Up the Rabbit Hole

On the evening that I turned twenty-nine, I found myself trapped inside a Fabergé egg.

Yep, you heard me – a Fabergé egg. A priceless treasure, the kind that Romanovs once collected like Pokémon cards or comic books and gave to their wives.

Naturally, my older brother, Kane (born Kamal), was to blame. If you knew him, you’d understand. But we’ll get into that later.

I woke up on my birthday feeling fine. My job was moving along, at an investment firm a quick drive from my family home in Brampton (where I still lived with my parents, like a lot of Punjabi millennials my age). After work, I stopped by the salon for a blowout and picked up my newest sari from the tailor, pistachio chiffon with silver beading made lehenga style. My mother and father and cousins were throwing me a party and I wanted to look my best.

At home, my mother was in the kitchen frying pakoras, the air heavy with smoke and spices. My favorite foods steamed in foil trays on the kitchen table. Basmati rice with raisins and cashews, tandoori chicken, store-bought naan cut into squares alongside baingan bharta, cheerfully orange mounds of gajrela. With mutton curry and malai kofta in the making, judging by the ingredients neatly piled on the counter.

“Happy birthday, beta,” my mother said, smiling as she rinsed her hands.

I squeezed her shoulder and gave her a quick hug. “Mummy, I wish you’d let me cook. Or at least order catering.”

“Too expensive and full of sugar and fat. And you always make a mess.” She added, “Stop that,” when I sneaked a few raisins.

I told her about my day – how I was so, so close to signing a star client, the CEO of a bitcoin mining firm that had just been written up in Forbes. Normally, my mother loved hearing about my work, but today she was quiet, her hands unsteady as they spooned batter into hot oil. I knew Kane was on her mind. He had hated celebrating his own birthdays, sneering that they were bourgeois and capitalistic. He’d let my mother fry up a fresh batch of pakoras instead of making a birthday cake, which he’d eat alone in his room.

We hadn’t heard from him in over seven years. His presence still hung around our house, like dead incense fumes. My mother and father never brought him up. Even at the best of times, they avoided conflict like timid rabbits, and talking about him was still too painful. For them, at least.

“You should go and get dressed for the party,” my mother said, seeming to read my thoughts. “Your bhuas and masis will be here soon. Oh, and text your Daddy to pick up some achar from the store.”

After changing into my sari and touching up my makeup, I went into Kane’s bedroom. It had stayed as-is since he left. My father and I rarely went inside, though my mother dusted and vacuumed it weekly. (I wanted to make it over into an office but knew better than to ask.)

The room was narrow and papered in beige. It had shelves and a laminate desk crowded with vintage knickknacks. Cracked Royal Doulton figurines and fake Ming vases that Kane had collected since grade school, hand-painted china teacups and prints of famous paintings. Among them, a knockoff Fabergé egg he gave me when I graduated from university, the last time any of us had seen him. I didn’t miss Kane, not even a little bit, but for my parents’ sake I didn’t throw his gift away. It stayed on his desk, an oval orb about five inches tall, pale pink enamel decorated with pearls and dark gold. Admittedly pretty in a sharp way, not unlike Kane himself. When you pushed an invisible button the top divided, revealing an eentsy gold and enamel palace with birch trees overlooking a mirrored lake.

He had pressed the egg into my hands and said I’d see him soon if all went as planned, a smug, almost hostile look on his face. I brushed off his words, though I hid the egg in his bedroom as soon as I could. It gave me an odd feeling, with its aged look and fine detailing, unusually well made for an imitation, the strange engravings on its sides. God only knew where he found it. Knowing him, a five-finger discount, probably.

Reaching out, I cradled the egg in my palm.

And that’s when it happened. The air shook. Thundering noises. A weird sensation of space and time shifting and curling into corkscrew shapes and stretching. Electricity snapped at my skin. I curled into a ball and clamped my hands over my ears, though I wouldn’t let myself scream. I knew whatever was happening had to be Kane’s doing. He wouldn’t get the better of me.

The roaring stopped. I lifted my head and uneasily straightened my legs, a cold breeze smelling of apples lifting the embroidered hem of my sari. “Jesus,” I breathed, looking around.

In front of me, a cream and gold limestone palace with a classical look, long and low and C-shaped, surrounded by a spiky gated fence with tidy grounds and forest in the distance. A domed sky of diamond-shaped panels overhead – hard and shiny and blue. The air had a pinkish glow.

No, I thought. Oh no.

Was I inside Kane’s egg?

It couldn’t be. Could it?

The palace gate was bolted shut. I couldn’t run. Not that I knew where to go.

Footsteps approached. I turned to see uniformed figures. Tall and hefty, Scandinavian blond braids, skin with the same rosiness as the enamel shell of Kane’s egg. The figures looked more zombieish than human. Their unseeing eyes focused on my unshod feet and sari.

“Hello?” I asked, struggling to keep the alarm from my voice. “Er, bonjourno? Guten tag? Dobriy den?”

No answer.

“I’m …not sure how I got here, but I mean no harm. And I’d really appreciate it if you let me go.”

Silence. And then one made a hideous croaking noise.

With jerky movements, they clutched my arms and hauled me across the entrance square. My feet scraped gravel, and I felt my nylons split all the way up my shins. We zoomed through clouds of dust that streaked my sari.

“Please stop manhandling me,” I said shakily, as we passed bronze sculptures and drizzling fountains and railed-in terraces. “I can walk on my own. Just tell me where to go.” Again, no response. They seemed like minions of some kind controlled by an unseen force. Which, come to think of it, made them even scarier.

We reached the front doors. The minions pushed me into a gold and marble foyer that made Versailles look like a Walmart in comparison. Down hallways, past silk-curtained waiting rooms and alcoves and studies, chapels and banquet halls with patterned wallpaper and complicated wooden flooring. Everything had a hard enamel shine. Even the fresh flowers in vases, the shrubs and trees peeking through windows.

The minions led me into a room with a velvet-covered throne and dumped me in front of red and blue tapestries of Greek gods. (Later on, I’d be told that they were genuine Gobelins, whatever that meant.) The minions arranged themselves in a semicircle around me, wordlessly commanding me to stay put. And so I did.

About an hour later, a man entered. Dark skinned and in his thirties, dressed in quilted robes, gold and silver headdresses shaped like moon rays twisted around his temples, a jeweled scepter in one bony hand. He raised a finger and the minions scattered.

The man grinned.

“So you’re finally here, little sister,” Kane said.

Suddenly exhausted, I fainted. So much for not letting him get the better of me.

We were never close.

Kane had always annoyed me. Even when we were kids, I found him draining –inconsiderate and complaining and always needing to be the most interesting person in the room. I longed for an older brother like those of my friends, who’d give them piggyback rides and beat up their bullies. I have no doubt that Kane, too, probably wished I were someone else. After all, we are the heroes of our own stories.

We did bond once when we were small. One afternoon, our mother needed to spring clean our basement and ordered Kane to look after me. He sulkily obeyed her, though even then I knew he’d have preferred to watch Rugrats or play with his treasured Micro Machines. (He still called himself Kamal in those days.) I cried and cried as Kane played Peekaboo with me without success. Finally, to shut me up, he plopped me on the den floor so we could race his toy cars on plastic runners. To his surprise and my own, I laughed and begged him in toddler gibberish to “make the cars vroom” again and again. We did, all day.

It wasn’t just Kane’s toys that captured my attention. As we played, every so often, it seemed like we weren’t in my parents’ house, but in an actual car, bright red and smelling of oil and leather and metal and zipping down a highway. Kane in the driver’s seat, of course, as I ordered him to go faster.

Later, I told my mother all about it. She gave me a funny look and said it was good and well to play make-believe, but I shouldn’t let my imagination run away from me. In the years to come, I’d tell myself I dreamed the whole thing, though my mother never asked Kane to take care of me again. Both she and my father encouraged me to play with my cousins instead, the children of family friends who came to my birthday parties and ate the samosas and cupcakes my mother made from Duncan Hines mixes. I was happy to oblige. Although Kane and I had formed the beginnings of a friendship, he creeped me out. There was something off about him, something distant. The way he held his thin shoulders, a strange light in his eyes, like he knew things about the world that nobody else had discovered. I didn’t want to know.

Kane never complained about me avoiding him, but he would size me up whenever my friends came over to do our Punjabi school homework or play My Little Pony. A searching expression on his face that made me more wary.

I stayed close with my friends all through grade school and university. My mother still has a framed picture of us from our U of T convocation, our copper-streaked hair falling onto plump shoulders, the stern façade of Hart House behind us. Kane in front at our mother’s insistence, an unexpected presence after years of avoiding family functions. He wore a satin sarong printed with suns and stars that he assured was vintage Gaultier. It outshone everyone else’s graduation gowns and J. Crew dresses, to my friends’ irritation. One arm gingerly on my shoulder, a smirk on his thin face.

He himself didn’t bother with university. He’d always hated school. As he scowled and scuttled through childhood and his teens, he began replacing his toy cars with junk from thrift shops and antique stores that he bought with his birthday and Diwali money. My parents didn’t comment on his strange new hobby. While I brought home perfect report cards and kept my after-school activities to a minimum, lest they interfere with my “studies,” they let Kane do what he wanted, caving to his request for an allowance, an alien convention I assumed was exclusive to white households, like being “grounded.” He demanded that we call him Kane, even though my father had named him Kamal in keeping with an old family tradition. “He’ll grow out of it,” my father said.

He didn’t. Nor did my father and mother intervene when the kids at school beat him up and called him “coconut” and “fancypants” and worse names. Not out of meanness or neglectfulness on my parents’ part, but because they simply didn’t know how to handle the situation. Kane wasn’t like the other desi boys in Brampton, let alone anyone from my parents’ hometowns in India. At seventeen, he was expelled for stealing his geography teacher’s Tiffany charm bracelet and refusing to give it back. He insisted that he hadn’t stolen it so much as “repurposed” it for a greater good none of us could possibly understand.

My father talked the school out of calling the police and bribed Kane’s teacher to stay quiet. The night after Kane was expelled, at dinnertime, while we picked at our roti and dahl and aloo gobi, my father cut off Kane’s excuses and ordered him to get his act together. Kane was young, he could change his ways, my father said. But time was running out.

Kane turned to me. Hoping that I would defend him, maybe. Though I suspected that he hadn’t just taken the bracelet and that there might be something to his BS about a greater good, I didn’t say anything. He nodded and excused himself from the table. After packing his favorite trinkets in a battered Fendi tote, he walked out the front door. Waving away my mother’s pleas, the unspoken understanding that Indian boys should stay home and look after their parents as they grew old. He returned to us twice, on my eighteenth birthday and my graduation. Both times staring at me with the same old intensity. I kept my distance.

And then Kane vanished from the face of the earth.

“He wants attention,” my parents said wearily when I suggested calling the police. “He’ll come back one day,” they added, and ended the conversation.

He didn’t.

After I came to in the throne room of Kane’s Fabergé egg-world, he installed me in a bedroom on the first floor of his palace. The state chamber, he said. With its many mirrors, light purply-blue walls, and canopied bed with tassels, it looked nice enough, though I didn’t find it very comfortable. The furniture felt hard and bumpy and the air smelled stale, no matter how many windows I opened.

“I’ll explain everything in time,” Kane said when I demanded answers, still weak and upset from … well … everything that had happened, plus seeing him again after so many years. “Rest up, get used to your surroundings.”

“Are you going to tell me why the hell you brought me here? What is this place? And what about Mummy and Daddy?”

“What about them?” An edge in his voice.

“It’s my birthday.” A whiny note in my own. I couldn’t stop thinking about my abandoned party, the hours my mother spent cooking the perfect menu and how long it had taken me to find my sari. My cousin Jassi had invited a guy she promised was my soulmate, cute and Punjabi and a fan of The Weeknd. Wishing I were anywhere else, I willed myself not to cry.

“Mom and Dad are fine. Relax.” Kane sighed. “Oh and happy trip around the sun. I’ll have a special feast brought to your chamber.”

Relax I did for the next few days. What else could I do? I lived like a queen. A bizarre existence. Every morning, a long, perfumed bath. Kane assigned me a squad of minions that took away my sari and gave me long, heavy gowns that made me look bosomy and dumpy. They scraped the polish from my nails and washed my hair with a smelly shampoo that dissolved my blond highlights, and then braided my locks into loops. I wore heeled boots and sapphire and emerald tiaras of silver lace, all the while longing for my breezy salwar kameezes at home, the sensible Bata sandals I’d bought while visiting my grandparents in Ludhiana.

At mealtimes, I ate in the enormous dining hall. Three times a day, the table set with roses and dripping candles on fresh linen, courses of aspics and cheeses and meat pies, flamingos roasted whole and ancient bottles of wine. I mostly stuck to bread and a bean soup that reminded me of my mother’s rajma, and cups of black coffee rather than the dessert spirits Kane offered. He made the minions join me out of formality, though I never saw them eat or drink.

I had never been separated from my mother and father for more than a few days and missed them like crazy. Being away from work also worried me. My firm would lose our star client without me around to schmooze them and finalize the details. For Kane’s sake, I pretended to enjoy myself, partly to avoid picking a fight. Although he said he was busy, he seemed anxious to please. My done-up bedroom, the freakishly pampering servants – God only knew his motives. He spent his days holed up in his study and said he was working on a new secret project.

All in all, his palace bugged me, a perfect symbol of Kane’s hypocrisy. He had always mocked my good grades when we were young, how I played volleyball and lacrosse and visited the Sikh temple weekly and preferred to wear Abercrombie and Fitch over Alexander McQueen. Since birth, I’d listened to our parents’ endless lectures that brown kids like Kane and me had to try 150 percent harder in life to succeed, which made Kane roll his eyes. He said it was a backwards mindset that caved to racist respectability politics, the idea that non-white immigrant families couldn’t be less than perfect. When my father dryly pointed out that Kane’s designer clothing and expensive collectibles didn’t exactly challenge the status quo, Kane snapped that they were secondhand and didn’t count. What was his excuse now, living in a place that Marie Antoinette would have found over the top? Dressed in a king’s robes, looking like a pope or archbishop – never mind that we weren’t even Christian.

Underneath his politeness and concern, I knew Kane liked having me under his thumb. Eating meals that he’d planned at his chosen time, wearing clothing he’d picked. The same way everything had always revolved around him since we were kids. My parents constantly dancing to his tune, buying him whatever clothes or toys he wanted, and him repaying us all by disappearing and putting us through hell. Forever in control, no matter whom he hurt. I had no intention of hanging around Kane’s world and waiting for him to “explain things.” So help me, I’d end the cycle.

With that in mind, I planned my escape. I pretended to wander outside to pass the time and scoped out the palace grounds and the surrounding forest, in the hope of finding a route back home. The minions gave me a muff and furred cloak to wear, though they didn’t let me past the bolted gate. The forest was only a few hundred meters wide and stood tall against a fake looking backdrop of snowy mountains. I wandered past miniature bridges over streams and explored tulip beds and rock gardens (decorated with marble statues of Kane, naturally). Everything resembled the miniature egg he’d given me to a T –a perfect life-size copy. I didn’t know much about Fabergé eggs, only that they were treasures from the Russian empire, from before the Bolsheviks took out all the royals and overthrew the country. Even from my limited perspective, Kane’s world looked and felt the real thing, though I wasn’t sure if we were inside his egg or a universe that looked like it. An alternate dimension or fantasy, maybe, created with magic. Sometimes the air wavered and shimmered as though the rules of physics didn’t apply.

On the fifth day after I arrived, with stubbornness driven by anger, I found what I searched for while picking cherries in the royal orchards.

A hole in the air like a doorway – on the other side of the fence.

Dark and human-shaped and flashing hot blue sparks.

The branches of a nearby apple tree stretched over it, practically begging to be climbed. Maybe the hole didn’t lead home, but to limbo. Or instant death. It didn’t matter. At that point, anything would have been better than spending one more minute in Kane’s little dictatorship of smothering luxury.

I glanced at my minion escort. “I’m feeling chilly. Do you think you could fetch me some, um, warm milk with honey?”

The minion jerked their head in a nod and lumbered to the palace. Once they were out of sight, I tore off my overskirt and tossed my cloak and muff aside. I would have removed my dress and boots, but with their hundreds of tiny buttons and lacings, I had no time. Bunching my skirts around my waist, I hoisted myself up the tree, my heels digging into slippery bark that blistered my fingers. I reached the top branch and pushed leaves aside as I clumsily wiggled across. The branch bent and cracked beneath my weight – all in all, very unlike CrossFit obstacle training at my gym back home, and not an experience I hoped to repeat. At least there were no bugs.

Hoarse shrieks filled my ears. The minions had spotted me escaping. As I wiggled over the fence, I heard my dress rip. Good. It was ugly anyway. Once clear, I lowered my body and swung on the branch for several seconds. It split, and I crashed to the ground in a heap.

My ankle throbbed. I had no time to baby it – the minions had reached the fence and were bending metal posts apart like the Hulk. I scrambled to my feet and rushed into the void.

The sounds of the forest cut off. Just like when I arrived in the egg-world, space and time turned and twisted, a nauseating feeling, though not nearly as bad as that first trip. Maybe it got easier with practice. Or I was traveling a shorter distance.

The air grew still. Sunlight blazed from above. I fearfully glanced at the hole, searching its silent blackness. The minions hadn’t followed me, thankfully.

So where was I?

All around me, a plaza with cathedrals and towers and stone-paved walkways. At the center, a squat building about twelve storeys high with bronze doors and mushroom-pale walls highlighted with dark marble. The air stunk of sewage, quiet except for the odd bird chirping. In the distance, hills and trees that looked like magic marker scribbles, an orange watercolor sky.

I had seen all this before.

The landscape looked exactly like a scarf Kane wore in junior high. A trademark Pucci design, he used to brag (which, again, meant nothing to me), all bold shapes and colors. I thought hard and remembered something he’d once said – that the pattern was based a tourist attraction in Italy. A monument in Milan or Naples, maybe.

Il Battistero di San Giovanni a Firenze

Yes, that was it.

I peered at the roads and buildings. They had faint black lines like a pen and ink drawing or cartoon. Running my hand along the nearest wall, I cringed at its slippery, satiny sheen, the fabric texture.

Oh God. I was inside a piece of clothing.

Being inside a Fabergé egg was bad enough. But a scarf? No way.

I broke into a run. My heels snagged the clothlike ground, to my disgust. I hobbled into a street filled with restaurants and shops, including an out-of-place Sephora with stone archways. Its appearance comforted me somehow, a reminder of my life back in Brampton, of shopping in big box stores like any other girl my age and believing that alternate universes only existed in science fiction novels and movies.

Flinging the Sephora door open, I ran inside and shuddered as an icy, dizzying wind passed through my body, a feeling I’d come to recognize as traveling from one world to another. Again, I recovered a lot more quickly this time. I scanned the inside of the store and saw no trademark black and white counters, no paints and powders twinkling beneath fluorescent lights. Instead, bright maroon and yellow and blue slashes forming a city skyline marked with letters and skulls. Cars honking in the background, a racket of subway trains. Giant graffiti birds grinned at me in the sky, all teeth and talons. I tripped and twisted my ankle even more. Pain ripped through my body and red blobs bloomed on my dress. A whimper escaped me as I slapped at my legs, frantically trying to stem the flow.

“It’s just pigment, little sister. Oil-based, but eminently washable.”

I looked up. Kane at the entrance. He wore a tailored dark suit, his curly hair straightened into a bob that made me furious, for some reason.

“So you’ve found my Basquiat-world,” he said with a patronizing half-smile. “You know, Basquiat was a Neo-Expressionist artist who achieved mainstream cred in the 80’s, not in part from his unlikely friendship with Andy Warhol–“
“I know who Basquiat is.” I snapped, massaged my aching ankle. “And Warhol. You’re dressed like him, aren’t you? Oh, and this world is that old print in your bedroom back home, isn’t it? The one over your desk?”

“Guilty on all charges. And just so you know, the Basquiat in my bedroom is an original. Undiscovered, worth millions and originally gifted to Madonna if you can believe it. Snagging it from the basement of her Upper East Side mansion and smuggling it across the American border was a nightmare. More so than finding that Fabergé egg of yours in the wastelands of Russia, also genuine and retrieved from a heap of imperialist rubble.” He made an airy gesture. “Extracting the essence of the Basquiat painting to create this mini-verse was a bigger pain in the arse. Stories for another day.”

“I couldn’t care less.” In truth, Kane’s Basquiat was one of his few keepsakes that I actually liked. I couldn’t help admiring the city around me, its colors and textures, and I wouldn’t have minded hearing about how he stole it from Madonna. Of course, I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of knowing.

“I thought you’d enjoy this world more than my old scarf next door,” he said, extending a hand to help me up.

I retreated. “Get away from me.”

“You’re hurt–“

“You heard me.”

He looked wounded. “I understand why you’re upset. All of this is a lot to absorb. But I’ve done what I could to make you feel at home. Did I not tell you to rest at the palace until I explained everything?”

“So this is my fault? God, do you know how sociopathic you are?”

He winced. “I just … never mind.” As he tucked a stray hair behind his ear, I noticed a gleam of silver around his wrist, a jingling collection of dangling charms.

The Tiffany bracelet he’d stolen.

Instant rage. “That better not be what I think it is.” How could he wear it so shamelessly? What could it mean to him? Not my father’s overwhelming embarrassment when he realized his only son was a thief and a liar. Nor my mother’s pain when Kane ran away from home and never returned. Why would that bracelet mean anything when he only cared about himself?

Following my gaze, Kane looked sheepish. He fiddled with the charms. “I suppose I should tell you why I have this, along with my other bric-a-brac—”

“Shut up,” I interrupted. “I don’t want to know anymore. Leave me out of whatever you’re doing here.” I exhaled a sharp breath. “Now take me home. Quickly, so I never have to see you again.”

He closed his eyes. “If that’s what you want.”

“It is. We’re done.”

He summoned a few minions from the palace to send me back to my parents’ house “in style.” They arrived with my birthday sari, cleaned and ironed and in a plastic dry-clean bag. One carried a tray of sandwiches that Kane promised were quite tasty, filled with boiled eggs and caviar and made with aged sourdough from a 50-year starter, or so he said.

“I’m not hungry.” I stopped another minion from pouring me a goblet of wine, though I allowed them to wrap my aching ankle with gauze. “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t drink.”

“Always the good Punjabi girl,” Kane muttered. I ignored him. He waved his hand and the minion picked me up like a sack of potatoes. Not the same one I’d tricked in the orchard, but they emanated resentment all the same. I took some satisfaction in seeing my filthy dress stain their uniform.

Kane began walking. The rest of us followed him down streets smelling of turpentine. Rounding a few corners, we climbed a stairway to a high overpass where a subway train waited, backlit by a swollen sun that looked like a pumpkin. Kane approached the end car and carefully slid the door open. “Here you are. Home, as requested.”

I shifted in the minion’s arms and looked inside. Buff-colored walls, cheap furniture crowded with a collection of ornaments.

You had got to be kidding me. “Tell me that’s not your room at Mummy and Daddy’s.”

“The one and only. I reckon I never technically left their house. Make of that what you will.”

“But … how is this possible?”

“I thought you didn’t want to know.” He gestured at a copper dial with spidery markings next to the door. “I’ve fixed things so that no time will have passed when you return to Mom and Dad’s, just like those Narnia books that Manvir Aunty made us read when we were children. It’s why I kept telling you not to worry.”

“Why didn’t you take me home sooner?”

“I hoped you’d acclimate to my worlds and perhaps stay longer and keep me company. I get lonely.” I gave him a look. “Also, we have unfinished business,” he admitted.

“Well, too bad.” I tugged on my minion’s sleeve. They set me down, more gently than my first day in the egg world, though with plenty of room for improvement. Another minion handed me my sari. Snatching it, I limped to Kane’s bedroom door and mentally prepared myself for the shock of crossing dimensions. And then, at the threshold, I paused. “What ‘unfinished business’?”

A shadow crossed his face. “You know what I mean.”

“I wouldn’t ask if I did.” He didn’t respond. “Just tell me, will you?”

“Why didn’t you speak up for me?” he asked in an even voice. “When Mom and Dad and everyone thought I stole Ms. Haider’s bracelet?”

“You did steal it.”

“You knew damn well there was more to the story, that I wasn’t just some run-of-the mill pickpocketing delinquent. You’ve always known.”

“So that’s why you brought me here? For revenge?” I threw up my hands and teetered on my hurt ankle. A minion held me upright and produced two stools. “Thank you,” I said grudgingly, seating myself. Kane sat as well.

“You remember that day we played together as kids, with my toy cars–“

“Whatever you think happened that day, didn’t,” I said quickly. “It was just pretend.”

“Is this then pretend?” He motioned at the subway, the Basquiat streetscape. “I’d expect such a reaction from Mom and Dad, but I thought more of you, perhaps against my better judgment.”

“All right, I’ll bite. Tell me what’s going on. You made these worlds?”

He relaxed a little. “As I said, I can magically extract the essence, or, rather, the souls of objects and transform them into these larger three-dimensional spaces,” he said. “It’s easier when I like or admire the source objects or find them interesting, hence why I collect works of art for inspiration. The minions, I spawned by transforming ceramic figures from a Tyrolean flea market into Golem-like creatures.”

“And now they’re your slaves.” He let the remark pass. “So this string of worlds you’ve made are the souls of objects. Are you a magician, or is this not real, like The Matrix?”

“I genuinely don’t know. For the last twenty-five years, I’ve been trying to figure out my powers – if I was born with them or if some godly figure cursed me. And what they might mean in the grand scheme of things.” He leaned against the subway car, smearing his suit with dust and paint. “I can’t do it alone. I need your help.”

“Why me?”

The edge in his voice returned. “Who else? I have no friends. Would I ask our dear mother and father when they’ve written me off as a wastrel?”

“Give me a break, Kamal. They spoiled you rotten.”

“Coming from the prodigal daughter herself. I was never good enough for them. A problem child to throw money at, perpetually swept under the carpet.”

My eyes flashed. “You’d rather they be like Jassi’s parents, who slapped her around as a kid and still yell and pick at her? Yes, Mummy and Daddy pushed us to do well and might not love us conditionally. We’re Punjabi. That’s how it is.” But my voice faltered. Because Kane had a point.

I’d always been proud of being close with my mother and father. But for me, it was easy. Like I said, they hated conflict, and everything about me fell in line with what they liked and didn’t like. The career I chose, even my favorite foods. The parents of my cousins and Indian friends might scream and grumble at them, but they accepted them and wanted them to be happy. I couldn’t say the same.

What if I’d been different? Would my mother and father have loved me a little less, or given up on me?

The way they gave on Kane.

“Mummy and Daddy did their best,” I continued, my voice softening. “I know it wasn’t good enough, for which I am really sorry, but they will never, ever understand that you have magical powers. Dollars to doughnuts, they suspect it, especially Mummy, but a magician son just isn’t something she or Daddy can or will accept. They can only see you as a screw-up. It’s tough, I know.”

He looked at me meaningfully. “And you?”

“I guess … I’ve always known what you are. I shouldn’t have stayed away from you when we were kids. I was scared. I still am.” Sighing, I glanced into the subway car at Kane’s sprawling collection of trinkets. “Out of curiosity, what happens if the original Basquait painting in your bedroom is thrown out or wrecked?”

Kane shrugged. “That never occurred to me. I assume this world will be destroyed as well?”

“Are you an idiot?” I stared at him. “What if Mummy and Daddy get rid of your things, or pick them up and wind up here by accident? We’re screwed! I have to go back and hide your stuff.”

“You know Mom only handles my belongings with duster rags.”

“She might not one day!”

He smirked. “Pragmatism never was my strong suit. Precisely why you should stay here. A voice of reason to keep me in check.”

“Kane,” I began.

“I’m scared, too, Gurpreet. We’ve had our issues, Lord knows. I’ve always seemed like a shit brother, and perhaps I was. But I need you. My only family.”

“Don’t say that.”

“Will you stay with me?” There we were. My do-or-die moment with Kane, which I’d tried so hard to avoid my entire life. Would I go down the rabbit hole and join him on whatever messed up magical trip he had in mind? I glanced above him, at a scrawl of graffiti on a crumbling masonry wall: “Question Everything.”

“I have to go home, Kane.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You’re selling yourself short. You might have some otherworldly capacities of your own. Your intuition has always been remarkable. You’d flourish by my side–“

“Stop,” I said. “You ask too much. Putting the magic stuff aside, you can’t expect our relationship to be fixed in one conversation. We both need space to heal.”

He looked sad, and then nodded. “Take this before you go.” He slipped off the Tiffany bracelet and clasped it around my wrist. “I used it to create a roadmap of sorts – to keep track of all the object-souls I’ve extracted into worlds thus far. Consider it a belated birthday present. To be sure, it suits you better than Ms. Haider.” I examined the clusters of charms. Cups and saucers, Escher mazes, Persian carpets. Near the clasp, a tiny egg and a scarf next to a miniature painting that glowed slightly, which he tapped with a buffed fingernail. “You see how that one shines? It’s because I’m in it now. You’ll always know where to find me.”

Humoring him, “And how might I do that?”

“You can return to my string of worlds through the Fabergé egg, the same way you arrived. As of now, the only entry point from Mom and Dad’s house. A deficiency I hope to remedy soon.”

Hah, I thought, but kept my peace. “Look after yourself, Kane.”

“Likewise, little sister.”

I slung my sari over my shoulder and stepped into the subway car.

After traveling back to my parents’ home, I quickly changed into my sari. Guests had gathered downstairs, and voices and laughter filled the house. I had no time to unbraid the princess updo I wore in Kane’s palace. It would probably earn me more than a few odd looks that night, but at least my ankle felt better. Kane’s minion had bandaged it well.

With care, I wrapped my hand with the end of my sari for protection and then packed Kane’s soul-world ornaments, artwork, and clothing into a cardboard box, using his bracelet as a guide. He’d been right that our mother and father never touched his things, but I would take no chances. 

I unclasped his bracelet and held it to the light. A new charm had suddenly appeared, a shapeless blob. Another world he’d extracted from another pretty collectible he loved, that was likely still taking shape. It shone brighter than the other charms.

You’ll always know where to find me.

The doorbell rang. My mother calling me to come downstairs. My father back from grocery shopping asking if anyone wanted cha or pakoras or mango lassi.

I put the bracelet in the box, shut the lid, and slid it under Kane’s bed. Without a backwards glance, I went downstairs to my party.

Suri Parmar is a content creator based in Toronto who hates confining herself to any particular medium or genre. For that reason, she considers herself an agent's nightmare. She is an alumna of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Canadian Film Centre and her fiction has appeared in New Haven Review and The Spectacle. You can find more of her musings on Twitter and Instagram at @_hoodlumrock and can check out her creative portfolio at suriparmar.com