“That doesn’t make any sense!” snapped Tuni. “One person can’t just swap out for another!”
“You would think not,” I muttered, remembering Neel falling into the other king’s story.
Tiktiki One click-clacked its tongue like it was agreeing with me, and Tuntuni bellowed, “People—or animals—can’t just substitute for each other in their own stories!” In his agitation, Tuni jumped on Tiktiki One’s back, making the little lizard click-clack even louder. “A villain can’t just take over the role of the victim!”
But even as the talking bird said this, I remembered something Mati had said on the beach. She’d said that heroes and monsters weren’t always so easy to label. It wasn’t what you looked like, who your family was, or where you came from that made someone bad or good, but the things you did each and every day. But still, what did all that have to do with stories smushing into one another?
My face must have shown my confusion, because Bunty asked, “You have noticed it, haven’t you, the shrinking of multiplicity? The shifting of narratives?”
“Um, no. I mean, yes,” I hedged. “I mean, uh, what’s a narrative again?”
“Narratives are stories,” explained the tiger. “Haven’t you noticed some story slippage?”
And then Bunty’s image flickered again. I saw, in a flash, the old woman’s face, then the tiger’s, the old woman’s, the tiger’s.
“Oh, geez. What is going on here?” I whispered, mostly to myself.
“Why can’t a tiger become a vegetarian?” squawked Tuni, obviously impatient with the turn the conversation had taken.
“Not now, Tuni—” I began, but the yellow bird cut me off.
“Because they can’t change their stripes!” The bird flew nervously around my head. “Let’s get out of here, Princess, before this beast decides we’d be a purr-fect meal!”
Bunty sniffed. “It’s really ridiculously rude to discuss someone in their presence. You’re worse than the Anti-Chaos Committee.”
I wasn’t sure what an Anti-Chaos Committee was, but had something more important to ask about. “Okay, let’s say, just for argument’s sake, I had noticed something. This swapping-of-stories thing. Do you know why it’s happening?”
“I don’t know why the stories are getting mixed up.” Bunty looked thoughtful. “All I know is there have been several brazen breaches in nature’s normative narrative threads. There seems to be a conscious collapsing of complexity, a dumbing-down of diversity, a melding of multiplicity.” As Bunty said these long words, I was distracted by another one of those blue butterflies, wafting slowly by.
“I don’t understand what any of that means,” I finally admitted.
“Don’t ask that granny-eater any more questions!” Tuntuni yelled. “We’ve got to go find your moon mother before she rises in the sky!”
My old friend Tuntuni was right. We’d already delayed too long. It was time to go. But when I got back into the auto rikshaw, the tiger got up and padded over in our direction, as if they wanted to come with us. Tuni put up a wing. “Oh, no, Professor Tiger, you’re not invited.”
“But I can unquestioningly help you on your quixotic quest!” roared the beast. “To find your matrilineal ancestress, the moon!”
“Princess!” squawked Tuntuni in my ear. “Be reasonable! If they look like a killer and sound like a killer, what’s to say they aren’t a killer? What if the tiger only wants to help because they want to eat your moon mother or, worse still, us?”
I knew that what Tuni was saying was the sensible thing, but it still felt bad to be stereotyping Bunty in this way just because they were a tiger.
“No offense, Bunty,” I said finally, “I think it’s better if we part ways. You find your way into your right story, and we’ll find our way back to ours.” Then, thankfully, the auto rikshaw started. I gunned the engine and drove away.
I couldn’t help but feel guilty, though, as Tuntuni, Tiktiki One, and I left the tiger shaking their head in our rearview.
Almost right away, I regretted leaving Bunty behind. Because the scenery passing by was so weird, I knew that the story-smushing thing was happening again, and I wished the smart tiger was with us to help me understand what was going on.
Within minutes of leaving Bunty, I saw, jogging along the side of the road, a wedding party. There were four dragonflies bearing the sticks of a house-like palanquin on their shoulders. Inside the palki was a little doll dressed as a bride, sandalwood decorating her face and her red silk sari pulled modestly over her head, under a shola pith tiara. Next to her palanquin, riding on a rocking horse, was a little groom doll dressed in white dhoti panjabi with a pointy bridegroom’s topor on his head. Bringing up the rear of the wedding party was a motley dancing crew: some frogs with mushroom umbrellas over their heads, some giant ants, and an elephant and a horse prancing around on their rear legs.
I was reminded of a bunch of Bengali nursery rhymes I’d heard from Baba, like one about an elephant and horse dancing at a wedding, but before I could ask Tuntuni about it, I saw who else was dancing in the wedding party. A plump stuffed bear with a tub labeled Hunny and a sweet little piglet in a striped shirt.
“Well, that doesn’t seem right,” I muttered. The bear and piglet were definitely characters from a totally different set of cultural stories.
“Don’t be so judgy about grammar,” sniffed Tuntuni. “So what if the bear doesn’t have a great sense of spelling? He’s a bear after all.”
I drove on, not bothering to explain to my bird companion that it wasn’t the bear’s spelling of the word honey that was bothering me. Why were so many stories from different cultures mashing up like this?
We hadn’t gone but half an hour when something else weird happened. It was almost sunset, and I was getting more and more worried about ever getting my moon mother’s attention before she rose in the sky. Tuni and I were calling and calling to her, our heads turned upward, which is why I didn’t notice—until it was too late—the sticky white strands covering the road like a huge spiderweb. I swerved the auto rikshaw hard and ended up driving us into a ditch.
“Hang on!” I yelled.
“Second accident in a day! There go your rikshaw insurance raaaaaaaaates!” shrieked Tuni as we crashed, the auto landing with a metallic screech down in the ditch.
“You okay?” I rubbed my head where I’d slammed it into the side of the vehicle. The front of the auto rikshaw was all crumpled, and there was a big metal piece sticking out of the bottom. (An axle? That’s a car thing, right?)
“Oh, my wing! My beak! My poor handsome head!” groaned Tuni. “Princess, if you had a driver’s license, I would tell them to revoke it!”
The gecko just sat there, blinking at the both of us.
I managed to get myself out of the beat-up, sideways auto and then limped off to look at the stuff blocking the road. The path in front of us was covered in white stringy goo. It looked like we were at summer camp and someone had decided to pull a prank by decorating our cabin with crisscrossing string. The string wasn’t just across our path in the road, but threaded through the groves of thorny trees on either side of it. There was something about this that felt like a setup. Immediately, I took out my bow and arrow and looked this way and that.