Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

by James Patrick Kelly

  The policeman came over to the window and bent over Shruti, his hands on his knees. He was balding and shiny with sweat, and his khaki uniform bulged at the stomach. “Do you know where your Nani went, little girl?” he asked.

  Shruti nodded and pointed out the window.

  He looked out, sighed, patted her head, and went to talk to Mama.

  Shaking Mama off, Auntie went into the kitchen. She pulled jalebis, bright orange and gleaming with sugar syrup, out of the fridge, and set a plate of them by the policeman. She gave one to each boy and a half to Shruti. Shruti looked down at the sticky sweet, then held it out to Gautam, but her cousin Vikram grabbed it out of her hand and ran into their room. Gautam chased after him.

  Shruti sat on the window ledge in a stream of dusty golden light, watching her mother and aunt. She did not cry, and she did not speak. They never heard her speak again.

  Nani told me things.

  She told me the forest is all around us, as close as breath, as close as my shadow to the ground. She told me there are entrances. Even here in Mumbai. I cannot get there yet, though. The city sticks to me like skin.

  Skin comes off. I tried that. But it hurts, and there is blood, and Mama puts antiseptic cream on it and scolds.

  Nani told me that it doesn't hurt when snake skin comes off. Only humans need blood to change. She said there will be blood when I become a woman, and change breeds change, so I'll be able to shed this skin. She told me how.

  She didn't tell me where she has gone, but I know. She went back to the forest. Mama does not know, and I cannot tell her because it's a secret.

  Nani told me lots of secrets. They fill my mouth and bubble on my tongue, like cola or like music. I will never ever speak them, though, even if Papa shouts and Auntie slaps me, because Nani said I mustn't.

  Shruti returned to school to find that she was something of a celebrity. Even the older children clustered around her, asking what had happened to her grandmother. It had been in the newspapers.

  She did not answer.

  They put it down to grief at first, but she didn't cry, and soon one of the popular girls decided that she was a stuck-up little bitch. She became first the playground target, then the playground ghost: nowhere to be found.

  They tracked her down, finally, by her music. Found her sitting on a wall twice her height, cross-legged, playing a flute. The wall was crawling with lizards and little snakes, and a one-legged crow perched silently on Shruti's bony knee.

  They started calling her Pishaach.

  They always chase me. They know I will not scream. Pishaach, they call me, and they glare, as if my silence were a threat. Pishaach, Pishaach, and they pull my hair and squeeze the juice from orange skins into my eyes.

  Vikram joins them when my brother isn't there.

  I can run faster, though, and I am not scared of the roof. They are. Stupid little boys.

  I like the roof, though it smells like smog and piss and the marihana that the big boys smoke. Vikram doesn't come up here; the bigger boys would beat him if he did. I go from shadow into bright afternoon, sneeze, and make my way over the hot roof to the low wall that runs around its edge, stepping over broken glass and needles. Carefully. Gautam says they could give me AIDS.

  I leave that behind, leave the rancid mattress and used condoms behind. They're all illusion anyway; Mama says everything is. Over the central partition lies my own palace, where the roof is too weak to hold the bigger children. I walk over my courtyard to my balcony: a magic princess, kept from her land and her true nature by the wicked rakshasas, her only solace the music of her dead grandfather's flute.

  Vikram told me what the mattress and condoms were for. Gautam told him not to tell me dirty things, but I don't care.

  My balcony is a brighter yellow than the rest of the wall. Sitting cross-legged, looking out over my crawling, roaring city, I pull out Nana's flute and play to the world.

  The flute was Gautam's, really. Nana had left it to him. The only sounds he could coax from it were hideous squeaks and wheezes, so it collected dust on the dresser until the morning Gautam woke to his Nana's music and a shape at the window, flat black against the pale gray of early dawn. Gautam sat up on his mattress and watched silently with wide eyes and dry throat until the figure moved and became recognizably his sister.

  Vikram slept through it all. He didn't notice for several days that Shruti had the flute. Then he said, “You should have given it to me.”

  “You don't even play,” said Gautam. “And he wasn't your Nana.”

  “I'm the eldest.”

  Shruti left the flute at the feet of their idol of Krishna, though, and not even Vikram would take it from that place. Over the years, this became the flute's home.

  The crows are my brothers, enchanted to take winged form until the sun goes down. The geckos are my cousins; numerous, scurrying, and easily scared. The snakes who find me even up here are, of course, Naga; my Nani's kin, drawn as the snake people always are to music. The sparrows are just sparrows.

  Music draws my secret kin to me and lets me see with my eyes closed, see the truth. It soars, the mood poised between hope and heartbreak, weaving the story of a captive princess.

  Almost full moon, and I am nearly a woman. Mama had to take me shopping for bras this week.

  I must touch moonlight for three nights running—full moon and the night on either side—and pray for him to break my enchantment. It must happen while I am on this threshold. The moon will bring my period within the month, and with the blood I will cast aside this skin. Nani said it would be so. She said it would hurt, too, but I don't mind.

  If I do not touch the moon I will be doomed to stay human.

  Shruti drew snakes in art class. They started as crayon wiggles and grew into pencil studies and sketches of sinuous beauty—cobras on walls, in doorways, silhouetted against the full moon. They earned her excellent marks, except when the assignment was portraits or flowers.

  She drew snakes in maths and Hindi as well, which never earned her excellent marks.

  Full moon.

  Moonlight does not truly come into our apartment; it is trapped in a watery smear by the mosquito netting. Last night I went up to the roof to find it, and the people on the mattress almost saw me. I will try the garden tonight.

  Gautam sleeps soundly, and getting past the adults is easy; Papa snores louder than any noise I can make, and Auntie and Uncle sleep in the big room at the end of the hall. But last night Vikram's eyes followed me when I returned.

  A lullaby on the flute sends him into a deep sleep. It almost does the same to me. I slip out of the apartment yawning.

  I am silence in the building, a shadow on the path, a barefoot snake girl in the garden. I touch the moon, let him spill silvery brightness through my fingers; and turn, and sway, and dance in a wordless prayer to the soundless music of dark and light.

  Behind me, the door closes. I spin. A form on the front steps, then a growing silhouette. Vikram. I step back.

  “Where do you go alone at night, Pishaach?” He closes in on me, long-legged. His voice is a low and vicious monotone. “You live in our house, you eat our food, we put up with you—we coddle you, you freakish mute. How dare you go sneaking out like a thief, and—don't even think about raising that demon flute. I know what you did to me.”

  I back into the darkness under the trees, flinch as his arm reaches out toward me.

  “Ah, now you remember your place. Maybe you remember also what happens to little girls who don't behave.” He grins suddenly, moonlight glinting in his eyes, his teeth. “You can't even scream. Everyone will think you were willing.”

  I shift my weight.

  “Where will you run?” he whispers. “You didn't bring the key. You can't get back in without me. Stupid little slut.”

  There is a pounding in my ears. Vikram laughs. He smells of cologne and smoke, clogging my breath. A van, backing up, plays a tinny “Ode to Joy.” I could run for the street. But that has its o
wn dangers. I take another step back, and another, and my heel touches something that is not a plant. Something smooth and warm; something that starts sliding past me in response, shrinking Vikram to a merely human terror. I stop. Auto horns blare. Shapes around me spring into definition. A motorcycle coughs.

  A king cobra raises its head in a single sketched curve of light. I take a breath. Taste jasmine, ripening bananas, blood. The tail caresses my heel, lingers, and moves on.

  I set my foot slowly down. Vikram goes still, as I did, eyes white and wide. A breeze chills the sweat on my skin.

  The snake pauses between the two of us; draws slowly higher, barely swaying, until it is face-to-face with Vikram; then sinks, becomes a shadow, leaves silence behind. I feel the motorcycle's roar, the stillness of the trees, my hammering heart. I hear nothing.

  Then Vikram takes a shaky breath and backs up onto the path. “Good luck getting out of there unbitten, bitch,” he calls. He crosses his arms over his chest and smirks. “I'll enjoy watching.”

  I remember my flute.

  Even when the moon is full, its dark is only a few days away. I play that dark to Vikram now, play unseen terrors, images of death slow and painful, fears of life and love gone wrong. I play the hypnotic, deadly beauty of the cobra, and the nightmare chaos of an auto accident. The music tastes of bile and blood. It rushes forth, wailing, screeching—and Vikram breaks for home.

  I ease out of the garden while he fumbles for the key, then run after him. I catch the door before he closes it. Look at him.

  I arch forward, smile at Vikram, and say, “Boo.”

  Vikram did not return to their room that night. He spent it shivering on the sofa, though the night was warm, and that is where Auntie found him the next day. He woke when she went to him, put his head on her shoulder like a much smaller boy, and whispered, “That demon flute, Mama. She put a spell on me.”

  She coaxed his version of the story out of him, then tucked him into her own bed and went seething to make the coffee. When Shruti's mother sleepily joined her, Auntie said, “If you cannot control your—daughter—she can sleep in your room from now on.”

  Mama tried to understand what was wrong. She asked Auntie, and Gautam, and Vikram when he woke. But not Shruti, of course.

  I wait until Gautam's breathing slows into sleep, then roll to my feet and ghost into the kitchen, my steps silent on the hard, cool floor. On the way, I switch on the bathroom light and close the door.

  The altar is in an alcove set into the kitchen wall. It smells faintly of sandalwood. I reach in to take my flute back from Lord Krishna.

  It is gone.

  I kneel before the altar, my fingers searching the space under it, the crack between its edge and the wall. They find only incense ash.

  “Looking for something?”

  Pale golden light washes past me. I turn to see Vikram lit by the open fridge, my flute clenched in one hand. “You thought I would let you have it, after yesterday, or what?” he asks. His voice is too calm. “And you thought that trick with the bathroom light would fool me? I'm not the dumb one.”

  I uncoil, coming to my feet fast, and grab for the flute. He holds it over my head with one hand, pushes me away with the other. I hit the wall.

  “Come on,” he says. “Give me an excuse to break it.”

  I turn on my heel and run for the front door. He follows me, leans over me as I reach for the doorknob, laughs softly into my ear. His breath disturbs my hair.

  I need only touch the moonlight one more time. But I doubt he will even let me get downstairs. And perhaps I will not bleed until the ritual is complete. I slump, turn back to our room, drag my mattress over next to Gautam's, and settle back in. With Vikram's eyes on me, I pray to the Moon and to Durga to give me time.

  My first period starts four days later. As Nani warned me, it hurts.

  There once lived, among the Naga people, a girl of surpassing beauty. Her tail looped in long coils and her scales looked new-molted, shining and unmarred. She was alluring even in human form, with hooded eyes and long shining hair like the dark of the moon. The fair hue of her underbelly spread to all her human skin, and she kept the serpent's grace.

  Perhaps she was a princess; perhaps she was a queen. Perhaps she was merely a lovely girl from a Naga village.

  Taking human form, this girl would escape her lands and come to ours, seeking music. There is no music in the Naga lands. It is their only lack, and the reason they wear our clothes and dare our world. This girl loved music even more than most, and she risked more, and lost. For she was trapped by a snake charmer, who took her home to be his wife.

  So my Nani told me, and there she would always stop.

  “What happened to her, Nani?”

  “She learned to make rotis and curries and beds, and she learned to eat mice and rats only when nobody could see,” she would say. “She had a daughter, in time, and that daughter had two children. A boy and a girl. And that girl, that Naga's granddaughter, has in her the magic of our people.”

  It seemed incredible, even then. Not that she was other-worldly. No, with her dark knowing eyes in her walnut face and her hair of spun moonlight, that was obvious. What stunned me was that she might once have been young. “Were you really beautiful, Nani?”

  She would laugh. “For many, many years. It is only in this form that we truly age, Asha.”

  Asha. Hope. She called me that always. I did not understand why; I had been named after music, and she loved music.

  Mama found the flute in the back of a cupboard, behind the pressure cooker. She lectured Shruti about caring for the family heirloom, while Vikram smirked, and kept the flute locked up for a week.

  Meanwhile, Vikram hid Shruti's homework. He rubbed soap into her toothbrush. He spilled black ink on her new school uniform. He left cockroaches in her pillowcase. Shruti may as well have been Untouchable in Auntie's eyes, but Mama was angry, so she cried on Gautam's shoulder. He was annoyed at first, inclined to shrug her off, but after the cockroaches he got into a shouting match with Vikram and called him a bastard. Auntie heard him.

  Shruti took to hiding in her room after school. When Vikram followed her, she started disappearing, up to the roof or into the garden with the flute. But one day the downstairs grannies stopped talking and glared when they saw her, and she realized that Auntie must have told them something. She ran away.

  They never found the cobra, nor any sign of it, but Shruti was blamed for every snakebite in the area thereafter. She started playing her music in the early morning, when nobody would see her. Women hawking vegetables were her accompaniment; the neighbors kept away and told their children to do the same.

  Her mother stopped talking to the neighbors; Gautam stopped playing cricket with Vikram's friends. Her father grew solemn and silent. They would not hear ill of Shruti in public.

  Three years later the city had a miracle: a boy who was able to pick up cobras without coming to harm. He was on the television, and his parents were interviewed. Shruti's neighbors argued about whether the boy was blessed by Lord Shiva or Lord Vishnu.

  Shruti could pick cobras up, too, but Shruti was far too unsettling to be a miracle.

  Mama waits until Papa and Uncle approve of the curry before saying, “Shruti made it.”

  Papa glares at her. “And that makes it all right? What shall we say to the young men? She does not talk, she frightens all the neighbors, worms and lizards come to hear her play that damned flute—but she makes a fairly good curry?”

  Auntie adds, “When she's helped at every step.”

  Vikram makes a show of spitting the curry out, nose wrinkled.

  Gautam looks coolly at him and takes another bite. I look down at my own plate. The smell of ghee and cardamom is cloying. What will my home be like when Gautam leaves—to go to college, to start his own life?

  “She's a good girl,” Mama protests, “and she learns well.”

  “Then teach her to speak.”

  Mama looks down at h
er plate, biting her lip.

  “She's unnatural,” says Auntie. “Like your mother was.”

  Uncle frowns at her. “That's enough.”

  Papa says, “But she's right.”

  Gautam clears his throat. “How do you think we will do in the test match, Papa?”

  I look at them—at my mother trying to make herself small, my brother trying to distract Papa—and I am glad no man will have me. I get up, leaving my food barely touched, and walk away.

  “Shruti!”

  Papa no longer frightens me. Nani's eyes can silence him, even when they are in my face. I look at him until he looks away, then turn and leave the apartment.

  Ankita Nani's eyes never left Nana when he was playing his flute. She watched him, unblinking and adoring—as romantic to a child as any Bollywood film. Only when he died, when she told me she was going home, did I see the shadow behind the romance.

  She obeyed him, of course, just as Mama obeys Papa. Is every girl a Naga, stolen away to serve her husband?

  The wall that runs around the roof bears new graffiti. Bold and elaborate in silvered red, it says VIKR. He has left cans of spray paint under the letters; Vikram does not delay when Auntie expects him downstairs. I pick up the silver, shake it, and draw a slow outward spiral centered on the K. When it is big enough I spiral back in, filling in the gaps to make a moon, so that only the huge V and the R's looping tail still show. I spray one practiced black curve over the moon: a cobra, its tail extending along the wall.

  The roof was mine first.

  I pick my way over to the other side. My side. I have to keep to the edges, along the wall, because the rest will not hold my weight anymore.

  Cross-legged on the yellow patch of outer wall that I used to call my balcony, I play the music of moonlit gardens and enchantments that can be broken. I face the roof instead of the city so that Vikram cannot sneak up on me, and so I see the cobra raise his head.

  He rises till his eyes are level with my own. His body is dappled, liquid motion. He could kill me with one strike, but that is abstract knowledge: my heart does not race, my breath does not shorten. I envy his grace; I do not fear it. Perhaps this is what it means to be Pishaach.