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by
Tasha Suri
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December 29, 2023 - January 4, 2024
The women had been dressed with reverence, marked with blessed water, prayed over for a day and a night until dawn had touched the sky. They were as holy as women could be.
She was very, very late back, and although she’d warned the cook Billu that she was going to be late—bribed him with hashish she’d saved specifically for this occasion—there was only so far that she could stretch his goodwill.
She couldn’t let herself want her old gifts or old strength. But this she could want: enough coin to buy sacred wood without groveling before a man who hated her. Enough coin to make life a little better: for those children at the market, who had no one. For Rukh, who was her responsibility now. For herself.
There was a single charpoy of woven bamboo for a bed.
Rao could only be quietly impressed. To perform with grace before a crowd of drunk old lechers was a hard enough task. To end a six-stage Ahiranyi traditional dance in its third step was even harder, for a woman who valued her art. And this woman—who had danced in the hall three nights in a row, each night swirling her way through a blatantly seditious piece intended to venerate the yaksa spirits seasoned with just enough flashes of hip and ankle to please the customers—clearly valued her art very highly indeed.
The poet and his followers were rebels, though, of a kind. In this room, he’d heard them speak of secession and resistance through the medium of Parijati poetry—the metaphor of rose and thorn, of poisonous oleander, of fires and honey, turning Parijat’s own language against itself.
The poet was not looking at him. The poet had saved his life.
Those were always the best lies, the ones set over real bones.
“He wrote that there is no meaning in the universe: no fate, no high blood, no rights of kings over land. Everything is emptiness. The world only has meaning when we give it meaning.”
The Parijati placed many names for Ahiranya’s great forest upon their maps. They segmented it, delineating it with fine lines, affixing labels on all the parts where humans were able to survive, where time did not move strangely and the rot hadn’t infiltrated: the burnt fields of the east; the thick tranches of ancient mangrove, where marsh villages on their water-stilts flourished, to the west. Name after name, each painstakingly transliterated between Parijati and all the disparate scripts and tongues of Parijatdvipa. Only the Ahiranyi language was not included.
“Power doesn’t have to be the way the regent and your rebels make it be,” Priya said eventually, making do with her own artless words, her own simple knowledge of the way the world worked. “Power can be looking after people. Keeping them safe, instead of putting them into danger.”
On his arm, the cuff of metal marking his status gleamed the faded silver of a scar.
“Now,” Priya said. “A tale of the yaksa.” She told Malini a simple tale. A story told to children, of a young man, a woodcutter, who was born under ill stars. If he fell in love, his beloved would share his cursed luck. Any man or woman he married would die an early death. “So he avoided other people,” Priya said. “And his family worried about him all the time. And then he told them he’d found someone to marry after all.” “Who?” Malini asked. “A tree.” “A tree?” “That,” Priya said, “is exactly how his family responded. They weren’t impressed, I promise you. But he garlanded the tree like it
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She would take control of the dosages of poison. She’d prove herself biddable and easy to ignore once more, so that Pramila would hand her the responsibility, never questioning her motives. She’d keep the princess alive—for the sake of Bhumika and the household, and also because it was right. And not because she wanted to. Not because of that at all.
“My own teacher educated Lord Rajan’s sister,” Lata said. “That makes us family of a kind, my lord, in scholarship.” “Cousins in scholarship?” Govind asked, eyebrow raised. “The bond of students who share a sage can be greater to us than a bond of blood,” she said. “Or so many sages believe. In my eyes, it is entirely honorable to be in his company.”
“He was the one who escalated,” Ashok said. “All those men and women put to death for—what? An ‘attack’ in which no one died but Meena? Your regent is a fool, or his master is a fool. The emperor needs to understand that they can’t take our language, ban our stories, let us starve, and then outright kill us, without consequences. I don’t regret it, Priya. And neither should you.”
The power of the yaksa is a cuckoo in the nest of your body.
There was something ugly and sweet about the feeling that ran through him in response to her pain. It was, he reasoned, the satisfaction of watching a lesson being learned.
“No one else thinks like he does, little dove,” Aditya said gently. He lightly brushed the shorn ends of her hair. “This is a more enlightened time. But you’ve no need for a knife. You have guards enough to protect you, and two brothers who love you.” “And who will protect me from my brothers?” Malini asked.
I did not lie, Malini thought. She knew how to lie, of course. She did so often. But the value of a truth, carefully carved to meet the needs of her audience, was much greater, and far more difficult to disprove.
The palace of illusions, Malini had told her, was the place she needed to go. Priya knew of it. It was a pleasure house in a rather elegant—if not terribly reputable—part of the pink lantern district. Its name was both a joke and a mockery: It had been named for the palace in an old myth found all across the subcontinent, the palace of a beautiful queen who had many husbands.
Instead she grabbed a little carving knife from the table, from beside where one of her siblings had fallen unconscious, their forehead pressed to an upturned plate of food, and clutched it in a sweat-slippery hand.
“I’ve avoided marriage. I’ll never willingly beget children with a man. And what is more monstrous than that? To be inherently, by your nature, unable to serve your purpose? To want, simply because you want, to love simply for the sake of love?”
“I want you to talk to me. I want you to use your reason. But you’ve backed yourself into a corner, haven’t you, Ashok? You’re killing everything you love. Yourself. Your followers. And you can’t see any way out but this.” Priya’s head was still bleeding freely, dripping onto the soil. “Maybe I should thank you after all for abandoning me. If I’d stayed with you, you’d be killing me too. At least now you’re only hurting me.”
“Symbolism is important. And freedom… You will not understand this, Princess Malini. But there is a subtle pain the conquered feel. Our old language is nearly lost. Our old ways. Even when we try to explain a vision of ourselves to one another—in our poetry, our song, our theater masks—we do so in opposition to you, or by looking to the past. As if we have no future. Parijatdvipa has reshaped us. It is not a conversation, but a rewriting. The pleasure of security and comfort can only ease the pain for so long.”
“But I’m going to have to be, Priya. I need to be—the part of me I need to be—can’t be good. Or soft. Not to do what’s needful.”
“My own brother ripped my heart out in a vision. That part doesn’t matter,” Priya said hastily, when Malini’s mouth began to shape an alarmed question. “What matters is that my own brother hurt me, horribly, and I don’t think I can hate him, even now.” Malini pushed the obvious questions aside. “When my brother hurt me, I made it my life’s purpose to destroy him.”
“My apologies. We do not have time for flowery words in Dwarali.” Malini, who had read his wife’s elegant missives and had once enjoyed Dwarali poetry, refrained from commenting upon this claim.
“If I am your emperor, you must give me the time I require. My word is, after all, law.” His voice was sudden iron. “And if I am not your emperor, then go and fight your war without me. It’s simple enough.”
needful.
Lol
needful,”
