When the Dharma Raja left, I collected the dream fruit. I placed my hand against the bark and found it perfectly cold and polished as a pearl. One by one, I plucked the ripest fruits. They were dusky as plums, and yet there was something of the Otherworld to them. An uncanny chill to their flesh. A strange gemstone sheen to their deep violet. The moment someone ate them, the flesh would break apart—inky and star-flecked as the night sky. It tasted like the outskirts of consciousness. Of wanting. That’s what made the Otherworld so ravenous. This was why I asked every night for them to tell me about their day. I wanted to hear the lilt at the end of their sentences. How they had yearned for one last piece of moon candy. How they had been pulled from their beds too early. Sometimes the act of wanting was more intoxicating than the pleasure of realizing the act.
I arrived in the Night Bazaar just in time to watch Nritti’s last dance. Every time I crossed into the Otherworld, a wave of shock fell over me. There were so many people. So many things. Life pulsed all around me and I reveled in the surge of sounds, so different from my usual quiet haunt where sleep and shadows frosted the world.
My collection of dream fruit floated behind me, kept cool in its shadow bundle. Soon, I’d have to make my way to the side of Night, which was the only place where the fruit wouldn’t spoil. But for a moment, I tilted my head back and stared at the sun. I had to settle for this half-view of daytime and this ripped sky. As always, my imagination wandered over what the sky truly looked like during the day. When I awoke each dusk, the world looked bloodied, as if the sun had waged a war to stay in the sky and lost. Nritti said morning and day were soft and golden, an infinite crown fitted over the world. She said it looked like peace. I wished I could’ve known peace.
The passersby began to jostle back and forth. Some inclined their heads to me in respect. Others turned away, disgust flitting across their features. I steeled myself. Whenever a mortal prince visited the Otherworld, the large crowd diluted the true denizens of the Night Bazaar. For the most part, the Otherworld understood my role in the balance of light and dark. They never perceived me as some harbinger of evil. But when beings poured in from every crevice of the world, they dragged along whatever local superstitions had gathered in the places where they haunted and guarded, ruled and treasured. The human world was still young. To them, night brought no dreams. Only nightmares made real.
“It’s her,” a naga whispered to his mate. Their cobra hoods flared around their faces.
Beliefs in fear had a way of tethering minds. I couldn’t help that once I had tucked night around the world that things with empty backs and hollow grins began to look for sustenance. Night was not meant to be protective. Night was meant to be restorative. Most days, I let that knowledge spread through me like a balm. But today I felt exhausted. I moved away from the naga and his mate without glancing into their eyes.
Around me, vendors hawked all manner of objects. There were sweets for sale—handfuls of stardust shaped into glittering whorls and shimmering blossoms. A beautiful nagini grabbed a fistful and waved it through the air.
“To enhance the beautiful visions dancing before your eyes! Guaranteed to taste sweeter than an apsara’s kiss or one year of your life will be returned to you free of charge!” she promised.
More vendors. More tables. Enchanted flutes for sale. A tonic in an emerald bottle guaranteed to honey the voice and ensnare listeners. Tins of cosmetics, kohl made from pressed shadows, and pots of deep red and scarlet stolen from the last flames of sunset.
In front of me, a couple playfully argued as they made their way to the podium of celestial nymphs.
“What if you prefer their beauty to mine and leave me?” teased the woman in front of me. She was a lovely being. Her slim torso disappeared into elegant golden feathers and shining talons. Golden pearls wreathed her wings and her smile was lustrous. Content.
Her mate leaned toward her. Light winked out in the space between his head curving to hers, like day flashing to night. He traced her feathers.
“Your beauty rivals the sun. Your sweetness rivals the moon. You are every beginning and end,” he said, brushing a kiss to her temple. “You are entirely inescapable.”
The tenderness between them sharpened into an edge, and I felt cut. I remembered, suddenly, what loneliness looked like. Loneliness looked like a gaping hole where there should have been your reflection in a mirror. My throat tightened. I couldn’t look away from the couple, and yet the longer I stared at them, the more I felt a heaviness weighing on my chest.
I walked faster, and my thoughts slipped into familiar daydreams. Daydreams of shadows fitted together, eager hands waiting to trace a beloved face, warmth blossoming between two hearts. In those dim spaces behind want, a face emerged in my dreams. A hard and unforgiving face, whose beauty belonged to the night and whose eyes looked cut from stone. The Dharma Raja. As soon as the image came to mind, I jolted. I couldn’t picture the Dharma Raja walking beside me in the Night Bazaar. But for some reason, I could picture him walking beside me in other places. By a grove of silver trees. By a sea of pleated starlight. By a palace of marble and glass.
A horrid bellowing broke my reverie.
I spun around to see a raksha with the head of a water buffalo twirling a pair of eyeballs around his head.
“Enchanted pair of eyes! Useful for seeing through all kinds of things,” he shouted. “Like deception and jars of wine. Or even”—he stopped and grinned—“a lovely apsara’s clothes.”
A group of men crowded the raksha. I moved past them and flicked my wrist. A night wind rattled through the bazaar, kicking up the silk skirts of tents and display tables and stealing the eyeballs straight out of the raksha’s hands and into my palm.
The raksha blinked. “What happened to it?”
“You lied to us!” yelled one male.
“THIEF!” roared the raksha.
I grinned, ducking beneath a silver rope strung with colored glass lanterns before disappearing into the crowd. Nritti hated the way some of the men and women of the Otherworld looked at her. Some women would lust after her. Some women would blame her for love unrequited. Some men would lust after her. Some men would blame her for love unrequited. And when everyone in this world had power, beauty could become a dangerous thing.
By the time I got to the apsaras’ dancing podium, a huge crowd had gathered. I watched as the apsaras soared through the air, silk trailing behind them. Each time they stamped their feet, the gunghroo bells around their ankles released tiny blooms of petals and gold dust. The crowd sighed. Tablas dropped low beats and the sky broke, sending golden flakes to rain down on the audience. They were near the final movement of the dance. Flutes and bells, horns and silvery voices grew louder in urgency, spinning a story to which the apsaras danced. A tale of kings vanquishing demons who wandered beyond their realm and invaded the mortal world in the dead of night. Nritti had mentioned that tonight’s performance would be held in honor of the human prince. Maybe the song was about him and his deeds. I spotted an opening near the back of the crowd and edged closer. I couldn’t stay for the finale, but I always tried to see Nritti’s dance before I set up the vendor stall of dream fruit.
From the sudden intakes of breath, I knew that Nritti had taken over the stage. She leapt into the air, soaring above the others. The light clung to her, and her steps echoed in the very vaults of the heavens.