Chapter 2: Shakti Ka Jaagna (The Awakening)

Ritu did not sleep.

The not-sleeping was not unusual — Nat performers kept irregular hours, the particular schedule of people whose workday began at sundown and whose adrenaline did not subside until well after midnight, the body still humming with the residual electricity of performance long after the last audience member had wandered home. But this not-sleeping was different. This was the not-sleeping of a mind that had encountered something it could not categorise and that was, in the absence of a category, cycling — the same images, the same questions, the same golden shimmer playing on a loop behind her closed eyes.

The shimmer. The line. The opening. The sunflowers.

She lay in her bunk — the narrow bunk in Mama and Papa's wagon, the bunk that was too short for her now (she'd grown three inches in the last year, the particular adolescent growth that happened to Nat girls later than to settled girls, the delayed growth that the troupe's irregular meals produced) and that smelled of camphor and old cotton and the particular must of a wagon that had been traveling the Vasishtha roads for thirty years and that had absorbed, in its wood, the dust and heat and spice of every town it had passed through.

She held her hands up. In the dark. The hands that had glowed.

They were not glowing now. They were ordinary hands — sixteen-year-old hands, callused from rope-climbing and wagon-driving and the particular manual labour that Nat life demanded, nails trimmed short for performance, the henna from last week's wedding show fading to orange on the fingertips. Ordinary hands.

But they had opened a door.

At dawn — the Vasishtha dawn, pink-to-orange-to-blue in twenty minutes, the sunrise that was the subcontinent's fastest — Ritu climbed out of the wagon. The camp was stirring. Lakku was feeding the oxen. Noor was at the cookfire, making chai (Noor's chai was adequate, Amba's chai was excellent, and the difference between the two was the difference between a woman who cooked because she had to and a woman who cooked because the cooking was her art — Amba's chai involved a sequence of gestures so precise that watching her make it was itself a performance). The cousins were loading equipment. Papa was checking the wagon's axle — the left axle, the one that had been threatening to crack since Jodhpura and that Papa addressed with the particular optimism of a man who believed that speaking kindly to wood would convince it not to break.

Amba was not visible. Amba was in the wagon. Amba in the morning was a force that required containment and that was, by mutual family agreement, not engaged with until after the first chai.

Ritu took her chai from Noor. The exchange was — Noor's eyes met hers. The look. The we-share-a-secret look. The look that said: I haven't told anyone. The look that also said: you need to figure this out.

Ritu drank the chai and walked to the river.

The river was — not a proper river. A nadi, the locals called it — a seasonal stream that was full in monsoon and half-hearted in winter and, in the current season (the tail end of the hot months, the weeks before monsoon when the land was at its driest and the streams at their lowest), a trickle. Enough water to wash in, enough to fill the water-skins, not enough to bathe properly, the particular water-scarcity that defined Vasishtha Rajya living and that made every water source a negotiation between need and availability.

She knelt at the bank. The water was warm — river water in the Vasishtha's hot season was always warm, the sun heating the shallow flow to a temperature that was closer to chai than to refreshment. She cupped water in her hands. Washed her face. The water ran down her chin, her neck, the front of her kurta.

And she felt it again.

The pulling. Not in her chest this time — in her hands. In the palms, specifically, in the particular centre of the palms where the lines converged, where the fortune-tellers in the market towns claimed to read destinies in the patterns of skin. The pulling was — specific. Directional. As if the air in front of her had a seam and the seam was calling to her hands and the calling was: open me.

Ritu looked at the air in front of her. The air was — air. Transparent, warm, carrying the smell of dust and dry grass and the distant campfire and the particular morning-smell of the Vasishtha plains, which was the smell of a landscape preparing for heat, the landscape bracing.

But there — she could see it now. Not with her ordinary vision. With a different vision — a vision that was like seeing heat-shimmer on the road but intentional, a vision that showed her what was behind the visible, the invisible seam that ran through the air like a thread through fabric.

She raised her hands. The palms faced the seam. The pulling intensified — the palms warming, the warmth not unpleasant but startling, the particular heat that she had felt on stage but that was, here, in the morning, by the river, with no audience and no torchlight and no performance, undeniable.

The seam began to glow. Faintly. Gold. The gold of — sunflowers? The gold of — she didn't know. The gold of something ancient.

The glow widened. The air was opening. She could see — through the opening, through the narrowest crack — something on the other side. A place. Not this place. A different place. Green. Impossibly green. The green of a garden that had been watered and tended and loved, the green that did not exist in the Vasishtha Rajya's dry season.

"Ritu."

Papa's voice. Behind her. Close.

The seam snapped shut. The glow vanished. The air was air. Her hands dropped to her sides.

She turned. Devraj was standing at the top of the riverbank. His face was — Ritu read faces the way musicians read notes, the performer's training that made every facial expression a text to be decoded — and Papa's face was saying: I saw.

"Papa, I—"

"Come." He held out his hand. The hand that was — she noticed now — trembling. Not the tremor of age (Papa was forty-eight, not old by any measure) but the tremor of a man who was seeing something he had been expecting to see and dreading to see for sixteen years.

She climbed the bank. Took his hand. The hand was warm and rough — the hand of a man who drove wagons and built stages and carried props and whose body was the tool that his life required. But the hand was trembling.

He led her away from the camp. Not far — fifty paces, to the spot under the neem tree where the oxen were not tethered and the cousins were not loading and the particular privacy that a Nat camp could offer, which was not much (privacy in a traveling troupe was a theoretical concept, the troupe being a family and the family being a unit that operated on the principle of total transparency, the principle that said: everyone knows everything about everyone, and the knowing is the safety and the safety is the family).

He sat on a root. She sat next to him.

"Your birth mother," he said. "Had a gift."

The sentence — the sentence was — Ritu heard it and the hearing was the hearing of a thing she had known and not known, the particular half-knowledge that adopted children carry: the knowledge that there is a before and that the before is not this, and the not-this is not discussed, not because the not-discussing is cruel but because the not-discussing is the agreement, the contract that says: you are ours and the ours-ness is the whole story.

"You've never told me about my birth mother."

"No."

"Sixteen years."

"Sixteen years."

"Why now?"

"Because now you're doing the thing she did. And the doing means the hiding is over."

Devraj told her. Not all of it — not the fire, not the soldiers, not the kingdom burning, because Devraj did not know all of it. What Devraj knew was this: sixteen years ago, on a road in the Vasishtha Rajya at dawn, he and Amba had found a basket. In the basket: a baby. In the basket with the baby: a letter. The letter was in old Prakrit — a script that neither Devraj nor Amba could read, a script that belonged to — somewhere else. Somewhere that was not the Vasishtha Rajya. Somewhere that was, in the letter's strange characters, unreachable.

"We kept the letter," Devraj said. "We couldn't read it, but we kept it. Your mother — Amba — she put it in the trunk. The green trunk. The one that has the lock."

"The lock that doesn't work."

"The lock works. The key is lost. There's a difference."

"Papa."

"The letter is in the trunk. I will give it to you. But, Ritu — the letter is not the important thing. The important thing is what you did last night and what you were doing at the river just now."

"I don't know what I'm doing."

"I know you don't. That's what frightens me."

"Is it — is it magic? The Shakti?"

The word — Shakti — was loaded. In the Vasishtha Rajya, Shakti was the province of the court mages, the Rajvidya practitioners who trained at the Academy in the capital and who were licensed by the High Throne to practice their art. Shakti was regulated. Shakti was controlled. Shakti was, for people who were not court-sanctioned mages, illegal.

And for Nats — for the traveling performers, the lowest caste — Shakti was death. The High Throne's law was explicit: wild magic users (the term for anyone who wielded Shakti without court sanction) were to be reported, detained, and — the law's language was bureaucratic but the meaning was clear — eliminated. The wild magic purges had happened three times in Ritu's lifetime. She had been too young to remember the first two, but the third — seven years ago, when she was nine — she remembered. She remembered the Rakshak soldiers passing through, asking questions, checking hands for the particular calluses that magical practice produced (the calluses were a myth, but the checking was real, and the checking was the terror). She remembered Amba hiding the family in a barn for three days. She remembered the silence.

"It's Shakti," Devraj confirmed. "Your birth mother had it. You have it. The Shakti of — I don't know the name. But the Shakti that opens doors. The air — the air opens when you tell it to. I've seen it twice now. Last night on the stage and this morning at the river."

"Mama can't know."

"Ritu, your mother knows everything. She knew you were different from the day we found you. She's been waiting for this. She's been dreading this."

"Dreading."

"Because the gift is the danger. The gift is what the Rakshak hunt. The gift is what the High Throne fears. And your mother's only job — her only job, since the day she picked you out of that basket — has been to keep you alive. And the keeping-alive requires that the gift stays hidden."

"It opened on stage, Papa. In front of two hundred people."

"They thought it was a trick."

"And next time? If it opens again? If it opens bigger? If someone who isn't a Haldipura farmer sees it?"

Devraj was quiet. The quiet of a man who was calculating — not numbers but risks, the particular risk-assessment that Nat families performed constantly, the constant calculation of: is this town safe? Is this road safe? Is this audience safe? The calculation that was the Nat family's survival algorithm and that was now being applied to a new variable: a daughter who could open doors in the air.

"We don't perform for a while," he said.

"Papa, performing is how we eat."

"We'll find other work. Noor can do alterations in the towns. Lakku can do manual labour. I can—"

"You can't stop performing. The troupe is the troupe because it performs. Without the performing, we're just — we're just Nats with wagons."

"Being Nats with wagons is safer than being Nats with a magic-wielder."

"I can learn to control it."

"Can you?"

"I don't know. But I can try. At the river — it stopped when you spoke. It stopped. It responds to — to something. Concentration. Intent. It's not random. It's connected to me. To my — to my emotions, maybe. On stage it happened during the climax. At the river it happened when I was focused. It's not involuntary. It's — it's mine."

"Yours." Devraj said the word the way he said the words of the performances: carefully, with the understanding that words are things and things have weight. "The Shakti is yours. But the consequences are all of ours. The family's. The troupe's. If the Rakshak discover you, they don't just take you. They take us. All of us."

"I know."

"So the controlling must happen fast. And the controlling must happen in secret. And until the controlling is complete — no performing."

"Papa—"

"No performing."

He stood. The conversation was over — not because the topic was exhausted but because Devraj had reached the edge of what he could discuss. The edge was: the letter, the gift, the danger. Beyond the edge was: everything else. The questions Ritu had never asked and that Devraj had never answered. Who was my birth mother? Where did I come from? Why was I in a basket on a road? Where is the kingdom that the letter came from?

The questions that were now — because the golden shimmer was real and the door was real and the hands that opened it were hers — urgent.

"The letter," she said. "Can I have the letter?"

"Tonight. When your mother is asleep."

"She sleeps?"

"Briefly. Between midnight and two AM. It's our only window."

"For sixteen years you've been timing Mama's sleep cycle."

"For forty-eight years, Ritu. Since the day I met her. The timing of your mother's sleep is the most important data I possess."

The almost-laugh — the laugh that wanted to happen but couldn't, because the conversation was too heavy for laughing but the heaviness had produced, in its pressure, the particular diamond of humour that appears when humans are pressed beyond their capacity for seriousness.

Ritu went back to the camp. Drank more chai (Noor's adequate chai, which was, this morning, more than adequate — the warmth was the thing, the warmth that said: you are here, you are in the camp, the oxen are being fed and the cookfire is going and the morning is proceeding and the proceeding is the safety). Helped Lakku load the props. Oiled the wagon wheels. Performed the particular morning tasks of a Nat performer who was also a daughter who was also a sister who was also a cousin who was also, she now knew, a Door-Keeper.

A Door-Keeper. The words felt — she tried them on, the way she tried on costumes. The words fit. The words fit the way the emerald lehenga had fit: not perfectly, not yet, but with the promise of perfection, with the understanding that the fitting would improve with wearing and the wearing would improve with time.

The caravan moved. The oxen pulled. The wagons creaked. The road stretched — the Vasishtha Rajya's roads, the dusty, rutted, sun-baked roads that connected the towns and that were, for the Nat families, home. Not the towns — the roads. The Nats did not belong to the towns. The Nats belonged to the spaces between the towns, the movement, the perpetual transit that was their identity and their freedom and their cage.

Ritu sat in the back of the wagon. Alone. The letter in the green trunk — she could feel it now, the way she could feel the seams in the air. The letter was — calling. Not literally. Not the way the seam called. But the letter was there and the there-ness was a pull and the pull was: read me. Know me. Open me.

The Dwar Shakti in her palms hummed.

She was the door. The door was her.

And the door was waking up.