Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  “No, no, no,” murmured Gauri.

  She sank to her knees, folding Vikram to her. His sword clattered to the ground. Instinctively, she wanted to pick it up, slide it back into its sheath, to do anything of ritual that might transform this into something normal. She could see normal stretched out, extravagant as a horizon: an endless rotation of meetings, smiles stolen from outside the glances of courtiers and therefore all the sweeter, her spine against his chest and their limbs a labyrinth none could enter but they. Days that blended together, arguments that tilted to a fit of laughing, hands cobwebbing with the blue veins of a long life. No magic compared.

  Gauri wanted to snatch back all she had said. Now, Vikram’s words curled her mouth with bitterness.

  That’s all that tomorrow means to you?

  If tomorrow still had his smile, then it meant all to her.

  In her arms, Vikram was strangely light. Gauri gathered him tightly, as though to stop any more of him from escaping. Shock robbed her words.

  But though she had lost her sense of time, her guards had not.

  Bharata-Ujijain officials flooded the courtyard.

  She did not hear the sound of their trumpet sounding alarm. She barely felt the heavy shawl draped around her shoulders, the attendants’ urgent hands forcing her to rise. All she felt was the sudden cold against her skin when Vikram was taken from her.

  PRESENT

  Hira frowned. “But I know this story! I thought you said this happened to you.”

  “It did.”

  “But I already know the ending. I don’t want a story where I know the ending.”

  Besides, Hira could not imagine what this story had to do with Meghana and her wedding. Meghana had never even met her husband-to-be. Though that did not stop her from imagining that their souls had known each other from the moment they were forged.

  Hira thought this sounded foolish.

  “People can take a lot of roads to get to the same ending, and even with the same ending, sometimes it is quite a different story,” said her grandmother.

  “But everyone knows this story,” said Hira, sighing. “Is this the one with the happy ending or the sad ending?”

  Her grandmother did not smile this time. She did not look out the window wistfully the way she sometimes did. Instead, she reached for the strange necklace at her throat. It was fashioned like a snake. Sometimes Hira thought that it changed colors, switching its jewels from emeralds to rubies and sometimes sapphires, the way a person might select different silks from a wardrobe. But Meghana and her parents said that was just her imagination.

  “It is the one with the true ending,” said her grandmother.

  THE BARGAIN FOR BREATH

  Gauri crouched beside Vikram’s bed.

  Ever since the royal physician had visited Vikram, a steady parade of diplomats hesitated to knock at the door. But that did not stop them from lingering. And it certainly did not stop their words from traveling to Gauri where she sat hardly a foot away, leaning over Vikram. One courtier’s wife wept loudly, declaring: “Ah, so soon a widow! Her henna has not yet dried!”

  But Gauri was no widow. She was not even a wife.

  Both kingdoms stirred restlessly.

  Distantly, Gauri wondered whether the diplomats of Ujijain had already begun packing for their kingdom. Outside the chamber they spoke of broken treatises, and even foul play at the hands of a clever queen. After all, she was the last one who had seen him alive and well. And wasn’t her glass hand rather cruel looking at times? Why did she not smile around the emperor the way he smiled around her? Perhaps her dark eyes had lured him. Perhaps not all of her had returned from that strange land they had visited. Perhaps, perhaps. All splinters of a tale twisting out of hand.

  The physicians could not diagnose him.

  Aasha declared that no poison had touched him.

  Gauri smoothed the hair from his forehead, fussed with his sheets, rubbed his feet to bring warmth back to his skin instead of this burning fervor that had gripped it. She sat and loudly criticized his favorite books. She declared that she was utterly naked and entirely bored. She told him this was a game she did not wish to play.

  But she recognized what she was doing. She had seen her enemies do the same. Polishing their armor, squinting at the sky, poring over plans that had already come to pass. Redundancies on the way to the inevitable.

  Out of earshot, Gauri was called unseemly and theatrical.

  She was never called grieving.

  The physicians declared that their best hope was to wait and see. But Gauri did not miss the twist of their mouths. They pitied her. They thought he would die if not by tomorrow, then in a matter of days.

  Scouts had brought back reports of a similar illness gathering souls outside of the city gates. One day, people coughed and fell asleep, burning with fever. They never woke.

  Once the physicians had left, Gauri admitted no one but Aasha and Nalini. Nalini held her, wept the tears Gauri could not summon. More would come. By morning, Vikram’s father would be here so that the ones Vikram had loved best would be there when …

  No. Her mind could not bear the weight of those thoughts.

  “I did this to him,” she said.

  Vikram had not moved in hours. His eyelids had ceased their twitching. The fever had lulled from a fire to a flicker, leaving his skin cold and wooden.

  “Hush, don’t say such things,” said Nalini. “How could you have known?”

  “But I sent him beyond the city walls. I told him that he should go on a procession, meet officials, shake hands. I—”

  She broke off.

  But Aasha stood still as a statue. She kept looking out the window, until Gauri finally snapped:

  “Are you wondering why Death is taking so long to get here?”

  Aasha fixed her with a calm stare. “That is not who I am waiting for.”

  But she would say nothing more than that.

  * * *

  Officially, all wedding ceremonial preparations had been placed on hold in light of the emperor’s illness. The palace officially said that everything would resume at the first flush of health. There was no mention of the physicians’ dire gazes. Or the stillness of Vikram, the gradual cooling of his skin so that all that separated him from life and death were the stingy pulses of his heart.

  The food was still prepared. The banners still painted. But the palace had started to make quiet shifts … marigolds to throw in a procession, sandalwood paste used only to prepare the dead, wood hewn for a funeral pyre. Whispers chased each other up and down the palace staircases, clambering up the walls until they threatened to spill over into the cities.

  When night fell, Gauri heard the door open. Aasha stood there. She walked forward and wordlessly placed a bite of food to Gauri’s lips. Gauri opened her mouth mechanically.

  How strange that only last night, she had not fed herself either.

  Her attendants and friends had taken turns feeding her bites of creamy rasmalai and spicy saag because the henna for her wedding was still drying, and she was not allowed to touch anything lest she ruin the pattern.

  “Why?” asked Gauri, finally. “How could he live through Alaka and all of its terrors only to … here. What did I do? Was I…”

  She blinked. She thought of the warmth of his hand cupping her cheek. The way he steepled his fingers and pressed his brows flat when he thought. How he would pull her behind a pillar, covering her laugh with his lips until she did not want to think but only do this. Forever.

  “What?” asked Aasha gently. Too gently.

  “Was I too happy?”

  And finally, Gauri wept.

  She wept as Aasha rocked her back and forth. She wept as Vikram still did not move. And she only stopped weeping when Aasha whispered:

  “There might be a way to save him.”

  Gauri stilled. She sniffed, dragging her arm across her face.

  “What would you have me do? Plead my case to Death?”

&nb
sp; Perhaps she was delirious. But when Gauri thought of Death, she remembered a man with cruel eyes and a sensuous mouth, a man who would not flinch from anyone’s tears. Hers would make no difference.

  “You know how the Otherworld likes its games,” said Aasha.

  “They think this—” said Gauri, flailing a hand at Vikram lying prone in his bed, “is a game?”

  Aasha only shrugged. “Everything is a game when there is nothing to lose.”

  The offhanded way she spoke struck Gauri, but she knew that her friend meant no offense. Aasha was centuries older. She might look like a mortal, experience things like a mortal, but she was not of this world.

  Hidden in her words was truth.

  To an immortal being, Death was not even a fairy tale. It was a city they had no cause to visit. Death lent no urgency to their love affairs. It did not sweeten the taste of food with the fear that these might be the last flavors to sit upon one’s tongue. It did not heighten colors with the dread that when they closed their eyes, this would be the last image to blaze through one’s dreams.

  “Do not leave his side,” said Aasha. “When the yamaduta comes, follow him.”

  When she heard the name yamaduta, Gauri flinched. A yamaduta was a messenger of Death himself. Sometimes the messenger took the form of a dog with brindled fur and four eyes. Sometimes the messenger was a beautiful woman. For some, Death came in the shape of a loved one whose back was eternally turned. For some, Death came with blunted teeth and a baleful gaze. Gauri did not want Death to come at all.

  “Make a bargain,” said Aasha. “You have already seen the realm of Death, haven’t you?”

  Gauri nodded, sure of this even though the details of her visit had long ago softened into dreams.

  “Then it cannot hide from you,” said Aasha. “Strike a bargain. It has been done before, once.”

  Gauri knew the tale. It was the story of Savitri, a princess, and Satyavan, her husband. Satyavan was fated to die a year and a day after their marriage. Because of Satyavan’s piety, it was said that the Dharma Raja himself came to collect his soul. But Savitri refused to part with her husband. She followed him through the twisting lands of Naraka, extracting one boon after the next. Even though she had angered the Dharma Raja with her stubbornness, her devotion impressed him. At last, Savitri requested a boon with a catch: Grant me a hundred sons by my husband. And Death, perhaps exhausted from his ordeal with the clever princess or perhaps softened by her entreaties, had no choice but to let the soul of Satyavan return to the light.

  “Maybe Vikram could outwit death,” said Gauri miserably. “But I—”

  “—you are an extremely ferocious individual,” said Aasha. “I don’t think Death would wish to converse with you at all.”

  Aasha’s words dragged forth a light. And Gauri’s soul strained toward the radiance of those words as if she were a plant newly freed of the ground’s darkness.

  No one would take her bridegroom from her.

  Gauri’s smile became a vicious slash.

  Let them try.

  “Bring me my best weapons,” she said.

  * * *

  Gauri had laid many traps in her life. She had laid branches over trenches studded with iron spikes. Mimicked the birdcalls of spies to soothe her enemies’ suspicions. Placed gaps in her speech that courtiers fell into, and spun their own words into chains.

  But she had never laid a trap like this.

  It would have to be enough, she thought. She settled down to wait.

  By now, night had ripened to full dark. Time turned stingy. Seconds lasted for minutes. Minutes for hours. Hours refused to melt, holding their shape like frost on a winter morning. Sleep seduced Gauri’s thoughts, but every time her chin dipped, the sharpened points of her jeweled choker jolted her from rest.

  All through the evening, Vikram had not moved. Once or twice, Gauri had felt her gaze straying to him, but she willed herself not to look. Look at him, and the image would hold. She would be too scared to blink. Too scared that if she did, his soul would slip out from beneath him, and she would not catch it in time. But even lying there, Gauri could not ignore the taste of betrayal at the back of her throat. It seemed impossible to imagine that there was a world where she could not follow, a world that even now his soul leaned toward. As if that was where he belonged. And not by her side.

  No sooner had that dark thought burst inside her did she feel it:

  The presence of Death.

  Some might think death felt like a slowing down, the lull of closed eyes, the body settling in for sleep. But they were wrong. Death commanded urgency. Its presence squeezed life like a fruit. Her chest clenched. Her soul, frightened, curled in on itself and yet life sluiced out anyway. Life dribbled down the ridges of her anima. Life was a puddle of spilled ambrosia on the floor of a grand room, and in its reflection, every mundane action had been rendered golden by Death’s secret alchemy.

  Gauri gasped—

  With one hand, she grabbed Death’s messenger. She gagged a little, for when she looked down—dressed in Vikram’s garments from the day—she saw a pearlescent arm sunk to the wrist in her own body. The arm snapped back, the hand empty and recoiling.

  “What trickery is this?” demanded the yamaduta.

  Gauri looked up. She stared. For this gleaning, the yamaduta had taken a cruel and beautiful form. In a way, she was humbled. Of course the one face that would lure Vikram to the afterlife was none other than her own.

  Gauri stared at the creature that had stolen her face. It took a moment before she could remember that it was not human. She could stab it repeatedly with her weapons, but it could not die, for it was not alive. It was a command poured into the shape of that which would pull or punish the soul of that who it had come to retrieve.

  “You … you are not the soul I am to take.”

  The messenger glanced around the room. But Vikram was nowhere to be found. Before night had fallen, Gauri had him removed from the room and placed him in her own chambers. But not before she had taken his clothes—an act that had scandalized her courtiers—pricked his thumb, and smeared her lips with his blood.

  The messengers of Death are said not to look too closely, Aasha had warned. It is said that they cannot bear to look into the face of a mortal lest they become too fascinated. They check only for the trace of someone’s soul lingering in their blood and the scent of their mortal bodies.

  “You are correct,” said Gauri.

  She dragged her arm across her mouth, but the taste of Vikram’s blood snuck onto her tongue anyway. His clothes were far too big on her, and the dangling sleeves and breadth in her shoulders made her feel like a child. Facing a being as old as time, she was a child.

  “Reveal him to me. His soul has been summoned.”

  Gauri steeled herself. And then she looked into the creature’s eyes. Her own eyes. Stern and dark and inherited from a father she had always known at a distance.

  “You cannot have him.”

  “It is not up to you, oh Queen. You are not the first bride to be widowed before she is made a wife. You will not be the last.”

  “I said you cannot have his soul.”

  The messenger tilted her head to one side. A movement made all the more wrong on the creature for its borrowed features.

  “How did you know?”

  Now it was Gauri’s turn to go still.

  Know … what?

  The yamaduta splayed her fingers like a king displaying a feast, and Gauri saw an image stretched out:

  A Tapestry.

  Some part of her knew it, but her immediate memory could not recall where. The Tapestry shifted and shimmered, recoiling from itself as if it were a living thing. And then the image sharpened, diving in unto itself and expanding upon a single thread. Gauri felt an answering tug in her heart. Vikram.

  “The young emperor’s life thread was split. The Dread Queen decided one path. Her Pale Consort decided another path. Their divergence created a gap. When two lives
diverge, there is a small enough space through which I might slip through and grab his soul. But rules are rules, and I am bound to them just as anyone else. Because his life could not be decided by immortals, it allows for the meddling of one who is far more acquainted with death—”

  “A mortal,” breathed Gauri. She glanced into her own face. “A mortal can decide if Vikram’s soul is taken?”

  The false Gauri’s hands fell at her side. The image vanished.

  “In a way,” it said.

  It smiled. And in this, Gauri found the creature’s flaw. Its smile was nothing like hers. It may have gotten nearly every detail of her face correct, but it had missed one thing. Her scar. Few knew the tale, and so most assumed that the scar was not a scar at all, but a dimple. A mark of beauty. Not a mark of a girl who had only found solace in sharp things. Gauri sensed the gap in the creature’s words. She sensed the taunt of more knowledge, the slippery silence it left behind as if its cleverness had a residue. But for all its cleverness, it did not know her grin.

  And so Gauri raised her chin and emptied her eyes of any guile. The barest touch of triumph crimped the edges of the creature’s smile.

  “The loop runs twofold,” said the creature. “You must steal your bridegroom’s last breath from the final gate before Death. He is an aberration—”

  Gauri, now giddy with the chance that she might win him back, fought to keep a smile from her face. The creature would not want her life? Then it could have anything. Anything at all. She didn’t care. Because the moment the messenger of Death started speaking, she had started imagining. She imagined like one starved of ideas, all of them tamped down so that she would not cause herself more grief. She could imagine Vikram leaning forward, elbows braced on his knees, all long limbs and sly grins and outrage at being called an “aberration.” She could imagine him.

  “—but take care, oh Queen.”

  Gauri’s eyes snapped to the creature.

  “I give you this single night to cross this land and go hence. But know now that the halls leading to the realm of Death are their own treachery.” The creature paused. It grinned with all its teeth. Moonlight broke through the room, and its eyes glistened in the way of predators. “You may find that you do not care to bring back your bridegroom’s last breath after all. You can always turn around.”