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Vanthiyadevan reached back over his shoulder and froze, fingers closing around empty space rather than his horse's reins.
Semban?
He caught a familiar flash of brown out of the corner of his eye just as he began to turn around. The horse had stayed back a little ways behind him, lingering in the market and taking an interest in a number of garlands that swung gently where they hung.
Either the non-existent breeze had moved them, or they were swinging because someone had gotten curious and started pulling and tugging at them.
Vanthiyadevan brushed some stray curls from his face, chest rising in a small sigh— knowing his horse, the odds that they were facing the latter situation were a little too high.
"Semban!"
He dodged an ox cart and got there just before Semban could interfere with a pile of jasmine blossoms as they sat unattended, waiting to be strung. But the horse knocked some to the ground anyway, and Vanthiyadevan found himself gesturing a wordless apology to the woman stringing the garlands as he pulled Semban away, mindful of the woman's young children as they rushed to gather the fallen buds at his feet as though they were playing a game.
Semban bobbed his head as he followed, evidently pleased with himself. The end of some coir netting was tucked in his mouth, and tangled in the material below was a small basket that spun precariously a few feet off the ground.
Vanthiyadevan stopped in the middle of the road, shaking his head as he brought his face close to Semban's.
“You can't just do things like this,” he said as he stroked his horse’s neck, a bit of affection slipping into his voice despite himself. “I know I’ve told you.”
He bent down and carefully retrieved the hanging basket, tucking it under his arm as he gently pulled the coir netting from Semban’s mouth.
“Now where did you get this…”
His eyes scanned the crowd, looking past stacks of tender young jackfruit and baskets of pori, waiting for an irate man or woman to come marching towards him out from some market stall at any moment now.
Preferably whoever came marching forward to claim the basket would be a woman. And preferably a woman not holding something she intended to whack him with.
Though maybe I’d deserve it for causing her trouble, Vanthiyadevan thought, a wry smile on his face.
He patted Semban’s cheek. No, he wouldn’t really mind, regardless of who came to claim the basket. Of all the women in the world, from Cheena in the east and Yavana far to the west, from the sparkling coast of Lanka up to the mountains where Lord Shiva’s abode crowned the splendid Himalaya, there was only one woman who captured his thoughts now.
But no one materialized to come for the basket, woman or no.
Well, he would just have to go find the owner and return it in person then. He balanced it in one hand and peaked beneath the lid, half expecting to hear someone in the distance cry out to Muruga once they came to the entirely reasonable conclusion that someone had absconded with their goods in broad daylight and was now helping himself to them.
Inside the basket were a dozen sesame urundai, dark and sweet with palm jaggery, all nestled together over a banana leaf.
And then someone—someone who sounded suspiciously like Nambi—did cry out, but not with Muruga’s name on his lips.
Vanthiyadevan peered around in the direction Nambi’s voice had come from, back towards the kiosk hung with garlands of fragrant jasmine. Above it rose the vimanam of a small brick temple, the care and skill of its Chozha artisans visible even at a distance; it was the closest temple in the immediate area that a devout Vaishnavite like Nambi might find his heart drawn to visit.
Sure enough, Nambi soon emerged from beneath the temple gate, clutching his clothes so that he wouldn’t trip in his hurry.
The clothes were dropped the instant he saw Vanthiyadevan, and he immediately brandished his staff with worrying vigor.
“Have you been telling stories about Kannan and how he ran off with the gopis’ butter as a child, Nambi?” Vanthiyadevan called out, counting on his smile and good mood to diffuse the situation. “Semban must’ve been listening and, well, he got the wrong idea!”
Nambi huffed and grabbed the basket from Vanthiyadevan’s hands, checking to be sure all urundai were still present.
“The leela is a completely different situation, thambi. The butter is bhakti — thought and emotion purified and turned into love, like butter churned from pure milk!” he retorted. For a moment Vanthiyadevan was worried he’d jab him with his staff, but Nambi merely threatened him and stopped short of actually doing it. “Remember how Andal yearned to offer Krishna a hundred pots of butter, and a hundred pots of sweet rice?”
“I thought you told me never to listen to Andal’s poems?” He raised an eyebrow and gave Nambi a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Or I’d abandon life as a warrior and my service to the Chozha kingdom, and devote myself to the service of Narayana right then and there? Then instead of you following me around everywhere like the bad spy we both know you are—”
Nambi threw up a hand and rolled his eyes at the accusation.
“—you’d take me to all the great Vishnu temples, and we’d offer Andal’s hundred pots of rice and freshly-churned butter together.”
Vanthiyadevan pat Semban’s flanks as though reassuring the horse that he would of course come too.
Nambi just stared at them both, and by the look on his face, Vanthiyadevan figured he was probably on the verge of starting some theological explanation that would somehow turn into a useless, lighthearted argument.
Well, from Vanthiyadevan’s perspective, that’s what it would be.
Luckily the Vaishnavite thought better of it.
“Yes,” Nambi grumbled, still irritable. “If only you could stop your horse from running off with somebody’s prasadam like a thief and just… getting into trouble in general.”
“Semban is excellent at getting out of trouble too,” Vanthiyadevan said, gathering up the horse’s reins. “On the battlefield, I mean.”
He noticed a procession coming up the road and pulled Semban towards him, walking off to the side a little to move out of the way of whoever was in the approaching palanquin.
“Are you admitting you’re not some sort of great warrior?” Nambi said, gathering up his staff and the urundai basket to follow him.
Vanthiyadevan might have felt slightly wounded by that comment if anybody else had been listening.
“Sometimes you have to call a strategic retreat and regroup elsewhere. It’s better to live to fight another day than die and give up a real shot at victory,” he said. “But someone like you shouldn’t have to worry about tactics and war and the details of something that involves so much violence and death.”
“Well you know, thambi, the Arthashastra actually discusses—”
Then Vanthiyadevan jumped forward to grab the basket of urundai, pulling Nambi by proxy out of the path of a group of goats who were carelessly charging down the road, fleeing the coming procession.
Nambi had let go of the urundai basket, leaving Vanthiyadevan holding it as he ignored the goats and launched into a discussion of the Mahabharata and old Tamil literature and other works whose names Vanthiyadevan didn’t catch.
He’d stopped paying attention entirely; he was rooted to the spot, and his heart leapt in his chest like a deer fleeing a hunter’s arrow.
Mere meters away, the palanquin had halted, its occupant pulling back the cloth that separated her from Vanthiyadevan and the rest of the world.
Kundavai .
The entire world shrunk, and there was just her, himself, and the space between them.
She gave him a subtle smile, her dark eyes glinting with a mind as sharp as his sword that made her all the more beautiful, a jewel whose heart the sun had set aflame.
She called out to him and the basket of sesame urundai nearly slipped from his hands, Kundavai’s voice sweeter than all the jaggery in the world
Moon, don’t rise tonight, he thought. In her face shines all the light I need.