The Tenth Limb

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THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION

The spider tucked the blanket under Bhairav Chatterjee’s chin with two of its legs while he slept, and he woke up because the legs were cold.

Not cool. Cold as temple brass at dawn. Cold as the coins he pressed into beggars’ palms outside Kalighat when he wanted the goddess to see him being good.

The legs—there were too many of them, he knew that even half-asleep, the way you know a stranger is standing in your room before you open your eyes—worked the edge of the cotton sheet with a patience no spider should possess, folding it just so, the way his mother used to when he was a boy and feverish and she believed a tucked blanket could keep death from climbing through the window.

He lay there.

He did not scream.

He was sixty-three years old and had slept on this rope bed in this room in Shobhabazar for forty years, and he knew the sounds of every insect that lived in the walls, every rat behind the grain tin, every lizard that lost its footing on the damp plaster at three in the morning.

This was not one of them.

The spider had a leg span roughly the width of a dinner plate. Bhairav could feel its weight on the mattress, the slight depression beside his hip, the way a cat might sink into an old cotton mattress.

But it was not a cat.

It was Kaka, his huntsman.

He had found it in a puja pandal three years ago, small as a two-rupee coin, hiding inside a marigold garland after most of the people had gone home. He had brought it back because it had looked at him with what he chose to interpret as recognition. He fed it cockroaches when he could catch them and left droplets of water near the window grille. It grew.

It had kept growing.

But not like this.

Bhairav opened his eyes.

The room was dark except for the streetlight leaking through the shutter slats, painting thin orange bars across the wall. The spider sat between them, very still, the way it always did when it watched him.

Huntsmen have eight legs.

Everyone knows this.

Bhairav knew it the way he knew the Gayatri mantra, the way he knew which floorboard complained beside the shrine, the way he could still reconstruct his wife’s face in darkness though she had been dead eleven years.

This one had ten limbs.

He counted once.

Then again.

Eight ordinary spider legs spread around the flattened body.

And between them, growing from where nothing should have grown, were two smaller appendages.

They were thinner. More deliberate. Jointed slightly differently. They did not rest on the mattress the way the other legs did.

They folded.

Arms, Bhairav thought.

Not because they were truly arms. Some surviving sensible corner of his mind understood that distinction.

But because one of them was still holding the edge of his blanket.

The spider looked at him.

Spiders do not have faces made for human expression, but this one possessed the obscene advantage of appearing to look back. Eight eyes caught what little light entered the room, two of them larger and facing forward, and behind them—or through them, or merely inside Bhairav’s frightened old imagination—there was something that seemed to know him.

Not notice him.

Know him.

The thought came with such unexpected warmth that it frightened him more than the cold limbs had.

“Kaka,” he whispered.

The spider shifted.

The mattress dipped.

It moved closer, and the smell in the room changed.

Not the smell of a spider. Bhairav would later be unable to say whether spiders had smells at all.

This was rain striking hot pavement after weeks of dust. Oil lamps burning inside a temple. Damp flowers crushed beneath bare feet. His mother’s hair when she bent over him to touch his forehead during a fever.

He should have been terrified.

He waited for terror.

It did not come.

Instead there came something he had not felt since childhood: the sensation of being examined completely and somehow not rejected.

He looked toward the calendar hanging beside the shrine.

Durga Puja.

Sasthi.

By evening there would be Bodhon, the ceremonial awakening, though half the city had already begun behaving as if the goddess had arrived days ago. The pandals were open, lights had colonized the lanes, and somewhere beyond the sleeping houses enormous painted eyes were waiting for morning.

Durga.

Ten arms.

Bhairav looked back at Kaka.

Eight legs.

Two impossible new limbs.

Ten.

The number lodged itself in him before reason had time to object.

He sat up slowly.

The spider did not retreat. It watched him with its eight eyes and the two strange limbs folded against its body, patient as a priest waiting for an offering.

“You are not Kaka,” Bhairav said.

The spider said nothing.

Of course it said nothing.

But the room changed.

The orange bars of streetlight on the wall seemed to brighten though no vehicle had passed outside. The air grew dense with incense though Bhairav had lit none. Above the bed, his shadow and the spider’s shadow touched and merged, stretching across the plaster into one impossible black arrangement of limbs.

For half a second it resembled an idol.

Then a scooter passed at the end of the lane and the shadow broke apart.

Bhairav got out of bed.

His knees cracked.

He was a thin man, dried out by years of fasting, bad sleep and the ordinary abrasion of remaining alive. His beard had gone completely white. Every morning he trimmed it himself before renewing the mark on his forehead and sitting before the shrine.

He had once served as a priest at a small Kali temple near Kalighat. That had been twenty years ago. Now he lived mostly on a meagre old-age pension that arrived when bureaucracy remembered he existed, plus the rice, vegetables and occasional fish brought by neighbors who called him Bhairav-kaku and were never entirely certain whether feeding a holy man counted as charity, insurance, or both.

He was a holy man the way a broken umbrella is still an umbrella.

Technically.

With qualifications.

He went to the window and opened the shutters.

Below, the lane was almost empty. Somewhere a dog scratched itself beneath a scooter. A milk van coughed on the main road. It was a little after three in the morning, that temporary republic when even Calcutta stops arguing.

The city was holding its breath.

Behind him, the mattress creaked.

Bhairav turned.

The spider was on the floor.

It moved toward the corner where he kept his shrine, the eight familiar legs carrying the striped body in the low sideways glide peculiar to huntsmen.

The other two remained folded.

It stopped beneath the shrine.

Looked up.

On the wall was the old print of Durga Bhairav had kept for thirty years. The colors had faded. The cheap wooden frame had swollen during monsoons. The goddess stood above Mahishasura, lion beside her, ten arms radiating outward with weapon, conch, lotus, blessing.

The frame was crooked.

It had been crooked for months.

Bhairav knew this because every morning he looked at it and every morning he intended to straighten it later.

The spider rose.

One of the new limbs reached upward.

Then the other.

The claws caught the bottom corners of the frame.

Very gently, Kaka straightened the goddess.

Bhairav’s knees gave.

He sat down hard on the floor.

“You came,” he said.

His voice broke.

He had not cried since his wife’s funeral.

He cried now.

Not dramatically. No wailing, no fists against the floor. The tears simply emerged and ran down the grooves beside his nose while he watched a spider correct the alignment of Durga.

He thought this was exactly the sort of miracle meant for him.

Not the sun stopping in the sky.

Not the Ganga flowing backward.

Not a marble statue drinking milk while television crews shouted outside.

A crooked photograph.

A spider.

Three in the morning.

Nobody watching.

The spider turned from the shrine.

It crossed the floor toward him.

It came close enough that Bhairav could see the minute hairs on its legs, the mottled markings on its body, the delicate articulation of those two impossible new appendages.

He thought of everything he had asked for in his life.

Money when the pension stopped.

His wife’s recovery when the cancer came.

His son to telephone from Toronto.

Not return. Bhairav had eventually reduced the prayer to that.

Just telephone.

Once.

He had asked politely at first. Then desperately. Then angrily. Then with bargaining, fasting, offerings, promises, mantras spoken until language became noise.

He had offered flowers.

Oil.

Sweets.

Blood from his own bitten tongue when grief made him stupid.

Nothing.

The goddess had not answered.

Or she had answered no.

Or there had never been anyone listening.

That final possibility had entered him gradually after his wife died and had remained there like a rat behind a cupboard: unseen, undeniable, moving occasionally at night.

And now, on Sasthi morning, in one damp room in Shobhabazar, something with ten limbs had tucked in his blanket and straightened Durga’s photograph.

Bhairav did not know what it wanted.

He did not know why it had happened.

He did not know whether he was witnessing divinity, mutation, senility, starvation, grief, or one extremely ambitious spider.

But belief had never required Bhairav to know.

Knowing was for accountants.

Faith was what remained after the arithmetic failed.

He looked at the creature.

“This is for me,” he whispered.

There was vanity in that sentence.

He knew it even while saying it.

Perhaps every private miracle is partly vanity—the conviction that the machinery of the universe has interrupted its normal schedule to attend to your particular wound.

But Bhairav had spent most of his life asking the infinite to notice him.

He could hardly complain about the method.

He reached out his hand.

The spider did not move away.

He touched the third leg on the left, the way he had touched it many times before when Kaka was smaller and harmless and categorically a spider.

The leg was warm.

That surprised him.

The two new limbs had been cold against his neck.

Now this ordinary leg was warm as skin.

“Maa,” he said.

The word came out before he decided to speak it.

The spider climbed onto his palm.

It should have weighed more than it did. Instead it seemed almost weightless, the legs distributed across his hand and wrist, the two strange appendages folded close to its body.

Bhairav stared at it.

Eight eyes stared back.

And there, kneeling beside his bed at three in the morning, Bhairav understood that some choice had appeared before him.

Not the grand choice between faith and reason. People who speak of such choices generally have both food and electricity.

His choice was smaller.

He could panic.

He could trap Kaka beneath a bucket.

He could wake the neighbors.

He could telephone someone who would telephone someone else until eventually thirty people arrived, followed by a local journalist, two policemen, a club secretary, three men claiming expertise in tantric zoology, and somebody trying to monetize the queue.

He could take a photograph.

That thought stopped him.

A photograph.

Within an hour Kaka could belong to WhatsApp.

By breakfast the goddess would have a watermark.

By lunch somebody would be selling ten-limbed-spider keychains at the crossing.

No.

Whatever this was, Bhairav thought, it had come quietly.

He would answer quietly.

He stood, holding the spider in both hands the way he once held the lamp during aarti.

He carried it to the bed.

He lay down.

He placed Kaka on his chest, over his heart, and drew the blanket over himself.

For a moment nothing happened.

Then the two new limbs rose.

One caught the left edge of the blanket.

The other caught the right.

They tucked it beneath his chin.

Bhairav laughed.

A small, wet, ridiculous laugh escaped him in the dark.

“Thik achhe,” he whispered.

All right.

He closed his eyes.

He did not sleep immediately.

The city began returning by degrees.

A pressure cooker somewhere.

A bucket beneath a tap.

The cough of an old man in the adjoining house.

A conch shell.

Then, farther away, the first slow testing strokes of a dhak.

Dhoom.

Dhoom.

Dha-dhoom.

Another answered from some other lane.

Soon there were more.

Calcutta assembling itself out of percussion.

Bhairav lay still beneath the blanket.

He thought about his son in Toronto.

The unpaid months.

His wife in the hospital.

The promises he had made to gods.

The promises gods had not made to him.

All the mantras he had spoken into the dark.

All the faith he had kept like a coal under his tongue, burning, burning, useful for neither heat nor light but impossible to spit out.

Perhaps this was not Durga.

The thought arrived calmly.

For the first time that morning, Bhairav allowed it to remain.

Perhaps Kaka was simply Kaka.

Perhaps some grotesque developmental accident had produced two appendages where there should be none.

Perhaps Bhairav was dreaming.

Perhaps age had finally put a crack through the machinery behind his eyes.

Perhaps there would be a perfectly good explanation once daylight arrived with its vulgar instruments.

He found, unexpectedly, that none of those possibilities mattered.

The blanket was tucked beneath his chin.

Something warm was resting over his heart.

Something he had cared for when it was small was now, impossibly, caring for him.

For most of his life Bhairav had imagined divine attention as intervention.

Cure the cancer.

Send the money.

Bring back the son.

Reverse the verdict.

Move the mountain.

He had never considered the possibility that if a god existed, the god might occasionally do something useless.

Straighten a picture.

Pull up a blanket.

Sit beside an old man until he slept.

The thought broke something inside him.

Or repaired it.

He could not tell the difference anymore.

Outside, the dhak grew louder.

Someone blew another conch.

A voice from the lane called, “Bolo Durga Mai ki—”

Several voices answered:

“Jai!”

Bhairav smiled without opening his eyes.

He had spent decades waiting for his prayer to be answered in a language large enough to convince him.

Thunder.

Gold.

Healing.

Justice.

Instead there was this.

Ten limbs.

Two of them impossible.

Two of them holding his blanket in place.

His breathing slowed.

The spider remained on his chest.

Bhairav imagined the city beyond the shutters filling with her images: Durga beneath bamboo and cloth and electric light, Durga in old bonedi houses, Durga beneath chandeliers and LED screens, Durga painted, sculpted, gilded, themed, sponsored, photographed, uploaded; ten arms raised against the buffalo demon while millions passed beneath her gaze carrying handbags, children, debts, resentments, shopping lists, illnesses, private griefs.

And here, in a room too small for spectacle, a creature that might have meant nothing at all rested over the heart of one old man.

Bhairav slept.

Kaka remained where it was.

Its eight ordinary legs rested lightly against the blanket.

The two new limbs lay beside Bhairav’s throat.

Not touching him.

Not quite.

Morning entered through the shutters one blade at a time.

The old print of Durga hung perfectly straight above the shrine.

Outside, the city prepared to awaken the goddess.

Inside, Bhairav Chatterjee had already decided she was awake.