Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

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 her 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.

I play for the cobra, and he dances for me while sunset stains the sky orange and purple behind him.

Vikram comes through the doorway and stops, his mouth a comical O. His eyes slide from me to the snake to his graffiti, and he slips back indoors.

I lower my flute. He will be back. I am not sure how to let the snake know, but when the music stops he lowers his hood and slithers into my shadow. I look down but cannot see him.

I lower one foot to the ground. It touches ground and nothing else. The cobra has vanished.

When Vikram returns with his thugs they see only me, sitting where I should not be and playing the sun down. They come to the center partition to stare at me, at the empty roof. I smile.

Amit laughs at Vikram. Vikram punches him. Stalks away. The rest leave soon enough.

But I do not dare go home until Gautam comes to find me.

Shruti passed her classes, but only just. She did not have a tutor, as most students did, and many nights she would forget her homework in music. Her teachers were less amused by her doodles every year. At the end of Tenth Standard one teacher told her parents that she was only good for the arts, if that.

Vikram and Gautam spent that summer closeted with tutors. Vikram was preparing for engineering college, and Gautam for Twelfth Standard. Most days, nobody knew where Shruti went. A frown grew between her mother’s eyebrows, and she watched Shruti silently at meals.

Uncle took Papa aside one day. “You will have to decide what to do with her, you know,” he said. “She’s a good girl in her way, but. ”

“Yes,” said Papa. “But.”

I pause in the doorway to catch my breath, almost coughing at the smoke. Vikram and his gang are on my roof. I could exile them, set the snake on them. But if I did, what would Vikram do tonight?

I dodge an auntie’s venomous glare and slip downstairs to hide under the bougainvillea, where sunlight falls in patches of magenta and the air is thick and sweet with mango and flowering rose.

I take one delicious breath, then pause. The air is too cool and too clean. There is no exhaust underlying the sweetness, no smog. No sound of children from the apartment beyond. The garden has lost its boundaries; when I raise the flute there are a hundred ears listening. I take a step forward, hesitate.

A hand on my shoulder. I twist, ready to strike, and find a bare chest. Skin like polished teak, and the dark smell of earth just after rain. I look up.

He is slender, and the curve of his cheek is a boy’s, but his eyes are clear and old as drops of amber. His hair falls unbound to the middle of his back, and light glints from a silver circlet as he leans down. I should be frightened, and am not, and that tells me who he is.

“Asha,” he murmurs, his lips close to mine, “won’t you play for me?”

I play for him there in the multicolored light, in our tiny section of an endless forest, and he dances for me. Below the waist his body is a snake’s.