“Tell him that if he complains, he’ll have me to contend with,” she says. “No one insults my cooking!”
I feel my lips curve into a smile. “I will. Shubhraat, Kaki.”
She waves in return—both good night and dismissal—and turns back to her stove.
Mouth still savoring the sweet pastry, I nearly forget where I am until I pass another building—the one Bahar’s family lives in. Since Bahar’s arrest by the thanedars, her parents have avoided me completely, and today is no exception. Perched on the steps leading into the building, Bahar’s mother looks right through me, her eyes dull, listless. Bahar’s father, who was recently elected to the tenements’ governing council, pretends I don’t exist. Leaning against the lathi that marks his elevated status, he talks loudly to a neighbor about the new identification pins and badges the palace issued its workers last month.
“… one of the sweeper’s boys forgot his turban pin at home and was beaten to a pulp by the guards at the Walled City entrance!” Bahar’s father spits on the ground. “If he’d had the coin, he could’ve just paid them off and entered the place. Poor boy! Thank Sant Javer they didn’t split him to pieces.”
My own turban pin feels like an added weight to my head. The two men glance up as I pass by, both of them glaring at me.
“You watch yourself,” Bahar’s father says suddenly after three years of silence. “You watch yourself closely, boy, or you’ll face the same.”
I do not reply. For the longest time, I wondered if Bahar’s parents blamed me for her arrest. Papa said back then that I was imagining things.
“My daughter was innocent!” His voice grows loud, drawing more stares. “She had no magic in her. She hadn’t even talked to a magus! Not like his whore of a mother!”
It’s been a while—several years—since someone has made such a reference to my mother directly in my presence. Death mollifies most people, and after my mother died, many chose not to speak of her and the past out of respect for Papa. Except when they thought I wasn’t listening. The damage was already done when I finally put meaning to the words people used for my mother—words Papa slapped me for uttering in his presence.
“You know nothing about your mother or the sacrifices she made,” he said, neither accepting nor denying the accusations.
No, I think bitterly now. I don’t know my mother. What I do know of her is from whispers and conjecture, from the malice of brokenhearted fathers. The shouting shakes Bahar’s mother from her stupor. She pulls her husband back in, leaving me standing there, surrounded by stares.
The tenements outside Ambarvadi are set up like a small town, with wards to the north, south, east, and west, each area populated with a fixed number of houses and buildings, which are little more than ruins of old havelis and temples.
Even though the population of non-magi has doubled over the past couple of decades, the government has done nothing to increase the land allotted to us, ignoring every request and petition we’ve made. To accommodate the increased inhabitants, larger apartments are now divided with bedsheets and tarps to house two or more families. In some cases, whole other floors were added atop the roofs of existing buildings, the walls a patchwork of mud brick, corrugated metal, and old wood.
Years before the Great War and King Lohar’s reign, Papa said, the tenements did not exist. The area that now forms the northern tenements consisted of houses inhabited by both magi and non-magi, of buildings that were an integral part of Ambarvadi itself. Queen Megha wasn’t the most egalitarian ruler, but during the earlier part of her reign, non-magi still had a voice and the ability to use it when they wished to challenge a royal edict. But as the queen grew older—and more unstable, some say—things began to change.
Ministers, who envied higher-ranking non-magi for their positions at court and non-magi farmers for their prosperous land, began poisoning the old queen’s ears. They eventually convinced her to introduce a set of land taxes on non-magi for “occupying magical soil.” My people revolted—and in doing so, played right into the ministers’ hands. Non-magi were branded traitors, and people like Papa, who had trained to work at the Ministry of Treasure, were replaced with magi workers without explanation.
The idea of the tenements came from a priestess in the queen’s council. She suggested housing us at a distance, ensuring the safety of the magical population from further rebellion, and integrating us back into society through hard, honest work. As for King Lohar—one of his first acts as the new ruler was to make the last remaining non-magus minister on his council lick the dirt off the ground, and then kill him without mercy.
“Because we know how dangerous non-magi are to people with magic in their veins,” Papa liked to joke when I was younger and knew little better than to laugh at everything my father deemed funny. I hardly think Papa would find the things people say about Ma funny, either.
But perhaps Papa knows more than he lets on. Even before he fell ill, my father hardly ever talked to the other tenement dwellers, except Ruhani Kaki, which earned him a reputation of being self-contained and aloof. After Bahar was taken away, I became much the same.
People look at you only if you give them a reason to, I remind myself.
So I do what I’ve always done when faced with unwanted attention. I lower my gaze and hunch my shoulders. I walk away, neither too fast, nor too slow. The farther I move from Bahar’s building, the fewer stares I draw. My muscles relax, my feet picking up the pace as I approach our house.
“Papa!” I push open the door and step inside. “Papa, are you awake?”
Formed from the ruins of an old haveli, our house itself is no
