I heard a gasp from the audience and shouts of alarm. And then I heard it, clear as a bell, Sesha’s horrible voice from the darkness of the audience.
“Stop reading! Stop laughing! Stop telling those dratted Kingdom Beyond stories!”
As we had planned, he shot out green bolts of power at me from the audience. Just as they were about to reach me, I tossed down to Neel my regular copy of the book and he tossed me Einstein-ji’s magical one. Where Sesha’s power hit the powerful volume, the light already coming off it expanded and grew. Neel carefully put me down, but I held the magical book up over my head, like I’d once seen a boy in a movie hold a boom box playing love songs for his girlfriend. Only I was playing a different sort of love song. A love song for our stories, our lives, and the continued life of the multiverse.
Shockingly, the magical book now glowing in my hand wasn’t just absorbing Sesha’s bolts; it was shooting them back out at him too. I heard where the little zings and zips of power whizzed through the audience, finding their target only in him.
“What are you doing? Stop that!” Sesha growled. And now I could see him. He had run up right in front of the stage, from where he blasted me again with his bolts of power. His handsome face was screwed up with anger, his eyes flashing with venom. Right behind him, dressed in a brilliant lehenga choli and dripping with diamonds, was Pinki, Neel’s mother. She froze at the sight of us onstage, obviously recognizing us both.
“You? Here?” she whispered.
“I read your mehendi, Mother,” Neel said, throwing off his disguise. “You don’t have to marry this clown to protect the multiverse’s stories! You don’t have to protect them alone! We are on your side! We will do it together!”
“I remember you!” Sesha looked from his bride-to-be to Neel and back again. Then he looked at me. His voice was wild with fury. “You were at the choosing, when I was captured by those monsters at Ghatatkach Academy! You called me father then! That day has haunted me for all my life—but no more!”
“You were there!” exclaimed Pinki almost at the same time. “You were both there on that day—and it was you who convinced me not to marry Sesha!”
I realized that by going back in time, Neel and I had changed our present. Both of our parents remembered seeing us when they were young people. “And we’re here now to give you the same message!” Neel shouted. “You shouldn’t have married him them, and you shouldn’t marry him now!”
“Haven’t you learned your lesson?” I said, glaring at Sesha. “If you bring about the big crunch, not just our story lines will end, yours will too! But listen—everybody can change! Why not rewrite the ending to your story? You don’t have to be a villain! You can choose a different ending! You can choose to tell a different tale!”
“Don’t tell me what to do, you impudent imp!” Sesha snarled. He increased the power of his green bolts so that now my arms ached from the stress of holding up the glowing-book-slash-weapon-slash-shield. “You are the part of my story I will change! You have always been the problem, the nagging sore, the out-of-place character! But not for much longer!”
“Yesss! Kill her, Father!” It was Naga, that seven-headed pain in the rear end, right behind dear old Daddy, as per usual. “End her story! Close the book on her! Burn her library down!”
“Nah, man, I don’t think so!” Neel leaped from the stage directly onto Naga’s heads. He slashed and fought with the seven-headed snake, leaving me alone with my past.
“Die, Daughter! Die, you chaos curse!” Sesha snarled. “I will not have this confusion, these many stories! I will rule one universe united in singularity! I will erase you at last from the pages of the multiverse!”
I kept deflecting Sesha’s evil blasts with Einstein-ji’s book, but I was getting tired. The glowing volume grew so hot I almost wanted to drop it. The book was buzzing and humming, searing my hands with heat.
“Ahh!” I cried out in pain, almost crushed by the power of the stories in my hands. Neel looked back, and that was his downfall. As he turned to look at me, one of Naga’s giant fangs caught him through the shoulder.
“No!” I screamed.
Hanging there from Naga’s fang, Neel started to shake. His skin became crisscrossed with venom. His eyes started to roll to the back of his head, and I knew I was losing him.
“My son!” Pinki shrieked, leaping on Naga with all her terrible power. She flung the seven-headed snake to one side, cradling Neel’s form in her arms. Then she turned on Sesha with such a terrible cry, he stopped shooting out his green lightning at me. I fell to my knees, the book still in my hands.
“You’re almost my wife—you can’t fight me,” said Sesha, but he could say no more, because with a multiverse-shaking move, Pinki opened her mouth and screamed. With Neel still lifeless in her arms, the Demon Queen’s jaw became unhinged from her face and the darkness of all of outer space came shooting out. I saw planets, moons, and comets, and then, awfully, the Victrola funnel shape of a black hole. The black hole reached out to swallow Sesha, like a formless cosmic rakkhosh, now creating life, now ending it. And then, not with a bang, but with the tiniest of whimpering, popping sounds, Sesha was gone.
“Father!” Naga cried, writhing around in agony. But the seven-headed serpent had never been as stupid as our father had made him think he was. When he realized Sesha’s fate, he quickly slithered down the audience aisle and away into the night.
As soon as Sesha disappeared into the void of the black hole, Pinki laid Neel tenderly on the stage. The sangeet audience all gathered around now, clucking their tongues, oohing and aahing as if this were a part of the show. Neel shuddered and gasped, the lines of venom slowly disappearing from his face. But still his eyes were closed.
“He’s not waking up!” I cried.
Pinki screamed again, her cries generating new universes that sprung out of her open lips. As if aware of the galaxies spinning out of Pinki’s mouth, the magical book leaped out of my hands to expand and grow into the shape of a small star in the cosmos that Pinki had created. I heard every story in the book, every story in the room, every story in the multiverse, being told in a rising babble of voices. The words manifested themselves in the air, in all sorts of languages and images and metaphors spinning around and around one another, finally coming together in a fireworks display of star collision. The light was so bright, I had to shield my eyes from it. The audience, as well as the rakkhosh dancers behind me, began yelling and howling, protecting their eyes and ears from the brilliance too.
When Neel began to stir, Pinki sobbed in relief.
“I think he’s going to be okay!” I breathed.
Finally, with a huge inhale, Pinki swallowed it all once again. The planets. The galaxies. The magical storybook turned star. The black hole containing Sesha. All of it. And then she let out the most giant burp I have ever heard.
“Impressive, my gaseously gifted daughter!” said a wibbly-wobbly voice so familiar and dear I almost screamed with joy.
It was Ai-Ma, with her gangly limbs and three-toothed grin and galumphing walk and all her love and all her stories and all her wisdom. It was her. Neel’s grandmother—who was monster, goddess, crone, ancestress, teacher, and friend. It was her, but also not her. She was so transparent, we could see all of outer space through her form. She was so huge, her feet were like ships, her arms were like highways, and her head touched the sky.