The Chaos Curse (Kiranmala and the Kingdom Beyond #3) - Sayantani DasGupta Page 0,91
the dad party dance of a side-to-side foot shuffle and butt wiggle. In short, I looked like a total fool. “Neel, come on!” I hissed out of the side of my mouth.
There was a rise in the music, a heartfelt warbling of notes, and with that Neel kind of kangaroo-hopped to center stage and gave a big, silly ballerina twirl. As he twirled, he tossed me a copy of Thakurmar Jhuli, not Einstein-ji’s magical time-traveling copy, but a regular old copy of the folktale book that a grandma or dad or aunty might read to their kids.
As the music changed, Neel kept dancing to the middle of the stage. Here it came, my part. It was now or never. Copying a move from a 2-D movie I’d seen a long time ago with Zuzu, I shouted, “Nobody puts our stories in a corner!” and ran at Neel, the book still in my hands.
I jumped and he caught me, holding me up by the waist with his strong rakkhosh arms and twirling me around. I flew, arms extended, the book held out from my hands like a glittering beacon in the dark. The other dancing rakkhosh gathered all around us, pulling out their copies of the book too. At my signal, we all opened our books and started simultaneously reading whatever story each of us had stumbled onto.
I don’t know how or why, but the moment I began to read, my voice rising and falling in story, clashing and meshing with all the other voices reading their stories at the same time, I felt something magical happen. We storytellers began to glow, as if there was a power beaming out of us. The kids in the sangeet audience—children of villagers and lords, servants and ministers—ran forward toward the stage, to hear our stories better. They giggled and shouted at the funny voices some of the storytellers were putting on, chiming in at the familiar parts, begging for more when someone’s story ended.
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.
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