Star Daughter(24)

“I’m sorry,” said the stall owner, a young man who could have himself been the hero in a Bollywood love story, “but all I have in stock is what you see here.”

Sheetal stood rooted to the mosaic-tiled floor, trying really hard not to ogle. By accident or ardent wish, she’d stumbled into a mythic wonderland. It was all so strange, so seductive, that if this had been any other day, she would have been raring to see it all, taste it all, to unearth rusty keys to hidden cabinets of curiosities and gulp down steaming purple potions that would send her on adventures in imaginary realms.

“Sheetal!” snapped Radhikafoi. “Minal!” She gripped Sheetal’s arm hard enough to bruise. “I’ve been trying to get you to listen for ten minutes. Come now.”

Ten minutes? It had felt like thirty seconds. Sheetal fought to loosen herself from the Night Market’s glamour. How could she have forgotten Dad?

Minal, too, looked dazed. “This place . . . I could lose myself here. We need to be careful.”

“Ah, yes,” said a sly voice far too close to Sheetal’s ear. “A young girl brimming over with want. Stewing in it like vegetables in dal. Want goes so well with rice, wouldn’t you say?” A wrinkled brown finger beckoned. Sheetal stared down its length to find an old woman in a maroon-and-gold sari. “Come to my stall, child, and see if we can’t find something to plug up that hole in your heart.”

“My heart’s not the one that needs help,” Sheetal said.

“Everyone’s heart seeks something.” The vendor scurried back behind the counter of her stall. “A cream, a charm, a confirmation.”

Radhikafoi sniffed but waved Sheetal forward.

She shared a cautious glance with Minal, then took in the tent before them. It might have been an illustration in a storybook: fireflies floated from the roof on delicate chains, illuminating the assortment of wares in lavender, powder blue, and hot pink light.

They were pretty spectacular wares, to be sure: Diamond-eyed onyx spiders that perched in customers’ hair, weaving elaborate cobweb headdresses while whispering arcane secrets in the arachnid tongue. Bouquets of silver poppies, garlands of copper jasmine blossoms, long-stemmed rainbow roses. Bottles of serenity and stillness, bottles of chaos and creation. Gems containing freshly harvested dreams.

“How about a potion to help my dad’s heart?” Sheetal asked.

“Some hearts,” said the vendor, as if she hadn’t heard, “seek their reflection in the form of a lover’s rapt gaze.” She thrust a silver hand mirror at Sheetal, ordinary but for a single brown eye where the glass should have been. As if someone were peering through the frame—and winking.

Sheetal nudged the mirror away. That was not how she wanted Dev to see her. Not that she cared what he thought anymore. “No, thanks. If you don’t have a potion, can you at least tell me if you’ve seen anyone who plays the harp?”

The vendor cackled. “I have a better question. Tell me, do you know the secret at the center of a rotting mushroom?”

“This is foolishness,” Radhikafoi told them. “Come, dikriyo.”

In another stall, Minal asked after the harp sisters while twirling a golden apple on its dew-damp branch. In a third, Sheetal picked up, then put down, decanters of black beetle-wing wine and unguents for forming a peridot carapace of one’s skin. Wonder steeped in her like starlight.

“I want it. All of it,” Minal murmured, her voice heavy with longing. “Promise we’ll come back?”

Sheetal loved this place, all the glorious things, all the ghastly things. She could spend the rest of the night spellbound. But they hadn’t found either the harp sisters or anything to help Dad, never mind a way for Minal to get to Svargalok. “We will. After.”

Then, across the way, in a stall so impenetrably dark the night paled next to it, she saw a jar full of marbles, each an entire world. Infinite worlds like infinite stories—the old yearning tugged, heartsore, in her chest. A pull toward something else, something she had no name for.

The flame at her core kindled. Here, it whispered, she could be seen, fully and freely.

She picked up the jar of marble worlds.

“Ah,” said the vendor, a vetala cloaked all in black with a hooded yellow stare every bit as shrewd as the spiders’. “You pursue it even now, do you not? Your place in all things? A place to belong?”

Sheetal felt coated in invisible slime. Had this creature, a spirit that had possessed a corpse to get around, just read her mind? “I’m looking for the harp sisters. Do you know where I can find them?”

“Find yourself first, little child caught between. Always floating, always seeking,” the vetala said. His smile grew sharper. “Did I mention that with practice, you can visit each of the worlds in the jar?”

For a sliver of an instant, Sheetal let herself imagine slipping away to another world, one where she might find answers scattered like coins from a change purse. Or better, an alternate timeline in which Charumati had stayed, Dad was fine, stars walked freely among humans again, and Dev had no ugly family history. A place where Sheetal could just relax. That sounded like the true heavenly realm.

She was so tempted, it hurt.

“My price is so small, a pittance. Merely a piece of you. I know—how about a prized memory?”

An image broke through her thoughts, Charumati’s warm lips brushing five-year-old Sheetal’s forehead the day Dad unscrewed the training wheels from her bike and gave it a first push into independence. I can do it, Mommy, she’d insisted, nervous but trying not to show it. Take them off!