When Hira stepped over the threshold of her grandmother’s living room, she heard a sharp gasp on the other side of the room.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” said her grandmother imperiously.
Hira’s shoulders fell. First Meghana, and now not even Dadi-Ma didn’t—
“Which makes me all the more delighted that you managed to sneak away,” said her grandmother, winking. “Were you painfully bored?”
Hira nodded.
“Did you grab a sweet on your way inside?”
Hira nodded once more.
“Did you get one for me too?”
Hira grinned, and ran forward. She dropped off the bowl of sweets and then embraced her grandmother. Her grandmother held her tightly. One warm hand on Hira’s shoulder blade and one cold hand against the back of her head.
“Let me see,” said Hira, curling up beside her.
Her grandmother laughed and held out her hands.
Hira had never seen anyone else with hands like her grandmother. Her left hand was a warm brown the color of toasted spices. Her knuckles looked like the knobs of a tree, plump veins running across them like roots. But her right hand?
Her right hand was made of glass.
It was smooth and always cold to the touch. It made Hira think that while the rest of her grandmother was in one place, sometimes her hand belonged to another world altogether. Maybe in that world it was cold and there was a crust of frost on the ground. Maybe theother hand had just turned up its silver palm to catch one of the flakes before her grandmother had need of it in their kingdom.
But while it amused Hira, her grandmother’s lips pressed into a line. It was the face she made whenever some memory caught her. And then, for the span of one blink, it was as if her grandmother were somewhere else entirely.
“Is something the matter?” asked Hira.
“Just a memory,” she said with a faint smile. “The older you get, the more memories feel a bit like old battle scars. They will ache for no reason until you ease them away.”
Hira frowned. “How do you do that?”
Her grandmother folded her strange hands in her lap.
“You relive them. You savor both the sorrowful and the sweet. You make peace with it, and as you do, you let it go, and it can have no power over you for a spell.”
Hira glanced up at her grandmother. She was seated by the fire even though the afternoon sun blazed high in the sky. A silk shawl was pulled tight around her shoulders. Her hair was completely white, and thinned in some places so that Hira could see patches of her shiny, brown scalp. But no matter how old she seemed, her eyes were a lively and lustrous black.
“You will understand one day,” said her grandmother. “Perhaps you will even think back on this day with some mixture of bitter and sweet. After all, your sister is leaving. I remember that day.”
“You had asister?” asked Hira, shocked.
Of all the things her grandmother had spoken of, her sister was not one of them. Hira tried to imagine her grandmother as a young girl… but she couldn’t. She’d seen the portraits, of course.Everyone had. Portraits of her grandparents, with her grandmother in her battle armor and her grandfather clutching a handful of scrolls. Where her grandmother’s gaze was intense and grave, her grandfather always looked as if he was about to laugh.
“Ihavea sister,” she corrected. “She is still alive. In fact, she looks like Meghana. Or perhaps Meghana looks like her. They are rather similar, you know. Beautiful and curious, with a touch of something rather mysterious about them. On her wedding day, I was miserable. Cried all night.”
“What happened to her?”
“She married a king from a faraway land that we all must one day visit.”
That sounded a little strange, but Hira thought better than to point that out. Sometimes her grandmother said strange things. Sometimes she could not even remember the story she was telling, and so Hira would have to tell her the story from the beginning just to find out what happened next.
“And you never saw her again?”
“I saw her. Once.” Her grandmother rubbed absentmindedly at her glass hand. “And I will see her again. I will see many people again. Perhaps soon, I suspect.”
