Through her tears she saw one of the boys rise to mimic an Acharya. It was Varcin. She saw him glance at her, his teeth white against his dark skin. Their eyes met. For a moment Varcin’s eyes widened, and his mouth dropped. He almost half-stumbled in her direction. Swiftly, she turned her face away. Varcin stopped when his eyes fell on her long hair, her battered face and withered hand. He looked away, confused. Shaking his head in sad disbelief, he went back to his friends.

Go! she told herself. Go and tell them who you are! But she could only watch silently, the firelight dancing in her dark eyes, as the wench brought goblets with flaming tops to their table, ‘Drink up, lads!’ The boys grabbed the goblets and in one go, consumed the fire-laden drink. They screamed, hissed and laughed in inebriated joy. The world beckoned them with its tantalizing charm.

Theirs was a perfect world from which Nala had been evicted. She had no place amongst them. She brushed away unshed tears with the back of her hand. She turned away from Varcin, the boy she had probably loved, and the others, friends she had cherished, and left the tavern to follow the path to Parshuram’s hermitage, into the enfolding comfort of the shadows.

ADHYAYA IV: A FIGHTING CHANCE

ADHYAYA IV

A FIGHTING CHANCE

All hope abandon, ye who enter here.
― Dante, The Divine Comedy

I

Shishupal looked down at his bare feet, callused and cracked, then at his ragged clothes, the dirt under his nails, his scratched hands, and the scars on his elbows, wondering how he had ever got to this state. Dantavakra wouldn’t have recognized him. He looked at the letters in his hand. Two copies, the words exactly alike. The last missive had borne no good tidings either. He climbed down, disappointed, from the roof to the murky alley, and squeezed his boots back on.

He heard chatter in Vadeh of how the Mathurans did not care about the impending battle at the end of the Armistice, as if they had some sinister trick up their sleeve. What trick? No one knew. Worse, he did not know, despite working shifts as a stablehand, a woodcutter, and once, even a man of letters. It was not that he did not learn any secrets at all. While he could not sneak inside Mathura, he did hear all manner of inconsequential news coming out of it. The wife of Lord Hiriam was with child but the real father was either Satyaki, or the lawscribe Atuyla Chand. Lady Asmai made mock of superstitions at the table but had all the black cats of the town slain. The cooks despised Lord Balram when he came to the village to sup and would spit in his food. Once he even overheard a serving boy confide to a girl that he saw Prince Yudhistir in Mathura.