The Little Goddess by Ian McDonaldThe Little Goddess
by Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald, who has lived in Northern Ireland for most of his life, works in 
program development for an independent television production company. His most 
recent book is River of Gods, from Simon and Schuster (UK). The novel is set in 
a kaleidoscopic India one hundred years after independence. He tells us, “It was 
while researching River, on a side-trip up into Nepal, that I first encountered, 
and was fascinated by, the Kumari Devi.”
 
I remember the night I became a goddess.
The men collected me from the hotel at sunset. I was light-headed with hunger, 
for the child-assessors said I must not eat on the day of the test. I had been 
up since dawn; the washing and dressing and making up were a long and tiring 
business. My parents bathed my feet in the bidet. We had never seen such a thing 
before and that seemed the natural use for it. None of us had ever stayed in a 
hotel. We thought it most grand, though I see now that it was a budget tourist 
chain. I remember the smell of onions cooking in ghee as I came down in the 
elevator. It smelled like the best food in the world.
I know the men must have been priests but I cannot remember if they wore formal 
dress. My mother cried in the lobby; my father’s mouth was pulled in and he held 
his eyes wide, in that way that grown-ups do when they want to cry but cannot 
let tears be seen. There were two other girls for the test staying in the same 
hotel. I did not know them; they were from other villages where the devi could 
live. Their parents wept unashamedly. I could not understand it; their daughters 
might be goddesses.
On the street, rickshaw drivers and pedestrians hooted and waved at us with our 
red robes and third eyes on our foreheads. The devi, the devi look! Best of all 
fortune! The other girls held on tight to the men’s hands. I lifted my skirts 
and stepped into the car with the darkened windows.
They took us to the Hanumandhoka. Police and machines kept the people out of the 
Durbar Square. I remember staring long at the machines, with their legs like 
steel chickens’ and naked blades in their hands. The King’s Own fighting 
machines. Then I saw the temple and its great roofs sweeping up and up and up 
into the red sunset and I thought for one instant the upturned eaves were 
bleeding.
The room was long and dim and stuffily warm. Low evening light shone in dusty 
rays through cracks and slits in the carved wood; so bright it almost burned. 
Outside you could hear the traffic and the bustle of tourists. The walls seemed 
thin but at the same time kilometers thick. Durbar Square was a world away. The 
room smelled of brassy metal. I did not recognize it then but I know it now as 
the smell of blood. Beneath the blood was another smell, of time piled thick as 
dust. One of the two women who would be my guardians if I passed the test told 
me the temple was five hundred years old. She was a short, round woman with a 
face that always seemed to be smiling, but when you looked closely you saw it 
was not. She made us sit on the floor on red cushions while the men brought the 
rest of the girls. Some of them were crying already. When there were ten of us 
the two women left and the door was closed. We sat for a long time in the heat 
of the long room. Some of the girls fidgeted and chattered but I gave all my 
attention to the wall carvings and soon I was lost. It has always been easy for 
me to lose myself; in Shakya I could disappear for hours in the movement of 
clouds across the mountain, in the ripple of the grey river far below, and the 
flap of the prayer banner in the wind. My parents saw it as a sign of my inborn 
divinity, one of the thirty-two that mark those girls in whom the goddess may 
dwell.
In the failing light I read the story of Jayaprakash Malla playing dice with the 
devi Taleju Bhawani who came to him in the shape of a red snake and left with 
the vow that she would only return to the Kings of Kathmandu as a virgin girl of 
low caste, to spite their haughtiness. I could not read its end in the darkness, 
but I did not need to. I was its end, or one of the other nine low-caste girls 
in the god-house of the devi.
Then the doors burst open wide and firecrackers exploded and through the rattle 
and smoke red demons leaped into the hall. Behind them men in crimson beat pans 
and clappers and bells. At once two of the girls began to cry and the two women 
came and took them away. But I knew the monsters were just silly men. In masks. 
These were not even close to demons. I have seen demons, after the rain clouds 
when the light comes low down the valley and all the mountains leap up as one. 
Stone demons, kilometers high. I have heard their voices, and their breath does 
not smell like onions. The silly men danced close to me, shaking their red manes 
and red tongues, but I could see their eyes behind the painted holes and they 
were afraid of me.
Then the door banged open again with another crash of fireworks and more men 
came through the smoke. They carried baskets draped with red sheets. They set 
them in front of us and whipped away the coverings. Buffalo heads, so freshly 
struck off the blood was bright and glossy. Eyes rolled up, lolling tongues 
still warm, noses still wet. And the flies, swarming around the severed neck. A 
man pushed a basket towards me on my cushion as if it were a dish of holy food. 
The crashing and beating outside rose to a roar, so loud and metallic it hurt. 
The girl from my own Shakya village started to wail; the cry spread to another 
and then another, then a fourth. The other woman, the tall pinched one with a 
skin like an old purse, came in to take them out, carefully lifting her gown so 
as not to trail it in the blood. The dancers whirled around like flame and the 
kneeling man lifted the buffalo head from the basket. He held it up in my face, 
eye to eye, but all I thought was that it must weigh a lot; his muscles stood 
out like vines, his arm shook. The flies looked like black jewels. Then there 
was a clap from outside and the men set down the heads and covered them up with 
their cloths and they left with the silly demon men whirling and leaping around 
them.
There was one other girl left on her cushion now. I did not know her. She was of 
a Vajryana family from Niwar down the valley. We sat a long time, wanting to 
talk but not knowing if silence was part of the trial. Then the door opened a 
third time and two men led a white goat into the devi hall. They brought it 
right between me and the Niwari girl. I saw its wicked, slotted eye roll. One 
held the goat’s tether, the other took a big ceremonial kukri from a leather 
sheath. He blessed it and with one fast strong stroke sent the goat’s head 
leaping from its body.
I almost laughed, for the goat looked so funny, its body not knowing where its 
head was, the head looking around for the body and then the body realizing that 
it had no head and going down with a kick, and why was the Niwari girl 
screaming, couldn’t she see how funny it was, or was she screaming because I saw 
the joke and she was jealous of that? Whatever her reason, smiling woman and 
weathered woman came and took her very gently away and the two men went down on 
their knees in the spreading blood and kissed the wooden floor. They lifted away 
the two parts of the goat. I wished they hadn’t done that. I would have liked 
someone with me in the big wooden hall. But I was on my own in the heat and the 
dark and then, over the traffic, I heard the deep-voiced bells of Kathmandu 
start to swing and ring. For the last time the doors opened and there were the 
women, in the light.
“Why have you left me all alone?” I cried. “What have I done wrong?”
“How could you do anything wrong, goddess?” said the old, wrinkled woman who, 
with her colleague, would become my mother and father and teacher and sister. 
“Now come along with us and hurry. The King is waiting.”
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. A road of 
white silk had been laid from the foot of the temple steps to a wooden palace 
close by. The people had been let  into the square and they pressed on either 
side of the processional way, held back by the police and the King’s 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 lines 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. How can a goddess have parents? Nor have you 
brothers and sisters. The King is your brother, the kingdom 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 King 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 
kneeling priests to the King in his plumed crown of diamonds and emeralds and 
pearls. The King namasted and we sat side by side on lion thrones and the long 
hall throbbed to the bells and drums of Durbar Square. I remember thinking that 
a King 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 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.
Next 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 royal car at 
her service. Her children were twelve, ten, nine, and seven. She was jolly and 
treated me like her fifth baby, the young favorite, but I felt even then that, 
like the demon-dancing-men, she was scared of me. Oh, it was the highest honor 
any woman could hope for, to be the mother of the goddess—so to speak—though you 
wouldn’t think it to hear her neighbors 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 king 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 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 Smiling 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, 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 down 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 stained 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 forward. 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 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 paralyzed. 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, the way 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 to worship me.
I traveled 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 saddhus 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 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 recognized 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 King’s Own machine had sheathed 
its blade, like a boy folding a knife, before the body, like that funny goat in 
the Hanumandhoka, realized 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 the Royal 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 Royal 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 King’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 kingdom 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 fetus.
“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 fetus-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 fetus-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 
kilometers 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.
Within three days the police had caught the plotters and it was raining. The 
clouds were low over Kathmandu. The color ran from the temples in Durbar Square 
but people beat tins and metal cups in the muddy streets calling praise on the 
Taleju Devi.
“What will happen to them?” I asked Tall Kumarima. “The bad men.”
“They will likely be hanged,” she said.
That autumn after the executions of the traitors the dissatisfaction finally 
poured on to the streets like sacrificial blood. Both sides claimed me: police 
and demonstrators. Others yet held me up as both the symbol of all that was good 
with our Kingdom and also everything wrong with it. Tall Kumarima tried to 
explain it to me but with my world mad and dangerous my attention was turned 
elsewhere, to the huge, old land to the south, spread out like a jeweled skirt. 
In such a time it was easy to be seduced by the terrifying depth of its history, 
by the gods and warriors who swept across it, empire after empire after empire. 
My kingdom had always been fierce and free but I met the men who liberated India 
from the Last Empire—men like gods—and saw that liberty broken up by rivalry and 
intrigue and corruption into feuding states; Awadh and Bharat, the United States 
of Bengal, Maratha, Karnataka.
Legendary names and places. Shining cities as old as history. There aeais 
haunted the crowded streets like gandhavas. There men outnumbered women four to 
one. There the old distinctions were abandoned and women married as far up and 
men as few steps down the tree of caste as they could. I became as enthralled by 
their leaders and parties and politics as any of their citizens by the 
aeai-generated soaps they loved so dearly. My spirit was down in India in that 
early, hard winter when the police and King’s machines restored the old order to 
the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens. One day I 
woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square 
heavy with it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange 
weather was not my doing but the result of huge, slow changes in the climate. 
Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes thick and soft as 
ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together 
inside the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.
“Devi, are you not one of my own children to me?”
I waggled my head, not wanting to say yes.
“Devi, have I ever, ever given you anything but my best?”
Like her counterpart a season before, she drew a plastic pillbox from her 
sleeve, set it on her palm. I sat back on my chair, afraid of it as I had never 
been afraid of anything Tall Kumarima offered me.
“I know how happy we are all here, but change must always happen. Change in the 
world, like this snow—unnatural, devi, not right—change in our city. And we are 
not immune to it in here, my flower. Change will come to you, devi. To you, to 
your body. You will become a woman. If I could, I would stop it happening to 
you, devi. But I can’t. No one can. What I can offer is . . . a delay. A stay. 
Take these. They will slow down the changes. For years, hopefully. Then we can 
all be happy here together, devi.” She looked up from her deferential half-bow, 
into my eyes. She smiled. “Have I ever wanted anything but the best for you?”
I held out my hand. Smiling Kumarima tipped the pills into my palm. I closed my 
fist and slipped from my carved throne. As I went to my room, I could hear 
Smiling Kumarima chanting prayers of thanksgiving to the goddesses in the 
carvings. I looked at the pills in my hand. Blue seemed such a wrong color. Then 
I filled my cup in my little washroom and washed them down, two gulps, down, 
down.
After that they came every day, two pills, blue as the Lord Krishna, appearing 
as miraculously on my bedside table. For some reason I never told Tall Kumarima, 
even when she commented on how fractious I was becoming, how strangely 
inattentive and absent-minded at ceremonies. I told her it was the devis in the 
walls, whispering to me. I knew enough of my specialness, that others have 
called my disorder, that that would be unquestioned. I was tired and lethargic 
that winter. My sense of smell grew keen to the least odor and the people in my 
courtyard with their stupid, beaming upturned faces infuriated me. I went for 
weeks without showing myself. The wooden corridors grew sharp and brassy with 
old blood. With the insight of demons, I can see now that my body was a chemical 
battlefield between my own hormones and Smiling Kumarima’s puberty suppressants. 
It was a heavy, humid spring that year and I felt huge and bloated in the heat, 
a waddling bulb of fluids under my robes and waxy make-up. I started to drop the 
little blue pills down the commode. I had been Kumari for seven Dasains.
I had thought I would feel like I used to, but I did not. It was not unwell, 
like the pills had made me feel, it was sensitive, acutely conscious of my body. 
I would lie in my wooden bed and feel my legs growing longer. I became very very 
aware of my tiny nipples. The heat and humidity got worse, or so it seemed to 
me.
At any time I could have opened my palmer and asked it what was happening to me, 
but I didn’t. I was scared that it might tell me it was the end of my divinity.
Tall Kumarima must have noticed that the hem of my gown no longer brushed the 
floorboards but it was Smiling Kumarima drew back in the corridor as we hurried 
towards the darshan hall, hesitated a moment, said, softly, smiling as always,
“How you’re growing, devi. Are you still. . . ? No, forgive me, of course. . . . 
Must be this warm weather we’re having, makes children shoot up like weeds. My 
own are bursting out of everything they own, nothing will fit them.”
The next morning as I was dressing a tap came on my door, like the scratch of a 
mouse or the click of an insect.
“Devi?”
No insect, no mouse. I froze, palmer in hand, earhook babbling the early morning 
news reports from Awadh and Bharat into my head.
“We are dressing.”
“Yes, devi, that is why I would like to come in.”
I just managed to peel off the palmer and stuff it under my mattress before the 
heavy door swung open on its pivot.
“We have been able to dress ourselves since we were six,” I retorted.
“Yes, indeed,” said Smiling Kumarima, smiling. “But some of the priests have 
mentioned to me a little laxness in the ritual dress.”
I stood in my red and gold night-robe, stretched out my arms and turned, like 
one of the trance-dancers I saw in the streets from my litter. Smiling Kumarima 
sighed.
“Devi, you know as well as I . . .”
I pulled my gown up over my head and stood unclothed, daring her to look, to 
search my body for signs of womanhood.
“See?” I challenged.
“Yes,” Smiling Kumarima said, “but what is that behind your ear?”
She reached to pluck the hook. It was in my fist in a flick.
“Is that what I think it is?” Smiling Kumarima said, soft smiling bulk filling 
the space between the door and me. “Who gave you that?”
“It is ours,” I declared in my most commanding voice but I was a naked 
twelve-year-old caught in wrongdoing and that commands less than dust.
“Give it to me.”
I clenched my fist tighter.
“We are a goddess, you cannot command us.”
“A goddess is as a goddess acts and right now, you are acting like a brat. Show 
me.”
She was a mother, I was her child. My fingers unfolded. Smiling Kumarima 
recoiled as if I held a poisonous snake. To her eyes of her faith, I did.
“Pollution,” she said faintly. “Spoiled, all spoiled. Her voice rose. “I know 
who gave you this!” Before my fingers could snap shut, she snatched the coil of 
plastic from my palm. She threw the earhook to the floor as if it burned her. I 
saw the hem of her skirt raise, I saw the heel come down, but it was my world, 
my oracle, my window on the beautiful. I dived to rescue the tiny plastic fetus. 
I remember no pain, no shock, not even Smiling Kumarima’s shriek of horror and 
fear as her heel came down, but I will always see the tip of my right index 
finger burst in a spray of red blood.
 
The pallav of my yellow sari flapped in the wind as I darted through the Delhi 
evening crush-hour. Beating the heel of his hand off his buzzer, the driver of 
the little wasp-colored phatphat cut in between a lumbering truck-train painted 
with gaudy gods and apsaras and a cream Government Maruti and pulled into the 
great chakra of traffic around Connaught Place. In Awadh you drive with your 
ears. The roar of horns and klaxons and cycle-rickshaw bells assailed from all 
sides at once. It rose before the dawn birds and only fell silent well after 
midnight. The driver skirted a saddhu walking through the traffic as calmly as 
if he were wading through the Holy Yamuna. His body was white with sacred ash, a 
mourning ghost, but his Siva trident burned blood red in the low sun. I had 
thought Kathmandu dirty, but Delhi’s golden light and incredible sunsets spoke 
of pollution beyond even that. Huddled in the rear seat of the autorickshaws 
with Deepti, I wore a smog mask and goggles to protect my delicate eye make-up. 
But the fold of my sari flapped over my shoulder in the evening wind and the 
little silver bells jingled.
There were six in our little fleet. We accelerated along the wide avenues of the 
British Raj, past the sprawling red buildings of old India, toward the glass 
spires of Awadh. Black kites circled the towers, scavengers, pickers of the 
dead. We turned beneath cool neem trees into the drive of a government bungalow. 
Burning torches lit us to the pillared porch. House staff in Rajput uniforms 
escorted us to the shaadi marquee.
Mamaji had arrived before any of us. She fluttered and fretted among her birds; 
a lick, a rub, a straightening, an admonition. “Stand up stand up, we’ll have no 
slumping here. My girls will be the bonniest at this shaadi, hear me?” Shweta, 
her bony, mean-mouthed assistant, collected our smog-masks. “Now girls, palmers 
ready.” We knew the drill with almost military smartness. Hand up, glove on, 
rings on, hook behind ear jewelry, decorously concealed by the fringed dupattas 
draped over our heads. “We are graced with Awadh’s finest tonight. Crème de la 
crème.” I barely blinked as the résumés rolled up my inner vision. “Right girls, 
from the left, first dozen, two minutes each then on to the next down the list. 
Quick smart!” Mamaji clapped her hands and we formed a line. A band struck a 
medley of musical numbers from Town and Country, the soap opera that was a 
national obsession in sophisticated Awadh. There we stood, twelve little 
wives-a-waiting while the Rajput servants hauled up the rear of the pavilion.
Applause broke around us like rain. A hundred men stood in a rough semi-circle, 
clapping enthusiastically, faces bright in the light from the carnival lanterns.
When I arrived in Awadh, the first thing I noticed was the people. People 
pushing people begging people talking people rushing past each other without a 
look or a word or an acknowledgement. I had thought Kathmandu held more people 
than a mind could imagine. I had not seen Old Delhi. The constant noise, the 
everyday callousness, the lack of any respect appalled me. You could vanish into 
that crowd of faces like a drop of rain into a tank. The second thing I noticed 
was that the faces were all men. It was indeed as my palmer had whispered to me. 
There were four men for every woman.
Fine men good men clever men rich men, men of ambition and career and property, 
men of power and prospects. Men with no hope of ever marrying within their own 
class and caste. Men with little prospect of marrying ever. Shaadi had once been 
the word for wedding festivities, the groom on his beautiful white horse, so 
noble, the bride shy and lovely behind her golden veil. Then it became a name 
for dating agencies: lovely wheat-complexioned Agarwal, U.S.-university MBA, 
seeks same civil service/military for matrimonials. Now it was a bride-parade, a 
marriage-market for lonely men with large dowries. Dowries that paid a hefty 
commission to the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency.
The Lovely Girls lined up on the left side of the Silken Wall that ran the 
length of the bungalow garden. The first twelve men formed up on the right. They 
plumped and preened in their finery but I could see they were nervous. The 
partition was no more than a row of saris pinned to a line strung between 
plastic uprights, fluttering in the rising evening wind. A token of decorum. 
Purdah. They were not even silk.
Reshmi was first to walk and talk the Silken Wall. She was a Yadav country girl 
from Uttaranchal, big-handed and big-faced. A peasant’s daughter. She could cook 
and sew and sing, do household accounts, manage both domestic aeais and human 
staff. Her first prospective was a weasely man with a weak jaw in government 
whites and a Nehru cap. He had bad teeth. Never good. Any one of us could have 
told him he was wasting his shaadi fee, but they namasted to each other and 
stepped out, regulation three paces between them. At the end of the walk Reshmi 
would loop back to rejoin the tail of the line and meet her next prospective. On 
big shaadis like this my feet would bleed by the end of the night. Red 
footprints on the marble floors of Mamaji’s courtyard haveli.
I stepped out with Ashok, a big globe of a thirty-two-year-old who wheezed a 
little as he rolled along. He was dressed in a voluminous white kurta, the 
fashion this season though he was fourth generation Punjabi. His grooming 
amounted to an uncontrollable beard and oily hair that smelled of too much 
Dapper Deepak pomade. Even before he namasted I knew it was his first shaadi. I 
could see his eyeballs move as he read my résumé, seeming to hover before him. I 
did not need to read his to know he was a dataraja, for he talked about nothing 
but himself and the brilliant things he was doing; the spec of some new protein 
processor array, the ’ware he was breeding, the aeais he was nurturing in his 
stables, his trips to Europe and the United States where everyone knew his name 
and great people were glad to welcome him.
“Of course, Awadh’s never going to ratify the Hamilton Acts—no matter how close 
Shrivastava Minister is to President McAuley—but if it did, if we allow 
ourselves that tiny counterfactual—well, it’s the end of the economy: Awadh is 
IT, there are more graduates in Mehrauli than there are in the whole of 
California. The Americans may go on about the mockery of a human soul, but they 
need our Level 2.8s—you know what that is? An aeai can pass as human 99 percent 
of the time—because everybody know no one does quantum crypto like us, so I’m 
not worrying about having to close up the data-haven, and even if they do, well, 
there’s always Bharat—I cannot see the Ranas bowing down to Washington, not when 
25 percent of their forex comes out of licensing deals from Town and Country . . 
. and that’s hundred percent aeai generated. . . .”
He was a big affable clown of a man with wealth that would have bought my Palace 
in Durbar Square and every priest in it and I found myself praying to Taleju to 
save me from marrying such a bore. He stopped in mid-stride, so abruptly I 
almost tripped.
“You must keep walking,” I hissed. “That is the rule.”
“Wow,” he said, standing stupid, eyes round in surprise. Couples piled up behind 
us. In my peripheral vision I could see Mamaji making urgent, threatening 
gestures. Get him on. “Oh wow. You’re an ex-Kumari.”
“Please, you are drawing attention to yourself.” I would have tugged his arm, 
but that would have been an even more deadly error.
“What was it like, being a goddess?”
“I am just a woman now, like any other,” I said. Ashok gave a soft harrumph, as 
if he had achieved a very small enlightenment, and walked on, hands clasped 
behind his back. He may have spoken to me once, twice before we reached the end 
of the Silk Wall and parted: I did not hear him, I did not hear the music, I did 
not even hear the eternal thunder of Delhi’s traffic. The only sound in my head 
was the high-pitched sound between my eyes of needing to cry but knowing I could 
not. Fat, selfish, gabbling, Ashok had sent me back to the night I ceased to be 
a goddess.
Bare soles slapping the polished wood of the Kumari Ghar’s corridors. Running 
feet, muted shouts growing ever more distant as I knelt, still unclothed for my 
Kumarima’s inspection, looking at the blood drip from my smashed fingertip onto 
the painted wood floor. I remember no pain; rather, I looked at the pain from a 
separate place, as if the girl who felt it were another person. Far far away, 
Smiling Kumarima stood, held in time, hands to mouth in horror and guilt. The 
voices faded and the bells of Durbar Square began to swing and toll, calling to 
their brothers across the city of Kathmandu until the valley rang from Bhaktapur 
to Trisuli Bazaar for the fall of the Kumari Devi.
In the space of a single night, I became human again. I was taken to the 
Hanumandhoka—walking this time like anyone else on the paving stones—where the 
priests said a final puja. I handed back my red robes and jewels and boxes of 
make-up, all neatly folded and piled. Tall Kumarima had got me human clothes. I 
think she had been keeping them for some time. The King did not come to say 
goodbye to me. I was no longer his sister. But his surgeons had put my finger 
back together well, though they warned that it would always feel a little numb 
and inflexible.
I left at dawn, while the street cleaners were washing down the stones of Durbar 
Square beneath the apricot sky, in a smooth-running Royal Mercedes with darkened 
windows. My Kumarimas made their farewells at the palace gate. Tall Kumarima 
hugged me briefly to her.
“Oh, there was so much more I needed to do. Well, it will have to suffice.”
I felt her quivering against me, like a bird too tightly gripped in a hand. 
Smiling Kumarima could not look at me. I did not want her to.
As the car took me across the waking city I tried to understand how it felt to 
be human. I had been a goddess so long I could hardly remember feeling any other 
way, but it seemed so little different that I began to suspect that you are 
divine because people say you are. The road climbed through green suburbs, 
winding now, growing narrower, busy with brightly decorated buses and trucks. 
The houses grew leaner and meaner, to roadside hovels and chai-stalls and then 
we were out of the city—the first time since I had arrived seven years before. I 
pressed my hands and face to the glass and looked down on Kathmandu beneath its 
shroud of ochre smog. The car joined the long line of traffic along the narrow, 
rough road that clung to the valley side. Above me, mountains dotted with 
goatherd shelters and stone shrines flying tattered prayer banners. Below me, 
rushing cream-brown water. Nearly there. I wondered how far behind me on this 
road were those other government cars, carrying the priests sent to seek out 
little girls bearing the thirty-two signs of perfection. Then the car rounded 
the bend in the valley and I was home, Shakya, its truck halts and gas station, 
the shops and the temple of Padma Narteswara, the dusty trees with white rings 
painted around their trunks and between them the stone wall and arch where the 
steps led down through the terraces to my house, and in that stone-framed 
rectangle of sky, my parents, standing there side by side, pressing closely, 
shyly, against each other as I had last seen them lingering in the courtyard of 
the Kumari Ghar.
 
Mamaji was too respectable to show anything like outright anger, but she had 
ways of expressing her displeasure. The smallest crust of roti at dinner, the 
meanest scoop of dhal. New girls coming, make room make room—me to the highest, 
stuffiest room, furthest from the cool of the courtyard pool.
“He asked for my palmer address,” I said.
“If I had a rupee for every palmer address,” Mamaji said. “He was only 
interested in you as a novelty, dearie. Anthropology. He was never going to make 
a proposition. No, you can forget right about him.”
But my banishment to the tower was a small punishment for it lifted me above the 
noise and fumes of the old city. If portions were cut, small loss: the food had 
been dreadful every day of the almost two years I had been at the haveli. 
Through the wooden lattice, beyond the water tanks and satellite dishes and kids 
playing rooftop cricket, I could see the ramparts of the Red Fort, the minarets 
and domes of the Jami Masjid and beyond them, the glittering glass and titanium 
spires of New Delhi. And higher than any of them, the flocks of pigeons from the 
kabooter lofts, clay pipes bound to their legs so they fluted and sang as they 
swirled over Chandni Chowk. And Mamaji’s worldly wisdom made her a fool this 
time, for Ashok was surreptitiously messaging me, sometimes questions about when 
I was divine, mostly about himself and his great plans and ideas. His 
lilac-colored words, floating in my inner-vision against the intricate 
silhouettes of my jali screens, were bright pleasures in those high summer days. 
I discovered the delight of political argument; against Ashok’s breezy optimism, 
I set my readings of the news channels. From the opinion columns it seemed 
inevitable to me that Awadh, in exchange for Favored Nation status from the 
United States of America, would ratify the Hamilton Acts and outlaw all aeais 
more intelligent than a langur monkey. I told none of our intercourse to Mamaji. 
She would have forbidden it, unless he made a proposal.
On an evening of pre-monsoon heat, when the boys were too tired even for cricket 
and the sky was an upturned brass bowl, Mamaji came to my turret on the top of 
the old merchant’s haveli. Against propriety, the jalis were thrown open, my 
gauze curtains stirred in the swirls of heat rising from the alleys below.
“Still you are eating my bread.” She prodded my thali with her foot. It was too 
hot for food, too hot for anything other than lying and waiting for the rain and 
the cool, if it came at all this year. I could hear the voices of the girls down 
in the courtyard as they kicked their legs in the pool. This day I would have 
loved to be sitting along the tiled edge with them but I was piercingly aware 
that I had lived in the haveli of the Lovely Girl Shaadi Agency longer than any 
of them. I did not want to be their Kumarima. And when the whispers along the 
cool marble corridors made them aware of my childhood, they would ask for small 
pujas, little miracles to help them find the right man. I no longer granted 
them, not because I feared that I had no power any more—that I never had—but 
that it went out from me and into them and that was why they got the bankers and 
television executives and Mercedes salesmen.
“I should have left you in that Nepalese sewer. Goddess! Hah! And me fooled into 
thinking you were a prize asset. Men! They may have share options and Chowpatty 
Beach apartments but deep down, they’re as superstitious as any back-country 
yadav.”
“I’m sorry, Mamaji,” I said, turning my eyes away.
“Can you help it? You were only born perfect in thirty-two different ways. Now 
you listen, cho chweet. A man came to call on me.”
Men always came calling, glancing up at the giggles and rustles of the Lovely 
Girls peeping through the jalis as he waited in the cool of the courtyard for 
Shweta to present him to Mamaji. Men with offers of marriage, men with 
prenuptial contracts, men with dowry down-payments. Men asking for special, 
private viewings. This man who had called on Mamaji had come for one of these.
“Fine young man, lovely young man, just twenty. Father’s big in water. He has 
requested a private rendezvous, with you.”
I was instantly suspicious, but I had learned among the Lovely Girls of Delhi, 
even more than among the priests and Kumarimas of Kathmandu, to let nothing show 
on my painted face.
“Me? Such an honor . . . and him only twenty . . . and a good family too, so 
well connected.”
“He is a Brahmin.”
“I know I am only a Shakya. . . .”
“You don’t understand. He is a Brahmin.”
There was so much more I needed to do, Tall Kumarima had said as the royal car 
drove away from the carved wooden gates of the Kumari Ghar. One whisper through 
the window would have told me everything: the curse of the Kumari.
Shakya hid from me. People crossed the street to find things to look at and do. 
Old family friends nodded nervously before remembering important business they 
had to be about. The chai-dhabas gave me free tea so I would feel uncomfortable 
and leave. Truckers were my friends, bus-drivers and long-haulers pulled in at 
the biodiesel stations. They must have wondered who was this strange 
twelve-year-old girl, hanging around truck-halts. I do not doubt some of them 
thought more. Village by village, town by town the legend spread up and down the 
north road. Ex-Kumari.
Then the accidents started. A boy lost half his hand in the fan belt of a Nissan 
engine. A teenager drank bad rakshi and died of alcohol poisoning. A man slipped 
between two passing trucks and was crushed. The talk in the chai-dhabas and the 
repair shops was once again of my uncle who fell to his death while the little 
goddess-to-be bounced in her wire cradle laughing and laughing and laughing.
I stopped going out. As winter took hold over the head-country of the Kathmandu 
valley, whole weeks passed when I did not leave my room. Days slipped away 
watching sleet slash past my window, the prayer banners bent almost horizontal 
in the wind, the wire of the cableway bouncing. Beneath it, the furious, 
flooding river. In that season the voices of the demons spoke loud from the 
mountain, telling me the most hateful things about faithless Kumaris who betray 
the sacred heritage of their devi.
On the shortest day of the year the bride buyer came through Shakya. I heard a 
voice I did not recognize talking over the television that burbled away day and 
night in the main room. I opened the door just enough to admit a voice and gleam 
of firelight.
“I wouldn’t take the money off you. You’re wasting your time here in Nepal. 
Everyone knows the story, and even if they pretend they don’t believe, they 
don’t act that way.”
I heard my father’s voice but could not make out his words. The bride buyer 
said,
“What might work is down south, Bharat or Awadh. They’re so desperate in Delhi 
they’ll even take Untouchables. They’re a queer lot, those Indians; some of them 
might even like the idea of marrying a goddess, like a status thing. But I can’t 
take her, she’s too young, they’ll send her straight back at the border. They’ve 
got rules. In India, would you believe? Call me when she turns fourteen.”
Two days after my fourteenth birthday, the bride buyer returned to Shakya and I 
left with him in his Japanese SUV. I did not like his company or trust his 
hands, so I slept or feigned sleep while he drove down into the lowlands of the 
Terai. When I woke I was well over the border into my childhood land of wonder. 
I had thought the bride-buyer would take me to ancient, holy Varanasi, the new 
capital of the Bharat’s dazzling Rana dynasty, but the Awadhis, it seemed, were 
less in awe of Hindu superstitions. So we came to the vast, incoherent roaring 
sprawl of the two Delhis, like twin hemispheres of a brain, and to the Lovely 
Girl Shaadi Agency. Where the marriageable men were not so twenty-forties 
sophisticated, at least in the matter of ex-devis. Where the only ones above the 
curse of the Kumari were those held in even greater superstitious awe: the 
genetically engineered children known as Brahmins.
Wisdom was theirs, health was theirs, beauty and success and status assured and 
a wealth that could never be devalued or wasted or gambled away, for it was 
worked into every twist of their DNA. The Brahmin children of India’s 
super-elite enjoyed long life—twice that of their parents—but at a price. They 
were indeed the twice-born, a caste above any other, so high as to be new 
Untouchables. A fitting partner for a former goddess: a new god.
 
Gas flares from the heavy industries of Tughluq lit the western horizon. From 
the top of the high tower I could read New Delhi’s hidden geometries, the 
necklaces of light around Connaught Place, the grand glowing net of the dead 
Raj’s monumental capital, the incoherent glow of the old city to the north. The 
penthouse at the top of the sweeping wing-curve of Narayan Tower was glass; 
glass walls, glass roof, beneath me, polished obsidian that reflected the night 
sky. I walked with stars at my head and feet. It was a room designed to awe and 
intimidate. It was nothing to one who had witnessed demons strike the heads from 
goats, who had walked on bloody silk to her own palace. It was nothing to one 
dressed, as the messenger had required, in the full panoply of the goddess. Red 
robe, red nails, red lips, red eye of Siva painted above my own black kohled 
eyes, fake-gold headdress hung with costume pearls, my fingers dripped gaudy 
rings from the cheap jewelry sellers of Kinari Bazaar, a light chain of real 
gold ran from my nose stud to my ear-ring; I was once again Kumari Devi. My 
demons rustled inside me.
Mamaji had drilled me as we scooted from old city to new. She had swathed me in 
a light voile chador, to protect my make-up she said; in truth, to conceal me 
from the eyes of the street. The girls had called blessings and prayers after me 
as the phatphat scuttled out of the haveli’s courtyard.
“You will say nothing. If he speaks to you, you duck your head like a good Hindu 
girl. If anything has to be said, I will say it. You may have been a goddess but 
he is a Brahmin. He could buy your pissy palace a dozen times over. Above all, 
do not let your eyes betray you. The eyes say nothing. They taught you that at 
least in that Kathmandu, didn’t they? Now come on cho chweet, let’s make a 
match.”
The glass penthouse was lit only by city-glow and concealed lamps that gave off 
an uncomfortable blue light. Ved Prakash Narayan sat on a musnud, a slab of 
unadorned black marble. Its simplicity spoke of wealth and power beneath any 
ornate jewelry. My bare feet whispered on the star-filled glass. Blue light 
welled up as I approached the dais. Ved Prakash Narayan was dressed in a 
beautifully worked long sherwani coat and traditional tight churidar pajamas. He 
leaned forward into the light and it took every word of control Tall Kumarima 
had ever whispered to me to hold the gasp.
A ten-year-old boy sat on the throne of the Mughal Emperor.
Live twice as long, but age half as fast. The best deal Kolkata’s genetic 
engineers could strike with four million years of human DNA. A child husband for 
a once-child goddess. Except this was no child. In legal standing, experience, 
education, taste, and emotions, this was a twenty-year-old man, every way except 
the physical.
His feet did not touch the floor.
“Quite, quite extraordinary.” His voice was a boy’s. He slipped from his throne, 
walked around me, studying me as if I were an artifact in a museum. He was a 
head shorter than me. “Yes, this is indeed special. What is the settlement?”
Mamaji’s voice from the door named a number. I obeyed my training and tried not 
to catch his eye as he stalked around me.
“Acceptable. My man will deliver the prenuptial before the end of the week. A 
goddess. My goddess.”
Then I caught his eyes and I saw where all his missing years were. They were 
blue, alien blue, and colder than any of the lights of his tower-top palace.
 
These Brahmins are worse than any of us when it comes to social climbing, Ashok 
messaged me in my aerie atop the shaadi haveli, prison turned bridal boudoir. 
Castes within castes within castes. His words hung in the air over the hazy 
ramparts of the red fort before dissolving into the dashings of the musical 
pigeons. Your children will be blessed.
Until then I had not thought about the duties of a wife with a ten-year-old boy.
On a day of staggering heat I was wed to Ved Prakash Narayan in a 
climate-control bubble on the manicured green before Emperor Humayun’s tomb. As 
on the night I was introduced, I was dressed as Kumari. My husband, veiled in 
gold, arrived perched on top of a white horse followed by a band and a dozen 
elephants with colored patterns worked on their trunks. Security robots 
patrolled the grounds as astrologers proclaimed favorable auspices and an 
old-type brahmin in his red cord blessed our union. Rose petals fluttered around 
me, the proud father and mother distributed gems from Hyderabad to their guests, 
my shaadi sisters wept with joy and loss, Mamaji sniffed back a tear and vile 
old Shweta went round hoarding the free and over-flowing food from the buffet. 
As we were applauded and played down the receiving line, I noticed all the other 
somber-faced ten-year-old boys with their beautiful, tall foreign wives. I 
reminded myself who was the child bride here. But none of them were goddesses.
I remember little of the grand durbar that followed except face after face after 
face, mouth after mouth after mouth opening, making noise, swallowing glass 
after glass after glass of French champagne. I did not drink for I do not have 
the taste for alcohol, though my young husband in his raja finery took it, and 
smoked big cigars too. As we got into the car—the honeymoon was another Western 
tradition we were adopting—I asked if anyone had remembered to inform my 
parents.
We flew to Mumbai on the company tilt-jet. I had never before flown in an 
aircraft. I pressed my hands, still hennaed with the patterns of my mehndi, on 
either side of the window as if to hold in every fleeting glimpse of Delhi 
falling away beneath me. It was every divine vision I had ever had looking down 
from my bed in the Kumari Ghar on to India. This was indeed the true vehicle of 
a goddess. But the demons whispered as we turned in the air over the towers of 
New Delhi, you will be old and withered when he is still in his prime. 
When the limousine from the airport turned on to Marine Drive and I saw the 
Arabian Sea glinting in the city-light, I asked my husband to stop the car so I 
could look and wonder. I felt tears start in my eyes and thought, the same water 
in it is in you. But the demons would not let me be: you are married to 
something that is not human.
My honeymoon was wonder upon wonder: our penthouse apartment with the glass 
walls that opened on sunset over Chowpatty Beach. The new splendid outfits we 
wore as we drove along the boulevards, where stars and movie-gods smiled down 
and blessed us in the virtual sight of our palmers. Color, motion, noise, 
chatter; people and people and people. Behind it all, the wash and hush and 
smell of the alien sea.
Chambermaids prepared me for the wedding night. They worked with baths and 
balms, oils and massages, extending the now-fading henna tracery on my hands up 
my arms, over my small upright breasts, down the manipuraka chakra over my 
navel. They wove gold ornaments into my hair, slipped bracelets on my arms and 
rings on my fingers and toes, dusted and powdered my dark Nepali skin. They 
purified me with incense smoke and flower petals, they shrouded me in veils and 
silks as fine as rumors. They lengthened my lashes and kohled my eyes and shaped 
my nails to fine, painted points.
“What do I do? I’ve never even touched a man,” I asked, but they namasted and 
slipped away without answer. But the older—the Tall Kumarima, as I thought of 
her—left a small soapstone box on my bridal divan. Inside were two white pills.
They were good. I should have expected no less. One moment I was standing 
nervous and fearful on the Turkestan carpet with a soft night air that smelled 
of the sea stirring the translucent curtains, the next visions of the Kama 
Sutra, beamed into my brain through my golden earhook, swirled up around me like 
the pigeons over Chandni Chowk. I looked at the patterns my shaadi sisters had 
painted on the palms of my hands and they danced and coiled from my skin. The 
smells and perfumes of my body were alive, suffocating. It was as if my skin had 
been peeled back and every nerve exposed. Even the touch of the barely moving 
night air was intolerable. Every car horn on Marine Drive was like molten silver 
dropped into my ear.
I was terribly afraid.
Then the double doors to the robing room opened and my husband entered. He was 
dressed as a Mughal grandee in a jeweled turban and a long-sleeved pleated red 
robe bowed out at the front in the manly act.
“My goddess,” he said. Then he parted his robe and I saw what stood so proud.
The harness was of crimson leather intricately inlaid with fine mirror-work. It 
fastened around the waist and also over the shoulders, for extra security. The 
buckles were gold. I recall the details of the harness so clearly because I 
could not take more than one look at the thing it carried. Black. Massive as a 
horse’s, but delicately upcurved. Ridged and studded. This all I remember before 
the room unfolded around me like the scented petals of a lotus and my senses 
blended as one and I was running through the apartments of the Taj Marine Hotel.
How had I ever imagined it could be different for a creature with the appetites 
and desires of an adult but the physical form of a ten-year-old boy?
Servants and dressers stared at me as I screamed incoherently, grabbing at 
wraps, shawls, anything to cover my shame. At some tremendous remove I remember 
my husband’s voice calling Goddess! My Goddess! over and over.
 
“Schizophrenia is a terribly grating word,” Ashok said. He twirled the stem of a 
red thornless rose between his fingers. “Old-school. It’s dissociative disorder 
these days. Except there are no disorders, just adaptive behaviors. It was what 
you needed to cope with being a goddess. Dissociating. Disjuncting. Becoming you 
and other to stay sane.”
Night in the gardens of the Dataraja Ashok. Water trickled in the stone canals 
of the charbagh. I could smell it, sweet and wet. A pressure curtain held the 
smog at bay; trees screened out Delhi’s traffic. I could even see a few stars. 
We sat in an open chhatri pavilion, the marble still warm from the day. Set on 
silver thalis were medjool dates, halva—crisp with flies—folded paan. A security 
robot stepped into the lights from the Colonial bungalow, passed into shadow. 
But for it I might have been in the age of the rajas.
Time broken apart, whirring like kabooter wings. Dissociative behavior. 
Mechanisms for coping. Running along the palm-lined boulevards of Mumbai, shawls 
clutched around my wifely finery that made me feel more naked than bare skin. I 
ran without heed or direction. Taxis hooted, phatphats veered as I dashed across 
crowded streets. Even if I had had money for a phatphat—what need had the wife 
of a Brahmin for crude cash?—I did not know where to direct it. Yet that other, 
demonic self must have known, for I found myself on the vast marble concourse of 
a railway station, a sole mite of stillness among the tens of thousands of 
hastening travelers and beggars and vendors and staff. My shawls and throws 
clutched around me, I looked up at the dome of red Raj stone and it was a second 
skull, full of the awful realization of what I had done.
A runaway bride without even a paisa to her name, alone in Mumbai Chhatrapati 
Shivaji Terminus. A hundred trains leaving that minute for any destination but 
nowhere to go. People stared at me, half Nautch-courtesan, half Untouchable 
street-sleeper. In my shame, I remembered the hook behind my ear. Ashok, I wrote 
across the sandstone pillars and swirling ads. Help me!
“I don’t want to be split, I don’t want to be me and other, why can’t I just be 
one?” I beat the heels of my hands off my forehead in frustration. “Make me 
well, make me right!” Shards of memory. The white-uniformed staff serving me hot 
chai in the first-class private compartment of the shatabdi express. The robots 
waiting at the platform with the antique covered palanquin, to bear me through 
the Delhi dawn traffic to the green watered geometries of Ashok’s gardens. But 
behind them all was one enduring image, my uncle’s white fist slipping on the 
bouncing cable and him falling, legs pedalling air, to the creamy waters of 
Shakya river. Even then, I had been split. Fear and shock. Laughter and smiles. 
How else could anyone survive being a goddess?
Goddess. My Goddess. 
Ashok could not understand. “Would you cure a singer of his talent? There is no 
madness, only ways of adapting. Intelligence is evolution. Some would argue that 
I display symptoms of mild Asperger’s syndrome.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
He twirled the rose so hard the stem snapped.
“Have you thought about what you’re going to do?”
I had thought of little else. The Narayans would not give up their dowry 
lightly. Mamaji would sweep me from her door. My village was closed to me.
“Maybe for a while, if you could . . .”
“It’s not a good time. . . . Who’s going to have the ear of the Lok Sabha? A 
family building a dam that’s going to guarantee their water supply for the next 
fifty years, or a software entrepreneur with a stable of Level 2.75 aeais that 
the United States government thinks are the sperm of Shaitan? Family values 
still count in Awadh. You should know.”
I heard my voice say, like a very small girl, “Where can I go?”
The bride-buyer’s stories of Kumaris whom no one would marry and could not go 
home again ended in the woman-cages of Varanasi and Kolkata. Chinese paid rupees 
by the roll for an ex-Goddess.
Ashok moistened his lips with his tongue.
“I have someone in Bharat, in Varanasi. Awadh and Bharat are seldom on speaking 
terms.”
“Oh thank you, thank you . . .” I went down on my knees before Ashok, clutched 
his hands between my palms. He looked away. Despite the artificial cool of the 
charbagh, he was sweating freely.
“It’s not a gift. It’s . . . employment. A job.”
“A job, that’s good, I can do that; I’m a good worker, work away at anything I 
will; what is it? Doesn’t matter, I can do it. . . .”
“There are commodities need transported.”
“What kind of commodities? Oh it doesn’t mater, I can carry anything.”
“Aeais.” He rolled a paan from the silver dish. “I’m not going to wait around 
for Shrivastava’s Krishna Cops to land in my garden with their excommunication 
ware.”
“The Hamilton Acts,” I ventured, though I did not know what they were, what most 
of Ashok’s mumbles and rants meant.
“Word is, everything above level 2.5.” Ashok chewed his lower lip. His eyes 
widened as the paan curled through his skull.
“Of course, I will do anything I can to help.”
“I haven’t told you how I need you to transport them. Absolutely safe, secure, 
where no Krishna Cop can ever find them.” He touched his right forefinger to his 
Third Eye. “Self, and other.”
 
I went to Kerala and had processors put into my skull. Two men did it on a 
converted bulk gas carrier moored outside territorial waters. They shaved my 
long lovely black hair, unhinged my skull and sent robots smaller than the 
tiniest spider spinning computers through my brain. Their position out beyond 
the Keralese fast patrol boats enabled them to carry out much secret surgery, 
mostly for the Western military. They gave me a bungalow and an Australian girl 
to watch over me while my sutures fused and hormone washes speed-grew my hair 
back.
Protein chips; only show on the highest resolution scans but no one’ll look 
twice at you; no one’ll look twice at another shaadi girl down hunting for a 
husband. 
So I sat and stared at the sea for six weeks and thought about what it would be 
like to drown in the middle of it, alone and lost a thousand kilometers from the 
nearest hand that might seize yours. A thousand kilometers north in Delhi a man 
in an Indian suit shook hands with a man in an American suit and announced the 
Special Relationship that would make Ashok an outlaw.
You know what Krishna Cops are? They hunt aeais. They hunt the people who stable 
them, and the people who carry them. They don’t care. They’re not picky. But 
they won’t catch you. They’ll never catch you. 
I listened to demons in the swash and run of the big sea on the shore. Demons I 
now knew were facets of my other self. But I was not afraid of them. In 
Hinduism, demons are merely the mirrors of the gods. As with men, so with gods; 
it is the winners who write the history. The universe would look no different 
had Ravana and his Rakshasas won their cosmic wars.
No one but you can carry them. No one but you has the neurological architecture. 
No one but you could endure another mind in there. 
The Australian girl left small gifts outside my door: plastic bangles, 
jelly-shoes, rings, and hairslides. She stole them from the shops in town. I 
think they were her way of saying that she wanted to know me, but was afraid of 
what I had been, of what the things in my head would make me become. The last 
thing she stole was a beautiful sheer silk dupatta to cover my ragged hair when 
she took me to the airport. From beneath it I looked at the girls in business 
saris talking into their hands in the departure lounge and listened to the woman 
pilot announce the weather in Awadh. Then I looked out of the phatphat at the 
girls darting confidently through the Delhi traffic on their scooters and 
wondered why my life could not be like theirs.
“It’s grown back well.” Ashok knelt before me on my cushions in the chhatri. It 
was his sacred place, his temple. He raised his palmer-gloved hand and touched 
his forefinger to the tilak over my third eye. I could smell his breath. Onions, 
garlic, rancid ghee. “You may feel a little disoriented. . . .”
I gasped. Senses blurred, fused, melted. I saw heard felt smelled tasted 
everything as one undifferentiated sensation, as gods and babies sense, wholly 
and purely. Sounds were colored, light had texture, smells spoke and chimed. 
Then I saw myself surge up from my cushions and fall toward the hard white 
marble. I heard myself cry out. Ashok lunged toward me. Two Ashoks lunged toward 
me. But it was neither of those. I saw one Ashok, with two visions, inside my 
head. I could not make shape or sense out of my two seeings, I could not tell 
which was real, which was mine, which was me. Universes away I heard a voice say 
help me. I saw Ashok’s houseboys lift me and take me to bed. The painted 
ceiling, patterned with vines and shoots and flowers, billowed above me like 
monsoon storm clouds, then blossomed into darkness.
In the heat of the night I woke stark, staring, every sense glowing. I knew the 
position and velocity of each insect in my airy room that smelled of biodiesel, 
dust, and patchouli. I was not alone. There was an other under the dome of my 
skull. Not an awareness, a consciousness; a sense of separateness, a 
manifestation of myself. An avatar. A demon.
“Who are you?” I whispered. My voice sounded loud and full of bells, like Durbar 
Square. It did not answer—it could not answer, it was not a sentience—but it 
took me out into the charbagh water garden. The stars, smudged by pollution, 
were a dome over me. The crescent moon lay on its back. I looked up and fell 
into it. Chandra. Mangal. Budh. Guru. Shukra. Shani. Rahu. Ketu. The planets 
were not points of light, balls of stone and gas; they had names, characters, 
loves, hatreds. The twenty-seven Nakshatars spun around my head. I saw their 
shapes and natures, the patterns of connections that bound the stars into 
relationships and stories and dramas as human and complex as Town and Country. I 
saw the wheel of the rashis, the Great Houses, arc across the sky, and the whole 
turning, engines within engines, endless wheels of influence and subtle 
communication, from the edge of the universe to the center of the earth I stood 
upon. Planets, stars, constellations; the story of every human life unfolded 
itself above me and I could read them all. Every word.
All night I played among the stars.
In the morning, over bed-tea, I asked Ashok, “What is it?”
“A rudimentary Level 2.6. A janampatri aeai, does astrology, runs the 
permutations. It thinks it lives out there, like some kind of space monkey. It’s 
not very smart, really. Knows about horoscopes and that’s it. Now get that down 
you and grab your stuff. You’ve a train to catch.”
My reserved seat was in the women’s bogie of the high-speed shatabdi express. 
Husbands booked their wives on to it to protect them from the attentions of the 
male passengers who assumed every female was single and available. The few 
career women chose it for the same reason. My fellow passenger across the table 
from me was a Muslim woman in a formal business shalwar. She regarded me with 
disdain as we raced across the Ganga plain at three hundred and fifty kilometers 
per hour. Little simpering wife-thing. 
You would not be so quick to judge if you knew what we really were, I thought. 
We can look into your life and tell you everything that has, is and will ever 
happen to you, mapped out in the chakras of the stars. In that night among the 
constellations my demon and I had flowed into each other until there was no 
place where we could say aeai ended and I began.
I had thought holy Varanasi would sing to me like Kathmandu, a spiritual home, a 
city of nine million gods and one goddess, riding through the streets in a 
phatphat. What I saw was another Indian capital of another Indian state; glass 
towers and diamond domes and industry parks for the big world to notice, slums 
and bastis at their feet like sewage pigs. Streets began in this millennium and 
ended in one three before it. Traffic and hoardings and people people people but 
the diesel smoke leaking in around the edges of my smog mask carried a ghost of 
incense.
Ashok’s Varanasi agent met me in the Jantar Mantar, the great solar observatory 
of Jai Singh; sundials and star spheres and shadow discs like modern sculpture. 
She was little older than me; dressed in a cling-silk top and jeans that hung so 
low from her hips I could see the valley of her buttocks. I disliked her at once 
but she touched her palmer-glove to my forehead in the shadows around Jai 
Singh’s astrological instruments and I felt the stars go out of me. The sky 
died. I had been holy again and now I was just meat. Ashok’s girli pressed a 
roll of rupees into my hand. I barely looked at it. I barely heard her 
instructions to get something to eat, get a kafi, get some decent clothes. I was 
bereft. I found myself trudging up the steep stone steps of the great Samrat not 
knowing where I was who I was what I was doing halfway up a massive sundial. 
Half a me. Then my third eye opened and I saw the river wide and blue before me. 
I saw the white sands of the eastern shore and the shelters and dung fires of 
the sadhus. I saw the ghats, the stone river steps, curving away on either side 
further than the reach of my eyes. And I saw people. People washing and praying 
cleaning their clothes and offering puja and buying and selling and living and 
dying. People in boats and people kneeling, people waist deep in the river, 
people scooping up silver handfuls of water to pour over their heads. People 
casting handfuls of marigold flowers onto the stream, people lighting little 
mango-leaf diya lamps and setting them afloat, people bringing their dead to dip 
them in the sacred water. I saw the pyres of the burning ghat, I smelled 
sandalwood, charring flesh, I heard the skull burst, releasing the soul. I had 
heard that sound before at the Royal burning ghats of Pashupatinath, when the 
King’s Mother died. A soft crack, and free. It was a comforting sound. It made 
me think of home.
 
In that season I came many times to the city by the Ganga. Each time I was a 
different person. Accountants, counselors, machine-soldiers, soapi actors, 
database controllers: I was the goddess of a thousand skills. The day after I 
saw Awadhi Krishna Cops patrolling the platforms at Delhi station with their 
security robots and guns that could kill both humans and aeais, Ashok began to 
mix up my modes of transport. I flew, I trained, I chugged overnight on 
overcrowded country buses, I waited in chauffeured Mercedes in long lines of 
brightly decorated trucks at the Awadh-Bharat border. The trucks, like the crack 
of an exploding skull, reminded me of my kingdom. But at the end was always the 
rat-faced girli lifting her hand to my tilak and taking me apart again. In that 
season I was a fabric weaver, a tax consultant, a wedding planner, a soapi 
editor, an air traffic controller. She took all of them away.
And then the trip came when the Krishna Cops were waiting at the Bharat end as 
well. By now I knew the politics of it as well as Ashok. The Bharatis would 
never sign the Hamilton Acts—their multi-billion-rupee entertainment industry 
depended on aeais—but neither did they want to antagonize America. So, a 
compromise: all aeais over Level 2.8 banned, everything else licensed and 
Krishna Cops patrolling the airports and railway stations. Like trying to hold 
back the Ganga with your fingers.
I had spotted the courier on the flight. He was two rows in front of me; young, 
wisp of a beard, Star-Asia youth fashion, all baggy and big. Nervous nervous 
nervous, all the time checking his breast pocket, checking checking checking. A 
small time badmash, a wannabe dataraja with a couple of specialist 2.85s loaded 
onto a palmer. I could not imagine how he had made it through Delhi airport 
security.
It was inevitable that the Varanasi Krishna Cops would spot him. They closed on 
him as we lined up at passport control. He broke. He ran. Women and children 
fled as he ran across the huge marble arrivals hall, trying to get to the light, 
the huge glass wall and the doors and the mad traffic beyond. His fists pounded 
at air. I heard the Krishna Cops’ staccato cries. I saw them unholster their 
weapons. Shrieks went up. I kept my head down, shuffled forward. The immigration 
officer checked my papers. Another shaadi bride on the hunt. I hurried through, 
turned away toward the taxi ranks. Behind me I heard the arrivals hall fall so 
shockingly silent it seemed to ring like a temple bell.
I was afraid then. When I returned to Delhi it was as if my fear had flown 
before me. The city of djinns was the city of rumors. The government had signed 
the Hamilton Act. Krishna Cops were sweeping house to house. Palmer files were 
to be monitored. Children’s aeai toys were illegal. US marines were being 
airlifted in. Prime Minister Shrivastava was about to announce the replacement 
of the rupee with the dollar. A monsoon of fear and speculation and in the 
middle of it all was Ashok.
“One final run, then I’m out. Can you do this for me? One final run?”
The bungalow was already half-emptied. The furniture was all packed, only his 
processor cores remained. They were draped in dustsheets, ghosts of the 
creatures that had lived there. The Krishna Cops were welcome to them.
“We both go to Bharat?”
“No, that would be too dangerous. You go ahead, I’ll follow when it’s safe.” He 
hesitated. Tonight, even the traffic beyond the high walls sounded different. “I 
need you to take more than the usual.”
“How many?”
“Five.”
He saw me shy back as he raised his hand to my forehead.
“Is it safe?”
“Five, and that’s it done. For good.”
“Is it safe?”
“It’s a series of overlays, they’ll share core code in common.”
It was a long time since I had turned my vision inward to the jewels Ashok had 
strung through my skull. Circuitry. A brain within a brain.
“Is it safe?”
I saw Ashok swallow, then bob his head: a Westerner’s yes. I closed my eyes. 
Seconds later I felt the warm, dry touch of his finger to my inner eye.
We came to with the brass light of early morning shining through the jali. We 
were aware we were deeply dehydrated. We were aware that we were in need of 
slow-release carbohydrate. Our serotonin inhibitor levels were low. The window 
arch through which the sun beamed was a Mughal true arch. The protein circuits 
in my head were DPMA one-eight-seven-nine slash omegas, under licence from 
BioScan of Bangalore.
Everything we looked at gave off a rainbow of interpretations. I saw the world 
with the strange manias of my new guests: medic, nutritionist, architectural 
renderer, biochip designer, engineering aeai controlling a host of repair-shop 
robots. Nasatya. Vaishvanara. Maya. Brihaspati. Tvastri. My intimate demons. 
This was not other. This was legion. I was a many-headed devi.
All that morning, all afternoon, I fought to make sense of a world that was five 
worlds, five impressions. I fought. Fought to make us me. Ashok fretted, tugging 
at his woolly beard, pacing, trying to watch television, check his mails. At any 
instant Krishna Cop combat robots could come dropping over his walls. 
Integration would come. It had to come. I could not survive the clamor in my 
skull, a monsoon of interpretations. Sirens raced in the streets, far, near, far 
again. Every one of them fired off a different reaction from my selves.
I found Ashok sitting amongst his shrouded processors, knees pulled up to his 
chest, arms draped over them. He looked like a big, fat, soft boy, his Mama’s 
favorite.
Noradrenaline pallor, mild hypoglycaemia, fatigue toxins, said Nasatya.
Yin Systems bevabyte quantum storage arrays, said Brihaspati simultaneously.
I touched him on the shoulder. He jerked awake. It was full dark outside, 
stifling: the monsoon was already sweeping up through the United States of 
Bengal.
“We’re ready,” I said. “I’m ready.”
Dark-scented hibiscus spilled over the porch where the Mercedes waited.
“I’ll see you in a week,” he said. “In Varanasi.”
“In Varanasi.”
He took my shoulders in his hands and kissed me lightly, on the cheek. I drew my 
dupatta over my head. Veiled, I was taken to the United Provinces Night Sleeper 
Service. As I lay in the first class compartment the aeais chattered away inside 
my head, surprised to discover each other, reflections of reflections.
The chowkidar brought me bed-tea on a silver tray in the morning. Dawn came up 
over Varanasi’s sprawling slums and industrial parks. My personalized 
news-service aeai told me that Lok Sabha would vote on ratifying the Hamilton 
Accords at ten am. At twelve, Prime Minister Shrivastava and the United States 
Ambassador would announce a Most Favored Nation trade package with Awadh.
The train emptied onto the platform beneath the spun-diamond canopy I knew so 
well. Every second passenger, it seemed, was a smuggler. If I could spot them so 
easily, so could the Krishna Cops. They lined the exit ramps, more than I had 
ever seen before. There were uniforms behind them and robots behind the 
uniforms. The porter carried my bag on his head; I used it to navigate the press 
of people pouring off the night train. Walk straight, as your Mamaji taught you. 
Walk tall and proud, like you are walking the Silken Way with a rich man. I drew 
my dupatta over my head, for modesty. Then I saw the crowd piling up at the 
ramp. The Krishna Cops were scanning every passenger with palmers.
I could see the badmashs and smuggler-boys hanging back, moving to the rear of 
the mill of bodies. But there was no escape there either. Armed police backed by 
riot-control robots took up position at the end of the platform. Shuffle by 
shuffle, the press of people pushed me toward the Krishna Cops, waving their 
right hands like blessings over the passengers. Those things could peel back my 
scalp and peer into my skull. My red case bobbed ahead, guiding me to my cage.
Brihaspati showed me what they would do to the circuits in my head.
Help me! I prayed to my gods. And Maya, architect of the demons, answered me. 
Its memories were my memories and it remembered rendering an architectural 
simulation of this station long before robot construction spiders started to 
spin their nano-diamond web. Two visions of Varanasi station, superimposed. With 
one difference that might save my life. Maya’s showed me the inside of things. 
The inside of the platform. The drain beneath the hatch between the rear of the 
chai-booth and the roof support.
I pushed through the men to the small dead space at the rear. I hesitated before 
I knelt beside the hatch. One surge of the crowd, one trip, one fall, and I 
would be crushed. The hatch was jammed shut with dirt. Nails broke, nails tore 
as I scrabbled it loose and heaved it up. The smell that came up from the dark 
square was so foul I almost vomited. I forced myself in, dropped a meter into 
shin-deep sludge. The rectangle of light showed me my situation. I was mired in 
excrement. The tunnel forced me to crawl but the end of it was promise, the end 
of it was a semi-circle of daylight. I buried my hands in the soft sewage. This 
time I did retch up my bed tea. I crept forward, trying not to choke. It was 
vile beyond anything I had ever experienced. But not so vile as having your 
skull opened and knives slice away slivers of your brain. I crawled on my hands 
and knees under the tracks of Varanasi Station, to the light, to the light, to 
the light, and out through the open conduit into the cess lagoon where pigs and 
rag-pickers rooted in the shoals of drying human manure.
I washed as clean as I could in the shriveled canal. Dhobi-wallahs beat laundry 
against stone slabs. I tried to ignore Nasatya’s warnings about the hideous 
infections I might have picked up.
I was to meet Ashok’s girl on the street of gajras. Children sat in doorways and 
open shop fronts threading marigolds onto needles. The work was too cheap even 
for robots. Blossoms spilled from bushels and plastic cases. My phatphat’s tires 
slipped on wet rose petals. We drove beneath a canopy of gajra garlands that 
hung from poles above the shop-fronts. Everywhere was the smell of dead, rotting 
flowers. The phatphat turned into a smaller, darker alley and into the back of a 
mob. The driver pressed his hand to the horn. The people reluctantly gave him 
way. The alcofuel engine whined. We crept forward. Open space, then a police 
jawan stepped forward to bar our way. He wore full combat armor. Brihaspati read 
the glints of data flickering across his visor: deployments, communications, an 
arrest warrant. I covered my head and lower face as the driver talked to him. 
What’s going on? Some badmash. Some dataraja.
Down the street of gajras, uniformed police led by a plainclothes Krishna Cop 
burst open a door. Their guns were drawn. In the same breath, the shutters of 
the jharoka immediately above crashed up. A figure jumped up onto the wooden 
rail. Behind me, the crowd let out a vast roaring sigh. There he is there the 
badmash oh look look it’s a girl!
From the folds of my dupatta I saw Ashok’s girli teeter there an instant, then 
jump up and grab a washing line. It snapped and swung her ungently down through 
racks of marigold garlands into the street. She crouched a moment, saw the 
police, saw the crowd, saw me, then turned and ran. The jawan started toward 
her, but there was another quicker, deadlier. A woman screamed as the robot 
bounded from the rooftop into the alley. Chrome legs pistoned, its insect head 
bobbed, locked on. Marigold petals flew up around the fleeing girl but everyone 
knew she could not escape the killing thing. One step, two step, it was behind 
her. I saw her glance over her shoulder as the robot unsheathed its blade.
I knew what would happen next. I had seen it before, in the petal-strewn streets 
of Kathmandu, as I rode my litter among my gods and Kumarimas.
The blade flashed. A great cry from the crowd. The girl’s head bounded down the 
alley. A great jet of blood. Sacrificial blood. The headless body took one step, 
two.
I slipped from the phatphat and stole away through the transfixed crowd.
I saw the completion of the story on a news channel at a chai-dhaba by the tank 
on Scindia ghat. The tourists, the faithful, the vendors and funeral parties 
were my camouflage. I sipped chai from a plastic cup and watched the small 
screen above the bar. The sound was low but I could understand well enough from 
the pictures. Delhi police break up a notorious aeai smuggling ring. In a 
gesture of Bharati-Awadhi friendship, Varanasi Krishna cops make a series of 
arrests. The camera cut away before the robot struck. The final shot was of 
Ashok, pushed down into a Delhi police car in plastic handcuffs.
I went to sit on the lowest ghat. The river would still me, the river would 
guide me. It was of the same substance as me, divinity. Brown water swirled at 
my be-ringed toes. That water could wash away all earthly sin. On the far side 
of the holy river, tall chimneys poured yellow smoke into the sky. A tiny 
round-faced girl came up to me, offered me marigold gajras to buy. I waved her 
away. I saw again this river, these ghats, these temples and boats as I had when 
I lay in my wooden room in my palace in Durbar Square. I saw now the lie Tall 
Kumarima’s palmer had fed me. I had thought India a jeweled skirt, laid out for 
me to wear. It was a bride-buyer with an envelope of rupees, it was walking the 
Silken Way until feet cracked and bled. It was a husband with the body of a 
child and the appetites of a man warped by his impotence. It was a savior who 
had always only wanted me for my sickness. It was a young girl’s head rolling in 
a gutter.
Inside this still-girl’s head, my demons were silent. They could see as well as 
I that that there would never be a home for us in Bharat, Awadh, Maratha, any 
nation of India.
 
North of Nayarangadh the road rose through wooded ridges, climbing steadily up 
to Mugling where it turned and clung to the side of the Trisuli’s steep valley. 
It was my third bus in as many days. I had a routine now. Sit at the back, wrap 
my dupatta round me, look out the window. Keep my hand on my money. Say nothing.
I picked up the first bus outside Jaunpur. After emptying Ashok’s account, I 
thought it best to leave Varanasi as inconspicuously as possible. I did not need 
Brihaspati to show me the hunter aeais howling after me. Of course they would 
have the air, rail, and bus stations covered. I rode out of the Holy City on an 
unlicensed taxi. The driver seemed pleased with the size of the tip. The second 
bus took me from Gorakhpur through the dhal fields and banana plantations to 
Nautanwa on the border. I had deliberately chosen small, out-of-the-way 
Nautanwa, but still I bowed my head and shuffled my feet as I came up to the 
Sikh emigration officer behind his tin counter. I held my breath. He waved me 
through without even a glance at my identity card.
I walked up the gentle slope and across the border. Had I been blind, I would 
have known at once when I crossed into my kingdom. The great roar that had 
followed me as close as my own skin fell silent so abruptly it seemed to echo. 
The traffic did not blare its way through all obstacles. It steered, it sought 
ways around pedestrians and sacred cows lolling in the middle of the road, 
chewing. People were polite in the bureau where I changed my Bharati rupees for 
Nepalese; did not press and push and try to sell me things I did not want in the 
shop where I bought a bag of greasy samosas; smiled shyly to me in the cheap 
hotel where I hired a room for the night. Did not demand demand demand.
I slept so deeply that it felt like a fall through endless white sheets that 
smelled of sky. In the morning the third bus came to take me up to Kathmandu.
The road was one vast train of trucks, winding in and out of the bluffs, looping 
back on itself, all the while climbing, climbing. The gears on the old bus 
whined. The engine strove. I loved that sound, of engines fighting gravity. It 
was the sound of my earliest recollection, before the child-assessors came up a 
road just like this to Shakya. Trains of trucks and buses in the night. I looked 
out at the roadside dhabas, the shrines of piled rocks, the tattered prayer 
banners bent in the wind, the cableways crossing the chocolate-creamy river far 
below, skinny kids kicking swaying cages across the high wires. So familiar, so 
alien to the demons that shared my skull.
The baby must have been crying for some time before the noise rose above the 
background hubbub of the bus. The mother was two rows ahead of me, she shushed 
and swung and soothed the tiny girl but the cries were becoming screams.
It was Nasatya made me get out of my seat and go to her.
“Give her to me,” I said and there must have been some tone of command from the 
medical aeai in my voice for she passed me the baby without a thought. I pulled 
back the sheet in which she was wrapped. The little girl’s belly was painfully 
bloated, her limbs floppy and waxen.
“She’s started getting colic when she eats,” the mother said but before she 
could stop me I pulled away her diaper. The stench was abominable; the excrement 
bulky and pale.
“What are you feeding her?”
The woman held up a roti bread, chewed at the edges to soften it for baby. I 
pushed my fingers into the baby’s mouth to force it open though Vaishvanara the 
nutritionist already knew what we would find. The tongue was blotched red, 
pimpled with tiny ulcers.
“Has this only started since you began giving her solid food?” I asked. The 
mother waggled her head in agreement. “This child has ceoliac disease,” I 
pronounced. The woman put her hands to her face in horror, began to rock and 
wail. “Your child will be fine, you must just stop feeding her bread, anything 
made from any grain except rice. She cannot process the proteins in wheat and 
barley. Feed her rice, rice and vegetables and she will brighten up right away.”
The entire bus was staring as I went back to my seat. The woman and her baby got 
off at Naubise. The child was still wailing, weak now from its rage, but the 
woman raised a namaste to me. A blessing. I had come to Nepal with no 
destination, no plan or hope, just a need to be back. But already an idea was 
forming
Beyond Naubise the road climbed steadily, switching back and forth over the 
buttresses of the mountains that embraced Kathmandu. Evening was coming on. 
Looking back I could see the river of headlights snaking across the 
mountainside. Where the bus ground around another hairpin bend, I could see the 
same snake climb up ahead of me in red taillights. The bus labored up a long 
steep climb. I could hear, everyone could hear, the noise in the engine that 
should not have been there. Up we crawled to the high saddle where the watershed 
divided, right to the valley of Kathmandu, left to Pokhara and the High 
Himalaya. Slower, slower. We could all smell the burning insulation, hear the 
rattling.
It was not me who rushed to the driver and his mate. It was the demon Trivasti.
“Stop stop at once!” I cried. “Your alternator has seized! You will burn us up.”
The driver pulled into the narrow draw, up against the raw rock. On the offside, 
trucks passed with millimeters to spare. We got the hood up. We could see the 
smoke wafting from the alternator. The men shook their heads and pulled out 
palmers. The passengers piled to the front of the bus to stare and talk.
“No no no, give me a wrench,” I ordered.
The driver stared but I shook my outstretched hand, demanding. Perhaps he 
remembered the crying baby. Perhaps he was thinking about how long it would take 
a repair truck to come up from Kathmandu. Perhaps he was thinking about how good 
it would be to be home with his wife and children. He slapped the monkey wrench 
into my hand. In less than a minute I had the belt off and the alternator 
disconnected.
“Your bearings have seized,” I said. “It’s a persistent fault on pre-2030 
models. A hundred meters more and you would have burned her out. You can drive 
her on the battery. There’s enough in it to get you down to Kathmandu.”
They stared at this little girl in an Indian sari, head covered but sleeves of 
her choli rolled up and fingers greasy with biolube.
The demon returned to his place and it was clear as the darkening sky what I 
would do now. The driver and his mate called out to me as I walked up beside the 
line of vehicles to the head of the pass. We ignored them. Passing drivers 
sounded their multiple, musical horns, offered lifts. I walked on. I could see 
the top now. It was not far to the place where the three roads divided. Back to 
India, down to the city, up to the mountains.
There was a chai-dhaba at the wide, oil-stained place where vehicles turned. It 
was bright with neon signs for American drinks and Bharati mineral water, like 
something fallen from the stars. A generator chugged. A television burbled 
familiar, soft Nepali news. The air smelled of hot ghee and biodiesel.
The owner did not know what to make of me, strange little girl in my Indian 
finery. Finally he said, “Fine night.”
It was. Above the smogs and soots of the valley, the air was magically clear. I 
could see for a lifetime in any direction. To the west the sky held a little 
last light. The great peaks of Manaslu and Anapurna glowed mauve against the 
blue.
“It is,” I said, “oh it is.”
Traffic pushed slowly past, never ceasing on this high crossroads of the world. 
I stood in the neon flicker of the dhaba, looking long at the mountains and I 
thought, I shall live there. We shall live in a wooden house close to trees with 
running water cold from high snow. We shall have a fire and a television for 
company and prayer banners flying in the wind and in time people will stop being 
afraid and will come up the path to our door. There are many ways to be divine. 
There is the big divine, of ritual and magnificence and blood and terror. Ours 
shall be a little divinity, of small miracles and everyday wonders. Machines 
mended, programs woven, people healed, homes designed, minds and bodies fed. I 
shall be a little goddess. In time, the story of me will spread and people will 
come from all over; Nepalis and foreigners, travelers and hikers and monks. 
Maybe one day a man who is not afraid. That would be good. But if he does not 
come, that will be good also, for I shall never be alone, not with a houseful of 
demons.
Then I found I was running, with the surprised chai-wallah calling, “Hey! Hey! 
Hey!” after me, running down the side of the slow-moving line of traffic, 
banging on the doors, “Hi! Hi! Pokhara! Pokhara!” slipping and sliding over the 
rough gravel, toward the far, bright mountains.