1807 A.N. — Vasanta Moon, Day 15–17
Sundara-Ghāṭ Ashram, Bangla Delta Mandal — continued from the previous chapter.
The map began with the places where the world tried to lie.
"Counter-currents first," Rakhal murmured, leaning over the reed board while his father, Janardan, sketched the "true" plan in slow, faithful strokes to the side. The study smelled of indigo and clean ash, the clever, home smell of work that has survived many administrators. Outside, morning clucked—goats, a mortar, the short temper of a kettle.
"Show me the un-river," Janardan said, amused. "Where the water pretends to go forward and doesn't."
Rakhal breathed, not for the trick of it but for the clarity, and let the Citta-rails lift like a lattice laid over memory. The Ghāṭ steps, the neem, the five vats in their scabbed circles, the clay pits beyond—these came first. Then he widened attention the way Kumkum had drilled into him: no straining, no asking; listen until a pattern grows the courage to speak.
"There," he said, tapping the air above the board. "Past the third vat, southeast. The river back-eddies twice at the bend. See?" He traced a tight loop with his finger. "At monsoon heights it kisses the bank, then pulls back, hissing. The sand builds where the pull-back slows—here." He shifted left a thumb-width. "And here it scours."
"The scouring gives us the good clay," Janardan said, following. "The pull-back gives sour mud."
Rakhal nodded. "Sour and useless for conduction. It never quite remembers how to set."
They had tested it every season, hoping. Sour mud ate labor and returned insult. But sour mud sat exactly where an unkind clerk, told to look for clay near "the bend with the twin eddies," would plant a flag.
"The wrong bend," Rakhal said.
"The best kind," Janardan replied, mouth tilted. "Wrong… truthfully."
They worked in companionable silence. Janardan laid the true map with a craftsman's love; Rakhal translated it into the polite map for the Mandal: vats perfectly round (too perfect), the clay pit a square stamped in the sour patch, the path shifted by half a cubit so the river-stair approached at an angle that looked tidy and felt wrong to anyone who had walked it barefoot in rain.
"Not too tidy," Janardan warned.
"I know." Rakhal added a tiny flaw—one step on the river-stair a finger's breadth longer than its neighbor, the kind of asymmetry old masons left to keep houses humane. He inked a small banyan wrongly, but believably, three paces off. He wrote labels in his neatest hand. "Stores," "Ink-House," "Scholars' Hall," "Clay Pit," "Boat Sheds."
He did not write "Arrays." He did not write "Spiral." He did not write "Places where the ground was taught to behave."
"When we hand this over," Janardan said, "you will not blink."
"I never blink," Rakhal said.
"You blink constantly."
"That's what not blinking looks like," Rakhal countered, and Janardan laughed, the sound fitting into the room like it had been planned for it.
By noon they had two plans—the true, rolled and tied with plain twine; the polite, rolled and tied with the Mandal's favorite—red thread. Rakhal laid the polite map to dry where light fell kind and not direct.
"Your Bhadra's sentence worked," Janardan said, wiping his nib. "'Draw the counter-currents first.'"
"He's not my Bhadra."
"He will be," Janardan said, sipping tea. "Old men pick their grandchildren."
Rakhal smiled without showing it. In the doorway, Meghla tilted her head at the board, then at her son. "Make the banyan's shadow shorter," she said. "The assistants in the shade will not leave before they've proved to themselves the map is lying. Don't give them more comfort than you must."
"Yes, Ma." He rubbed the shadow out and redrew it like a better truth.
"Jashodhara!" Meghla called down the corridor. "Survey-batch at third bell. No humming today."
A groan carried back—friendly and aggrieved. "Why do we make worse dye on purpose?"
"Because paper likes unimpressive stories," Meghla said. "Give it one."
Day 15 ended with work like this—adjustments, errands, small acts of obedience to the plan. Rakhal copied Kumkum's acknowledgment in his neatest script. He did his hour of index-copy penance without complaint, though he added in the margin, for no reader but himself: Listening continues. No improvisation. Coil remains single and silent.
At dusk the duel ring came alive.
The ring was no more than a cracked circle of hard earth under the peepul tree, marked by white lime lines and a rope that thought better of being taut. Seniors drifted out—loose-shouldered boys and sharp-eyed girls, adolescents suddenly or forever. Kumkum stood at the edge with her hands tucked in her sleeves and a cane that pretended to be for walking.
"Declare," she said, as two stepped into the circle.
"Pr̥thvī," said Bishu, a barrel-chested boy whose smiles arrived late and stayed long. "Proof: Hold."
"Jala," said Piya, fast and fierce, bracelets quiet for once. "Proof: Release."
"Site?" Kumkum asked.
"Dry ground," Bishu said.
"Wet mind," Piya said.
"Agreed," said Kumkum. "Boundaries hold. No blood. Parīkṣā judges. Begin."
Rakhal sat on the rope, feeling its roughness, feeling rails whisper of old duels—footfalls bitten, breath held, a hundred tiny decisions that had taught soil and skin to remember each other by mutual consent.
It never really was a fight, not the way stories wrote it. Bishu's heel set; Piya leaned. Bishu moved a palm; the ground sighed and tightened, an invitation to stay. Piya's breath changed; the air around her skin softened, and the ground reconsidered its instructions. She stepped; he set; she released; he held; their teacher's cane did not move. Two minutes in Piya feinted not at Bishu but at the edge of the circle where a hairline crack had forgotten itself. The crack widened just enough to annoy Bishu's ankles. He frowned; the ground obliged him by frowning back; Piya stepped past his scowl and laid her palm to his shoulder like forgiveness. He sat, laughing, on a ground that had agreed to be a chair instead of a trap.
"Proof?" Kumkum asked.
"Hold yields to release when pride instructs the soil," Piya said, solemn and wicked. "Bishu tells dirt to behave. Dirt loves him too much to refuse."
"Good," Kumkum said, then turned the cane to Rakhal without looking. "What did you see?"
"Two loops," he said. "One in earth—Bishu—closing with his jaw; one in water—Piya—closing with her exhale. Her loop closed when she stopped listening to his foot and listened to the crack. The crack wanted a friend."
"Never say 'the crack wanted a friend' in a court," Kumkum said. "Say it to your mother while cooking and to no one else."
"Understood."
He watched three more duels, learning where not to look. His ten-day listening grew its own habits: one simple object a day (today a copper bead no bigger than a sesame), no innovation, write everything down, sleep.
Day 16 arrived on schedule and proved it by rearranging a dozen small plans.
"Survey-batch," Meghla said at third bell, and the ink-house turned to quiet theater. No hum. No spiral. Only recipe. Jashodhara paced like a general who had been told to use spoons. Two apprentices stirred with grim devotion.
"How will we live with this dye?" one muttered.
"By selling it to people who like words more than colors," Jashodhara said. "And by making the good stuff after the survey leaves."
Rakhal hovered and did not help. He wrote notes that smelled like caution.
Survey-batch dye: follows page 12 recipe exactly. No "hush/hold/handover" hum. Color dull-but-serviceable. Set okay at long soak. Public method accepted. Spiral absent.
He found, to his surprise, that he felt proud of dullness when it was chosen.
At noon, two of Clerk Chatterji's assistants wandered through the yard on the invented pretense of counting walls. They peered at vats with the expression men reserve for dowries. Meghla gave them sweet rice with sliced banana and let them think she had fed them bananas instead of information.
"Do you need anything else?" she asked, every syllable kind.
"Maps," one said, already patting his bag.
"We submitted them yesterday," she said. "Would you like another? We have polite copies."
"We have copies," the other hurried. "We enjoy copies."
"Then enjoy them there," she returned, smiling, and they fled gratefully to the shade of the wrong banyan.
At dusk, as the ring prepared for one last friendly duel, Tapan-da came to the gate with a report disguised as a joke.
"Good news," he said. "The canoe you offered to the survey team leaks, but only on even days."
"We will schedule their inspection accordingly," Kumkum said.
"Less good news," Tapan added. "Mandira Pal's palanquin went upriver at noon. Toward Navadvīpa-pura. It returned at dusk. Heavier."
"Full of paper," Meghla guessed.
"And perfume that wants you to smell it from two courtyards over," Tapan said. "Also, rumor says the Mandal has a Pr̥thvī adept on the way. Someone who can listen to mud and tell you why it lies."
"A listener," Rakhal said.
"Embargo," Kumkum whispered, not at him but at the air.
Day 17 came with the click of sandals meant to be heard.
They arrived at mid-morn: three boats sliding in with government calm. Clerk Anant Chatterji stood at the prow of the first, tie crisp, case oiled. He stepped onto the ghāṭ with the practiced care of a man who had never fallen in public.
Behind him, Mandira Pal emerged from a high-backed palanquin set on a loaned platform like a throne pretending not to be. She wore mango-leaf green and a smile that had killed more poor ideas than teachers ever would. Her eyes went to Rakhal the way a cat glances at a fish and then at the cook.
And on the second boat, a woman stood without ornaments. She wore a simple brown sari with a border barely there, hair bound, lips unsugared. The ground seemed to notice her feet.
"Adept Rukmini," Chatterji announced, with the respect a clerk reserves for knives he cannot file. "Pr̥thvī Sequence"—he paused—"elevated."
Rukmini's gaze took the courtyard in as a whole, as if the world were a sheet pulled tight and she could read the knots underneath. Mandira stepped close and managed to look down at her without changing height.
"My cousin sends his regards," Mandira said.
"I accept nothing on behalf of the earth," Rukmini replied, eyes still on ground. "Your regards may go to the river."
Mandira's smile stiffened like sugar cooked past thread stage.
"Welcome," Kumkum said, stepping forward. "Water?"
"Yes," Rukmini said. "But later." She pressed her palm to the courtyard dirt gently, the way a physician rests fingertips on a patient's wrist. Her eyes softened a hair. "This place has good bones."
"We feed them," Meghla said.
Chatterji clapped his case together once, the little crisp sound of procedure. "We begin with the site plan," he announced. "Thank you again for your cooperation."
Kumkum handed him the polite map with the same expression she used for handing boys a broom: use this carefully; I know how much mischief it can do. Chatterji passed it to an assistant who scurried, grateful, toward the wrong banyan.
"We'll start with the clay pits," Chatterji said. "Adept Rukmini will assess quality and volume. Then vats, then storage, then instructional methods."
"Methods?" Meghla said mildly. "We have two: we work, and we sleep."
"The Mandal requires… documentation."
"And we require paper that does not drink our rivers," Kumkum replied. "We'll both be disappointed."
"Later," Rukmini cut in, not impatient so much as uninterested in games. "Pits first."
They walked.
A small procession forms itself without anyone commanding: clerks and assistants; Jashodhara with her headscarf tight to keep questions from falling out; Tapan-da drifting beside the boats as if ready to pole a fool into a shallow. Rakhal kept back a pace and to the side, under the neem's rhythm, letting the rails settle into their now-familiar, useful half-presence. He did not intend to use them. He intended to watch.
"Your dye," Mandira said airily to Meghla as they walked, "is not as vivid as the rumors."
"Our rumors are vivid so our dye doesn't need to be," Meghla returned, and Mandira blinked twice before realizing she had been answered.
At the sour mud patch, Chatterji raised a hand as if halting a parade. "Clay pit," he announced, checking the map that had never lied to him personally. "Marking location A."
Rukmini crouched. She took a small iron probe from her sash and pushed it into the muck with a slow decisive motion. When she withdrew it, the iron wore a greasy sheen. She pressed a bit of mud between finger and thumb, then rubbed it along her palm. The lines in her hand accepted it and then politely refused to keep it.
"Sour," she said. "Weak memory. Slips under pressure. Conducts poorly; bleeds out prāṇa. Useless for arrays. Fine for potters with enemies."
Mandira, who had prepared her face for triumph upon first squat, recalibrated toward disdain. "Are you sure?" she asked, just this side of insulting.
Rukmini did not answer the question. She stood, brushed her palms, and started to walk—not anywhere Chatterji's map indicated. She walked like a person listening to a song people couldn't hear yet.
"Madam Adept," Chatterji said, polite alarm creeping in, "the plan—"
Rukmini twitched two fingers at him and kept walking. Past the banyan with the truthful shadow, past the third vat that had learned humility, past the long crack in the ground that had turned into a habit. Her bare feet found firmer soil by instinct. She turned once, slowly, like a needle calming, and set her palm on a patch of ground those who lived here avoided when it rained because their ankles loved it too much.
She knelt and pressed both hands to the earth, eyes half-closed.
The real vein thrummed to Rakhal's mind the way river conches do at dusk—quiet but incontrovertible. The good clay sat there in the ground like a bright, patient animal.
Rakhal's stomach dropped, then caught. He had expected the Mandal to bring men who would be fooled by maps. He had not expected the earth to bring a woman who would not be.
"Adept?" Chatterji said, and Mandira, eyes on Rakhal, smiled faintly, prepared to pivot her disdain into a call for seizure.
Rukmini's brow moved the smallest degree. She slid the probe into the ground, withdrew it. The iron wore a thin, clean, beautiful stripe, like a thought that remembered itself. She pinched a sliver of wet clay, rolled it between her fingers. Even from where he stood, Rakhal felt it: the closure in the loop, the way good clay says yes to pattern.
"Here," Rukmini said simply.
At "here," Chatterji's assistant wrote "HERE" in the ledger, large, hopeful. Mandira's eyes glittered.
"Madam," Meghla said evenly, "you have the Survey-batch to inspect—"
"Later," Rukmini said, still kneeling. Her head cocked, as if the earth had said another thing. "There's more. It runs… there." She pointed toward the low ridge behind the ink-house. That was true, too. The bright, patient animal laid its tail there.
Rakhal inhaled once, the long way.
"Do we declare this an asset of strategic importance?" Chatterji asked, almost to himself, script-pen gathering courage like a sword.
Rukmini frowned—just a fingertip's worth—and paused. She listened harder. Her fingers pressed deeper. Her head turned slightly toward… the wrong pit.
Rakhal felt it at the same moment: a faint hiss of almost-closure from the sour patch. Not a yes, not honestly—but a hint that could be mistaken by a person teetering between two truths.
His breath hitched. The wrong bend had been a beautiful lie because it relied on the river's own mischief. It would fool clerks; it would not fool Pr̥thvī. Unless—
No improvisation, Kumkum's voice said in him, as real as palm on scalp. Ten days of listening. No hammering. No cleverness.
"I'm not building," he told the knot under his breastbone. "I'm humming."
He did not lift a finger. He did not whisper out loud. He did not "compile" anything. He did what he had done in front of the vats and then stopped exactly one step sooner. He held the schema of the coil in his mind—nine turns, rice-grain pitch, eyes folded—and sought, not the making, but the note it had asked the water to remember. F₁—the friendly, steady beat of proper closure. Not to force; to contrast.
He let the note form in the part of him that had learned to listen at the Maidan mirror—just a breath-drawn tone, barely there. He aimed it, the way you aim kindness, at the sour patch. It was not a sound in air. It was a suggestion aimed at rails.
The ground under the sour mud did not become good. But for three heartbeats it pretended—no, not pretended, echoed—a harmonic of the real vein's yes. It sang wrong, but it sang close.
Rukmini's head snapped. Her hands froze, then lifted a finger's width from the earth as if a current had tickled them where no river ran. She looked from the real vein to the wrong pit and back again, a human compass thrown a second arrow. Her mouth held a question no clerk could spell.
Mandira saw the frown and pounced. "What is it?" she demanded, with the relief of a hawk seeing a rabbit. "Is the map wrong? Are these people cheats?"
"Silence," Rukmini said, very quietly.
The assistant's pen paused mid-heroic H. Chatterji's cheeks held civil composure like a man holds a hot roti.
Rukmini stood slowly, dust clinging to her palms, gaze narrowing slightly in the general direction of the neem. She turned her head until her eyes fell on Rakhal, who had not moved, who had done nothing a boy could be punished for in a court by the letter of any law—not hummed, not conjured, not compiled, not postured.
But listeners recognize other listeners the way treelines recognize wind.
"You," Adept Rukmini said. "Boy." Her voice carried not anger but a deep, exact curiosity. "What did you just do?"
Silence went tight. Even the crow on the ink-house roof forgot it had things to say.
Mandira pivoted, eyes bright. "Yes," she said, sugar over vitriol. "Tell us, boy. What trick of Citta have you done to confound an Adept?"
Kumkum's cane tapped once on dirt, a warning and a permission in one syllable of wood. Meghla's hand found the corner of her sari and held, knuckles pale as peeled betel.
Rakhal held her gaze—the Adept's—because to look away would turn reading into guilt. He did not smile. He did not bow. He did the politest thing he knew: he told a truth that was small enough not to become a weapon when repeated.
"I listened," he said. "And then I remembered a note."
Rukmini's eyes sharpened. "And then?"
"And then I stopped," he said, because stopping was what he had done and because saying so honored his teacher's rule.
Her gaze did not soften, but something in her stance did, almost imperceptible—weight shifting off accusation into assessment. "What note?"
"A helpful one," Rakhal said. He did not blink.
"Useless," Mandira snapped. "Clerk—"
"Quiet," Rukmini cut in, without heat. She kept looking at Rakhal. "You are not a liar," she said. It was not generous; it was diagnostic. "And you are something else I don't have a word for yet."
She turned back to the ground like a woman returning to a conversation with an old friend. She knelt by the real vein and pressed her palm flat. "This is good," she said matter-of-factly to Chatterji. "Record it."
The assistant, relieved to have a declarative sentence, wrote fast.
Rukmini stood and walked back to the sour patch. She pressed her palm there, let it rest, then moved it a hand-span to the left, then a hand-span to the right. The vein did not extend here. The earth told her, politely, to act her age.
"This is not," she said. "But something hummed. A clever dissonance. Reproducible?"
"By us?" Mandira asked quickly, composure rearming. "Or by him?"
"By the world," Rukmini said. "If the world chooses to listen to boys."
Chatterji cleared his throat. "Adept," he said, in that tone clerks use when their bosses are about to do something truthful and therefore inconvenient, "shall we proceed to classification?"
"We will proceed to classification," Rukmini said. "And to questions. About methods." She looked to the vats. "Your dye first. Then we will talk about the note."
Meghla said, calm, "We have a Survey-batch prepared. You are welcome to it."
"And the other batch?" Rukmini asked, almost lazily.
"Other batch?" Chatterji echoed, pen poised.
"The one the river respects," Rukmini said, eyes on Meghla. "The hum that makes clay and cloth agree."
Meghla smiled, and there was pride and danger both. "You hear far," she said.
"I have old ears," Rukmini returned. "They prefer honesty to policy."
Mandira huffed. "All this poetry about mud."
"All this mud about poetry," Kumkum corrected evenly. She looked at Rukmini with the frank respect women reserve for others who did not betray their morning practice for an easy afternoon. "We will show you what we teach in public," she said. "And we will guard what we teach our children."
Chatterji tensed. "Madam Āchārya—"
"Write," Rukmini told him. "'Sundara-Ghāṭ acknowledges Survey. Clay vein of quality present at coordinates—'" she gestured precisely "—'Production methods adequate for public use. Reserve methods under review.'"
"Under review by whom?" Chatterji asked, genuinely, and for a heartbeat he looked like a boy who had wandered into a library that would forgive him.
"By me," Rukmini said.
"By the Mandal," Mandira interjected.
"By me," Rukmini repeated, and Mandira's mouth shut like a snare.
They returned to the vats, and if anyone had dropped a pin, it would have written a letter to history. Jashodhara presented the Survey-batch with a sour face and a perfect bow. Adept Rukmini dipped cloth, watched dullness arrive at schedule, and nodded once.
"Acceptable. Uninspired. Safe."
"Exactly," Meghla said.
"Show me the kitchen," Rukmini said next, as if to embarrass nobody.
Meghla glanced at Kumkum. Kumkum's cane touched dirt twice. "After lunch," she said. "We have a friendly duel at second bell. You are welcome to judge."
Rukmini looked at the ring and then at Rakhal, then at the ground between them as if it had become a third conversationalist. "I will watch," she said.
They ate on the veranda—sweet rice and a green that knew how to apologize, lentils with a temper. Mandira ate in her palanquin and sent for lime slices twice. Chatterji chewed with eyes on his case, the way men eat when their stomachs have been apprenticed to their calendars.
At second bell, the ring woke again. Two seniors bowed—Piya again, and now Mohan, who loved Anila and walked like corners bored him. They declared, they proved, they fell laughing. Adept Rukmini watched with a face that moved rarely but filed everything. Mandira watched Rakhal watching the ring and mistook his interest for vanity.
Between bouts, Rukmini stepped closer to Rakhal as if drawn by a private suggestion.
"You learned that note where?" she asked, conversational as a neighbor.
"In the vat yard," he said. "By listening to failure until it confessed."
"Whose idea was the coil?"
"Mine," he said. Not pridefully; inventory.
"Who gave you permission to break an embargo?"
"No one," he admitted. "I didn't break it. I asked the water for a favor and gave it a bell to remember the act."
Her mouth did not smile. "You know you are dancing on a thread."
"I tied a knot first," he said.
She looked away to keep a smile from betraying her mouth. "What's your Sequence?"
"Twenty," he said. "Initiate. Listener."
"Your teacher reminds you," she said, eyes flicking toward Kumkum.
"Every hour," he said.
"Good," she said. "There are things I can only say to boys who are still told 'no'."
Mandira glided in, catching only the last word. "No?" she said brightly. "But yes is so much better for innovation. Clerk Chatterji, surely the Mandal wants to encourage youths who make mud sing."
"The Mandal wants to catalogue singing," Chatterji said weakly.
"The Mandal wants to own singing," Meghla said from the side, pleasantly.
"I want to know it," Rukmini said.
The afternoon rolled out like a scroll. Clerks measured wall lengths. Assistants squinted at vats as if squinting improved dye. Kumkum staged instruction in public—boys reading aloud from the primer, girls demonstrating posture and breath. Rukmini wandered, listening mostly to ground. At kitchen doorways, Meghla and Jashodhara staged nothing—which is to say they performed competence without flair and therefore showed the kind of mastery that doesn't teach thieves anything.
By late light, the day had begun pretending to be normal again, which is what dangerous days do before they finish their trick. Chatterji packed his case with the joy of a man seeing his bed in his mind. Mandira stood for one last gaze over the yard, felt it fail to become a kingdom, and wrapped her shawl as if that could compensate.
Rukmini stayed by the neem, eyes on Rakhal, just long enough to turn a boy's evening into cliff.
"You will come to the clay with me at dawn," she said, not as an order but as an invitation made of granite. "You will not bring tools. You will not hum. You will show me how to hear without asking for what I want."
"I'm on listening orders for three more days," he said.
"Good," she said. "That means you're the only one I can trust not to perform."
Mandira bristled. "Adept Rukmini," she said sweetly, "as Patron-Observer, I must insist—"
"You must do nothing," Rukmini said, not unkindly. "You may observe me observing. Or you may go home."
Chatterji looked at the ground the way men look at sky when it has decided not to rain. "Adept," he began carefully, "the Mandal—I—"
"The Mandal sent me," Rukmini said. "To listen. I am listening." She turned to Rakhal again, and the gaze felt like being asked your name by someone with a use for it. "You called a false harmonic without touching the world," she said, almost to herself. "I've never met a Citta boy who could make the earth blink."
"Yantra," Rakhal said quietly. "Mind-Mechanism." He didn't know why he said it. Perhaps because to leave the word unsaid felt like lying in the opposite direction.
She tasted the shape of it. "Yantra," she repeated. "Your Path is misnamed and therefore properly named."
From the palanquin, Mandira called, too loudly, "Clerk! I will need copies of all notes. The Mandal will require full transfer of custodianship within the fortnight—"
"Within the Concord," Chatterji said, flustered into bravery. "Procedures—"
"Within sense," Kumkum said, earning Rukmini's second-favorite kind of smile.
"Dawn," Rukmini said again to Rakhal, the word turning morning into an appointment with the earth.
"Dawn," he echoed.
She nodded and walked away, leaving the sentence—and the ashram—weighted and precise. Chatterji flapped briefly, gathered his assistants, promised to return "with forms," and left with Mandira's palanquin scraping grace off the pathway as it went.
Evening regained itself. The neem unbent. The river practiced saying night. Rakhal stood under the saffron thread of sky and felt the thin fizz under his skin that came after he had asked the world for a courtesy and been granted something riskier: attention.
Meghla set a cup of water in his hand without looking, the way mothers do when they have memorized which hand a child will accept a cup in and how to make that seem like an accident. "You didn't break," she murmured, proud in the way women are when boys keep their promises to teachers and to mysterious, older, more inconvenient forces.
"I almost did," he said.
"Almost is a coin whose merchant has no change," Jashodhara muttered as she went by, and he smiled into the cup.
Kumkum came last. She tapped his ankle with the cane—once, lightly, the cane's version of a pat. "Tomorrow, you will wake before dawn," she said. "You will go with Adept Rukmini. You will do nothing and come back with more than nothing. You will write."
"Yes, Āchārya."
"And Rakhal," she added, looking squarely at his face as the day finally chose to leave, "when listeners find each other, the world gets nosy. Guard your grammar."
He nodded. "Yes."
"Good," she said, and turned away, leaving him with the tree, the river, the map that lied politely on the clerk's desk upriver, and the first adult in the Mandal who had looked at him and not seen a problem or a prize but a tool she did not yet know how to name.
The neem shook a little, the way trees do when they are tempted to laugh. From the duel ring came soft voices arguing praise. From the water, a long note.
Rakhal looked at the patch of sour mud that had sung on command and felt both pleased and chastened. You could persuade the world to blink once, maybe twice. After that, the world would become curious.
He put his palm flat on the courtyard dirt, and without asking, listened.