Free The Girl in the Garden by Kamala Nair Page A

stay out of it.
Well, I didn’t love her just then, I hated her. I wanted her to hurt the way I hurt—I imagined her grief when she discovered that she had driven me straight into the Rakshasi’s oven. Or maybe a cobra would bite me, and I would limp home and swoon on the verandah steps, fang marks ringing my leg.
    Hate, anger, determination, thrust me forward, farther and farther down the winding path, deeper into the teeming forest, in spite of my fear at what I might find. The farther I went, the more I wondered if my cousins could be right—what if something dangerous really did live in the forest?
    Every so often a bulbous toad or a sleek frog would shoot out from underfoot with a croak. Needlelike mosquitoes hummed in my ears, and enormous black flies took refuge on my arms. I must have walked at least a mile—I had no idea that the property extended so far back.
    The sun was preparing to descend for the night. Tinges of primrose and fuchsia began to bleed into the white gold glare of daylight.
    I was just about to give up and turn back, when something stopped me. A glass-winged dragonfly hovered just in front of my nose, then glided ahead, buoyed by a softbreeze. A silver thread was wrapped around the tip of the dragonfly’s tail, and from the end of the string fluttered the tiniest, most perfectly formed red rose I had ever seen. The strange dragonfly seemed to want me to go after it, so I did. Entranced, I followed it through the forest until we arrived at a clearing and a circular stone wall at least four times my height. The stone was covered in green vines that were punctuated here and there with pink conical flowers, from which bumblebees sucked. The rose-wielding dragonfly, having accomplished its mission, zigzagged back into the forest, and as it did the silver thread unraveled and the rose floated to the ground. For a moment I reeled back.
Wait for me
, I wanted to call after the dragonfly. Perspiration trickled down both of my cheeks. Now that I was about to come face-to-face with the reality of whatever it was that lived in the forest, my anger-fueled courage faltered. What would I find behind that wall? A crazed criminal? A demonic woman? A bloodthirsty monster?
    The twitter of birds had intensified into a full chorus, flooding the air from every direction. In the grass, a shrill orchestra of cicadas took up their bows in accompaniment. I could not turn back now.
    Slowly I moved toward the wall with my arm outstretched until my fingertips touched its vine-smothered surface. I waited for something drastic to happen when my skin made contact with the stone, but when neither I nor the wall burst into flames or evaporated into thin air, I continued dragging my hand along the wall, emboldened, until my palm felt the roughness of vines give way to a smooth, hard wood.
    A door.
    The door had an old-fashioned brass knob, which I pushed and twisted to no avail.
    “Hello?” I called. My voice sounded hollow and out of place.
    Bending down, I pressed my glasses against the keyhole. An amber-throated hummingbird the size of my thumb thrummed in my line of vision, blocking my view.
    “Shoo, shoo,” I whispered.
    The bird’s wings were vibrating so rapidly I started to get dizzy until at last it buzzed off. The swimming sensation in my head came to a halt and my mouth fell open.
    A Rakshasi did not live here.
    A princess did.
    I was staring into the most dazzling garden I had ever seen. Cobblestone pathways meandered between rows of salmon-hued hibiscus, regal hollyhock, delicate impatiens, wild orchids, thorny rosebushes, and manicured shrubs starred with jasmine. Bunches of bougainvillea cascaded down the sides of the wall, draped across the stone like extravagant shawls. Magnolia trees, cotton-candy pink, were interspersed with coconut trees, which let in streaks of purplish light through their fanlike leaves. A rock-rimmed pond glistened in a corner of the garden, and lotus blossoms sprouting from green