Star Daughter(65)

Confused, Sheetal followed her mother inside. She had to grin at the hues that fell outside the sidereal color scheme of silver, black, and blue. They were small things—subtle accents like a scarlet cushion, a green fairy-tale compendium, a purple candy dish—just enough to show Charumati hadn’t forgotten her time on Earth.

“Hey, I made this for you!” Sheetal recalled, picking up the candy dish. She’d sculpted it in second-grade art class and then carved two interlocking horseshoes on the side before glazing the whole thing in a pretty aubergine.

Something in her chest softened. She’d thought Dad had accidentally thrown it out.

“I have always prized it.” Charumati’s lips brushed Sheetal’s cheek. “Come. Your practice dilruba waits within.”

They passed through one more set of doors at the back of Charumati’s apartments, and what she saw there made Sheetal forget everything else.

Moonlight lotuses bloomed from the pond’s crystalline waters, frosting the air a familiar silvery white. Like with so many of the rooms Sheetal had seen in the palace, the night sky served as a ceiling, making the water sparkle as if it were studded with diamonds.

“You have a pond?” Sheetal whistled.

“Every nakshatra has its own crop of moonlight lotuses.” Charumati beamed with pride. “It is what mortals might refer to as ‘waterfront property.’”

Peace rolled over Sheetal as she knelt by the pond, soothing as the whisper of the dark water against the shore. She felt the tension draining from her muscles, felt her heartbeat slowing in time with the astral melody. Her mouth curled into a dreamy smile.

Charumati beckoned to her from beneath a trellis overgrown with twinkling blue, black, and silver rosebuds, not far from the water’s edge. A moonlight lotus blossom glowed from behind her ear, highlighting the plain wooden dilruba at her side. She looked every inch the shining queen among her flowers, preparing to be serenaded.

My mother, the fairy tale, thought Sheetal, and maybe it was the moonlight lotuses, or maybe she was tired, but she couldn’t muster up the anger she’d felt just that morning.

Inhaling the flowers’ heavenly fragrance, she tackled her warm-up exercises, even the stupid lip trill, as earnestly as she could. She leaned the dilruba against her thigh, and Charumati pushed her shoulders back. “No slouching,” she chided.

Sheetal brought the bow to the strings and called the bhajan to mind. It was a gorgeous devotional song composed in the sixteenth century by the mystic poetess Mirabai to celebrate her love for Lord Krishna, but as Sheetal silently tasted the lyrics and tried the accompaniment, she knew it wasn’t right.

If she was going to win this competition—if she was going to save Dad—she couldn’t choose any old song. She needed to draw on her own anguish, her own confusion, to sing a song that would make the listener feel.

And she knew just the right song, the song Dad had played on a loop after Charumati had left. The song her mother had sung to him when she’d said goodbye. Sheetal wasn’t supposed to be there—Charumati had already put her to bed for the last time—but she’d slipped out and sneaked over to their bedroom, where she’d gone for comfort so often. Her mother had left the door ajar.

Sheetal hadn’t totally understood that Charumati was leaving them, not until she heard her sing the old Lata Mangeshkar film song “Tu Jahan Jahan Chalega.” Sheetal had watched enough older Bollywood movies with her parents to understand Hindi and even a dash of Urdu, so when her mother, radiant in the gloom, had pressed her cheek to Dad’s and crooned how, whatever direction he turned, her shadow would always be with him, how he should not mourn her, how her tears would always be there to stop his, she caught it all.

Even as Charumati had sung those words, she’d wept. “Watch over our Sheetal,” she’d whispered, kissing away Dad’s tears.

Sheetal had fled to her room before she could hear Dad’s reply. Mommy couldn’t be leaving. No. It was a bad dream. She’d burrowed under the covers and counted the floating shapes on the insides of her eyelids until she finally fell asleep.

When she woke up the next morning, it was just the two of them in the big house. Just her and Dad.

“You can’t keep a star from the sky, chakli,” he’d tried to explain, his reddened eyes ringed by bruises. Sheetal had refused to believe him. No one had made her mother leave, but her mother had done it anyway.

Sometimes she wondered if the song had been a curse. Dad had said it was Charumati’s music that had brought the two of them together, after all—her music and a slow dance in an empty parking lot.

“Ready, dikri?” Charumati asked now.

All the old sorrow, the crushing abandonment, the unbearable loss, threatened to submerge Sheetal, to drown her, moonlight lotuses notwithstanding. She surrendered to it, letting it carry her into the song. Her bow swept along the dilruba’s strings, evoking a sound like melancholy, like grief. Like a sundering. The pain poured out of her in gorgeous poetry, a lover begging her beloved not to give up on life simply because they must part.

Sheetal remembered every bit of Dad’s silence, of her own loneliness. Of her self-doubt—what had she done wrong? She remembered how still and empty their house felt without its heart, as if no one who lived there would ever breathe again.

“My shadow,” she sang, the lyrics wringing out everything she’d worked so hard to suppress, “my shadow.”