The Chaos Curse

by Sayantani DasGupta

  Of course Sesha wouldn’t recognize me in my rakkhoshi form. I wondered if he would have recognized me in any form.

  Ai-Ma wasn’t wrong. He had harmed me and my loved ones—Ma, Baba, my moon mother, Neel, and, indirectly, Naya.

  “Well, I’ve seen you before!” I snapped. “But I guess you’ve forgotten me!”

  The rakkhosh students around us erupted in shrieks of mocking laughter. They yelled insults and taunted Sesha. “Water, air, land, and flames, the snake’s gone and forgot his name!”

  Sesha lost his cookies at that. He snarled at me, pointing with a shaking finger. “My name will never be forgotten! But yours will be—I will erase all of rakkhosh-kind from the multiverse’s memory!” He frothed a little at the mouth. “Just you wait! No one will remember you; no one will tell your stories. You will become beasts from a long-ago and forgotten culture!”

  That made my blood freeze. Sesha’s plan for destroying the multiplicity of the multiverse had started this long ago?

  “No, Sesha, it’s your name that will be forgotten!” I said. To prove my point, and to buy myself some time, I pulled out my bow and arrow, aiming right at Sesha’s head.

  “Wait, I haven’t granted you the right of challenge kill,” Pinki protested. “What makes you think you have more right to kill than me?”

  “Challenge kill is an ancient right among our kind, and if this rakkhoshi has the right of injury on her side, it cannot be denied.” Surpanakha the headmistress stepped in between Pinki and me. “You say this serpent prince has harmed your loved ones, land demoness. If that is so, you must bind yourself to him and let fate decide if you have the right of vengeance upon him.”

  “Bind myself to him?” I asked, feeling weak again.

  “Yes.” Surpanakha waved her hand in front of Sesha’s mouth and somehow magically extracted a fountain of poison from one of his teeth. This she caught in a little vial and handed to me. “Drink, young land clanswoman, and if you have the right of challenge kill, it will not harm you.”

  I heard Neel shouting a warning, but without knowing why, I knew I would be able to drink the serpent poison without being harmed. Giving Sesha an approximation of Neel’s raised-eyebrow look, I lifted the vial, gave him a little “cheers,” and then drank the venom in one gulp. For a minute, I felt queasy and dizzy, but then the feeling cleared up almost right away. Even those few sips of Sesha’s venom made me feel sharper, stronger, and more powerful. I locked eyes with my serpent father, and I felt him begin to recognize me.

  “Who are you?” he hissed.

  I did not answer, because I heard Surpanakha asking me the question as if from far, far away. “What do you see, land clanswoman?”

  What did I see? I strung an arrow in my magic bow again and peered down its shaft, my vision condensing to one sharp point, right in the center of Sesha’s forehead. What did I see? I asked myself, my own voice thrumming through me like a song. What did I see? What did I see?

  “I’ll tell you what I see!” I heard Sesha shouting at me. “I see a monster made from hate!”

  I hesitated, my bow arm quavering a bit. Then a shocked murmur rose from all the students, who were pointing at me and rising from their tree-side seats. The grove was buzzing with conversation, exclamations, and shouts, and even Surpanakha was looking at me with a seriously surprised expression.

  My skin prickled with heat and power. I felt like myself, but a more beautiful version, a more powerful version, a more balanced and wiser version of me. Rather than killing me, I had survived Sesha’s poison and it had made me stronger. I glowed with what felt like moonlight from the inside out. It was as if I was manifesting into my most pure and true self.

  “What do you see?” Surpanakha had asked me.

  What did I see when I looked at Sesha? I saw hatred. I saw cruelty. I saw pain. I saw greed and suffering, but longing too. An intense longing, like a hunger. A hunger to possess things, to rule things, to dominate things. These were Sesha’s poison. These were the dark matter that had corrupted him. But even under all that poison, there was more there too. There was a desire to be more, do more, leave a mark on the multiverse. In these qualities, I saw myself. These were the parts of myself I had inherited from him. Parts of myself I could use for good or for evil. Ultimately, they were parts of myself I had to accept to truly know who I was.

  Sesha was beside himself, frothing at the mouth even as he shouted at me. “You hate me, do you? Well, I hate you too! I hate you too! And you have no idea what future your hate will bring!”

  As he snapped and hissed, banging against the bars of the magic cage like a demented animal, his words rang in my mind. You have no idea what future your hate will bring. Why did he say that? And where had I heard about hate bringing about some kind of future?

  My arm trembled, so long had I held out my bow. I still had no idea how to save Sesha, but his words had triggered a memory. It had been the end of my moon mother’s poem: Hate, not love, makes difference end. Hate, not love. That must be it. That must be how Sesha was making all these stories smush in the past, present, and future. That must be part of his plan to bring about the big crunch. To fan as much hate as possible in the multiverse. From petty rivalries to interspecies distrust to war, it was all a part of his plan. I thought of how Neel and I had been squabbling, and for that matter, Neel and Lal, me and Mati too. Was it all because of Sesha’s hate?

  Long ago, Einstein-ji had told me a riddle: Everything is connected to everything, but how? The answer, I had learned, was love. Love, and only love, would make the multiverse keep expanding. Love, and only love, would create more stories. Love, and only love, was the answer to how everything was connected to everything. So if love made stories, hate and fear killed them.

  As I thought this, a single flower from the champak tree floated off, as if on a breeze, becoming a bright blue butterfly. The tiny insect landed delicately on the end of my arrow, as if trying to tell me something. And all at once, I saw. The butterflies were stories—each delicate and fragile on its own, easily crushed, easily discarded. But together, migrating in a beautiful, beating mass, the insects were mighty. “Use the butterfly effect,” the scientists had told me. And I would.

  “Butterflies, please, I need your help!” I called. “Your stories are in danger. You are in danger!”

  They did not waste any time. A fluttering, rumbling, rustling sound made me look up. Layered thick along the banyan tree canopy were all the blue butterflies that had been flowers on the champak tree. The tree itself looked bare, dead. But the butterflies were layered so thick, their beating wings were like a living, breathing sky above our heads. As I looked up and saw them, so too did the rest of Ghatatkach Academy of Murder and Mayhem. The rakkhosh students snarled and whooped and tried to catch the delicate insects. The butterflies swooped down among the rakkhosh crowd, now changing a demon into a cartoon beagle, now changing a demoness into a glittering pony. The insects seemed to be playing with the rakkhosh, swooping down, landing on one, then flying away to land on another.

  But the majority of the butterflies landed en masse on and inside Sesha’s cage. They covered the cage, and him, so much I could hardly see him anymore. I lowered my weapon, mesmerized by the sight.

  “What is this? Get off! Get off!” Sesha sputtered. But the butterflies were relentless, flapping in his eyes, his hair, his ears, his nose, his mouth. I caught a glimpse of him changing now into an evil king with a bad haircut, now into a beating eye hungry for power. Then, in the next moment, he was a riddling master criminal with question marks all over his clothes, and then he was a corrupt president who liked to wear white roses in his lapel. Sesha—who would become the terrible and hated King of Serpents—was becoming instead a series of other villains from other stories.

  “He’s losing his own uniqueness,” said Neel. “The stories are mad that he’s trying to destroy them.”

  “They’ve been around us all the time, all these stories,” I wondered. “We just never recogni
zed them.”

  “Sesha needs chaos as much as we do,” Neel said. “He thinks the hate will save him, but it won’t. It’ll destroy who he is.”

  Finally, I lowered my weapon. “I’ll tell you what I see, Headmistress.” As I spoke these words to Surpanakha, I approached the magic cage. With a wave of my hands—a power I conjured from who knows where—I opened the door. It didn’t matter, because Sesha was such a prisoner of the butterflies, he could barely move now.

  I said, more to myself than anyone else, “I see my father, who I can’t love or hate. Who I can’t even understand, really. But still, I can put him in my past. I can forgive him and move on. Because without his story, my story would never have begun. And for better or worse, we need all our stories. All of them, for the multiverse to go on.”

  It was as if the butterflies had been waiting for my words. They picked Sesha up as easily as if he were the tiny insect, and they the mighty prince. And like that, with him squirming and crying and carrying on, they carried him up out of the cage, along the length of the banyan tree clearing, and finally, out into the now-starry night.

  The first to become unfrozen after this remarkable sight was Surpanakha, the demon headmistress.

  “Who did you say you are, child?” she asked me, grabbing my chin with hard fingers. Her face was outraged, her fangs glistening and sharp. The place where her nose should have been began twitching, and she was drooling, as if despite not having a nose, she could smell me and my smell had suddenly changed from rakkhosh-kind to something far more edible and tempting.

  I realized that just as the butterflies had revealed Sesha’s true form as every evil father, every cruel king, every power-hungry wizard from every fairy tale I had ever read, they were revealing Neel’s and my true forms as well.

  “No more disguises,” breathed Neel, pointing at my face.

  “No more disguises,” I confirmed, looking at his familiar one.

  The rakkhosh students and faculty, who had been distracted by Sesha’s flight with the butterflies, now started to react to Neel’s and my real appearance.

  “They’re not rakkhosh!” someone shrieked. “Who are they? It was a trick! They let the prisoner go!”

  The entire rakkhosh student body burst into confused shouts and exclamations. Now Pinki whirled on us too, claws out and fangs glowing. Neel wrestled Einstein-ji’s book from my backpack and opened it at random. There, lo and behold, was a story I’d never noticed before. A story called “There’s No Place Like Home.”

  “Don’t ever marry that snaky scumbucket!” Neel said to Pinki in a rush. “Mother, no matter what, it’s not worth it!”

  “Mother?” shrieked Pinki. Horror, but also a strange sense of recognition, was etched on her face.

  “Your Highness, hate, not love, makes difference end!” I shouted. “Sesha will try to marry you again in the future—but he won’t have learned his lesson! He still wants to take your power!”

  “Who are these students?” sputtered the headmistress. “Why do I not recognize them? Jackals!”

  But even as Surpanakha and her jackal minions leaped toward us, Ai-Ma shot out a gangly arm—growing it in a flash into a long but strong hose-like barrier. The headmistress and animals bumped against it and fell backward with loud shrieks and howls.

  “Good-bye, dear dung dumplings! Good luck, my beetle bums!” The old rakkhoshi waved with her other, normal-sized arm.

  “Good-bye, Ai-Ma! Thank you!” I called.

  “We love you!” yelled Neel. “Remember how much we love you!”

  “Stop!” shrieked Pinki. “Who are you? How dare you?”

  But we weren’t stopping, and we did dare. Together, we started reading the words of the story that would take us home. Rushing through sentences, our voices tripping over the paragraphs and phrases, we read our way out of danger. Together, Neel and I read our way to safety. Together, Neel and I read our way out of the stories of our pasts, launching forward into a future story of our own making.

  Our first concern when we got back was getting the antidote to Naya. I didn’t want to waste time running, so I borrowed a skateboard from one of the passing PSS girls and rushed the flowers I’d picked over to the hospital.

  As we waited for Dr. Ahmed to send word on if the antidote worked, we went to tell Mati what had happened.

  “You idiots!” my cousin yelled as soon as she heard about our adventures. “You could have been killed! Of all the callous, irresponsible stunts! Will you two never learn?”

  Neel and I both looked sheepishly at the ground, not wanting to argue with her. She had a lot on her shoulders, I realized, and we hadn’t been making it any easier for her.

  It was Tuni, who had been with Mati when we found her, who defused the situation. “They may be idiots, but they brought back the antidote for Naya’s poison,” Tuni chirped. “Isn’t that the most important thing?”

  I shot the little yellow bird a grateful smile. He flew over and landed on my shoulder.

  “We’re still waiting to hear from Dr. Ahmed if it worked,” Neel said in a soft voice.

  “I’m sorry, I know you’ve been under a lot of strain,” I added. “But since we’ve been gone, haven’t things gotten better?”

  “No!” Mati wailed. “If anything, since you two disappeared, the rate of story collapsing has gotten worse, not better! It’s a nightmare! I don’t even recognize my own homeland anymore!”

  Neel and I exchanged horrified looks. We’d saved ourselves, hopefully saved Naya, but somehow, we’d made the fate of the multiverse worse? Was it because we’d filled Sesha with even more hate?

  “What’s been going on?” I asked.

  “My mom and Sesha didn’t call off their wedding?” Neel seemed stunned.

  “No!” Mati said. “But while you two were gone, the royal wedding mehendi party got invaded by swarms of mythical creatures and story characters from the 2-D realm.”

  “Actually, according to this report in the Seven Oceans Gazette,” Bunty said as they strolled in, a pair of reading glasses propped on their broad nose and a newspaper in their mouth, “these strange guests called the henna ‘nifty temporary tattoos,’ thought the mehendi party food was too spicy, and insisted that Sesha change his name to Sam and wear a tuxedo instead of his sherwani. Ludicrous!”

  “It’s happening so fast now!” Tuni said. “It seems like all the people of the Kingdom Beyond and the Kingdom of Serpents and everywhere else in this dimension are starting to dress and talk and act like people from the 2-D realm.”

  “Worse, they’re forgetting their language,” said Mati, running a hand over her exhausted face. “Everyone is forgetting their stories.”

  As we walked around the resistance hideout with Bunty, Tuni, and Mati, evidence of the impending crunch was everywhere. Most of the PSS weren’t even wearing saris anymore, but pink jumpsuits and jeggings and skorts. Even as we gazed at them things changed right in front of our eyes. In the corner where Gyan Mukherjee had been making his fashion masterpieces was suddenly a giant, rakkhosh-sized girl with curly blond ringlets, sitting on a tuffet and eating what I could only assume were curds and whey. There was also a very tiny boy in her hand who kept jumping over a candlestick.

  The girl gave a startled yelp when she spontaneously arrived, and then proceeded to scream and cry, throwing a huge tantrum. The tiny-sized boy was oblivious and just kept on with his candlestick leaping. And although we were all expecting they would go back from where she came and return the fashion designer, hours went by and Miss Muffet and Jack were still there.

  “Can’t we get rid of them?” I asked Mati. Bunty began trying to reason with Muffet, to convince her to return to her own dimension, but the giant girl just lay down and stomped her arms and legs. “More curdsth! More whey!” she wailed. “And none of thath curry-flavor sthuff like lasth time! It’s too spithy!” As for Jack, he was so small it wasn’t even possible to understand anything he said. Tuni flew him up on top of one of the sewing machines for s
afekeeping and let him keep on with his obsessive jumping over the machine’s bobbin.

  My cousin shook her head sadly. “I’m scared, Kiran. I don’t know who’s going to be next. Did you know there’s a beanstalk growing in the middle of the unisex bathrooms? I mean, will I change too? I don’t want to forget my heritage; I don’t want to forget who I am. I don’t want to vanish into somebody else’s story.”

  I grabbed Mati’s hand and held on. “I won’t let you forget who you are, my sister,” I promised, remembering that in Bengali there was no real word for cousin. All cousins and even friends were our brothers and sisters; all adults were some version of aunties and uncles.

  Mati smiled and squeezed my hand. “I’m sorry we fought, Sis.”

  I wrapped my arms around her and gave her a big hug, feeling my heart expand to the size of the growing universe. I realized how small and tight everything in my chest had felt when we were fighting. “I am too.”

  Together, we decided to call an all-hands-on-deck planning meeting for that afternoon.

  “A council of war,” Mati had started to say, but I’d put my hand over her lips.

  “No, a meeting of friends and allies,” I’d corrected her. “No war, no hate. There’s enough strength in our love and friendship.”

  We sent a message via Tiktiki One and called back Lal, Buddhu, and Bhootoom to the resistance hideout. Soon, we were all there: Lal, Neel, Mati, Tuni, Bunty, Buddhu, Bhootoom, and those of the PSS who hadn’t forgotten who they were yet.

  Right before the meeting, we got some wonderful news. We heard from Dr. Ahmed that the poison antidote had worked! This made our little band of friends cheer and shout. With the doctor’s permission, we all went to visit Naya.

  My rakkhoshi friend was weak but awake. She would need a few weeks to recover her wing power, but the doctor felt confident that she would.

  “You went back to the past for me?” Naya asked, grasping our hands in gratitude.

  “I’m so sorry, Naya. I’m so sorry you got hurt. I’m so sorry for not thinking things through and risking your life.” I laid my head down on her bed, letting her stroke my hair. “Thank you for saving me.”