Chapter 3: Devgad Burns

Seven days.

That was the grace period Prithvika had given them. Seven days to dismantle a life.

Tanvi spent the first day pretending it wasn't happening. She went to the oyster beds at dawn, the way she always did, her feet following the mudflat paths that her muscles had memorised years ago. She checked the eastern beds. Counted shells. Measured water temperature with the cheap digital thermometer she'd bought from a marine supply shop in Ratnagiri. She texted her buyer in Mumbai—a high-end restaurant in Bandra that paid three hundred rupees per oyster and called them artisanal Konkan pearls on the menu, which Tanvi found hilarious because there was nothing artisanal about kneeling in salt mud at five in the morning while crabs tried to eat your toes.

Normal. She was being normal. She was being aggressively normal.

Her phone buzzed.

Tejas: Stop pretending

She didn't respond.

Tejas: I can feel you pretending from here Tejas: It feels like denial mixed with bombil

Despite everything, her lips twitched.

Go away,* she typed. *I'm working.

Tejas: You're standing in a mudflat at 6am performing normalcy for an audience of crabs. That's not working. That's theatre.

He wasn't wrong. He was never wrong about her. That was the cruelty of the twin bond—you could lie to the whole world, but the person who'd shared your first heartbeat would always know.

She pocketed her phone and looked out at the Arabian Sea. Grey-blue in the pre-dawn light. Calm, deceptively so—Devgad fishermen knew that the sea's calm face was a performance, the same way they knew that a dog wagging its tail might still bite. The Konkan coast was beautiful and treacherous in equal measure, and the people who lived on it had learned to hold both truths simultaneously.

I have seven days,* she thought. *Seven days to figure out how to leave everything I've built. My oysters. My farm. My house. Mihir.

Mihir. God.

She hadn't told him. Couldn't tell him. What would she say? Hey, so, funny story—I'm half-divine, my dead mother was impregnated by a celestial being, my brother and I have supernatural powers, and a goddess in a moss sari showed up at dinner last night and said I have to go compete in deadly trials or my uncontrolled power will destroy the Konkan coastline. Sol kadhi?

The absurdity of it made her want to laugh. The reality of it made her want to drown herself in the mudflat and let the oysters build a pearl around her grief.

---

The second day, Mihir came to the oyster beds.

He arrived the way he always did—on his old Royal Enfield Bullet, the black one with the dented tank that he refused to repair because the dent was from the time he'd dropped the bike while teaching Tanvi to ride, and he said that dent was the most romantic thing he owned. He was carrying two cutting chai in those small, disposable clay cups—the kulhad chai that the roadside stall between Devgad and Vijaydurg made with so much ginger that your sinuses cleared for three days.

"Peace offering," he said, handing her a cup. "Your uncle says you've been weird since Tuesday."

"My uncle thinks I'm weird permanently."

"He's not wrong." Mihir sat on the volcanic rock next to her. His hands—broad, calloused, stained with wood oil from the workshop—wrapped around his chai cup with the same gentle precision he used on his furniture. Everything Mihir touched, he touched carefully. Deliberately. As if the world were made of something fragile that deserved his attention.

It was one of the things she loved about him. And right now, it was one of the things that made the lie unbearable.

"Tanu." He wasn't looking at the sea. He was looking at her, and his face had that expression—the patient one, the one that said I will sit here until you tell me what's wrong, and I will not be the first to break. The Patil family stubbornness, which was legendary in Devgad. Mihir's grandfather had reportedly argued with a coconut tree for forty-five minutes because it was growing at an angle he found aesthetically offensive.

"I might have to go away for a while," she said. The words came out clumsy, malformed, like fish thrown onto a dock—flapping and gasping and thoroughly out of their element.

His chai cup paused halfway to his mouth. "Go where?"

"I can't—I don't know exactly."

"For how long?"

"I don't know that either."

The silence between them was filled by the sea, the distant put-put of a fishing boat's engine, the shriek of a Brahminy kite circling overhead. Devgad's soundtrack. The background music of every conversation she'd ever had, every kiss she'd ever shared with this man on this beach under these birds.

"Is this about the thing?" Mihir asked quietly.

Tanvi's blood went cold. "What thing?"

"The thing you don't tell me about. The thing that makes the streetlights flicker when you're upset. The thing that made your phone crack last week—and don't say you dropped it, Tanu, I've seen you drop that phone from the top of the Sindhudurg fort wall and it didn't get a scratch." He turned the chai cup in his hands. "The thing I've known about since we were fifteen and you accidentally made the entire Ganapati visarjan procession's diya flames turn blue."

She stared at him. "You—you knew?"

"Of course I knew." He said this the way you'd say of course the sea is salty or of course Devgad mangoes are the best in the world—as if it were a fundamental, self-evident truth that only a fool would question. "Tanu, I've loved you since I was twelve and fell out of a mango tree. You think I didn't notice that my girlfriend can make lightbulbs explode with her mind?"

"I'm not your girlfriend. We're not—we don't—Devgad doesn't—"

"Devgad doesn't do labels. I know. We have an understanding." He made air quotes with the hand not holding chai. "Tanu, I understand plenty. I understand that there is something inside you that you've been hiding from everyone, and I understand that it's getting bigger, and I understand that whatever showed up at your house on Tuesday night was connected to it."

"How do you know something showed up on Tuesday?"

"Because every jasmine plant in a two-kilometre radius bloomed overnight. In March. Out of season. The old ladies at the Mahalaxmi temple are calling it a miracle. The botanist at the agriculture college in Dapoli is having a nervous breakdown." He drank his chai. "I'm a woodcarver, Tanu. I work with natural materials. I notice when nature does something unnatural."

The chai in her hands was cooling. The ginger burned on her tongue like a small, domestic fire—nothing compared to the inferno building in her chest, but grounding in its way. Real. Concrete. A flavour she could hold onto while the rest of her life liquefied.

"I'm half-divine," she said. And then, because the words sounded insane even to her: "Apparently."

"Okay."

"Okay? Mihir, I just told you I'm half-god."

"Half-divine, you said. Is there a difference?"

"I—yes? No? I don't know. The point is, there are these trials—competitions—for people like me and Tejas. Divine beings run them. If we don't compete, our power grows out of control and destroys—" She waved vaguely at the sea, the village, the entirety of the Konkan coast. "Everything."

Mihir considered this. He had the consideration speed of a man who builds furniture—slow, thorough, measuring twice before even picking up the saw.

"When do you leave?"

"Five days."

"Will you come back?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. "I don't know."

He nodded. Finished his chai. Set the cup down on the rock—gently, the way he set everything down, because Mihir Patil treated the world with a care it probably didn't deserve.

"Then I'm coming with you to wherever you go, for as far as they'll let me."

"Mihir—"

"No." Firm. The Patil stubbornness, the coconut-tree-arguing stubbornness, the stubbornness that had survived a broken arm and a Kolhapur hospital and six weeks in a cast and still come back grinning. "You're not doing this alone. Tejas will be there, but Tejas is your brother, and brothers are good for fighting beside but terrible for the quiet parts. The parts where you're scared and you need someone to make chai and not ask questions. That's me. That's what I do. You know this."

She was crying. She hadn't noticed until a tear dropped into her chai and she tasted salt mixed with ginger and realised that she was, against all her instincts and training and the carefully constructed emotional fortifications of a woman who had spent twenty-four years hiding a cosmic secret, weeping openly on a volcanic rock in front of a man who carved furniture and loved her.

"I can't take you where I'm going," she said. "It's not—it's not a place for—"

"For mortals?" He raised an eyebrow. "Is that the word? Mortals?"

"Don't make fun of—"

"I'm not making fun. I'm clarifying vocabulary." He reached over and wiped the tear from her cheek with his thumb. Sawdust under his nail. Wood oil in the creases of his palm. The smell of teak and honest work. "Tanu, I've known you were different since we were children. I didn't know the word for it. Now I do. It doesn't change anything."

"It changes everything."

"It changes nothing." He said it with such absolute certainty that for a moment—just a moment—she believed him.

---

The remaining days passed in the particular time-distortion of impending departure—simultaneously too fast and impossibly slow, each hour both precious and unbearable. Tanvi trained her assistant at the oyster farm, a nineteen-year-old girl named Pallavi from Kunkeshwar who had the work ethic of a monsoon and the social skills of a territorial crab. She'd be fine. The oysters would be fine. Everything Tanvi had built would continue without her, which was both reassuring and existentially devastating.

Tejas handled his own dismantling with less grace. He'd been living in Malvan, running a small boat tour operation for tourists who wanted to see the Sindhudurg fort up close—a business that was sixty percent charm, twenty percent actual sailing knowledge, and twenty percent Tejas's ability to tell increasingly outrageous lies about the fort's history while maintaining a straight face. He closed the business in two days. Sold the boat to a fisherman named Ganesh who'd been eyeing it for months. Packed his life into a rucksack that was, characteristically, too small for the amount of stuff he'd tried to cram into it.

On the sixth night, Kaka cooked.

Not the way he usually cooked—efficient, practical, fuel-to-body. This was different. This was a funeral feast for a life that wasn't dead yet. He made everything. Solachi kadhi, the real kind, with fresh kokum and hand-scraped coconut. Fish curry with rawas—the Indian salmon that cost four hundred rupees a kilo at the Devgad fish market and that Kaka usually refused to buy because he said paying four hundred rupees for a fish was a sign of moral decay. Bharleli vangi, the stuffed baby aubergines that had been Suvarna's favourite, according to Kaka, who had never before volunteered information about the twins' mother's food preferences.

They ate on the floor of the main room, on a straw mat, the way the Ranade family had eaten for generations. Kaka sat with his legs crossed, his plate balanced on his knee, eating with his right hand with the elegant efficiency of a man who had never used cutlery and saw no reason to start. Tejas ate like he always did—too fast, dropping rice, getting curry on his shirt. Tanvi ate slowly, tasting everything, encoding every flavour into memory: the tang of the kokum, the heat of the green chilli, the sweetness of the coconut, the salt of the fish, the bitterness of the karela that Kaka had included because he believed a meal without bitterness was a lie.

"Kaka," Tejas said, halfway through his third helping. "Will you be okay?"

It was such a simple question. Such a devastating one.

Shripati Ranade looked at his nephew. At the boy he'd raised. At the young man who had his dead sister's eyes and her dead lover's power and a smile that could convince the sea to give up its fish voluntarily. He looked at him, and for the second time in Tanvi's life, she saw something crack in her uncle's face.

"I have been okay for twenty-four years," he said. "I will be okay for as long as it takes."

Tejas reached across the mat and put his hand on Kaka's knee. Just that. No words. The gesture of a young man who had been raised by a man who spoke in gestures rather than sentences, and who had learned that sometimes a hand on a knee says more than any speech ever could.

Tanvi looked at them and felt her heart do something complicated—contracting and expanding simultaneously, grief and love braided together so tightly that she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. The hum in her chest was quiet tonight. Even the power in her blood, it seemed, knew enough to be still during a goodbye.

---

The seventh morning. Dawn.

Prithvika came at the exact moment the sun broke the waterline—a disc of beaten gold rising from the Arabian Sea, painting the sky the colours of a bruise healing in reverse. She materialised at the end of the path that led to the Ranade house, and this time she wasn't alone.

Behind her stood two figures that Tanvi's mortal brain struggled to process. They were—large. Not physically large, though they were that too. Large in the way that a thunderstorm is large, or a cliff face, or the moment before a car crash when time stretches like taffy and you can see every detail of the thing that's about to change your life.

"Messengers," Prithvika said, by way of introduction. "They will escort you to the proving grounds."

Kaka stood in the doorway. He was wearing his best shirt—the white one with the collar, the one he wore to weddings and funerals and the annual Devgad fishing festival. He'd combed his hair. He looked like a man who had decided that if his children were leaving for a potentially fatal divine competition, he was going to see them off looking respectable.

Tanvi went to him first.

She wrapped her arms around his neck—she had to reach up; even at twenty-four, he was still taller—and pressed her face into his shoulder, and breathed in the smell of him: salt, fish, coconut oil, the faint camphor from the small shrine he kept in the bedroom, the accumulated scent of a man who had been her whole world for her entire life.

"I'll come back," she whispered.

"I know." He held her tight enough that she could feel the tremor in his arms—the first and only time she'd ever felt Shripati Ranade's body betray his composure. "You are a Ranade. Ranades always come back."

"That's not historically accurate. Ranades also die spectacularly and get songs written about them."

"Then come back, or I'll write a very bad song." His voice cracked on the last word. He released her before either of them could break further.

Tejas's goodbye was shorter. Rougher. He gripped Kaka's forearm in that particular man-to-man hold that Indian families use when hugging feels too vulnerable, and said, "Keep the oysters alive."

"The oysters are your sister's problem."

"Keep them alive anyway. She'll need something to come back to."

Then Mihir was there—he'd come on the Bullet, the engine still ticking as it cooled in the morning air. He'd brought two kulhad chais. Of course he had. He handed one to Tanvi, one to Tejas, and stood there in the Devgad dawn with sawdust on his jeans and love on his face and absolutely no idea what to do with either.

"I'll wait," he said. To Tanvi. Just to Tanvi. "However long it takes."

"You shouldn't—"

"Not a discussion. Not a negotiation. I'll wait." He kissed her. Once. On the forehead. The most chaste, the most devastating kiss of her life—his lips warm and dry, tasting of chai and certainty, pressed against her skin for exactly three seconds. Three seconds that contained their entire history and everything she was about to lose.

"Come back," he said. "Or I'll come find you. I don't care if I have to argue with every divine being in existence. The Patil stubbornness extends to celestial realms."

She almost laughed. Almost cried. Did both, simultaneously—the emotional whiplash of leaving everything you love for something you didn't choose.

She turned to Prithvika.

"We're ready."

The goddess extended her hand. Her palm was warm—impossibly warm, like sun-heated earth, like the Konkan soil in May, like the inside of a temple after hours of burning diyas. Tanvi took it. Tejas took her other hand.

The world dissolved.

Devgad disappeared—the sea, the mudflats, the oyster beds, the jackfruit tree, the red Mangalore tiles, the man with sawdust on his jeans, the uncle in his best shirt, the smell of bombil and jasmine and twenty-four years of hiding.

And in its place: light. Everywhere. The colour of everything and nothing, the frequency of creation itself, the sound of the universe inhaling before it speaks.

The twins were elsewhere.

The trials had begun.

---