Chapter 1: Rangmanch (The Stage)

Ritu Natraj had performed hundreds of times — almost since the day she could stand — but her heart still hammered like a dholak player losing tempo as the caravan rolled into Haldipura.

The town was unremarkable. A market town in the Vasishtha Rajya, the kind of town that existed because two trade roads crossed and someone had built a chai stall at the intersection and the chai stall had attracted a blacksmith and the blacksmith had attracted a temple and the temple had attracted a bazaar and the bazaar had attracted the particular human density that transforms a crossroads into a place with a name. Haldipura. The town of turmeric. Named for the crop that turned the surrounding fields the particular shade of dusty gold that made the landscape look like it had been painted by a deity with a limited palette and a generous hand.

But tonight, Haldipura was not unremarkable. Tonight, Haldipura was the town where Ritu Natraj would perform the lead role for the first time.

The first time. Sixteen years of watching from the wings — sixteen years of playing the servant girl, the village woman, the voiceless figure in the background whose job was to hold a prop and look present — and tonight she would be Rani Kasturi. The Warrior Queen. The woman who fought the Mayavi Rani and won. The role that Noor had played for three years and that Noor had surrendered not because Noor wanted to surrender it but because Noor was six months pregnant with her second child and the Warrior Queen's costume did not accommodate a belly and the performance's climactic sword fight was, according to Mata Ashwini the midwife in the last town, "an excellent way to deliver a baby two months early."

Reins held loose in her hands, Ritu sat next to Papa on the driver's bench. The wagon jolted over a rut and her teeth clacked together. The oxen — Motu and Chhotu, the names as inevitable for a pair of oxen as Gauri and Shankar for a pair of anything — plodded with the resigned patience of animals who had been pulling this wagon since before Ritu was born and who would continue pulling it until their joints gave or the road ended, whichever came first.

"Nervous?" Papa asked. Devraj Natraj — Dev to the troupe, Papa to his children, "that tall Nat fellow" to the towns they passed through — was a man whose face had been designed for kindness. Wide forehead, soft eyes, the moustache that drooped at the ends in the style of Rajasthani men who believed that the direction of a moustache indicated the direction of the soul: upward for pride, downward for gentleness. Papa's moustache pointed firmly earthward.

"I'm not nervous," Ritu said. "I'm prepared."

"The two are not mutually exclusive."

"Papa, I've rehearsed this role since I was twelve. I know every line, every gesture, every breath. If the audience throws rotten vegetables, it won't be because I forgot anything."

"The audience in Haldipura doesn't throw vegetables. They throw chappals. Their vegetables are too expensive."

Something bumped Ritu's back and she startled.

"Might as well open this now," Amba said through the wagon's open window. Amba Natraj — Mama to no one's face and everyone's understanding — was the kind of woman whose presence preceded her by approximately three minutes. You knew Amba was coming before you saw her, the way you knew a monsoon was coming before you felt the rain: by the change in atmospheric pressure, by the particular shift in the behavior of everyone around her, by the birds going quiet. She was leaning over Ritu's bunk with a rare smile — the rare smile, the one that involved both sides of her mouth instead of the skeptical half that was her default — holding a package wrapped in brown paper and tied with jute string.

"Happy birthday, meri jaan."

Papa chuckled and took the reins. Presents were rare. The Natraj troupe made enough coin to eat and enough to mend the wagons and enough to feed the oxen and not enough for anything that could be called extra, the particular economics of traveling performers in the Vasishtha Rajya being: survival, always and only survival, with occasional bursts of almost-prosperity followed by immediate returns to baseline.

"Thank you, Mama." Ritu took the package and tore into it. Her fingers found fabric — shiny fabric, the kind of fabric that reflected light and that therefore cost more than the dull fabrics that the troupe normally wore and that was therefore an extravagance and therefore a love-offering, the economics of fabric being the economics of affection in families that measured love in what they could sew.

She pulled it out.

An emerald-green lehenga. The fabric shimmered — not the cheap shimmer of synthetic cloth but the deep shimmer of silk, actual silk, the silk that came from the workshops in Patnagari and that cost more per metre than the troupe earned in a day. The choli was fitted, the neckline rounded, the chest embroidered with gold zari work forming a pattern of sunflowers — sunflowers that Ritu didn't recognise as significant but that were, she would later learn, the symbol of a kingdom she didn't know existed.

The skirt was full — not the modest fullness of everyday ghagras but the performance fullness, the fullness that spun, the fullness that caught the firelight and turned a girl into a queen.

"You only turn sixteen once," Papa said, and his moustache twitched in the way it twitched when he was trying not to cry. "Mama and Noor worked on it for two months."

Noor had been the troupe's seamstress since Lakku married her four years ago — Noor, who had left a settled life in Barmer to join a traveling Nat family, a decision that her own family still considered evidence of either madness or love, and since Noor's family did not believe in love as a basis for major life decisions, they had settled on madness.

"It's perfect for Rani Kasturi," Ritu said, and she meant it with every thread.

"The sword belt attaches here." Noor's voice came from inside the wagon — she was lying on the bunk, the pregnancy making standing optional and lying mandatory, her hand reaching through the window to point at a loop sewn into the lehenga's waistband. "I reinforced it. The last costume couldn't hold the sword and the audience could see it wobble."

"A wobbling sword is not regal," Amba said.

"A wobbling sword is comedy," Ritu said. "And this is a tragedy."

"All Nat performances are comedies," Amba said. "Even the tragedies. Because the audience laughs when we cry and cries when we laugh and the confusion is the art."

*

Haldipura's market square was the performance space. No stage — the troupe rarely had time or materials for a proper stage, and the Vasishtha Rajya's towns were accustomed to ground-level performance, the audience standing or squatting in a semicircle, the performers using the grass as their stage and the sky as their backdrop.

By the time the sun was setting — the particular Vasishtha sunset, orange and enormous, the sun dropping behind the turmeric fields like a coin dropping into a well — the troupe had set up. Lakku's wagon served as the backstage barrier, painted with the troupe's name in faded Devanagari: NATRAJ NATAK MANDALI. Devraj's voice boomed through the market square, drawing the crowd.

"Ladies and gentlemen, bhaiyon aur behno, prepare yourselves for a tale of love and betrayal, of queens and sorceresses, of swords and stars..."

Ritu was in the wagon. Changing into the emerald lehenga. The fabric slid over her skin — cool, the silk carrying the particular temperature of evening, the chill that said: the sun is going and the performance is coming and the two events are connected because Nat performances happen in the space between day and night, in the liminal hour, the hour that belongs to neither the sun nor the moon but to the stories.

Amba checked her makeup. The makeup was traditional — the kajal thick, the face powdered white (the irony of dark-skinned performers whitening their faces to play queens was not lost on Ritu, but the tradition was the tradition and the tradition was older than irony), the lips reddened with kumkum, the whole effect transforming Ritu from a sixteen-year-old Nat girl into something that approximated royalty in the particular way that performance approximates reality: convincingly enough for the audience, unconvincingly enough for the performer.

"Ritu." Amba's voice was the low voice, the not-performance voice, the voice that meant the words were real. "Use your gift."

The word — gift — hung in the air the way incense hangs in a temple: present, fragrant, slowly dissipating. Amba had never called Ritu gifted before. Amba had called Ritu stubborn (daily), dramatic (hourly), exhausting (every other word), but never gifted. The gifting was — Ritu felt it in her chest, the particular warmth that comes from a parent's unexpected praise, the warmth that is more warming than any fabric.

"I will, Mama."

Outside, the crowd was gathering. Ritu could hear them — the rustle of bodies finding positions, the murmur of conversations, the particular pre-performance energy of a crowd that is about to be entertained and that is, in its anticipation, already halfway to entertainment.

Lakku was first. The entrance — the villain's entrance, because in the Natraj Natak Mandali's version of Rani Kasturi, the Mayavi Rani appeared first, establishing the threat before the hero countered it. Lakku was good — Lakku was, truthfully, the troupe's best performer, the kind of performer who could make an audience hate him in three seconds and love him in five, the emotional range of a man who had been performing since birth and whose body was an instrument tuned to the particular frequency of crowd response.

Then Ritu's cousin Suraj — playing the King, the role that required height and voice and very little actual acting, the King being the kind of role that existed primarily so that the Queen would have someone to be married to and someone to rescue and someone to deliver the line "My Queen, the kingdom is saved" at the end while the Queen did all the actual saving.

Then Ritu.

She entered from behind the wagon. The crowd — perhaps two hundred people, the population of Haldipura minus the infants and the elderly and the particular subset of townsfolk who refused to watch Nat performances on principle (the principle being: Nats are low-caste, their art is vulgar, their presence is pollution, the particular cruelty of a society that watched the art and despised the artist) — the crowd saw the emerald lehenga first. The fabric caught the torchlight — the firelight from the four mashaals that Lakku had planted in the ground, the traditional Nat performance lighting, the fire that was both illumination and danger, the particular aesthetic of a performance that could, if a performer stepped wrong, result in a singed costume.

Then they saw Ritu.

Sixteen. Dark eyes — the particular dark that was not brown but something deeper, the dark that people in the towns sometimes commented on, the dark that Amba deflected with "she takes after her father's mother" and that Devraj deflected with silence, because both parents knew that Ritu's eyes did not come from either of their families and that the origin of Ritu's eyes was the question they had agreed, sixteen years ago, never to answer.

She spoke the first line. Rani Kasturi's first line — the line that the role demanded and that every actress who had played the role had delivered in the traditional way, with the chin up and the voice pitched to reach the last row.

"I am Kasturi. I was born in fire and I will die in fire and between the fires I will rule."

The audience was quiet. The particular quiet that means: we are listening. Not the bored quiet, not the confused quiet. The listening quiet. The quiet that every performer lives for, the quiet that says: you have us. Proceed.

Ritu proceeded.

The performance was — Ritu felt it happening, the way athletes describe the zone, the particular state of consciousness where the body and the mind and the story merge and the performer is no longer performing but being, the being that is the highest form of the art and that cannot be taught but only accessed, the door that opens when the preparation meets the moment.

She fought the Mayavi Rani (Lakku, in the sorceress's black robes, the fake sword connecting with Ritu's fake sword in the choreographed sequence that they had rehearsed two hundred times and that was, tonight, executing perfectly — the clang of wood on wood, the spin, the duck, the particular physicality that made the fight look real even though both combatants knew exactly where each blow would land). She wept for the kidnapped King (the tears that Ritu could summon at will — real tears, not glycerine, the particular talent of a performer who could access emotion the way a musician accesses notes: deliberately, precisely, the emotion arriving when called). She rallied her army (the army being Suraj and two cousins with wooden shields, the three of them representing the ten thousand soldiers that the story required and that the budget did not accommodate).

And then — the climax.

The moment in the story when Rani Kasturi confronts the Mayavi Rani for the final time. The moment when the Queen must reach deep — deeper than sword-skill, deeper than strategy, deeper than the royal authority that is her birthright — and find the power that defeats evil not through violence but through truth.

Ritu spoke the line: "I am the door between what was and what will be. I am the border. I am the boundary. I am the passage."

The words were from the script. The words were the traditional words, the words that every Rani Kasturi had spoken in every version of the play performed by every Nat troupe in the Vasishtha Rajya. The words were ordinary.

But what happened next was not ordinary.

Ritu felt it — in her chest, in her hands, in the space behind her eyes. A pulling. Not a muscle-pulling, not a physical pulling. A pulling at the air itself, as if the air in front of her was fabric and her mind was fingers and the fingers were finding the seam and the seam was asking to be opened.

The air shimmered.

The shimmer was — Ritu saw it and the seeing was like seeing a colour for the first time, like seeing a colour that had always been there but that her eyes had not known how to register until this moment, this exact moment, on this stage that was not a stage, in this town that was not important, in this body that was sixteen years old and that was, without Ritu's knowledge or consent, doing something that should have been impossible.

The shimmer became a line. A vertical line, glowing faintly gold. The gold of — Ritu didn't know what. The gold of something old. The gold of something that had been waiting.

The audience gasped. The gasp was the collective gasp — two hundred people inhaling simultaneously, the sound that an audience makes when the special effect exceeds expectations and when the audience has decided that the special effect is, in fact, a special effect, because what else could it be? The Nats were known for their tricks — smoke and mirrors and the particular stagecraft that substituted for the court magic that Nat troupes were forbidden to use.

The line widened. For a fraction of a second — a heartbeat, less than a heartbeat — the line became an opening, and through the opening Ritu saw: a garden. A garden that was not the market square and not the turmeric fields and not any garden she had ever seen. A garden where sunflowers grew — enormous sunflowers, the kind that don't exist in the Vasishtha Rajya, the kind that grow only in stories and in the memories of a kingdom that was destroyed sixteen years ago.

Then the line closed. The shimmer vanished. The air was air again.

The audience cheered. The cheering was the cheering of an audience that had witnessed an excellent trick — the best trick they'd seen from a Nat troupe, perhaps the best trick they'd ever seen — and that was applauding the craft, not knowing that no craft had been involved, that what they had witnessed was not a trick but a door, and the door was real, and the door had been opened by a sixteen-year-old girl who did not know she could open doors.

Ritu finished the performance. She spoke the remaining lines — the victory lines, the resolution lines, the "My Queen, the kingdom is saved" line delivered by Suraj — but the speaking was automatic, the body performing while the mind was elsewhere, the mind in the space where the shimmer had been, the mind asking: what was that? What did I do? What was the garden? Why sunflowers?

After — after the crowd dispersed and the coin was collected (good haul, Amba's expression said, the expression of a woman who counted coin the way farmers counted rain: obsessively, gratefully, with the understanding that the next drought was always imminent) and the mashaals were doused and the wagons were being prepared for the night — Noor found Ritu.

Noor, who had been watching from inside Lakku's wagon. Noor, whose view of the performance had been from a particular angle — the angle that was not the audience's angle but the performer's angle, the angle from behind, the angle that saw the performer's body instead of the performer's face.

"Ritu." Noor's voice was quiet. Not the quiet of calm — the quiet of someone who was managing a large emotion with inadequate tools.

"Did you see it?" Ritu asked. Because if anyone had seen it — not the trick, not the shimmer-as-stagecraft — but the real thing, the door, the opening — it would be Noor, who watched from behind and who noticed what the audience missed.

"I saw your hands," Noor said. "Your hands were — Ritu, your hands were glowing. Not like fire. Like — like the light was coming from inside your skin. From your palms. The gold light. And then the air opened and I saw — I saw the garden."

"You saw the garden."

"The sunflowers."

"You saw the sunflowers."

"Ritu, what was that?"

Ritu didn't know. Ritu didn't know what the shimmer was or what the garden was or why the sunflowers had been there or why her hands had glowed or what the pulling feeling was or how to make it happen again or how to make it not happen again. Ritu didn't know anything except: the air had opened. And she had opened it. And the opening had felt — not wrong. Not frightening. Not unnatural. The opening had felt like coming home. Like walking through a door that she had always known was there but had never been able to see.

"Don't tell Mama," Ritu said.

"Ritu—"

"Promise me, Noor. Don't tell Mama. Not yet. Not until I understand."

Noor looked at her — the look of a woman who was carrying one secret (the pregnancy that made her ribs ache) and was now being asked to carry another (the golden shimmer that had turned the air into a door) and who was calculating, in the particular mathematics of a Natraj family member, the cost-benefit of the carrying.

"I promise," Noor said. "But, Ritu — your mother will find out. Amba always finds out."

"Amba always finds out" was the Natraj family's universal law. More reliable than gravity. More predictable than sunrise. The law that governed all attempts at secrecy within the troupe and that had a perfect success rate.

But tonight — tonight, Ritu needed the secret to hold. Just for one night. One night to sit in the wagon and look at her hands — the hands that had glowed, the hands that had opened a door — and to wonder what she was.

What she was becoming.

What she had always been.