Kiralee spread her hands. “Not at all.”
“It’s just, I wanted to have an Indian guy as the love interest, a guy who looks like Muzammil Ibrahim.” They both gave her another questioning look, and Darcy felt embarrassed and young. “He’s a Bollywood actor, a model, really. He’s the hot guy who was never in the paranormals I read when I was little, you know? But I didn’t want it to be about me wanting him.”
“You wanted every girl to want him.” Kiralee was smiling again. “So you chose a white girl from California.”
Darcy suddenly wished she had drunk less, even as she took another drink. “Pretty much?”
“Makes perfect sense.” Kiralee swirled her ice. “In a problematic way. But life is problematic, so novels must be too.”
“That’s really deep, Kiralee,” Imogen said.
“But yeah, Yamaraj speaks English,” Darcy said, because she wanted to show that she’d thought about this. “It’s called Afterworlds, plural, because there’s lots of them. And each afterworld has a raja or a rani in charge, a living person who can cross into the spirit realm.”
“Is that from the . . . ?” Imogen frowned at her drink.
“The Vedas? Not really. It’s just a thing I made up.”
“That’s what we novelists do,” Kiralee said. “Make things up.”
“That’s for sure,” Darcy said. In the chaos of last November, she’d never kept straight what she’d made up and what she’d lifted from scripture. “Anyway, Yamaraj’s afterworld has lots of people from India, who speak languages from all over the subcontinent—Gujarati, Bengali, Hindi. English gets used as the common tongue down there, just like in real-life India.”
“Ah, the language of the colonizer.” Kiralee’s expression brightened. “There are some interesting things you could do with that.”
“Right,” Darcy said, though she suspected she hadn’t done any of them. She’d made Yamaraj speak English for the most practical of reasons, so that he and Lizzie didn’t have to mime their undying love. “The hardest thing is making him sound old-fashioned; it just makes him sound unsexy.”
“Old-fashioned?” Imogen asked.
“He was born, like, three thousand years ago.”
“And hooks up with a teenager?” Kiralee tsked a few times. “Such a thing has never been done!”
Imogen laughed at this. “Except all the vampires ever.”
“Well, he’s still seventeen, really.” Darcy took a sip of beer to marshal her thoughts. “Because time passes differently in the . . . crap. Is it creepy?”
Kiralee waved a hand. “As long as he looks seventeen, nobody gets squicked. And as for English, everyone speaks English on TV, even the bloody Klingons. Why shouldn’t Hindu death gods?”
“You’re babbling, Kiralee,” Imogen said. “Klingons speak f**king Klingon. There’s a language institute and everything. They’re translating the plays of Shakespeare!”
“Right, I forgot. You can obliterate the cultures that told the first stories, but Elvish and Klingon must be maintained at all costs!”
Imogen turned to Darcy. “Just ignore her. Kiralee hassles everyone about this stuff. But it’s only because she’s always in trouble herself.”
Kiralee shrugged. “As a whitefella who plunders indigenous mythos, I’ve had my share of squabble, all of it richly deserved. But at least I pass on my wisdom by hassling you young people.”
“You get in trouble for your books? But they’re so . . . inspiring!” After reading Dirawong, Darcy had done her sixth-grade final project on the Bundjalung people. “I mean, it feels like you believe everything you write. You’re a lot more respectful than I am about the Vedas.”
Kiralee laughed. “Well, I never used anyone’s god for purposes of YA hotness.”
Darcy stared at her.
“Not that I’ve read your book.” Kiralee put her hands up in surrender.
Imogen rolled her eyes. “It’s different when it’s your own god, Kiralee.”
“I guess so,” Darcy said, but that was a tricky one. The only statue of Ganesha in her parents’ house sat on her dad’s computer, and had magnetic feet, and she’d rejected her family’s vegetarianism when she turned thirteen. “Anyway, Yamaraj isn’t really a god. He’s the first mortal to discover the afterworld, which gives him special powers. He’s more like a superhero!”
Darcy was cheating here too. In the earliest scriptures, Yamaraj was mortal, but later he became a deity. That was the thing about the Vedas. They weren’t one book but hundreds of stories and hymns and meditations. They had everything—many gods or one, heaven and hell or reincarnation.
But in Afterworlds, Yamaraj was just a normal guy who’d discovered, more or less by accident, that he could walk among ghosts. Wasn’t that what mattered? Or had the words “hot Vedic death god” magically replaced the novel itself?
Imogen was smiling. “He’s only a superhero if he has an origin story.”
“He does! With lightning and everything!”
“Radioactive spider?”
“More like a donkey,” Darcy said. “That’s not from the Vedas, though. I ignored a lot of stuff, like the hymn where Yamaraj’s sister is trying to sleep with him.”
“That’s so YA!” Imogen said.
“I’m so not going there.” Darcy stared at the bottom of her glass, where there was nothing but foam. “Do you think I’m going to get in trouble?”
Kiralee placed her own drink on the jukebox and put a heavy arm around Darcy. “It’s not as if you’re some whitefella, plundering away.”
“That would be your specialty,” Imogen said.
“Look who’s throwing stones!” Kiralee cried. “Your work is hardly free of scandal.”
Imogen let out a sigh. “Right now my work’s free of everything, including a plot. I can’t find a decent mancy to use.”
“What’s a mancy?” Darcy asked, relieved that the conversation was finally moving past the plundering of religions. It had opened up questions that her drunken brain wasn’t fit to consider.
“Imogen’s debut is about a teenager who sets things on fire,” Kiralee said. “Pyromancy! And she thinks I’m bad.”