“Oh.”
Kamala ignored me and stared with her milky eyes at the white piles in the sea. I followed her gaze, my mouth nearly dropping open. What I had thought were small hillocks of stone were Airavata’s gigantic white ears. He rose out of the waves, water trailing through his wrinkled trunk and pooling along the dents of his back. I had never seen an elephant like Airavata. Across his tusks lay a thin cloud and in his trunk he carried an ivory comb. As Airavata combed the cloud, out drifted dark puffs of air that glinted with lightning. His eyes were filled with warmth and he flapped his ears in greeting. Artfully looping his trunk around the cloud, he unhooked it from his tusks and placed the comb and cloud onto his back.
“And what is this?” asked Airavata, leaning forward. His voice was rich and deep, streaked with friendliness and a wizened timber. “A demon near my waters and someone who smells of secrets.”
Kamala turned to me, whispering, “Which one am I?”
“The person full of secrets,” I muttered.
Kamala whinnied. “Oh, I hope you are a queen. You are funny. Funny, funny. What does funny taste like?” She paused. “Maybe I hope you are not a queen. I would like to taste funny.”
“I am certain you do.” I smirked before turning to Airavata. “We seek passage to the Otherworld, to the Night Bazaar.”
“Strange place. Stranger still, with chaos alive and angry.”
I swallowed nervously, my thoughts jumping to Amar. Where was he? Was he safe?
“What do you mean?”
“It means that I am spinning storm clouds of late,” said Airavata slowly. He waved his trunk toward a dark cloud that darted around his legs.
“Will you let me pass? I have to get there.”
Airavata stared, before bowing his head. “No.”
“No?” I repeated dumbly. “You don’t understand, I need to be there. I need to speak with the Dharma Raja. I need to get back to—”
“It does not matter to me how or why you must get back. I am merely a spinner of clouds. Not a diviner. I cannot augur your heartbreak like entrails any more than I can speak the language of faraway stars.”
“Why won’t you let me in?”
Kamala turned sightless on me. I thought I saw hunger in her gaze. Not today, I murmured in my head. I will not be demon feed.
“I demand that you let me in,” I repeated.
Airavata only batted his ears. “You see, that is why. You can only enter the Otherworld by invitation, self-worth or sacrifice. Or by standing beneath a double-rainbow with a belly full of cold, cold sapphires. And I have not seen a double-rainbow in five hundred years. And I know you have no invitation, for your name is on no list. The way you seek before me now is the way of self-worth, and that you have not earned.”
“There are demons inside the Otherworld. Flesh-eating bhuts and wraiths the size of whole countries and you’re telling me that I have to prove myself to join them?”
“I never said it had to be good self-worth. You could slay a million children. Maybe then you could come. But in your current state, your soul cannot handle the Otherworld.”
“But I was let in before!” I protested, thinking back to my wedding day, and the hours spent with my arms around Amar’s waist while we walked through jungles, our bodies close. I thought of his promise, his palm welling with blood. His assurances. His kiss. “Why is now any different?”
“It is different because you are different.”
“And when I ‘prove’ myself, I’ll somehow find my way back in?”
Airavata nodded.
“Isn’t there something I can give you?” I asked, furiously thinking back to the head of hair that Kamala had eaten off. “Something you want?”
Airavata bowed his head. “Poor thing. Poor being of secrets and nighttime. There is nothing you can give me that I would ever take willingly.”
“What do I need to do?”
“I do not know. I only know that I cannot let you in. There is something unfinished that you carry with you. Rid yourself of it and you may enter.”
The elephant regarded us patiently, not breaking the exchange. I sensed that he was hiding something, but he wouldn’t say. And I wasn’t going to press him. I could tell, from years spent battling Mother Dhina and Mother Shastri, when an argument or a rationalization was useless.
I opened my mouth to say something, but Kamala spoke first.
“Then give us a cloud bridge. To get back to the other side. There is more than one way into the Otherworld.”
“We’re just going to turn around?” I asked incredulously.
“If you know the area where the Dharma Raja will be, I can sniff out his location,” said Kamala.
“How?” I asked.
“When death is close I become alive…”
I stared at Kamala. I had already given her my hair and pledged her a bite of my skin. I knew she was bound to help me. But it never struck me that she might do so voluntarily.
“Why are you helping me?”
“Why do I do anything? Why do I hate beets or lust after the feeling of hair in my mouth instead of blood? Maybe I like the thought of being filled. Of being less empty,” said Kamala with another ghoulish grin. “Maybe I am bored and your company is a funny thing. Your energy is a strange one. You are a pillar of salt I want to lick and break, but save and love.”
Where would I even go? I couldn’t chase false horizons hoping it would somehow land me in front of him. There had to be a specific place, somewhere he’d be drawn despite himself. Amar’s words floated back to me:
I love you, jaani. My soul could never forget you. It would retrace every step until it found you.
Retrace every step …
Death always visited his familiar haunts. Blood-damp stretches of battlefields, sage-sharp mats of midwives’ huts, rain-slick rocks of riverbeds. But maybe there was another place he would go. A place that, once, had meant something to us.
I fished out the onyx stone filled with two memories. I could use it to find my way back to Amar. Back to the Night Bazaar. Back to Nritti and her ice and honey words. Back … to myself.
Airavata batted his ears. “And what do you expect me to do?”
“We need that cloud bridge.” I turned to Kamala. “When we get back, there’s something I must do, and I hope that will tell us at least where the Dharma Raja will be. And then we can use your … talents … to get us all the way.”
“Delightful,” murmured Kamala. “I have not been so excited since a massacre twelve years ago. All those bodies. So delicious.”
Airavata bowed his head in assent.
Hooking a cloud between his curved tusks, he began to comb it. A billowy vapor formed a mist over the ocean before flattening into a uniform stretch of white, dotted here and there with iron and purple storm clouds. I reached for Kamala and swung myself onto her back.
Gently, I kicked my heels into her side and we took off onto the cloud bridge. I had thought the cloudy material would be soft, like running on sand or fresh grass, but the cloud bridge was as hard as stone. Airavata walked beside us, sinking ever deeper into the waves until only his head was visible. His eyes twinkled, a knowing glint in his eye. But if he had a secret to tell or a thought to give voice to, he would not share it with me.