A THOUSAND EYES

Rakesh runs his fingers on my midriff, warns about the humidity at this time of the year in Guwahati. Adjusting the pleats of my sari, I think about his mother. “As a newlywed, you should visit Kamakhya where Goddess Sati used to retire in secret to satisfy her amour with her husband, Lord Shiva,” she said, her mouth drawn into a thin line, her chin drooping. I can tell she was beautiful once.

Goat scat shines on the hilly road. On the side, wildflowers entwine with weeds. We walk past the panels with sculptured goddesses, the pallu of my sari covering my nose, my anklets jingling, my thoughts absconding to the afternoon before the nuptials when I saw Rakesh’s father with my neighbor, a widow of nearly ten years, in the back room: his hand caressing her back, his lips softly biting on her neck. Moans and whispers. Space filled with abandon. I felt hot behind my ears. I felt mysteriously hungry. For the rest of the day I couldn’t decide if I felt outraged at Rakesh’s father or lusted after Rakesh.

The sun burns behind the clouds, a subdued flame. A dull pain rises in the right side of my abdomen, as if something is released. I scan a dark indent at the horizon? wonder if it’ll rain again, if the monsoon will leave us alone. After a while, the endless, relentless rain reeks, doesn’t feel clean anymore.

The courtyard is streaked with animal blood. Offerings to the goddess include flower garlands, sweets and animal sacrifices. Sati is also famous as the bleeding goddess. She supposedly menstruates in the month of June and the Brahmaputra River near this temple turns red.  In reality, the priests drop vermilion into the water to glorify Sati’s fertility and fulfill the tradition.

Barefoot, the scat is pressed under our heels and stuck between our toes, some of it warm. A man, with a goat on a leash, turns a finger clockwise in his ear as he leads it downstairs to the sacrificing platform. My eyes are anchored to the animal’s pleading eyes. A line forms and slithers towards the passage in the shape of a womb. At the entrance the stone wall glistens as if engraved with a thousand eyes.

Rakesh holds my hand, looks at my feet. I study his sweat stained collar, his arms and his strong wrists. The air is weighed down by ringing bells. “I’ll give you a bath,” he whispers, his breath a flame under my earlobe. I wonder how long since his parents touched each other: if absence of fucking makes you stiff as a corpse, if lack of passion is mistaken for being closer to God. I wonder if this is the place to think of sex. If not here, then where?

Ahead of us, a pregnant woman tucks her hair behind her ears. A carving of another Goddess overlooks us. Garlands between her breasts, thick thighs, her skin grey, rubbed with time. A draft comes from inside the temple, warm as a tongue. The animal downstairs makes a sound, distinct like death.

I lift my saree that billows around my ankles. Chants drone on above us, the passage gets narrower and darker as if we are about to be crowned, as if we are about to be born.

When the line stops moving, I put my hand in Rakesh’s side pocket, caress the fabric of his khakis. He places his hand over mine: his head slightly bent, his curly hair pointed at me. He resembles his father but clean-shaved, guilt-free. I want to tell him what I saw and felt: part rapture, part shame. In his brown eyes, I want to see my whole self and know if we’ll ever have what Sati and Shiva had or if we’ll drift away and I’ll become compromising like his mother. If years will come out of us like colorful birds in the sky or if they’ll hang like roots of a banyan tree, limp. If one of us goes first, how will the other live?

Inside the cave, a sheet of stone slopes downwards from two sides, meet in a uterus-shape depression. The Goddess is not a sculpture but a stone kept moist from an underground perennial spring. The man, who came with the goat, makes his offering. A musty, sharp smell settles inside me. The pregnant lady bows, picks a flower lying next to the Goddess and touches it on her forehead.

I close my eyes, fold my hands. And images crack open like an egg: Sati’s mouth ringed with blood, the goat’s head on a newborn, Rakesh opening and closing my legs? penetrating me in a hundred different positions. Bodies resting in dirt or washed off to the seas, corroded to salt. Bodies returned to stillness before they are done being dead, before they turn into pristine wombs and hearts, ready to be broken in again.

__

Tara Isabel Zambrano works as a semiconductor chip designer in a startup in Texas. Her work has been published in Tin House Online, The Cincinnati Review, Slice, Bat City Review, Yemassee, The Minnesota Review and others. She reads prose for The Common. Tara moved from India to the United States two decades ago and holds an instrument rating for single engine aircrafts.