by Z.V. Anjali
Surya, god of the sun, was having an ordinary day by the reckoning of any of the planets he directed. He was beaming benevolently upon Earth, distantly upon Brihaspati, and with relentless fierceness upon Budha, holding the entire system in his orbit, when he felt a long-forgotten tug.
“Oh, no,” he said aloud to the heavens. “Not again. How long has it been? Surely the humans have learned better—oh, no.”
The tug was a mantra, chanted by a human with more curiosity than sense. Inexorably, it pulled Surya in human form to the surface of the Earth where, for the second time in several millennia, he faced a blinking, bedazzled teenaged girl. “You silly fool,” Surya said, upon materializing before the girl in some stone ruins set in a hot and dusty landscape. “Do you know what you’ve done?” Her pitifully young face, still thick with baby fat, squinched up to avoid Surya’s glare. With an effort, he dimmed his brightness. He had learned the trick from his wife Chhaya, who taught him the secrets of shadow, but it was always a little uncomfortable. The girl opened her eyes to stare at Surya in awe, terror, and—curse her—childish glee. "Do you have any idea of the mess you’ve created, for both of us?”
“I just read the inscription out loud to hear what it sounded like.” She gestured at a large oval stone, graven with Sanskrit letters, set in a crumbled turret. “I’m studying Sanskrit. I’ve been hunting down old mantras for my thesis—it’s about the relationship between meter and sacrality in ancient Sanskrit texts. I came out to these ruins because I knew they had inscriptions that hadn’t been studied. I can’t believe you’re here. You’re Surya, right? I can’t believe it worked—”
“Yes, I’m Surya,” he interrupted, with savage irritation. “That is correct. And can you identify the purpose of the mantra you just chanted?”
The girl’s face stilled as reality struck. “You don’t mean—not really, not in the 21st century—”
“The mantra was created eons ago,” Surya snapped. “Some things from back then hold their power even now. The old stories are true. You used the same mantra the princess Pritha won from the sage Durvasa. The mantra that calls the god of your choice to you and compels him to give you a child. Compels him. I have no choice in the matter, once the mantra calls me!” The girl looked stunned, then terrified. Surya looked away from her, as if she were the sun-god and he the squinting mortal.
Pritha had been similarly petrified, in a distant age. She had summoned Surya to see if the mantra would work. She had been horrified to learn that she could not simply send him back once called. She could not have a child, she’d said. She was unmarried, and an illegitimate child would destroy her honor. Surya could do nothing. He’d told her he had no choice. The mantra bound him. Overcome with pity and horror, he’d done all he could to soften the unavoidable blow. He’d promised her that the mating would be pleasurable, the pregnancy and childbirth painless and no longer than an hour, and her virginity restored at the end of it. He’d kept those promises to the fullest. Pritha had placed her new son in a basket and set him adrift on the river to his adoptive parents and his sad, glorious destiny.
“You mean,” the girl said, her voice wavering, “the two of us have to—have sex? And then—I’ll have to be pregnant?” Her tone made it clear that no part of this appealed to her. She was about the same age Pritha had been. She seemed even younger to Surya, but then, he was millennia older. Back then, he’d found the prospect of inflicting unwanted motherhood on a young girl to be grievous and troubling, a monstrous consequence of the mantra. Now he found it unacceptable, no matter the circumstance. And he’d learned a thing or two about getting around mantras.
“Don’t despair. I’ll think of something. There’s always a way.” Any mantra, oath, curse or condition had a loophole, which could be discovered with enough cleverness. And Surya knew just who to ask about such technicalities. “What is your name?”
“Nisha.”
“Don’t fear, Nisha. I must go confer with another god. My body will remain here, but I will appear to be in a trance. I’m confident we will find a solution.” Surya could not leave Nisha’s presence until he had fulfilled the mantra’s conditions, which had been another source of pressure during the Pritha debacle. But in the intervening millennia, he’d learned a useful trick. He could leave his physical embodiment in one place, while sending his consciousness winging away, tethered to his body but as if with an elastic band that could stretch a long way before snapping back. His thought-self flew away on the thin gold band connecting it to his physical presence. Surya knew where he was going: Yamaloka, where Yama, god of death and righteousness, master of law’s nuances and loopholes, reigned with an iron fist.
Death and righteousness. What a juxtaposition. It carried so many possible meanings. Perhaps the true meaning was that righteousness be recognized and rewarded only after death—the result of the failings of mortal justice. In his early days, Yama had presided over the ancestral realm like a jolly innkeeper, only barring those patrons who molested others. But as humans developed ever more complex notions of duty and propriety, they looked to him to sort them into an increasingly fine-grained hierarchy of merit after death. Yama accepted the assignment, but it wore on him. He became somber and seldom smiled, except when in the company of his beloved dogs.
He did not smile now, as he greeted Surya in his chamber, but his face showed some warmth for an old friend. “I presume you were summoned, else your consciousness would not be here by itself.”
“Yes. By the same mantra that summoned us both millennia ago. Pritha’s mantra.” Pritha had summoned Yama to her deliberately, after her marriage to a man cursed to celibacy, years after her thoughtless and impulsive summoning of Surya. Yama had given her a son—in Surya’s opinion, a useless moralizer and a scourge to his family, but renowned for his righteousness. So Yama knew all about the mantra in question. Surya’s explanation of his predicament did not take long.
“A serious problem. Perhaps the mantra would allow you to give her a puppy, instead of a human child?” Yama patted the head of a mongrel pup who had jumped onto his lap. “Many humans see their dogs as family, equal to the children of their own flesh. I have seen heavenly reunions between humans and their canine friends more joyful than any between parent and child. Dogs are loving, loyal, and do not answer back. And they are much less work than a child.”
Surya considered this. It was not a bad thought. “One moment,” he said. He allowed the thin gold band to draw his mind back like a yo-yo (one of humanity’s more diverting inventions). “What if I gave you a puppy?” Surya demanded, of Nisha, as soon as he came to before her. “Are you fond of dogs? Could you love one as your child?”
“Uh, I was bitten by one ages ago…I’m kind of scared of them, to be honest…”
“What about a cat?” Surya loved cats, and cats loved him back. They were his favorite creatures. Nisha made a face. Surya sighed. “Never mind, then. We’ll think of something else.” His consciousness boomeranged back to Yama. “Dogs won’t work. Neither will cats. I can feel the bonds of the mantra—” For a god, a mantra’s rules were like invisible cobwebs. You might not be able to see or predict how the mantra would constrain you, but if you pushed against it, you could feel it. “—and, if it’s not a literal child of the flesh, it must be something she can genuinely regard as a child. She does not feel so about dogs. Or cats.”
“I suppose there are potted plants,” Yama said, but neither of them considered that a promising notion. Then Yama’s face brightened for just a moment. ““I know who to ask. Why didn’t I take you straight to her? She will know what to do.”
“Who?” Surya’s mind drifted out of Yama’s hall behind him, followed by the ever-present dogs.
“The only one to successfully use a loophole against me.”
Ah. They were going to pay Savitri a visit. A princess in her mortal life, Savitri had fallen in love with a poor exile, prophesied to die early. She’d insisted on marrying him despite his doom. When Yama had come for him, Savitri had followed, arguing, cajoling, and haggling for her husband’s life. Yama, impressed, had granted her boon after boon, always with the caveat that she could not ask for her husband’s life. She had asked to be blessed with children. Yama had been bound by his word to grant her request—and, as Savitri had sworn she wouldn’t love again, this had required resurrecting her husband.
After her long life ended, Savitri set herself up as a counselor in the ancestral realm. She helped other souls wriggle out of prophecies, oaths, curses, ill-considered blessings, mantras, and duties. She had a chamber where they could seek her advice. It was a parody of a human law office, a mélange of lawyer aesthetics from around the world and different historical periods. There was no theme, other than what lawyer-fashions Savitri found amusing.
Today she wore a heavy, embroidered cape and a gilded cap, which Surya vaguely recalled from the days of the Viking law-speakers. But her eccentricity could not conceal the sharp, analytical intelligence in her eyes as she heard Surya’s tale. “Fascinating,” she said, at the end of it. “I’ve heard of this mantra, of course. But I’d assumed it was forgotten centuries ago, and lost its efficacy.”
“You would think,” Surya said. “But this girl is a curious child, a student who found it wandering in some ruins. Pritha would never have committed it to stone—but perhaps she shared it with someone who did, or whose disciple did.”
“What exactly does the mantra say the summoned god must do?”
“Give the summoner a child.”
“Hmm. That’s the exact phrasing? You are to give her a child?”
“Yes,” Surya said, puzzled.
“Not that she must bear a child, or your child, or give you a child?”
“Ah,” Yama said. “Perhaps, if the mantra doesn’t require her to bear a child, you could simply impregnate her and then cause her to miscarry immediately, so early she wouldn’t even feel any difference.”
Surya frowned. “I don’t think that would work. Would a miscarriage count as a child?”
“No,” Savitri interjected decisively. “In that case, you would have given her, at most, an embryo or a blastocyst, or rather a genetic contribution to the formation of such. It could only count as giving her a child if she carried the pregnancy to term.”
“Anyway, in that case, I’d still have to mate with her,” Surya pointed out. “Which she does not want. And neither do I.” Mating with Pritha had been an annoying chore. Now, centuries later, Surya found the thought of mating with such an infant intolerable.
“Rest assured, that wasn’t what I was thinking,” Savitri said. “What I meant was this. You could bear a child and give it to her.”
“Me? I’m not a woman.”
“You’re a god.” Savitri spoke with great patience, as if to a dullard. “You can grow a womb inside you. Then you can conceive and bear a child, with no genetic contribution from her.”
“A baby god,” Yama said, his face showing unwonted softness.
“A baby sun,” Savitri said. “A new star, which she can adopt, and name, and look upon from afar.”
Surya, rallying his shocked wits, managed to spot an objection. “But if she doesn’t regard it as a child—and how could she?—this plan won’t be any better than giving her a puppy.”
Savitri smiled. “No, for it will be your literal child. There are two beings involved here, you and her. You must give her a child. If it’s a child to either of you, the mantra is satisfied.”
Testing the mantra’s invisible bonds, Surya found that it was so. He marveled at the prospect. Yes, he could grow a womb, or even take on a woman’s form entirely. Gods chose their own physical embodiments. It had always felt right and natural to Surya to manifest in male form when he appeared as a human, and so he had done—but he would not be the first god to change form. Some did it as their identities evolved; others changed temporarily, for pragmatic reasons, as Surya was about to. “A baby sun,” he repeated, wonderingly. He could do it. He could collapse dust-clouds within himself, and send the proto-star out into space, to grow and command its own system of satellites. “I will tell Nisha. Thank you, Savitri, and you, Yama, for bringing me to her.”
He allowed the fine shimmering tether to pull him back into his body, before a waiting, anxious Nisha. She’d had the sense to stay put. “We have a solution.” Surya beamed so hard that Nisha had to avert her gaze.
“My own star,” she said, after hearing the explanation. “Or half mine, anyway. What does that mean?”
“Stars require no mothering,” Surya reassured her. “It means you can name him and will always be able to see him. Or her. And he or she may wish to visit with you. You will always have your own guiding star, deep in the heavens.”
“That sounds nice,” Nisha said, with evident relief. “Actually—” She began to smile. “It sounds awesome. But—oh, you’re changing now—oh.” She sounded frightened, but that wouldn’t last. Surya shifted, allowing his body to expand, growing new organs and a new system. It was odd. He greatly preferred his usual form. But this was an experience, enlightening and unsettling.
Surya swept away into the heavens, pulling Nisha in his wake, creating a bubble to protect her from the harsh emptiness of space. He went far past his usual station, deep into black unknown reaches. The new star would need its own space to grow and draw satellite planets.
First, the collapsing of the dust-clouds, the pressure and heat within him. Then, the delivery. Surya could protect himself from pain as well as he did for Pritha; even so, it was terrifying, and felt like he would split in two. Finally, the proto-star, pulsing and brilliant, emerged from Surya, connected only by a cord of blazing light, which Surya severed.
“What shall we name her?”
It took her a moment, but Nisha settled on, “Chamaka.” It meant sparkle or shine, if Surya wasn’t mistaken. Chamaka winked and glowed in recognition as Nisha spoke her name. She released a small shower of sparks, floated between Surya and Nisha, and began to play, dipping and weaving in every direction, cavorting against the blackness, reveling in the new delight of movement. She bumped against Surya, and then against Nisha’s bubble, and then—
“She’s laughing,” Surya said. “Not in the human way—you can’t hear it—but that’s a laugh.”
Nisha laughed as well, her grin as bright as their new daughter. “Oh, my god—look at her go, it’s like she’s dancing.”
And indeed, there was a captivating rhythm to her zigging and zagging. Chamaka frolicked like a dolphin in warm waters as Surya and Nisha watched. At length, when Surya thought he’d better return Nisha to her home, Chamaka twinkled at them in farewell, and drifted off to finish growing and form her own system.
Surya deposited Nisha back on Earth, with a new appreciation for the dangers of ancient mantras and new inspiration for her thesis. “I can’t tell anyone about this, but it’s given me an idea about the meter. I think the meter is why the mantra still worked.”
“Perhaps,” Surya allowed. “Rhythm has its own power. It doesn’t lose relevance as swiftly as words do.”
“I’ll always be able to see her moving to her own rhythm,” Nisha said. “I know this whole thing was almost a disaster. I know it meant a lot of work for you—but I don’t regret it. I’ll always have my star.”
“It was not much work, by divine standards,” Surya said, kindly. “You have no cause for regret. You have only gained knowledge.”
And, leaving Nisha safely on Earth, Surya returned to the center of his realm, leading the march of the planets onwards.
© Copyright 2023 Z.V. Anjali
About the Author
Z.V. Anjali is a a lawyer who tries not to write like one, and this is one of their first stories they've published.