Vanished (3 page)

It had stopped raining
when Neela trudged home.
Just take very good care of it
—her grandmother's words came echoing back to her. And now, somewhere out there, her grandmother's veena was traveling farther and farther away. Neela choked up, imagining it thrown carelessly into the back of a car, rolling around along the bumpy roads of Arlington. Her grandmother would never forgive her.

Maybe Hal had planned the whole thing, from the time he opened the door and found her, a drowned rat in the pouring rain. And yet, something didn't seem right. Sure, Hal could have tricked her, but how could he know it would rain, and how could he know she would stop at the church because of it?

Unless he was following her already. She remembered the sound she heard walking home, like someone stepping on a twig behind her. Was that Hal? But why would he follow her? And if he did, it didn't explain how he could be in the church before her and how he seemed to know his way around. It also didn't explain why he wanted her veena.

When she climbed up the front steps of her house, the door flew open. “I was so worried!” Mrs. Krishnan hugged her hard as Neela inhaled the scent of her mother, a mixture of cardamom, flour, and Lysol.

Normally Neela would have cried at this moment, but she was distracted by the sight of her mother. “What are you wearing?” she asked.

Mrs. Krishnan had on a neon green
salwar kameez
from India, the top in a checkered pattern with sequins and gold lamé, the pant bottoms puffing out like balloons. “I'm doing laundry. It was the only clean thing I had. But who cares about me? Go put on something dry.”

After Neela changed, she found her mother in the living room holding a mug of cocoa. “What?” her mother asked, seeing Neela's face. “I thought you liked cocoa.” She was looking around the room. “And where did you put the veena?”

Neela had been dreading this moment. She sat on the couch and began to recount the awful story.

Before she finished, her mother interrupted. “You followed a stranger to have cocoa?” She set down the mug as if it were poison.

“Wait,” Neela said. “It gets worse.”

When she was done, Mrs. Krishnan had her hands up to her mouth in disbelief.

“I should have known,” she said. “I should have known.” Neela wondered how her mother could have known, unless she was a mind reader. But she kept quiet because then her mother said, “It's bad luck. I should have
known
.”

Like strep throat or the chicken pox, or the Great Plague, which Neela had read about in social studies, bad luck was one of those things her mother tried at great lengths to avoid. She was training to be a pharmacist, and it was her belief that all human experience was the result of chemistry and luck, good and bad. But mostly bad. Neela's father, who worked in a research lab at MIT, would always exclaim,
That's so unscientific.
But there was no changing her mother's opinion. Bad luck was an impenetrable force working against them all. Worse, it was contagious.

Just then the back door jiggled as Mr. Krishnan came in. “Hello, mateys,” he called, using his standard greeting. He bit into a muffin he picked up from the kitchen.

“You're home early,” Mrs. Krishnan said.

“Meeting got cancelled,” he said, chewing. He looked at her curiously. “Why the clown outfit?”

“Can't a person do laundry here? And we've got bigger things to worry about.”

When he heard Neela's story, Mr. Krishnan stopped chewing. She wondered what happened to the piece of muffin in his mouth, whether he had swallowed it or it had spontaneously disappeared. “I don't believe it,” he said. “In a
church
?”

“She shouldn't have done it,” Mrs. Krishnan said.

“She didn't have a choice,” he said.

“But she
did
.”

“I'm sorry,” Neela said miserably. It was so much worse when her parents were talking about her in the third person, as if she wasn't there.

“Are you going to tell your mother, then?” Neela's mother asked.

Mr. Krishnan shook his head. “I don't know.”

Neela stared at the floor, wishing it would open up and swallow her. But the floor did no such thing. She was on her own.

Dinner consisted of
dosas
, thin crepes made from rice and lentils, accompanied by
sambar
, a thick, spicy soup. Over their dosas and sambar, Neela and her parents discussed the missing veena.

Mr. Krishnan tried to be hopeful. “Maybe it's still there at the church.”

“Or maybe it vanished,” Mrs. Krishnan said pointedly.

Mr. Krishnan gave her a look. “Who would steal a veena in a church?” he continued. “No one would even know what it is.”

“Wait a minute.” Neela thought of something. “When Hal showed me the closet where I could store the veena, he said, ‘Your veena will be safe. You have my word.'”

“So?” Mrs. Krishnan said, dipping a piece of dosa in sambar.

“Don't you see? He said
veena
. But that was before we started talking about it in the kitchen. How could he know what was inside the case when it was closed?”

“Maybe he's seen one before,” Mrs. Krishnan said.

“No—it's a custom-made case.
Nobody
would know what was inside.”

“Where is Neela's veena?” asked four-year-old Sree.

“It's taking a nap,” their mother said. “Just like you did before dinner.” She pushed back a lock of his lanky, black hair that had fallen over his eyes. He was perpetually in need of a haircut because he was scared of the barber, and it was impossible for Mrs. Krishnan to cut his hair unless she had a whole bag of lollipops to bribe him with.

“Veenas don't sleep,” he said.

Neela remembered something else. “And there was that teakettle.”

“What teakettle?” Mr. Krishnan asked.

“The teakettle with a dragon on it. Hal used it to make my cocoa.”

Sree stared at his plate and bowl. “There's a fly in my sambar.”

Their mother sighed. “No there isn't, Sree.”

“Don't you see?” Neela said impatiently. “The teakettle had a dragon on it…My veena has a dragon, too.”

“Somebody stepped on the veena,” Sree tried again.

“But maybe Hal didn't take your veena,” Mr. Krishnan countered. “Maybe the janitor stored it somewhere.”

“Neela stepped on it,” Sree persisted.

“Nobody stepped on the veena,” Mr. Krishnan said. “Eat your sambar, Sree.”

“I'm done,” Neela announced. Why didn't she see the connection before? She jumped from the table.

“You didn't finish your plate,” her mother called after her.

But Neela was already halfway to the study, her thoughts leaping ahead. A dragon teakettle. A dragon veena. Maybe she could find something that connected the teakettle with the veena if she searched the Internet. And what had Hal called the dragon? A why-something.

Twenty minutes went by, and while she found pictures of veenas with dragons and dragons on teakettles, nowhere could she find anything that linked the two together. She stared at the computer screen. She had reached a dead end.

Her mother called her from the kitchen. When Neela got there, her mother held a small brass plate with a tiny piece of camphor on it. Sree was standing next to her, watching. Neela groaned. “Oh, Mom. Not that.”

Sree widened his eyes. “What? What?”

“It won't hurt anyone,” Mrs. Krishnan said. She said it lightly, but there was a frown on her face as if there was something else on her mind.

Sree jumped up and down. “What?”

Mrs. Krishnan lit the camphor and it burst immediately into bright bluish-orange flames. A sweet, acrid smell filled the room.
“Drishti,”
she said.

In front of Neela, Mrs. Krishnan moved the plate with the dancing camphor flames in two circles, one clockwise and one counterclockwise.

“What's drishti?” Sree asked.

“When you drop dead because somebody wishes it,” Neela said.

“Who's dead?” he wailed.

Neela's mother glared at her. “No one, Sree.
Drishti
is a word for bad luck. I just performed an
aarti
on Neela, in case someone wished her bad luck today.”

Neela watched her mother. “How is that supposed to bring my veena back?” she asked skeptically.

By now the camphor had burned out, leaving a black, sooty residue on the plate. With an index finger, Mrs. Krishnan smeared a dot of the inky soot on Neela's forehead, and then Sree's. “When I was growing up, we always did this if we needed to ward off the evil eye.”

“Why does somebody wish bad luck on Neela?” Sree asked.

Good question, Neela thought. Because it felt like a ton of bad luck had been dumped on her.

Mrs. Krishnan pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Sometimes we want what others have. We want them not to succeed. But I do think you can change bad luck and hope for the best.”

Sree still didn't understand. “Why?”

“Maybe you can ask Lalitha Patti if we visit her in December.”

“Are we going to India?” he asked.

“Are we?” Neela asked. She felt a glimmer of hope despite herself. Her best friend, Pavi, also had family in Chennai and always went there in December. Maybe Neela would get to see her if they went at the same time. Which would be good since Neela wasn't sure how Lalitha Patti would react to being around the grandchild who had lost her veena.

“I'd rather go in June,” Mrs. Krishnan said, “but I may need to finish up my classes in the summer.”

“So you can help people take their medicine?” Sree asked. This was his rough understanding of what pharmacy was all about.

“Yes, Sree.”

As Mrs. Krishnan cleaned off the brass plate, Neela thought of all the people who could wish her bad luck. Amanda? Hal? Or was it someone else she didn't know?

That night, Neela had a hard time falling asleep. She kept thinking of Hal and the missing veena, and what her grandmother would say when she found out the awful truth. She remembered that on her visits to India, Lalitha Patti would take the veena out only on certain days, as if it was too special to use daily. And when she did, she would practice on it for hours and talk to no one. Why her grandmother would then send such a special instrument to Neela, it was hard to say. But she had, and now Neela felt that in the biggest and most terrible way, she had let her grandmother down. Was it bad luck, as her mother said? Neela wasn't sure. But her only hope was to find the veena before her grandmother heard what happened.

Neela got up from bed. The floor was cold under her feet as she made her way quietly down the hall. She would ask her mother if they could go back to the stone church tomorrow after school. They could have another look around. Maybe Neela had missed something the first time.

As she got closer to her parents' bedroom, she heard voices inside. She was about to knock on the door, when she heard her father speaking in Tamil. From the way he kept starting and stopping, she could tell he was on the phone.