So far, Kadambari has put off visiting the Goddess, but this is the first time that she’s constipated while pregnant. On the Mom>Wife blog, it said that straining while pooping can lead to a miscarriage. It is uncomfortable for the most part, but after four miscarriages, Kadambari can’t take a chance. Her mother had fertility problems too, until she didn’t. A story her mother loved telling involved kneeling up to a temple where a Goddess filled her mother’s belly with Kadambari. Her mother told the story so well that Kadambari thought it was made up. Kadambari was ten when her mother died and without her mother to remind her, she soon forgot the story and the Goddess. So much so that in the years of trying for a baby, Kadambari never thought to go visit. She had gone the medical way. Blood work, thyroid profiles, doctors, acupuncture, too much clomiphene citrate, FSH injections, rounds of IVF, hormone testing—and much more of the same. Not much success in it, however. So, when Kadambari overhears a woman at the nail salon talking about a Goddess, she decides it’s the same one her mother had gone to. This woman went kneeling too and busted a knee on the way up to the temple. In return, the Goddess blessed her with twins.

When Kadambari tells Arya about the Goddess, he agrees to go to the temple. Even if he doesn’t pray and eats prasad with the wrong hand. Her in-laws aren’t the religious kind either, so they don’t have strong opinions on the matter. Other than the kneeling, that they can’t do. Kadambari suggests Thursday, a holy day, but after finding a great discount on MakeMyTrip, they book an air-conditioned rental for the coming Wednesday. 

*

In preparation for the visit, Kadambari tries to take a stool softener. She wants to go empty before the Goddess, but she can’t bring herself to squeeze the bottle’s contents up her bum. She’s struggled with enemas in the past, too. The night before, she eats food without garlic and onion, overthinks the salwar with sleeves, and eventually goes with the black one that hides the love handles. On the morning of the trip, Kadambari exfoliates in the shower, so dead cells are sloughed off. There are purists who’d vouch against soap and deodorant too, but Kadambari thinks her armpit smell would offend the Goddess more. 

The journey is like every other journey the Barots take. 

Mrs. Barot keeps busy with the ghughra, chikki, and cardamon chai. Each time someone comments on the poor air quality, the war in Gaza, or consults the maps to see how long until they reach the temple, her hand darts out with a sweet surprise. Mr. Barot reads out the horoscopes. First, the one in Bombay Times, then the one by the Finolex man with golf ball eyes who only has bad things to say about Scorpios. Today, he is in great shape.

“SCORPIO: Stay alert! You may get heartbroken, lose mental peace and money today. Don’t despair, things start looking up after Friday,” Mr. Barot says in a cheery tone. 

“Friday is two days away.” Mrs. Barot says.

Kadambari nods, Thank God the way her father taught her. It is a versatile thing, this nod. It can mean okay, sure, maybe not, YES, I think so, why not, I thought you did that already, no? depending on the tilt of the head, the level of enthusiasm, etc. She uses it because it makes her seem nice and because her father said that it would help her out of sticky situations. This is from before the time he began to stay in bed all day, so she believes him. Her mother wasn’t the nodding kind. 

“You’re quiet…” Arya drives with one hand on the wheel. He rests the other on the gear, lacing it over her hand. Kadambari married Arya because he doesn’t mind getting his palms sweaty and because he trusts her not to change the gear. She believes he married her because she asked. 

“We can stop if you’re tired.” 

She nods, not really. 

“Kadam. At twelve weeks, she-or-he’s bigger than a lime.”

“Didn’t you say a fig?”

“That was last week. Growing a digestive tract sounds tiring to me is all.”

Right. Fig, lime, pea-pod, lemon, apple. Last time it got to the size of an apple, and it had a heartbeat. Then the heart stopped beating, and she needed a D&C to suck bits of it out of her uterus.Afterwards, Arya took her to dinner at a restaurant they had been wanting to go to for months. While they were eating pasta, Arya ordered dessert. When they were waiting for the bill to come, he made plans for the weekend. He didn’t mention the clinic. Arya drove that way too, rarely checking the rear-view mirror. That was Kadambari’s job when they had to park the car in tight places. 

*

Only one other couple is waiting around for the cable car, and it seems they’re here for sightseeing—their three sons feed monkeys from across a railing. The railing creaks under their weight but it’s the monkeys that have Kadambari worried. She is about to tell the boys that monkeys attack unprovoked when the mother gathers them into her, and away from danger. Maybe it’s the way the morning sun catches the mother’s animated body in play with her youngest, but dressed in white chikankari, the mother looks aflame. Kadambari reaches out for her sunglasses to shield herself from the glare of second-hand joy. Once they’re inside the cable car, Mrs. Barot’s hand shoots out with a greasy ghughra. “Children never come the way you expect them to,” the older woman says with tenderness. “You should enjoy this time. Because when they come… oof. Soft, superrrr breakable.” 

Kadambari nods, badly designed, no?  

She is thinking about her friends when she says this: Anushka and Mary from college.

Anushka has given her toddler two ear infections by cleaning his ears too thoroughly. And Mary forgot baby Tanya on the beach for an hour. Two weeks after the incident, baby Tanya looked just as red and unholy at her own baptism. At the weekly dinners, their badly designed babies are all the girls talk about when Kadambari goes to the bathroom. They have a lot to talk about so Kadambari starts spending more and more of her time in the bathroom. Their WhatsApp group is called Friends For Lyfe. Anushka explained that lyfe sounded cooler but Kadambari thinks it’s because spelling it the wrong way makes it feel less like a promise. It has been months since she last met them. She wonders what they’ll make of her visit to a fertility Goddess when it slides into view. At first, she sees only the golden spire. Then, the temple of sandstone—white and pink, like meat hanging in a butcher’s shop. Below it, red steps cleave open the mountain. 

*

Having taken the cable car, they’ve circumvented the bulk of the steps; only 50 or so remain that lead up to the temple. As they walk up these steps, the gaze of the other pilgrims burns into her cool back. A few aunties, village girls, and two balding husbands are all on their knees, blocking the stairs like goats on a highway. One of the aunties even has the look of a grazing animal about her. Now that they’re almost here, Kadambari’s anxiety presses against her ribcage like a solid thing. It gnaws at her that they rented an air-conditioned Toyota, rode the cable car, even stopped to eat pakodas while every other pilgrim kneeled up some 2 km of sandstone steps. Where was their sacrifice? When she tells the Barots, they agree with the logic of her argument. It’s too late to find a sacrificial goat or sheep, so they settle on a generous donation instead. 

The temple hall is not what she expected but it does reek of incense. Columns rise up on each side to hold up a vaulted roof and every wall droops with plastic and scaffolding. As Kadambari walks past snoring pilgrims, a shrill cry bounces off the dome and a cuckoo flits out of some crack. The cry grows, then echoes, until men with vermillion-streaked foreheads come with long bamboo sticks to chase it away. The bird falls dead instead. Google doesn’t have conclusive answers on whether dead cuckoos make for bad omens so Kadambari goes back to locating the donation box. When she’s done pushing the shiny notes into the box, a young couple kneels up the last few steps into the temple. When they get on their feet, they don’t look stupid, or bovine. They look desperate. Their white trousers are brownish-red below the knees and it sticks to them like skin. Blobs of blood, shiny and plump with sacrifice, follow after them. When they bump into Kadambari, she says sorry seven times. Sorry for not kneeling. Sorry she thought money would count. Sorry she didn’t have a backup plan. Sorry, sorry, sorrysorry, those are mostly out of momentum. 

*

In the antechamber where plastic Parvatis line the ceiling and walls, a soft-spoken pandit informs Kadambari that the Goddess has gone to sleep.

“Till what time?”

“Till she’s done.”

“Which will be soon?”

“It can be an hour. It can also be a week.” 

Kadambari had researched the Goddess’ eyes, that she is a reincarnation of Parvati cast in a mound of granite but week-long naps had never come up. As the pandit makes his way back to orbiting the temple, she’s reminded of the day they cremated her mother. Back then, the pandit wouldn’t let Kadambari on the riverbank because she wasn’t a boy. She didn’t fight the sweaty pandit who declared it was God’s will. Much like now when she finds her way to a tap to wash her feet. Keep clean for when the Goddess does wake up. Kadambari thinks about bloody kneecaps as the water runs clear of dirt. I have to offer the Goddess something as valuable. Something she will find hard to give up—her monthly trips to the nail salon, for example. Kadambari’s addicted to acrylics: glued on and temporary, they can be dissolved in an acetone bath, filed down and plucked. People say pregnant women shouldn’t get acrylics done—poisonous fumes and all—but Kadambari found well-ventilated salons that used expensive ingredients. Touching the scar dividing her nose in half from when her mother scratched her, Kadambari decides it’s even the safe thing to do. After all, stiletto tipped nails will maim a baby a lot faster than short-trimmed ones. She makes a vow to never again spend money on a set of acrylic nails. Her thoughts soon turn to shellac manicures.

*

It has been three hours since the Goddess went to sleep. Working in sales, Kadambari has come to tell reluctant clients from the length of their silences over cold calls. This trip to the temple feels the same, no matter the fact that it is a Goddess giving her the silent treatment. Even the Barots are almost out of chikki and conversation. Not the vermillion men though, they talk about donating Rotweillers as watchdogs to the temple. She realises they aren’t temple employees when they come by to distribute election flyers. The man on the flyer is wearing Ray Bans and holding up a peace sign. Kadambari rolls up a half-bitten piece of chikki with the bright orange paper. The man vanishes under a crease, leaving the peace sign. In a last-ditch attempt, Mrs. Barot reads from a website. “… the Hindu Goddess of snakes. Worshipped for the prevention of snakebites along with prosperity and fertility. Interesting,” her mother-in-law says in between yawns. 

“Fertility is third as per this order?” Arya asks.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“You’re the one reading it.”

“I did say we should book a hotel. What happens once it’s dark?” Mr. Barot asks.

“We pay for another day’s rental,” Arya quips.

“Don’t we have to look the Goddess in the eye to get our wish granted?” 

“She’s not a genie. She’s a Goddess.”

“And what about Kadambari?”  

 “I’m fine.”

“A Goddess taking a nap is nothing if not a bad sign!”

Kadambari can tell the Barots are only two steps away from breaking into Gujarati. They do it whenever they’re fighting with each other. She thinks it’s to keep her safe from their ugliness since she doesn’t speak Gujarati. 

“We’re out of chikki,” Kadambari interjects so she doesn’t have to hear the offensive language. Excited to change back to themselves, they decide to get namkeens, ghatiya, and cold drinks, too. In no time, the Barots are laughing at each other’s jokes. Arya is showing them a cat video. Kadambari watches mother and son; identical crows’ feet line their eyes. They laugh so hard they slap their thighs to keep from laughing more. Chewing on the fresh namkeen, she finds her throat thick with sick. The nausea is not as bad so she can walk instead of run. Last month, on her way to the toilet, she puked into a succulent that later died.

*

To stop negative vibrations from entering the place of worship, the toilet is tucked into the furthest corner of the temple. Past the antechamber that leads to the Goddess’s shrine, past outbuildings where trees have taken root, on the other side of a wild bamboo grove. The only thing connecting the temple to the toilet is a marble corridor with benches. On one of the benches, a girl who looks no older than thirteen watches cartoons on the cracked screen of a smartphone. The baby shows through the chiffon salwar printed with bright yellow flowers. As Kadambari passes the pregnant child, her strides get quicker, and for some reason she can’t quite explain, she hides her manicured nails in her pockets. 

The toilet stall is dark and warm, like a mouth. She goes about the whole thing methodically. Leaning over the bowl, Kadambari sticks two fingers into her mouth and brings up chunks of curdled chikki and namkeen. Then mush thinned with decay. Swirling toothpaste in her mouth, she spits into the sink. She checks the sanitary napkin using her phone’s flashlight. There are no skid marks or clots. No sign of failure. Before making her way out of the toilet, Kadambari cleans up again. Gently presses her bloated tummy out of habit. It’s rock hard, so she knows it’s useless to try to poop. Most of her life, her poop came out hard four days out of seven. Those days, the commode ran pink because it cut her on the way out. After she met Arya and started drinking coffee, she pooped fine. Till now, that is. When bells start screeching right above the toilet, Kadambari is sure it’s in protest of her shitty thoughts. Impure thoughts are considered as bad as coming unclean to a temple although Arya wouldn’t agree. He won’t wash his feet either to prove his point. He said this fixation with cleanliness meant people who clean toilets—like Shanti at home—can’t visit the Goddess. He is right but Shanti has a daughter, and sons. What’s sad is that Shanti’s daughter and sons clean toilets, too. And they’re banned from temples. Born to Shanti, they’re born unclean, as per the law. 

*

Outside, posters of women selling toothpaste are plastered next to ones of the man from the flyer. He is wearing Ray-Bans again but here his hands are folded in a namaste. It’s been so long since Kadambari’s been alone that she stays for a bit with the smiling women.

She makes up conversations between them and the Ray-Ban man.

“You know why I like you?”

“Because I’m an important person.”  

“And I can’t see your eyes.”

“I like you because of your perfect teeth.”

Not knowing how to go on with the story, she goes back to staring at them. Till they start to seem familiar. And the wind rustling through gaps of bamboo starts to sound like waves breaking on a shore. Kadambari closes her eyes and breathes deeply, forming an image of salt and sea but her mind mucks about clean-smelling hospital rooms and beeping monitors. She tries to push the images away when a draft of day-old garbage comes from someplace closer, followed by a faint whiff of sandalwood. Then, the sound of spitting. Opening her eyes, she finds a stout village woman walking out of a gap between the bamboo trees. Behind the woman, a walking trail snakes into the wild. Once the woman gets closer, Kadambari  notices the woman isn’t really stout. Her saree is bunched up above her knees, and it wraps around her like a baggy sack.

“Is she up?”

Kadambari notes that the Hindi is stilted. “Not yet.”

“You here for snakebite or baba-baby?”

“Baba,” Kadambari says, considering the sex for the first time. 

“She is better for snakebites.”

This woman with the body of a mountain road in monsoon seems to be teetering on her feet. Kadambari has seen women like her on crossroads, sometimes with a flesh-coloured bra on. They squat and scream about things that don’t make sense. About snow forgetting it was water before. Or how women become flowering trees when they die so they’re pretty in death. Nobody stops to listen to them. Kadambari thinks it’s because they shriek so loud and ugly about their pain when everyone else gets their fix through a drip. While Kadambari is making up her mind about this woman and what to do next, the pregnant child with yellow flowers on her salwar appears from the side of the temple. The child barely glances at Kadambari’s nails—stiletto tips, curved, more talon than nail. Instead, yawning very wide, the child asks the way to the toilet in the same stilted Hindi of the village woman. Once Kadambari directs her, both she and the woman wait until the child is gone. Kadambari knows she should make her way back. That she won’t come across as rude, but it seems the woman is waiting for her, so she stays. When the strange woman nods at her, Kadambari takes it to mean, go on. 

“I am pregnant,” she says.

“I smell it on you. You want blessings?”

The woman laughs and shows off teeth brown with history.  “I gave my husband fourteen. With baba-baby, I am good. How many you lose?”

“Three.”

“Hmm.”

Kadambari can’t stand the woman for making her lie, stiffening as she corrects the number to four. One should have made it. Just as she’s decided to leave, the smell of sandalwood stings Kadambari’s nose. There’s something else fermenting, and she notices that this woman has blue eyes. 

“One could’ve made it,” Kadambari says aloud.

Conjuring a glass bottle from between the folds of fat and saree, the woman sighs once she sees the bottle is empty. “Medicine.” The woman says to explain the bottle before disappearing it again. “And why you want this baba?” 

The wild woman stares at her while Kadambari works this question in her mind. She can now see that the woman’s eyes are clouded blue from cataracts. Are these eyes why the woman asks such questions? Before Kadambari can find the right answer, other questions start to come to mind. Why do people live in houses? Or spend their days in bed? The woman keeps drawing closer and those roving cataracts search and scan Kadambari’s face. Where does our sadness go when we die? The woman doesn’t even whisper when she says, “Nobody really needs that kind of trouble.” The woman’s spit settles on Kadambari’s skin. A fine mist of it is sucked into open pores. This time when the woman laughs, Kadambari hears wind-chimes by the sea. Kadambari relaxes and surveys this crazy woman some more. The cheap nylon saree extends to matchstick legs. They join club feet blackened by hours spent in open fields. A pool of water is gathered there, and against the marble, it looks yellow. Kadambari looks back at the woman. The woman holds herself like a bird before flight as her body wracks with laughter.  Why do flightless birds flap their wings?

*

Peeing in a temple is as bad as it can be. The punishment can range from steep fines and a lifetime ban to a spot of lynching. Only a child can get away with it. Or a cow. With a cow, it can be considered lucky. Seeing how the madwoman is neither, everyone’s fired up. The vermillion men most so; they drool. The Barots guard Kadambari from them when they want an account of the conversation she had with the woman. The men leave after money is exchanged. They go to the pregnant child next, who confirms it’s pee. The child adds that there might be shit mixed in, too. The madwoman hasn’t gone to school, so the men force her thumbprint into a big black register. Then, because she laughs, they ply her with threats. One of the vermillion men has on an orange scarf. He looks like the leader. “The Cabinet Minister’s wife comes here to pray.”

“I don’t know that kind of priest.”

This one spits while talking. “Don’t you villagers vote?” 

Kadambari watches as the scarf man draws his neck back into himself.

“Grandma, it’s the man running things. The one on the posters!” The voice belongs to the soft-spoken pandit. 

“Four eyes? Tell that wife to leave him. Fourteen children I gave mine but still that wretch left me. And don’t forget… running men run faster.” 

“Grandma. If you climb the 500 steps on your knees as penance, it’s all good. And there’ll be a fine. Obviously.”

“You seen these legs?”

Once they see the hooves, the vermilion men start blooming. The pandits tell the men to let this go. That only God can pass judgment here. But the vermillion is in the men’s cheeks, their necks. Scarf man’s neck has fully disappeared. He looks lethal and ludicrous at once. He and the other men step away and start circling the hall like carrion birds. The pregnant child has put the cartoon away to watch this bit.

“I need a curse put on my husband’s new woman. Make a snake bite her.”

“Grandma, she helps people get better from snakebites. Not the other way around.”

The madwoman spews spit like she knows better. “When your Goddess does that for me, I promise to take it all back into my bladder.” The pandits are also now offended. The Barots are still standing guard over Kadambari when the vermillion men escort the woman out of the temple.

“A real gone case. Very sad.”

“Very sad. Maybe we should have come on a holier day.”

“Kadambari had said Thursday!”

The woman glides along the marble as the men drag her between them. 

The woman enjoys the attention and starts hissing at everyone. Most people look away, not Kadambari. The heretic woman’s eyes roll back to her whites when she laughs and shakes with unspeakable joy. When the men lift her to keep her from squirming, she swings her feet up and down like a child on an unfamiliar swing. The woman’s club feet keep up the rhythm of swinging. They hover over the marble for a second too long. Kadambari holds her breath. She imagines this woman floating above the floor till she’s swinging between trees and rising still.

“Can you see?”

“See what, Kadam?”

Then, as these things go, the wild woman is dragged down the stairs. 

*

A new bloody couple kneels into the temple and the Barots bite down on snacks to turn them to paste with their white teeth.

“Her eighteen children should take care of her. Put her someplace,” Mrs Barot says. 

“Fourteen.” Mr. Barot is quick to correct her.

“Fourteen. It’s poor nutrition if you ask me.” Mrs. Barot adds, “Very sad.”  

“Her entire village has come to take her back. Or else these men—”

“—Let’s not talk about that kind of thing. We’re in a temple.”

“… Kadam, you ok?”

All the Barots are looking at her. She wonders what her face looks like, but she knows it just looks tired. She’s good at hiding but her nails gleam a bit like jagged glass that people cut themselves on. She digs them into her clothes to keep from telling them about her nails. How she went for acrylics so she’d stop biting her nails. What to make of nail biting: that she is scared of things that grow, or change. Or that she mutilates them till they’re on the floor, crescent-shaped, no longer fast-growing. And what is a child if not fast-growing? For a second, Kadambari feels her sadness almost as intensely as that time when she felt the pressure of a burst faucet against her palm. When Arya turned off the water main, and for a few hours after, she could feel the weight of it pressing down on her palm, still. It was the same with the last miscarriage. After the baby was scraped out of her, the ghost of it pressed against her pelvis, her naval, banging at night on the walls of her intestine. That’s why she thinks she’s become constipated this time around. It’s a case of ghost-infested poop that doesn’t know how to leave. The Barots are boring holes into her now with their six eyes. 

“Kadam… Are you ok?”

She nods, maybe a little tired. 

When a different pandit tells them that the Goddess will wake in half an hour,

Kadambari feels sticky between her legs.

*

On the way to the toilet, Kadambari passes mothers and daughters, couples and grandmothers, all of them hopeful that things can change. She’s one of them. Pregnant four times, dreamer of four futures, here still after being told that four can sometimes equal zero. Each of those times she had to make this trip, she gave herself pop quizzes on her way to bloody discovery. Sometimes on geography or birds. Never on politics. This time she does away with the quiz so she might answer the madwoman’s question. 

Why you want this baba? 

When she reaches the marble corridor, the yellow pee is still there. Kadambari steps on it and it makes a normal sound, splosh. 

Because I like children. 

 Kadambari can feel the blood, the universe moving so fast inside her and outside.

Before she can grab one answer, another crashes into it, changing it completely. 

And this world needs heroes.  

Her heart bangs to a fevered rhythm inside the toilet.  

Fear comes off her like she’s been hosed with it. Pungent, syrupy. 

Because I want my boy to have a better childhood than I did.  

He’ll go on school trips and wear better shoes. 

She doesn’t sit down for support. And pulls the underwear’s elastic band like it’s the lid to a drawer holding unimportant trinkets.

I’m scared Arya will leave me. This way I’ll have something of my own. 

I’m scared.

I need a place to return to when I die.

Kadambari looks down—  

I am tired of loving my dead mother.

 —at the sanitary napkin. She looks at it for a long time in the dark. Wiping the residue off with the cheap one-ply toilet paper, she slaps the elastic band back into place a little too hard. Then, she sinks into the commode.

After some time, sweat lines her salwar, and her perfume is worn down by the stench of nauseating armpit. She strains with all she has. When dots of sweat multiply on her upper lip, the first log is crowned. It sticks out, and she eases out a mangled brown mass by wedging her fake fingernail between it and her bum. The hard thing sliding out of her has edges, even. She knows what she has to do now. An act of faith. Relax the muscles and wait. It was the only thing that worked for her as a child. Waiting for the shit to come, she notices the holes on the tin roof form a constellation, maybe the Pleiades, maybe not. More time passes and she starts crying. At first the crying is loud and directionless because she isn’t used to it. From a dislike of vermillion men dragging away women with used-up wombs to living in a world where Goddesses let such things happen. To having nightmares of bleeding uterine walls and waking up to bloody goodbyes. Even worse, how easy it is after a while to get used to them both. About the days she wants her mother more than she wants to be a mother. And how becoming a mother without a mother somehow feels worse than being a daughter without a mother. She cries till the cry is no longer a cry but a desperate begging for the dead to return. After the first log is out of her, her face is a wall of water. The second log is harder, and even after she tries to pull it out, some of the poop is stuck inside her. She strains her muscles to push it back up her rectum. When she gets up to wash herself, she can feel the ghosts but she also can’t. Kadambari’s as empty as she can be.  

*

The Goddess’ shrine is musty. Everything is slick with damp and the air is viscous with the smell of rotting jasmine and blood. Kadambari folds her knees under her. When they knock on the floor, the sharp sensation rings throughout her body as if she’s hollow. She closes her eyes and lays her palms flat against each other in prayer. She wonders if the nearby hotels will have rooms available when floating in front of her closed eyelid is a softly glowing white spot. Kadambari opens her eyes to make her wish. She’s not sure if it’s what she wants anymore, but she does it anyway.  

The End.

About the Author:

Duboree Das is an Assamese writer and filmmaker living in Mumbai, India. Her short films have toured festivals like Chelsea in New York, Salento, Boden and Jaipur.

Find Das on Instagram: @duboree. 

*Feature image by Paz Arando on Unsplash