Star Daughter(91)
Sheetal hadn’t really done more than glance at the marionettes when they were in her room, but now it was obvious why Priyanka had panicked after they’d gone missing. They were unsettlingly sophisticated, able to convey degrees of emotion and mood with the subtlest movements, and Priyanka’s control over them made Sheetal’s breath catch. Her chaotic thoughts—it would be her turn soon, oh, gods, it would be her turn soon, what if she couldn’t do it, what if she couldn’t do it what would she do oh gods—slowed as she found herself sucked into the world Priyanka and her puppets created.
The princess, a fierce lady who carried her kingdom in her knapsack to safeguard it from a sinister sorcerer, roamed the land with her consort in search of injustice. Each day, the pair would rescue a village or do away with a ruthless employer or just make certain everyone had enough to eat.
They encountered thieves, immoral landlords, even cruel schoolmasters, and vanquished them all. But the biggest threat to the kingdom, the greedy sorcerer, still lurked just out of sight.
“Funny,” growled the tiger. “They say the pen is mightier than the sword, but when it comes to getting things done, there’s a lot to be said for a sharp blade and a good set of claws.”
The princess hefted her sword. “You have to address people in the language they speak.”
At the end of each day, the duo set down the kingdom, unfolding it like a board game, to enjoy a repast with the royal family, ramble through the rose gardens, and sleep soundly in their silken palace bed.
When the tiger fell victim to the sorcerer’s poison, obliging the princess to trade her kingdom to the sorcerer in exchange for a healing spell, the court wept. When she later tricked him into returning the kingdom, the court cheered. When the now-hale tiger slashed the sorcerer into gory strips, at last liberating the kingdom from his tyranny, the court roared.
Using nothing but dialogue and well-timed gestures, Priyanka had compelled the entire starry court to care about the fates of a pair of inanimate wooden puppets. The whole audience gave her a standing ovation.
While her attendant removed the stage, Priyanka and her puppets took deep bows. A proud smile wreathed her face. She would be hard to beat, and she knew it.
“That was amazing,” Minal whispered.
“Yeah.” Sheetal had to compete with that?
As the judges scribbled notes in the ten-minute break, she glanced at Jeet. He’d affected an apathetic expression, and even Dev was glowering at him.
She looked over to catch her mother eyeing Rati. Rati inclined her head and stared back.
The break ended, and the Esteemed Matriarch selected the next name. “Please welcome our second champion, Leela Swaminathan of House Krittika. She will paint the loss of innocence.”
One attendant set up her watercolor palette, canvas, and brushes on the platform, while the other inspired her, the act as simple and unpretentious as Leela herself. Stardust ringed her like a corona, and Leela seated herself at her easel and chanted a short mantra to Sarasvati Devi, goddess of speech and knowledge and patroness of the arts.
Then, her back to the audience, she began to paint.
The stars were enraptured, drinking in every brushstroke. Even Minal watched with fascination. To Sheetal, however, it was torture, even with the time-lapse magic that allowed each artist to complete a new work within their allotted hour. All she could think of was her own performance and the drop of blood Nani had waiting, and of the post-competition coronation with her starry circlet, when she would become a full star.
What . . . what if she was already too much of a star to be inspired?
If she failed, if she lost, would Nani, the same person who had instituted an absolute separation of stars and mortals, still help Dad? What would keep her from closing the gates the second Sheetal left?
Apparently Sheetal was still human enough to break into a sweat, because she flushed all over. Had she been stupid not to accept Rati’s bargain?
She wanted to grab Minal and Dev and beg them to think of something, to point out the all-important detail she’d overlooked. Instead, she had to sit and wait as Leela deliberated and swept the canvas with her brush just so.
After what felt like a week and simultaneously no time at all, Leela stepped back and evaluated her painting. With a nod, she set her brush down.
When she moved aside, revealing the canvas to the audience, Sheetal felt sliced in half.
There, somehow far more than mere red and black and brown paint, was pain, was rage. There was the anguish of having trusted and been betrayed time and again until the world was nothing more than a nightmare carousel. There on the canvas was a feral woman with disheveled, filthy hair and disillusioned demon’s eyes but also a calloused, bloody heart that refused not to beat. Not, deep inside where it counted, to hope.
It was so gorgeous, so hideous, that Sheetal almost sobbed.
There, she wanted to tell her mother and her grandmother and Beena and Rati and the entire starry court. You want to understand humans? That is what makes us—and art—what we are. That choice to keep getting back up and trying again in the face of suffering and injustice and despair.
Would she lose that when she became a full star?
“It is certainly passionate and interesting in its execution,” Charumati whispered, “yet it puts me in mind of your foi’s clients, the misery that brought them to her door. Rather than exalt these emotions, would it not be better to heal their cause altogether?”