She shuddered and plowed into the cheese puffs. If Minal hadn’t found her in time . . . If Dev had heard her . . .
And her hair! Her own hair had betrayed her.
Why?
Overhead, the stars glittered in their usual patterns. Constellations, asterisms, clusters. The lunar mansions, where the moon’s twenty-seven wives lived. Sheetal traced the faint lines of her relatives’ faces, the flow of their glimmering tresses. As a kid, she’d known all their voices, strung together like pearls in a cosmic necklace. The memory flickered within her, a silver-toned, subtle language that had little to do with human speech.
Twinkling among them, of course, was Charumati. In Sheetal’s eyes, her mother burned more brilliantly than the others in the blue-black heavens, almost too vibrant, too visible.
Sheetal stuffed her face with more cheese puffs and chewed really hard.
If you lopped it off at just the right place, her parents’ romance could be a fairy tale: Charumati, eager for adventure, had abandoned her place in her nakshatra, her royal house, and descended to Earth because she’d thought human lives looked glamorous and exciting. And who had she met there but astrophysicist Dad, who’d made a career out of studying the stars?
He liked to say it was love at first conversation, a love made of inspiration and dreams and enchantment.
In the fairy tale, they met, they married, they had Sheetal, Dad solved a huge problem in his field, and the three of them lived happily ever after.
But life wasn’t a fairy tale, and unfortunately for Charumati, the time when humans believed in magic had passed. Except for a few handfuls of dreamers here and there, mortals had built themselves a new fantasy, a boring one where they already knew everything worth knowing—all empirical evidence and explicitly defined labels. Anything else was foolish superstition and couldn’t possibly exist. There wasn’t room for her mother in a world like that, and so she went home to the starry court.
Leaving Sheetal with nothing but these occasional scraps of melody that both soothed and starved her.
Superstition? Tell that to my hair, she thought, Radhikafoi’s aghast face looming in her mind. She gingerly probed the top of her head with orange-dusted fingers. A strand came loose in her hand, its tip gleaming bright as frost.
How was it silver again? Why was any of this happening? Why tonight?
Her chest pulled as taut as a harp’s strings. She gulped down a breath and trained her eyes on the celestial canopy above her, picking out the various nakshatras. Ashvini. Svati. Vishakha. Satabhishak. Pushya.
As if she’d invoked them, the stars began crooning down their ragas in voices as glossy and polished as a favorite dream. Their essence suffused the sky in light and song. Until she’d first tried to share them with Minal when they were six, Sheetal hadn’t realized that only she and Dad could see the faces in her nakshatra, let alone hear their music. No one else.
The balmy night sky draped dark folds over her like a jewel-studded shawl. She tried to fight its spell, to fight its song, even as the spark at her core flared in acknowledgment.
“Listen,” the stars murmured. “Listen.”
She slowly relaxed, her muscles loosening. The part of her that had never stopped waiting for her mother to return wanted to listen. It had never stopped longing for Charumati’s gentle touch on her head, had never stopped dreaming of her mother’s warm hugs, of her sparkling stories and her shimmering smile. I miss you, Mom.
As Sheetal sank into the starry song, sipping it like silver wine, it spread through her body, illuminating her veins, the secret chambers of her heart. It felt like reaching into lore and legend and yet-untapped reservoirs of dreams. She was close to understanding, so close. . . .
Her hands tingled.
“Nice night,” Dad remarked, jolting her out of her reverie. He’d changed out of his kurta pajama into chinos and a T-shirt. “Saying hi to your mom?”
Sheetal leaped up, her breath coming in gasps. She must not have heard the sliding door.
Normally she loved having Dad around. But right now his easy presence felt jarring, a false note that sent hairline fractures through the delicate spun glass of her link to her constellation—to her mother. The astral melody receded from her grasp.
Without the silvery chimes to keep it at bay, her suspicion came flooding back. Why? she wondered again, feeling the carpet of grass under her bare feet. Why were the stars calling to her? What did they want?
One corner of Dad’s mouth turned up. “Or maybe you’re thinking about somebody else?” He started humming a familiar tune, but deliberately off-key.
Sheetal froze. “Oh, my gods, Dad! Stop!”
Dad mangled a few more lines. “What, you don’t think I sound like Kishore Kumar?”
Her face burned as hot as the new-lit flame inside her. “Can we, I don’t know, not talk about this?”
“But I love this song. Don’t you?” He hummed it again, exaggerating the notes.
“Dad!” If only she could sink into the lawn and disappear the way her appalled eyebrows must have vanished into her hair. “What. Are. You. Doing. Please stop.”
Still keeping a straight face, Dad helped himself to a cheese puff. “Don’t tell me I need to invite the Merai clan over for Scrabble night just to keep an eye on you.”
Sheetal wished she could zip her hoodie up over her face. “Radhikafoi told you, didn’t she.” Not that there was really anything to tell. It wasn’t like she and Dev had been making out in public.
And ew, she did not want to be thinking of making out with anyone while Dad stood two feet away.
Dad chuckled. “No, but you just told me yourself.”
Here came the no-boys, no-dating lecture. But Sheetal knew how to throw him off. As a kid, she would ask Dad what he saw when he watched the heavens, and he always said the same thing: Your mummy.
Tonight, still overwhelmed by the sudden appearance of the starsong, she whispered, “Aren’t you tired of missing her? Mom, I mean?”
“I hear her, dikri,” Dad said simply. “I’ll never be tired of that.”
“How, though?” Sheetal stared at him. “She’s gone.”
“I hear her,” Dad repeated. “I hear her singing. It’s as beautiful as the day we met.”
“I don’t understand.” He’d never told her that before. Her chest tightened in confusion and hurt. Did he hear Charumati more often than Sheetal did?
Dad looked up at the sky, and his gaze went soft. There it was, the murky gray sorrow they’d both gotten so good at keeping from anyone else. “You’re going to be seventeen soon. Growing up.”
“In four days.” Sheetal didn’t know what else to say. Maybe it didn’t matter how much Dad could hear her mother. It didn’t make her not being there any better.
“Chakli,” Dad said, pulling Sheetal to him. “My little chakli. You know I love you, right?” She buried her head in his chest. He smelled like shaving cream and security.
For a minute, she let herself forget that she wasn’t his little sparrow anymore, let herself forget all her questions, all her doubts. She just let herself be in the past, when everything was the way it was supposed to be. Summer days wading into the ocean at Point Pleasant with Dad, but only up to her waist so her hair stayed clear of the salty surf, while her mother knelt on the shore to chat with the seagulls.