Sixty Feet of Marigolds

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THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION

The smell hit me first. Copper, but sweet, like a coin sucked clean under the tongue. It was coming from my own hands.

I had been holding the marigold garland for maybe ten minutes, waiting in the Shoshthi crowd outside the Ekdalia pandal, and when I looked down, my palms were wet. Not sweat. Sweat doesn’t dry into rust-colored flakes along your lifelines. I wiped them on my jeans and told myself it was dye from the flowers. Then I rubbed a petal between my fingers. It left a yellow stain beside the red one.

I stopped looking.

“Did you eat?” Mou asked. My wife was pressed against my side in the crush, dabbing her forehead with the end of her dupatta. “You look white.”

“I’m fine.”

My molars were throbbing. I had this insane urge to bite down on something hard: a key, the metal barricade, my own wedding ring. I kept my lips together because my gums were swelling and I could feel the roots of my teeth moving, very slowly, as if someone underneath them was rearranging furniture.

The pandal was packed. Children with light-up toys. Old men in dhutis arguing about the dhak. Somebody’s elbow permanently lodged beneath my ribs. Above us stood sixty feet of Durga, her gold face shining under the lights, marigolds hanging from her shoulders almost to the platform. Her painted eyes looked down through the incense with that expression people found whatever they needed in.

I wanted to go home. That was all. I wanted to take my clothes off, switch on the fan, and lie down somewhere nobody would ask whether I was enjoying myself.

Mou had been planning this evening for weeks. She had bought the garland, booked the cab, laid out my kurta. Before we left, she had stood in the bedroom doorway and asked whether her earrings looked all right. I had said yes without looking. She had waited until I looked.

I was trying. I want that understood. Even before the blood, before any of it, I had been trying to give her one evening in which she didn’t have to drag me through my own life.

I hadn’t told her about the hairs.

Since breakfast, I had been finding them in my mouth. Long, black, coarse things that tasted of clay. The first had come out of a mouthful of toast. The second had been wound around a back tooth. I had pulled until my eye watered, and it had come free with a tiny piece of gum attached.

I had rinsed the basin before Mou came in.

The priest raised the lamp. The dhak players went into that rolling rhythm that seems to get behind your breastbone and knock from the inside. Phones went up. Hands joined. The man directly ahead of us began clapping.

Then the goddess opened her eyes.

Her painted eyelids lifted with the slow resistance of skin coming away from a wound. Gold cracked and curled along the edges. Beneath it was white, wet and veined, with a strand of mucus stretching from the lower lid to her cheek. One eye rolled down. The other stayed fixed somewhere above our heads.

The moving eye found me.

My first thought was: I left the stove on.

That stupid, domestic thought. There would be a pan. There would be something burned. I could go home and deal with a thing that had a name.

Beside me, somebody whispered, “Ma.”

The goddess’s cheek split.

People cheered. For perhaps two seconds, they cheered. A man held his little boy higher so he could see the special effect. The priest still had the lamp raised when a dark trickle ran from the idol’s mouth, over her chin, and into the flowers.

Then her arm moved.

Clay plates slid across one another at the elbow. Bamboo burst through the wrist and withdrew again, slick now, bending where bamboo shouldn’t bend. Her hand swept across the front of the crowd, caught the barricade, and drove it sideways through the people leaning against it.

The man ahead of us was wearing a red polo shirt. I remember the little white horse embroidered on his chest. His upper body went with the railing. His legs stayed where they were for a moment, knees bending as if he were about to sit down.

Something hot struck my eyelids.

When I could see again, he was hanging from her fingers by his collar. He looked down at the ropes spilling out beneath his shirt and made a small, offended noise. His hands were still coming together. Clap. Clap. As if the message hadn’t reached them.

She tucked him into the flowers at her throat.

The marigolds closed around his waist. He stopped falling apart. He didn’t stop clapping.

Mou grabbed my hand.

“Move.”

There was nowhere to move. The people behind us were still pressing forward. A woman fell between the barricades, and I stepped on her wrist because somebody stepped on my heel, and for three or four seconds all I could see was the back of Mou’s head disappearing.

I pulled. She pulled. We came out sideways through a torn panel of cloth, into a lane full of people running in both directions.

I still had the garland wound around my wrist.

On the next street, the small community Durga was already off her platform. Cheap gold paint. A crown slightly crooked. The sort of idol you passed on your way to the ones worth photographing.

Her feet dragged behind her while the rest of her moved. The clay skirt had split, showing the straw framework inside. It was contracting and relaxing. Something pale slid between the bamboo ribs and disappeared.

She had a little girl in a yellow dress cupped in one hand.

The child wasn’t screaming. She was looking at the goddess with the furious concentration of a child waiting to be put down. One sandal blinked red every time she kicked.

The goddess held her up to the light, considering her. Then her mouth opened past the hinges of her jaw.

The child’s mother caught one sandal.

That was all she caught.

Mou made a sound I had never heard from her. I tried to tell her not to look, but my mouth filled with blood.

I was chewing my tongue.

I could feel it trapped between my teeth, could feel each stroke of my jaw, and still couldn’t make myself stop. My mouth was trying to clear something out of the way. Under my tongue, something hard was pressing upward.

Mou slapped me.

“Stop it. Look at me.”

I looked. Her hand was red.

“What’s happening to you?”

“I don’t know.”

It came out thick and low, a voice pushed through wet earth.

We found a taxi halfway onto the pavement. The engine was running. The driver had collapsed across the wheel, his throat open, the horn sounding beneath his chest.

A man with one ear hanging loose was pulling him out. I helped. The driver’s shirt caught on the gear lever and tore. We left him beside the front wheel because the street behind us had begun to empty in a way I didn’t want to understand.

The man took the wheel. A woman with a phone climbed in beside him. Mou and I squeezed into the back with a teenage boy whose forearm had a second elbow in it.

“Go,” Mou said. “Please.”

The engine screamed. The taxi shuddered and stayed where it was.

He tried again. Burning rubber came through the windows. I leaned out far enough to see that the left front wheel had folded beneath the car against the broken base of a barricade.

“It’s stuck.”

The man put his foot down harder.

“It’s fucking stuck.”

He stopped. In the sudden quiet, the radio sounded absurdly loud. A live Puja broadcast. Bells, chanting, someone asking listeners to stay tuned. Then a crash. Then the chanting continued, although the voice doing it seemed to be getting farther and farther down a throat.

The woman in front was trying to call her daughter. No connection. Messages kept arriving anyway.

“Look,” she said.

She held the phone between the seats. A pandal in north Calcutta. Another somewhere I couldn’t recognize. Then a third. Different decorations, different faces, the same movement under the paint. In one, the goddess had leaned into the crowd up to her shoulders. Her arms kept bringing things to her mouth. The person filming was saying his brother’s name over and over, as if the right number of repetitions would make him come back.

We watched the other phones. Every video had begun with people cheering.

They had all opened their eyes.

The boy beside me started laughing. A thin, leaking sound. He had his broken arm cradled against his stomach.

“We asked her to come,” he said.

Nobody answered.

“We stood there and asked.”

The woman in front was crying into a call that hadn’t connected. The man at the wheel held his loose ear against his head.

Outside, the small Durga came around the corner. The child’s sandal was caught in the straw beneath her ribs.

The boy stopped laughing.

“Can you hear her?”

“Don’t,” Mou said, although he hadn’t moved yet.

He leaned toward the window. His face changed. All the terror went out of it, and the relief that replaced it was worse.

“She’s calling me.”

Mou caught his shirt as he opened the door. He twisted away, leaving a button in her hand, and ran toward the idol with his broken arm swinging.

She knelt. She opened her arms.

He went into them like a child coming home after something terrible had happened at school. Her hands settled on his back. For a moment, she simply held him.

Then her chest opened.

We heard the bones go. He tried to pull his face away, and she pressed it back against her. The straw inside her body worked over him in little tightening waves. His shoes scraped two clean lines through the muck before his feet lifted clear of them.

Mou pulled the door shut.

I had my hand over my mouth. A tooth had come through the middle of my tongue. I could feel its point against the roof of my mouth, searching for somewhere to fit.

“Show me,” she said.

I shook my head.

“Please.”

I lowered my hand.

She looked for a long time. She didn’t scream. I wanted her to scream. I wanted the ordinary mercy of somebody being afraid of me instead of afraid for me.

“How long?”

“This morning.”

The words dragged across the new tooth.

“There were hairs. In my food. And then the flowers, I thought the blood was from the flowers.”

I held up my wrist.

The garland had tightened. Between the crushed petals, the thread was dark and swollen. It pulsed against the thin skin above my hand.

Mou tried to unwind it. A flower came away with a little square of my skin attached.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You were looking forward to tonight.”

She stared at me, and for a second we were having a stupid married argument in a taxi, the sort you could finish at home while one person took off her earrings and the other pretended to look for the mosquito repellent.

“I would have come home with you,” she said.

I couldn’t look at her.

In the front seat, the man let go of his ear. It stayed where he had put it. Black fibers had grown across the torn place and were pulling it shut.

I knew those fibers.

I reached into my mouth and caught one between my fingers. It ran down behind my last molar. When I pulled, the skin beneath my jaw puckered inward.

It hadn’t been in the toast.

The woman with the phone was digging her fingernails into her palm. Her nails had turned black. She pushed until one disappeared completely into the flesh, then looked at Mou with an expression of such naked embarrassment that I had to turn away.

“I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said.

Nobody asked what.

The man at the wheel began to cry. His face was wet, but his mouth was smiling. He kept trying to push the smile back into place with both hands.

“We made her too big,” he said through his fingers. “Sixty feet. We gave her sixty feet of teeth.”

The taxi rocked.

Something scraped across the roof. Slowly. A fingernail testing a tin.

I looked up through the windshield. The Ekdalia goddess had come into the street. One shoulder had taken the corner off a building. Electrical cables lay across her crown. Her neck bent in several places as she lowered her face toward us, and inside each opening in the clay I saw the smooth red movement of something swallowing.

The man in the red polo shirt hung among the marigolds below her chin.

Clap. Clap.

Her breath misted the outside of my window. It smelled of hot rice, incense, the cupboard where my mother kept clean bedsheets. I could smell her kitchen after rain. I could smell the pillow I had cried into when I was small and hadn’t yet learned to do it quietly.

Her tongue moved over the glass.

One word appeared in the wetness.

OPEN.

The woman in front opened her mouth.

She made a small, grateful noise. Her jaw lowered past her collarbone. The skin on either side stretched white, then parted in two fine red lines. Inside, behind the teeth she had been born with, something unfolded.

The man did it too. He was still crying. Both of them were.

They got out of the taxi. The goddess lifted her face to let them pass. They walked toward the little pandal, holding their enormous mouths open with their hands as though carrying bowls they were afraid of spilling.

Mou reached across me for the lock.

I caught her wrist.

I hadn’t meant to catch it so hard. Her fingers opened. The little button she had torn from the boy’s shirt fell into my lap.

“Let go,” she said.

I did.

She moved away from me and tried the other door. A clay thumb covered its window. She pulled at the handle twice, then sat back. There was a white mark around her wrist where I had held it.

“Are you fighting it?” she asked.

I wanted to tell her how tired I was. How much effort it was taking to keep my teeth behind my lips, to remember what her hand was for, to sit beside the warmth of her throat and remember all the years attached to it. I wanted credit for having lasted this long. Even then. Even with her watching me.

“Are you?”

“No.”

She closed her eyes.

“Then do it fast,” she whispered. “Before you start to like it.”

I didn’t bite her.

I want to be clear about that. I have gone over it so many times, and that part is true. I didn’t put my teeth into my wife. I didn’t tear her face or open her throat. Some part of me still loved her. Some part of me was still holding on to that as if it would make any difference to what happened next.

I opened the door.

The goddess put two fingers inside. The door frame peeled away around them. She took me beneath the arms, carefully, almost awkwardly, as if I were an infant whose head still needed supporting.

Mou caught my kurta.

For one moment her weight came with me. Then the cloth tore, and she fell back into the seat with a strip of it in her hand.

I remember being relieved that she hadn’t pulled me down.

There. That is also true.

The goddess placed me against her shoulder, beside the man in the red shirt. His eyes followed me. His lips were moving, but I couldn’t hear him over the clapping.

The flowers beneath me were warm.

Something entered my back. I arched against it, and a second point came through under my ribs. Then there were too many to count. They threaded themselves between my bones and drew me close to her. My feet lifted. My spine settled into a hollow that seemed to have been waiting for it.

Below us, her other hand went into the taxi.

Mou screamed my name.

I had thought I knew how she said it. Annoyed, sleepy, calling from another room. I hadn’t known it could be made to last that long.

The goddess brought her up past me. Mou was still holding the torn piece of my kurta. A finger pressed beneath her chin and tilted her head back. Another passed through the soft place above her collarbone.

Her legs kicked against the gold chest.

The marigolds rose to meet her.

I saw then what the flowers were doing. Petals opened and fastened themselves to wet skin. The dark thread went through her and came out again, pulling her into the chain. It moved with the brisk, practiced economy of someone threading flowers for a living.

Her mouth kept forming my name after the sound stopped.

They hung her just below me, close enough that I could have touched her face if I could still move my arm. Around her neck, the flowers became thick and beautiful.

Farther down, there were others. Faces turned sideways. Bare feet. A woman’s braid threaded through a man’s open chest. Hands still gripping bags, phones, one another. Between the flowers, eyes moved. The long garland swayed, and every person in it tried to make the small adjustment that would stop the pain.

Sixty feet of marigolds.

Mou still had her phone. Her hands were pinned against her chest, but one thumb could move. I watched it working, stopping, working again.

My phone buzzed in my kurta pocket.

The arm I couldn’t move a moment earlier bent obediently to retrieve it.

A message from my wife, three feet away.

Your mouth.

I touched my lips. The splits had closed. My teeth fitted now. There was room for all of them.

I opened the front camera.

I was smiling.

I had the expression Mou had spent the evening trying to get out of me.

Below us, the street was filling again. Some people were running toward the goddesses with their arms raised. Others were being pulled from cars and shops by people they had arrived with. A man held a shutter down while his wife beat on it from the other side. Two streets away, above the rooftops, another gold face bent to feed.

The dhak players were still going. I could see one from where I hung. His head lay backward against his spine, his throat packed with flowers. His hands struck the drum in the same steady rhythm.

In the phone, the videos kept arriving.

One goddess raised her face. Then another. Then all the ones I could see on the screen turned toward their cameras. The flowers at their throats trembled.

Beside me, the clapping stopped.

Mou’s eyes widened. I felt her trying to turn her head away, felt the movement travel through the thread that held us both.

My jaw opened.

All our jaws opened.

And in my own voice, pleased and rested at last, I heard what we had been kept for.

Next year, bring more.