The Destined Path of Water Chapter 8: Chapter 8: Something Missing

Read chapter 8 of The Destined Path of Water by Simply No One on NovelPedia.

Rika | Age 13 I noticed it first in math class. Riya was explaining something about angles to me, leaning over with her pencil and drawing lines on the corner of my notebook, and when she sat back I looked down and realised that the margin on the opposite side of the page was already full of something I had drawn without noticing I was drawing it. Scales. Long curved ones, overlapping, the way fish scales overlap but larger, each one slightly different from the one beside it. And beneath them the suggestion of something enormous, just the edge of a shape, a curve of a back or a tail, disappearing off the margin of the page. I looked at it for a moment. Riya looked at it too. "What is that," she said. "I don't know," I said. Which was true and also not true, the way some things are. I had been drawing it for months without realising that was what I was drawing. Corners of pages, the back of my hand once when I had a pen and nothing else, the condensation on a glass of water traced with one finger and then gone. Always the same shapes. Scales and curves and the suggestion of something too large to fit on whatever surface I had. I only recognised the pattern when I saw it collected like that, all those small drawings accumulated on one page, the shape of something I had seen once at the bottom of a river when I was nine years old and had not spoken about since. The dragon. I closed the notebook. The thing was I had always known about him. The festival, the ritual, the two rivers he had made these were things I had grown up with the way you grow up with the smell of your own house, so familiar you stopped noticing them. My father used to carry me on his shoulders to the festival when I was small, before. I remembered the drums and the crowd and my mother's good shawl and the particular way my father held my ankles so I would not fall, firm and certain, a grip that said I have you, you will not fall. We had poured the water together. He had guided my small hands around the vessel and we had tilted it together and the water had gone back to the river and he had said, quietly, just for me, that is to say thank you. To say we remember. I had not been to the festival since they died. Neha Aunty and Prakash Uncle did not observe it. Or if they did they did not take me. The festival years had passed in my room listening to the drums through the walls, which was its own kind of grief, a small annual reminder of everything that had changed shape. Ken and Hina went. I had gone with them last year for the first time, to the river near our village, and I had performed the ritual and it had been fine, I had been fine, except that when the coin left my hand I had thought about my father's hands around mine and had to look at the water for a long time before I trusted my face again. I touched the necklace through my shirt. The ache had been there since I was nine but it was different now at thirteen, stronger somehow, less like an absence and more like a direction. Like the necklace was not just warm but pointing. At what I could not say. At something I did not have yet. The feeling was impossible to describe to anyone, which was one of the reasons I had not tried, that and the fact that describing it would require explaining the necklace which would require explaining the river which would require explaining the night I had walked into it and I was not ready to explain any of that to anyone including myself. So I carried it. I was good at carrying things. I had been doing it since I was four. Riya had noticed I wore the necklace always and had asked about it once, in the direct way she asked about everything. "Where did you get it," she said. "I found it," I said. She had looked at me with the expression she used when she knew there was more to something and had decided not to push. Then she had moved on. That was one of the things I liked best about Riya; she understood the difference between wanting to know something and needing to push for i