Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

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?