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.

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.