Long Hidden: Speculative Fiction from the Margins of History (14 page)

Prabhu returns the gesture sincerely, even bowing slightly. “I thank you for coming, Munira. I did not want to arrive at the girl’s house without a woman present. It would have been – untoward.”

Cani raises an eyebrow at that – Munira had hardly charmed her parents – but then again, Thanthai would probably have thrown out a lone middle-aged man who came to their house and asked to speak to his daughter.

“You owe me a favour, Prabhu, and don’t think I won’t collect,” she warns, opening the iron temple gate and disappearing as she walks through it. Cani’s dream feels somehow lighter with her departure.

Prabhu watches the swinging gate for few long moments before shaking his head as if to clear it. “Now, madam.” He tilts his head towards her. “Let us begin.”

Prabhu teaches her to stretch the boundaries of her dream by slow degrees on their long unfurling journey to Mysore. The first night she is only able to paint in thanthai’s liquor shop, but a few weeks into their journey she is able to build up all of Black Town and then more, farther, a dream that encompasses White Town and the glistening, gleaming river rushing away across the plain and pulling at the very edge of her consciousness as it goes.

By the evenings her mind already feels hammered thin with their cart-jolted lessons in history and courtly etiquette, but then she slips into dream and Prabhu asks for more. Her mind convulses and writhes and spreads and she populates the streets of Madras with much-hated mamis and the baker’s boy down the street with the shy smile and the street-sweepers and vegetable sellers and smell of sizzling mustard from their neighbour’s in the early morning and even La Bourdonnais on the French flagship, watching her dream-town with his brass-handled telescope hung with a glittering chain.

She tries to imagine Mama in their room, but there is something wrong with the way her starched second-best work sari drapes against her waist, something not quite right with how her hands move as she rolls chapatis on the mat, how her eyelashes catch the flour in the air. Cani changes her, cautiously at first, but then more desperately, trying to recall exactly how her lips stretched, just so, and as she shifts and pulls on those delicate details the edges of her dream begin curling up like blackened paper; the river boils to dust, the ships capsize, and the trees all turn to mice running in screaming circles but Mama’s face still isn’t quite right–

“Cani,” Prabhu interrupts urgently, voice shaking. “Focus, madam! Keep your dream stable!”

She turns her head and all the walls turn transparent; the perspective buckles and heaves, and she is looking down at Madras through the lens of a telescope perched on the back of an enormous, jewel-beaked eagle. Prabhu pulls himself up from one of the eagle’s talons and clutches her around the waist, muttering a prayer to Shiva and Saraswati. “O, whatever god is listening,” he continues his litany somewhat blasphemously, “please save me from overenthusiastic little ladies!” He peers over her shoulder, and she follows his gaze: her carefully constructed Madras is a ruin.

Cani wonders whether Prabhu is afraid of heights, and pulls at the eagle’s neck: it wheels in a wide arc in the cloud-stippled sky and Prabhu’s prayers intensify. He manages to save enough breath to mutter, “We will try again tomorrow night,” before his nerve breaks. “Now, can we please come to… ground level? The eagle has a hungry look in his eye, and people always tell me I have a mouse-like aspect.”

Instead, Cani urges her eagle on faster, plucking its feathers absently and tossing them at the boiling, rupturing buildings of her city. She watches as the feathers explode like cannonballs in the noonday sun, and only lands when all of Black Town is flattened.

When they reach Mysore, Cani is presented at the weekly durbar of the Nawab of the Carnatic, Muhammad Anwaruddin. “I am not nervous,” she says, as they wait to be announced.

Prabhu smothers his laugh with a cough. “Imagine it is a dream,” he advises. “Imagine that you are someone else.”

Cani asks, “Is he a good man?” Later she cannot remember whether Prabhu said “Oh yes,” or perhaps, “He is my nawab,” or perhaps “Who are we to judge those set above us by god?”

The nawab is a large man, perfumed heavily with rose attar and oudh, smiling vaguely at her before greeting Prabhu with unconcealed enthusiasm. They leave Cani with a group of young noble girls and retire to one of the inner rooms for a private conversation. Cani is teaching the girls Tamil swearwords when Prabhu returns.

“You did well, Cani,” he tells her as they walk to their lodgings. “The nawab was greatly impressed.”

The nawab’s favour translates to beautifully appointed rooms near the palace and a generous monthly stipend on top of gifts of jewels and embroidered silk saris and gold. It is not long before Cani has as many rings as Prabhu, glittering dangerously on her fingers. It is a year before she automatically dreams herself into the silks and jewels of her new office.

“Why did you help the French take Madras, Prabhu?” Cani asks one day, trying to keep her dream stable as he destroys pieces of it with a sword; he has been testing her ability to keep her dreams steady, even under direct assault. He slits the throat of a tiger she conjures; it roars and bleeds brass clockwork pieces and scraps of yellow silk. He is sweating, and her dream barely wavers as she knits the tigers back to wholeness.

One of them gets past his guard and swipes at him; Cani disintegrates the tiger’s claws before it rips out Prabhu’s throat and he gives her a grateful look before letting his sword drop. “The British were supporting my nawab’s rival, and the French promised they would give Madras to us after they took it,” he admits, breathing heavily. That did not happen; Thanthai’s letters are full of complaints about Governor Dupleix’s heavy-handedness. “The French betrayed the nawab.”

Cani’s lips twist. “Foreigners never keep their word,” she says bitterly. Prabhu reaches out to touch her shoulder, but she shies away. She ignores the sadness that flits across his face; she is not a child any more.

Cani is fifteen when she kisses a boy for the first time; despite her years in Mysore she has only the rudiments of the local language, and so she does not understand what he whispers as he clutches her shoulders. His hand is up her blouse when the nawab’s guards find her in the alley behind his parents’ chai kada; they throw him to the ground without much ceremony and escort her back to her lodgings.

“You have terrible timing,” she tells Prabhu irately, readjusting her sari.

Prabhu looks pained. “I have need of you, madam,” he says, and hands her a French matchlock rifle.

Her annoyance drains away; she has never held such a weapon before. Prabhu demonstrates how to disassemble it, making her feel the weight and shape of each part until she knows its innards more intimately than she knows herself. Then he asks her to dream each piece, teaching her about metals and chemistry and physics all shaped like a weapon. She keeps dreaming the pieces into perfect shapes, but lighter than air; they float and playfully dodge Prabhu’s hands as he tries to assemble them, and when he fires the bullets they spray out in a soft cloud of poppies and gold.

“No,” he tells her patiently. “You must dream the rifle cruel. You must dream it bloodthirsty and vengeful. You must dream each part without mercy.”

Cani unspins the rifle in his hands and the pieces clatter to the floor. “Why do you need a dream-rifle?”

“Please do not question me now,” he pleads, kneading his temples, and Cani notices how much older and thinner he looks.

“Do you…” She hesitates, before crossing her arms. “Do you have children, Prabhu?”

He looks surprised at her change of subject. “I do,” he says slowly. “A boy and a girl, close to your age. They are with their mother.”

“Why haven’t I met them?”

Prabhu looks stricken. “I – do not see them much, magale.” He uses the term of endearment without thinking; he has not called her anything but her name in some years. “I am not a very good father.”

Cani resolutely does not think of Thanthai, who has never worn gold turban pins or fought clockwork tigers in the dreaming. She does not think of Thanthai’s hands as he paints, his terrible jokes, his little warm winks when Mama shouts at both of them. She does not think of him so hard that her dream begins to fracture into jagged, blackened pieces. She wakes to Prabhu’s concerned face with the taste of ashes and shame in her mouth. Her dream hasn’t collapsed since she was a little girl in an ox-cart on the road to Mysore.

Prabhu knocks on her door a few days later, and seems gratifyingly surprised when she invites him into her room. He trails his fingers along her embroidered silk canopy and looks discomfited by her dressing table crowded with kohl and henna and perfumes. At length, he says, “I should tell you why I want you to dream a rifle, Cani. You are not a weapon, to be mutely wielded.” He pulls at the folds of his turban. “Do you know the name Chanda Sahib?”

“The man who betrayed Queen Meenakshi,” she says, trying not to think of the last time she had heard the story. Her hands clench on her cotton bedspread.

Prabhu looks surprised before his face smooths in understanding. “Ah yes,” he jokes weakly. “You are Tamil. I remember well.”

“He was the nawab’s advisor,” Cani adds remorselessly, and the momentary lightness leaves Prabhu’s features.

“He was once, but no more. Now he is our enemy. Dupleix has paid a ransom to release him from prison, and he is raising an army against the nawab with the backing of the French.” Prabhu places his hand on Cani’s shoulder. “The nawab has given me orders to kill him in the dream, and I must obey. No, Cani – I
wish
to obey.” His eyes light. “This is why I need your dream-rifle.”

Cani measures the drunken stories of the kallu kada with the weight of the rifle’s pieces. Her fingernails dig into her palm. “Go into his dream first,” she says, finally. “Without any weapon. Tell me honestly what kind of man he is. You can tell that from a dream, can’t you? Isn’t that your power – to see what someone really, truly is?” Prabhu nods. “So look, and tell me what you see.” Cani adds, “I will trust you,” and Prabhu nods again, slowly: it is a warning, as well as a promise.

Prabhu returns from Chanda Sahib’s dream somehow reduced, his skin seeming to fit less firmly against his bones. He tells her what he saw as Cani spins him a soothing landscape: ektara players plucking gentle melodies in the shade of a banyan tree some cool autumn evening. His hands clench and unclench around hers and he whispers that Chanda Sahib dreams of white marble palaces with spires chased with gold, and queens beautiful and damned, breaking into dust and bright feathers under his fists, poisoning themselves endlessly, and pressing kisses full of fearful promise into the side of his neck. He dreams of land pulled around his celestial body like a cloak, each clasp a grove of coconut trees, rivers wound around his head for a turban. “The nawab is right,” he whispers to her as his body regains itself inside her dream. “A man who dreams so imperiously is to be feared.”

Cani believes him.

She dreams of her parents’ house, and in that comfort assembles a rifle of perfect purpose: each part is unconditional and sure, each mechanism gleaming like a hand covered in jewelled rings, thrumming with the desire for blood. Prabhu watches her in silent agitation, but when she presses her creation into his hands he calms. He fires it at the painting of George II that hangs above the bar and it disintegrates into strips of canvas and wood.

She feels a hot prickling behind her eyes, but does not cry. “Be careful, Prabhu,” she says instead, and he smiles too widely at her, like the first time they met.

“Thank you,” he says, bowing to her so deeply that his head nearly brushes the ground. “This is a weapon of unsurpassed beauty. I will use it well.”

Cani’s dream shivers as Prabhu fits his hands around the trigger, but it does not break apart. He opens the front door of the kada, and disappears as it slams shut.

He does not return that night, and Cani knows he is dead. Dreamwalkers are vulnerable in the dreaming; that is why they need conduits like her. Each unfamiliar dreamscape is a risk. She does not think about her rifle in Chanda Sahib’s hands, shooting bullets of lead instead of poppy-petals at Prabhu’s head.

The next night she dreams of Queen Meenakshi standing in front of the enormous white pillars of the Nayak palace of Tirumalai, lit into gleaming magnificence by the sun. Cani cannot be sure whether she is dreaming of a real palace, or a kind of palatial afterlife. Meenakshi turns her face toward Cani and opens her mouth but her lips and tongue and throat are all blistered with pearls; she cannot speak.

There were some men at the kallu kada that told a different tale of Meenakshi: that she was not usurped by a political ally, but rather that she let Chanda Sahib into Tirumalai as a lover, and that she killed herself out of heartsickness at his betrayal. Cani does not believe this story. The Queen in her dreams climbs the window of her tower-prison slowly, and when she throws herself from the highest window her face is not twisted with grief but bright with rage; she is a weapon of silk and flesh. Her surrender is an act of war.

The next morning Mysore is an unfamiliar city: there is a rumour that Chanda Sahib is marching toward them with fifteen thousand horse-mounted men, and there is so much confusion and fear that Cani barely manages to cross the streets to the Nawab’s palace. She is waiting for an audience in the antechamber when Munira saunters in, looking as irritable and lovely as the day Cani met her.

“I’m here to collect that favour,” Munira says, and Cani smooths the pleats of her sari with a hand heavy with jewelled rings, and reminds herself that she is no longer a child.

“Honoured sa-ilu,” she says silkily, dipping her body down in the correct courtly greeting. “I am not to be collected, by you or anyone else.”

Munira inclines her head slightly, an opponent acknowledging another across a battlefield. “Then what are you doing here, waiting to offer yourself to Prabhu’s nawab?”

Cani feels that tightening behind her eyes again; it would be so easy to cry, but she has not cried in a very long while. “You serve a nawab yourself,” she says harshly.