The Beastly Bride

PISHAACH Shweta Narayan

On the day Shruti’s grandfather was to be cremated, her grandmother went into the garden of their apartment complex to pick roses for a garland. She never came back. Shruti’s father and uncle went on to the crematorium with the body and the priest, while Shruti’s mother sat cross-legged on the floor in her heavy silk sari and wailed on Auntie’s shoulder, and the police searched for Ankita Bai.

Shruti climbed up to a sunlit windowsill, crumpling her stiff new pink dress. She leaned against the mosquito screen to peer down at the garden, its layered tops of coconut palms, mango trees, banana palms, and frangipani bushes spreading their greens over bright smears of rose and bougainvillea. Mama blew her nose noisily and sniffled, then wiped her face on the embroidered end of her sari. Auntie rolled her eyes.

The doorbell buzzed. Shruti’s brother and cousin raced off to answer it, and came back almost bouncing with excitement. With them was a policeman, cap in hand.

“You should ask my sister questions,” said Gautam importantly. “Ankita Nani always talked to her.”

The policeman came over to the window and bent over Shruti, his hands on his knees. He was balding and shiny with sweat, and his khaki uniform bulged at the stomach. “Do you know where your Nani went, little girl?” he asked.

Shruti nodded and pointed out the window.

He looked out, sighed, patted her head, and went to talk to Mama.

Shaking Mama off, Auntie went into the kitchen. She pulled jalebis, bright orange and gleaming with sugar syrup, out of the fridge, and set a plate of them by the policeman. She gave one to each boy and a half to Shruti. Shruti looked down at the sticky sweet, then held it out to Gautam, but her cousin Vikram grabbed it out of her hand and ran into their room. Gautam chased after him.

Shruti sat on the window ledge in a stream of dusty golden light, watching her mother and aunt. She did not cry, and she did not speak. They never heard her speak again.

Nani told me things.

She told me the forest is all around us, as close as breath, as close as my shadow to the ground. She told me there are entrances. Even here in Mumbai. I cannot get there yet, though. The city sticks to me like skin.

Skin comes off. I tried that. But it hurts, and there is blood, and Mama puts antiseptic cream on it and scolds.

Nani told me that it doesn’t hurt when snake skin comes off. Only humans need blood to change. She said there will be blood when I become a woman, and change breeds change, so I’ll be able to shed this skin. She told me how.

She didn’t tell me where she has gone, but I know. She went back to the forest. Mama does not know, and I cannot tell her because it’s a secret.

Nani told me lots of secrets. They fill my mouth and bubble on my tongue, like cola or like music. I will never ever speak them, though, even if Papa shouts and Auntie slaps me, because Nani said I mustn’t.

Shruti returned to school to find that she was something of a celebrity. Even the older children clustered around her, asking what had happened to her grandmother. It had been in the newspapers.

She did not answer.

They put it down to grief at first, but she didn’t cry, and soon one of the popular girls decided that she was a stuck-up little bitch. She became first the playground target, then the playground ghost: nowhere to be found.

They tracked her down, finally, by her music. Found her sitting on a wall twice her height, cross-legged, playing a flute. The wall was crawling with lizards and little snakes, and a one-legged crow perched silently on Shruti’s bony knee.

They started calling her Pishaach.

They always chase me. They know I will not scream. Pishaach, they call me, and they glare, as if my silence were a threat. Pishaach, Pishaach,and they pull my hair and squeeze the juice from orange skins into my eyes.

Vikram joins them when my brother isn’t there.

I can run faster, though, and I am not scared of the roof. They are. Stupid little boys.

I like the roof, though it smells like smog and piss and the marihana that the big boys smoke. Vikram doesn’t come up here; the bigger boys would beat him if he did. I go from shadow into bright afternoon, sneeze, and make my way over the hot roof to the low wall that runs around its edge, stepping over broken glass and needles. Carefully. Gautam says they could give me AIDS.

I leave that behind, leave the rancid mattress and used condoms behind. They’re all illusion anyway; Mama says everything is. Over the central partition lies my own palace, where the roof is too weak to hold the bigger children. I walk over my courtyard to my balcony: a magic princess, kept from her land and her true nature by the wicked rakshasas, her only solace the music of her dead grandfather’s flute.

Vikram told me what the mattress and condoms were for. Gautam told him not to tell me dirty things, but I don’t care.

My balcony is a brighter yellow than the rest of the wall. Sitting cross-legged, looking out over my crawling, roaring city, I pull out Nana’s flute and play to the world.

The flute was Gautam’s, really. Nana had left it to him. The only sounds he could coax from it were hideous squeaks and wheezes, so it collected dust on the dresser until the morning Gautam woke to his Nana’s music and a shape at the window, flat black against the pale gray of early dawn. Gautam sat up on his mattress and watched silently with wide eyes and dry throat until the figure moved and became recognizably his sister.

Vikram slept through it all. He didn’t notice for several days that Shruti had the flute. Then he said, “You should have given it to me.”

“You don’t even play,” said Gautam. “And he wasn’t your nana.”

“I’m the eldest.”

Shruti left the flute at the feet of their idol of Krishna, though, and not even Vikram would take it from that place. Over the years, this became the flute’s home.

The crows are my brothers, enchanted to take winged form until the sun goes down. The geckos are my cousins; numerous, scurrying, and easily scared. The snakes who find me even up here are, of course, Naga; my Nani’s kin, drawn as the snake people always are to music. The sparrows are just sparrows.

Music draws my secret kin to me and lets me see with my eyes closed, see the truth. It soars, the mood poised between hope and heartbreak, weaving the story of a captive princess.

Almost full moon, and I am nearly a woman. Mama had to take me shopping for bras this week.

I must touch moonlight for three nights running — full moon and the night on either side — and pray for him to break my enchantment. It must happen while I am on this threshold. The moon will bring my period within the month, and with the blood I will cast aside this skin. Nani said it would be so. She said it would hurt, too, but I don’t mind.

If I do not touch the moon I will be doomed to stay human.

Shruti drew snakes in art class. They started as crayon wiggles and grew into pencil studies and sketches of sinuous beauty — cobras on walls, in doorways, silhouetted against the full moon. They earned her excellent marks, except when the assignment was portraits or flowers.

She drew snakes in maths and Hindi as well, which never earned her excellent marks.

Full moon.

Moonlight does not truly come into our apartment; it is trapped in a watery smear by the mosquito netting. Last night I went up to the roof to find it, and the people on the mattress almost saw me. I will try the garden tonight.

Gautam sleeps soundly, and getting past the adults is easy; Papa snores louder than any noise I can make, and Auntie and Uncle sleep in the big room at the end of the hall. But last night Vikram’s eyes followed me when I returned.

A lullaby on the flute sends him into a deep sleep. It almost does the same to me. I slip out of the apartment yawning.

I am silence in the building, a shadow on the path, a barefoot snake girl in the garden. I touch the moon, let him spill silvery brightness through my fingers; and turn, and sway, and dance in a wordless prayer to the soundless music of dark and light.

Behind me, the door closes. I spin. A form on the front steps, then a growing silhouette. Vikram. I step back.

“Where do you go alone at night, Pishaach?” He closes in on me, long-legged. His voice is a low and vicious monotone.

“You live in our house, you eat our food, we put up with you — we coddle you, you freakish mute. How dare you go sneaking out like a thief, and — don’t even think about raising that demon flute. I know what you did to me.”

I back into the darkness under the trees, flinch as his arm reaches out toward me.

“Ah, now you remember your place. Maybe you remember also what happens to little girls who don’t behave.” He grins suddenly, moonlight glinting in his eyes, his teeth. “You can’t even scream. Everyone will think you were willing.”

I shift my weight.

“Where will you run?” he whispers. “You didn’t bring the key. You can’t get back in without me. Stupid little slut.”

There is a pounding in my ears. Vikram laughs. He smells of cologne and smoke, clogging my breath. A van, backing up, plays a tinny “Ode to Joy.” I could run for the street. But that has its own dangers. I take another step back, and another, and my heel touches something that is not a plant. Something smooth and warm; something that starts sliding past me in response, shrinking Vikram to a merely human terror. I stop. Auto horns blare. Shapes around me spring into definition. A motorcycle coughs.

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 grand-daughter, has in her the magic of our people.”

It seemed incredible, even then. Not that she was otherworldly. 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?

“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 Vand 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.

He touches me, later, with fingers and lips and coils, making my heart hammer and my breath quicken with something other than fear. I run my fingers over coffee-bean skin, trying to find where it turns into scales.

Naga do not marry.

They may build a home together, raise children together, create their lives together; but their ceremonies are only for birth and naming and death.

They tell a story about this: long ago, when the snake people married, a fair Naga girl was to marry a handsome youth. But at the wedding, with all the village gathered, her musk attracted and maddened the groom’s younger brother, who claimed her for himself. The brothers fought over her, long and hard and viciously, and each died of the other’s poison. In grief and shame the girl ran away, and never was seen again. The snake people have had no marriage since that day, and no true fights in mating season.

But my Nani considered herself married. “Once the gods have been called,” she said, “we cannot pretend that they were not here.”

His lips brush against my neck. “Asha, play for me.” We are in the garden again, among the dappled green scents and shadows, as we have been more often than is wise.

I find my voice. “Why.” It sounds dusty.

“You know I love your music,” he whispers in my ear. My breath catches at his voice, his closeness, his hands on my stomach, his heartbeat against my back; but his words are not the words I want.

I love your voice,I want to say. I love the way you move, the way you smell, the nonexistent point where skin becomes scale. I love the way you shimmer between forms, as I cannot and ache to and never will. I love the curves and the planes of your body, and I love your shifting face. I want to know who you are, and that is who I want to keep with me. Do you only love my music?

There are too many words. They jostle and clog in my throat. I shake my head.

“You know I do,” he says, “and you know you will.”

The air squeezes from my lungs. Have I no say in what I do? How dare he think so? I take a breath and start to play Nana’s song.

He grows rigid, his heartbeat quickening. His hands drop away from me. “No,” he says.

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.

“But listen,” said Papa, “I know a much better solution. I have written to — you know that boy, he was on television. The one who holds cobras. He is still alive; I wrote to his parents. They agreed that he should meet Shruti.”

“Oh, what a good idea,” Mama said. “They will have so much in common.”

“They can open a pet shop,” said Vikram.

Gautam glared. “Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“Than in my own home?”

Gautam turned his back on Vikram and said, “She’s never even met the boy.”

“Your mother’s right. They both like snakes to the point of obsession. Neither is quite — normal. ”

Vikram snorted.

“. but his parents are happy that she will not scream at his cobras.”

“She’s only sixteen, Papa.”

“Am I getting her married tomorrow?”

“Are they Brahmins?” asked Mama.

“No, but they are well-off, and we cannot be too—” He stopped, and glanced at Gautam. “That is, in this day and age, it is very old-fashioned to care about caste.”

Gautam pushed himself to his feet. Hands flat on the table, he leaned over his father. “You talk like she’s defective,” he said.

Vikram murmured, “There’s a reason for that.”

“She’s not stupid, Vikram. She’s clever enough to stay away from you.”

The microwave beeped insistently into the silence that followed.

“Vikram,” said Auntie, a little too loudly, “can you clear away your books and call your Papa? It’s time for dinner.”

“She’s just. innocent, Papa. Look, you don’t need to worry about her. She can stay with me. Really.”

“What kind of life would that be for her?” Mama demanded. “Unmarried, unwanted, and underfoot in her brother’s house? No!”

“Sit down,” said Papa. “I know you want your sister to be happy. We all do. But you are too young to see the wisdom of age.”

“Does the wisdom of age mean settling her life behind her back?”

“If she cannot even be home at dinnertime, maybe it does!”

Gautam’s eyes widened. “Shit.”

“Gautam,” said Mama, “What have we said about language?”

“Well, it’s not like her, is it? I’d better go look.”

Vikram stood up, smiling. “I’ll go with you,” he said. “Mama, you’ll clear my books, won’t you? The poor darling might be in trouble.”

Knowing that we are both disobeying our elders brings us closer. I do not leave when I normally would, nor do I pull away when he tugs at my kurti, when he eases it over my head. My jeans follow. The bra confuses him, until I help.

He is a shadow cast by the waning moon above me, black limned with silver. His tail strokes my leg, tossing an arc of light between its coils, and light catches in his circlet. He picks jasmine flowers, lets them drift through his fingers onto my bare skin. I taste jasmine on the roof of my mouth, and crushed leaves, and arousal. He leans down. Kisses my neck. I feel teeth against my skin.

He slides a hand teasingly down my belly, and shifts. The wind grows stronger, bringing me the rich leaf-scent of the great forest. His magic tingles just under my skin. I arch up, aching to shift, and find myself pressed against him. He is in man-form. His gasp matches my own. We stare at each other.

We both hear the snap of a broken twig.

We freeze. Another footfall and he shifts, from man to half snake to snake.

I snatch my jeans and jam my legs into them. Not Vikram, I pray, not here, not now.

The snake melts into shadows. I grab my kurti, telling myself that he had no choice. A click, and the great forest is washed away on a wave of overbright blue light, leaving me alone. I hold the kurti to my chest.

“What have you been doing?” It is Gautam’s voice. And Gautam’s LED key chain torch, the one he is so proud of. I wince.

“I think that’s pretty clear, no?” says Vikram behind him. “The question is, who’s Little Miss Innocence doing it with?”

I clutch my kurti closer.

“Put that on, stupid. It’s not for playing with.”

I twist away and pull it quickly over my head, inside out, trying not to show him more than he has already seen. Beadwork scrapes against me.

“I never would have believed it,” says Gautam softly.

Vikram shoulders past him. I shrink back. “Believe what you want,” says Vikram. “The question is what the neighbors—” His foot jerks sideways under him and he falls crashing through the bougainvillea bush. He screams.

Shadows swing wildly as Gautam runs toward us. He stops short of the bush, grabs his torch, points it. The shadows still. Wrapped around Vikram’s ankle, gleaming black against the blue-gray garden, are cobra’s coils.

Vikram tries to sit up, bloody scratches on his face and arms. The snake strikes. Vikram falls back and is still. A little wordless sobbing noise comes from my throat.

Gautam says shakily, “He—” He draws a hissing breath. “Ambulance.”

The snake shimmers, shifts to half man. Says, “No need.”

Gautam stares.

“No kills in mating season.”

They watch each other, the Naga swaying to silent music. I smell fear but cannot tell whose it is. Gautam pulls himself up straight. The Naga rises to match his height. Like the forest, he is washed away in the LED’s harsh glare; he looks as though he has gathered shadows for protection from the light.

Gautam shakes his head. “Mating,” he says blankly. “Mating? You’re — and she’s a child.”

“She was willing.”

Gautam glances at me but turns back to the Naga. “How would you know?” he demands. “You’re not even human.”

“I know she was willing, because I saw her unwilling. When he tried.” He points at Vikram, lying silent.

“What?”

I shake my head. Blood seeps from Vikram’s scratches, black as the paper-thin bougainvilleas scattered around and over him.

“I don’t know what you have done to my sister, but—”

“Done to her?” He draws himself higher, and higher yet, spreading his arms out like a hood. “I protect her. I hear her.” He starts a slow glide toward me, looking all the time at Gautam.

“Don’t you touch her!” Gautam stumbles forward, raising a fist.

The half-man shadow shrinks, becomes a snake. Hisses.

No kills in mating season.

Between rivals.

But Gautam is my brother. I shake my head again, but I am more invisible than even a shadow, and neither one sees me.

The cobra sways. I scream, “No!”

The cobra stops. Turns in a beautiful, silent arc and comes to me, slides over me, wraps himself around my arm, across my shoulder.

Gautam’s hand falls, and he stares at me. “You can talk?”

I stare back. There is too much to say.

“What else have you kept from me, Shruti? Why? I thought we were close.”

I want to run to him, to hold him. I want to explain. “Vikram talks better,” I say.

Gautam’s eyes widen. “Then he did.?”

I nod.

“You should have told me. Why didn’t you tell me? I would have believed you.”

“And Papa?”

“Aaizhavli.” He puts a hand to his face. “Papa.”

“What?”

“Papa has a suitable boy in mind for you.”

I cringe, shake my head. “No,” I say.

He nods. “And I don’t know what I can do for you, after this.”

I keep shaking my head.

The snake slips off my shoulders, shifts to half man, and wraps his arms around my waist. I twist around, rest my face against his chest, taste his wet-earth scent. He says, “Am I a suitable boy?”

I look up and meet his gaze. Warm. Anxious. He gestures wide with one hand, offering me the dark deep forest.

The elders cannot want a charmer in their land. Will they accept me? Send me back? Kill me? I am no shifter. What will they do to him? But I start to smile. If he will risk their anger, so will I. I say, “Yes.”

“You must be joking,” says Gautam. “Can you take him to meet Mama and Papa? Can you live in a snake hole? Think a little.”

I turn back to Gautam. My best friend in this world; but I will not let him say no for me. I stare him down.

“But, Shruti. ” Light grows in Gautam’s eyes; he blinks, and it streaks down his face. “If you, well. I would miss you. Horribly. But would you be happy?”

“Maybe.” I push my Naga’s hands gently away, stand, and go to Gautam. “Best chance.”

He takes a breath. Hugs me suddenly. Tight. “Then — go. And Vikram can bloody well die here, for all I care.”

I hug him back. “No,” I say. “Help him.” I turn and walk out of the false light.

The forest looms immediately around me, its shadows half-felt, half-seen. The ground is uncertain, the sky dark, and the trees darker yet. They taste of death as well as life, their roots drinking sharp blood and slow rot. Thick vines coil and hang from branches, brushing my skin, and some are not vines at all. I see eyes, faintly golden, unblinking, watching me.

“Wait.” It is faint, barely heard. I turn back.

I have to squint to see Gautam. He is faded, like an old photograph. But he is holding out the flute to me, and it is solid to my reaching fingers. He is not.

I want to say good-bye, to tell him that I love him. But he is gone, and the garden, and everything but the flute. I raise it to my lips and play a gentle song of hope and healing. Perhaps he hears it.

Then I reach out for my lover’s hand, and it is warm in mine; and we turn together and go into the forest.

On the day Shruti’s father planned to tell her about her future husband, she went into the garden to play her flute. She never came back.

SHWETA NARAYAN is a cultural crazy quilt: she was born in India and lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, and Scotland before moving to California. She’s particularly interested in boundaries and the people who cross them, and her fictional landscape is something of a Great Forest.

She grew up reading folktales and fairy tales from all over — and whatever was on the bookshelf — but didn’t discover her love of short stories until she was given The Green Man anthology in college. She read that in one big gulp and hasn’t stopped since, so she’s particularly thrilled to be included in this anthology.

Shweta’s a graduate of the Clarion 2007 writers’ workshop, for which she received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. She has stories forthcoming in Strange Horizons, Shimmer, and GUD Magazine, and poetry in Goblin Fruit. She can be found on the Web at www.shwetanarayan.org.

I love snakes. I love the way they move, the way they feel; if I were going to be drawn away from the world by an animal-person, you can bet it would be a Naga.

“Pishaach” isn’t really like the snake stories I grew up on, though. Traditional Nagas aren’t even shape-shifters. I think they ought to be — they’re drawn half snake half human, and snakes are a symbol of transformation the world over — but that bit came from somewhere else entirely. I’m a mix of cultures, you see, and so are the stories I tell. I grew up reading folktales from all over, and living all over the world, too; and “Pishaach” is inspired by selkie stories as much as anything Indian.

I loved those stories where the man hides a seal-maiden’s skin and she stays with him in human form until she finds it. And then she changes shape and is gone. She turns back into a seal, returns to the ocean, not caring who she leaves behind.

I always wondered how the selkie’s children felt about that. The ones caught between worlds. Which is, of course, where Shruti comes in.