It had been so nice and uncomplicated to be a sunshine girl. Not so long ago, I had found it easy to fall asleep at night. I hadn’t needed to search the whole house just because I’d seen a shadow out of the corner of my eye, and never got a scratchy feeling inside my brain when a book on a shelf had its spine facing in. Why wasn’t I like that anymore?

Maybe this was Something, after all. I knew this wasn’t normal, but I couldn’t help feeling like it was all my fault for not being stronger and braver. Why else would this anxiousness, this Something, sneak in and make itself so completely at home?

My eyes had filled with tears and I was clutching the yellow sketchbook so tightly my knuckles had gone white, so I turned quickly and went across the landing to my bedroom. Flopping down onto my rug with my box of art supplies, I opened my new sketchbook and started to draw the first thing that popped into my mind.

Monsters started to take shape on the first page. First the wolf from “Little Red Riding Hood,” then the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast,” and then an Asura—a huge, monstrous demon from Indian folklore. By the time I’d finished the pencil outline of the Asura, I felt calmer.

No, it was even better than that: as I stared at that third sketch, I felt the sudden, electric excitement you get when you have a totally brilliant idea.

One of the stories Mum had told me years ago, with my bedside lamp turned down low and The Illustrated Book of Indian Folklore on her lap, was the story of the Asura king Mahishasura. It went something like this:

Hundreds of years ago, long before India became the country it was now, there was a kingdom in the south called Mysore. It was a rich, golden city, with beautiful shining palaces, gentle hills, and lush green land.

Then Mahishasura came to Mysore. He was the cruelest and most powerful of all the Asuras. He killed the kings of Mysore and took the city for himself. The people resisted, but they were no match for him or his Asura army. They stole children from their beds, burned the crops, and threw anyone who tried to fight back into deep prisons so that they never saw the sun again. And Mysore became a sad, dark place, where the people lived in fear and where all hope seemed lost.

The first question I’d asked when Mum told me the story was “But why didn’t the gods stop him?”

In Indian folklore, the gods are always incredibly powerful, and three of them in particular: Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the destroyer. When I’d pointed this out to Mum, she rolled her eyes and said, “If you keep your gob closed for longer than two seconds, Kiki, you might find out.”

Because, as it turned out, Mahishasura had a secret weapon. Before he came to Mysore, he had spent years praying to Brahma. Impressed with his persistence (and I guess because gods did this kind of thing all the time in the stories), Brahma had offered him a boon.