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7. The others
The first time I can remember, I was eight. Parents teach their children about this, to prepare them for what they'll have to do all their lives. So I sat up all night, with my mum and our visiting stranger, a woman who breathed through the pain of delivery and took away two packets of sanitary pads. Later, there was someone we made up a bed for, who wore clothes I'd seen in history books, and a lost child who liked the aloo paratha my father cooked.
Much later, there was the first time with Kiran. We were twenty and twenty-one, just back from our second date, and the stranger was even younger. Her coat slipped to the floor, the pocket spilling blueprints of a public building, and something that gleamed in a vial, with a syringe. "She's on her way somewhere," Kiran said.
Somewhere in our recent history, I thought. Kiran put the vial back so it wouldn't get lost, and made tea for the three of us.
I know what you're thinking. But we feed and water our assassins in this country. Assassins, terrorists, freedom fighters. They are who we are; there is no other.
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8. Kiran
I put the mug of masala chai in front of him and said, "This was my wife's recipe."
And then cried. Because scent is a trigger for memory, because he had cried, too, and because it was that sort of night. The waves shattered on the shoreline and the wind howled a ghastly sympathy.
"Was," he said, perceptive despite everything, and I wondered if he would think it nothing worth crying about. Not a recent loss, not a whole lifetime's loss. One death, one widow, laid before someone who had received mercy, but not justice; whose loss was human dignity.
But he got up, went across to the window and rang the bell. As they do at funerals, sometimes. "A chime struck for you alone," he said, thoughtful, "though you don't have the whole symphony."
Like the poet said, the one Kiran loved. Written after he landed on my kitchen floor, after running all night from his torturers; before he went back to the battle he was fighting for his people, his language, his occupation of space; and before they fucking killed him.
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9. Ashes
In the morning, I went down to the gate with him. Kiran used to sit on the bars with her feet swinging, even in the bitter cold, when the snow came down to the low-tide mark.
To her poet, I did not say: this is the way to the gallows; nor, perhaps it was worth it in the end; or even: when the ashes were scattered, when I read, no one cried: it was so new, so sharp, that we didn't know we'd been cut.
(Let no inventory of our better world obscure this: who they were, and how they died, so we could lose our knowledge of grief.)
I said, "Be safe."
"Thank you," he said, picking up a plastic bag of painkillers, medical alcohol, and trail mix, and started off down the path. I watched him grow more distant, along the slough of land into water, until I was distracted by a bird rising from the fog. When I turned back he was gone. No footprints, and no sound but the crack of ice, and the gathering of crows.
A note on Akbar and Birbal
Akbar the Great was the third Mughal Emperor of India, and Raja Birbal was one of his “navaratnas", the nine principal advisers of his court. They are real historical figures (and hardly ancient history at all in Indian terms; Akbar died in 1605) but nevertheless, they’re best known for the large body of folklore about them. They’re funny, sweet stories, in which trouble may arise but Birbal always comes up with a clever scheme to save the day, and even if he and Akbar quarrel for a time, they’re always best of friends again by the end. What I love most about the stories is how relevant they continue to be: Akbar was a social and religious pluralist, a Muslim emperor who trusted his Hindu advisers implicitly. In their bickering, you can catch a glimpse of the modern Indian state, and much else besides. My friend Sumana Hariheswara writes: "May we all have mythical Birbal's incisive wit and courage, and mythical Akbar's ability to listen to critics about how we use our power, reflect, and change."
May we have just those.
Acknowledgements
Most of these stories were originally acquired and published by various SFF magazines and anthologies, and I'm very grateful to the editors at Anathema: Spec From The Margins, Goldfish Grimm's, Betwixt, Middle Planet, Expanded Horizons and GigaNotoSaurus. For "Eight Cities", which first appeared in Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation (Upper Rubber Boot Books, 2017), my thanks to Phoebe Wagner and Brontë Wieland. And a special shoutout to my (former) fellow editors at Luna Station Quarterly, for their work on "Flightcraft", and to the fiction editors at Strange Horizons, without whom my writing career would look very different.
In putting together this volume, I'm grateful as ever to Cathryn and Cara Wynn-Jones of Lodestar Author Services, and to Katie Rathfelder for her patient editing. The beautiful cover artwork is from “Star-sailing" by Katherine Catchpole, used with permission.
About the author
Iona Datt Sharma is a writer, lawyer, unrepentant hipster and the product of more than one country. They’re just finishing up their first novel, a historical fantasy about spies. Their other work can be found at www.generalist.org.uk/iona/about, and they’re on Twitter as @singlecrow.