“I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“How odd,” Malini said. Her voice was soft. Finally, she released Priya’s arm.
“I did not mean to harm you either,” said Malini. “I do not like acting without intent.”
Priya shook her head. “I’ll be more careful if I need to wake you in the future,” said Priya.
She hooked Malini’s arm into her own once more and began guiding her around the edge of the triveni.
“Now,” Priya said. “A tale of the yaksa.”
She told Malini a simple tale. A story told to children, of a young man, a woodcutter, who was born under ill stars. If he fell in love, his beloved would share his cursed luck. Any man or woman he married would die an early death.
“So he avoided other people,” Priya said. “And his family worried about him all the time. And then he told them he’d found someone to marry after all.”
“Who?” Malini asked.
“A tree.”
“Atree?”
“That,” Priya said, “is exactly how his family responded. They weren’t impressed, I promise you. But he garlanded the tree like it was a bride to him, and he told it tales and gave it offerings of flowers and secrets, and one day the tree transformed into a beautiful man. It had been a yaksa all along. The yaksa built the woodcutter a mahal of banyan and banana leaf, and they lived together happily. Now, when children are born ill-starred, we give them a first marriage to a tree, so the yaksa will watch over them, and their second, mortal marriage will be sweet.”
Malini gave Priya an odd, unreadable look.
“Men can fall in love with men, in Ahiranya?”
Oh. Priya swallowed. She’d made a mistake. A simple, innocent Ahiranyi tale was far less so to people who were… not Ahiranyi.
Surely Malini had heard the stories people told about the lasciviousness of the Ahiranyi: their willingness to sell pleasure, the looseness of their women, the fact that they were willing to sleep with their own sex? And surely, like all Parijati, she abhorred it.
“I’m sorry, my lady,” Priya said. “A silly maidservant like me, I should have known better.” She bowed her head in apology. “Please forgive me.”
She felt Malini’s hands on her shoulders. Suddenly they were facing one another.
“Please,” said Malini. “I’d like to hear your answer.”
“I suppose they can do so anywhere, my lady.”
Malini shook her head. “It isn’t done, in Parijat.” The tone of her voice did not suggest she would welcome questions, so Priya asked none.
Instead, Priya said with false lightness, “Well, men can only marry women now. One of the first regents did away with the way things used to be here.”
“And there are such tales,” Malini said, “about women too?” There was something hesitant in her voice.
“Yes,” said Priya. She swallowed again. She knew exactly why her throat felt dry. “What other tales shall I tell you about the yaksa, my lady?”
“Everything,” Malini said immediately. “Anything. I was told tales by my nursemaid, but they were clearly sanitized, made palatable for good Parijati children. I want to know a tale no one would ever tell me.” She paused, considering, then said, “Can you tell me a tale from the Birch Bark Mantras?”
“Those tales are forbidden, my lady,” Priya said, even though she had memorized them by rote as a girl, and still remembered fragments of each poem, ragged ghosts of verse.
“Tell me where the yaksa came from, then,” said Malini. “That must be innocent enough.”
It probably wasn’t. But Priya didn’t say so.
As she guided Malini over a dip in the floor, she glanced down. The floor, marked by grooves like waves. Like water.
Those waves had moved, too. They were not where she’d left them, yesterday.
