Only today my father is nowhere in sight.
“Papa!” Panic raises my voice to a shout. “Where are you?”
“I’m here, boy.”
I turn to the sound of his voice and find him standing right behind me, hazel eyes alight with curiosity. “You were outside?”
“A man has to relieve himself from time to time,” he says mildly and not without a touch of humor.
My heart slowly returns to its normal pace. “I thought something happened. The last time I found you unconscious on the floor, remember?”
The corner of Papa’s mouth turns up. “I’m not on the floor now, am I?”
Yet, even as he says the words, his knees knock together, a spasm going through his limbs. I catch hold of him before he falls, ignoring the protests that emerge from his mouth, and guide him to his cot. For a thin, small man, Papa is still heavy, weighed down by his bones, even though the muscles he built working at the palace stables have long since wasted away. I pour out a cup of precious drinking water from the large clay pot and, from a small cloth bundle next to it, withdraw the last of the medicinal herbs I bought in Havanpur. Latif’s coins, hidden inside my tunic pocket, arrived in the nick of time.
“I don’t know why you make me drink this. You’d be better off saving that coin to bind with a pretty girl.”
“Papa, please.” I crush the mix gently between my fingers—black sleeprose stamens, dried champak flower petals, the wings of a fire beetle, bits of garlic, and the saints know what else—before adding it to the water.
“Come now, Cavas. Are you telling me you’ve never had your eye on a girl?”
I expect to feel my heart squeeze out of habit, for Bahar’s face to flash in my mind. Instead, I see someone else, her gold eyes startling me enough to reply with a snap.
“No. Drink your medicine.”
“Is this how you talk to your father?” His amused smile is replaced quickly by a grimace. “With all that talk about modern medicine and the healing magic of the vaids, can they really do nothing about the taste?”
I watch him drain the last drops of the cup. “At times like this, I really miss your mother,” he says, the light slowly fading from his eyes. “She’d laugh at me. She’d say that if it tasted good, it wouldn’t be medicine, would it?”
I glance at the binding cord on my father’s right wrist, its blue and gold threads frayed, the colors so faded that you can barely see them anymore. He never took it off after my mother first tied it on his wrist, not even after she died. Ma’s portrait—sketched inexpertly by Papa—hangs garlanded in our room, right next to the small statuette of Sant Javer and the shriveled incense sticks we occasionally burn during prayers. Papa said that Ma’s eyes were the palest green—and that my face looks a little bit like hers. I don’t resemble my father at all. Papa’s eyes are hazel, not brown like mine, and he’s at least half a head shorter than I am.
There are nights when I see Ma’s eyes in my dreams, when I imagine her holding my hand, the sand under our bare feet cool, stars pricking a moonless sky overhead. When I tell Papa about these dreams, he says that my mother was born in the tenements in the south of Ambar, near the Desert of Dreams.
Strange, I think now, how my dreams about Ma took me to the desert, how they always take me there when I think of her. My boy, she calls me in these dreams. My precious boy. The last dream of her had been so vivid that the world I woke up to in the morning didn’t feel quite as real.
“I miss her, too,” I tell my father. “More than anything else in this world.”
8GUL
Their voices wake me up before the sun does, floating in from the courtyard, through the window to my dormitory.
“… dressed in a black ghagra and choli … capable of whisper magic, perhaps. The fireflies were acting most strangely.” A man’s voice. One that’s oddly familiar. I bury my head deep in my pillow.
“The thanedars in Ambarvadi must be mistaken. None of my girls were near the city last night.” Juhi’s low voice reaches my ears as distinctly as a temple bell. “We have a very strict curfew policy here, Thanedar ji.”
“If you’re sure about it, Juhi ji.” There’s a shuffling sound, a pause right outside our window. “You know how it is with young boys and girls these days. The things they get up to.”
My eyes snap open.
I climb out of my cot and nearly fall to the floor, knocking over the copper mug that I keep for washing on a small trunk next to my bed.
“Queen’s curses!” someone swears inside the room. Before the other novices can do more than groan their wakefulness, I’m already up, out of the dormitory, and sliding against the mud-brick walls until I reach the end of the corridor. There, I pause a few feet from Juhi standing at the door, the blue tips of her braid peeking out from behind the crumpled white sari draped around her head.
“Ji. Ji. I am sure, Thanedar ji.” I’m pretty sure I haven’t heard Juhi use that honorific so many times in one breath. There’s a pause, during which the thanedar says something else and Juhi laughs. “Oh no, you are too kind to an old widow.”
My palpitations
