Not long after they got back from their tour of the city, Tashni announced that Kashpur’s guests had arrived, and showed in Syuna and Zindla to the parlor where they were sitting around and talking. Devi was excited to see them, but her face fell a little when she saw Zindla looking from one to the other of the children without a sign of recognition.
“Zindla, it’s me, Devi,” she said, jumping up from the sofa she was sharing with Ami and Karsan. “I look different because the cabinet’s in Kashpur’s apartment insead of your shop.”
“Devi!” Zindla cried, and knelt down and hugged her.
“This is my mom and dad and grandma and my brother Karsan and my sister Ami,” she went on. “Everybody, this is Zindla and her mom Syuna. They run the shop where I first came to this world.”
Syuna sat down between Kashpur and Grandma, and Zindla squeezed onto the sofa between Devi and Ami, and they talked until Tashni said supper was ready. Devi overheard snatches of Syuna’s conversation with Grandma while she talked with Zindla about what had happened to each of them since they saw each other last.
“I don’t really have any friends at school yet,” she said. “My family moved to a new school district just before I came over to your shop, and then six months passed in my world, and I joined the other kids more than halfway through the school year. So it’s hard to get to know people. I think people are talking about me behind my back, making weird guesses about what happened to me when I disappeared.”
“How do they know about that, if you weren’t going to that school before?”
“I don’t know, but I started overhearing rumors about it within a few days after I started school again.”
Zindla told her that she’d taken over more responsibilities in the shop since her coming of age ceremony; sometimes both her parents would go out at once and leave her in charge of the shop, and sometimes she and her fiancé Myanda would go together to an estate sale and decide whether any of the things for sale would be good to buy for the shop. “Myanda can see enchantments, like Father,” she said, “and even cast a few spells, and I can appraise things pretty well once I know how strong an enchantment something has.”
“Have you found anything weird like the cabinet yet?”
“No,” Zindla said with a laugh. “Things like that come along only once every decade or less. We’ve mostly been buying books and small talismans, things you can wear or put on a shelf; Mother and Father make the big purchases like furniture.”
Just then, Tashni called them to supper. Devi sat between Zindla and Ami, with Mom and Dad and Syuna across the table from them.
Sharun continued his conversation with Syuna as they sat down for supper. They had been talking about Devi and her stay with Syuna’s family a few months ago.
“...So Zindla sewed her a couple of gowns in boys' colors,” she continued. “And gave her a couple of hair ornaments like Zyuneban boys wear. And she went about dressed as a boy for some time, but I said she must wear girl’s clothes to Zindla’s coming of age ceremony, and she agreed. Later on, Kashpur wrote to me saying that she had stopped wearing her hair like a boy’s, and I see she is wearing a girl’s robe today.”
Sharun didn’t think of blue as a girl color, but things were clearly different here. He asked, “You said that Zyuneban men wear these hair ornaments, and I vaguely recall seeing a few men wearing them while we were out touring the city today; but I notice that Kashpur and Sashtun aren’t...?”
“Yes, Stasa dress differently. They have looser customs about what men and women wear or how they dress their hair; there are a few things only men or women wear, but a lot that they consider suitable for either.”
“I suppose, if I move here permanently, I would have to dress and act like a man to fit in.”
“You’d probably better. We indulged Devi in her whim of dressing like a boy, but if Kashpur hadn’t been able to get the cabinet working and she’d been stuck here, and we had adopted her, I think we would have to put our foot down and insist that she dress like a girl as she grew older.”
Sharun thanked God again that Devi had been able to return home, and prayed that nothing would go wrong with their return to Earth tomorrow morning. He wondered what it might have been like for Devi, growing up as a girl here; how long would it take her to get used to it? More to the point, how long would it take Sharun, at his more advanced age, to get used to being a man if he moved here permanently?
On the other hand, it would have to be easier to get used to being a man than to being really old and disabled. Already, at sixty-nine, she was more limited in what she could do than she was even five years ago. He couldn’t bear the thought of being stuck in a nursing home, or worse, bedridden for her last few years. He was pretty sure he would want to move here eventually — the question was, did he want to do it within the next few months? Or wait until old age started catching up to her more severely — until she needed knee or hip replacement, for instance? Or until her memory got noticeably worse? The problem with waiting that long was that she might not get the lost memories back when he emigrated over here. And her memory already wasn’t quite as good as it used to be; those little senior moments were happening more often.
Yes, even if he never got completely used to being a man, he was pretty sure he could put up with it a lot better than losing her memory and reason.
“I used to teach children,” Sharun said, after a few moments of quiet thought. “What we call third grade — children around eight or nine years old. Then, when I was thirty-eight, I moved into administration, and I was the principal of a school for children five to ten years old by the time I retired. I’m concerned about what I could do for a living if I moved here — do you think I could get a job teaching children here, after I live here long enough to learn the things I would need to teach, of course? Do you have restrictions on who can teach?”
“You’d have to ask someone else for details,” Syuna said. “We Zyuneban don’t participate in the Stasa schools; most of us teach our children at home, and some women operate small schools with up to ten pupils. We aren’t allowed to work on any larger scale, because... never mind, I don’t suppose you’re interested in that. But I do know that the Stasa schools employ both men and women as teachers.”
That was troubling. “I am,” he said. “Interested in why you can’t have schools with more than ten pupils, I mean.”
“Well,” Syuna said, “about eighty years ago, the Republic, after a campaign of training teachers and building schools in every village throughout the country, made elementary schooling compulsory for all children. It had already been widespread in the big cities for a while, but not enforced. But some ethnic minorities, including the Zyuneban, weren’t happy with the way the schools taught only in Stasa, and even punished children for speaking Zyuni or other languages among themselves at playtime. So we fought for over thirty years for the right to teach our own children in our own language, and this was the compromise that was reached; we can teach our children in Zyuni, but we can only operate small schools with a single teacher. And Zyuneban can’t teach in the Stasa schools, not that many would be interested in doing so.”
“I see,” Sharun said. “We have had similar troubles in my world... such as the government forcing Indian children to attend boarding schools and speak only English there. But we eventually resolved that in a better way, I think... with no such size restriction on the schools the Indians operate themselves.”
They talked about educational policy for a while longer, and Sashtun, sitting on Sharun’s other side, contributed something from his own experiences at different levels of schooling.
“I think you could find a post as a teacher,” he said, “after a suitable period of acclimation to our world. You would need to learn all the things that a child of our people needs to learn — but the portal seems to have already given you knowledge of our written language, including basic arithmetic notation. At least I found I could understand not only written English text, but numbers and certain arithmetical notation, when I visited your world. I think a motivated adult of your age could learn everything else you would need within three years; let’s say a year of reading and weekly meetings with a tutor, and then two years at a teachers' college. From what your son said, I think your savings brought over in gold from your world would pay your expenses for that period of time and more.”
This was starting to seem pretty feasible, then.
After supper, they all went into the parlor again and sat around talking for a while. But Karsan and Hamanta were mostly focused on each other’s unfamiliar but intriguing new selves. As soon as Syuna and Zindla left to go home, Hamanta said: “It’s been a long, tiring day. I think we’d better get to bed soon, too.”
“Of course,” Kashpur said. “Do you need Sashtun to show you to your room?”
“I think we can find it again,” Karsan said. “Mom, could you make sure the kids get to bed soon, too?”
“Of course,” her mother said in his baritone voice, much deeper than her father’s had ever been. “I have a few more things to ask Kashpur and Sashtun about... There’s a lot to consider if I’m going to think of moving here permanently.”
“Good night.” Karsan hugged each of her children before they left the parlor.
As they walked down the hall toward their guest bedroom, Hamanta took Karsan’s hand in his. Karsan smiled up at him and squeezed his hand. This was it. She hadn’t been sure when they first arrived, but over the past nine or ten hours, she’d gotten more comfortable with her new body — or at least less disconcerted by it — and more interested in Hamanta’s. She was ready now, and from the look on his face, so was Hamanta.
“So,” Hamanta said as he closed the door behind them, “do you want to, um —”
In answer, Karsan stood on her tiptoes and kissed him. He kissed back fervently, his tongue darting into her mouth, where she nibbled on it.
“So that’s a yes,” he said with a silly grin on his acne-scarred face.
“Yes!” Karsan exclaimed. She put one arm around his neck and pulled him toward her, and, feeling very daring, untied the sash of his robe with the other hand.
“Hang on a minute,” Hamanta said, breaking from the kiss. “My purse is over there by the bedside — let me get a condom.”
“Oh — right,” Karsan said, blood draining from her face as she realized how caught up in the moment she’d been. She stepped back and watched silently as Hamanta, his robe already flapping open, strode over to the bedside table and pulled the packet of condoms out of his purse.
Karsan had had a vasectomy after Devi was born. But they didn’t know if the portal would translate that into a non-functional female reproductive system. Some preliminary research online suggested that the organ corresponding to the vas deferens in women was merely vestigial, and removing or truncating it wouldn’t prevent conception; but on the other hand, the portal was capable of changing people’s brains so they spoke different languages, and matching the ethnicity of the people surrounding the destination end; it might understand the purpose of the vasectomy and translate it into a tubal ligation or something. Either way, there was no sense taking chances. Whether a pregnant woman would be passed through unchanged, or stuck in one world until she gave birth, they didn’t want to risk it. — Except that a few moments ago, Karsan hadn’t cared about the risk, or even thought about it.
“Do you want to help me get this on?” Hamanta said, tearing open a packet and breaking into Karsan’s morose thoughts.
“Sure,” she said, and walked over toward him, untying her own robe as she went.
Nice, I really enjoy reading about people exploring new and different aspects of themself