Gauri Sinh

The Garud PropheciesSitara’s story

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For the two women defining strength in my life, my world within worlds:

My Taru. Your presence makes me stronger. And I hope that the discovery of mamma’s Badal when you get older, will be as wondrous to you as the one you met, age 3

And Mummy, the first strong woman I knew

And

For the man who continues to teach me strength and grace every day,

Chaitanya

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About the Author

Gauri Sinh earlier headed Bombay Times, the lifestyle and entertainment supplement of The Times of India, as Editor. More recently, she helmed After Hrs, the Mumbai city-based lifestyle and entertainment supplement of the broadsheet daily DNA, as Editor. Her previous book, a work of non-fiction, was published in 2010. Gauri lives and works in Mumbai.

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Sitara

Chapter 1

Awakening

In the beginning there was the end. Only no one saw it quite that way, despite the signs, the signs right there in front of us all, till they all coalesced and the end became the beginning. Padmini knew though. She didn’t have to tell me, I knew it, as I knew other things, things that Leila often screamed made people restless and awkward around me, but papa and ma didn’t pay any attention, they were furious at her tantrums on the dining table. I also knew that it was the Eagle who warned Padmini.

I knew because I had seen the Eagle, taut, majestic, his wingspan bigger than any I’ve ever seen around Astara, and I knew that this was not the first time he had visited Padmini. I knew to keep quiet about this visit too, the way I hadn’t quite, then, because I was only five, bemused and mesmerised at the hues that spun in a concentric vortex, around his head as he appeared.

I remember waking from my afternoon nap and stringing together my wonder in baby vocabulary, ‘I want a pet eagle like Padmini didi,’ I had said to my mother, beside myself with excitement in those first lucid moments after awaking from a particularly clear dream. My mother, harassed and distracted by Leila’s meltdown over yet another trifle, barely answered. But I didn’t miss Padmini startle, her head jerk in my direction. “And I want to touch the rainbow around it,” I had continued, to Padmini this time, because she had pushed back her chair and was facing me, eyes narrow, blazing with what I though at the time was anger, because I knew her secret, but later realised to

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The Garud Prophecies: Sitara’s story10

be excitement, deep and ferocious, because she understood she was not alone with her gift any longer. As she stared at me, the card she was holding on the table finally flashed its truth, face-up. The Eagle Lord, a master card in that deck, telling of changes to come, imparting warning and wisdom to those who dared understand his message.

As I grew, I understood that the deck was sacred but so were my visions and the Eagle was real, as real as I had seen him in my dream that day. And I knew Padmini understood him as nobody I know ever could, and she was anxious. Deeply anxious then, because she knew of what was to come and could do nothing to stop it.

The Koi overflowed a few months after, the dam flooded and Astara was nearly wiped out. I did not dwell much on that time, it remains a confused blur to me, the sadness and panic of people’s emotions a memory web of a five-year-old self that I’ve shut my mind to. It was only later, much later that I connected the Koi’s overflowing to the Eagle’s visit. And Padmini’s anxiousness, the vexing depth of her sorrow that my parents could not gauge because she hid it so well.

She had to be careful, she could not demonstrate more of the ‘possession’ they had believed her to have undergone, her hysteria complete at her helplessness to save us. They had had to restrain her physically, because of her frustration to get through to the elders, who really could not give in to a child’s insistence of the whole community at Astara moving to higher ground, up the Binodari foothills because the waters would rise.

No one connected her outburst with the terrible thunderstorm that shook Astara the next month, nor the flooding that followed, as if preordained, as the monsoon raged unabated. Almost half our settlement was wiped out in those floods and relief supplies from the big city two days journey away, were slow in coming.

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11Awakening

The days were hard and long and full of suffering. And Astara was too devastated from the wetness and misery later, to think back, remember that Padmini, 13 years old then, had known this – all of it. Only my mother, sharpest of us all in her attentive moments, realised that her eldest child might not be like the rest. But even she could only guess, she had no real inkling of the tremendous range of Padmini’s abilities. And she could not ever fathom the complex burden of mine.

The Eagle’s visit this time had left Padmini a ghost of her former self. She had perfected the art of being two people, relentlessly cheery around my parents and community, unbearably grave when we were training together. But this last visit had sucked out her lifeblood with its news. She now moved about hollow-eyed and tight-lipped, increasing our training sessions to three a day, strenuous even for my considerable stamina, so intent in her concentration that she almost overlooked the secrecy that had been the hallmark of our sessions since that day in our room when she had discovered I was like her. Or somewhat.

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Sitara

Chapter 2

Endurance

In those last few weeks before what Padmini saw finally unfolded, Leila got more and more unmanageable. My parents wore that harassed, sorrowful look they had come to acquire around her. She could not keep her volatility in check, she could not behave as we all did, with civility and grace, she did not have Padmini’s ability to exist in contradictory states, nor my flair for deception when necessary. She did not possess our modicum of self-preservation; in many ways despite her fierce, fiery nature, she was the sibling most vulnerable among us. I think my father saw this and in his own way tried to even the odds for her, though it was a desperate attempt.

Her rages grew worse, she lashed out at the smallest things. At first, I tried to be like Padmini who was impossibly gentle around Leila. She said to me once, early in our training, that Leila came without protection and we must protect her. I did not understand Padmini, what did Leila need to be protected from? But I tried to follow her lead, because Padmini was a compulsive force, so absolutely singular in the path of her inner conviction, the rest of us acquiesced without comment. And Padmini had always been my moral compass, her bearing selfless at the worst of times, in a way I aspired to, but could not reach. Yet.

My father did not understand the cause of Leila’s moods, her unreasonable outbursts, more violent each time, worse than ever, these final months of her twenty-second year. But in a language without words, he grasped the essence of what Padmini was

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13Endurance

trying to convey to me, what I could only half understand then. Leila was the one most vulnerable among us. He tried to be the wall that she was not born with, that shield she needed so and did not possess.

I have always felt my father was brave in the way some men are, those who go fight in a losing war, even whilst knowing they’re not coming back. He did not possess my mother’s occasional sharpness of perception, nor the gifts that both his eldest and his youngest somehow had been bestowed, though in unequal degree. He was a simple man, of few words and set habits. But Leila, the middle one, not given as much attention as first-borns normally manage, nor indulged as the littlest, caught his heart the way neither Padmini, nor I could manage.

The gifts, the gifts that were ours, that with some deep, unspoken sense of self-preservation, we said nothing of to others, they had not been overlooked in our in-between sibling. But if you have been given gifts, you must also have been made strong enough to contain them, to sustain them – to bear them. This was the awful flaw in our sister’s make-up, for which Leila paid a terrible price.

Leila lacked the steely grit that was so much a part of Padmini’s nature, despite her demure appearance. I had once seen Padmini push her hand out, straight and sure, right in between a crazed stray dog and Leila, who he was going for, on the way home from school. I will never forget the expression in her eyes when she did it – it was a moment for fear and flight, but she did neither, not even whisper to tell Leila to step back. It was as if she knew it would happen and she knew what she had to do. Her hand movement had been so graceful, it blinded me, momentarily, into immobility. Her lips turned white with the strain of it, but her eyes held that steady, unwavering determination of utter acceptance. I remember the screaming in my head, the hysterical

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The Garud Prophecies: Sitara’s story14

screaming, yelling at the dog to just ‘GO! GO AWAY!’ The dog had let go her hand, red with blood, and turned to me, his gaze flickering. Our eyes had met, I can still remember the flashing pupils of his. Then he ran, my panicked voice still echoing in my head.

Surprisingly Leila did not cry that time, no fits, nothing. She simply turned her clear wide eyes to Padmini and placed her palm flat over our sister’s gaping wound. In a few minutes the edges closed, the torn skin easing into a smooth, unbroken line. Padmini wiped the blood off. She turned to me, her eyes shining fiercely, but this time I knew the look for what it was. “I’m so proud of you, Sitara,” she said, her voice tight and small. “You didn’t scream at all.” And in that moment I realised that all that screaming had only been in my head. The entire incident had occurred in pin-drop silence, not even the dog had barked.

But this straining-at-the-leash spirit that had bent the dog’s will, the passionate, devil-may-care rebellion that people complained I had too much of – this too was absent in Leila. Tempestuous Leila, who was so sensitive to atmosphere, an animal slain by huntsmen in another settlement would evoke wails of misery, a storm of tears and a paroxysm of grief that Padmini felt as keenly but could do nothing to allay. I, too young or too heedless, would not know of Leila’s enormity of compassion, her peculiar sensitivity such that not just her hands could change the make-up of things, till much later.

On the day of that dog incident, each sister had done what she knew to do, using to capacity, that which she had been given to use, abilities not common to everyone – and each had managed to save the other. Call it what you will − inter-dependence, a circular merging, a trinity alliance − it allowed a glimpse of what was wrested within us and its potency when unleashed in unison.

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15Endurance

Each of us possessed a unique skill. A skill, that when welded at core as triumvirate, harnessed a force thrice over in magnitude. The Power of Three as mystic energy, as infinitum, a constant through time and multiple faiths, I would learn of, only later, from Padmini in our training. But at the time, the calm wasn’t to last.

When we reached home, Leila started screaming, screaming as if the world had come apart. We could not quiet her. Padmini knew the dog had been executed at that precise instant, on a dusty Astara road, for biting another child. I was still too young to understand, I just thought Leila was being a baby for not coping better with the shock of what had occurred a few minutes before. I could not be of much help to Leila in those days, the days she needed us most. Because Leila was sorely unequipped for the consequences of her gifts. But my father, in his parental intuitiveness had picked up on a fundamental that would guide our actions as siblings forever after – Leila must be protected, kept secure. Not just because she was our sister. Among the many burdens Padmini grappled with, which I understood only over time, and then too, at the very end, was a dangerous secret − our sister’s abilities could alter the very nature of reality. Her gift had to be contained.

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Sitara

Chapter 3

Preparation

Leila’s restlessness seemed irrevocably tied in to the atmosphere in those final few days. As I remember it now, those days seemed to have that indeterminate quality to them – the sensation of time lengthening and stretching, taut, crystal clear in intensity. Bearing peculiar weight, an oppressiveness, as formless as it was dense. That indefinable expectancy, that something was coming. Even those who did not really know, could not have understood at the time, seemed to strain under its constrictiveness. The weight of anticipation for what was yet hidden, as veiled as the mist that surrounded the blue mountains above the Koi. It is among these peaks I was sure the Eagle had fashioned his home, I used to imagine how fine it would look, given his magnificence and the many-hued orbs around him, but later, when I realised his true nature, I smiled at my earlier romanticism.

In the passing of those days, we were existing, going about our daily routines yet not really. For Padmini, unlike her helpless 13-year-old self at the time of the Eagle’s last visit, had decided to act on her knowledge in the interim. She would not be caught unprepared again. This last visit had galvanised her already frightening intensity of purpose such that she redoubled her efforts to initiate us into the strategies that would be key in surviving what was to come, determined to even our odds. Her mission: to better that chance the inhabitants of old Astara didn’t act on 12 years ago, because they dismissed as crazed, the frantic pleas of my sister’s 13-year-old self. Looking back on it

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17Preparation

now, I understand that it was Padmini who was the first mover, though her actions and the Eagle sighting are so tied together in my mind that I confuse the telling of the beginning.

They started slowly at first, the lessons. Deceptively slow, because Padmini was testing the waters, feeling her way forward, gauging the strength of my abilities. For matters of record, they started way before the Eagle’s second coming, they started in fact, on that day Padmini realised I had what she had, at age five. Later, it was the flooding that made up her mind for her, the speed and momentum and confidence with which she undertook what came next. As if she would never ever let what happened to the villagers befall us, because we would know she knew. Most importantly, we would listen when she said to. The gentle, even-tempered first-born of my parents had such a steel of resolve flowing through her veins that she changed the course of our lives on Astara. We owe a lot to our sister, were it not for her quiet conviction, her absolute, unbreakable strength of spirit, we would not be here.

Padmini needed us to be ready, and for her sake we tried to be. On my part, I could not do enough for the beautiful, graceful figure that took charge of training my five-year-old self. There was an eight year gap between Padmini and I, she seemed impossibly big, a second mother almost, who never shouted the way my own did, harassed and fraught by Leila’s moods, but who commanded obeisance with just a look. To me, Padmini was who I unerringly wanted to be when I grew up. Graceful, gentle, reverence inspiring. Her soothing words, her charm, the way she healed by presence alone − I wished dearly that I could too one day be the same.

“Try to focus, Taru,” she would admonish, “Don’t say it with your voice. Will it – say it with your mind …” And exhausted as I would be, from trying all day long, I would redouble my

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The Garud Prophecies: Sitara’s story18

efforts once more, until our voices, words, thoughts streamed into one another without a single sound being uttered. And the force of my will allowed communication, just as it had when the stray had got my sister’s hand in his mouth and the single-minded intensity of a child’s will had shattered its intent.

We could both communicate with our thoughts, only I had something Padmini did not, could not have known then. So young, I did not think much of this added ability, either. I was happy, content in my world, thrilled at Padmini’s attention. As I grew into my own person, a child as thoughtlessly outspoken, as haplessly brazen as Padmini was considerate and watchful, the desire to become my sister faded, but never quite went away. In my secret dreams, or when I felt deeply wronged, I would still magically metamorphose into Padmini and all those who had chided me for being me would beg forgiveness at my gracious Padmini-esque feet. That was in the comfortably distant future. Till then I would continue being me, bold, high spirited, devil-may-care. Until one day, Leila, five years older and always in need of watching changed the goalposts. Again.

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