The Star-Touched Queen

by Roshani Chokshi

  “It wasn’t my fault, Father, that peasant disrespected me—”

  “He sneezed.”

  “Yes, but on my jacket.”

  Skanda, my half-brother, was a fool. Where the Raja favored wisdom, Skanda favored wealth. Where the Raja listened, Skanda leered.

  “Would you like to know the difference between us and everyone else?” demanded the Raja.

  “Yes?”

  “Nothing whatsoever.”

  “But—”

  “The worms do not take heed of caste and rank when they feast on our ashes,” the Raja said. “Your subjects will not remember you. They will not remember the shade of your eyes, the colors you favored or the beauty of your wives. They will only remember your impression upon their hearts and whether you filled them with glee or grief. That is your immortality.”

  With that, he strode out of the grove. I ran back to the garden’s path, out of breath and hoping he hadn’t noticed my presence. By now, the sun had slipped behind the palace, transforming everything that surrounded it to a rosy gold.

  As the Raja approached, I saw him as I always did—illuminated and beyond reproach. But as he came closer, new details leapt forward. There were weary creases at the corners of his eyes and a new slope to his shoulders. It didn’t look right. I felt like I was truly seeing him for the first time and what I saw was a man stooped in age, wearing a thinning pelt of greatness. The moment our eyes met, I averted my gaze. Seeing him like this made me feel as if I had stumbled into something private, something I wasn’t supposed to know. Or, perhaps, just didn’t want to.

  I knelt before him, the tips of my fingers brushing against his feet in the customary symbol of respect and deference.

  “It is good to see you, daughter,” he said.

  I knew my father in his voice, in his words. The moment he spoke, all of the previous strangeness was forgotten. My father was not known for a pleasing, diplomatic tone. His voice had the gravelly lurch of a thunderclap and all the solemnity of sleep, but the sound clung to me in well-worn familiarity. It lulled me into safety and for a moment, I thought he would say that his meeting with the courtiers had been a sham, that he had no intention of marrying me off to strangers, that I would stay here forever. This was no heaven, but it was the hell that I knew, and I preferred it far more than whatever beast of a country awaited me.

  All of that half-hope slipped away with his next words.

  “In the manner of the old kings, we are holding a swayamvara for you,” he said. “You will get the chance to choose your own husband, Mayavati.”

  His voice filled the courtyard. Cold sweat turned my palms clammy and my practiced calm fell away. My mind scrambled for an escape, but everything felt too close, too slippery and, worst of all, hopelessly out of reach.

  He stared at me expectantly.

  “Yes, Father,” I forced out.

  I grimaced, sure he must have heard the curt edge to my speech. I thought he would scold me, but instead he lifted my chin.

  “You’re the only one I trust to make the correct judgment.”

  I wanted to yank away from his hold and hide the sudden glistening in my eyes, but his grip was firm, his eyes knowing. He released my chin and sat on a marble bench beneath the tart lime tree. He moved to one side, beckoning for me to join him, but I remained standing. Sitting was agreement to a forced marriage. And I didn’t agree.

  “The moment you could climb, you were always in the sanctum’s rafters,” he said in one breath. My head snapped up. There was no accusation in his voice, only something wistful … and warm. I glanced into his face, but nothing but pain and age marked his features.

  “How—”

  “It is difficult not to notice tutors fleeing the archival room every week,” he said with the ghost of a smile. “But I never stopped you because I wanted you to know. I wanted you to see how fraught ruling is.” He stopped and his chest heaved, shoulders dropping a fraction. “Perhaps I hoped that by letting you see, you might forgive what I must take from you.”

  I stared at him. This was the longest time we had spent in each other’s company. Until now, I only officially saw my father once a year on my annual Age Day. There were times when he had even left me gifts. Not that I was alone in this regard. My half-sisters also received small presents—clusters of gems or fashionable silks. But my presents had always been different. Fragrant sheaves of poetry or treaties of Vedic law. Valuable. I had entertained the hope that he wished to spare me from the stifling fate of my wedded half-sisters, but in the end I was no different.

  He rose to his feet and placed a hand on my shoulder. It felt leaden against my skin.

  “Even a favored daughter is still just a daughter.”

  I suppressed a flinch. The warmth of his voice had disappeared, replaced with the cool monotone I knew far better.

  “You have always possessed the intellect of a boy, Mayavati,” he said. “Should you have the good fortune of a different sex in your next life, you might prove to be a fine ruler.”

  A semicircle of the scarlet palace guards fanned out around the Raja and, without another word, he left. Despite the evening’s warmth, I shivered. His words clung to me. Each sentence was its own barb from which there was no escape.

  For the second time today, I found myself in a place without realizing how I got there. I stepped into the harem and a flurry of sounds swelled around me.

  “What did the Raja want with you?”

  I masked a groan. All my guilt for the young guardsman vanished. Loose tongue. Maybe I should have scared him more.

  My half-sister Parvati stepped forward, and her jade green eyes flashed with all the latent menace of someone too beautiful and too bored.

  “Are you going to be a royal devadasi?” she asked. “No one thought you’d marry, anyway.”

  I choked back a laugh. I would have far preferred to become a devadasi and live my life dedicated to the temple rather than fade into obscurity.

  “Is it true that the Raja has denounced you?” asked one of the wives.

  I turned to face the wife who had spoken. She was new, or at least I had not seen her before. A pair of buckteeth peeked out beneath thin lips. I doubted my father had wed her for her beauty or out of romantic interest. I wondered if the wife was like me, a bride of political convenience. She stared back at me, first curious and then embarrassed.

  “I am to marry,” I said to the room.

  Shrieks erupted throughout the harem.

  “Who?” asked Jaya. “A monster to match your horoscope?”

  “Are you sure the Raja was not lying to spare your feelings?” pressed another.

  I raised my chin, determined to shove past them all until a small voice caught my attention. Gauri ran to me, brown curls flying as she threw her arms around my legs. I curved around her, burying my face in her sweet-smelling hair and gripping her shoulders tightly, as though they were the only things anchoring me to the spot.

  “Are you leaving me?” she asked.

  I knelt beside her, searching her face, memorizing the rosiness of her cheeks and her dimpled smile. There was no way I could lie to her. I wanted to tell her that I had no choice and that she would have to find another person to tell her stories and spin her nightmares back into dreams. But before I could wrangle out an explanation, one of the wives rushed past me, pushing me backward.

  I looked up to see Mother Dhina and instinctively clutched Gauri closer.

  “Don’t poison this girl with your bad fortune,” she hissed, pulling Gauri away.

  Gauri protested but Mother Dhina’s grip was relentless. I rose from the floor slowly. I wanted stillness, poise. I wouldn’t show Gauri hysteria or rage. Mother Dhina’s gaze met mine.

  Around me, the line of women converged like a warped mirror. Here was my future—a cage fit for breeding bitterness and spite. I stumbled backward, edging along the walls as if I could avoid that fate through sheer force of will. The voices of the wives and my half-sisters billowed around
me, but I couldn’t separate their words. They seemed to speak as one.

  “Wherever you go, you’ll only bring death with you. Take your pestilence elsewhere,” spat Mother Dhina.

  The marble beneath me was cold and dry, but my feet slipped as if I stood in water. A ringing sound filled my ears and I sprinted out of the halls. Rage vibrated from my heels to my head as I swung open my bedroom door and sank to the floor.

  Where my room once glowed rosy in the sunset, now the glint of the walls shone scarlet and flame-like, poised to swallow me. Bharata wanted to be rid of me, just as much as I wanted to be rid of it. But not like this. Not like some parcel of land bartered between countries. That wasn’t freedom.

  I thought of Gauri’s face when I had knelt beside her. I thought about the words that I would have said—I had no choice but to leave. Maybe only half of that was true. I did have to leave, but the manner in which I left could be a choice that was entirely my own. I stared out the window, watching the infinite sky stretch before me. If they didn’t give me a choice, then I would make my own.

  I would escape.

  4

  THE INTRUDER

  Night coaxed out the stars, my jailers. Above me, the moon burned dull silver. In the dark sky, it looked flat enough to pry and use as a mirror. I had spent the last hour staring out the window, watching the sentinels patrol the vast walls that enclosed everything I had ever seen, touched and known for the past seventeen years. After hours of staring, I had found a spot left unguarded, a hole in the palace’s security. All I had to do was reach it and then … freedom.

  But until I could escape, other tasks clamored for my attention. I faced my room. It was the smallest of the chambers in the harem, shunted to the end of a hall that had no other occupants. They moved me here when I was ten. Mother Shastri told me that it was punishment after a swarm of bees chased my half-brother Yudhistira into a pool of water. He had teased me that day and had kicked over a drawing that I had labored over. I had glared at him, wishing that he would go away. That’s when I learned that sometimes my wishes had a strange way of coming true. Over the years I told myself that it was all mere coincidence, but now I hoped that whatever saved me back then from Yudhistira’s bullying would save me from the swayamvara. Stop that, I scolded myself. Hope and wishing wouldn’t save me.

  A veil of cold purpose fell over me. Enough meetings in the sanctum had taught me the layout of the city, the demographics of its inhabitants. I could do this. I just had to move fast. I opened up my chest of clothes and began separating the gaudy fabrics from the practical, the nonessential from the necessary. I was halfway through when I heard a voice at the door. Shoving the two heaps of clothes behind a screen, I jumped to my feet.

  “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 h
er 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.