“Careful, mortal.” The voice was disembodied, high and sweet as a nightingale’s call, commandingly stern as a priest’s sermon. “You dare step into the abode of a van-yakshini?”
For a moment, genuine terror gripped me as I looked around, whipping my head frantically in all possible directions. Even though none of the yakshagan had been seen ever since the Great War some centuries ago, people still advised against walking too close to the ditch that separated the forest from the settlements; a warning I had heedlessly flouted all three years of my apprenticeship. It would be just my luck, to be caught by some stray van-yakshini now, hell-bent on revenge for the wrongs of my ancestors.
But there was no one around me. I sighed in relief.
“Mortal,” came the voice again, far closer, trembling with irritation that verged on rage. “I am warning you. Step away.”
I felt something brush against my foot, soft as silk. I bent down, squinting my eyes in the fading light of the evening, and laughed as I spotted the culprit. Not a van-yakshini, not a snake, no, not at all. Only a jasmine-girl; small-bodied and pale-limbed, star-bright petals swaying softly in the wind as she hummed to herself, eyes shut.
“Hello.”
At the sound of my voice, they jerked open, revealing brilliant yellow irises, hard with anger. “Twice I have warned you already, mortal. Once more I shall do so. Leave while you still have the opportunity to do so. It will do you no good to incur the wrath of a van-yakshini.”
I took a long whiff deliberately. Most people would only smell the cloying fragrance of her petals, lush green and thick with nighttime, of course; only an apothecary could pick up on the milk-rich scent underneath, the tell-tale musk of her human skin; sour with sweat— a dead giveaway for any girl-blossom. As if chastened, the jasmine-girl closed her petals around her, frowning at me in consternation.
“I am a van-yakshini,” she repeated stubbornly, her tiny face scrunched up in indignation. “I am the heart of the forest, the lover of the wilds, feared by all; from the mynahs that twitter on the branches of the tallest arjuns to the rabbits that burrow deep into the roots.”
“Sure,” I said, conceding. “But right now, you are in a ditch. I suppose that makes you a ditch-yakshini?”
“A ditch?” The jasmine-girl sputtered, much to my surprise. Strangely, she did not seem to be aware of her location in the slightest. “A ditch! I cannot be in a ditch! The disrespect! The horror! Oh my poor petals!” For such a tiny girl-blossom, she sure could wail very loudly.
“There, there,” I consoled as best as I could, patting her petaled head, which was now drooping concerningly. “I…would you like a change in location? I can transplant you. My aunt’s garden—there are many girl-blossoms there. It’s a lot better than this, at least.” I gestured to her less-than-suitable-surroundings, and she sniffed again. “Come with me. Come on.”
“Fine,” said the jasmine-girl, raising her head. “I shall accept your proposal, mortal. But you shall water me daily. You, not your aunt, or any of your underlings. And you will not plant me anywhere near roses. They gossip a lot. Or moonflowers. I cannot stand the sight of them. Or—”
I uprooted her whole in one careful tug, cutting her off. She yelped, curtaining herself inside her petals. Van-yakshini. That was a first, but I had heard girl-blossoms make stranger claims.
“I will have to call you something, if you wish me to tend to you every day,” I told the jasmine-girl. “There are quite a few jasmine-girls in our garden. I might get confused.”
“None of them hold a petal to me,” she said haughtily, but then paused, considering. “Well, I suppose a name might be useful. I do not want you to mistake me for another and tend to them instead of me.” I waited for her to volunteer a nom-de-plume, but she did not, so I prompted, “What about your yakshini name?”
I was only humoring her, so it surprised me when she replied, in all seriousness, “It will burn out your mortal tongue the moment you utter it.”
“Well, we cannot have that.” I thought for a moment. “I suppose I can call you Malati?”
The jasmine-girl looked affronted. “What? That just means jasmine!”
“It will be easy for me to remember, then,” I said, walking up to the wrought-iron gate of my aunt’s back garden. I carefully lifted the latch, overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle. The air was sweeter here, suffused with the lushness of the girl-blossoms, and the varying scents of my aunt’s stores; nutmeg, star anise, dried ginger, and dhup.
I chose a secluded spot for the jasmine-girl, away from the roses and the moonflowers as she had requested, and gently set her down in an earthen pot, the inside of which was rich with soil and my aunt’s magic. “Welcome to our garden, Malati.”
“The level of your intelligence does not bode well for my future,” she said crossly, before dozing off in her new abode.
My aunt was not the least surprised to see a new jasmine-girl snoring away in her garden the next morning. “Other gardeners hang birdhouses or dig ponds,” said my aunt, turning to me with a fond laugh. “You plant girl-blossoms.”
Nobody quite knew how girl-blossoms came into existence, a mystery that had puzzled the empire’s best green-mages and scholars alike for decades; and neither me nor my aunt were inclined to research. The roses had been there before we moved in, all of them claiming to be queens of a kingdom long razed to ash by invaders (a fact we kindly kept from them). The violets we had brought from the bazaar to brighten the doorstep, not knowing that quite a few of them were actually girl-blossoms who had somehow escaped the florist’s knife. The moonflowers had been transplanted from the graves of five sisters who had perished in a fire.
Aunt Ishavari liked to believe that girl-blossoms were naught but girls who died too young; lost in the womb or taken by the god of ill-fortune, whose souls then were poured anew into petaled bodies; another chance at a happier, less hazardous life.
“Be gentle with this one, Shaili,” murmured my aunt, placing a gentle hand upon my shoulders. “Girl-blossoms do not end up in ditches. I feel that hers is a very tender soul.”
Whatever my aunt had surmised with her green-mage’s intuition, I did not see any evidence to support that sort of claim. Malati’s personality did not improve once transplanted; she was always whining about this or that, and soon the other girl-blossoms had started to shut themselves up in their buds when I approached, upset that I had brought Malati into their midst. I tried to coax them out with sweet words and the promise of quality mulch, but all I got for my efforts was a thorny slap to the wrist. Wounded, I moved to Malati, who also did not seem pleased to see me. “The bees are always hovering around me. And the butterflies flirt,” she complained as I bent to water her, crossing her slender white arms over her body. “The audacity! I am a van-yakshini.”
“I am sure they do not know,” I said. Neither me nor my aunt had given much credence to Malati’s claim, though we didn’t outright discredit it either. Girl-blossoms were tender beings, prone to both whimsy and sentiment. It was best to let them live out their delusions in peace, for the short but eventful duration of their life.
“It is true,” Malati insisted. “There can be only one explanation to my form: I am cursed. Yes,” she said to herself, mollified by her own reasoning. “It must be one of those megh-yakshinis. They are such an awful lot; looking down upon all of us from their fancy cloud palaces, drinking mist-wine and seducing the winds.”
I did not say anything in reply. The yakshagan, primordial beings of the sky, the rivers, and the wilds, were to us a myth at best, something to frighten little children away from plucking strange flowers and eating berries that they were not supposed to. The imperial chroniclers did maintain records of them, some predating the Great War, when they had lived alongside us in harmony. Some controversial scholars even argued that it was them we had to thank for green-magic; a bargain, perhaps, or simply a gift of friendship. But that was too long ago, before our ancestors had taken axes to their sacred groves and razed entire sections of the forest. To us, it had made no difference whether one was a megh-yakshini or a van-yakshini or something else entirely. In the end, the yakshagan had all but disappeared from our midst, leaving us to our own devices.
“Can you break my curse?” Malati continued, her petals quivering in anticipation.
“No,” I said heavily. I hated to be quashing her hopes, though ill-founded. “I do not have any magic. Only my aunt does. And before you ask,” I added, wincing at the way her face lit up. “No. Her magic does not work that way.”
“What does it do then?” Malati asked with some distaste. Clearly, she did not think any magic other than the curse-breaking one was worth having.
“You will see,” I said, patting her on the head. Truthfully, I could not actually describe faithfully what it was that my aunt’s magic did. While most of our customers claimed there was nothing magical about it at all, only skill and intuition, my aunt was a green-mage, through and through, and from an imperially-recognized family branch at that. I had seen flowers bloom at my aunt’s urging; the way herbs and roots yielded to her touch, letting her shape them like putty into remedies and potions and tinctures. If she prepared you a cough syrup, it would polish your singing voice for the rest of your life. If she brewed an alleviative tea, it would take from the guilt that weighed you down most heavily and make it soft as pulp for you to chew.
I did not have any of that. But I did not mind. As a child, I had often hoped green-magic would brush its tender wings against me and whisper to me in lilting notes like it did for my family, but now the ache of childhood was only an old scar that twinged from time to time, but didn’t cut so deeply so as to burrow a hole in me. I had long made my peace with it.
It was Mother, really, who took longer to recover from my lack of green-magic. Of all her children, I was the only one who was not blessed with even a kernel of the blessed magic that our emperor was cunning enough to cultivate well in his empire. Our family’s illustrious lineage had never let him down, an ever-blooming vine that had never before failed to flower—until me.
“There goes our good name down in the drain,” Mother would say forlornly, taking my small child’s hands in her aged ones, pressing hard, as if willing for the magic to seep into my skin with nothing with sheer force and will. “All five generations of it.”
It used to stab at me, when I watched my siblings bloom things to life with a brush of their fingers or a single kind word, laughing and whispering excitedly amongst themselves, a joy that was shared only by the three of them, never me. I had taken up gardening out of spite despite my lack of green-magic and my mother’s protests, but in time, I had come to like it, enough that when I turned thirteen, the age when most children apprenticed themselves to a trade, I thought of pursuing it in the service of some border-lord who could ill-afford the luxury of a green-mage.
But Aunt Ishavari had stalled those plans by arriving a week before I planned to leave, all with neatly signed letters of apprenticeship, ink still drying on the thick, gold-embossed imperial paper.
Mother had been less than thrilled about the whole prospect. “She will be of no use to you, sister.” The heat of her disapproval was searing, I could feel the bougainvillea that had begun to creep through the balcony window now steadily drooping, the pink and purple leaves shedding agitatedly in response to my mother’s agitation. “Gods know I have tried. The perpetual shame that I have to live with. The daughter of the imperial green-mage, unable to so much as ripen a mango—”
“Be that it may,” interrupted my aunt, the gentle cadence of her voice like a low murmuring brook in the summer, cool and soothing. The bougainvillea perked up once again. “I haven’t changed my mind about taking Shaili on as an apprentice. I even have all the necessary documents drawn up, like you said.”
Mother pursed her lips at that, looking sideways at the full stack of papers in my aunt’s hand, all official, stamped with the emperor’s own seal. “If you are hoping she might be a late-bloomer like you were, sister, then forget it,” Mother said. “Believe me, I have exhausted every possible avenue trying.”
There had been seances and summonings. I had been bathed in manure and slept naked upon flowerbeds. There had been long, muddy treks up the side of the hill, and all around the forest. There had been green-mages who had forced draughts of tree sap down my throat. My face flushed both in humiliation and memory, and I shuffled away from both of them.
“I do not care for that, Vaidehi,” my aunt said decidedly, gesturing for me to follow. “Shaili will always have a place at the apothecary, regardless of any green-magic, for as long as she wills it.”
That had caused my mother’s lovely face to curdle. “Take her and be damned, if you wish,” she snapped. “Gods know why you want her so badly. If you wanted to run your little apothecary to the ground, you would be better served hiring a mad bull.” She strode furiously into the house, every single blade of grass on our front lawn bristling in response.
Aunt Ishavari patiently waited for them to settle, before turning to me with the barest hint of a smile. She was my mother’s twin, but in that moment, they were as alike as a marigold and a foxglove. “Well then, Shaili? Shall we?”
Green-mages with any level of proficiency in their art could situate themselves in the very heart of the empire. The very best of them, such as my mother, were given a small battalion of elite soldiers and sent to win wars by choking out the lives of enemy soldiers by conjuring twisting roots and vines to wrap tight round their necks and torsos. Others were contracted by rich farmers to turn barren lands green or by bored nobles to tend to their prized greenhouses, and a few of them also went on to curate entire exhibitions showcasing their craft. My aunt could easily have been one of them, earning a pretty penny with little effort. But she had chosen to open an apothecary instead, charging people not money for her services, but things they could spare easily enough. Jars of honey and jam. A milking goat. Some help in setting up a pen so said goat did not go around making a meal of our supplies.
Aunt Ishavari did not ask me even for that. She demanded nothing of me, only bade me work for my keep, work that I would have done anyway. I did not question it, or wasted time and breath puzzling it over. Unlike my mother, I knew why Aunt Ishavari wanted me, when she could have had her pick of magical, talented apprentices across the empire. It was for the same reason I took in girl-blossoms: to care for a thing that had no other place in the world.
It took a good while, but Malati slowly began to settle in. Perhaps she grew tired of whining, for she started to do it less and less, and did not snark at the other girl-blossoms that much when they attempted to converse with her. For all her faults, she was terribly witty, and the others were soon won over. The frostiness between me and the other girl-blossoms also thawed in time, and now they allowed me to approach them for a petal or two without snapping at me with their sharp, sharp teeth. For the most part, Malati seemed to be at ease, and all was well.
That is, until the goat broke in.
It was really my fault. I was supposed to lock her in the pen the night before, but I forgot; and so we woke the next morning to Malati’s loud and piercing wail. I rushed to the garden as fast as I could, following the sound of her distress. There, a goat was chewing at her petals, oblivious to Malati’s tiny arms that kept batting at her. I managed to shoo her away, but the damage was done. Malati was nearly naked, with only a single remaining petal to provide her any semblance of modesty. She wrapped herself up in it mournfully, weeping fat tears of nectar that slid down her stalk.
“I am sorry,” I said sincerely, lifting her pot, “that I did not get here sooner.”
Malati sniffled, too traumatised to talk yet. I carried her inside the apothecary, and cleared a space amongst the many potions and concoctions lining the kitchen windowsill. Gently, I placed her there, a nice sunny spot. Malati did not lift up her sobbing head to admire her new spot, so I described it to her, rubbing her back softly.
“Will it grow back?” Malati asked at last, her tiny arms wrapping around her in a miserable embrace.
“Yes,” said my aunt, joining us. She unscrewed one of her many vials and rubbed soothing ointment along her torn petals, her magic filling the ache in our jasmine-girl’s heart that I could not. “All things grow, with time.”
My aunt’s prediction proved to be right. With time, Malati’s petals grew back, softer and whiter than before, and she was so delighted that for a while she would not let anyone touch them, terrified they would wilt at the slightest brush of our skin. “It is a miracle,” she said, examining them in newfound glee, turning them over this way and that, until I found her a tiny silver hand-mirror so she could admire herself with ease.
“Well, now you can go back outside,” I said, patting her on her little head.
“For what? So the goat can chew on me again?” She scrunched up her face in disgust. “I am staying here. Inside, where there are no goats and other horrid creatures. Besides,” she said, peeking up at me through downy lashes, “I am good for the apothecary.”
That she certainly was. With her there to deliver either biting remarks or sage advice to customers, people were stopping by a lot more frequently, charmed by the strange jasmine-girl who solemnly proclaimed herself a van-yakshini.
Some of them even offered to take her from us. “I have a greenhouse,” said one gentleman who had come by to procure some rare seedlings and stayed behind to persuade Malati. “Thrice as large as this apothecary, with hundreds of other jasmine-girls, but none like you. You can be their queen.”
“I already have one,” Malati said matter-of-factly, shutting her petals all the way through and refusing to come out until he left—which was well after sundown.
“Oh, who is it?” I cajoled, tickling her feet. She yelped and stuck out her tongue at me. “One of the rose-girls?”
“I’ll be damned before I swear my allegiance to those overbright harpies—”
But she was interrupted by a knock on the door. Three times, in soft succession, gentle but firm. Both me and my aunt exchanged knowing glances.
Plenty of people came to our apothecary all the time, but there were some who only came in the dark of the night or the still-hazy hours of the dawn, tear-tracks drying upon their cheeks. Some chose to tell their stories to us while my aunt worked her magic, while others chose to keep quiet—but they were all the same, with hearts hollowed with pain and in urgent need of mending.
My aunt welcomed her in while I crushed rose petals in a powder-blue cup (donated generously by one of our rose-girls), along with slivers of sugar apples and soaked remnants of love-letters. It was a delicate process, but fulfilling, a surefire cure for heartbreak.
“You are wasting your magic on the wrong thing,” proclaimed Malati from the windowsill, startling our customer. I shot Malati an admonishing look, but my aunt turned to her calmly, still working the mixture with her hands.
“Am I?” said my aunt. “What should I be using it on instead?”
“Poison.”
I let out a gasp, and even Aunt’s eyebrows rose, but the woman herself was unfazed. Some of her initial grief seemed to have lessened somewhat, and she looked a little more at ease. Aunt turned to her, ever-perceptive.
“Is that something you would want?” she asked. “I can brew it so that it is undetectable by anyone, even the imperial physician. I can brew it as excruciatingly painful as you want,” she paused, looking down at the cup in her hand, full of the healing tisane she had just mixed; a palliative that would strain the black-tar pain from her soul like a sieve. “Then this will have no effect on you.”
It was the curse of green-magic. It couldn’t fix everything, no matter how hard we might wish for it to be so. Green-magic could regrow petals but not lengthen a girl-blossom’s lifespan. It could not promise you both revenge and relief.
The woman thought for a moment. “He turned me out of the house with nothing but the clothes on my back. His wife of seven years, all for a woman who spoke to him thrice,” she said at last. “I—I loved him so much. I still do. I don’t want him to die.” She looked away as if ashamed. “But I want him to feel that pain too. The excruciating pain of being betrayed by one you thought above all reproach.”
Aunt complied, going right back to work. Green-magic swelled and filled the small of our cottage like smoke, leaving a cleansing aura in their wake.
“Jasmine-girl,” said the woman, addressing Malati. “How is it that you know?”
“I know,” was all Malati said, sounding shocked at her own confession, yellow eyes large and luminous in the dark.
People came to the apothecary for all sorts of cures. Sometimes, they came for basic aches and ills of the flesh; to cure the small pains that struck one as the season turned, or to excise the irrational sorrow that plagued them every once in a while. Sometimes it was to halve the grief of losing a loved one; at times to entomb it into a lacquered corner of their heart, so it remained firm and bright even as their minds started unravelling with age. Sometimes they came to forget, a mellow potion of violet and chamomile that eroded the details from your mind like the rain rinsing the topsoil downriver.
But the potion my aunt was brewing today was the opposite of that; pungent with eucalyptus bark and lime and javitri, steeped with one of Malati’s own petals. “This will help you remember, Malati,” said my aunt, ever so kindly. “But memories are often nothing but distilled quarts of pain and longing. I will ask you again: are you sure about this?”
Malati lifted her dainty little face, pale cheeks smeared with tear tracks. “Yes,” she said, the word soft but sure.
My hands ached to stop her. What if the weight of her past was too great to bear? There were many who came to our apothecary, bowed by the weight of their hurt, their grief. And Malati was only a jasmine-girl.
But it was not my choice to make.
My aunt moved to strain the concoction over her, but Malati shook her head. She drew back, confused, but then Malati looked towards me and I understood. Taking the concoction from my aunt, I strained it gently over Malati, who shuddered as the stinging concoction slid all over her. When it was done, she sat unmoving, mouth pursed as if she could still taste the bitter liquid. Or perhaps she was remembering.
I realised my aunt had gone, to give Malati some privacy, but I could not make myself move. Malati’s eyes turned to me, dark with some unknown horror, and I forced myself to turn around, but she spoke then; barely a whisper, a rushed, desperate plea. “I remember.”
Several beats passed before she spoke again. “I am not cursed. I am in exile.” Her voice was dull with pain. “My lover betrayed me to the queen, for stepping foot in mortal soil. I was only curious. I did not mean to break the law. I did not—” She broke off with a sob.
It was a severe punishment, for what seemed like a minor transgression. My heart ached for her. “What is the duration of your exile?”
“Three hundred thousand years,” pronounced Malati with an air of doom. I sucked in a breath. “Barring that, if someone says my name out loud, I can consider my exile at an end.” She raised her eyes to me, looking defeated all of a sudden. “My yakshini name.”
Malati’s head drooped, as if it were an impossible task, far more than waiting three hundred thousand years, by the end of which she might as well be dust.
“Alright,” I said. “Tell me.”
Malati turned to stare at me in horror. “You cannot. I was not jesting before. It will burn out your tongue.”
“That is alright,” I repeated. Malati shook her little blossom-head furiously. I gently uprooted her from her pot, holding her up in my palms. She was so very small, and so very sad. “I can do without my tongue, Malati,” I said evenly. “Can you do without your home?”
Malati looked miserable. “I…have sisters,” she said after a while. “Six of them, each dearer than the last. I have missed them.” Her voice broke on a sob. “I have missed them so much.”
She might be older than me, an immortal being of the vast open wilds, but at the moment she was only a lonely girl, lamenting all she had left behind. “It’s alright,” I said. “It is alright, Malati.” She was still upset, crying, tears pooling underneath her. It would be terribly inconvenient, I knew, but it was a small thing to bear, nothing at all, if it meant ending my jasmine-girl’s exile. “Tell me your name.”
She did, letting out a wretched sob, and I smiled, enunciating each syllable with the same care with which I had watered her daily. She had not undersold it; the pain was excruciating. My tongue starting burning away from the throat up.
When it was done, I let out a gaspful of smoke.
“Thank you,” said Malati, lifting her luminous eyes to me. Within the space of one heartbeat and the next, before I even had a chance to catch my breath, she changed, growing tall and lithe and lush, arms the soft brown of a tree’s heart, hair the redolent green-dark of a forest glen, strung up with jasmine blossoms like tiny stars.
“Thank you,” she repeated, marveling at herself as she strode out of the kitchen, me on her heels, the soles of her bare feet leaving wet green prints on the floor. She breathed in the clean morning air, perfumed with the scents of the sleeping girl-blossoms; violets and moonflowers and roses. Perhaps they were queens after all. Who knew? There was more magic in the whole wide world than only in the hands of those the empire kept on a tight leash, and strangely, I found myself at ease with that.
She turned her lovely, heart-shaped face to mine and I realised, with a painful twinge in my chest, that this was the very last time that I would be seeing her, in this or any form. Her queen would not forgive her a second transgression.
I wished, just for once, that I could speak, just to bid her farewell. But I could not, so instead I only nodded my head at her; the tart, sharp-tongued jasmine-girl who had really been a van-yakshini all along, who now stood before me powerful and bewitching as the goddess of spring herself.
“Farewell, mortal friend,” she said softly, inclining her head to me slightly. Then with a whirl of leaves, she was gone, slipping away like a shadow in the dark, leaving a trail of jasmines in her wake.
My aunt was waiting for me in the kitchen, a kettle whistling away at the stove. She placed twin ashwagandha leaves over my molars, commanding me to chew, and spooned turmeric paste into my now empty mouth. The pain lessened near instantly, and I massaged the sides of my cheeks in relief.
“I saw,” she said simply. “It was a great act of kindness—and the greatest kind of magic there is.” I blinked at her, confused. I was not the magical one; that was my aunt and her quiet knowledge, her quick fingers, her handy herbal remedies. But now, for the first time, I felt green-magic brush the edges of my soul, tingling the very tips of my fingers.
I looked up at my aunt, startled with the discovery, who only smiled serenely, taking the kettle off the stove. Gingerly, she poured out a measure of tea for the both of us; rich with clove sugar and cardamom and orange-blossoms, my aunt’s signature blend; for healing, soothing, and new beginnings.
“Do not worry, Shaili,” she said as I sipped tentatively, the hot drink warming my sore mouth, my hollow throat. “All things grow with time.”
Tunvey Mou hails from Assam and with every passing day in Delhi she wishes she had remained there as well. Ex-chess player, voracious reader, and part-time poisoner; she enjoys writing about eldritch monsters, uncanny myths, cursed love, demonic cults, ritual cannibalism, and other such delightful things.
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