At this, she lifted my chin. “Go to Teej. If he doesn’t come, then you know that you have lost nothing but time. And we have plenty of that to spend without consequence.”
I nodded, but the truth was that I did not want to spend time without consequence. I had glimpsed something more, a purpose that I was beginning to unlock day by day. The visitors to my dream wells had doubled and tripled in the past couple of days. Little by little, they were remembering the images I had spun. Little by little, my voice was being carried out into the world. The Dharma Raja’s words floated back to me: We could rewrite the world, you and I.
I didn’t need him, or anyone, to rewrite the world. But beside him, I had felt as if there was a world for me alone. A place that lived at the seams of my heart and grew there, wrapping glass vines around my bones and burying stars in my heart. It was a place of quiet and creativity. And if I had the choice, I never wanted to be without it.
But it seemed that wasn’t my choice to make.
“I’ll go to Teej.”
10
DEATH
The days blurred. I walked the halls, fed the hounds, stood before the Tapestry. Everywhere I moved, thoughts of her robbed me to the point where I sometimes didn’t recognize where I stood or where I was going. Fear is like a curse. But I choose differently. I wish I could say the same for you. I couldn’t shake those devious thoughts out of my head. She bent the way I saw the world. But she couldn’t bend it to the point that it broke a curse.
Today was Teej. I tried to forget it, to lose myself in some other thought. But I couldn’t.
The sky tilted to dusk. I fled to a part of the kingdom where souls waited to be categorized and organized, remade and reshaped. There, a familiar soul caught the light. And I remembered the request of the wife from so long ago, the woman whose words had spurred the listless existence that would very well be my future.
“Do you wish to wait for your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I love her.”
“Why?”
“Because life does not look how it should without her. It is a piece gone missing, a perspective that reminds me what it means to live. Without her, my life would be colorless. Life does not owe me fairness. But I will see beauty, even if I must fight for it. So will you let me stay beside her? And wait until she comes?”
Maybe the words hadn’t truly come to me until now. But finally, finally, I saw it. And the truth was a latch in my heart. The soul reached out and touched me, and in it, I saw the barren wasteland of my thoughts. How the world had lost shape and color and texture since I had not seen her. What she coaxed out of me was a visceral need to live, and wasn’t that what fueled immortality and made it worthwhile anyway? That there were wonders still left to be uncovered? Perhaps she could not bend the world such that it would break a curse. But she had bent my thoughts until I saw hope around its meaning, silver in its bleakness. I wanted to believe the curse had broken. Because I did love her. I couldn’t remember where it started and I couldn’t fathom it stopping. And she had left. And the pain of it had sucked the color from my world.
“I grant you this request,” I said.
And then, I ran.
Gupta was waiting for me, a dark green sherwani jacket in his hands.
“I have been waiting out here for so long, I thought I had started aging.”
“I don’t have time for this. I have to get to her—”
“She won’t be at the grove. She’s at Teej.”
My heart dropped.
“Even if I go, how will she recognize me? Don’t most of those lovers use ridiculous signals or secret words on their palms or something?”
“Maybe that’s the test,” said Gupta, shrugging. “You saw through a curse. Now she has to see through you.”
*
Choose me.
I stood behind the podium, curtained off from everyone else. There were all kinds of tricks to Teej. People tattooed their hands with hints so that they would not end up with the wrong mate. But there was the leap of faith in this exercise, the same leap of faith required of a relationship. Maybe it was a fool’s errand, but I had made my hand indistinguishable. We had never studied each other palms but perhaps that was where the beauty lay. Whatever form she took, I would recognize her. Because it was not me that knew her, it was my soul. And it could never forget her.
11
NIGHT
Hope is light. It shines its way into crevices and shadows you wouldn’t recognize. I held that hope within me, and I let it flare into a fire until it laid to waste my every doubt. I hardly remembered walking to the Teej celebration and waiting my turn in that line. Nritti held my hand tightly and waited beside me.
“Uloopi told me to give you this,” said Nritti, opening my palms.
A necklace with a round-cut sapphire and strung with delicate seed pearls fell into my hands.
“What is this?”
“She said this was what she created the first time she tried making the resurrection stone.”
“Does it bring back the dead?”
“No. But it calls forth our happiest memories.”
I clasped the necklace around my neck, savoring the strange warmth of the pendant between my collarbones. It was magical, but not enchanted. No memories surged before my eyes. And yet, I felt a thread of warmth from my head to my toes. Like the afterglow of a long laugh.
When I ascended the stage, some of the lesser beings taunted me. But I pushed past them, clutching that hope within me. This was a beginning. Maybe it would not be the beginning I wanted, but it was a beginning I deserved. I surveyed the row of hands, one by one, stopping when I saw the hand covered in soot. At first glance, it looked like it belonged to a raksha. But when I looked closer, I saw cracks in that paint. I saw that the monstrous was little more than a flimsy coat of color. More than that, it was an invitation—to start a life with a different way of seeing. Starting now. I reached out. The curtain fell back with a crumple of silk. Dimly, I heard the audience suck in their breath. There … there he stood. Tall and shadowed, with a crown of blackbuck horns threatening to pierce the split sky above us. Guilt flashed in his eyes, before it became something else entirely: relief.
“I hoped you would choose me,” he said.
I fought back an impossible laugh as that hope and light broke inside me.
“I have no dowry.”
“I don’t care.”
“Then what do you want from me?”
“I want to lie beside you and know the weight of your dreams. I want to share whole worlds with you and write your name in the stars. I want to measure eternity with your laughter. Be my queen and I promise you a life where you will never be bored. I promise you more power than a hundred kings. And I promise you that we will always be equals.”
“Not my soul then?”
“Would you entrust me with something so precious?”
I reached for one of my slippers and held it out, grinning.
“Here, my love, the dowry of a sole.”
He held me closer than a secret and when our lips met, the world between us became a charged and living thing.
12