They were on that plane headed to Seychelles because her grandmother had given her son an ultimatum. “I’m not speaking at your rally for the next election if you don’t take your wife and daughter on a holiday.”

“Thank you for this,” Esha had heard her aie say to him before they left for the airport as she attached his gold chain buttons to his kurta. Then she’d smiled in that way that made Esha think her aie knew everything, saw everything. “Even the fact that there’s an environmental conference in Seychelles doesn’t keep this from being special.”

Her father had turned utterly serious. “You and Esha are the only thing in the world that matters. You know that, right?” he’d asked. “I’d give everything up for the two of you if you asked.”

Esha had to shake all of this out of her head every day. Because in the end it all led to the story. “Do you know who Garuda is?”

Esha nodded, ready as she always was for the story.

“Once upon a time,” Aie started in her storyteller’s voice, “in the time of the Vedas, high in the Himalayas, two sisters, Vinata and Kadru, were married to the sage Kashyapa. One day, a celestial white horse flew past them in the sky. The sisters were struck by its beauty, but as always, they got into an argument. This time over the color of the horse’s tail. Vinata believed it to be white like the rest of the horse. Kadru insisted that the white horse had a black tail.

“Stubborn in their beliefs, they entered into a wager. The loser of the bet would spend her life in servitude to the other sibling after they inspected the horse up close the next day.

“Kadru was the mother of a thousand snakes, and she ordered her sons to find the horse and attach themselves to its tail so that it would appear black during inspection. When the tail was found to be black, Vinata accepted defeat. So began her lifelong servitude to her sister.

“A few years later, Vinata bore a winged son, a boon from the gods for her service. Garuda was the strongest of all birds, and his snake half brothers would task him perpetually with chores that tested his strength. Being his mother’s son, he too was automatically bound into servitude.

“When he was old enough to know about the lost wager, he vowed to earn their freedom back and asked the snakes what it would take. They asked him to acquire amrit, the nectar of immortality, from the gods.