The first man to summon me is Whitney, my boatswain on the Dharini. This is how I learn that Virat didn’t cremate me. My body still lies on the white sand of our cove, rotting in the turquoise waters of the Laccadive Sea.
“What year is it?” I ask Whitney, whose once-fiery muttonchops are now a dry gray.
“Seventeen-twenty-three, Captain,” Whitney replies. “Uh— does that still hurt?”
Looking down, I notice that my shot-riddled chest still drips, staining the deck below. It does still sting, but not in the way he means. “What do you want?”
“Captain, where did you and Mister Malsare hide the scepter?”
Of course, I think bitterly. Say what you will about privateers, you can trust them to be predictable. Then again, if Whitney is here, that would mean Virat didn’t take the scepter. “Why not ask your Mister Malsare?”
His squints in pain, his glass eye drifting out of place. “Mister Malsare is no more.”
That shouldn’t hurt, but it does.
“They cremated him, you know,” Whitney says. Looking pointedly at my tattered chest, he dangles the ultimate bait. “Captain, if you tell me where the hidden cove is, I’ll lascar my way to the island to burn your skull.”
“Keeping the scepter, of course?” I ask, enjoying Whitney’s discomfort. “Is this worth your soul, Whitney?” I needle him further. This necromantic dabbling is clearly bothering the good Christian he wants to be.
“Captain, do you want me to burn the skull or not?” Whitney asked.
I think back to the Virat I knew: smiling, carefree, tender. Will it be that Virat waiting for me across the sunless sea? Or will it be the sneering pirate-king who emptied his flintlock into my chest? Only one way to know.
“A map and quill,” I command the man. “Some parchment if you have it.”
The boatswain scribbles as I dictate the location of both the Scepter and the grotto where my corpse lies. If he hadn’t been such a crass little hobgoblin, perhaps I would’ve been more forthcoming. If he had offered to cremate me out of loyalty, perhaps I would have told him of the other two islands in the Arabian Sea where Virat and I had hidden the Cross of Bautista and the diadem of Braganca.
Perhaps, I would’ve even confided in him why Virat had actually killed me: not for a treasure or for the Dharini, but for a paltry brass ring. Plucking it off the haul from the Esmeralda, I’d pressed the ring into Virat’s palm before showering his moonlit body with jewels. Drunk on rum and victory, we’d flung ourselves headlong into each other. Weeks later, we’d sobered up on a cold white cove.
Once Whitney is finished jotting down directions, he repeats his promises to find my skull and burn it. Then he pushes me back into that dark and sunless sea where the unburnt wait for salvation.
“Captain?” A slight man with whitecaps in his hair stands outside the circle of fowl blood. This is not my previous summoner’s hillside manor. We are in a moldering, lime-washed room cluttered with sorcerous-looking trinkets. “Captain Kolhe?”
“What year is it?” I bark, dripping blood and shot. “And who are you?”
“Wh— the year?” He jumps in surprise, unaccustomed to understanding Marathi. “Nineteen-forty-six. And I am Kanwar. Kanwar Gulati, a collector of antiquities,” The man salutes excitedly. “Are you really Captain Kolhe?”
Eight years since the last summoner and two hundred since the first, my name still carries water. Pride swells my chest, expelling a pellet, “Indeed, you speak to the Harrier of Coromandel, terror of the Portuguese—”
“I wanted—”
“The cove is emptied. Whitney took the scepter and sold my remains as a curio,” I preempt the inevitable question. “And I’m not telling you where anything else is. Many have asked. Many have been spurned.”
“Please, Captain! I have your skull,” Gulati blurts out, with all the grace of a man who has never haggled with a fishwife.
If I had a heartbeat, it would quicken now. My past summoners all claimed my skull was lost, that Whitney had boiled and sold it as a curio. Had this strange, scrawny man really unearthed what had been lost to history? “Show me.”
“Of course, Captain!” Rummaging in his satchel, Gulati pulls out a shattered, bleached grin. “Look! I bought it for two annas at the Chor Bazaar.”
Two annas. That’s the price for which Whitney traded away my release? I peered into the sockets, my lips curling to match the shattered grin. Virat’s second shot had been through my smile, after I’d already died.
“I’ll burn it, Captain.” Gulati says. “Then you can go wherever you’re meant to.”
“Wherever I’m meant to?”
Where do people like me go? Virat, is that where you went?
“Please, Captain, I mean no offense!” Gulati hastens to answer. “I just— I need the money. Zeenat and I must leave before they come for us.”
“Before who comes for you?”
Then the collector spins me tales far stranger than any I’ve heard on the seven seas. Since my passing, the collector tells me, the coasts I once sailed fell under the banner of the firang, but a day of reckoning has arrived. In the Eastern reaches, man-made suns are razing cities. Nearer home, an unarmed ascetic has dislodged the empire of the firang. Lands from Makran to Mergui will exorcise them soon, but at a great cost. Kanwar Gulati’s home, the land of five rivers, is to be sundered: torn between two new kingdoms, one Mohammedan and one not. Lahore, the city the Gulatis have called home for untold generations, is to be absorbed by the new kingdom.
Finally, the collector tells his own tale, the story of Kanwar Gulati and Zeenat Qureshi, a Sikh and a Mohammedan in love, two souls who met and mingled before this sundering was considered anything but spiteful fantasy.
“I must cross the new border, Captain. They won’t spare us.”
I relent, for the sake of love that kills.
“Bring me that.” I point to a map amidst Gulati’s clutter. “Amidst my treasures was a golden cross tall as a thoroughbred, plucked from a Portuguese tribute ship. It should pay for whatever you need in your next adventure, and likely your next three lives.”
Tears wet the parchment as he pens down the directions and. Then, the summoner keeps his word, firing up a porcelain crucible to melt my skull. As we wait, he finally asks what most of them do. “What’s it like? Being stuck, I mean.”
“Like a thirst that lasts a thousand years.”
My eyes open on a woman with hair hunched over in a dark room that smells of oily smoke and old sweat. The woman’s attire clings to her form in a manner unbecoming even for this hovel. Despite the state of her, she greets me with execrable cheer, “Hi, Captain!”
Even after Gulati cremated my skull, I have been summoned again and again and again. And now again. Was this the punishment Virat threatened? An eternal afterlife, spent answering the questions of graverobbers?
“When is it?” I ask the woman, to find my bearings. “And who are you?”
“Twenty-twenty-five, and Gargi Malsare.” Her impudent laugh breaks with a porcine snort as she notices the change in my expression. “The name means something, doesn’t it?”
I want to believe. I do, as ludicrous as it is.
Virat is long dead.
This Malsare is hundreds of years removed— but that nose. Those lips.
“Recognize me?” She rises from her creaky stool and leans closer. She brandishes a tarnished ring in my face, close enough to notice the rampant horse embossed into the aquamarine patina around its brass. “Recognize this?”
How could I not?
“It’s been in my family for generations,” she carries on, “Then I looked him up! I found the rumors about you, about your disappearance. You gave him this, right? You were lovers!”
Lovers? No.
Eager, foolish, I had pressed too far.
Not content with flesh, I’d begged for the rest of his life.
“What do you want, child?
“I don’t want treasure.” Her confidence wavers, revealing the rudderless young woman beneath the mask. “I just need your advice. About Priya.”
“What advice?”
She looks at the floor, ashamed. “I’m afraid she won’t love me back.”
“It is a rightful fear.”
“You’re not supposed to say that,” she snaps.
“Your ancestor killed me for professing my love,” I reply.
“Oh— my god, I thought—” Gargi falls silent, pondering this revelation.
“Even while we found comfort in each other, Virat couldn’t bear calling what we had what it was. When I ripped that veil of modesty from him—” I pause, the pellets in my stomach rattling about. The words are bitter ash as they flow from my lips. “What could have been love turned to hate, recoiling at its own grandeur.”
“But he kept the ring,” Gargi holds up the brass trinket.
“Yes,” I study the ring again, remember it glittering in the sun, past the barrel.
“What should I do?” she asks, tiring of my silence.
“Free yourself, and her,” I say. “Tell her.”
“Father will kill me.”
“Then flee.”
“How?” Her laugh dies in the room’s suffocating confines. She turns her pockets inside out and, between hesitant sobs, says, “It’s not the sixteen-hundreds anymore. I can’t just hop on a boat and leave.”
As the girl bawls her eyes out, my eyes float back to the corroded ring in her hand, lingering on that beacon through time. Token of a love once impossible to name, now my anchor to this world. I am lighter than ether in this moment, lighter than I have ever been in all the times I have been dragged back to this infernal plane.
In that moment, I know this is the last time.
I know this is the right time. “Child, do you have a map?”
Abhijeet Sathe is a reformed engineer who writes about pirates and magic to postpone dealing with the real world. His work has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Bombay Literary Magazine, Tasavvur and various anthologies (full list at abhijeetmakesthings.com/writing.) You can find him on bluesky at @bingingout.bsky.social
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