When Devils Sing(53)

A furious pounding sounded at the door of her room—shocking Neera back to the surface. She scrambled to her feet and out of the bathroom, peeking out from behind the curtain of Room 4’s window.

It was Nanaji, banging his fist against the door, rattling the thin, cheap wood in the frame. “Neera!”

She opened the door a crack. “What’s wrong?”

“Where is it?” Her grandfather pushed past her like a bull chasing a flag, his eyes darting all around the room. He spotted her guitar where she’d carefully laid it on the bed and stomped over, yanking it up by its neck. His hand slapped roughly against the strings, sending a discordant hum through the room.

“Nanaji—stop. What’re you doing?” Neera reached around him, grasping for the guitar. He held it away from her.

“This thing! I never want to hear it again.” Guitar in hand, he stormed out of the room. The edge of the Yamaha ricocheted against the doorframe, chipping the wood.

“Stop, you’re damaging it!” Neera yelled, following her grandfather into the humid night. Moths circled overhead, bouncing around the dim lights that lined the motel walkways.

“It’s bad luck,” Nanaji hissed, whirling around to face Neera. He shook the guitar, the soundboard scraping against the concrete in a way that made her physically recoil. “We can’t keep this. You can’t keep playing it.”

Neera made another grab for the instrument, but Nanaji yanked it back again. “This has ruined us,” he snarled. “It’s cursed us.” And in Nanaji’s terrible, fearful face—his trembling chin, his wild, yellowing eyes—Neera saw the truth.

It wasn’t about the guitar. It never had been. It was about Ajay, as all things were. To her grandparents, their son was supposed to be their savior, to carry on their legacy. Their name. Their blood. But he’d traded it all in for the hope of making it with his guitar.

Instead, he got a bullet to the head.

Now, Ajay was just ashes in the earth.

And all Nanaji had left was an embarrassment of a daughter and a mistake for a granddaughter.

“Just give it back,” Neera begged. “I won’t play it here anymore, I promise.”

“No, it is done. No more!” Nanaji shook his head as he turned on his heel, dragging the guitar with him. The sound of the body scraping against the ground made Neera want to retch, her stomach turning itself inside out with agony. It whited out every rational thought, every bit of care she might have had for her grandfather.

Neera sprang forward, charging at him. It was pure, feral instinct. She crashed into Nanaji in a mess of limbs and shouted words. They grappled awkwardly over the guitar’s smooth body.

Then, without warning, Nanaji shoved Neera backward so hard she fell to the ground, her palms burning as they scraped the concrete. The guitar fell, too, clattering against the hard cement. Several strings snapped at once—sending pops into the night air.

Neera and Nanaji paused, frozen for a moment. Together they stared at the broken guitar. The neck was snapped clean off, attached only by a single, taut string.

Neera scrambled forward on her hands and knees. In a distant sort of way, she registered the sting of fresh, bloody scratches on her palms. She didn’t care. Her hands hovered over the instrument, but she didn’t dare touch it. She couldn’t bring herself to just yet. If she did, it might crumble altogether.

Nanaji spat on the ground, a wet bit of saliva landing inches from the guitar’s neck.

Neera looked up at him. Nanaji’s face held no shame or remorse, still contorted in a disgusted grimace. And he wasn’t looking at the guitar but at Neera. Right at her, with that look of horror and revulsion, like she wasn’t his flesh and blood. She was a pest. A thing he wished he could be rid of.

They stayed like that—Neera on her knees before the broken Yamaha, staring up at her grandfather—for several long, unbearable heartbeats.

Without another word, Nanaji turned and trudged away to the motel’s lobby. From within Room 3, her grandmother watched from around the curtain. Neera’s eyes found hers, before Nani quickly looked away—the sliver of lamplight inside vanishing as the curtain twitched back in place.

For a long time, Neera knelt there in the dying light, knees aching on the hard concrete, staring at the shattered remains of her guitar.



* * *



AJAY HAD ONCE told Neera an angel gifted him the Yamaha acoustic guitar with its own rare guitar pick. The angel was a smooth-talking man from San Francisco who, in the sixties, had played with the likes of Janis Joplin and Simon & Garfunkel.

The Yamaha was a vintage instrument—a Red Label made in Japan in the sixties, one of the first of its kind—and worth at least several grand. Still, Ajay never sold the guitar and its accompanying pick, even when things got bad and he was pawning nearly everything he owned to get by. Not when he slept on Kiran’s couch for months on end. Not when he kept a strict diet of instant coffee and bummed cigarettes to stave off days of hunger because he couldn’t afford much else.

He kept it until Neera’s fifteenth birthday, when he’d gifted it to her.

“Why’re you giving this to me?” Neera had asked that day. “It’s your everything. I can’t take it from you.”

Ajay had merely placated her with a grin, as he often did. “I’ve learned all I can from it. Now it’s your turn.”