A superstition in India is: the smell of the nishagandhi, which opens its petals once in six months and only at midnight, calls up snakes from underneath the soil. Nobody is foolish enough to plant it in their gardens, but it grows wild sometimes, hides under the drooping branches of old trees, waits and slowly digs its roots into the earth. Padma, of course, knows this superstition because her neighbour pointed out the white flower leaning over the edge of the pond with a shaking finger and told her to pull it up before she moves in. She nods but does nothing; it seems silly to fear a flower after losing an arm in the final battle, pretending to be the corpse of her dead sister to survive the Death Eater sweeps, saying goodbye to her parents at the Apparation Point at Stonehenge.

She draws all the curtains, slices through the plug of the phone and shovels mud into the ancient fireplace that shakes and covers her with bits of plaster every time she Floos anywhere.

Owls still find her house, but she leaves the letters unopened on her drawing room mat, even the Howler which Lisa Turpin finally sent her out of frustration. It builds up and builds up until it’s shaking with pent-up magic, and it finally explodes into a burst of girlish yelling but Padma just curses it into red squares of paper which fall slowly to the floor.

Milk and eggs and bread and two pots of strawberry jam arrive on her doorstep every three weeks, thanks to the five-hundred rupee note pressed into the hands of the local shopkeeper and the additional five-hundred that’s placed under the mat before each delivery.

*

She covers all the mirrors in her house with a white cloth, following a superstition that she doesn’t even know about, and takes to wearing the same dusty pair of jeans every day. Sometimes she doesn’t even bother brushing her hair in the mornings and all her tubes of lipstick dry out slowly in the bathroom cabinet.

*

It’s been exactly four-and-a-half months since Padma moved in, and she wakes up one night with the smell of the nishagandhi hot and insistent against her body. When she pads downstairs to pour herself a glass of water she hears a rustling.

She’s out in the garden with her wand levelled even before she has time to think it through, but it falls to the grass without a noise and rolls against the bed of begonias.

A man, a boy, slowly claws his way out of the pool of water, his skin glistening, glistening but not just with moisture. Neck, bluish shoulders, sinuous torso and then instead of legs, a long blue-green serpent’s tail. The tip flicks out of the water as he cradles his hands around the open petals of the nishagandhi, and as if by magic, probably by magic, the scales shimmer and fade to unnaturally slick skin. He looks up at Padma and opens his mouth silently, as if he has forgotten how to form words; his tongue is forked.

“Melusine,” Padma breathes, but she is mistaken.

*

If Melusine had swum from the rivers of France to the wide oceans that border India she would have been worshipped as a goddess. One of the many myths that Padma knows nothing about is the myth of the Nagas, half-human half-snake deities of fertility. And even today, in the underground palaces below the busy city streets of Bhogavati, they wait, coiled around themselves in endless figures of eight. Wait until the first days of April when they emerge and sink their teeth into the white clouds and wring out the first drops of monsoon rain.

*

The man whispers his name to her as they curl around each other in her bed. “Ananta,” he says. Eternity. “And yours?”

Padma flexes the silvery fingers of her left arm and says, “I don’t have one.”

Ananta laughs. “Anamika,” he christens her. “The nameless one.”

She doesn’t respond and instead traces the faint line where his scales began, the first time she saw him, and asks, “Will you shriek a warning before I die?”

The serpent shakes his head. “That’s the wrong myth,” he replies.

*

A myth that Padma does know is that of Adam and Eve, and in that story the serpent is the tempter. The bringer of knowledge, of shame, of evil- but most of all, of knowledge. The other myths that Padma knows about those who seek knowledge are: Faustus, who made a deal with the devil in exchange for perfect understanding, and Prometheus, who stole fire from the Gods.

In the version of the Prometheus myth that Padma knows, Zeus chains Prometheus to a rock and sets an eagle upon him to devour his immortal liver, constantly replenished.

As such, Padma really doesn’t think much of the eagle as an emblem for Ravenclaw.

All things considered, a serpent would be far more apt.


*

Parvati always said that love makes you hungry, and Padma is surprised to find that she was correct. Milk and eggs and leftover bread don’t seem appetising at all, and so they walk down to the market down the road with their hands clutched around each other. It’s the first time Padma’s been outside in months, and she shivers every time someone brushes a little too close to her. The long-sleeved shirt she’s wearing makes her uncomfortably hot under the summer sun, and she hugs her false hand against her stomach self-consciously until Ananta kisses the tips of her fingers. “You’re beautiful,” he grins, and then picks out ripe papayas for after dinner.

It’s only under the sunlight that Padma looks at him properly, and his pale skin and unblinking blue eyes don’t seem very Indian against the weathered tan of the vegetable vendor. There’s still something of a bluish tinge around his lips, and when Padma wakes up in his arms that night and peels back his shirt she finds silvery scales covering his chest.

The only myth that Padma knows about women falling in love with snakes is the one about Lilith in the bible, and half the time people dismiss her as apocryphal. She mentions it to Ananta when he wakes up and he says, “I am not Melusine and you are not Lilith. You’ve got the wrong myth again.”

*

They start making the trip regularly, and then going even further; walks in the park, smiling at the neighbours, seeing Hollywood movies at the newly-opened multiplex a few streets away, even shopping. It starts with Padma buying Ananta freshly-pressed shirts with little button-down collars that she smoothes down against his neck every morning, and trousers, and belt-buckles, and shoes, and shampoo and before she knows it Padma’s throwing out the ratty old shirts and the pair of jeans she’s worn forever and filling up her shelves with skirts and little tops and glittery things that Ananta loves sliding his fingers over. She starts wearing lipstick and painting her nails and going to places where she can wear the expensive shoes she bought last week, and it’s easier than she’d like to admit though she still doesn’t use mirrors. Padma especially loves watching the other girls’ eyes rake enviously over Ananta while he loops his arm around her waist and whispers how much he loves her in her ear; Padma has never owned anything as beautiful as him.

Padma had quite a lot of money of her own, but it runs through her fingers quicker than she expected and she ends up paying for dresses and dinners and tall glasses of electric blue cocktails with the sizeable amount of money that came with Parvati’s posthumous Medal of Valour. When she goes to the local division of Gringotts bank, the seal around the bag filled with clinking galleons has an orange-and-gold phoenix on it, and Padma nearly leaves it sitting there on the counter.

*

The letters stop coming eventually, and it’s easy to forget that Padma ever knew any place other than this. She lives in India a bit like a stranger, on the fringes, but when she sits on the verandah and watches Ananta water the plants her house feels like a little more than a collection of four walls sprouting up from the earth.

“Can you make rain?” She asks him, then, in the middle of July when it’s sweltering and dry.

He shrugs his shoulders and smiles strangely. “You’ve been reading up on your myths,” is the only answer he gives her.

There’s another myth that Padma doesn’t know about and that’s the Lamia myth, which kind of follows the Lilith one except for the fact that this time Lamia is half-human half-serpent. Zeus fell in love with Lamia, and Hera, in a fit of jealous rage, murdered Lamia’s children. The grief turns her into a monster and she roamed the earth eating children out of envy and hatred.

In other myths, Lamia is a female vampire, a walking corpse.

*

“Will you ever die?” She asks, pulling him closer to her as if their touch will ward off death.

He laughs at that. “Snakes do not die, they merely shed their skins and begin again.”


*

They’re making love and he seems, if anything, more like a snake than before with Padma’s fingers pressed into his shoulders. He cries out Parvati’s name when he comes, and again when he’s leaning against her shoulder, “Parvati, Parvati” mumbled lovingly against her skin and when she pushes him away he smiles like a cat.

“What do you mean?” She asks him, knees pulled up to her chest, her eyes horrified.

His hands creep up her thigh and grins, “Don’t act like you don’t know.”

She shakes her head, and he just slides off the bed and pulls down the white sheet covering the mirror on her dressing table. He holds out his hand and she walks over to him numbly, leaning against him as he holds her against him and points to her own reflection looking back at her.

Red lipstick, a trace of silver eyeshadow, fuchsia silk shirt and a crumpled black skirt that they were in too much of a hurry too pull off.

Ananta’s own shirt is slightly open, and the scales on his chest have spread over his shoulders and down the length of his arms.

“We always try to recreate the ones we have lost,” he explains.

She tries to turn around, but his grip is firm. She shivers.

“Don’t you even remember, Padma?” His voice is soft, and almost regretful. “You hate fuchsia, you don’t wear red lipstick.”

Padma closes her eyes and tries not too look, but she’s crying and crying, and between sobs she whispers, “Who are you?” but when she opens her eyes again he’s gone.

*

It rains that night. A mad clamouring storm which bangs against the windows and fills Padma’s ears with thunder, and through it all there’s the same intense smell creeping through the house and twisting around Padma’s wrists. She can feel the bones shift inside her body slowly, so slowly, and when she looks down at her hands they are covered in scales.

The nishagandhi is opening its petals to the rain.

Ananta stands in the pond under the tree with water coming up to his shins and tilts his face up at the rain; lightning illuminates the garden briefly, and strikes so close that he can smell something singed in the air, but he is not afraid. The rain soaks through his clothes and he casts them off with a careless motion. A rolling crack of thunder and Ananta slowly raises his arms to the sky and allows the rain to peel the skin from his bones; he steps out of his sloughed off body as the rain eases and the petals of the nishagandhi close upon themselves once more.

Snakes do not die, they merely shed their skins and begin again.

Dawn breaks, clear & still & pale pink over the horizon.

A man, a boy, slowly steps out of the mud of the pond and stretches his arms and legs and revels in the feel of the watery sun against his new skin.

A cobra slowly slithers out from the pond and coils herself around his legs in a figure of eight.

He opens his eyes, and they are an unblinking unnatural shade of red. He reaches down and picks up the serpent in his hands, speaking in English because he knows that she will understand.

“I am Lord Voldemort,” he says.

*

The Naga myth has been tweaked to suit my own diabolical purposes, but other myths are generally intact. Wikipedia is a good place to find out a bit more about each of them.

End.