Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

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 own 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.