by Sheela Chari
Practicing! She could hardly wait.
At Neela’s next lesson, Sudha Auntie’s face scrunched up as if she were savoring a piece of rich chocolate in her mouth.
“What?” Mrs. Krishnan asked. “Something bad?”
Neela’s teacher smiled in delight. “Look at the initials on the neck. It’s a Guru original.”
“A what?” Mrs. Krishnan asked.
“Guru—he made this veena. Didn’t your mother mention it to you?” Sudha Auntie asked.
Mr. Krishnan shook her head. “Not exactly. Actually, she—oomph.” Mrs. Krishnan had stepped on his foot. He looked at her and fell quiet.
“Sorry,” Mrs. Krishnan said.
“I’m surprised, when getting a Guru original is such a catch.” Sudha Auntie peered at the dragon. “And I’ve never seen a peg box like this—you’ve got a whole dragon here! But I guess Guru did things his own way.”
“Does it play well?” Mrs. Krishnan said. “That’s all that matters.”
“What’s so great about Guru?” Neela asked.
“Why, he was a legend,” Sudha Auntie sputtered. “He did everything by hand, and he knew how to pick the right wood. It’s even said that he had a special carving tool from God that he found in the Kaveri River one day after meditating.”
Mr. Krishnan grinned. “At least it didn’t need batteries.”
“So Guru was famous,” Neela said, ignoring her dad. It would be cool to own a veena made by a famous person.
“Famous? Yes, though not in the way you’d imagine,” her teacher said gravely.
She was about to say more when Mrs. Krishnan spoke up. “What Sudha Auntie is trying to say is that you should consider yourself very lucky,” she said.
“It’s not every day a kid gets such an instrument,” her teacher said. “You’ll have to be responsible.” She said this in an extra-stern way, as if she thought Neela spent most of her time being the opposite.
But Neela was used to Sudha Auntie’s remarks, so she just nodded, which was the easiest way to ignore her teacher. And that was how after three years of practicing on Sudha Auntie’s student veena, Neela suddenly came to have a veena of her own. Not any veena, but an old, lovely one, made by a legendary craftsman, and a gift from her grandmother. Now if she could only play on it without humiliating herself.
Neela reached Winthrop Street and pulled a bag of chips out of her backpack. She continued walking, enjoying the sharp, salty taste of fried potato melting in her mouth. Around her the autumn leaves swirled along the pavement, and the wind whipped the tree branches back and forth. She was watching the waving branches when she thought she heard something behind her like the sound of a twig breaking. She turned around. But no one was there, only a weeping willow fluttering wildly against the wind.
Then, just as she passed the stone church where she had her art class, it started. One by one the drops fell, then another and another, until the splashes felt bigger and bigger against her skin. Suddenly there was a clap of thunder, and the rain came down like a great avalanche of water.
Neela had never seen so much rain in her life. She ran, dragging the veena behind her until she spotted an archway over the front doors of the stone church. Under the narrow overhang she escaped the pounding rain and was able to catch her breath.
Now she understood the expression to “look like a drowned rat.” In just a few minutes her ponytail had come undone, with most of her hair plastered to her face in wet, heavy locks. Outside the arch, the rain continued as street gutters swelled, and puddles collected along the sidewalk like ponds. She leaned against the big wooden door and wiped her face with her sleeve, which did little, since her sleeve was just as drenched as the rest of her.
How long would it rain? As she wondered this, the front door opened. Surprised, Neela turned around and found a silver-haired man standing in the doorway. He was remarkably lean and tall, wearing a hunter-green argyle vest; neat, dark wool pants; and a cream-colored linen shirt with a crisp collar. His vest, pants, and even his shirtsleeves were wet, along with the rest of him.
“So, you’re here,” he said. And then he revealed another strange thing about himself. Instead of having a beautiful voice to match his elegant clothing—Neela would have guessed something European—she was taken aback to hear a thick, throaty Boston accent: Ya heya.
Neela shivered. “I was just waiting for the rain to stop,” she said. I should go home, she thought. She was only two streets away. But it was still raining hard. What if the rain leaked into her veena case by the time she got home?
The man cleared his throat. “I saw you from inside. Why don’t you come in before you turn to soup?”
The image of herself turning to soup was so odd she laughed. The man laughed too, the lines softening around his mouth in a friendly way. He seemed nice. It would be so good to get out of the cold for a few minutes. She could feel water squishing between her toes.
Still, she hesitated. She had always been told never to go anywhere with a stranger. She looked at the rain again. It was coming down just as heavily, as she saw pinecones, leaves, and even someone’s notebook wash along the sidewalk.
“It could be a long time before the rain lets up,” the man said mildly. “And the church certainly doesn’t mind.”
“I guess I could come in for a while,” she said. She reached for her case.
“What’s that?”
“My instrument. I can’t leave it outside.”
He opened the door wider and she stepped in, engulfed by warm air and the scent of something sweet like dried herbs. Curious, she looked around. She had entered a vestibule that connected the chapel to the rest of the building. She’d never been here before, always using the basement entrance for her art class. The ceiling was high, and from it hung a single domed chandelier. Except for the chandelier, the only other light came from the chapel.
The man pointed to a coatrack. “Hang your jacket there. You can store your instrument next to it.” Neela took off her coat, glad to be rid of the dripping thing.
“I’m making hot cocoa in the kitchen,” he continued. “Would you like some?”
“I love cocoa,” she admitted. She wheeled her veena behind her.
The man stopped. “For heaven’s sake, you can leave your instrument right there. It’s so big, I wonder if it will even fit through the kitchen door.”
Neela hesitated. “I’d rather not.”
“Nothing will happen. You’re in a church.” When he saw she hadn’t changed her mind, he said, “Would you rather leave it in the closet?” He led her to a coat closet farther down the hall. “This is where I hang my things. You can put it next to my coat.”
Neela made sure that her veena fit neatly inside the closet. “Thank you,” she said, relieved. “It’s just that I don’t normally go outside with it.” She felt much better about coming in from the rain.
The old man smiled. “I completely understand. But don’t worry,” he said to her as she followed him inside. “Your veena will be safe. You have my word.”
The old man’s shoes left watery prints as Neela followed him down the hall to the kitchen. She wondered again why he was wet. If he had things hanging in the closet, then maybe he worked in the church. But then shouldn’t he have been indoors before the rain started?
“You’re sure it’s okay?” she asked.
“Have a seat,” he said as if he hadn’t heard her. “What a day. Got caught in the rain, too. Not that I mind. I’m used to far worse.”
Neela listened, fascinated by the sound of his words: I’m yusta faa waas. The plumber who came to fix the garbage disposal last week talked the same way. She tried to remember the way this man spoke so she could imitate him for her best friend, Pavi, later. The trick was to drop the r’s.
“You want a towel for your hair?” he asked. “You’ve got so much of it there.”
Neela patted her hair self-consciously, realizing she was a mess. “Um, no, thank you, I’m fine,” she said. She redi
d her ponytail, gathering the stray ends.
He reached for a teakettle that was on a shelf built into the wall next to the burners. The kettle was made from bronze and seemed old, with a black, curving handle and a spout in the shape of a strange creature. She looked more closely.
“Is that a dragon?”
The man nodded, filling the kettle with water and setting it on the stove top. Then he said something she didn’t understand. “It’s a wyvern.” Before she could ask what he meant, he asked, “So, do you have a name?”
“It’s Neela.”
“Hmm. Is that an Indian name?”
Neela sat down at the counter. “How did you know?”
He looked amused. “You don’t need to be Sherlock to figure it out.”
Neela flushed. She knew she had what her father called classic Indian features: an oval face with high cheekbones, large eyes, and long jet-black hair. Still, it always surprised her to know that others saw this part of her first, the part she couldn’t see unless she looked in a mirror.
She waited a moment and then said, “And your name, sir?”
He scooped cocoa powder into two mugs. “You can call me Hal,” he said. As they waited for the water to boil, Neela noticed a strange sound, like air being deflated out of a tire. Phsst phsst. Puzzled, she glanced behind her. It was coming from outside the kitchen door. Phsst phsst.
“Do you hear that?” she asked.
Hal looked at her. “Hear what?”
The sound stopped. At that moment, the teakettle started whistling.
“That’s just the kettle,” he said.
Neela frowned. It was definitely not the teakettle. In fact, she could hear it again faintly, as if it were retreating from the kitchen door. And then it was gone, and Neela almost wondered if she hadn’t imagined the whole thing.
By now, Hal had poured the hot water into the mugs and finished them off with a dollop of cream from the refrigerator. As soon as Neela took a mug from him, she forgot about the sound, lacing her fingers around the hot ceramic. It felt so good to hold it in her hands, as if its warmth were seeping into her skin and spreading out to the farthest tips of her body. She looked around surreptitiously, wondering if there might be a bag of potato chips, but decided she was pushing her luck.
He sat next to her at the counter. “You’re a musician?”
Neela nodded. “That’s my veena I have with me. I’ve been playing for three years. I used to play the piano, and I’ve done a little voice, but it’s the veena I love.”
“Love?” Hal repeated. “How can a kid like you know anything about that?”
Neela felt the skin prickle along her neck the way it did when one of her parents said something completely annoying. “All the great musicians started when they were kids.”
“Whooee. I can see I pushed the wrong button. Don’t mind me, then.” He leaned on the counter with both elbows, rubbing his temple with his fingers. “So how do you get an instrument like this? Is there a veena store in Arlington?”
“Of course not!” she said. “My grandmother sent it from India. Before that, I borrowed my teacher’s veena for three years, and hers wasn’t very good. I mean, it was nice she lent it to me, but I love my grandmother’s veena so much more.”
“Yes, love,” Hal said.
Neela observed the fine arch of his eyebrows, which were the same silver gray as his hair, and the sharp slope of his strong nose. Something about him nagged at her. Somewhere, someplace, she had seen this man before. “Are you a minister here?” she asked.
Hal glanced at her in surprise. “No, I gave that all up a long time ago. I’m damn lucky I did, if I can say that in a church.”
Neela tried to shrug casually, even though she felt a twinge of excitement that an adult had sworn in front of her. She was still trying to figure out where she had seen him. If he wasn’t a minister, then maybe she had seen him somewhere else. His face seemed so familiar.
She looked around the kitchen. “It’s a nice church. I like coming here for art class.”
Hal nodded as if he knew about the class. They talked about it for a while, and Neela told him how most of the time there weren’t any rules, and that was what made the class fun. “We don’t get much done,” she said, “but I guess it doesn’t really matter.”
Hal had a far-off look on his face, as if he were trying to levitate an object in a distant place. His fine eyebrows were drawn together intensely. Was he a relative of someone in her art class?
Before she could ask, he suddenly jumped up from his stool, as if the object in his mind had sprouted wings, and he was off to catch it. “I have to go,” he said.
Neela looked at the clock and was astonished to see it was almost four. She was late for home by almost an hour. “Me too,” she exclaimed. “Thanks for the hot cocoa. It was nice to—”
Hal cut off her compliment midsentence. “You have to wash your own mug. Use that sponge and the soap. Make sure you clean it really well. I mean, really well.”
Then before Neela could say anything, Hal walked out a door in the back without even a glance. Neela was left staring at his departing figure and the banging-shut door. After a moment, she collected her wits. What was all that? And not even a good-bye?
She stood at the sink, fuming. At first she thought she’d leave her mug unwashed on the counter. But she had been raised to listen to elders, even rude ones, and her upbringing eventually won out. She turned the faucet on and looked out the window, seeing that the rain had pretty much stopped, though there was water still pouring noisily overhead from the gutters.
As she scrubbed and rinsed the soap from the mug, her annoyance at Hal slowly dribbled away. She wondered again why he seemed so familiar. It had something to do with his eyes and that expression of concentration on his face. Maybe it wasn’t him she had seen before, she decided. It was that look.
A few minutes later, Neela was done with the mug and was about to leave when the teakettle caught her eye again. Hal had replaced it on the shelf while she drank her cocoa. What had he called it? A why? A why-something. It was hard to tell, with his accent. She looked at it more carefully. The dragon was made out of cast iron, with outstretched wings and scaly legs. Its face was sharp and triangular, with eyes set back high in two slits. Without thinking, Neela reached out with one finger. The dragon felt cold and smooth, except for the mouth, which was very sharp, despite its miniature size.
She slowly retraced her steps out of the kitchen to the vestibule. She wondered what she would tell her mother, who would be worried about her by now. At the coat closet, she opened the wooden folding door, still thinking of what to say at home, when she stopped. At first she thought she was mistaken. But the closet was so small, the truth was plain and simple. An awful feeling crept over her. She stared at the coat still hanging in the closet, a dark vinyl jacket that Hal had said was his, and the gaping space next to it where her veena should have been.
She searched the vestibule and then went as far as the doors of the chapel. Inside, the chapel was dark and empty, the somber-colored sky barely shining through the multicolored stained glass behind the altar. She felt a tightness in her throat as she entered, looking around the nearest pews, afraid that someone would ask her what she was doing, but looking nevertheless, wishing desperately that the veena had been moved to the chapel or else stored somewhere close by. But no matter where she looked, she found nothing.
At last she went back to the kitchen. Maybe Hal was still around; maybe he had put the veena away someplace else; maybe he had done something so explainable and obvious that the whole disaster she imagined unfolding before her would disappear instantly.
She walked back through the vestibule, continuing down the hallway to the kitchen, and opened the door through which he had left, thinking it led to another part of the church. But when she opened the door, she was dismayed to see an alley instead. There was no one there, only a long walkway with puddles of water on the ground.
“Hal?” s
he called out. Her voice sounded feeble to her ears, like a small pebble thrown inside an empty cavern. Beyond the alley lay the great, yawning expanse of the parking lot, with no sign of Hal or her missing veena.
It had stopped raining when Neela trudged home. Just take very good care of it—her grandmother’s words came echoing back to her. And now, somewhere out there, her grandmother’s veena was traveling farther and farther away. Neela choked up, imagining it thrown carelessly into the back of a car, rolling around along the bumpy roads of Arlington. Her grandmother would never forgive her.
Maybe Hal had planned the whole thing, from the time he opened the door and found her, a drowned rat in the pouring rain. And yet, something didn’t seem right. Sure, Hal could have tricked her, but how could he know it would rain, and how could he know she would stop at the church because of it?
Unless he was following her already. She remembered the sound she heard walking home, like someone stepping on a twig behind her. Was that Hal? But why would he follow her? And if he did, it didn’t explain how he could be in the church before her and how he seemed to know his way around. It also didn’t explain why he wanted her veena.
When she climbed up the front steps of her house, the door flew open. “I was so worried!” Mrs. Krishnan hugged her hard as Neela inhaled the scent of her mother, a mixture of cardamom, flour, and Lysol.
Normally Neela would have cried at this moment, but she was distracted by the sight of her mother. “What are you wearing?” she asked.
Mrs. Krishnan had on a neon green salwar kameez from India, the top in a checkered pattern with sequins and gold lamé, the pant bottoms puffing out like balloons. “I’m doing laundry. It was the only clean thing I had. But who cares about me? Go put on something dry.”
After Neela changed, she found her mother in the living room holding a mug of cocoa. “What?” her mother asked, seeing Neela’s face. “I thought you liked cocoa.” She was looking around the room. “And where did you put the veena?”
