I play for the cobra and he dances for me, while sunset stains the sky orange and purple behind him.
Vikram comes through the doorway and stops, his mouth a comical O. His eyes slide from me to the snake to his graffiti, and he slips back indoors.
I lower my flute. He will be back. I am not sure how to let the snake know, but when the music stops he lowers his hood and slithers into my shadow. I look down but cannot see him.
I lower one foot to the ground. It touches ground and nothing else. The cobra has vanished.
When Vikram returns with his thugs they see only me, sitting where I should not be and playing the sun down. They come to the center partition to stare at me, at the empty roof.
I smile.
Amit laughs at Vikram. Vikram punches him. Stalks away. The rest leave soon enough.
But I do not dare go home until Gautam comes to find me.
Shruti passed her classes, but only just. She did not have a tutor, as most students did, and many nights she would forget her homework in music. Her teachers were less amused by her doodles every year. At the end of Tenth Standard one teacher told her parents that she was only good for the arts, if that.
Vikram and Gautam spent that summer closeted with tutors. Vikram was preparing for engineering college, and Gautam for Twelfth Standard. Most days, nobody knew where Shruti went. A frown grew between her mother's eyebrows, and she watched Shruti silently at meals.
Uncle took Papa aside one day. “You will have to decide what to do with her, you know,” he said. “She's a good girl in her way, but…”
“Yes,” said Papa. “But.”
I pause in the doorway to catch my breath, almost coughing at the smoke. Vikram and his gang are on my roof. I could exile them, set the snake on them. But if I did, what would Vikram do tonight?
I dodge an auntie's venomous glare and slip downstairs to hide under the bougainvillea, where sunlight falls in patches of magenta and the air is thick and sweet with mango and flowering rose.
I take one delicious breath, then pause. The air is too cool and too clean. There is no exhaust underlying the sweetness, no smog. No sound of children from the apartment beyond. The garden has lost its boundaries; when I raise the flute there are a hundred ears listening. I take a step forward, hesitate.
A hand on my shoulder. I twist, ready to strike, and find a bare chest. Skin like polished teak, and the dark smell of earth just after rain. I look up.
He is slender, and the curve of his cheek is a boy's, but his eyes are clear and old as drops of amber. His hair falls unbound to the middle of his back, and light glints from a silver circlet as he leans down. I should be frightened, and am not, and that tells me who he is.
“Asha,” he murmurs, his lips close to mine, “won't you play for me?”
I play for him there in the multicolored light, in our tiny section of an endless forest, and he dances for me. Below the waist his body is a snake's.
He touches me, later, with fingers and lips and coils, making my heart hammer and my breath quicken with something other than fear. I run my fingers over coffee-bean skin, trying to find where it turns into scales.
Naga do not marry.
They may build a home together, raise children together, create their lives together; but their ceremonies are only for birth and naming and death.
They tell a story about this: long ago, when the snake people married, a fair Naga girl was to marry a handsome youth. But at the wedding, with all the village gathered, her musk attracted and maddened the groom's younger brother, who claimed her for himself. The brothers fought over her, long and hard and viciously, and each died of the other's poison. In grief and shame the girl ran away, and never was seen again. The snake people have had no marriage since that day, and no true fights in mating season.
But my Nani considered herself married. “Once the gods have been called,” she said, “we cannot pretend that they were not here.”
His lips brush against my neck. “Asha, play for me.” We are in the garden again, among the dappled green scents and shadows, as we have been more often than is wise.
I find my voice. “Why.” It sounds dusty.
“You know I love your music,” he whispers in my ear. My breath catches at his voice, his closeness, his hands on my stomach, his heartbeat against my back; but his words are not the words I want.
I love your voice, I want to say. I love the way you move, the way you smell, the nonexistent point where skin becomes scale. I love the way you shimmer between forms, as I cannot and ache to and never will. I love the curves and the planes of your body, and I love your shifting face. I want to know who you are, and that is who I want to keep with me. Do you only love my music?
There are too many words. They jostle and clog in my throat. I shake my head.
“You know I do,” he says, “and you know you will.”
The air squeezes from my lungs. Have I no say in what I do? How dare he think so? I take a breath and start to play Nana's song.
He grows rigid, his heartbeat quickening. His hands drop away from me. “No,” he says.
I turn to him; see terror, adoration; remember the way Nani looked at Nana. I stop playing.
He watches my eyes, my hands. He looks at me like I'm Vikram.
I will not be Vikram.
“No,” I agree. “Go free.”
His eyes widen. He shimmers, becomes first a cobra, then merely another shadow. I play then, play him the words I could not speak before, but only the shadows hear.
Shruti started haunting the garden, playing eerie, melancholy tunes that made the babies cry. Or so the neighbors said. Vikram said she was probably making their mothers cry, too. And souring their milk, and rotting the mangoes and bananas on the branches. Auntie wanted to know why, if that girl would not make pleasant music, she was allowed to play that flute at all.
Papa told Shruti to stay out of the garden.
Two days before the full moon, she bought a child's recorder made of bright blue plastic.
I have been mostly alone when I've played. But not every time. He must need the music like I need to shift, to escape. Unfair that he may have what he needs; but my lack is not his fault.
I touch the moonlight, feel my leaden form struggle for a moment to become fluid, to shed its skin. Feel it give up. I settle at the base of the coconut palm and play until the forest is listening. Then I pull out the recorder, play a simple tune.
“Gift,” I say in my dusty, unused voice.
I set it aside and get up. When I look down again, it is gone.
Anywhere three trees grow together, the land's invisible border rubs thin, and the great forest grows so close that it sometimes spills over.
The forest has no edge, but it has many, many frayed borders. It likes opening into our world for a beckoning, teasing, deadly instant. It is fully alive, this forest, with giant trees draped with giant vines, their leaves bigger than me; with dirt-colored flowers and flower-colored birds and sleek, silent predators. Naga live in the rivers, in the wet earth, and in hollow trees; the monkey people claim the canopy. Garuda sometimes nest on the highest branches, which border on their realm.
It is home to great beauty, the forest, in form and scent and movement, but the only music found there is the music of the natural world, calls and cries and falling rain.
So my Nani told me.
“Why?” I asked.
“We do not make music.”
“Why not?”
“Perhaps we have not the skill.”
“I do.”
“It is not something we learn, Asha. We do not live as you do here.” She smiled sadly, but she said no more.
I play to myself in the punishing afternoon, when I know I will be alone. To myself and to the forest beyond. I play with my eyes closed, letting the world paint itself in touch and smell. Overripe bananas, frying onions and cumin, my own sweat beaded on my forehead and dampening my clothes. The occasional breeze, warm, bringing the stench o
f exhaust and burning garbage. My fingers, slippery on the flute.
The taste of his musk, of earth after rainfall, brings my eyes half-open. I watch for him through my eyelashes, and let my fingers and breath sing him a lonely mood. He drifts into view, shifting uncertainly from half-form to cobra and back; he starts to dance and stops again.
When I draw breath, he shifts to full man, naked, too wild for modesty. I look away, shame and lust burning my cheeks.
“Show me?”
I look back. His gaze is wary, but he holds the little blue recorder as though it were precious. I hold out a hand. He edges forward. I grasp his wrist to pull him closer. He jerks back, shifts to cobra, disappears.
I pick up the recorder. Will he come back for it, if not for me? I play a note. Sniff and blink tears away. Whisper, “Come back.”
I hear lorry and rickshaw horns in the silence. Then his voice, behind me. “Will you charm me?”
I shake my head.
“How can I know?”
I turn to look at him. “Could kill me,” I suggest.
He stares for a second, then slides forward till I can feel his warmth. His tail curls around my ankle. “I would not.” I keep looking at him, and eventually his lips twist into something that might be a smile. “But how can you know?”
I nod.
“What should we do?”
I reach out again to take his hand, and this time he does not start. I shape it around the recorder, showing his long fingers where to be.
He laughs, silently and a bit raggedly. “That is…not quite the answer I was expecting.”
The monkey people are territorial. Sooner steal a Garuda's egg than seek the monkeys’ great city in the trees.
Not so the Naga. They care little about land, only one race frightens them, and that race cannot find their homes.
When my Nani told me this I did not understand.
She glanced at me, cutting onions by feel. Her eyes were bright, the knife swift and steady in her wrinkled hand. “You will,” she said.
He is waiting for me in the garden, his tail coiled under him, his head in his hands. He looks up as I hurry over, but he does not speak until I am close. Then he puts his arms around me, leans his head on my shoulder, and says, “They took it away.”
“Who?” I do not have to ask what. I hold him, stroking his hair, breathing in its dark-leaf fragrance.
“The elders. Not all of them; your Nani said not to.”
My arms tighten around him. “Nani?”
“She is our storyteller. But the rest are—angry—that any of us would learn your people's magic, and shocked that any of us could.”
“Magic?” The lizards and birds do not come when he plays.
“Making the sweet sounds with your fingers. They said it was wrong, and…they took it away.”
The grief in his voice shakes me. Even Auntie would not take music away from me. I ask, “Why?”
“They're scared, I suppose.” He speaks into my shoulder. “Of course they're scared. It is our bane. So beautiful, so powerful…” He pulls back, looks at me, and says, “We cannot resist that pull.”
I rest a fingertip on his nose. “Bane.”
He blinks.
I smile and hold the flute to his lips. He reaches out a hand, slowly, to touch it, and looks wide-eyed at me.
“Blow,” I say.
He does. It makes no sound at all. He looks surprised, and indignant, and I cannot help but laugh. This makes him glower, so I kiss him before showing him how to coax a sound from the flute.
Later, as his fingers trace the beadwork on my kurti, around my neck, across my breasts; as my lips are learning the shape and taste of him in the dark, he says, “I am not allowed to be here.”
I kiss his shoulder, his neck, his jaw. Whisper in his ear, “Nor I.”
Papa's call pulled Mama out of the kitchen, wiping flour off her hands, and Gautam out of his room to the big, scarred-wood dining table. Vikram was at the other end, with heavy books around him, and Vikram showed no signs of leaving. Shruti was still in the garden and did not hear.
“Well,” Papa said, “maybe it's for the best. She will be less of a problem if she hears it from Gautam.”
Vikram looked up.
“Hears what, Papa?” Gautam asked.
Mama polished an imagined smudge from the wood with the end of her sari.
Papa sighed. “She cannot go to college,” he said, “and no normal man will marry her. And Mr. Bhosle says Amit heard her playing that music of hers with someone. What next?”
Gautam said, “She can stay with me.”
“A live-in mousetrap,” said Vikram.
Auntie, coming in with a stack of stainless steel plates, laughed. “Wait until you have a wife, Gautam.” She set the plates on the table with a clatter.
“But listen,” said Papa, “I know a much better solution. I have written to—you know that boy, he was on television. The one who holds cobras. He is still alive; I wrote to his parents. They agreed that he should meet Shruti.”
“Oh, what a good idea,” Mama said. “They will have so much in common.”
“They can open a pet shop,” said Vikram.
Gautam glared. “Don't you have somewhere else to be?”
“Than in my own home?”
Gautam turned his back on Vikram and said, “She's never even met the boy.”
“Your mother's right. They both like snakes to the point of obsession. Neither is quite—normal…”
Vikram snorted.
“…but his parents are happy that she will not scream at his cobras.”
“She's only sixteen, Papa.”
“Am I getting her married tomorrow?”
“Are they Brahmins?” asked Mama.
“No, but they are well off, and we cannot be too—” He stopped, and glanced at Gautam. “That is, in this day and age, it is very old-fashioned to care about caste.”
Gautam pushed himself to his feet. Hands flat on the table, he leaned over his father. “You talk like she's defective,” he said.
Vikram murmured, “There's a reason for that.”
“She's not stupid, Vikram. She's clever enough to stay away from you.”
The microwave beeped insistently into the silence that followed.
“Vikram,” said Auntie, a little too loudly, “can you clear away your books and call your Papa, Beta? It's time for dinner.”
“She's just…innocent, Papa. Look, you don't need to worry about her. She can stay with me. Really.”
“What kind of life would that be for her?” Mama demanded. “Unmarried, unwanted, and underfoot in her brother's house? No!”
“Sit down,” said Papa. “I know you want your sister to be happy. We all do. But you are too young to see the wisdom of age.”
“Does the wisdom of age mean settling her life behind her back?”
“If she cannot even be home at dinnertime, maybe it does!”
Gautam's eyes widened. “Shit.”
“Gautam,” said Mama, “What have we said about language?”
“Well, it's not like her, is it? I'd better go look.”
Vikram stood up, smiling. “I'll go with you,” he said. “Mama, you'll clear my books, won't you? The poor darling might be in trouble.”
Knowing that we are both disobeying our elders brings us closer. I do not leave when I normally would, nor do I pull away when he tugs at my kurti, when he eases it over my head. My jeans follow. The bra confuses him, until I help.
He is a shadow cast by the waning moon above me, black limned with silver. His tail strokes my leg, tossing an arc of light between its coils, and light catches in his circlet. He picks jasmine flowers, lets them drift through his fingers onto my bare skin. I taste jasmine on the roof of my mouth, and crushed leaves, and arousal. He leans down. Kisses my neck. I feel teeth against my skin.
He slides a hand teasingly down my belly, and shifts. The wind grows stronger, bringing me the rich leaf-scent of the great
forest. His magic tingles just under my skin. I arch up, aching to shift, and find myself pressed against him. He is in man-form. His gasp matches my own. We stare at each other.
We both hear the snap of a broken twig.
We freeze. Another footfall and he shifts, from man to half-snake to snake.
I snatch my jeans and jam my legs into them. Not Vikram, I pray, not here, not now.
The snake melts into shadows. I grab my kurti, telling myself that he had no choice. A click, and the great forest is washed away on a wave of over-bright blue light, leaving me alone. I hold the kurti to my chest.
“What have you been doing?” It is Gautam's voice. And Gautam's LED key chain torch, the one he is so proud of. I wince.
“I think that's pretty clear, no?” says Vikram behind him. “The question is, who's Little Miss Innocence doing it with?”
I clutch my kurti closer.
“Put that on, stupid. It's not for playing with.”
I twist away and pull it quickly over my head, inside out, trying not to show him more than he has already seen. Beadwork scrapes against me.
“I never would have believed it,” says Gautam softly.
Vikram shoulders past him. I shrink back. “Believe what you want,” says Vikram. “The question is what the neighbors—” His foot jerks sideways under him and he falls crashing through the bougainvillea bush. He screams.
Shadows swing wildly as Gautam runs toward us. He stops short of the bush, grabs his torch, points it. The shadows still. Wrapped around Vikram's ankle, gleaming black against the blue-gray garden, are cobra's coils.
Vikram tries to sit up, bloody scratches on his face and arms. The snake strikes. Vikram falls back and is still. A little wordless sobbing noise comes from my throat.
Gautam says shakily, “He—” He draws a hissing breath. “Ambulance.”
The snake shimmers, shifts to half-man. Says, “No need.”
Gautam stares.
“No kills in mating season.”
They watch each other, the Naga swaying to silent music. I smell fear but cannot tell whose it is. Gautam pulls himself up straight. The Naga rises to match his height. Like the forest, he is washed away in the LED's harsh glare; he looks as though he has gathered shadows for protection from the light.
Nebula Awards Showcase 2012 Page 14