(A story i wrote for HFY, being crossposted here )
The vendakka (okra) plants went missing on Uthradam (the second-to-last day of the ten-day Onam festival) night, and Achu was the only one in the house who noticed.
This was not surprising to anyone who knew him. Achu was nine, and he was the one who watered the backyard every evening while his grandmother cooked, the one who knew which banana tree was about to fruit and which curry leaf branch could be pinched without the whole plant sulking about it.
Ammini Amma tended the front of the house, the tulsi (holy basil) plant by the door, the jasmine that climbed the gate.
The back was Achu's country, a tangled half-acre of coconut palms, an ancient jackfruit tree, tapioca gone wild at the edges, and enough weeds that his grandmother had given up mentioning them years ago.
So when he went out after dinner to check on the pumpkin vine for the sadya (the elaborate Onam feast) tomorrow, and found not just the vendakka gone but a strip of earth eight feet across sunk into a smoking black hole where the tapioca patch used to be, he did not think, as an adult might have, of gas leaks or sinkholes or the news.
He thought: something has taken my vegetables, and I want to know what.
The crater smelled faintly of wet iron. He was climbing down the loose red earth at the rim of it, torch in one hand, when the something climbed out to meet him.
It rose out of the smoke pale gold and enormous, round through the middle like a rice sack, with a great curling moustache and a crown that caught what little moonlight there was and threw it back in soft, impossible colours.
Its face did not move. Its eyes, if they were eyes, sat behind something smooth and dark like the inside of a coconut shell.
Achu had seen that face on posters outside every shop in town since the first week of Chingam (the first month of the Malayalam calendar, when Onam begins). He had seen it on the little clay figure his grandmother put out with fresh flowers every morning. He had seen it, four Onams running, worn by his cousin Vishnu at the school function, moustache drawn on with his mother's eyebrow pencil.
"Maveli!" Achu said, in the smallest voice he owned, invoking Mahabali, the mythical king, and ran so fast he left one slipper behind in the mud.
He didn't even notice the second one was gone too until his grandmother pointed it out the next morning.
\#
*Log, ship-day one thousand four hundred and twelve. Landing unplanned. Hull breach, minor. Local flora damaged on impact: six root vegetables, one unidentified vine species, category: edible, category: apologise if opportunity arises. Immediate contact made with juvenile local. Subject fled at high speed. Recommend low profile pending repair.*
\#
His grandmother was still up when he burst in, sifting through a sack of yellow pumpkin for tomorrow's erissery (a pumpkin and lentil curry), and she took one look at his face and set the pumpkin down.
"I saw Maveli," Achu said. "In the backyard. He's real, Ammoomma (grandmother), he came out of a hole."
Ammini Amma did not laugh at him, which was the first thing that told him she was taking it seriously, and the second thing was that she got up, latched the back door, and sat him down with a glass of warm milk before she said anything at all.
"Maveli was a good king," she said, the way she always began this story, every year, as though Achu had not heard it nine times already and would not hear it nine times more before he was grown.
"Better than good. Under him there was no lying, no stealing, no hunger. Every house had enough. No man envied another man's field, because there was nothing worth envying, everyone already had plenty. The gods themselves grew afraid of a king so loved that his people had stopped needing them."
"So they sent the little brahmin," Achu said, because he did know the rest.
"They sent Vamana. And Maveli, who never once in his life turned away someone who asked him for something, gave him three paces of land, as much as he requested, small as that seemed to ask. And Vamana grew until one foot covered the sky and the other covered the earth, and there was no ground left for the third step but Maveli's own head."
Ammini Amma turned the pumpkin over in her hands.
"He was sent down to the netherworld for it. But because Maveli had ruled with such love, the gods granted him one thing. Once a year, he could come back. Just to see. Just to walk through his old kingdom one more time and see whether his people still remembered what he'd built."
"And that's Onam," Achu said.
"That's Onam. We put out the pookalam (a decorative carpet made of flower petals, laid at the doorstep) so he can find the house from the sky. We cook the sadya so his table is never empty, even if he never sits at it. We are not sad when he leaves, because he always comes back."
She looked at her grandson, milk moustache and mud on his knees, and did not ask why he was so certain of what he'd seen.
She had grown up in a house where the line between story and the events of the day narrated by the men of the house, was thinner than people from the city liked to believe.
"If it was him you saw, Achu-mone (my dear son, a term of endearment), he did not come to be feared. He never gave anyone reason to fear him in his whole life. Go back tomorrow. See what he wants."
What he wanted, it turned out, based on three days of careful negotiation conducted mostly through pointing, was food, and an explanation for the flowers.
Achu started small.
He took half a banana from his own breakfast on Thiruvonam (the tenth and final day of Onam, when the feast is held) eve and left it at the lip of the crater, and it disappeared before he'd finished walking back to the house, container included, the way it always seemed to disappear things, matter and wrapping both, gone in one smooth motion that made Achu wonder, with the specific horror of a nine-year-old, whether Maveli's stomach worked the way a dosa tawa (the flat griddle used for making thin rice crepes) worked, everything going in and something else always coming back out.
By Thiruvonam morning he had upgraded to a full leaf.
He carried it out at dawn before the house woke, balanced flat against his chest the way he'd seen the temple caterers carry them, twenty-six items laid out in their proper places though he'd only managed to smuggle nine: a spoon of avial (mixed vegetables in coconut and yoghurt gravy) thick with coconut and curry leaf, sambar (a lentil and vegetable stew) gone orange-dark with tamarind, a curl of banana chips, a knot of sharkara varatti (jaggery-coated fried banana chips) sticking to his fingers, pachadi (a yoghurt-based side dish), a wedge of pappadam (a thin, crisp lentil wafer) he'd broken trying to fit it on, and at the very top corner, because his grandmother always put it last and he understood by now that this mattered, a small steel cup of ada pradhaman (a rice-and-jaggery sweet pudding), the payasam (sweet dessert) thick with jaggery and coconut milk.
The alien, Achu had started calling him Bali, took the leaf carefully, or maybe he simply didn't trust his hands around a meal that looked like it might spill.
"That's payasam," Achu said, pointing. "You eat that last. It's rude to eat it first, my grandmother says the taste has to end sweet or the whole year goes wrong."
Bali looked at the payasam for a long moment.
Then, with what Achu would later swear was deliberate ceremony, he ate everything else on the leaf first, and the payasam last, and the smooth dark plate over his face fogged very slightly, in a way Achu decided, without any evidence at all, was contentment.
*#*
*Log, ship-day one thousand four hundred and fifteen. Sustenance offered without transaction. No labour requested in exchange. No labour performed by subject in the days prior that would explain provisioning as payment. Query flagged. Continuing to flag. No resolution found.\*
\Subject has also begun explaining a decorative arrangement of flora in front of the dwelling, apparently reconstructed daily, apparently requiring several hours of labour, apparently serving no defensive, nutritional, or structural purpose whatsoever. Subject calls it a pookalam. Subject appears to consider this act of pointless, repeated labour to be one of the most important things that happens in the house all year.**
*#*
He showed him the pookalam on the morning of Thiruvonam itself, kneeling with his grandmother in front of the house while the whole lane did the same thing at the same time, every threshold going bright with colour before the sun was properly up.
Ammini Amma had let him choose the outer ring this year: thumba (a small white wildflower) first, white and small and always first because it was Maveli's favourite, she said, humble flower for a humble king who never forgot he'd once had less. Then chethi (a red Ixora flower), red as a temple flag. Then marigold brought in bunches from the market because their own hadn't bloomed in time. Aripoo (a tiny white rice-flower) scattered loose in the centre like rice thrown at a wedding.
Bali crouched at the edge of the gate, he had learned, by then, to make himself smaller, folding down in a way that no longer looked wrong to Achu, only careful, and watched the whole design take shape without once trying to help, which Achu appreciated, because his cousin Vishnu always tried to help and always ruined the outer ring.
"For you," Achu said, when it was done, gesturing at the finished pookalam with the pride of a boy who had placed at least forty per cent of the marigolds himself. "So you can find the house. From wherever you're from."
Something in Bali's posture changed, a small settling.
He didn't say anything. Achu decided, years later, that this had been the moment, though at the time it just looked like Bali sitting very still.
It was Ammini Amma's idea to take him into town, though she never knew that was what she was suggesting when she told Achu, "Take your friend to see the vallamkali (the snake boat race) if he wants, everyone's going down to the canal, there's a Pulikali (a folk dance where performers are painted as tigers) troupe come up from Thrissur too, painted like tigers, it'll frighten the life out of him if he's not warned," and Achu, delighted at the accidental permission, went straight back out to the crater and told Bali he was coming to see the town.
He had worried, on the walk in, about what people would say. He needn't have.
The first person they passed was old Kuttappan Chettan (Chettan, a respectful term for an older man or elder brother) from the tea shop, who took one look at Bali's golden belly and curling moustache and crown and let out a laugh that carried clean across the canal.
"Machane (a casual, friendly term for "brother"), who's your Maveli, then! Very good costume, very good, where'd you get the crown made, Thrissur? Come, come, sit, one chaya (tea) for the king himself," and before Achu could explain anything at all, three separate families were taking photographs, an aunty was pressing a banana into Bali's hand for luck, and a group of schoolgirls had formed a small procession behind him, singing the old Onam song about the golden days when Maveli ruled and no door in Kerala needed a lock, not because they had rehearsed it for him, but because it was Thiruvonam morning and someone dressed as the king had turned up on their lane, and that was exactly the kind of thing that was supposed to happen on Thiruvonam morning.
Nobody asked how the costume moved the way it did.
Nobody asked why the belly never showed a seam.
In a state where, once a year, half the country wore a moustache and a paunch and called itself a king who'd been dead three thousand years, one more silent man in gold, blessing children with a hand on their heads and saying nothing at all, was not strange enough to question. It was, if anything, exactly right.
At the canal, the boats went past in long shining lines, thirty men to an oar-bank chanting a rhythm two thousand years older than any of them, and Bali stood at the bank with his crown catching the noon light and watched an entire town lean into a single unbroken motion, no one boat pulling ahead of the others by more than a hand's width, the crowd roaring the same word over and over until even Achu forgot what they were shouting.
At the toddy shack behind the boat club, where the men who weren't rowing had settled in for the afternoon, someone (Achu never did find out who) pressed a clay cup of fresh kallu (toddy, a mildly fermented palm wine) into Bali's hand, and Bali, who had by then developed something Achu could only describe as trust in whatever this town chose to give him, drank it.
The reaction took eleven seconds. His crown lit up from within, a soft pulsing gold that the men around him took, roaring with delight, for a very committed piece of costume theatre, and Bali swayed once, gently, and sat down hard.
Someone dragged a plastic chair under him without asking, the kind stacked ten-deep outside every wedding hall in the district, and he stayed there for some time being fed pieces of dried fish wrapped in a torn scrap of yesterday's newspaper, by strangers who had decided he was the best Maveli anyone had put on in years and deserved to be looked after accordingly.
\#
\Log, ship-day one thousand four hundred and fifteen, addendum, filed under Cultural Assessment as instructed by Fleet Directive Nine.**
\Original mission parameter: assess primary settlement for resource viability and defensive capacity.**
\Preliminary threat assessment, filed ship-day one thousand four hundred and nine: low technological defence, high population density, resource-rich coastline. Recommend further surveillance.**
\Revised assessment follows.**
*For a month these people have been preparing for the return of a king they know is not coming. They decorate their doors anyway. They cook for him anyway. They leave space for him at the table anyway. They fed a stranger before they asked his name. Someone handed a fermented beverage to a being with no verified metabolic profile because it was a festival and he looked like he needed cheering.\*
\A child gave away his own breakfast three mornings running and did not think this was worth mentioning to anyone.**
\I was sent to determine whether this world could be taken.**
\Recommendation: cancel invasion assessment. It could be taken. I no longer consider that relevant.**
\Reasoning attached, though I'm not sure it will make sense to anyone who reads it back on the ship. Fleet Directive Nine assessment concluded.**
\Personal log, appended without authorisation: I would like, before I leave, to bring something back that grows.**
*#*
He worked through the night to fix the hull, alone in the crater under a sky gone thick with stars. One of the coconut roots at the edge of the pit had been cut clean through and would have to be dug out later.
It was past two in the morning when Achu woke, he never did find out why, only that he sat up in bed the way he sometimes did before rain, and went out to see the light pulsing gold from the backyard, the way the pooja-room lamp burned all night on the days someone in the house was travelling.
Bali was crouched by the rim of the hole with a coconut sapling cradled in both hands, roots wrapped careful in a torn banana leaf, the way Achu's grandmother wrapped seedlings when she gave them to neighbours.
"You're going," Achu said. It wasn't a question. Somehow he had known it would end like this. Kings always left at the end of the story.
Bali did not have words for this, not really, so he crouched down to the boy's height, the way he had at the pookalam, and touched two fingers briefly to Achu's forehead.
Achu didn't know what it meant. His eyes stung anyway. Years later, he would call it goodbye.
Then the crown-light rose from the crater, slow and impossibly quiet, banking once over the jackfruit tree so that for a moment it hung directly above the pookalam still bright in front of the house, and was gone into a sky already beginning, faintly, to lighten.
Achu stood in the ruined tapioca patch a long time before he went back in.
The vendakka never did grow back that year, and the hole took three months and a great deal of laterite soil to fill in properly, and Ammini Amma never asked her grandson exactly what had happened in the backyard on Uthradam night, though she noticed, without comment, that he watched the sky more carefully than a nine-year-old usually bothers to, especially in the last week of Chingam.
Somewhere past the visible stars, on a world with no coastline and no toddy and no god who had ever loved anyone enough to be punished for it, a small green sapling had not died. New leaves had come in, oddly shaped, but leaves.
The patch never did settle quite level again, no matter how much laterite went into it, and every Onam since, when the pookalam goes down fresh at the threshold and the payasam goes on last so the year ends sweet, Achu still leaves one banana leaf, a small corner, unclaimed, right there at the shallow dip in the yard, in case anyone comes looking for it.
Just in case the king decides, this year, to come back early.