Her nostrils flared faintly. Then the wood of her face softened and reshaped itself, and she was Sanjana again. He reached for her. He took her hands and helped her from the tree.
“Come,” she said. “We need to find the others. They’re waiting for us.”
DHIREN
There was a lake behind Dhiren’s home. Once, it had been good fishing waters, and he had kept his family fed and made money selling what remained in the local market besides. But the rot struck it five years ago, and since then the waters had become useless. He’d tried to fish there regardless, at first. Then he’d gutted his first catch and found a flower growing through it, a stem instead of a spine, thorns instead of fine bones, and given the lake up for good.
It had been too late by then. The rot showed through his skin weeks later. Then it touched his wife. His sons.
They’d all perished since. Only Dhiren remained.
He barely went anywhere anymore. Sometimes a kind boy from the family who lived closest, called Anil, visited and brought him food. When Dhiren’s roof had broken during a storm, Anil had climbed up and fixed it with wood from the tree branch that had felled the roof in the first place. “It seems like a fair exchange,” Anil had said. “Besides, the tree was dead anyway.”
Today, the boy was trying to fix netting over Dhiren’s window to keep mosquitoes out. “You get so many of them over your lake,” he said.
“The rot attracts them,” Dhiren told him. “Don’t go near it. You must be careful. You have your whole life ahead of you.”
He always said this to Anil. And Anil always grinned back at him and said he’d be careful of course. No need to worry about him.
But today Anil said nothing. He held the netting in his hand, silent, and stared out at the water.
“There’s something coming,” Anil whispered. “Can you feel it?”
Dhiren leveraged himself carefully to his feet. His body ached terribly, but there was something in the boy’s voice that compelled him to move regardless. He looked out the window.
The water of the lake was rippling. Moving. And two people were standing beside it.
“Did you hear them come?” Dhiren asked. “I did not hear them come.”
Anil shook his head.
There was something strange about both of them. They were too still. Too patient. People did not stand like that—with the calm of trees, as if they belonged to the earth and always had. The calm called him. Tugged every leaf and root embedded in his flesh.
He knew them. He knew.
“Uncle—what are you doing?” Anil asked alarmed. “Don’t go out there!”
“I must,” Dhiren croaked. He opened the door. Went toward them.
There was a woman rising out of the water. But she was also… not a woman. Her eyes were lidless, inhuman. Her hair was the deep fronds of plants that grew in watery darkness. She turned to look at him, her face ancient and youthful all at once, and smiled.
“Yaksa,” he breathed, and fell to his aching knees. “Yaksa.”
“A worshipper,” she said, in a voice that was liquid deep. “And so soon. How lucky I am.”
“Come with us,” the woman on the shore said. She was merry, bright-eyed. Her teeth, when she smiled, were sharp. “Come with us, worshipper. We’re gathering our kin. Come and welcome them.”
His limbs obeyed. He stood, and followed as they walked away from the lake, back into the darkness of the forest that lay behind his home. The male yaksa—who looked human, entirely human, if not for his stillness—gazed at him with dazed eyes.
“I’m finding my family,” he said hoarsely. And Dhiren nodded, because a yaksa was speaking to him, and what could he do but listen, and be thankful?
Behind him, far behind him, Anil had run out of the house. Anil was yelling his name. If Dhiren had looked back, he would have seen confusion in the boy’s eyes, and fear—and a new bloom, flowering its way through the boy’s jaw.
But he did not. He kept his eyes forward. He followed his gods.
BHUMIKA
The entire household gathered to watch Priya and Sima go. Billu pushed gifts from the kitchens into Priya’s hands, then directed his attentions to Sima when she protested that she couldn’t possibly carry everything. Even Kritika offered them both a respectful farewell, and promised to keep them in her prayers.
