Ataa clears out Hemal’s old loft room and buys straw for Abjit to weave two more mattresses. Until they are done, Nira shares mine. We stay up far too late at first, trading stories, and one night, after Ataa starts snoring in the next room, I slide the window open. The blown-glass window eye swings back and forth on its string. I say, “Hemal?”
There is only mist, so thick that the ground and the neem tree are gone. It pokes a finger into my room, right around the eye. I cringe back. Nira says, “Listen.”
Hemal is singing.
Nira and I listen at the window most nights until I am nine, though Nira is still eight. We learn teaching songs and sad love songs and sometimes fishermen’s ditties that make the ground sway under us. We are not scared.
It’s a fisher song that Amaa hears. She slams the window shut and locks it, her lips a pale tight line, her fingers trembling. “I should beat you,” she says.
“Like you beat Hemal?”
Tears pool in her eyes, glint on her cheeks. She stumbles from the room.
Ataa is grave the next morning. Amaa is ill. Abjit says, “Is she mist-sick?” Ataa does not answer.
“It’s Shaya’s fault,” says Abjit.
Ataa says, “Something is in the mist.”
I shrug. “Just Hemal.”
“No,” says Ataa. “Hemal’s dead. Stoning is part of culture law; it keeps us safe, keeps the dead from walking.”
Nira and I look at each other. We know.
Amaa does not get better, not properly. She forgets where she is. She forgets what she is doing. Now it is Amaa who must stay at home and safe.
So Ataa inks caste marks into Abjit’s forehead, and he starts running messages, though he limps. Nira and I teach my little sisters. We teach them the city and we teach them Hemal’s songs to find the way. And we teach them not to sing around Amaa.
We keep the love songs and fishing songs to ourselves.
When Nira and I are ten, Amaa calls me Hemal. I run outside, leaving Nira to soothe her.
The next day, Ataa gives us our caste marks.
Nira and I go everywhere. Though we are little, we are fast and we never lose our way. Nobody knows how we do it. Nobody else sees Hemal. The mist is not threatening where she is. It is her. And though her eye and lip are swollen black and blood drips over her caste marks, she never frightens us.
We get work at the palace, which makes Ataa proud and Abjit jealous, and there we meet Bhatar. He is like a fire-shadow: dark, long, and quick. Caste marks shadow his eyes, for he is cousin to the King. He is sixteen. Nira and I are eleven now, and it doesn’t seem so old.
Sometimes Bhatar comes with us when we run messages, which breaks caste law. He says he doesn’t care about castes and who are we to question the King’s cousin? He says the mist has nothing left to scare him with. It took his sister, and the thing that came back tried to kill him. He unmade it; he says it wept and begged with his sister’s voice. He was eleven then. Like us.
I think he is brave. Nira says he is reckless.
Bhatar unmakes the mist with a whirling, stomping dance. Where he hits the ground even the dead market grows more real; gleaming brassware clunks when we tap it, and we smell rotten fish and mangoes and the sea. Bhatar tries to teach us, but we cannot keep his rhythm any more than he can keep our tune. He says that may be for the best; songs break culture law. I say, “Is everyone a lawbreaker?” Nira and Bhatar have no answers.
With dance and song together we thin the mist to haze, till one day the sun breaks through. We do not expect it to hurt. While we blink away tears, the mist pulls over us once more.
Bhatar grins and hugs me. “We’ll do it again,” he says.
I say, “How does lawbreaking thin the mist?”
On the day we dance back the royal gardens and bring sunlight streaming down over the whole palace, the mist pulls away to reveal two gardeners and a palace servant. Adults. I open my mouth, do not know what to say; but the mist keeps rolling back behind them, back and down, leaving the hilltop bare to the sun. I point. From above, it looks like a silent white ocean.
The next time we meet, the same three adults come trailing hopefully after the children. Bhatar starts to teach them the dance. He is seventeen. Nira and I are twelve, and the adults look more like him than we do.
There was a pavilion in the gardens, made of painted wood and slate, where Bhatar fought his sister. It became forgotten. But he remembers, so we learn it for a meeting place.
Mist and rushes grow so thick that Bhatar must dance the path into being. His first step sinks in past the ankle, but Nira and I know better than to scream, and his second step comes down on slate paving, and his third. Octagons and squares tiled together. His seventh step finds the boards of a wooden bridge all painted red. We follow, fifteen people of nine different castes, singing what he has shown us into memory.
The pavilion is eight-sided, red with black beams and yellow rails and grey slate floors. Painted on each wall is a palace-caste man at work. The roof is fringed yellow silk. Sun shines through it, though mist pours down the walls.
Bhatar starts sounding like the adults he talks to. Nira and I have work, so we don’t hear everything he says. But he takes me aside and says that the mist is our fear. “I think it will grow, Shaya of the questions,” he says, “until we stop hurting one another.” Worry lines his forehead and his eyes.
Nira thinks he is wrong. But though there are forty-one of us now, of thirteen castes, she says this only to me and to Hemal.
When I am fourteen, though Nira is still thirteen, Abjit pulls me into a dusty corner and kisses me. I start crying. I know what happens to lawbreakers.
“Don’t be a baby,” Abjit says. “I’m going to marry you.”
I snatch my hand away, run to Nira. “What happened?” she says.
I tell her. She pulls back, her lips smiling upside-down. “I don’t want you to kiss Abjit,” she says. “If you must kiss a boy, kiss Bhatar.”
I lean forwards. Her lips are softer than his, and warmer, and her breath is sweet. I feel her upside-down smile melt.
Nira and I walk hand-in-hand to the pavilion the next day. Hemal holds the mist thick around us.
Bhatar is not there. Nobody is. We wait, each with an arm around the other; then Nira tries dancing again. Watching her, I make my first song. A love song to my dearest friend, its hesitant rhythm following her dance and the sunlight that catches on her hair. I find myself smiling as I sing.
We are kissing again when the children come running up. Their sandals are loud, slap-slap, on the solid path and bridge. We pull apart.
“You’re kissing,” says one.
“You’re girls,” says another.
“Where’s Bhatar?” says Nira.
They fall silent. And stay silent, until the pavilion is full of sweaty, shifting, wordless bodies. I say, “Where’s Bhatar?”
“He spoke to the King, his cousin,” says somebody. Uwati, who is sixteen and often with him. “We brought sunlight into the court, pushed the mist far away. Bhatar said we must teach everyone to sing, to dance, but the king said that was noisemaking and public gathering, and did Bhatar mean to teach the rabble not to heed the law?”
“He told the King that the law brought the mist,” says Yash. “Fear of the law and the killings.” Yash is old. He is tall and thin and has a beard, and children. But now he looks frightened. “He told the King that the law must change.”
I look around. We are fewer than we were.
“And?” says Nira.
Uwati says, small and thin in the silence, “And he’s dead. So is everyone who tried to help him. It was so fast…”