The Wild Ones

by Nafiza Azad

  “Because I was human, my rights as an individual, as a living, breathing person, didn’t… don’t matter to the middle worlders. What happened with Baarish… Forgive me, I still can’t speak about it,” he whispers. “Those stars you wear in your palms? They are my tears. When I am in more pain than I can endure, I shed a tear that is the purest form of magic that can exist. They’re the reason Baarish wanted me. Wants me. If consumed, one tear can fuel a middle worlder clan for years. Baarish intended… intends to use me to harvest as many tears as he can before my body breaks and I die.”

  The tea turns cold in the cups. None of us speak. None of us are able to.

  Taraana tells us that the chance to escape came once. A little girl, a granddaughter of Baarish’s, felt sorry for him, so she set him free when the Dar wasn’t around. Taraana took the box of tears and ran.

  “I didn’t think I would get away with it, but how could I not try?” That was the day he met Paheli. He tossed her the box right before he was recaptured because he was damned if he would let Baarish use the tears.

  “Why didn’t you just escape into the Between?” Etsuko asks.

  “I didn’t know what the Between was then. I was completely unschooled in the ways of the middle world. I had seen doors to the Between, but I was never brave enough to open one and walk through,” Taraana confesses.

  “Not even once?” Valentina looks disbelieving.

  He shakes his head. “I had learned that what seemed like it could hurt me, usually did.”

  We are silent for a while after this.

  “Baarish took advantage of the fact that no one knew of my existence. He kept me in a cage for a decade. The girl who helped me escape once did so again when the coup happened—a month after I was recaptured—and Baarish’s enemies came into power and imprisoned him. This time she led me to a wall, guided me into opening a door to the Between, and all but pushed me in. My time stopped from then on. Just like you, I’m stuck at the age I was when I first entered the Between.

  “I have spent a lot of time hiding. Learning about the middle world. Trying to figure out what I’m supposed to be. All I can find out about the Keepers of the Between is that they always begin as human beings, and I suppose that’s why they’re considered expendable. No matter how much I searched, I couldn’t find any other records of them.” Taraana leans back, looking as if the telling of his tale has exhausted him.

  “Why haven’t we seen you before? Why haven’t you contacted us before?” Paheli demands. “I always wondered who you were! I looked for you everywhere!”

  Taraana flushes. “I spent most of my time hiding in towns and cities with thin magic, hoping to remain out of notice of middle worlders who would try to exploit me if they knew who I was. I knew you”—he gestures to us all—“existed. Every time someone wears my stars, I can hear echoes of their hearts. But being with me would have meant being in danger. In fact, I am risking you right now.” He ducks his head apologetically.

  “So, the reason you have approached us now?” Valentina prompts.

  The light leaves Taraana’s face, and an end tries to write itself in the depths of his eyes. “Baarish will pursue me until he captures me. Once he does, he will torture me. This time around, I won’t submit to the pain. I refuse. This time around, I will end myself rather than go through that pain, that humiliation, again. I don’t know what the consequences of my death will be. I don’t know if the tears you wear will be affected.”

  So Baarish dreams himself the architect of our end?

  Paheli snorts. “As if we are going to allow him or you to do anything of the sort.”

  “No one can stop him. No one ever wants to,” Taraana says, his words soft enough to be mistaken for the sound of the raindrops falling on the wooden railings of the balcony.

  “We have had enough of being victims,” Kamboja spits out.

  “What can you do?” Taraana asks. “Unless I stay in the Between and never venture out, he will capture me. Even if I stay in the Between, he will find a way to take me. He has resources that I don’t. His family and his allies are more than I will ever be able to claim.”

  “We are your family now. We are your allies, and we will be your resources. You helped me when you didn’t need to. You helped all of us. Your fight is our fight.” Paheli drains her cup and looks at Taraana. “We haven’t had enough of living yet. We are not willing to give up. Are you?”

  From the Book of MEMORIES

  GHUFRAN

  CITY OF ORIGIN: BAGHDAD

  The inimitable truth of loss creeps up on her like the sun rising in the morning—only without the light. She is made up of yellow ribbons dipped in blood and memories of fear and filth. When the sunlight brushes the leaves of the date trees, she stands at doors listening for her own footsteps and wonders if there is a curve in time where she can meet herself. Escape from her thoughts is impossible except on Fridays when the muezzin calls the world to prayer and she finds peace, briefly, from the blue in the sky. But the afternoon nearly always finds her weeping behind the curtains of her sister’s house.

  She has poetry, a dirge or two, scribbled in henna black on her sand-scarred arms. Her palms are full of lines that talk of lives shorter than the last film someone smuggled in across the border. Her kisses, and she is stingy with those, taste like goodbye and her eyes are continually searching the crowd for faces she knows she will never see again. She hides her hair and her body in voluminous material the color of a shroud. Her toes curl bashfully in the sand, remembering the ground her feet will never walk on again. Mismatched bangles clang on her hands and her lips shape questions that will never be answered.

  She has the scent of the desert, the madness of the desert, and the sorrow of it. She has screams in her mouth and blood on her hands. She is what they removed to find space for the liberty they gifted, this woman.

  Heartbreak, Stone Buildings, and Tandoori

  We accompany Taraana back to Jbeil and leave him safe with Assi before, with a pause in between to gather our spirits, we walk toward the next door, our next destination. After some discussion, we decided that if we are going to fight Baarish, we need more information about him. As such, we are going to go to the city in which he lives to do some reconnaissance.

  Paheli opens the door to Agra without much thought, but the Between must be hiccuping, because the city on the other side of the door is definitely not Agra. For one thing, it’s snowing in this city. She closes the door and then turns to us, her eyes confused.

  “Try again,” Valentina commands. Paheli silently obeys, and this time the door opens to the city it is supposed to.

  We pile out of the Between and out into a courtyard in front of the Taj Mahal. After spending a few minutes staring at the monument, we leave quickly and enter the city proper. Agra, built on the banks of the Yamuna River, is eminently suitable to be the location of the residence of the Keeper of the Rivers and Lakes in Uttar Pradesh.

  We become visible to humans and make our way to Kinari Bazaar to exchange money. It is a shrill Saturday morning, and the sun is entirely without mercy. The market is bustling with people and purpose, colors and smells. Vendors hawk their goods in raucous voices. People haggle over each cent they unwillingly spend. In a corner of the market, right beside a vendor selling fragrant bunches of gajra, is a very old woman sitting in the middle of countless corked bottles. At first glance, the bottles seem empty, but a closer look reveals a smoky substance inside. Nobody stops at her stall; nobody even seems to realize she is there.

  We linger in front of her cart and wait for her attention. At first, she seems disinclined to give it to us, so Paheli takes out a Between diamond and holds it up to catch a spark of the sun. The old woman’s eyes flicker, a reptilian blink, and one side of her mouth creeps up in a ghastly facsimile of a smile.

  “Well, well, well,” she says. All right, she speaks in Hindi, so she doesn’t say exactly that, but bear with us. Some things are lost in translation. While not all of us kno
w Hindi, Taraana’s tears in our palms let us communicate in all the existing languages in the world. It’s a perk we enjoy. The woman licks her lips. “What have we here?”

  Paheli steps up. “We would like to exchange some Between diamonds for local currency,” she says carefully. She’s wearing a festive blue dress, and thanks to Kamboja, her light pink hair is arranged in complex braids.

  “Let’s see what you have.” The old woman leans nearer. An unpleasant odor wafts toward us. Something dark and decaying. We stand our ground. Paheli takes out five Between diamonds. The woman’s eyes widen and her smile grows, crawling up her cheeks. She licks her lips again with a black tongue and names her price.

  Paheli stares at her for a very long moment before returning the diamonds to the pouch they came in. “We will try our luck with the human merchants.”

  We turn to go.

  “Wait!” the woman says, half-rising from the rickety stool she is sitting on. The decaying smell grows stronger. “I will give you more.”

  We don’t react.

  “I will give you the going rate,” the woman says, and this time we stop, turn around, and do business.

  Afterward, Paheli gestures to the corked bottles with her chin. “What do you sell here?”

  A sly look brightens the woman’s eyes this time. “Heartbreak. All different kinds. To give to your rival or take yourself. Can I interest you in one?”

  “No, thank you,” Widad says before we drag Paheli away just in case she becomes curious.

  Three rickshaw rides—with two stops for mithai and one for pani puri—later, we arrive at the posh hotel we plan to stay in. The hotel employees are anxious when they realize their much-lauded luxury and Koh-i-noor suites are going to belong to us for the next few days, though their unease melts into pleasure when we tip them lavishly.

  We settle into rooms that are richly and tastefully decorated in pleasantly contrasting, vibrant shades. Paheli and Valentina share the Koh-i-noor suite, claiming seniority among the Wild Ones, and we gather into its large living room after freshening up in bathrooms with walls the color of the Mediterranean Sea. The doors leading to the balcony in the living room are open, and we can see the domes of the Taj Mahal gleaming in the distance. We arrange ourselves on the chaise, on the chairs, and on the rug in the middle of the room.

  Valentina walks out of the bathroom, wearing a towel as a turban. She stares at Paheli, who is eating a mysteriously sourced mango with glee. “We need to talk.”

  “Room service,” she replies to our unasked question. She glances at Valentina. “Aren’t we talking now?”

  “I mean about Taraana,” Valentina says, sitting next to Sevda on a settee.

  Paheli finishes eating the mango, washes her hands in the mini kitchen, and returns to the living room. She sits on the floor beside Talei. She, too, has showered and is wearing a shapeless yellow lounging dress with large red flowers embroidered on it. With her light pink hair, blue eyes, and dark skin, she looks very much like an exploded rainbow. We don’t tell her this, of course.

  “Do any of you disagree with my decision to adopt Taraana?” she asks, looking around at each of us. All of us feel a thrill of recognition when her eyes rest on us. “Please feel free to tell me frankly.”

  “I don’t disagree.… It’s just that I’m scared,” Sevda finally says. Widad, Daraja, Talei, and Kamboja don’t speak, but the fear on their faces needs no words.

  “We are not helping him. We are helping ourselves,” Ligaya says, lacing her fingers together. “If he dies, won’t we, too? How can I disagree with that?”

  “Right? Besides, we owe him,” Etsuko adds. “This Baarish has a lot more power compared to us, but the magic he is so proud of doesn’t work on us. Doesn’t that give us an advantage?”

  “I’m scared too, Sevda. There’s nothing wrong with being scared,” Areum says, the bracelets on her wrists noisily chiming. “It’s just that fear cannot be the language in which we make our decisions.”

  Paheli raises an eyebrow at Valentina. “And you?”

  “We’re already here.” Valentina rolls her eyes. “Besides, I am always ready for a fight.”

  “Ghufran?” Paheli asks very gently.

  “I am tired of being afraid,” she replies, rearranging the veil she always has on her head.

  “All right. If, at any time in the following days, you feel like you can no longer participate in this battle, if that’s what it is, please leave. You can stay with Eulalie in New Orleans until things calm down. I don’t know what the future holds, but you have my word that I won’t begrudge you your need for safety. It is never a bad thing to put yourself first.” Paheli looks around the room. “Is that good?”

  We all nod.

  “Okay! Tomorrow, we are going to go around the city to find out more about Baarish from the middle worlders here,” Paheli says.

  “How are we going to gather information when asking questions here is like painting targets on ourselves?” Talei asks.

  “We don’t ask questions,” Valentina replies. “We guide conversations.”

  “What exactly are we looking for?” Sevda asks. She has a frown on her fair face. “Can’t we ask someone else to gather information on him without putting ourselves at risk?”

  “We could…,” Paheli says slowly. “But what would be the fun in that? I’m joking, don’t pinch me, Talei!” She stops and glares at Talei. “We know that Baarish is scum. We are just going to see how much of a scumbag he is. Does his scumminess extend to other people, or is it exclusively reserved for Taraana? How does he treat the other people in his clan? What about his family? What’s their relationship to Baarish? How do they treat people? We’re looking for Baarish’s unofficial profile, the one that wouldn’t appear on the website of Keepers of the Middle World.”

  “Why do we need to know about the way he treats his family or how his family treats others?” Daraja asks.

  “Well, if we can remove Baarish from power, someone else will have to step up. If we know what his family dynamics are, we may be able to guide someone who doesn’t want to kill Taraana to fill Baarish’s position. It seems prudent for us to see what kind of people his family are, as well,” Paheli says.

  “Isn’t this going to be dangerous?” Sevda asks. She’s sitting on the edge of her seat, looking ill at ease.

  “If you don’t feel up to it, you can stay behind tomorrow,” Valentina reminds her.

  “No, I was just asking,” Sevda says, a blush staining her cheeks.

  The conversation falters for a bit, and we turn our attention to the Taj Mahal gleaming in the distance.

  “It’s so beautiful,” Widad says, sighing. “People call it the greatest testament to love.”

  “People need to remember it’s a tomb.” Kamboja sneers. “A tomb, in case you didn’t hear me the first time.”

  “How did the empress die?” Areum asks. “Don’t look at me like that, Talei. The lives of dead royalty are hardly the most important parts of the history I need to know.”

  “She died giving birth to her fourteenth child,” Daraja answers her.

  Fourteen children. That poor woman.

  “He should have loved her a little less so she could have lived a little more,” Etsuko muses out loud.

  “What is love, do you think?” Areum asks.

  “Mangoes. Unlimited mangoes,” Paheli promptly replies.

  Valentina rolls her eyes. “Love is peril.”

  Paheli nods. “And mangoes.”

  “I miss going out on dates,” Sevda says softly. “And meadows filled with flowers.”

  “I can ask Eulalie to magic us a meadow,” Paheli offers.

  Sevda shakes her head. “It’s okay.”

  “You know what I miss?” Ligaya asks, leaning against a chair. She doesn’t give us a chance to answer. “Periods.”

  We stare at her.

  “Periods?” Areum chokes.

  “Periods.” Ligaya nods.

  “Kick her out
of here,” Kamboja says, standing up. “Take her star!”

  Areum pounces on Ligaya, tickling her, and the rest of us join in, until Ligaya is screaming for mercy. Our periods stop as soon as the stars embed in our palms. Time stops for us biologically, so periods, too, become a memory.

  Does the absence of periods make a question of our femininity?

  Observations, Conversations, and Hot Parantha

  After the tandoori is devoured and Ligaya is tickled, we engage in a dance-off to the beats of Bollywood music. None of us claim to be Madhuri Dixit, but Paheli is particularly lethal on the dance floor. She has two left feet, and anyone dancing near her will be tripped. We go to sleep late and wake long before the roosters and spend some time battling private demons. Later, the hotel provides us with a far grander breakfast than it should be able to in the wee hours of the morning. We spare a thought, and some money, for those whose fate writes them into hot kitchens for far less than they deserve.

  In this moment, a capricious energy connects all eleven of us. We cannot stay still, so we don’t. We spill out of each other’s rooms, sprawl over sofas and chairs, sing, and whisper to each other or ourselves. Now that we have an immediate purpose, we are more alive and more clearly present in each moment. We suddenly have meaning. We, who were abandoned by those who meant the most to us, suddenly are important to someone. It is a heady feeling that occurs less in words and more in the feeling of looking into someone’s eyes and knowing you are being seen.

  We leave the hotel just as the first rays of the sun hit the Taj Mahal’s domes and turn them incandescent. The city still has patches of darkness. The murmur of people on their way to act out the daily struggle of making a living is gaining momentum. We pause in front of a chai wallah and purchase eleven cups of hot masala chai from him. Looking around as we sip our tea, we see many middle worlders in this sea of humans. Most of them are physically identical to humans, but there are some who aren’t, who present themselves in the human world anyway, relying on the human brain to not comprehend their not-human features. For example, a middle worlder with the body of a human but with the yellow legs of a bird is standing right next to us. He is talking merrily about his wife to the chai wallah, who notices nothing different about him.