"Gardner Dozois - The Year's Best Science Fiction 23rd Annual Collection" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dozois Gardner)

Men always came calling, glancing up at the giggles and rustles of the Lovely Girls peeping through the
jalis as he waited in the cool of the courtyard for Shweta to present him to Mamaji. Men with offers of
marriage, men with prenuptial contracts, men with dowry down-payments. Men asking for special,
private viewings. This man who had called on Mamaji had come for one of these.

“Fine young man, lovely young man, just twenty. Father’s big in water. He has requested a private
rendezvous, with you.”

I was instantly suspicious, but I had learned among the Lovely Girls of Delhi, even more than among the
priests and Kumarimas of Kathmandu, to let nothing show on my painted face.

“Me? Such an honor . . . and him only twenty . . . and a good family too, so well connected.”

“He is a Brahmin.”

“I know I am only a Shakya. . . .”

“You don’t understand. He is a Brahmin.”

There was so much more I needed to do, Tall Kumarima had said as the royal car drove away from the
carved wooden gates of the Kumari Ghar. One whisper through the window would have told me
everything: the curse of the Kumari.

Shakya hid from me. People crossed the street to find things to look at and do. Old family friends
nodded nervously before remembering important business they had to be about. The chai-dhabas gave
me free tea so I would feel uncomfortable and leave. Truckers were my friends, bus-drivers and
long-haulers pulled in at the biodiesel stations. They must have wondered who was this strange
twelve-year-old girl, hanging around truck-halts. I do not doubt some of them thought more. Village by
village, town by town the legend spread up and down the north road. Ex-Kumari.

Then the accidents started. A boy lost half his hand in the fan belt of a Nissan engine. A teenager drank
bad rakshi and died of alcohol poisoning. A man slipped between two passing trucks and was crushed.
The talk in the chai-dhabas and the repair shops was once again of my uncle who fell to his death while
the little goddess-to-be bounced in her wire cradle laughing and laughing and laughing.

I stopped going out. As winter took hold over the head-country of the Kathmandu valley, whole weeks
passed when I did not leave my room. Days slipped away watching sleet slash past my window, the
prayer banners bent almost horizontal in the wind, the wire of the cableway bouncing. Beneath it, the
furious, flooding river. In that season the voices of the demons spoke loud from the mountain, telling me
the most hateful things about faithless Kumaris who betray the sacred heritage of their devi.

On the shortest day of the year the bride buyer came through Shakya. I heard a voice I did not recognize
talking over the television that burbled away day and night in the main room. I opened the door just
enough to admit a voice and gleam of firelight.

“I wouldn’t take the money off you. You’re wasting your time here in Nepal. Everyone knows the story,
and even if they pretend they don’t believe, they don’t act that way.”

I heard my father’s voice but could not make out his words. The bride buyer said,