‘Master?’

‘Hm...’

‘If what you are going to teach me is not the Art of the Sun, what is it called?’

‘The Dance of Shadows.’

V

Nala began her journey by slaving away at the hearth every other night. Not in the forge to craft splendid weapons, but in the kitchen, cooking Parshuram’s recipes for dinner. ‘Mathurans and Gandharans are the finest connoisseurs of food,’ he told her. ‘The others wouldn’t know fine food from camel piss.’ So, for the next few weeks, Nala smashed and ground, pounded and sliced, chopped and cut delicate mixes of cumin, quail, fennel, lichen, colocassia leaves, khas root, fenugreek greens, lamb meat and so on. It was not as if Parshuram procured the ingredients himself to make her life easier. Nala was sent on these errands. But truth be told, she did not mind this part of her training. Ever since Varnavrat, her hearing had developed immensely. She trapped partridges with ease. She uncovered the hiding places of rabbits with panache. She could close her eyes and pinch a fish from a lake, using just her ears and hands. She enjoyed wading out into the shallows to collect lotus stems, shake fruit from trees, dig for roots and raid bird nests to find the ingredients her Master demanded. It reminded her of the treks at Meru. By the time Nala returned to the hermitage, she would be covered with bark and pollen, but wearing a smile on her scarred face.

But that was as far as smiles went. Parshuram had her cooking meals so complex they sometimes required precariously balancing a hundred ingredients. At other times, Parshuram wanted something simple, like rice steamed with flowers, or lake fish baked in green coconuts. If a single grain was misplaced or the sauce did not have the right undercurrent of flavour, the food was thrown to the dogs and Nala had to toil at the hearth all over again.

Months passed and the breadth of Parshuram’s instruction expanded into new useless areas, and so did Nala’s frustration. But she never showed it. One such area was languages. Nala had been told she had to grasp both the Old Tongue and Greek. She already knew Magahi Prakrit from her days in the forest, and High Sanskrit from her time at Meru. But those languages were nothing compared to what she had to learn now. She was asked to master the bastard Sanskrit accent of the Reshts. Parshuram made her do two hours of scribing and reading each day, in each language, until he finally announced she no longer spoke the Old Tongue ‘like a pig giving birth to triplets› or write Greek ‘like a blind man with a maimed hand’. Nala still did not know how knowing Greek would help her avenge her family, but she had vowed to obey, and obey she did.