Once Nala grew familiar with the languages, Parshuram forbade her to speak anything else for hours at a time. ‘You will not hear these languages amongst the Vedans,’ he told her, ‘but you will hear them on ships, and among merchants. And when you hear the tongue, do not let them know you understand, unless you absolutely must. You will be surprised how much you will come to know when people think you do not understand the language.’

Parshuram also had a penchant for playing games. One time, he asked her to poison the wine barrels of a visiting troupe of theatre performers so they would be unable to rise in time to perform their controversial play, Battle of Goverdhun. Later that month, Nala switched the report on Kasmira’s apple production in an auditor’s caravan with the forged one Parshuram had prepared. At the Summer Festival, she added a certain herb to the daily fodder at a farm so that the enormous goat was stricken with loose bowels. The goat could not be sacrificed at the new house ceremony of the Overseer later that night, a sign considered so ominous that the Overseer decided against moving to Kasmira.

‘You might be terrible at everything else, but you seem to have a penchant for instigating trouble, Nala. A good thing, considering you are not pretty enough to be stupid.’ Parshuram had chuckled and tousled the hair that had once again grown into annoying curls.

Nala never knew the reasons for the tasks Parshuram set out but she did not let this bother her. The man had committed genocide. She knew she could trust him. She simply set her mind on how to achieve a task rather than why to achieve it. Maybe if she impressed Parshuram enough, he would finally teach her the Dance of Shadows. But that day never came.

Instead, he taught her about cosmetics. For a week, Nala was made to sit as one of the initiates of Agni, the God of Fire, clad in orange, trying to look suitably poor and pathetic. Parshuram taught her how to use pastes and dyes to mask her vitiligo and change her disguise. Passersby dropped coins into her worn sack and prayers poured from them like a waterfall: one asked to be rich, another prayed for forgiveness for burning his neighbour’s crops; yet another for fucking her neighbour’s husband; many women wished for sons, but one asked for her son to die.

Still, the moment of redemption did not come. Sometimes, Nala felt Parshuram kept her for his own entertainment, especially when he ensured she got into trouble during her tasks. She always needed to have a worthy tale at hand to explain why she was stealing the undergarments of the boatsman’s son or why she had released a host of mice into the local granaries. Needless to say, no lies were ever worthy enough. Once she was caught by the villagers and whipped till her back was lacerated. But Parshuram had just stood and watched.