“Maya didi?” called the voice. Immediately, my heart sank. Gauri. I would never see Gauri again. “It’s time for my story!”
In spite of myself, I smiled and opened the door for her. She glowed against the dark of the hallways, and it took every last wisp of strength not to hold her to me and weep into her hair. Tomorrow loomed in my mind. I could feel the heft of it like a solid weight against my fingers.
“Story!” she said, shaking my arm in a mock-pleading voice.
“What story do you want?”
It was a tradition between us. The moment evening slipped into night, Gauri would sneak into my room and I would recite fairytales to her—embellishing the beautiful, glossing over the grotesque. Gauri clambered onto my bed, tugging the blankets around her. I sat by her side.
“Tell me about the other realms,” said Gauri wistfully. “I’m going to live there when I grow up.”
“Which one?”
Gauri frowned. “How many are there?”
As far as I knew, there was only one and it had nothing in it but scheming courtiers, lying wives and gilded menageries. But I wasn’t going to tell Gauri that. In all the tomes and folklores I had read from the archives, there was no limit to the worlds around us. Somewhere unseen were demonic realms filled with laughing asuras and blackened suns. There were austere kingdoms on the peaks of mountains where phoenixes serenaded the moon and the halls of the gods glinted with lightning. And there was our own, human world, mortal, with only the comfort of stories to keep away the chill of death.
“There’s thousands, but mainly three. Think of it like cities within kingdoms,” I said when I saw her brows scrunch up. “There’s our world, which has you, and is therefore the best one.” Gauri grinned. “Then there’s the Otherworld, with its Night Bazaar and strange but beautiful beings. And then,” I dropped my voice to a whisper, “there’s the Netherworld, which holds Naraka, the realm of the dead.”
Gauri shivered. “What’s there?”
“Demons,” I said, raising my arms like a giant bat.
Her eyes widened and she curled closer to me. “Tell me about the Night Bazaar.”
I worried the edges of my dress … this was the part I made different from the stories. But Gauri didn’t need to know that.
“It’s a market for the Otherworld people, the beings in our stories, like apsaras, who dance in the heavens, or gandharvas, who play celestial music. Or even naginis, who want to buy new scales for their serpent tails. All of them.”
Gauri wrinkled a nose, unimpressed. “They buy dresses there?”
“Much, much more,” I said. “It’s a place for purchasing nightmares and dreams sweet as rasmalai. You can buy sleepless nights or trade your full name for a wish. It’s where demon mercenaries lend out their magic like colorful ribbons. There’s memories of beautiful women for sale and a thousand potions for things from a broken heart to a sore tooth.”
“Really?” asked Gauri, her voice barely above a whisper.
I shrugged. “Maybe. But I’ve told you and now it’s time to sleep. No more tales.”
I rolled to the side, feigning sleep, when Gauri poked me.
“How will I find it when I’m done growing up?”
“If I knew, don’t you think I would have tried to get there already?” I laughed. “It’s hard to find, Gauri.”
“I can find it!” she piped up. “Last week, I found slippers beneath a statue. But I don’t know why they were there.”
I tried to stifle my laugh with a cough. I may have hidden those last week. They belonged to Mother Dhina and had the most irritating tassels. And to add insult to injury, they had bells.
“Did you tell anyone?”
“No. I thought an apsara had left them there. Maybe she wanted them back and she’d get mad if I took them.”
“So you think finding hidden slippers qualifies you to enter the Otherworld?”
Gauri blinked at me as though this were the most obvious conclusion.
“I’ll tell you where to find it, then,” I said, laughing. Truthfully, the folktales never said how to get there, but Gauri looked at me so expectantly I couldn’t imagine any harm in playing up her imagination. “You have to go when the creatures are at their weakest, on the night of a new moon. The Otherworld is on the other side of a moonbeam and inside a hundred lotus petals. It’s in that space of time right before you fall asleep…”
Gauri muffled a yawn and looked sleepily at the door.
“I’m going to go someday.”
“Are you?” I asked, wrapping my arm around her. “You should take me with you.”
“I’ll take you, didi.”
Her voice was heavy with sleepiness, but her body was curled tight and tense. I knew she was trying to keep herself awake, drawing out the minutes where we could lie side by side. But we both knew she had to leave.
“Will we see each other again?” she asked softly.
“Yes.”
Gauri fell silent. “In this life?”
I turned to face her. “What do you mean?”
“Mother Urvashi says that if I’m bad in this life then I’ll come back as a goat in my next life. Which means that there is another life.” Gauri didn’t look at me, focusing instead on tightly twisting the hem of her gown. “So will you see me again before I’m a goat?”
“You’re too good to be a goat.”
“Didi, you’re not answering me.”
“I know,” I said into her hair. “I just don’t know.”
“But if we were sisters this time, we would be sisters again, right?”
“Of course.”
“And we were sisters in our last life too, right?”
“Naturally.”
“What do you think we were?” asked Gauri, looking up at me. “Princesses?”
“Nothing as boring as that,” I said. “We could have been stars, you and me. And not the mean ones that blindly spell out the rest of your life, but beautiful constellations hovering far above fate.” I pointed to the open window. “We could have been something magical. Talking bears that built a palace in a mango tree. Or twin makaras with tails so long they could have encircled the ocean twice.”
“Makaras are scary.”
“No, they’re not.”
“They’re huge,” she said, spreading her arms, “and they have lots of teeth.” Gauri hooked her fingers into her cheeks and pulled, revealing a number of loose baby teeth and gaps.
“Er tharp tooth,” she said, still pulling on her cheeks.
“What?”
She let go of her lips. “They’re sharp too.”
I laughed. “Well, you’re very small with lots of teeth and are just as vicious and scary as a sea dragon.”
“It’s bad to be a dragon.”
“Says who? Nothing wrong with a little bit of viciousness. Would you rather be a dove or a dragon?”
“Mother Dhina says—”
“I’m not asking about what Mother Dhina thinks, I’m asking you.”
Gauri peeked at me from beneath the blankets. “I think it would be nice to blow fire. I’d never get hungry.”
I laughed. “Sound reasoning, as ever.”
Slowly, Gauri slipped off the bed. I clenched my hands together so that I wouldn’t be tempted to comfort her. I couldn’t coddle her. I couldn’t lull her with false promises. All I could ask was that she would remember what I said, remember the stories I told and hope that some of that knowledge would, in time, be its own comfort.
“No matter where we are, we’ll always share the same sky. We can always find each other in the same constellation.”
Gauri sniffed. “Which?”
“The loveliest of them all,” I said, pointing at a slight angle in the stars. I may have hated the rest of them, but not this one. This constellation was far from the rest, a lonely cluster of lights. “The Solitary Star. That will be our constellation. Legend says it was built by the celestial architect who made the golden city of Lanka.”
“Real gold?” repeated Gauri. “Maybe I’ll go there too.”