Sitara

Chapter 5

Badal

The pony was glossy brown with a white star on its forehead and a fluidity of motion that left onlookers in awe. Its mane was long, and hung like a waterfall down its back. Sometimes we would weave our long ribbons or coloured thread through its hair just for fun and it seemed almost unworldly in its radiance. Our father was proud of it, in awe of its dazzling beauty. So were our neighbours. They asked where he had acquired it, and he pretended it was a secret, but they were not jesting and neither was he.

We knew where he’d acquired it – and we kept the silence. For this creature of light and stars, dancing joyousness and life was borne of the imagination of our sibling. He was the same sorry pony, broken and bleeding, wrested out of the landslide along with our father that day. We never knew his original colour, nor how his personality might have actually been. Leila had conjured him up, defying nature, the very cycle of birth and death, breathing life into broken limbs and colour into lifeless eyes. She had worked in resolute silence, her eyes dazzling as now his coat did and his back had mended as did his spirit. He was the horse she wanted him to be.

And such was her power, the force and purity of her intent that he was. She called him Badal, to remind her of the sky and its unmenacing soft clouds, a dreamy connotation that bore no resemblance with our reality, but offered comfort for all that. He was, with every breath in his wish-come-true body, hers. And he never let us forget it.

They say well-wishers support you in misfortune, and more importantly, tolerate you in successes. So too, it was with Astara’s social fabric, at least the sprinkling of families who interacted with us. They were wonderstruck at Badal, perhaps some of them wished a horse like him exactly, but for all that, their wonder and awe was pure, it showed little trace of covetousness and its more poisonous component, malice.

In that I am exceedingly thankful, for many of Astara’s people mimicked both the simplicity and the hardiness of the elements they grew up around. It was a rough and ready sort of countryside, of steep rocks and howling, unhampered winds in the dangerous cold, courtesy the Binodaris. By contrast, summer was about a gentle sun, cooling breezes from the mountains and the relief of the all-encompassing sea further down.

Most Astarians tended to be open-natured, resilient, searingly honest, with the wondrous inner contentment more evident in agrarian societies. A people who seemingly have little, so Spartan, so austere their homes, but in actuality possess real riches, that potent ease in recognising the benevolence in the living earth around them, its wealth, its gifts.

Astarians had their mountains, its rich dense soil and the life-giving sun and rain. They had their crops and livestock (horses being the preferred mode of travel over the rock-hewn terrain of our settlement), their will to work long hours and live frugally. The city people, two days journey away might think they lacked much, but Astara had yet to work up that acquisitive side to their personalities that the city people so clung to. It would come, no doubt, once the big city encroached further, but for now, Astara was mercifully still shy of it.

For all their open heartedness though, our little settlement was not without its hindrances. Superstition still held sway, newness of any kind was viewed with suspicion, jostled into secondary place by the iron grip of tradition – the way followed by the elders in the community was more trusted and relied on.

The Panchayat was exceedingly strong, their word ruled our little community with an iron hand. Elders were respected and obeyed. We did things as our forefathers had, and believed it would so continue, ever after. Or some of us did, those who did not have Eagle Familiars, I should say.

For all that, there was trust in a higher power, or several, also a general suspension of disbelief with anything out of the ordinary. Astarians never nursed that healthy dislike or disbelief in the shamanic that the city dwellers often demonstrated, when they came in groups, attempting to climb the Binodaris, which was not all that often. Astarians understood that life was complex and the ways of Mother Earth mysterious on occasion – implausible belief could and did preside over logical explanation many a time.

Regardless, we sisters were careful, it was not so much a disclosure of the abilities we possessed that worried us, as the consequences such a disclosure would embody. The fact that we might be branded freaks, either worshipped as living deities and forced into a life on show, forever at the mercy of public opinion (it had happened to some cousin long ago, but I cannot recall when or why, being too little). Or then ostracised, routed out as deviant, told to leave our beloved family by the obdurate Panchayat.

We were so young, and the power in our abilities was an ongoing revelation, we had no wish to share its secrets. Instinctively we knew we had to be careful, for all its lofty tolerance of the shamanic, Astara was still not given to trust what it didn’t understand too easily. A certain way of functioning was too deeply embedded here, rooted to the old ways, a pace that didn’t take too kindly to being pushed (we had already glimpsed this in the past, when Padmini’s suggestion of relocating higher was rejected without preamble before the Koi flooding). No, we were wary and cautious and we believed, stronger for it.

Meanwhile, while Badal was thriving, Leila was not. The fits came without warning, and lasted longer each time. We braced for bad news after, and to our relief our family never made the connection between Leila’s meltdowns and news of the tragedies around us.

Our father was tested more than most those years, and we could do nothing. We were beginning to discover just how wide a net Leila’s immense reach of power could cast. She was an Empath to extraordinary levels, and she was a healer the likes of which none of us had ever encountered. But her body, her little human self could not endure the might of the energy she had been bestowed.

Leila, as she understood the level of suffering of those not just around her, but far far away, was internalising all of it. And was slowly, relentlessly being torn apart from within, unable to withstand its burden. Her instability made my father weak.

Paradoxically it made our eldest sibling stronger, more determined, for the greater Leila suffered, the harder it drove Padmini to push us, knowing it would all lead to the Eagle’s visit soon enough. She would not surrender us, her thoughts before she masked them, flowed to me in grim succession, defiant, immovable. But surrender us to what? As the years passed and my awareness grew I understood the enormity of what Padmini was grappling with. And I knew we would need everything we had to, as she put it, not surrender.