“Come down here, please!” she called, clearly exasperated. “Granny and Gramps want to say hi.”

With one last mournful look at my sketchbook, I left it behind on my bed. It had been a few days since we’d last FaceTimed with my grandparents and I did really like talking to them, but I just wished it didn’t have to be right now.

“She never has her nose out of that book,” Mum was saying as I walked down the stairs.

“Oh my word,” Granny’s voice replied somewhat drily, “I wonder who she gets that from.”

Mum snorted a laugh, but said, “I don’t think I’m quite as bad.” I could almost picture her shaking her head. “I love that Kiki is so passionate about something and works so hard at it, and her art really is brilliant, but I wish she’d spend a little more time in the real world.”

But the real world was so much harder to live in.

I went into the kitchen. “Hi, Granny! Hi, Gramps!”

“There you are, pet!” Gramps boomed from the screen of the tablet propped up on the kitchen counter. “It’s always lovely to see your smile.”

Granny stuck her head into the frame as well. “A few of your aunties are here,” she said. I noticed she was wearing a sari, which was unusual. “I think they want to say hello, too.”

Then there was a flurry as Granny and Gramps got out of the way, and three beaming, plump aunties pushed and jostled each other to get a good look at me.

“Kritika!” one of them squealed. Her hands flapped at me like she was dying to pinch my cheeks. I could practically feel the bruises forming. “Look at you! Eleven years old now, hmm? You look more and more like Ashwini thayi every year.”

“Every year,” another auntie echoed. “If you turn your face just slightly to the right, Kritika, you could be a replica of that old photo of Ashwini thayi!”

Ashwini thayi was our family’s cautionary tale. Thayi means grandmother, but it can be used for pretty much any female relative who is either dead or old. Ashwini had been my great-grandmother’s sister and she had died at the age of thirteen, of causes that no one could ever agree on because no one who had actually known her was still alive. Gramps said it was the flu (which was probably true), my uncle Shiv said it was a broken heart (what?), and at least five different distantly related aunties all insisted it had been bad behavior (again, what?).

So the kids in the family were all pretty used to hearing things like “Careful, or you’ll end up like Ashwini thayi!” or “Do you want to end up like Ashwini thayi? No? Then don’t be so cheeky!”

I always felt like poor Ashwini thayi deserved a better story than that, so I had put a version of her in my Mysore. Honestly, my version of her was no truer to the real Ashwini than the stories the aunties came out with, but I liked to think she would have liked it. My Ashwini was an Asura slayer, fierce, proud, and brave. In my Mysore, Ashwini thayi got to be a hero.