Nebula Awards Showcase 2012

I turn to him; see terror, adoration; remember the way Nani looked at Nana. I stop playing.

He watches my eyes, my hands. He looks at me like I’m Vikram.

I will not be Vikram.

“No,” I agree. “Go free.”

His eyes widen. He shimmers, becomes first a cobra, then merely another shadow. I play then, play him the words I could not speak before, but only the shadows hear.

Shruti started haunting the garden, playing eerie, melancholy tunes that made the babies cry. Or so the neighbors said. Vikram said she was probably making their mothers cry, too. And souring their milk, and rotting the mangoes and bananas on the branches. Auntie wanted to know why, if that girl would not make pleasant music, she was allowed to play that flute at all.

Papa told Shruti to stay out of the garden.

Two days before the full moon, she bought a child’s recorder made of bright blue plastic.

I have been mostly alone when I’ve played. But not every time. He must need the music like I need to shift, to escape. Unfair that he may have what he needs; but my lack is not his fault.

I touch the moonlight, feel my leaden form struggle for a moment to become fluid, to shed its skin. Feel it give up. I settle at the base of the coconut palm and play until the forest is listening. Then I pull out the recorder, play a simple tune.

“Gift,” I say in my dusty, unused voice.

I set it aside and get up. When I look down again, it is gone.

Anywhere three trees grow together, the land’s invisible border rubs thin, and the great forest grows so close that it sometimes spills over.

The forest has no edge, but it has many, many frayed borders. It likes opening into our world for a beckoning, teasing, deadly instant. It is fully alive, this forest, with giant trees draped with giant vines, their leaves bigger than me; with dirt-colored flowers and flower-colored birds and sleek, silent predators. Naga live in the rivers, in the wet earth, and in hollow trees; the monkey people claim the canopy. Garuda sometimes nest on the highest branches, which border on their realm.

It is home to great beauty, the forest, in form and scent and movement, but the only music found there is the music of the natural world, calls and cries and falling rain.

So my Nani told me.

“Why?” I asked.

“We do not make music.”

“Why not?”

“Perhaps we have not the skill.”

“I do.”

“It is not something we learn, Asha. We do not live as you do here.” She smiled sadly, but she said no more.

I play to myself in the punishing afternoon, when I know I will be alone. To myself and to the forest beyond. I play with my eyes closed, letting the world paint itself in touch and smell. Overripe bananas, frying onions and cumin, my own sweat beaded on my forehead and dampening my clothes. The occasional breeze, warm, bringing the stench of exhaust and burning garbage. My fingers, slippery on the flute.

The taste of his musk, of earth after rainfall, brings my eyes half-open. I watch for him through my eyelashes, and let my fingers and breath sing him a lonely mood. He drifts into view, shifting uncertainly from half-form to cobra and back; he starts to dance and stops again.

When I draw breath, he shifts to full man, naked, too wild for modesty. I look away, shame and lust burning my cheeks.

“Show me?”

I look back. His gaze is wary, but he holds the little blue recorder as though it were precious. I hold out a hand. He edges forward. I grasp his wrist to pull him closer. He jerks back, shifts to cobra, disappears.

I pick up the recorder. Will he come back for it, if not for me? I play a note. Sniff and blink tears away. Whisper, “Come back.”

I hear lorry and rickshaw horns in the silence. Then his voice, behind me. “Will you charm me?”

I shake my head.

“How can I know?”

I turn to look at him. “Could kill me,” I suggest.

He stares for a second, then slides forward till I can feel his warmth. His tail curls around my ankle. “I would not.” I keep looking at him, and eventually his lips twist into something that might be a smile. “But how can you know?”

I nod.

“What should we do?”

I reach out again to take his hand, and this time he does not start. I shape it around the recorder, showing his long fingers where to be.

He laughs, silently and a bit raggedly. “That is . . . not quite the answer I was expecting.”

The monkey people are territorial. Sooner steal a Garuda’s egg than seek the monkeys’ great city in the trees.

Not so the Naga. They care little about land, only one race frightens them, and that race cannot find their homes.

When my Nani told me this I did not understand.

She glanced at me, cutting onions by feel. Her eyes were bright, the knife swift and steady in her wrinkled hand. “You will,” she said.

He is waiting for me in the garden, his tail coiled under him, his head in his hands. He looks up as I hurry over, but he does not speak until I am close. Then he puts his arms around me, leans his head on my shoulder, and says, “They took it away.”

“Who?” I do not have to ask what. I hold him, stroking his hair, breathing in its dark-leaf fragrance.

“The elders. Not all of them; your Nani said not to.”

My arms tighten around him. “Nani?”

“She is our storyteller. But the rest are—angry—that any of us would learn your people’s magic, and shocked that any of us could.”

“Magic?” The lizards and birds do not come when he plays.

“Making the sweet sounds with your fingers. They said it was wrong, and . . . they took it away.”

The grief in his voice shakes me. Even Auntie would not take music away from me. I ask, “Why?”

“They’re scared, I suppose.” He speaks into my shoulder. “Of course they’re scared. It is our bane. So beautiful, so powerful . . .” He pulls back, looks at me, and says, “We cannot resist that pull.”

I rest a fingertip on his nose. “Bane.”

He blinks.

I smile and hold the flute to his lips. He reaches out a hand, slowly, to touch it, and looks wide-eyed at me.

“Blow,” I say.

He does. It makes no sound at all. He looks surprised, and indignant, and I cannot help but laugh. This makes him glower, so I kiss him before showing him how to coax a sound from the flute.

Later, as his fingers trace the beadwork on my kurti, around my neck, across my breasts; as my lips are learning the shape and taste of him in the dark, he says, “I am not allowed to be here.”

I kiss his shoulder, his neck, his jaw. Whisper in his ear, “Nor I.”

Papa’s call pulled Mama out of the kitchen, wiping flour off her hands, and Gautam out of his room to the big, scarred-wood dining table. Vikram was at the other end, with heavy books around him, and Vikram showed no signs of leaving. Shruti was still in the garden and did not hear.

“Well,” Papa said, “maybe it’s for the best. She will be less of a problem if she hears it from Gautam.”

Vikram looked up.

“Hears what, Papa?” Gautam asked.

Mama polished an imagined smudge from the wood with the end of her sari.

Papa sighed. “She cannot go to college,” he said, “and no normal man will marry her. And Mr. Bhosle says Amit heard her playing that music of hers with someone. What next?”

Gautam said, “She can stay with me.”

“A live-in mousetrap,” said Vikram.

Auntie, coming in with a stack of stainless steel plates, laughed. “Wait until you have a wife, Gautam.” She set the plates on the table with a clatter.