even as he joked, he sounded resigned. As if this was all he might truly expect from her.

  Gauri took a deep breath. Her heart pounded. She felt rather ill, to be honest.

  “I have better proof,” she said in a small voice.

  And then, not waiting for him to answer, Gauri turned on her heel and padded down the hall. She led him through a labyrinth of their rooms—past the columbarium and the messenger doves with their heads buried in their wings, past the receptacle that held the royal insignia and the sovereign jewels, and finally past the secret courtyard and her Garden of Swords and Sweets. Vikram kept a study there, a massive room cramped with books, where an artful architectural contrivance filled the room with light without allowing sunlight to spoil the pages.

  Sometimes, it seemed to Gauri that Vikram’s scrolls and books and treatises roosted. As if they were birds with heads tucked under their wings, nestled deep inside their alcoves and sleeping. She had told him this once, and he had laughed.

  “I guess that’s fitting,” he had said. “Stories, knowledge … they set the mind alight.”

  That idea: levity brought on by the wings of a good book and a better story. That was what she had tried to show him.

  When they entered the study, a flock of stories in mid-flight was there to greet him. Suspended from the arched ceilings by the finest gossamer thread were pieces of blank paper folded into extraordinary shapes. A winged lion, paper teeth cut to points. A peacock strutting across a bookcase, its tail fanned out and nearly sweeping the floor. A makara swimming across a ceiling newly painted with stars.

  This was what he was to her.

  To her, he was the tipping point of wonder to awe.

  He made her see the world as pieces of unfinished magic, waiting to be transformed.

  She knew she was … unyielding. She could not melt into humor the way he could. She didn’t shout open declarations of love, but that did not mean that she did not feel.

  Beside her, Vikram’s eyes were wide. He walked beneath this sea of paper transformations, blank pages that looked like the beginning of a tale. The painted stars didn’t shine, but Vikram regarded them as if they were real and somehow, the light changed. The force of his wonder was its own illumination.

  “Vikram…” she started, the words knotting together.

  He was standing at the far end of the room. If it had not been so silent, he might not have heard her. But he did, and he turned.

  Last week, they had faced each other across a small room that felt as wide as a country. Today, they faced each other across a greater distance and yet they felt so tightly knit that the simple act of breathing in and out, of blinking slowly and regarding the other, of waiting, was like reaching out and drawing a line across the other’s soul.

  He smiled.

  He crossed the study’s distance in a matter of strides, and stood before her. Gone was his sly smile. There was something raw and unguarded in his eyes. And Gauri knew that if he looked closely, he would see that expression mirrored in her own. She tried to look elsewhere before he saw, but he caught her chin in his hand.

  “I know you find these things hard to say,” he said. “So at least allow me to see the truth of it in your eyes.”

  She relented. For long, horrible moments, Vikram’s eyes held her in thrall. They searched her thoroughly until it wasn’t enough just to look at each other. Somehow, her hands went to the buttons of his silk jacket. Somehow, his fingers left her chin to travel down the bare slope of her neck, to the flimsy clasps of her nightsilk. Somehow, she pulled him or he pul
led her, and now she was seated on top of the long, wooden table strewn with plans and papers.

  “You never said sorry, you know,” he murmured.

  “And I never will,” she retorted.

  “Here’s an idea. Perhaps you don’t have to say it at all,” he said against the hollow of her neck. “You could always show it instead.”

  “And why do I have to be the one doing all the apologizing? You have nothing to be sorry for?”

  “I do,” he said, toying with the ends of her hair.

  “Then why don’t you start.”

  Vikram’s gaze flicked up to hers abruptly. There was no apology there. But something akin to … daring. Or hunger.

  “That’s only fair, my queen,” he said. His voice seemed to borrow some of the darkness around them, and Gauri’s heartbeat started to race, tangling together in anticipation. “I’ll do my utmost to convey the very depths of my sorrow.” He dropped his head to the slope where her neck met her shoulders and kissed her there. “Though I must warn you, it will be a long apology.”

  PRESENT

  Hira tilted her head. “So they fought and then she made him a really pretty present?” She felt like she was missing something. “That’s it?”

  Her grandmother coughed abruptly. “Yes.”

  “They just … talked?”

  That sounded very boring.

  Her grandmother rubbed her temples. “May I finish the story?”

  THE GATE OF GRIEF

  It seemed fitting that at the threshold to the Gate of Grief, Gauri should weep.

  The irony that what should slow her down was happiness instead of fear was not lost on her. Now, she feared her heart had become too heavy. If the first vision she had seen with Vikram’s name had held bitterness with a core of sweet, this was sweetness with a bitter shadow. The name taunted her. The vision showed her not what she had to look forward to, bitterness and all, but how much she had to lose. Gauri saw her loss written out in a bitter calligraphy—all those paper marvels catching fire and crisping underfoot, the long dining hall where he might have laid down her down and covered her body with his, lips swallowing up laughter and false stars so drenched with human hope that they put forth their own light. Love. Love like secret choreography, a dance of limbs and laughter, a steady pattern made more beautiful by each passing day.