Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For my dearest Lindsey pie: my heart sister in Devi,

tea dragon to my nagini, and staunch believer in my magic.

All the rose hot chocolate, desi feasts, and dreamstone vials forever.

Epigraph

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

—FROM “THE STOLEN CHILD,”

BY W. B. YEATS

Part One

Eons ago, when time first spun out of nothing like the whorled shell of a nautilus, there lived a boy who loved to swim. The blood of all nagas runs brackish, of course, yet this boy’s affinity for the aquatic surpassed that of even the rest of his kind: at the moment of his hatching, he wiggled free of his gold-speckled egg, his tiny tail uncoiling behind him, and slithered unerringly toward the nearest of Bhogavati’s many beaches. His astonished parents, who had been reaching out to embrace their infant son, were instead forced to pursue him into the layers of lacework foam cast off by the waves that crashed on the lavender shore.

“I want to swim everywhere!” he cried, squirming in his mother’s grasp. No matter how keenly his parents attempted to dissuade him, he would not yield.

When it was clear their pleas would bear no fruit, his mother sighed and relinquished his arm. “As you will, my hatchling. If it is that important to you, then swim.”

“But,” his father said, less willing to surrender his fresh-born child so easily, “only until you have run out of new waters to try. After that, you must return home and make a life among us.”

With all the worlds yet to wander through, the boy gamely agreed, then disappeared into the sea.

As millennia passed and the small boy grew into a young man, he spent his days undulating among a multitude of ever-changing companions. From sunrise to sunset, through storm and shine, he frolicked with sand dollars and starfish, crooned lullabies to guppies and goblin sharks, and idled with tortoises and tube sponges. In between, he collected conch shells and multicolored pearls, which he left on land for treasure hunters to find. Their iridescent sheen matched the meghdhanush he occasionally glimpsed in the sky, Lord Indra’s mighty seven-hued bow.

From stream to swamp to lake to ocean the young man splashed, from realm to realm, wading through the bluest of hot springs and the brownest of mudflats. From pond to river to lagoon he slipped, through salt water and through sweet. He swam, and he swam, and he swam, the current sometimes calm, other times enraged, but always swaddling him as soundly as his absent mother’s arms.