"The Little Goddess" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDonald Ian)

The Little Goddess by Ian McDonaldThe Little Goddess
by Ian McDonald
Ian McDonald, who has lived in Northern Ireland for most of his life, works in
program development for an independent television production company. His most
recent book is River of Gods, from Simon and Schuster (UK). The novel is set in
a kaleidoscopic India one hundred years after independence. He tells us, УIt was
while researching River, on a side-trip up into Nepal, that I first encountered,
and was fascinated by, the Kumari Devi.Ф

I remember the night I became a goddess.
The men collected me from the hotel at sunset. I was light-headed with hunger,
for the child-assessors said I must not eat on the day of the test. I had been
up since dawn; the washing and dressing and making up were a long and tiring
business. My parents bathed my feet in the bidet. We had never seen such a thing
before and that seemed the natural use for it. None of us had ever stayed in a
hotel. We thought it most grand, though I see now that it was a budget tourist
chain. I remember the smell of onions cooking in ghee as I came down in the
elevator. It smelled like the best food in the world.
I know the men must have been priests but I cannot remember if they wore formal
dress. My mother cried in the lobby; my fatherТs mouth was pulled in and he held
his eyes wide, in that way that grown-ups do when they want to cry but cannot
let tears be seen. There were two other girls for the test staying in the same
hotel. I did not know them; they were from other villages where the devi could
live. Their parents wept unashamedly. I could not understand it; their daughters
might be goddesses.
On the street, rickshaw drivers and pedestrians hooted and waved at us with our
red robes and third eyes on our foreheads. The devi, the devi look! Best of all
fortune! The other girls held on tight to the menТs hands. I lifted my skirts
and stepped into the car with the darkened windows.
They took us to the Hanumandhoka. Police and machines kept the people out of the
Durbar Square. I remember staring long at the machines, with their legs like
steel chickensТ and naked blades in their hands. The KingТs Own fighting
machines. Then I saw the temple and its great roofs sweeping up and up and up
into the red sunset and I thought for one instant the upturned eaves were
bleeding.
The room was long and dim and stuffily warm. Low evening light shone in dusty
rays through cracks and slits in the carved wood; so bright it almost burned.
Outside you could hear the traffic and the bustle of tourists. The walls seemed
thin but at the same time kilometers thick. Durbar Square was a world away. The
room smelled of brassy metal. I did not recognize it then but I know it now as
the smell of blood. Beneath the blood was another smell, of time piled thick as
dust. One of the two women who would be my guardians if I passed the test told
me the temple was five hundred years old. She was a short, round woman with a
face that always seemed to be smiling, but when you looked closely you saw it
was not. She made us sit on the floor on red cushions while the men brought the
rest of the girls. Some of them were crying already. When there were ten of us
the two women left and the door was closed. We sat for a long time in the heat
of the long room. Some of the girls fidgeted and chattered but I gave all my
attention to the wall carvings and soon I was lost. It has always been easy for
me to lose myself; in Shakya I could disappear for hours in the movement of