Free Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran Page A

traveling east to see me.

    T he following morning, Anu trailed behind me while I took my bath. She kneeled with me in the puja room, praying as I did for the strength to impress the Dewan. Then she sat beside me while Avani lined my eyes with black kohl and rouged my lips. But when I reached out to take her hand as Avani braided my hair, she withdrew hers. I understood why she was upset.
    “Do you remember when we read the Bhagavad Gita together?” I said.
    She didn’t reply.
    “How Lord Krishna convinced Arjuna to fight a war against his own brothers even though his heart wasn’t in it? Why did he fight that battle?”
    Anu remained silent while Avani slipped green bangles onto my wrists. She wasn’t going to answer, so I did it for her.
    “Because it was the right thing to do. The death of his brothers would save thousands of innocent lives in the future. Sometimes, Anu, we have to take actions that make us sad because it’s the right thing to do for the future.”
    She watched while Avani fetched Mother’s gold earrings and thin gold necklace from the locked chest. When Avani was about to put them on me, my sister said suddenly, “Can I do it?”
    Avani stepped aside. I felt Anu’s small hands at the back of my neck and fought the urge to cry. I was doing this for her as well, I reminded myself. I’d watched for several weeks while she had nursed the tiny bulbul back to health; her tears of joy when it finally flew away. Sometimes birds are injured and they die. But then they are reborn into healthy bodies. That is samsara. But Anu was too gentle and tender to rationalize these things. Loss, pain, separation . . . these were things I needed to protect her from.
    “Look in the mirror,” Anu said wonderingly. “You’re a princess.”
    She was right. I didn’t recognize the girl with her long neck ringed in gold and her full lips bright against her pale face. This was someone who belonged to a wealthy family, with a good marriage and at least two children and a long life of family duties ahead. None of that had happened for me, and standing there in front of Mother’s mirror, I was determined to make it happen for Anu.
    Everyone assembled in our courtyard—Father, the priest, Shivaji and his three sons, plus countless neighbors pretending to be there for Father’s sake but truly there for a glimpse of the Dewan. Even Aunt had traveled across Barwa Sagar with her husband and children to witness my trial. Our house had not had so many visitors since the day of Mother’s funeral.
    The women in our neighborhood gathered in the kitchen, where Avani and Grandmother had prepared trays of food. There were terra-cotta bowls filled with sweet milk, fresh slices of fruit, fried milk balls dripping with syrup, and sherbet garnished with rose petals. But I wasn’t hungry. I sat alone in my room and waited for the sound of the procession. I was not to exit the house until the Dewan’s arrival; it would be the first time our neighbors had ever witnessed a woman in Barwa Sagar breaking purdah.
    “There is no shame in it,” Shivaji said. “In Jhansi, none ofthe women are in purdah,” he reminded me. “They ride as freely through the streets as men.”
    “Is that the same for every great city?”
    “No. Only Jhansi. But there, no one thinks twice about it.”
    He made it sound simple, but when Father came and wrote on my palm that the Dewan’s procession had been seen entering our village, my heart began to beat wildly in my chest.
    “There’s nothing to fear,” he added. “Pass or fail.” He reached into his kurta and placed a long leather necklace in my hand. At the center dangled a single charm—a peacock carved from bamboo. “Today, you must be all-seeing,” he wrote, “like a peacock with a hundred eyes. But you must also be like bamboo. When a storm comes, bamboo bends. It doesn’t break.”
    Music began to echo through the courtyard. The Dewan’s procession had arrived. The people in the