Star-Touched Stories

by Roshani Chokshi

  The name showed her what she could have, but only if she reached him in time.

  Her fear grabbed her by the throat then.

  Fear that she should not reach him in time, but be forced to return empty-handed to a world that would be ripped of all that might have been so sweet.

  Her tears had not even begun to cool when the skeletal horse greeted her at the entrance. True to its promise, Kamala manifested the moment Gauri stepped over the boundary from one gate and through the hall that would connect her to the second.

  “Ah, there it is,” said the horse.

  Gauri looked behind her, but saw nothing.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked roughly, wiping at her face. “Let’s go. We can’t waste any more time, and I—”

  “—yes yes yes, I know. You shall start dragging ghosts, but I would have a care,” rasped the horse. “It is showing, you know.”

  Gauri rolled her eyes, and then pressed her fists against her face, as if she were terribly annoyed when what she was really doing was wiping away her tears.

  “I thought you were sent to help me, and instead you’re bothering me with this nonsense about invisible undergarments showing or what have you.”

  The horse tossed back its head and let out a sharp laugh.

  “Invisible undergarments?” it repeated, delighted with itself. “Is that what humans call souls?”

  “Souls?” asked Gauri. “Are you trying to tell me that my soul is showing?”

  “But of course your soul is showing, my inedible bone!” said the horse. “It leans out! Can’t you see it? Wilting and unbound! Did you see something that made your rib cage split with sorrow? Bad bad bad. That’s how souls fall out, you know. And this is not a good place to start losing your soul.”

  The horse trotted forward. Its hollow hooves made a sound like dragging skulls on the stone floor.

  “It is not always so bad to spend a moment just standing,” said the horse. Its ears twitched. “I will not move until you do not. Ha! How clever I am.”

  Realizing that she would get nowhere with this bizarre creature, Gauri relented. She stood there. And as she did, she found that it was easier to breathe. She found that the vision of bliss did not expand painfully inside her chest, but instead felt like a hope held tight against one’s skin. And though Gauri was almost certain that the horse was insane, the moment she merely stood there … and let her thoughts be gathered, she felt … better.

  The horse stamped its foot. “I am rather disappointed.”

  “Why?” asked Gauri.

  “There is nothing at all I want from you,” it said, huffing. “I cannot have your blood on orders…”

  Gauri wanted to ask who had ordered such a thing, but thought it best not to bait her own mortality.

  “… and I do not even wish to nibble a bit on your soul. It smacks of heroism. Bleh. Nasty residue. Full of pomp. Empty of originality. I detest it.”

  For the third time, Gauri found herself thanking the strange demon horse.

  * * *

  The hallway leading to the Gate of Grief might have looked just like the one that she had just left save for a disturbing difference.

  There were people in the walls.

  Bodies tipped forward like the eaves of a building. Grieving faces and streaming hair and reaching hands formed a dome above those who wandered here. This place had wiped away the color of their skin, and left them the color of milk. But though they had no skin color to speak of, something grew across their features …

  At first Gauri thought it was decay.

  It unnerved her how beautiful decay could look. Ages ago, it had been her thankless task to join the scouts of Bharata after a war. They would walk through the battlefields days or sometimes weeks after a victor had been declared. Sometimes they were there to recover a soldier’s armor, or retrieve coded messages left behind by a felled spy. On those trips, it was not uncommon to find a body in a state of unravelment. And though it disgusted her, she couldn’t look away from the strange life that sprouted where another life had vanished. Fistfuls of mushrooms with satin caps. Mold with exquisite frills that were every shade of cream. Fungi like a nest of pearls.

  The closer she looked at the faces above the hall, the more she saw that it was not decay at all.

  But frost.

  Gauri rose up on her tiptoes, straining. From a distance, the frost looked furred. If she had been in a fanciful mood, she might have imagined that these were beings in the middle of a transformation. Any moment now and great wings would shake loose from their shoulder blades and they would turn to swans.

  That was not how death worked here.

  Where the wall joined the floor, Gauri saw the final transformation of the faces. They were merely shapes of polished ice. All features smoothed away. A darker thought crossed Gauri’s mind. Perhaps it was not frost that she was seeing, but the shape of forget spasming across the features of the long dead. This was their fate. If forgotten entirely, they would become no more than building blocks set to something greater than them.

  The night pillars lined against the hall were less dark than they had been before. Now, golden daylight streamed down them in rivulets. In their new glow, Gauri was disturbed to see how much of the people’s faces were see-through. Their skin was thinner here, and the light went through it as if it were a veil. She hesitated to look down at her own arms, scared to catch the glint of her own bone.

  “Do you like happy things?” asked the horse, trotting at a fast clip.

  “I’m no different from anyone else,” said Gauri. “Of course I do.”

  The horse’s ears swiveled. She could feel its withers rippling beneath her leg. Something like pity rolled off the creature.

  “When you get to the gate, snatch your happiness by the teeth and do not let it go.”

  Strange, she thought. Then again, the horse never said anything of sense to her. Gauri looked around, bored. In the previous hall, Kamala moved as fast as the speed of thought. Now, however, she trotted at a fast clip but did not gallop. “Out of respect” it had said primly when Gauri asked why.

  No one moved fast here.

  There were less people marching toward the Gate of Grief than there were people wandering through the Gate of Names. But those who were here moved as if they walked through water. Every action exaggerated. Every expression twisted to extravagance. Gauri felt laid bare by their own rawness. And she hated it. Close your heart and move forward, she wanted to scold. But grief was a private world, and that was how it manifested here. She could yell and jump in front of a person. They would not notice.

  “Why can I see them and they can’t see me?”

  “Family privileges,” harrumphed Kamala.

  Once more, Gauri just rolled her eyes. When Kamala said bizarre things, there was no use trying to decipher it.

  “How much longer until we’re there?” she asked.

  “Oh, an eon and a blink!” laughed the horse.

  She was trying her best not to let the thinning night pillars frighten her, but with every rivulet of gold dripping down the base, all she felt was that blissful memory pulling away from her. She wasn’t even sure whether she was doing this right. Go past the two gates, and then what? Would Vikram’s last breath be waiting for her? Would she recognize it? Would it be like a plume of smoke or … or him but pallid and rendered ghostly?

  Ahead of her, someone screamed.

  The sound of it made the hairs on the back of her neck rise. Kamala broke her trot for only a moment.

  “Do not look too long,” she said.

  At what? Gauri wondered silently.

  Ahead of her stood a giant construction of smoke. The smell of char stung her nose. The smoke swallowed up the frosted bodies once arching above them. This was the Gate of Grief. It was not wrought iron at all, but plumes of smoke that perhaps dreamed of being stone, for they looked hardy and cruel even as she could see straight through it to a land that was little more than scraps of
shadow layered one upon the other.

  “Steamed tears,” said Kamala. “Very good building blocks. Nice tensile strength. But don’t walk through it with your tongue out. Far too salty.”

  A gate of steamed tears?

  Unlike the other gate, people walked in …

  But not many walked out.

  Save for one.

  The owner of the scream.

  Gauri was not the only one to see him. As one, every person turned and faced him. The man was older than Gauri, but not so old that his face bore any proof. His hair was disheveled. His robes marked him as a tradesman of some kind. Behind him walked a beautiful woman who was clearly dead. Wisps of smoke curled off her hair, teased by an invisible wind so that it looked as if she smoldered. Her skin was iridescent like a pearl’s nacre. She held the man by the wrist, and tears coursed down her face. Her mangalsutra, that which marked her as a married woman, had broken in death and now dangled off her neck.

  “Turn around,” she pleaded. “Please, my love.”

  And in her voice, Gauri recognized the owner of the scream.

  But not once did the man look at her.

  “Why can everyone see him?” asked Gauri softly.

  Kamala’s ears flicked. “He is one who finds himself here quite … often. Every day he finds his way to the Underworld, and tries to bring his wife back to the land of the living.”

  There was a noticeable recoil from the people. They leaned out, giving the man and his wife a wide berth. Even Gauri found herself leaning to one side, eager for Kamala to get on with it and take her to the Gate of Grief.

  Maybe it was cruel of her. Perhaps she should have been more impressed by the feat he’d accomplished. But in his face, it looked as if the price was far too steep. His own wife knew it.

  “I can never stay past dawn and yet you drag me back,” she wept.

  Gauri wanted to shut her ears, but she couldn’t, and she was forced to listen. The woman sounded desperate.

  “Don’t you love me?”

  “You know I do,” the man bit out gruffly, and still he marched forward, dragging his wife back toward the land of the living.

  “Then why won’t you turn around?” she asked, pleading. “Why won’t you let me go?” Softer, this time, she said: “Only one of us can be a ghost.”

  He let out his breath. “I don’t want to lose you.”

  “Am I lost simply because I am not by your side? Do you think if you drag me from hell that you have won?”

  “Stop it,” he said, trying to shake his hand loose from hers. But she did not let go.

  “You do this every day,” she said. “Every day when you wake up, you break yourself to bring me back. And even then, it is not a resurrection. It is a replacement.”

  “No, it’s not,” he said.

  “Every night you will drag me up and every dawn I will have to leave.”

  “If I do this enough times, you won’t have to go back.”

  She fell silent. The man’s grief was a palpable thing, and Gauri bent over in her seat, feeling for all the world as if every wound she had ever suffered had opened up at once. She was not alone. Through her skin, she could feel Kamala’s dark heart race. At either side of her, those who wandered through this limbo crumpled and sank to their knees.

  The dead wife shrieked:

  “You will always wake up alone. And one day, you will raise your hands to engrave your grief on your wrists and you will find that they are gnarled with age, and there is so little blood left in you that you might as well wait to join me,” she said hoarsely. “And you will realize that time has tugged a blanket before your eyes. You will realize that you have squandered autumns and starved your eyes of stars. And you will hate me.”

  “I could never hate you,” he said.

  But he spoke the words dully, as one who had repeated something so many times that its meaning had thinned.

  “Turn,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Because you love me.”

  Gauri found herself sitting upright. She could not look away from this scene of grief played out before her. She wasn’t even sure what she wanted in that moment, whether she would siphon off some secondhand victory if he did not turn.

  But then, slowly, the man lifted his head. He turned slowly on his heel, his chest never once falling. As if all this time, he held in his breath. As if he were holding onto it just for her. Joy lit up his wife’s face. When he turned to her, they beheld each other. Gauri felt like an intruder, but she could not look away from them.

  The moment they turned to each other, Gauri saw them as they might have been once. For a blink of an eye, the woman had gone from eerie to earthen, her iridescent skin flooding with russet color. The wisps of smoke coalescing to black hair now silvered with age. Crease-lines, of joy, flared against the man’s eyes. She held his face in her hands, crying as she smiled.

  And then she disappeared.

  The man stood there, his hands still raised in the air, molded to the shape of her. Desolation sucked the very air from the space around him. But he did not weep. Nor did he cross once more past the Gate of Grief. Slowly, he turned toward the land of the living. Slowly, he picked his way through the crowd, like one whose eyes are adjusting to the light. Slowly, he found the strength to leave her behind.

  “You pity him,” rasped the horse. And it said it with something like disgust.

  They were nearly at the gate. Gauri would have jumped off and ran the rest of the way, but the floor had changed. Now, the reflection of the bodies overhead rippled across the liquid floor. Kamala may have been able to trot across its surface. But what if Gauri simply drowned? She forced down her impatience.

  “So what if I pity him?”

  “It is cruel to laugh at one’s reflection.”

  Gauri felt struck. This was what her life had come to … being scolded by a being half-dead. It wasn’t as though she was alone in pitying the man.

  Everyone had recoiled. Part of her felt self-righteous. She would never be so beside herself with grief that she would waste her life dragging up the dead. Even the phantom of his own wife was exasperated.

  But then again, wasn’t that what she was doing? Fetching Vikram’s last breath from hell’s gates? If she lost him again … would she do this? Grate herself down to the marrow until she lost the very reason she had journeyed down to this bleak place?

  “Grief is a land of its own, though here it squeezes itself into the shape of a gate,” said Kamala. “Be careful what kind of citizen you make, little bone.”

  Kamala stopped trotting, and Gauri slid off its back. Vikram’s name was warm against her throat. She wished she could wrap her whole body in that warmth.

  “His last breath is in there,” said the horse.

  “And then what will happen?” asked Gauri. Her hand moved to the sword at her side. Would she have to fight for it? The way she had when they had fought in the Tournament of Wishes? She hoped she would have to fight for it. This place made her weak and useless.

  “What will happen,” said the horse cryptically.

  “Will it show me the future?” she asked.

  “Oh yes,” said Kamala. “But this is no place for prophecy, it is a place for pain. And you will suffer the most for it.”

  Gauri turned. But the words What do you mean? died on her lips. The horse had disappeared. And with it, everyone else who had once stood around her. She had walked through the Gate of Grief without knowing, and inside she found a place that she did not expect. It was not bleak and stern like the Gate of Names. It was … beautiful. Sharp.

  Gauri was in a palace carved of white. Above her, the sky swelled with snow, its belly hanging low and trailing clouds as if daring the spires of this kingdom to pierce it. This was not a place she recognized in the land of Bharata-Ujijain. Yet it felt as familiar as home.

  “Vikram?” she called.

  A cloud snagged on a tower, and snow began to fall from the broken sky.

 
“Gauri?” he answered.

  Something caught within her. She ran to the sound of him. Snow stuck to her skin and dusted her hair. Around her, enchantment fell away. Paper animals gathered themselves off the white walls and zoomed around her. She heard lyrics of ice that conjured twisted gardens encased in glass. Palaces of music unheard crumpling into fluted sighs of love. The air sounded as if it had been rummaged through, as if the fingers of some pale god had combed the atmosphere.

  But the sound of love—the sound of Vikram’s voice, the laughter straining at the seams of his words—was a found thing.

  Like the way back home.

  “Vikram?” she called again.

  He did not answer, but the echo of his voice remained. Gauri ran past a set of open rooms before she found him. In each one, she glimpsed that which she might have had. In one, he tossed a child in the air. A boy with dark eyes like hers and a slow smile like his. In the next, they reclined against cushions. The light moved over them slowly and Gauri saw gray in their hair. In the room before she saw him, she glimpsed an unfamiliar elderly couple staring out a window. The kingdom they looked upon was vast, and the sunrise moved over it reverently, touching it with gentle light as if in awe that such a place existed. The couple held hands.

  In the last room sat Vikram.

  The bedroom looked much the same as their own with a single difference:

  Gauri was already in it. She looked as old as Mother Dhina in this vision. Gray in her hair. Her veins raised. Her arms cradling an older Vikram on his deathbed. Age had wrought its ravage, but they were not so old that their own shadows should peel off them and wander elsewhere. Around the walls stood people with blurred faces. Family not yet made.

  At the center of it all hovered a blue flame, wispy and quivering. His last breath. Here, for the taking.

  Gauri stopped. For long moments, she could not bring herself to move. The grief of this place ripped through her. This was the truth. She would always lose him.

  The only difference was the timing.