Kiki Kallira Breaks a Kingdom Read online

  “Well,” said Brahma, “I said no god or man could kill him. Perhaps you should send a goddess.”

  So the gods combined their power and created the warrior goddess Chamundeshwari, who was every bit as awesome as she sounded. She rode into Mysore on the back of a great lion and, at the foot of the hills, she and Mahishasura had a long, bitter battle. In the end, she won. She killed the demon king and saved Mysore. Yay!

  To show her how grateful they were, the people of Mysore gave the hills a new name in her honor. They called them the Chamundi Hills. (“The next time we visit Granny and Gramps,” Mum said, “I’ll take you to Mysore to see the real Chamundi Hills. You can even see a statue of Mahishasura and a temple for Chamundeshwari at the top!”)

  It was a fun story. Just a story. Much like Zeus and Thor and Osiris, Mahishasura had never really existed. I sometimes liked to think they had all been around once, because mythology was so cool, but I was eleven years old and I kind of knew myths were just myths. Jackals didn’t talk, the sun wasn’t pulled across the sky by a god in a chariot, and Asuras weren’t real.

  And the totally amazing idea I had right then, with the yellow sketchbook open in front of me, was to create a Kiki version of the old city of Mysore and retell the story of Mahishasura my own way.

  I sketched quick, sharp lines with my pencil, went over them in black ink, and filled the shapes in with shades of cream, white, gold, and red. Mysore Palace sparkled back at me from the paper, almost exactly like the one I had seen in the real city the last time Mum and I visited India. It was so warm and alive that I could almost hear the birds and feel the heat of the sun.

  I drew outward from there, taking pieces out of the story Mum had told me and jumbling them up with my own whimsical ideas. I drew palaces and clockwork trains, outdoor markets and rainbow houses. Red London double-decker buses and jackals in deep, dark woods. Cobblestone streets and lush green hills. A circus that never stopped, a castle in the sky. Sketch after sketch after sketch. Black ink and vivid colors. My hand cramped and my neck ached, but I barely noticed because I was so excited about the world growing right in front of me. My world.

  I’d been having so much fun with my weird, perfect, patchwork Mysore that I didn’t really want to ruin it by introducing Mahishasura and his army of demons into it. But all good stories need an enemy the heroes have to fight, right?

  I started with his head. Mahishasura was a buffalo demon, so I drew a pair of thick, curled horns. It took me a little while to get the pencil lines just right, but once I was happy with them, I inked them in with bold, black strokes.

  And that was when the real world got weird.

  At first, it just felt like I was on a train. A bit rumbly, but fine. Then the rumble got rumblier and my whole bedroom shook. I looked up in time to see an empty cup rattle violently on my desk. My colored pencils rolled away from me. The cup crashed to the floor.

  The sky outside my window went dark. Not nighttime-dark, but the dark of storm clouds. They gathered and swept across the sky, churning in time to the rumble of the earth.

  Somewhere below, Mum’s voice called my name in alarm. I looked out of the window and saw that beyond our back garden, the river was choppy and frothy, like the waves on an ocean. A boat rocked back and forth while water splashed over the tall sides of the riverbank.

  Then, abruptly, it stopped. Just like that. The room went still, the skies cleared, the sun came back out, and the river went quiet.

  “Kiki?” Mum was out of breath as she appeared in the doorway of my room. “Are you okay?”

  “What was that?”

  “An earthquake, I think,” she said, perplexed.

  Of course, it hadn’t been an earthquake at all, but we didn’t know that then. We didn’t know that the furious churning of the earth, water, and sky had been a warning.

  This was the point at which I should have thrown my beautiful yellow sketchbook into the river, but I didn’t know that, either. Instead, I threw away the broken cup, made myself a grilled cheese, and kept drawing.

  2

  Fast forward three months to October. Emily and I went back to school, Emily’s mum told us the new baby was going to be a boy, and my not-so-new-anymore sketchbook was almost full.

  “Kiki?”

  It was Mum’s voice, but I didn’t answer her. I was in the middle of a really detailed, delicate sketch of one of my characters’ battles with an Asura and I just couldn’t stop now, not when the strokes of my pencil were coming so quickly and I was so close to capturing the look of glee on my heroine’s face.

  “Kiki!”

  A swoop of my pencil for the swish of her hair as she leaped at the Asura, a sword shining in her hand.

  “Kritika. Kallira.”

  Uh-oh. Mum had used The Voice and my full name.

  I tore my eyes away from the paper. “Yes?”

  “Come down here, please!” she called, clearly exasperated. “Granny and Gramps want to say hi.”

  With one last mournful look at my sketchbook, I left it behind on my bed. It had been a few days since we’d last FaceTimed with my grandparents and I did really like talking to them, but I just wished it didn’t have to be right now.

  “She never has her nose out of that book,” Mum was saying as I walked down the stairs.

  “Oh my word,” Granny’s voice replied somewhat drily, “I wonder who she gets that from.”

  Mum snorted a laugh, but said, “I don’t think I’m quite as bad.” I could almost picture her shaking her head. “I love that Kiki is so passionate about something and works so hard at it, and her art really is brilliant, but I wish she’d spend a little more time in the real world.”

  But the real world was so much harder to live in.

  I went into the kitchen. “Hi, Granny! Hi, Gramps!”

  “There you are, pet!” Gramps boomed from the screen of the tablet propped up on the kitchen counter. “It’s always lovely to see your smile.”

  Granny stuck her head into the frame as well. “A few of your aunties are here,” she said. I noticed she was wearing a sari, which was unusual. “I think they want to say hello, too.”

  Then there was a flurry as Granny and Gramps got out of the way, and three beaming, plump aunties pushed and jostled each other to get a good look at me.

  “Kritika!” one of them squealed. Her hands flapped at me like she was dying to pinch my cheeks. I could practically feel the bruises forming. “Look at you! Eleven years old now, hmm? You look more and more like Ashwini thayi every year.”

  “Every year,” another auntie echoed. “If you turn your face just slightly to the right, Kritika, you could be a replica of that old photo of Ashwini thayi!”

  Ashwini thayi was our family’s cautionary tale. Thayi means grandmother, but it can be used for pretty much any female relative who is either dead or old. Ashwini had been my great-grandmother’s sister and she had died at the age of thirteen, of causes that no one could ever agree on because no one who had actually known her was still alive. Gramps said it was the flu (which was probably true), my uncle Shiv said it was a broken heart (what?), and at least five different distantly related aunties all insisted it had been bad behavior (again, what?).

  So the kids in the family were all pretty used to hearing things like “Careful, or you’ll end up like Ashwini thayi!” or “Do you want to end up like Ashwini thayi? No? Then don’t be so cheeky!”

  I always felt like poor Ashwini thayi deserved a better story than that, so I had put a version of her in my Mysore. Honestly, my version of her was no truer to the real Ashwini than the stories the aunties came out with, but I liked to think she would have liked it. My Ashwini was an Asura slayer, fierce, proud, and brave. In my Mysore, Ashwini thayi got to be a hero.

  Coincidentally, she was the one I had been drawing when Mum interrupted me.

  The aunties were still talking over one another. I caught snatches of “How are you?” and “What are you studying in school these days?” and then, at last, Granny wrestled her phone back and shooed them away.

  “Are you having a party?” I asked her, puzzled by the unusual number of visitors in their house this late in the day. India was four and a half hours ahead of us, so it was past ten o’clock at night there.

  “Only a small one,” said Granny. “It’s Dussehra.”

  Dussehra is an Indian festival. It was celebrated in different ways around the country, but in Karnataka, the state where my grandparents lived, it was celebrated with lots of delicious food, elephant parades in cities like Mysore, and processions of goddess statues down the river Kaveri. Part of the festival was about celebrating Chamundeshwari’s defeat of the demon king Mahishasura.

  The Kodava people of Coorg, which was where Gramps’s family came from and where Ashwini thayi used to live, celebrated the actual Kaveri instead. Their beliefs revolved around the river and our ancestors rather than gods or goddesses, so their Dussehra sometimes involved a trip to Talakaveri, the place where the river begins.

  Basically, India has a lot of different traditions and cultures, probably because there was a time not so long ago when the country was a bunch of separate states and kingdoms. I didn’t even know most of the traditions, but I was pretty sure people in the north of the country celebrated Dussehra differently. They called Chamundeshwari by the name Durga, for a start, and in some places, their Dussehra celebrated the defeat of a totally different demon king by a totally different god instead.

  Mum and I usually went to India once a year, during the summer, but one time, we went in October, and that was the only time I’d ever celebrated Dussehra myself. It had been a whole week
of eating delicious things, which, as far as I was concerned, made it the best festival ever. Sometimes, if I tried really hard, I could almost still taste some of the treats we’d had: Mysore pak, a buttery, sugary biscuit that came in slabs; jalebis, those sweet, sticky, sunset-colored rings soaked in syrup; dosas, which were sort of like savory crepes that I’d slather with butter; and kaju katlis, diamond-shaped sweets made out of ground-up cashews and sugar.

  There had been a lot of sugar involved. I was practically drooling just thinking about it now.

  “I’m so jealous,” I said mournfully.

  “I’ll eat an extra piece of kaju katli just for you,” Gramps said generously.

  “I have a whole box of Mysore pak right here,” Granny chimed in, a very Mum-esque twinkle of mischief in her eye. “Do you want to see?”

  Mum and I looked at each other in a moment of mutual sorrow that we’d been saddled with a family like this.

  * * *

  • • •

  After the call, Mum started chopping garlic and onions for the risotto she was making us for dinner. As I measured out the rice, she said, “Kiki, I know you overheard what I said to Granny and Gramps about your art . . .”

  “Would that be the part where you said I’m brilliant?” I asked, smiling angelically.

  She rolled her eyes. “I know what it’s like to love something so much that you hate to be parted from it. I could read books and scribble with my pencil all day.”

  “I’d do that, too, but I’d also need cake,” I said firmly.

  She considered that. “Same, actually.” And then she gave herself a quick shake. “The point is, it’s okay to love the worlds inside your head.”

  “But?”

  “No, that’s it,” she said, and smiled. “It’s okay. Yes, it’s annoying when I have to yell your name six times before you hear me but, you know, pot and kettle. If this is what makes you feel better on a bad day, then I’m glad you have it.”

  Guilt and love and gratitude made my throat tight, so I just hugged her. I had never told her just how bad it got sometimes inside my brain, but maybe I didn’t need to. She understood me anyway. She got me.

  Later, teeth brushed and pajamas on, I went back to my room and, more importantly, back to my sketchbook. Ashwini took shape on the clean white paper, a girl with a sharp dark bob, merry brown eyes, a red leather jacket, and an expression of pure glee on her face as she battled one of Mahishasura’s demon soldiers.

  In my story, Ashwini was the leader of a group of rebel kids who were trying to take Mysore back from the Asuras. They called themselves the Crows, because crows are stubborn and cunning and loyal, and they lived in a lovely crooked house that had a talent for hiding them from Mahishasura’s minions.

  The crooked house wasn’t going to be in this sketch, though. I wasn’t sure what the background would be yet, but it would be outdoors, maybe on a large arched bridge over the Kaveri.

  I sketched out the finer details of the Asura that Ashwini was fighting. He was a dragon demon, like the one the god Indra had defeated in one of the myths, and he was the size of a horse, with enormous black wings, slit nostrils that breathed smoke, a spiky scarlet tongue, and shiny black jewels for scales. Before Ashwini had tracked him down, he had been one of Mahishasura’s most feared minions. The sight of his silhouette swooping across the night sky had made the people of Mysore tremble in fear.

  I inked over the pale pencil lines and reached for my box of colored pencils. Sweeping black lines and blocks of rich color transformed the white paper into something alive. Soon, the battle felt so real that I could almost feel the hiss of the Asura’s breath on my face.

  My bed gave a jerk beneath me. I jerked, too, startled.

  “Hello?” I said foolishly.

  Funnily enough, no one answered.

  I shrugged it off and went back to my sketch. I gave the Asura’s tail a wicked curve.

  “Ow!”

  I dropped the pencil and snatched my hands back. It had been a quick, sudden burst of pain, like an electric shock. I could have sworn it had come from my sketchbook!

  After a moment of hesitation, I put one hand back down on the page, ready to snatch it away if I needed to. Nothing happened. It was just paper. My paper, as much a part of me as my own skin.

  I was probably just tired. It had been a while since I’d had more than five or six hours of sleep at night, and while it was definitely more fun to stay up and draw than it was to stay up wondering if I needed to double-check the downstairs windows, I knew I’d be useless at school tomorrow if I didn’t at least try to sleep.

  I put my sketchbook and pencils back on my desk, got under my warm, cuddly blanket, and flicked my lamp off.

  When I woke up, my desk was in flames and there was a demon in my bedroom.

  3

  These were just implausible levels of bad luck. I had bad dreams just like everybody else, of course, but it seemed a little unfair that this dream involved a demon and a fire. Just one of the two would have been more than enough, thanks.

  I stayed calm. I sat up, blinked at the demon, and tried to ignore how real the heat from the flames felt.

  The Asura regarded me silently. He was exactly like the one I had drawn before I fell sleep. Black-jewel scales, slit nostrils with curls of smoke, and malevolent eyes. I swallowed. It was fine to be a little scared at this point, right? Even if you knew it wasn’t real?

  “Can I help you?” I asked politely.

  The Asura narrowed those eyes. “What is this place?” he demanded. His voice was a low snarl.

  Tiny beads of sweat formed on the tip of my nose. The room had become hot and smoky.

  “This is London,” I said.

  “Lun-din,” the Asura repeated, testing the syllables in his mouth. “Not Mysore?”

  “No . . . ?”

  “Then he did it,” the Asura rumbled. Was that wonder in his voice? “Mahishasura has found a way home at last.”

  This didn’t sound like good news to me.

  “Kiki? What’s all that noise down there?”

  The Asura whipped around at the sound of Mum’s voice from her bedroom in the loft above us. As he did, his wickedly sharp tail hit my leg, where blood bloomed immediately.

  “Ow!”

  This was the second time I had said that tonight. I stared at the blood, while the flames from the desk spread to the window curtains, and I felt a sudden, horrible terror.

  This wasn’t a dream, was it?

  I did not stay calm. Even as my brain rejected the possibility that this was real, my body started to panic. My heart pounded. My curtains were on fire, my desk was on fire, the sketchbook on my desk was on fire.

  And the Asura was gone.

  I heard a crash from downstairs as the front door slammed open. He had escaped.

  Great. There was a demon loose in London.

  “What was that?” I could hear Mum shifting in bed. She would be downstairs any minute now. “Was that the door?”

  There was literally no way I could answer that honestly, so I lied. “I didn’t hear anything!” I squeaked.

  What was I supposed to deal with first? Fire or demon? Demon or fire?

  Well, one of the two was still in my house with my mother, so that settled things. Holding my breath and scrunching up my eyes to block out as much smoke as I could, I dragged my blankets off my bed, smacked at the curtains with them, and then threw them over the desk to smother the remaining flames.

  Then I turned and ran, barefoot, out of my room, down the stairs, and out of the open front door. I had absolutely no idea what I planned to do when I found the Asura, who was an impressively ferocious dragony demony thing while I was just a kid in her favorite pajamas, but I couldn’t just let him get away, either. After all, I was the one who had somehow set him loose.

  Not to mention the fact that he was the only one who could explain to me how he had become so, you know, real.

  So I ran down the street and turned the corner. My feet did not approve of the cracked, uneven pavement and my decision to venture forth without shoes, but they would just have to put up with it.