by Ian McDonald
Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima (as I would now have to think of them) took a hand each and led me, skipping, from the great looming Hanuman temple. I saw that a road of white silk had been laid from the foot of the temple to a wooden palace close by. The people had been let back into the square and they pressed in on either side of the processional way, held back by the police and the robots. The machines held burning torches in their grasping hands. Fire glinted from their killing blades. There was great silence in the dark square.
‘Your home, goddess,’ said Smiling Kumarima, bending low to whisper in my ear. ‘Walk the silk, devi. Do not stray off it. I have your hand, you will be safe with me.’
I walked between my Kumarimas, humming a pop tune I had heard on the radio at the hotel. When I looked back I saw that I had left two sets of bloody footprints.
You have no caste, no village, no home. This palace is your home, and who would wish for any other? We have made it lovely for you, for you will only leave it six times a year. Everything you need is here within these walls.
You have no mother or father. A goddess has no parents. You have no brothers or sisters. The President is your brother, Nepal your sister. The priests who attend on you, they are nothing. We your Kumarimas are less than nothing. Dust, dirt, a tool. You may say anything, and we must obey it.
As we have said, you will leave the palace only six times a year. You will be carried in a palanquin. Oh, it is a beautiful thing, carved wood and silk. Outside this palace you shall not touch the ground. The moment you touch the ground, you cease to be divine.
You will wear red, with your hair in a topknot and your toe-and fingernails painted. You will carry the red tilak of Siva on your forehead. We will help you with your preparations until they become second nature.
You will speak only within the confines of your palace, and little even then. Silence becomes the Kumari. You will not smile or show any emotion.
You will not bleed. Not a scrape, not a scratch. The power is in the blood and when the blood leaves, the devi leaves. On the day of your first blood, even one single drop, we will tell the priest and he will inform the President that the goddess has left. You will no longer be divine and you will leave this palace and return to your family. You will not bleed.
You have no name. You are Taleju, you are Kumari. You are the goddess.
These instructions my two Kumarimas whispered to me as we walked between priests to the President. He wore a western suit but a proper hat. He knew that though there were no longer any kings in Nepal, I was still royal. He namasted and we sat side by side on old royal lion thrones and the long hall throbbed to the bells and drums of Durbar Square. I remember thinking that a ruler must bow to me but there are rules even for goddesses.
Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima. I draw Tall Kumarima in my memory first, for it is right to give pre-eminence to age. She was almost as tall as a Westerner and thin as a stick in a drought. At first I was scared of her. Then I heard her voice and could never be scared of her again; her voice was kind as a singing bird. When she spoke you felt you now knew everything. Tall Kumarima lived in a small apartment above a tourist shop on the edge of Durbar Square. From her window she could see my Kumari Ghar, among the stepped towers of the dhokas. Her husband had died of lung cancer from pollution and cheap Indian cigarettes. Her two tall sons were grown and married with children of their own, older than me. In that time she had mothered five Kumari Devis before me.
Now I remember Smiling Kumarima. She was short and round and had breathing problems for which she used inhalers, blue and brown. I would hear the snake hiss of them on days when Durbar Square was golden with smog. She lived out in the new suburbs up on the western hills, a long journey even by the official car at her service. Her children were twelve, ten, nine and seven. She was jolly and treated me like her fifth baby, the young favourite, but I felt even then that, like the demon-dancing men, she was scared of me. Oh, it was the highest honour any woman could hope for, to be the mother of the goddess - so to speak - though you wouldn’t think it to hear her neighbours in the unit, shutting yourself away in that dreadful wooden box, and all the blood, medieval, medieval, but they couldn’t understand. Somebody had to keep the nation safe against those who would turn us into another India or, worse, China; someone had to preserve the old ways of the divine kingdom. I understood early that difference between them. Smiling Kumarima was my mother out of duty. Tall Kumarima from love.
I never learned their true names. Their rhythms and cycles of shifts waxed and waned through the days and nights like the faces of the moon. Smiling Kumarima once found me looking up through the lattice of a jali screen at the fat moon on a rare night when the sky was clear and healthy, and she shouted me away, Don’t be looking at that thing, it will call the blood out of you, little devi, and you will be the devi no more.
Within the wooden walls and iron rules of my Kumari Ghar, years become indistinguishable, indistinct. I think now I was five when I became Taleju Devi. The year, I believe, was 2034. But some memories break the surface, like flowers through snow.
Monsoon rain on the steep-sloped roofs, water rushing and gurgling through the gutters, and the shutter that every year blew loose and rattled in the wind. We had monsoons, then. Thunder demons in the mountains around the city, my room flash lit with lightning. Tall Kumarima came to see if I needed singing to sleep but I was not afraid. A goddess cannot fear a storm.
The day I went walking in the little garden, when S miling Kumarima let out a cry and fell at my feet on the grass and the words to tell her to get up, not to worship me were on my lips when she held up, between thumb and forefinger, twisting and writhing and trying to find a place for its mouth to seize: a green leech.
The morning Tall Kumarima came to tell me people had asked me to show myself. At first I had thought it wonderful that people would want to come and look at me on my little jharoka balcony in my clothes and paint and jewels. Now I found it tiresome; all those round eyes and gaping mouths. It was a week after my tenth birthday. I remember Tall Kumarima smiled but tried not to let me see. She took me to the jharoka to wave to the people in the court and I saw a hundred Chinese faces upturned to me, then the high, excited voices. I waited and waited but two tourists would not go away. They were an ordinary couple, dark local faces, country clothes.
‘Why are they keeping us waiting?’ I asked.
‘Wave to them,’ Tall Kumarima urged. ‘That is all they want.’ The woman saw my lifted hand first. She went weak and grabbed her husband by the arm. The man bent to her, then looked up at me. I read many emotions on that face; shock, confusion, recognition, revulsion, wonder, hope. Fear. I waved and the man tugged at his wife, look, look up. I remember that, against all the laws, I smiled. The woman burst into tears. The man made to call out but Tall Kumarima hastened me away.
‘Who were those funny people?’ I asked. ‘They were both wearing very white shoes.’
‘Your mother and father,’ Tall Kumarima said. As she led me along the Durga corridor with the usual order not to brush my free hand along the wooden walls for fear of splinters, I felt her grip tremble.
That night I dreamed the dream of my life, that is not a dream but one of my earliest experiences, knocking and knocking and knocking at the door of my remembering. This was a memory I would not admit in daylight, so it must come by night, to the secret door.
I am in the cage over a ravine. A river runs far below, milky with mud and silt, foaming cream over the boulders and slabs sheared from the mountainsides. The cable spans the river from my home to the summer grazing and I sit in the wire cage used to carry the goats across the river. At my back is the main road, always loud with trucks, the prayer banners and Kinley bottled water sign of my family’s roadside teahouse. My cage still sways from my uncle’s last kick. I see him, arms and legs wrapped around the wire, grinning his gap-toothed grin. His face is summer-burned brown, his hands cracked and brown from the trucks he services. Oil engrained in
the creases. He wrinkles up his nose at me and unhooks a leg to kick my cage forward on its pulley-wheel. Pulley sways cable sways mountains, sky and river sway but I am safe in my little goat-cage. I have been kicked across this ravine many times. My uncle inches forwards. Thus we cross the river, by kicks and inches.
I never see what strikes him - some thing of the brain perhaps, like the sickness Lowlanders get when they go up to the high country. But the next time I look my uncle is clinging to the wire by his right arm and leg. His left arm and leg hang down, shaking like a cow with its throat cut, shaking the wire and my little cage. I am three years old and I think this is funny, a trick my uncle is doing just for me, so I shake back, bouncing my cage, bouncing my uncle up and down, up and down. Half his body will not obey him and he tries to move forward by sliding his leg along, like this, jerk his hand forward quick so he never loses grip of the wire, and all the while bouncing up and down, up and down. Now my uncle tries to shout but his words are noise and slobber because half his face is paralysed. Now I see his fingers lose their grip on the wire. Now I see him spin round and his hooked leg come free. Now he falls away, half his body reaching, half his mouth screaming. I see him fall, I see him bounce from the rocks and cartwheel, a thing I have always wished I could do. I see him go into the river and the brown water swallow him.
My older brother came out with a hook and a line and hauled me in. When my parents found I was not shrieking, not a sob or a tear or even a pout, that was when they knew I was destined to become the goddess. I was smiling in my wire cage.
I remember best the festivals, for it was only then that I left the Kumari Ghar. Dasain, at the end of summer, was the greatest. For eight days the city ran red. On the final night I lay awake listening to the voices in the square flow together into one roar, like I imagined the sea would sound, the voices of the men gambling for the luck of Lakshmi, devi of wealth. My father and uncles had gambled on the last night of Dasain. I remember I came down and demanded to know what all the laughing was about and they turned away from their cards and really laughed. I had not thought there could be so many coins in the world as there were on that table but it was nothing compared to Kathmandu on the eighth of Dasain. Smiling Kumarima told me it took some of the priests all year to earn back what they lost. Then came the ninth day, the great day and I sailed out from my palace for the city would worship me.
I travelled on a litter carried by forty men strapped to bamboo poles as thick as my body. They went gingerly, testing every step for the streets were slippery. Surrounded by gods and priests and sadhus mad with holiness, I rode on my golden throne. Closer to me than any were my Kumarimas, my two mothers, so splendid and ornate in their red robes and headdresses and make-up that they did not look like humans at all. But Tall Kumarima’s voice and Smiling Kumarima’s smile assured me as I rode with Hanuman and Taleju through the cheering and the music and the banners bright against the blue sky and the smell I now recognised from the night I became a goddess, the smell of blood.
That Dasain the city received me as never before. The roar of the night of Lakshmi continued into the day. As Taleju Devi I was not supposed to notice anything as low as humans but out of the corners of my painted eyes I could see beyond the security robots stepping in time with my bearers, and the streets radiating out from the stupa of Chhetrapati were solid with bodies. They threw jets and gushes of water from plastic bottles up into the air, glittering, breaking into little rainbows, raining down on them, soaking them, but they did not care. Their faces were crazy with devotion.
Tall Kumarima saw my puzzlement and bent to whisper.
‘They do puja for the rain. The monsoon has failed a second time, devi.’
As I spoke, Smiling Kumarima fanned me so no one would see my lips move. ‘We don’t like the rain,’ I said firmly.
‘A goddess cannot do only what she likes,’ Tall Kumarima said. ‘It is a serious matter. The people have no water. The rivers are running dry.’
I thought of the river that ran far down deep below the house where I was born, the water creamy and gushing and flecked with yellow foam. I saw it swallow my uncle and could not imagine it ever becoming thin, weak, hungry.
‘So why do they throw water then?’ I asked.
‘So the devi will give them more,’ Smiling Kumarima explained. But I could not see the sense in that even for goddesses and I frowned, trying to understand how humans were, and so I was looking right at him when he came at me.
He had city pale skin and hair parted on the left that flopped as he dived out of the crowd. He moved his fists to the collar of his diagonally striped shirt and people surged away from him. I saw him hook his thumbs into two loops of black string. I saw his mouth open in a great cry. Then the machine swooped and I saw a flash of silver. The young man’s head flew up into the air. His mouth and eyes went round: from a cry to an oh! The President’s machine had sheathed its blade, like a boy folding a knife, before the body, like that funny goat in the Hanumandhoka, realised it was dead and fell to the ground. The crowd screamed and tried to get away from the headless thing. My bearers rocked, swayed, uncertain where to go, what to do. For a moment I thought they might drop me.
Smiling Kumarima let out little shrieks of horror, ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ My face was spotted with blood.
‘It’s not hers,’ Tall Kumarima shouted. ‘It’s not hers!’ She moistened a handkerchief with a lick of saliva. She was gently wiping the young man’s blood from my face when security in their dark suits and glasses arrived, beating through the crowd. They lifted me, stepped over the body and carried me to the waiting car.
‘You smudged my make-up,’ I said to the guard as the car swept away. Worshippers barely made it out of our way in the narrow alleys.
Tall Kumarima came to my room that night. The air was loud with helicopters, quartering the city for the plotters. Helicopters, and machines like the President’s Own robots, that could fly and look down on Kathmandu with the eyes of a hawk. She sat on my bed and laid a little transparent blue box on the red and gold embroidered coverlet. In it were two pale pills.
‘To help you sleep.’
I shook my head. Tall Kumarima folded the blue box into the sleeve of her robe.
‘Who was he?’
‘A fundamentalist. A karsevak. A foolish, sad young man.’
‘A Hindu, but he wanted to hurt us.’
‘That is the madness of it, devi. He and his kind think our nation has grown too Western, too far from its roots and religious truths.’
‘And he attacks us, the Taleju Devi. He would have blown up his own goddess, but the machine took his head. That is almost as strange as people throwing water to the rain.’
Tall Kumarima bowed her head. She reached inside the sash of her robe and took out a second object, which she set on my heavy cover with the same precise care as she had the sleeping pills. It was a light, fingerless glove, for the right hand; clinging to its back was a curl of plastic shaped like a very very tiny goat foetus.
‘Do you know what this is?’
I nodded. Every devotee doing puja in the streets seemed to own one, right hands held up to snatch my image. A palmer.
‘It sends messages into your head,’ I whispered.
‘That is the least of what it can do, devi. Think of it like your jharoka, but this window opens onto the world beyond Durbar Square, beyond Kathmandu and Nepal. It is an aeai, an artificial intelligence, a thinking-thing, like the machines up there, but much cleverer than them. They are clever enough to fly and hunt and not much else, but this aeai can tell you anything you want to know. All you have to do is ask. And there are things you need to know, devi. You will not be Kumari forever. The day will come when you will leave your palace and go back to the world. I have seen them before you.’ She reached out to take my face between her hands, then drew back. ‘You are special, my devi, but the kind of special it takes to be Kumari means you will find it hard in the world. People will call it a sickness. Worse than that
, even . . .’
She banished the emotion by gently fitting the foetus-shaped receiver behind my ear. I felt the plastic move against my skin, then Tall Kumarima slipped on the glove, waved her hand in a mudra and I heard her voice inside my head. Glowing words appeared in the air between us, words I had been painstakingly taught to read by Tall Kumarima.
Don’t let anyone find it, her dancing hand said. Tell no one, not even Smiling Kumarima. I know you call her that, but she would not understand. She would think it was unclean, a pollution. In some ways, she is not so different from that man who tried to harm you. Let this be our secret, just you and me.
Soon after, Smiling Kumarima came to look in on me and check for fleas but I pretended to be asleep. The glove and the foetus-thing were hidden under my pillow. I imagined them talking to me through the goose down and soft soft cotton, sending dreams while the helicopters and hunting robots wheeled in the night above me. When the latch on her door clicked too, I put on the glove and earhook and went looking for the lost rain. I found it one hundred and fifty kilometres up, through the eye of a weather aeai spinning over east India. I saw the monsoon, a coil of cloud like a cat’s claw hooking up across the sea. There had been cats in the village; suspicious things, lean on mice and barley. No cat was permitted in the Kumari Ghar. I looked down on my Kingdom but I could not see a city or a palace or me down here at all. I saw mountains, white mountains ridged with grey and blue ice. I was goddess of this. And the heart went out of me, because it was nothing, a tiny crust of stone on top of that huge world that hung beneath it like the full teat of a cow, rich and heavy with people and their brilliant cities and their bright nations. India, where our gods and names were born.