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

early, hard winter when the police and King’s machines restored the old order to
the city beyond Durbar Square. Unrest in earth and the three heavens. One day I
woke to find snow in the wooden court; the roofs of the temple of Durbar Square
heavy with it, like frowning, freezing old men. I knew now that the strange
weather was not my doing but the result of huge, slow changes in the climate.
Smiling Kumarima came to me in my jharoka as I watched flakes thick and soft as
ash sift down from the white sky. She knelt before me, rubbed her hands together
inside the cuffs of her wide sleeves. She suffered badly in the cold and damp.
“Devi, are you not one of my own children to me?”
I waggled my head, not wanting to say yes.
“Devi, have I ever, ever given you anything but my best?”
Like her counterpart a season before, she drew a plastic pillbox from her
sleeve, set it on her palm. I sat back on my chair, afraid of it as I had never
been afraid of anything Tall Kumarima offered me.
“I know how happy we are all here, but change must always happen. Change in the
world, like this snow—unnatural, devi, not right—change in our city. And we are
not immune to it in here, my flower. Change will come to you, devi. To you, to
your body. You will become a woman. If I could, I would stop it happening to
you, devi. But I can’t. No one can. What I can offer is . . . a delay. A stay.
Take these. They will slow down the changes. For years, hopefully. Then we can
all be happy here together, devi.” She looked up from her deferential half-bow,
into my eyes. She smiled. “Have I ever wanted anything but the best for you?”
I held out my hand. Smiling Kumarima tipped the pills into my palm. I closed my
fist and slipped from my carved throne. As I went to my room, I could hear
Smiling Kumarima chanting prayers of thanksgiving to the goddesses in the
carvings. I looked at the pills in my hand. Blue seemed such a wrong color. Then
I filled my cup in my little washroom and washed them down, two gulps, down,
down.
After that they came every day, two pills, blue as the Lord Krishna, appearing
as miraculously on my bedside table. For some reason I never told Tall Kumarima,
even when she commented on how fractious I was becoming, how strangely
inattentive and absent-minded at ceremonies. I told her it was the devis in the
walls, whispering to me. I knew enough of my specialness, that others have
called my disorder, that that would be unquestioned. I was tired and lethargic
that winter. My sense of smell grew keen to the least odor and the people in my
courtyard with their stupid, beaming upturned faces infuriated me. I went for
weeks without showing myself. The wooden corridors grew sharp and brassy with
old blood. With the insight of demons, I can see now that my body was a chemical
battlefield between my own hormones and Smiling Kumarima’s puberty suppressants.
It was a heavy, humid spring that year and I felt huge and bloated in the heat,
a waddling bulb of fluids under my robes and waxy make-up. I started to drop the
little blue pills down the commode. I had been Kumari for seven Dasains.
I had thought I would feel like I used to, but I did not. It was not unwell,
like the pills had made me feel, it was sensitive, acutely conscious of my body.
I would lie in my wooden bed and feel my legs growing longer. I became very very
aware of my tiny nipples. The heat and humidity got worse, or so it seemed to
me.
At any time I could have opened my palmer and asked it what was happening to me,
but I didn’t. I was scared that it might tell me it was the end of my divinity.
Tall Kumarima must have noticed that the hem of my gown no longer brushed the