The lamp had burned low by the time UshaRani stopped pretending she was asleep.
She lay on her side with her head on Bishu’s chest, her hand against the warm cotton of his dhoti, listening to his heartbeat. The room was dark except for the small flame at the threshold. Through the open window came the sound of the sea — distant, steady, without opinion.
“You are not sleeping,” Bishu said.
The sea did not care about Kalinganagar.
It moved past the village the way it moved past everything on this coast — restless, indifferent, carrying its salt wherever the wind directed it. The village stood on a strip of land between coconut groves and the Bay of Bengal — perhaps sixty houses, thatched roofs and mud walls the colour of old clay, a small pond at the centre, a Jagannath temple at the eastern edge. At the far end of the northern lane, behind a house somewhat larger than the others, stood a bara koli tree that had been there, by village estimate, since before anyone’s grandfather’s grandfather was born.
“Maharaj.”
The word came out as barely a whisper. Dhanupani, the king’s chief sevayat, had been in royal service for thirty years. He had stood beside three kings in four battles. Nothing made him flinch.
But this made him flinch.
King SuryaVamshi had just risen from the cold green waters of the Mahanadi, water streaming from his arms and shoulders, and there — stuck across his face from forehead to chin — was a strand of hair. One single strand. Black as monsoon clouds. And so long it still trailed in the river behind him, a full arm’s length and more, moving with the water’s slow current.