I look down at the gardens and pool, at the attendants trying to cajole out Shyamu, who still cavorts in the water. Unlike the bridal suite, where Karun and I could gaze out at the beach, we now face the interior. I think of all the occupants in the hotel, of the hundreds of windows and balconies overlooking the same courtyard—a few lights even illuminate the small buildings by the pool. The odds of locating Karun may have improved tremendously, but it’s still going to require a lot of luck.

“Listen, Guddi, I’m trying to find my husband. He came with three friends some days back in a van. They’re all scientists—sent for personally by Devi ma. Think, now—have you heard anything of such a group staying in the hotel?”

Guddi scrunches up her forehead in concentration. “What’s a scientist, Didi?” she finally asks. I try explaining it to her, but she gets more and more confused, especially after Jaz returns from his inordinately long time in the bathroom and joins the interrogation. “I’ve only been here since last night,” she says, her voice quivering, her chin slumping, her eyes tearing up. Then she brightens. “I know who you can ask. Although we’ll have to check with Chitra didi first.”

“Chitra didi?”

“She’s the supervisor. I’m sure she’ll allow you to come along upstairs after we dry off.”

“What’s upstairs?”

Guddi gives me a startled look. “Why, Devi ma, of course. She knows everything—without her knowledge, not even a leaf can drop.”


WITH THE WHISTLE around her neck and white sneakers on her feet, Chitra, the Devi’s most senior assistant, looks like an angry coach. “Didn’t I say you had an audience with Devi ma this evening?” she scolds Guddi, paying little attention to Jaz or me. “How could you have gotten yourself all wet? As it is we’ve lost all the Ooper-devi saris in the train wreck—do you know how difficult they were to get?”

“It’s not my fault, Didi. Shyamu jumped into the swimming pool.”

“And who gave you permission to go outside on him? I told you to practice in the garden, didn’t I? Did you think you could just walk off with him on your first day?”

“But in the village I used to—”

“Yes, I’m sure you have a thousand tales from your village—for all I know, the elephants there rocked you to sleep every night. Now take off that sari so we can try to iron it dry. As it is, the first thing Anupam did in the kitchen was splatter herself—her sari looks dyed in a vat of potato curry. So it’s going to be just you, which means Devi ma will be furious. We promised to have all of you glowing and ready like Ooper-devi’s maidens to accompany her next appearance.”

“Why don’t we take along Sarita didi? She’s wearing the same thing.”

Chitra examines my sari. “So you decided to jump in for a dip as well—what is this, an epidemic? Well, don’t just stare at me—take it off—we haven’t got much time.”

While the saris are drying, Chitra supervises our sprucing up—repainting the bridal dots on Guddi’s face, but declaring they would be lost on mine. She’s surprisingly agreeable to Guddi’s suggestion we take “Gaurav bhaiyya” along—Devi ma, apparently, has a preference for male attendants. Jaz, though, balks at trading in his wet garb for the beige and white uniform. Perhaps he fears disrobing will expose him as a Muslim, though I suspect it’s his sense of fashion the uniform offends. His one concession, upon Chitra’s insistence that nobody bareheaded can be allowed an audience with Devi ma, is the bright red cloth wrapped around his head like a turban. “You look very handsome, Gaurav bhaiyya,” Guddi blushingly tells him, as he preens in front of a mirror, adjusting the turban this way and that. I’m beginning to realize there’s more than just a trace of peacock in him.

Chitra doesn’t recall a van, blue-striped or otherwise, coming to the hotel. “All I’ve seen on the driveway are elephants, for the past fortnight at least.” She’s dubious about the whole notion of the scientists being bused in. “People flock here in droves—it’s not like Devi ma needs to summon anybody. But you should ask her. All the hundreds of devotees she blesses—only she can keep track, with her supernatural powers.”

In the elevator, Chitra swipes a card through an electronic slot to get us moving. “Do you know, we don’t have a single generator in the entire hotel? Devi ma is mighty enough to ensure us all the electricity we want—ever since she came, we haven’t lost power for a second.”

As we approach the third floor, I wonder if by some fantastic coincidence we will be led to my wedding night room. Where Devi ma will be holding court, and Karun assessing the proceedings with a scientific eye, jotting observations in a notebook. But the elevator keeps rising, to the fourth and top floor. Devi ma has taken up quarters in the presidential suite.

Dozens of hopeful faces peer out from behind the Khakis standing guard at the door to the emergency staircase. Some supplicants seem to have escaped into the corridor—they mill around, blocking our way. Chitra blows her whistle and stamps her foot, as she might to make mice scurry away. “See what I mean about the droves? You have no idea how lucky you are to get an audience.” Two separate sets of guards search us—I hold my breath as they pat Jaz down, but neither group finds his gun (he whispers to me that he’s hidden it in Guddi’s bathroom, behind the flush). The ultimate barrier is a gauntlet of credential-checking clerks, who squint up balefully from their ledgers as we approach. I expect Chitra will help us breeze past, but even she has to grind through the bureaucratic questions they ask.

With all the crowds clamoring hysterically for an audience, my expectations for the Devi have steadily risen. Will she spark and corkscrew in her suite like she did on the beach? Or will she appear in one of those calendar-art renditions, perhaps Laxmi emerging from a lotus with garlands flowing from her arms? Guddi has been rhapsodizing incessantly about enchanted forests and kingdoms of gold, all of which she seems to expect behind the door. She appears nonplussed when Chitra ushers us into a room, enormous and impeccably appointed, but in an ultra-modern, Western style. After the carnival of Mughals and Mauryas and Rajputs and Cholas exploding through the lower floors, the effect is shocking. (Could this represent the pinnacle of Indian culture, its ultimate aspiration?) The only desi embellishment, among the pastel walls and corporate furniture, the abstract paintings so bland that the Khakis haven’t even bothered to deface them, is an empty throne—the glitz-painted kind rented out at Hindu weddings to seat the bride and groom. Guddi rushes over to genuflect at it.

“This way,” Chitra calls, and leads us out onto the terrace, fortunately redeemed by the return of the Buddhas canopied by Mughal domes, even a gopuram rising above the emergency stairwell. A small plantation of potted palms flanks an infinity pool that seems to flow directly into the Arabian Sea. Attendants scurry around with plates and bottles and pillows, electricians tinker with wiring and panels of audio equipment, a group of devotees in a corner bulges against its cordon of guards. Amidst all this activity, though, the Devi is nowhere to be seen. A second throne, as ornate as the one inside, flanks the pool. But it too is empty.

“Devi ma doesn’t like sitting in it, finds it too hard,” Chitra explains. She gestures towards a beach chair facing away from us. “Well don’t just stand there, touch her feet.”

At first, I’m confused by the chair’s ordinariness, its utilitarian plastic slats and dull aluminum frame. Then I notice the feet, gleaming with the sheen of real gold, resting on a brocaded red pillow like sacraments presented for worship in a shrine. Guddi immediately throws herself upon them, kissing them with almost fetishistic fervor.

For a moment, I can only stare on. I’ve always assumed there is some sort of fraudulence to the Devi, but what if she’s real, if this is the shimmer of divinity? When I look into her face, though, the illusion lifts—the gold, I realize, comes from a glaze of paint. Tiny creases around her brow and chin give the game away—the pigment is a mask, through which the whites of her eyes float up luminously. Coddled in the chair by a cloud of puffy pillows, her body looks even tinier than it appeared on the turret. How strange that they’ve used a midget to fill the role, I think. Then she bids us welcome, and I realize she’s simply a girl of eight or nine.

“I’m so gratified you’ve come to see me. Do you know the one cure for all the unhappiness in this world?” The words sound the same as those spoken from the turret, though the voice is different, the delivery clumsy. “For all the fear and danger. For all the fear and danger and… the fear and danger and…”

“Strife,” Chitra whispers, and the Devi girl repeats the word, then the entire sentence a few times.

Guddi finally tears herself away from the Devi’s feet, and I bend down for my go at them. Splayed for convenience, raised to be within easy reach of the devotees, they remain perfectly still when I touch them. They are chubby like the rest of her body, even the soles look fleshy. “I am your protector, your savior,” the girl says, then again forgets what comes next. She stumbles through a few unsuccessful attempts to continue, then reaches out for a bottle of Coca-Cola on the plastic beach table next to her.

That’s when I notice her extra pair of arms. The two appendages emerge from her shoulders, the right longer than the left, but both stunted and elbow-less. At first I think they are prosthetic devices glued on for effect. But then I see the nubbed club of flesh at the end of the left arm, which suggests a birth defect. “Once your feet have touched these sands, I will forever keep you safe under my shield,” she suddenly spouts, her memory refreshed by the caffeine.

The perfectly formed hand at the end of her right appendage mesmerizes me. The digits move and bend unconsciously, spider-like, as she concentrates on delivering more of her lines. The arm itself is too short to reach out to grab the Coke bottle, but once she’s ready for another sip, the extra fingers adeptly lift the straw out from the neck to her mouth. I want to touch them, squeeze them, trace the bones under the flesh to make sure they’re real.

“What are you staring at like that?” she says, stopping mid-sip.

“I’m sorry, Devi ma—I was just lost—lost in your words.”

She glares at me, then turns to Chitra. “Where are my maidens? You promised they’d dance on the terrace below me in glowing saris.”

“Forgive me, Devi ma, there’s been a delay—the enemy attacked our train and stole the saris. Only these two maidens made it out—let me have the lights turned off, so you can at least see what the saris look like.”

The demonstration flops. Perhaps the light levels aren’t low enough, or the dunking has permanently washed away the fluorescence, but the saris refuse to perform. Guddi’s still manages a few weak flashes near the arms and across the chest, but mine hangs as lifelessly around me as a shroud. After screaming for the head of whoever’s responsible for the derailment, the Devi turns to me. “Show me what you’ve brought.”

Fortunately, Chitra has warned me of the need to bear a gift, so I take out my last packet of orange biscuits (unharmed within their watertight wrapper) and lay it on the pillow, between the girl’s feet. She rips it open—I try not to gawk as her extra hand rustles around in the packet and brings a biscuit to her mouth. She chews on it, then spits the mush out at my face. “This is horrible. Are you trying to poison me?”

I wipe it off, noticing Chitra’s frantic shake of head too late. My action enrages the girl. “How dare you wipe off my blessing? Don’t you know everything from me is holy, is prasad?” She rises from her chair to lunge at me when Chitra and Guddi intervene.

“Forgive her, Devi ma, she didn’t know. Next time, she’ll bring the bonbon biscuits you like.” They force my forehead down to scrape it at the girl’s feet.

“Get her up,” the girl commands, and the two pull me up and hold me between them. For an instant, I think I will be blessed with Devi spit again, but instead, she shakes up the Coke bottle and sprays the froth at me. Seeing me dripping with cola, she bursts out laughing. Then she hurls the bottle at my face. I hear it whiz by my ear and smash on the terrace behind. “What else do you have for me besides biscuits?”

“She’s brought a pomegranate, Devi ma,” Guddi says, and I turn to her sharply. The fruit fell out when I changed out of my wet sari, but I scooped it back up quickly and didn’t think anyone had noticed. “Go on, let Devi ma see how red it is.”