Now, Nala looked at Parshuram marching ahead, his newly acquired donkey by his side, burdened with books and bottles of wine. Around them, the sun was shrinking behind the peaks, letting in ghostly fingers of dusk.

‘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.