Star Daughter(53)

Sheetal stepped through the doors, and she instantly knew why Charumati had wanted to re-create the feel of this place. With its moon-phase sconces and horoscope-patterned ceiling, rich carpets, and wealth of scrolls and silver gilt-edged tomes on the stacks and stacks of scallop-framed ebony shelves that practically extended into infinity, the library felt just as magical as the Night Market.

But even better, here she could look for answers.

Sheetal took a second to gaze around her. So many books! So many books, and so much possibility.

A few stars sat at the long mosaicked tables, engrossed in their reading, and she even spotted two of the other champions, Leela and Sachin, cozy in brocade-covered armchairs. And there was that rude star from the convocation, Rati, brazenly checking out Sachin’s hoard of reading material.

“Oh, wow,” said Minal. “I wonder if they have sequels that haven’t even been written yet.” She wandered toward the stacks. “Coming?”

Figuring it couldn’t hurt to be friendly, Sheetal waved as she walked past the tables. Leela glanced up long enough to smile before going back to the scroll she’d been jotting notes on. Rati looked right through her, which was fine by Sheetal. Sachin, though, bounded over. “I’m Sachin. Nice to finally meet you, Sheetal.”

Except for the filmy green-and-peach scarf knotted around his neck and multiple pinna piercings, he looked like he could be one of Dad’s colleagues at the lab. Sheetal instinctively wanted to call him “Uncle,” but of course she refrained. “Nice to meet you, too. I hear you sculpt?”

Sachin chuckled. “My work is more than mere sculpture. Having studied under some of the finest masters alive in both India and Germany, I like to imagine it papers over the gulf between East and West. My fiancé—also my manager—can talk for hours about the implicit critique and paradoxical embrace of the precolonial era as expressed by way of the Enlightenment and neoclassicism.”

Sheetal guessed he was one of those people who thought picking random terms out of the dictionary made them sound smart. She peeked over at the books piled carelessly on his table. Two lay open, showing pictures of classical statuary and more modern art installations cobbled together from DayGlo paint, barbed wire, and driftwood. “I can’t wait to see it,” she lied. “I’m sure it’s great.”

“Oh, you will,” Sachin said. “We’re all friends here. Just because we’re in competition doesn’t mean we can’t get to know each other, right? I’ve always believed in promoting camaraderie in the workplace. Keeps things fun.”

He was saying the right things, but they didn’t ring true. More like he wanted her to know how insignificant she was, pitted against the genius of his word salad. “I guess not,” she said. “Well, gotta go. My friend’s waiting!”

Without looking back, she hurried behind the tables and into the stacks. If the other champions were that pretentious and full of themselves, it was going to be a long couple of days.

Minal had vanished, so Sheetal wandered through the rows of books alone. In contrast to the usual silvers and blacks and blues, there were salmon pinks, sunny yellows, mango oranges, twilight purples, dark indigos, and deepest blue-blacks, all grouped by color, just like Charumati had said.

She grinned. The colors represented dawn and midday and afternoon and evening and night, all standing for ragas, songs that corresponded to the time of day. She’d been studying those since she started playing the dilruba.

Charumati had told her all subjects fell under one of those ragas, and you sang for whatever it was you wanted to read about. The problem was, Sheetal didn’t know which raga to sing. Where did history go?

She plucked a nearby tome off the shelf. It had an orange cover and silver Devanagari script. Sanskrit, but she could somehow understand it: wild strawberries. Which was pretty wild in and of itself. She went down a different row and reached for another book. Yellow, and more Sanskrit. She scanned the surrounding spines. All yellow, and nothing close to what she needed.

But Leela and Sachin had found what they needed. There had to be a system. She just needed to crack it.

Sheetal unrolled a scroll far enough to see that it was elaborately illustrated. She’d seen versions of this Mughal painting before: Radha and Krishna leaning together in a swing as Krishna played his bamboo flute.

Had a star inspired this one? Did they inspire all art ever?

A few feet away, someone hummed a recurring melody. Whoever it was had a remarkable voice, high and haunting like wind through a cave.

She rolled the scroll back up and followed the music. The song plucked at her heart, turning it into a veena. As she reached the end of the row, her own tongue readied itself to sing.

“A morning raga,” she muttered.

Her voice must have grown too loud, because the stars in her line of sight glanced up. Recognition spread over their faces, and whispers spread through the air. The humming stopped, too.

Trying to tune out the stares, Sheetal waited until the humming resumed. Then she followed it to the next row of stacks, where a boy she vaguely recognized from breakfast perused a shelf lined with pink spines and pink-tied scrolls.

His hum ended as she reached the edge of his stack, and she watched as he extracted a volume from the shelf and thumbed through it.

Now that she was paying attention, Sheetal noticed other voices singing, too, as their owners moved through the stacks. A star appeared in her row, and the book she was looking for began to glow in time with her song like starlight glittering on frost.