Mona'a Malik's stories have appeared in The Fiddlehead, Joyland, and Event, among others. She received an Arts and Letters NL award for poetry, and her play Sania The Destroyer was a finalist for the QWF Playwriting Prize.
Fiction winner of the 2020 Prose & Poetry Contest selected by guest judge Shruti Swamy.
“A postdoc doesn’t make money,” Pavaan says. He thinks I was selfish to pursue what I wanted. And I was. I am. I don’t want to help Amma, I don’t want to help the dead that keep coming to me.
I’m jealous of the ghosts, the ones that eventually disappear.
He says I can still come work for him at the electronics store, “You might never get a job. You think a tenure-track position is easy to find?” My brother, he’s like that. He said something similar when I got my master’s, when I got my PhD. Serves Amma right for spoiling him as a child. He thinks he’s right about everything. Then why do I try to impress him?
And anyway, the research gives me something, I don’t know, a goal? The possibility of salvation? I kept thinking about where Pavaan would be for Diwali, whether he’d come to our home or go to his in-laws. He loved Nanyamma. I knew if she was still here, he’d come to Kolkata. He was her little puchki, and she had coddled him, too.
A big bump and my head belted forward against the driver’s seat. Police officers at the border of the site, shadows in front of the gates. They’d stopped us. When I explained my research to them through the rusting rolled-down window, they told me to get out of the taxi. Unsmiling, they said to bring my travel papers and my notebooks.
They took me to a small, white, rickety building with a big double door entrance while the driver waited. Into a little interrogation office with just a wooden desk. They made me sit on a plastic chair and they sat on the other side with cups of tea. They didn’t offer me anything. Just looked me up and down.
“How long do you plan to be here?”
“One month.”
“One month!” shouted the older one. “And where will you stay?”
I mentioned the name of the hotel.
“By yourself?”
“Yes.”
“The site is out of our jurisdiction.”
Meaning what?
The tall one was handsome-ish, dark-skinned with a light beard and moustache, trimmed. The other had an old-style handlebar moustache that took up most of his face. He was so light he looked Kashmiri, and he had wrinkles around his potato nose.
“We wouldn’t be able to protect you if something goes wrong, it’s not a safe place for a young woman alone,” the handsome-ish one said. He leaned over the desk.
A veiled threat? I hadn’t been sleeping for weeks, I was closer to death than most of the ghosts.
“How long were you in Tarapith?”
Tarapith, both the name of a temple and the town that housed it. The tantric Hindu temple was dedicated to the Goddess Tara, a fearsome facet of the great Goddess Devi.
Couldn’t they see from the greenish circles under my eyes and the yellow in my face? “Three days.”
The older one frowned and shook his head. He was repeating himself. “Why do you need to study death? Young girls should not be studying death.”
I scoffed mentally, to an image of Baba, at the idea of these officers telling me what I could or couldn’t study. The handsome one was looking through my green ring-bound notebook, the rough sketches of altars and tantriks and sculptures I’d made among my notes. He said his name was Tej. I asked him if it was short for anything. He smiled. Cute. Beatific. Most of the interviews were on tapes in my suitcase in the trunk of the taxi, but I didn’t let on. I didn’t need them going through everything I owned.
“It’s quite a precise interest, isn’t it?”
“Precise?” I paused diplomatically, not knowing what else to say. “I studied the art history of the sites, too.”
No AC in the room and my palms were dripping. I wiped them on my kurta as I glanced into the little office across the room from where we sat—they had a kettle, a messy desk full of papers. I wondered what they’d eaten for lunch. I’m always curious about people who spend their days connecting and communing with the afterlife, with the antyesti, the last sacrifice. What was it like, I wondered, to guard the sacred riverfront, the gates to death? When I was a child, I thought the priests lived at the temple and always tried to spy out the secret places where they might sleep or use the washroom, struggling to lose my family in the crowd so I could get one glimpse.
Tej told me he liked my shoes, maroon loafers that I had gotten at Payless near Eaton Centre in Toronto, but he waited to tell me until his colleague went to a washroom somewhere outside the building.
I smiled and thanked him and complimented his ugly striped tie.
“America?” he asked, when I took out my study permit.
“Canada.”
“So next to America,” he said. “Close.” When he talked to me his presence was airy and light, like someone above death. “I can walk you to your hotel when we’re done here.” He made a joke about Delhis/delis in New York. His voice bubbled over; it was stupid, but he made me want to laugh for the first time in a long while.
“The taxi’s waiting for me.”
“Right.”
Whether there was a real threat or not, I had no one to ask. Both men were suspicious of my academic pursuits. What kind of woman studies death rituals in the middle of the night? It wasn’t a place for a young lady. Of course, I agreed. Back at the taxi they looked inside once more, they wrote something in their notes.
The older one tried to scare me off, but I was already scared.
Of how I might change or continue to change. I’d gone through all the trouble of clearing the topic with my supervisor, of making contacts in the region, of making appointments to interview. Professor Knezevic would deride the notion that I felt unsafe. And I’d skipped several interviews at Tarapith, which didn’t look great as far as my professionalism was concerned.
If I told her what I was seeing, she would say: Dita, everybody starts to see things in the middle of the night.
. . .
From my hotel room, I called my mother’s house and left a voicemail, being a good daughter, saying I had arrived. I tried to call my brother, too, but there was no answer the first time, and the second time it was the maid, so I hung up.
. . .
Like the country itself, my family was a mix of those who were religious and those that practiced only at festival times: Amma wasn’t religious, only superstitious. Aparna, my sister-in-law, wouldn’t wear her hair open at night and made everyone eat curds with sugar before going on a trip. They both kept salt in bowls in the corners of rooms to absorb negative energy. Pavaan performed the niceties of cultural customs when it was required, and Amma always capitulated back when he used to visit. “I don’t think it’s a healthy way of living,” he said about my life in academia, and then that would get Amma all riled up.
“Why don’t you listen to us? Why don’t you listen to your big brother?”
. . .
I watched as Tej rolled over in his sleep, his skinny fat touching my hip, that bulge of his almost-paunch. I could hear Nanyamma whining “mota, mota, mota.” I kneed the officer away, but he only yawned and slapped an arm on top of my neck, securing me. I kneed him harder and he gasped but didn’t wake. I wanted him to think ugly thoughts about me, this man who had no interest in a sacred anything. I would make him hate me.
“It’s all the same,” Tej had told me, as he laughed at people who spent so much money visiting the grounds, bringing all of their family on heritage walks and boat tours.
“Don’t you believe in God at all?” I’d asked.
“Sure,” he said, but not convincingly, and tapped at his chest, either to show his belief was in his heart, or because something was obstructing his lungs as he smoked.
Unbeknownst to him, each time I’d go to his office, in my head all I saw were appled cheeks, that deep deep blush. Instead of Tej’s gut, I saw this sanyasini. An inconspicuous young renunciate, thirty-something, at most mid-forties, who had followed me from room to room, from tomb to tomb in Tarapith.
This wooden shack with the grain in the ceiling weaving its way around large dark knots, reeked of sweat. I’d follow the pattern in a hazy way, breathing through my mouth while we fucked on top of a thin mat that I chose to believe was for midday naps. I imagined what Pavaan and Amma would think of Tej, would think of everything I did. My mother was upset that I wasn’t coming for Diwali. I told her I had too much work, that I couldn’t lose the two days of traveling there and back. If only she could have Baba there with her.
“But everyone’s coming,” she said. “All your aunties and their families.”
‘All your aunties’ meant my mother’s two living sisters, Rushi Mausi and Ruli Mausi. For the first time in years, they and their large parivaar were coming to Amma’s place for a celebration instead of Amma going to one of theirs.
“I put hundreds of candles out.” She said it like, ‘Can you imagine that at my age, I would have to do this by myself?’
. . .
The next week, Amma phoned again, just as I’d tucked myself into my hotel bed, to describe in great detail how well the dinner had gone. Predictably, Pavaan and Aparna hadn’t shown. The way Amma described it, all the families had gotten along very well during the meal, but I knew that her younger sisters pitied her. I imagined the snide comments they would make to each other about the food. I imagined myself there, in a pressed kurta Amma would have set out for me, nodding and smiling for six hours straight, the choodiyaan on my wrists tinkling as though happy.
I’d spent Diwali in the hotel instead, eating the hotel’s special of moong dal ladoo, aloo ki kachori, and methi malai paneer in my room, even though at some point it ended up in the toilet. “Looks good,” a presence had noted, squatting on my right arm, eying the aloo. “I’m famished.” The tee-hee-hees of spirits echoing off the walls. Outside, a barrage of festival fireworks in the background. I clutched my stomach, shuddering as I pictured the sanyasini, her translucent hand slipping into mine. The other ghosts watching us. How fitting that in Bengali, Tara meant eye, pupil. Like Tej, she’d had her eye on me from the start. Her chosen one.
My skin felt wet and cold. I called Pavaan’s house and this time talked to the maid for a while. She told me, as I had expected, that there was a big party in Asansol, at Aparna’s sister’s house. She seemed annoyed that she had to keep working through the holiday when they would be out of town for four whole days. I asked her what she did for Diwali, and she said she ate leftovers and watched TV. I scrolled through my emails, ignoring the ones from Knezevic asking for updates. I told the maid I’d been to Tarapith, but she’d never heard of it.
. . .
Amma caught me speaking to a spirit in the bathroom.
“Who’s in there, Jaanu?” she shouted, thrusting against the unwieldy door with her shoulder, bursting in to see nine-year-old Dita brushing her hair. The speckly gray corporeality who lived in our mirror had been kind enough to tell me how to get the knots out of my wiry mane, to brush gently from the bottom and move up. He was frustrated by how much time I spent in there. Loner ghosts will get you out of their lodgings, their haunt, one way or another.
“I don’t know his name,” I told my mother.
Amma was out of breath, made me promise never to do it again.
“Do what?” I asked.
She pulled me by the ear and dragged me out into the hallway.
Pavaan told me that I was making myself look stupid with these pranks. “You’ll end up like Baba,” he prophesied.
I waited for Nanyamma to contradict him, too bruised up to fight back as I was, but Nanyamma just blamed Amma because we had been eating non-veg food since Baba died. “Meat is the food of ghosts,” she told her. “Did you forget everything I taught you?” She had lived with us before, but after Baba died, she moved into the big bedroom, and Amma moved downstairs in the room next to mine.
. . .
Other people’s grandmothers don’t talk about death so often, Dishari, my first and only best friend, said, which is why she liked coming over for dinner. We were fourteen. Nanyamma had waited until Amma was out of the room before she told us that it takes the jiva, the soul, thirteen days before it understands that it is not alive, before it understands its mission, time for the next part of the spirit’s journey. Dishari ate with her mouth wide open, tongue a little out, while Nanyamma spoke in great detail, her fingerfuls of rice halfway in while Nanyamma’s hands danced. “You can’t see spirits but they’re all around. Those are the ones that got stuck!”
Which made me realize Nanyamma didn’t know what she was talking about. She couldn’t see what I saw, the clouds of disintegrating figures that hovered near the walls or in the refrigerator or over my breath at night. But it didn’t make her stories less entrancing. Nanyamma’d have her friends over and when she thought we were in our rooms, they’d watch raunchy movies like Bandit Queen with Seema Biswas flouncing around in the nude, and Nanyamma’s friends made vulgar jokes about snakes. She wore a small Kali amulet under her clothes, she slapped me and Pavaan if we talked back or annoyed her, and she made chapatis at night when my mother was too tired from work. I dream about her sometimes, and she rubs oil on my head, and tells me what a stupid larkee I am in a loving way. She pulls at the strands of my hair as she braids it, so I wake saying, “Ouch, Nany!”
. . .
I hid it from her. Even though I was told once that hearing voices was a good thing; a guru in Asansol said they came from the divine, that through pranayama breathing we could be more in touch with what the voices wanted us to know. But it didn’t matter because my family didn’t believe that. They hadn’t believed Baba.
Maybe Nanyamma could have helped me if I had told her back then. She won’t stop haranguing me. Those little flicks against the skin. “Stop it, Nany!” Under the armpits where it really hurts. After she died, she became more critical, always pissed about something. You know how old people are, if things aren’t the same as when their own parents were roaming the earth, it’s all wrong wrong wrong. She told me that ghosts are those that have died violent or unnatural deaths, or those who haven’t had proper funerals. She blamed Amma for her fate. “She must have forgotten to recite the Gayatri mantras!” Somewhere under the deepest layers of my skin, I feel her presence, but I refuse to let her in. You have to draw the line somewhere. I want to be a good person, but I know that I can’t.
. . .
From the day Tej’s car scuttled behind my taxi to the hotel, I saw him most every night at Manikarnika, but my brain dragged its feet in letting the town and temple of Tarapith go. All my dreams, all my thoughts when I couldn’t push past the pain to work, were centered on that place. I was a shaky thing, startled easily, walking through the grounds like I was stepping on glass. Threw up dinner consistently. Couldn’t even get down the complimentary fruit that came with my breakfasts, green-pink pods of jungli jalebi and sour salted and chilied starfruit.
Tej was not a lout nor a gentleman. He was thirty-eight, four years older than myself, and had worked at the ghat for the last ten. But he had no defined ideas on religion despite all the time he spent here. No particular bent this way or that when it came to the Goddess Tara or to the story of Lord Shiva and Lord Vishnu through whose actions, this ghat, Manikarnika, had been created.
Fifteen days after Diwali, the ghats of Varanasi, including Manikarnika, where I had then been for almost two months, are lit up with the flames of millions of earthen diyas for Dev Diwali. That year, the stars came to earth and the moon lovingly shone over them, the fires within the lamps vibrated with the lashings of wind, an ocean’s tide coming in and out, a constellation constructed for those other than me. I almost cried as the Gods descended to the ghat, as the dead or undead argued and pushed each other for a better view of something I couldn’t see. I wandered among them, hoping to feel some God’s affection, to feel some purpose again, since it was clear that Tara had rejected me. I didn’t ask for too much. That night there was such an influx of tourists that it was hard to move. The water was black, and the evening boat rides to look up at the lights were all booked up. I saw a child wandering on his own and he frightened me. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive. Since Tej was working security for the festival, I continued my walk alone through the blocked ghat, saw people taking dips in the water, followed families burning incense and praying. I heard so many people were out that night that the roads near the Kashi Vishwanath temple had to be closed to vehicles. I heard that a boy went missing in the crowds but was returned to his family the next morning. Whether he was the same or not, I didn’t know.
At four a.m. I thought I saw the boy again, emerging from the water of the Ganges. He was purple even with all the lights around him, limbs swollen with water, his hair dripped down his clothes. I swallowed my scream to run back to my room. Ignoring a throbbing stomach to fall asleep, and then wake again, to thoughts of Tarapith coiled in my head like a bad joke I had once made, remembering how I had kept telling myself I was ready for a transformation of any kind. Ready to be different than I had always been. That I’d kill myself if nothing happened. Like Baba. That I would give everything up to the dark. Yet, here I was, the same but worse. Coward.
. . .
Devotees pray. The interconnected samadhi—so many tombs closing in on me. Beggars grabbing your legs by the Homa, the square cement pit for fire sacrifice, some foisting small prints of Tara, Mahakali, of Bamakhepa the “mad” saint, onto you. Flaps of tarp above the vendors created a kind of roof. They were selling incense and water—no vendors like these at the other ghats, and I could see a terracotta façade gilded with scenes of Indian sagas. The ringing sounds of thousands yelling and whispering and saying “Joy Maa Tara!” in my head. The face of the sanyasini, I never got her name, confronted my own, with ghosts all around her, and then I would wake up in shivers.
. . .
Red hot ants on my skin. Like it was yesterday, if you don’t mind the expression. From the bathroom to the courtyard to school they followed me, beating down with devilish energy, pricking me with tiny bites. No one else could see the little marks they left. The raised bumps.
I was five and crying under the banyan tree at the girls’ school when my brother picked me up on his way home from the boys’ school. He and his friend Gogi watched me sob.
“What’s the matter?” asked Paavan in a candied voice, one that would make me pour out ache. He made Gogi stand by the roadside, spitting out the remnants of the paan left in his mouth, purchased with folded rupees they had probably stolen from Amma’s square peach-pink purse, the one she left hanging in her closet when she went to bed.
“They-keep-climbing-into-my-skin,” I cried. “I want them to get out.” I told him about the red eyes, how they wouldn’t let me sleep. I didn’t tell him how they talked to me incessantly, these soft gray shadows. They wanted all of my time. Even before I could talk back, I had never really been alone.
His eyes glinted in the sun over his jutting chin. He called Gogi over. They stood next to each other, dissecting me. Pavaan squinting, Gogi smiling with his small sharp teeth. My brother pointed at me, still sitting on the ground. “She’s a demon lover. The demons, they’ll take her back into their world and she’ll have to leave our family forever.”
“No, I’m not!” I cried louder, my sobs ripening into hiccups. Gogi patted me on the back and nodded. “What can we do to push the demons out?”
Paavan scratched his chin and told Gogi they would think of something. They dragged me to my feet so we could go home. I wiped my eyes with the sleeve of my uniform and begged them not to tell Amma.
That night I was woken up from a phantom-ridden sleep by my brother, who brought me to the parlor. He and Gogi, tall dark figures blocking the light of a half moon, poised in front of the rose velvet sofa. They pressed me to eat a red paste Gogi held in a small bowl and then made me spin in circles above three horizontal chalk lines on the apartment floor. They touched ash to my forehead in three lines, saying that Shiva would destroy my negative qualities.
“Eat it, eat it,” Gogi said, when I couldn’t get the first teaspoon down. His shadowy body bobbed closer, bringing the bowl to my mouth, “It will cure you!”
When I finished the bitter-tasting tonic, expectant, they burst into laughter, hands over their mouths so that Amma wouldn’t wake up. And for years, they mocked me for being stupid enough to eat red ant paste.
. . .
The main gates of Tarapith are in my dreams. More often than Nanyamma. The temple rises high above the village. I see it all, in the snatches of time when I manage to fall asleep. Twenty years later, it obliges me to perceive my body as it was, descending the staircase onto the heat and sand of the Mahasmashana, the Great Cremation Grounds. For one shimmering moment it had felt like I’d been waiting my whole life to be in that energy. The love I felt within the banyan trees and their leathery glossy leaves. The smell of fire. The constant sounds of animals and birds. You never know what it is that you’re missing in your life until it’s in front of you.
The murti, the face of the Goddess, brims with divine power. She is silver and always looks Northward, except during one festival where she is moved to gaze upon the cremation grounds. All of this, the temple, the grounds, all hers. In between interviews or when I needed to rest (often), this is where I spent my time. Gazing up. It was terrifying to see her mouth smeared with red blood-like sindoor. In the hymn of her one hundred names from the Mundamala-tantra, she is called “she who is smeared with blood” and “she who likes blood.” The whiskey offerings from devotees make her long tongue wet, her lips exposing its silver tip. When I asked Mother Tara what was wrong with me, she was silent. I asked her to tell me what to do.
The stillness felt both like home and the cold shoulder.
I had a very personal connection to the Goddess, but many do. Buddhists also believe in Tara. That she hears the cries of those suffering in Sa˙msāra, the wandering from one cycle of life to another. Before rebirth. Some see the Goddess as protection from fear, from evil, from our own bad qualities. No one is quite sure which interpretation of Tara came first.
When I was a child, I watched Nanyamma bumping around in front of her tiny shrine: a silver Kali statuette, a blue-skinned Kali portrait in a black frame, a bowl of rice, and a red flower garland in the corner of her room were her tribute to the Mother of the Universe. It was only later that I learned that Tara was a form of Kali. The version of Maa Tara I saw around me was a warrior. The iconography depicts her wearing a garland of severed heads, carrying a sacrificial sword and a flaying knife in two of her four arms. Dozens of goats were slaughtered each day in Tarapith, to assuage Tara’s anger.
. . .
Two weeks after Nanyamma’s heart attack, I heard her, much more frightened than she had ever sounded in life. After waiting patiently, joyously, for the next journey, her plaintive voice cried out in my room and I froze, my body dead weight. Her voice cracking louder than Pavaan and Amma’s footsteps, the stairs squeaking on their way to the upstairs bedrooms: “What will happen to me now?!”
. . .
When the ghosts raced back the first time, it was like ringing bells. Clanging, reverberating, death knells. I spent the days sweating through my underwear, flipping through the channels and the static.
One afternoon, my finger paused on a local news station interviewing a middle-aged researcher who had a voice like my dreams at night.
A researcher who just happened to be going to my hometown, to Kolkata; a York University professor who studied the devotional rituals of young women on pilgrimage in various regions. Short and squat with crisp brown hair that fell past her chest. She was going to the ghats to study those who lived as devotees, and the initiates who performed rituals. She spoke Hindi with a terrible accent and was not deterred by the reporter: “Hindus use fire as their special means of communicating with the Gods. They believe the human body is a composition of the five elements. The body, in which the soul is hiding...”
It was a sign. I scribbled her name down on an old unpaid bill. Two months later, when I ran out of money and was kicked out of the residence, I would hold the piece of paper and repeat her name over and over again. Susan Knezevic. Susan Knezevic. Susan Knezevic. Even saying it felt like answers.
. . .
You couldn’t keep from stepping on them. They were everywhere. Not everyone could afford enough wood to completely burn the bodies and many poor people barely managed to get the bodies here. Within the sacred site of Tarapith, the Shakta, followers of the Goddess Tara, swarm the grounds, punctuated with the bones that stick up from the dirt. You had to skirt around the mounds. I begged forgiveness constantly, observing the countless dogs that might dig up what hadn’t transcended.
I carried a clipboard and two new pens, my white recorder tucked carefully into my deep kurta pocket as I walked, never taking it out until I knew my interviewee was comfortable. I still wonder what the dogs and the other animals believed. Did they know what happened to the scraps of these dead in their quest for liberation?
They say Maa Tara is attracted to bones and skeletons; maybe it’s her demon-slaying form that feels close to them. The samadhis had red-painted skulls on the mud walls, and Bamakhepa saw her dancing upon a burning corpse in his first vision, didn’t he? As I moved, I was inundated with rancid whiffs of ash mixed with feces and the smoky aromatics of vegetables cooking over more small fires. One of the administrators had mentioned how the mounds of the dead wash away in the rainy seasons.
I passed men in their various stages of undress on the way to the chamber. A man intoxicated with divine fervour, meant to reverse and transgress the social norms outside of the gates, who had smeared himself in the white bone ash of the cremated dead. The tantrics, sometimes derided by Hindus who practiced other traditions, did not engage outside of the confines of the everyday to offend or draw attention, but to outstrip arbitrary restrictions of societal life, to directly experience Ananda or the “inherently blissful,” liberating energy and one’s consciousness.
Knezevic’s favorite poet Rumi once said, The Beloved has permeated every cell of my body / Of myself there remains only a name, everything else is Him.
I wondered if that was how this man felt about the Goddess. “Subha sandhyā!” I called to him.
The fervoured man wore a red loincloth, his hair long and wet, hanging down his back. He looked bored when I asked him how long he had been there, when he had decided to come.
There was enough hostility to make me think I should have stuck to art history. Knezevic had studied temptation and salvation in Rossetti for her master’s once upon a time, then segued sharply into the South Asian subcontinent. It made me wonder how she saw me. Was I object or subject? Were my subjects objects?
I had wanted to talk to the doms, the subcaste that does the cremations, but not one understood my Bengali accent, or my Hindi.
More and more I wandered in circles, but they wouldn’t talk to me. Most devotees were rightly suspicious of researchers, but although I was used to being discounted and neglected, I was surprised. People often have this need, this burning urgency, to tell their stories. They had at my first three sites. I followed them, imagined the conversations they were having with each other, and in their heads, and sometimes wrote that down in the place of notes. The kinds of notes that could sell books. The man in the loincloth was a true devotee, I thought, I sensed Maa Tara pulsing through him and his being repelled by me.
Further evidence of her disfavor?
. . .
Tej was right in some ways, an officer with a brain, when he’d tried to describe the tension in believing and dissecting belief at the same time.
I’d felt like an abomination, imbibing Maa Tara’s wrath in that crowded inner chamber at Tarapith. The great mother’s disgust. At first, I had tried to blame the ritual pollution, the emanations of impurity from everyone around me, fifty people in a room that was maybe five feet squared. But I had no one to censure but myself. Thousands of ghosts descended. Inauspicious; I had visions of Alakshmi as an owl, bringing misfortune, sweat glittered on my hands. Trapped in the center of the room, my dress became soaked, and in the heat and noise, no one had noticed. Except the sanyasini. Someone held me from behind. She had light brown hair that felt soft though my hand passed through it. She brought me to her tomb.
. . .
She had this angled bob when we first met, very different from the choppy waves I’d seen on the TV program. Hair dyed as dark as my own, and maroon, almost purplish, lipstick. Vampy. Professor Knezevic wore tailored blazers, always in deep colors, with a silk scarf. Sharp white collars underneath. Everything said, ‘I know what I’m doing.’
When she talked to you, it was like she was bored and staring right above the tip of your head.
“How well do you speak Hindi and Bengali?” she asked, when I walked into her office in 2001, my figurative hat in hands.
When I answered, her eyes lit up like little black moons. “You’ll have to take courses to catch up,” she said, “Obviously. To make up for the deficiencies.”
It was my last chance. She said I was lucky that I had taken advanced courses in Sanskrit back home, although I was out of practice. I explained that an illness had kept me from finishing my last year. I told her, in not so many words, that I thought I’d found my purpose in life.
“I’m not sure you’ll suit, but you can start on some translation work. Do you know Dhumavati?”
I’d spend a year translating for her before we’d even get around to talking about my own projects. After my PhD, I stayed on for my postdoc, even though I knew it looked bad to remain at the same institution for so long. But I wasn’t doing this for accolades.
Tarapith was where the goddess devotees believed Sati’s third eye fell to earth, associating the site with mystical vision. A place of great power, one of the most important Shakti Pith and Siddha Pith; all spiritual practices there yield faster and stronger results. I’d made a comment about it months before I went, offhanded, about the Goddess Tara, and Professor Knezevic had gone on and on about the people who had researched there before me. It was exotic and therefore tempting to journals, and besides, none of the researchers had died, was her underlying message.
Well, I hadn’t died either.
At the hotel, at Tej’s office, I narrowed down hypotheses—although I barely ate, my stomach grew. My womb, I thought, as my hands cupped the tender area. My waking moments were unbroken, my brain ceaselessly exhuming my past, wondering what made her affix herself. The sanyasini had said she wanted to take care of me, speaking in a language of air and gesture, her arms around me a rope tightening, her face sable and see-through. My body shaking the entire time. Nanyamma says that the Asuras and rakshasas could corrupt a person’s soul, that demonic Asuras could throw you out of harmony with the divine. I threw up for four days straight after the ceremony in the Sanctum Santorum, the vomit transforming into bile and streams of water.
In my hotel room in Tarapith, I’d recited names of Narasimha and read the Bhagavata Purana aloud. I banged my head against the wall next to my bed until I felt the blood trickle down my face. My palm touched my forehead and came away wet. There was no escape. Every untranscendent figure became sharp and violent, forced its way into me.
I once read about an Irish woman named Janelle who believed she was possessed by Kali. A practitioner of witchcraft, she said it was not the first time she had been possessed, but she seemed pleased to be branching out to Eastern Goddesses.
. . .
A river poured off my temples, gravel under my palms. Following the route to Manikarnika Ghat, I kept asking the driver to stop. In seconds, I was on my hands and knees on the side of the busy road, throwing up with passion and relief at having escaped Tarapith, and hoping not to get hit. I shrugged it off, telling myself it’s just the way I’m configured; I’d gotten nauseated on the train ride to Tarapith, on the rickshaw to the railway station, and on every long trip as a child I carried grocery bags glutted with vomit. Amma told me that Baba, too, had gotten carsick. One of the few true things I knew about him was that he chewed raw ginger on every trip.
In Canada, it wasn’t so bad for me; the heat doesn’t kill in the same way. As eggs and toast came up from my stomach, I regretted ramming them down my throat at dawn, when I’d only been thinking about protein and focus and my schedule for the day. The driver swerved and stopped and swerved and stopped and sped up. My hair was jagged, my head swaying back and forth over a plastic bag in my lap that held my dirty laundry. And yet it didn’t feel like nausea.
At one stop, a skinny young woman tried to snare the taxi. Tall and rigid-looking, she argued with the driver, telling him she was going in the same direction, that we could split the fare. She said nothing to me. Her elbows were pointed and they did a kind of jitter in the air, aggressively jingling her silver bracelets. The tinkling distracted me for a moment from my body. She reminded me of my sister-in-law, yapping and yapping until the driver pulled away. I almost stopped him, almost thought about the girl sweltering in the heat.
I wasn’t close with Aparna or my brother. I shouldn’t blame her—it was Amma’s fault, too, for enabling them, showering them with presents for a little bit of attention. I was scared to say anything to my brother, to tell him he should go to Kolkata, I didn’t want to spook him. His temper. They never visited Amma, left her alone in that house. He expected us to be excited about the baby but never took any interest in us. Did he think I would one day support Amma, too?
The extended family divided along fault lines once the baby came, or once Aparna came. Rushi and Ruli Mausi were on Amma’s side. Most of the time. And of course, I’m sure, Pavaan’s in-laws had all manner of things to say about us. I was in no one’s camp, being too busy, floating away somewhere else.
While the driver chatted amiably on his headphones to someone, I suspected his wife due to the lengthy conversation about ingredients and ungrateful grandchildren, I tried to look forward. At Manikarnika, after a year and a half, I told myself, you will complete your preliminary fieldwork and write the first chapter of your book! I would take hundreds and hundreds of pages of notes and transcribed interviews and finally shape them into something. It wasn’t at all why I had come back but still, a book! I imagined large print runs and academic accolades. In dissolving lines that came and went, I tried to picture a career, a life.
. . .
Although I’d always planned to go at some point, Tara had been in the stars, weeks before Tarapith, gleaming above the Howrah Bridge, glorious and righteous. A dotted warrior of light. She called to me.
And then I was there, among all the initiates who followed Tara, I was there in the Glorious Segway to the Afterlife, not hiding from my fate any longer. I had kept my promise to myself. Ready. I was ready.
. . .
That sticky, stinky, hot Toronto summer was nothing that Kolkata hadn’t prepared me for. That summer that I turned twenty-five and wasn’t sleeping, and months passed where I couldn’t differentiate visions of the dead from hallucinations.
Just over two years earlier, I had transformed into bubbly Dita, a personality I never thought existed inside me. I was present during conversations, made connections for what felt like the first time. Left the house at night to meet my new friends with deep purposeful strides. For two and a half years I had lived in Canada, and there had been no visits.
“Haaah-haaah. Haaah-haaah.” Heavy breathing from the dorm bathroom.
I refused to believe when they came back.
After my poetry class discussing Oliver’s wild geese, there were murmurs, and when I turned, no one.
In the stairwell of the Arts building, I could hear children running and jumping.
In the dorm, I checked behind the butterflied shower curtain before sitting down to pee. Back in my room I stopped breathing until they went away—the TV kept on for company, even when it turned to static, even when voices called through the screen. They said that I needed to help them. They said they were going to make me pay if I didn’t. I laid in the same clothes day in and day out, ate peanut butter with a spoon under the blankets as my groceries depleted. Closed my eyes and crawled to the bathroom to expel dry hard shit.
Stupid Dita.
I believed that the ocean had freed me, that cultural customs had kept the spirit world near. I couldn’t call Amma now.
“Why can’t you go to school here?” Paavan had wanted to know, back then, three years earlier, echoing my mother who was infuriated that I wouldn’t attend the perfectly good school in Kolkata where I had also been accepted. He was rolling a cigarette but never quite finished and tiny leaves of tobacco lay scattered on his white pants.
Aparna reclined on the pink sofa, pretending to watch television, a game show hosted by Ashutosh Rana, but I could see the way her feet were tapping, I could see the tilt of her head. She had labeled me a problem.
Amma went to the kitchen, “Talk to her. I can’t talk to her.” She was tired after Nanyamma’s departure. She didn’t want to deal with it. And I knew I had to get out.
My new home after being kicked out of the dorms for lack of payment: a brick building at the mouth of the Humber River where there were more squatters than rooms. The air smelled as if it hadn’t budged for a hundred years combined with remnant stench from the old fish market. Demons chewed at the edges of my meals until I spat out what I had already eaten and my skin in the mirror was that of an old man, un-tweezed moustache and skin hanging off the bone. She had said that fire was used to communicate with the Gods. When the days got worse, I piled up my clothes, books, and papers in my arms and carried them to the front steps. I sat by the front doors, listening to the crackling, sputtering, and snapping. The gentle whoosh of the wind as everything I owned became tinder.
. . .
Let me talk to this hypothetical wound of Baba in my head, the one ghost I haven’t been able to reach, and he appears like a therapist or a cat, nodding sagely at intervals. He has no answers, but sometimes that is enough.
He gave me free rein to find out how far away the Gods are, coming to the opposite conclusion as Lorca. Baba, I thought, what have we come to? How else to make things better, to not paper over our hearts, than to constantly seek?
“Two months! This is really unbelievable, Dita.” I could hear the whistling in Knezevic’s nose when she breathed out heavily. On the receiving end of one too many frantic emails, I finally figured out the time difference for Skype. It was night or barely morning in my hotel room and I sat at the little table behind the TV, gripping the laptop tightly as pains came and went, stabbing me through every abdominal organ.
“What the fuck is going on?” She was screeching. I had never heard her swear before. “Did you meet up with that female initiate, the interview I set up at Tarapith? I couldn’t get a hold of her either.”
It didn’t connect at first. “I don’t know.”
She sounded out the words. “Deeee-taa, did you com-plete the int-er-views with the initiates who had taken Sannyasa? The woman you were supposed to meet with.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Send your outlines from both sites, and don’t take so long to update me next time. I thought you were dead or something!”
It had taken so many months, years, before Knezevic trusted me at all, and still she acted like she knew my Gods better than me, like religion was a game to be figured out.
“The initiates were really responding to me.”
“Your funding is dissipating, Dita. I can’t babysit you forever.”
“The internet isn’t very good here,” I offered.
I ran to meet Tej in his office. The pain in my stomach was unbearable and I hadn’t shit in a week. The sweat pooled under unshowered arms, a heavily perfumed creek, as I locked the door behind myself and pushed Tej down. I desperately wanted to undo Tarapith, to feel something real. As I moved toward him, I heard Nany say, “Heavy enough, isn’t he?” When I didn’t respond, she said, “Don’t let me ruin your fun,” in a put-out tone.
“Are you toying with me?” Tej asked afterward, not quite inching away, but maintaining a distinct line of separation. “Don’t answer my calls and then tell me to meet you in the middle of the night. It’s not very kind.”
“My bra is under your back,” I told him. I rooted around the shack, looking for the rest of my clothes.
“You can leave if you want to,” he said.
I sneered.
“It’s my office,” he said, referring to the four-by-four wooden structure, smaller than the box I had been crucified in at Tarapith. Out back behind the rickety white building where he had interrogated me.
“Yes, yes, it’s your office. Don’t worry. I won’t come back.” I picked up my rumpled kurta that had fallen behind the door. I put the dirty clothes back on and kicked Tej on his mat, so angry that he couldn’t unmake me. He was surrounded by death here, but he wasn’t connected to anything.
“Bitch!”
Being in this sanctified space was a job to him. He was worse than me in that way; to deride the Gods, I thought, was unthinkable. But at least he saw me as I was, the thing that was wrong. I hadn’t hidden anything this time. I kicked him again, made him yelp.
When was it that I had started to refuse to see the people who were dead? In his office, in the renunciates’ huts, everywhere on the grounds. It didn’t matter if it was my grandparents on my father’s side, hovering around my apartment in Toronto, pale but healthy-looking, chattering at me like they did when I used to visit home, saying I had gained weight and why didn’t I pray for them more often (clucking “This is what happens when you send your children to a foreign country”), or someone dead, maybe a second cousin, in my dreams. I could only tune out the ones that didn’t speak Bengali for some reason.
I didn’t want to hear it. I had hoped they would become something better in their next life, or for them to gain freedom from Sa˙msāra, but I didn’t want to speak to them. Why couldn’t my father come back to me instead? The sanyasini, too, I could see her in my hotel room mirror. The way she had laid with me in Tarapith, my body hot and cold all over. Now she was like any other spirit, their eyes on me.
“How can you study death objectively when you’re objectively insane,” was Tej’s parting shot as he held his stomach, the twin wound where I had hurt him. “There are no such things as ghosts!”
All I wanted was a normal life. And I would get it for myself.
. . .
I arrived in Tarapith, shiny-faced and energetic with a long list of all that I would get done over the next few weeks. My painstakingly-researched questions went over commendably during my first interview with a Tarapith administrator. On my second day, this same tall gentleman with his one-sided gait escorted me into the Sanctum Santorum, the enclosure with the deity presiding over everyone in a tiny claustrophobic space; the innermost part of the temple, the words literally meaning ‘womb chamber.’
It wasn’t often that others outside of the priests were allowed in. I respectfully stood aside to take notes on the rites. As the administrator told me how the chamber was built, and how many years ago, I began sweating profusely.
“You can see the corresponding details on the temple as well,” he added, and I continued my scribbles on the notepad as if they were still words.
They came flooding in—ghost and demon and ghoul recessed within my skin and veins. The ants biting. Talking over me. Forcing their consciousness against mine. Whatever the tantrik was saying came loose in my head, the words frothing in my brain. Like the ritual had been done wrong or like I was wrong. I was wrong. My breathing stopped. I was sure I had become as blue as Maa Tara.
JOY MAA TARA JOY MAA TARA JOY MAA TARA ringing in my head.
“Miss Dita?” he asked.
JOY MAA TARA JOY MAA TARA…
Sometimes it’s all I can hear at night. Still.
. . .
Pavaan told his wife, the thing that attached to her was just paranoia. Talked about me like I wasn’t there. When we first met, Aparna said to introduce her to other people as my sister, as if that hemipteran stick resembled me at all. Now, I was a duty, a sick relative she must visit at AMRI Hospital and pray for. A nurse on the 211 line back in Toronto had told me it was paranoid delusions. If I made myself aware of them, really aware, she said, if I thought hard about the fact that they were imaginary, they would go away. So I had exerted myself through the torture of school. The nights I couldn’t sleep, I squeezed my eyes shut and rocked back and forth.
Blue and white walls, a thin bed. The constant alarms and bells and tubes and nurses. Amma asked Pavaan in hurried whispers what to do, what to do. Nanyamma chimed in from the inner chambers of my brain—Dita, just tell them to make a paste of chandan. Dita, tell them to put my amulet on you. Dita, you need the bhamyar to come and sing the song for exorcism.
My hands were webbed, they stretched and moved through walls, sensed the vibrations of the patients in the next room. I squinted my eyes at the sun coming through the window, my vision all orbed eyelashes. My whole body lifted above the bed, an agonizing humming ringing through my insides. The world around me was covered in a thin transparent film that separated us: Aparna and Amma both afraid of me on the other side. I could see the way their eyes darted toward and then away once I directed my stare at them. Something for them to bond over. They wanted to put me away, I was sure. It made me sad to see the hairs around my mother’s forehead slide out of her braid, soft grey coils. Pavaan went back and forth from work, but he was only around once in a while. “You know how much time and money is being blown on you? Amma is exhausted.”
“Calm down, Pavy,” I said. I spouted academic theories about demon possession until he stalked off.
How I longed for them to see what I see. To know I wasn’t bad, but misunderstood.
“You’re selfish,” he said when he’d returned from lunch. The remnants of sauce from his giant meal down the side of his mouth made me nauseated, which was nothing compared to the thin soups I would be served later that day.
“Do you remember the ant paste?” I said.
“Oh god, you really have gone mad, haven’t you? You can’t blame me for something that happened a hundred years ago.”
“You’re just angry that you’ll have to take care of Amma.”
“Fuck off.” Pavaan, Nanyamma’s favourite, was two-stepping by my bed, pacing and then stopping and then pacing. His dwindling black hair stuck up straight from a lack of sleep. “If Nanyamma was here, she’d give you two good thuppad on the side of the head.”
“But she is here, Pavy!”
“You need serious help! This has nothing to do with any Gods or your conspiracy theories. Are you eating what the nurses are bringing you? You look so thin it’s disgusting.”
I tried to calm him, speak in a soothing tone.
“No, you don’t understand. No pujari, no guru would sanction this madness. You didn’t even come to Nanyamma’s wake. Why would she come to you now? I’ve never met anyone who thought so much of only herself.”
And how could I have gone to the wake and acted normally, with Nanyamma whispering in my ear the whole time? But like Tara, formed by a single tear in the Buddhist tradition, I vibrated to Nany’s compassion, how she mixed her own hurt with my absolution. With her help, I was ready at last. To give everything up.
. . .
Why couldn’t I be the good daughter again? That dream where I made amends. Remade the broken bonds of my family. Took care of Amma until the end.
I could start over. It wasn’t too late, I told myself.
But I wasn’t a quitter and I guessed I owed it to Knezevic. After this bout of fieldwork though, after that, what if I could surrender this obsession and start my life anew? Maybe there is no resolution to death. Maybe comprehension is futile.
It had been months since Amma and I had spoken.
“Don’t contact me again,” I had told Tej as I left him for the last time.
In the hotel room, I had bathed and changed my clothes, the fundamental practice of any un-initiated who visits a site. But it was always something beneath my clothes that was the problem. That made me want to rip off my skin. In the tiny hotel shower, I scraped and scrubbed until it was raw.
I called Pavaan’s house again, hugging my stomach, feeling the thumps coming from within, spoke again to the maid. I asked her about the weather; rainy. I kept her awake, asking what her siblings back home thought about this, about that, did they plan to vote in the elections, did their children listen to them, what had she watched on TV that day, what she thought happened after death. She was too polite to hang up on me until finally, when midnight was coming on again, she said she thought she heard knocking at the door.
Contrite, I spent the night wrapped in blankets I had brought from home, my real home, in Kolkata, lugging them from site to site. It was too warm for comforters, but I smelled them and clung to them. I felt that pinch under my arms once again, but this time I opened myself to Nanyamma and welcomed her in.
. . .
Batump. Batump. Thumping noises from beyond my bedroom door. Beating spiderwebs away from the ceiling with the big broom. Amma. Every so often, after Baba died, she would clean in the middle of the night. My earliest memories.
Baba, I barely recalled. At three years old, I was comforted by the thumping. I crawled off the mat where I slept and shifted my body towards the sound, knees smacking against the hard floor, the soft cotton of my kurta slipping back and forth. But in the hall, there was no one.
The thumping came again, more erratic. I looked up and saw clouded shapes moving against the ceiling. And then they saw me.
Swooping down over my body, we babbled to one another.
. . .
The roots of the banyan trees move under us. The mornings are not lush and green and the sounds from the earliest birds are not soft. The warmth of the sun browns our bodies further as we listen to the sweet whimpers of the dogs rustling in their sleep. To the stout mornings full of bellows and longing, as we sit on the makeshift verandas of our samadhis. The music ringing and clawing at you, of birds, of insects, of people. But for me, it is always quiet on the inside.
The evening comes on as it always did. Each time it is a miracle. I can feel the hint of a breeze on my shoulders, the slightest bit of dust settling over my body.
“How long have you been here?” the woman asks a devotee.
“We are not here to count time,” the man responds.
“But what is your purpose here?” I watch as the girl sputters, holding the microphone closer to the naked man. Her recorder is so small, black, and fits in the palm of her hand. So small.
My eyes can’t help lingering on her. She’s lovely. Her eyes catch mine and then look away. My toes dig into the dirt. I know the firmness of my body, unlike hers, is gone. My skin is now as coriaceous as the leaves.
I compare her to myself: contrasting the way she leans into the initiates with the way I had held myself distant, her professional dress shirt and pants, where I had worn old saris and tried to blend in. But we are the same, and that fills my belly with happiness. I think of the pain that once overtook me. Years later, decades, all the voices thrum together sweetly. Amma and Nanyamma and all the others.
I can see that she is hurt, I can see it in the way she speaks and the way her body tenses. The initiates and devotees grunt in annoyance as she talks. Some of us move away, like she holds a force field around her body. She hasn’t yet come to my samadhi though I’ve waited and waited for her. I stand, all in red. When she turns, I can see the flecks of brown in her eyes, the sweat on her upper lip. She looks worn but excited, like a cat in heat. I sway back and forth to get her attention. “Joy Maa Tara!” I sing under my breath. There is no longer any need to be special, or be anyone at all.
I want her to see the spirit and love inside me. To feel Tara’s forgiveness. To take her away from this world.
She looks past me, continues to wander. The moon slips fast in the milk of the clouds.
I follow her through the maze of bones.
