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

hall throbbed to the bells and drums of Durbar Square. I remember thinking that
a King must bow to me but there are rules even for goddesses.
Smiling Kumarima and Tall Kumarima. I draw Tall Kumarima in my memory first, for
it is right to give pre-eminence to age. She was almost as tall as a Westerner
and thin as a stick in a drought. At first I was scared of her. Then I heard her
voice and could never be scared again; her voice was kind as a singing bird.
When she spoke you felt you now knew everything. Tall Kumarima lived in a small
apartment above a tourist shop on the edge of Durbar Square. From her window she
could see my Kumari Ghar, among the stepped towers of the dhokas. Her husband
had died of lung cancer from pollution and cheap Indian cigarettes. Her two tall
sons were grown and married with children of their own, older than me. In that
time she had mothered five Kumari Devis before me.
Next I remember Smiling Kumarima. She was short and round and had breathing
problems for which she used inhalers, blue and brown. I would hear the snake
hiss of them on days when Durbar Square was golden with smog. She lived out in
the new suburbs up on the western hills, a long journey even by the royal car at
her service. Her children were twelve, ten, nine, and seven. She was jolly and
treated me like her fifth baby, the young favorite, but I felt even then that,
like the demon-dancing-men, she was scared of me. Oh, it was the highest honor
any woman could hope for, to be the mother of the goddessЧso to speakЧthough you
wouldnТt think it to hear her neighbors in the unit, shutting yourself away in
that dreadful wooden box, and all the blood, medieval, medieval, but they
couldnТt understand. Somebody had to keep the king safe against those who would
turn us into another India, or worse, China; someone had to preserve the old
ways of the divine kingdom. I understood early that difference between them.
Smiling Kumarima was my mother out of duty. Tall Kumarima from love.
I never learned their true names. Their rhythms and cycles of shifts waxed and
waned through the days and nights like the faces of the moon. Smiling Kumarima
once found me looking up through the lattice of a jali screen at the fat moon on
a rare night when the sky was clear and healthy and shouted me away, donТt be
looking at that thing, it will call the blood out of you, little devi, and you
will be the devi no more.
Within the wooden walls and iron rules of my Kumari Ghar, years become
indistinguishable, indistinct. I think now I was five when I became Taleju Devi.
The year, I believe, was 2034. But some memories break the surface, like flowers
through snow.
Monsoon rain on the steep-sloped roofs, water rushing and gurgling through the
gutters, and the shutter that every year blew loose and rattled in the wind. We
had monsoons, then. Thunder demons in the mountains around the city, my room
flash lit with lightning. Tall Kumarima came to see if I needed singing to sleep
but I was not afraid. A goddess cannot fear a storm.
The day I went walking in the little garden, when Smiling Kumarima let out a cry
and fell at my feet on the grass and the words to tell her to get up, not to
worship me were on my lips when she held, between thumb and forefinger, twisting
and writhing and trying to find a place for its mouth to seize: a green leech.
The morning Tall Kumarima came to tell me people had asked me to show myself. At
first I had thought it wonderful that people would want to come and look at me
on my little jharoka balcony in my clothes and paint and jewels. Now I found it
tiresome; all those round eyes and gaping mouths. It was a week after my tenth
birthday. I remember Tall Kumarima smiled but tried not to let me see. She took