Charred Marigold

“Come.” Nabh smiled, rising to his feet as he interlaced his fingers through mine.

Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful tonight” played softly from the run-down laptop propped against the chipping yellow wall that was covered in Nabh’s sketches. We swayed there in the darkness of his room, listening to each other’s breathing as the sounds of Clapton’s guitar percolated the night, accented by the barking of squabbling street dogs and the smell of burning rubbish in the distance.

I was two weeks late, and never had I longed for the uterus-shattering tug of my menses more. I had been foolish; unwilling to lose Nabh’s friendship— the one ray of light in the darkness of my days— so I bed him. And I enjoyed it.

“Let’s go to Pashupatinath.” I said quietly, unravelling my fingers from his. I needed fresh air, I needed to be close to the gentle, all encompassing embrace of Lord Pashupati, the form of Shiva known as the lord of animals, for what was I if not one of his creatures?

I followed Nabh quietly down the cement steps and through the wooden door of his family’s home. It was chilly, the wintry air of the Himalayas seeping into my bones as we maneuvered the narrow, brick-lain streets of his neighborhood. The darkness of Kathmandu should not be referred to as darkness at all, not merely due to the bright headlamps of endless motorbikes and vehicles racing mercilessly along the smog covered roads, but because there was something about this city that never seemed to sleep, a wakefulness as ancient and luminous as the stars— fragrant with a consciousness much larger than my own, that laughed in the face of my petty, mortal problems. I found it sobering.

The warm, tantalizing scent of ghee, caramelized sugar and fresh cardamom wafted down the street as we left the sleepier parts of the neighborhood behind. Nabh stopped in a small, well lit shop with a large fryer out front, where a weathered Nepali man sizzled greasy treats in a vat of sputtering oil. Nabh purchased a few ladoos, pulling down my dust mask to feed me one of the soft, creamy sweets with his hand.

Thick bellows of smoke rose from the banks of the Bagmati river, where bodies burned by the sacred waters, now filled with the pollution of the city. The richly decorated tiers of the Pashupatinath temple peered over the high wall enclosing it, as Mahadev overlooked the goings on below.

Nabh nibbled a laddo, but I didn’t feel right eating beside the dead. Instead, I watched the throng of visitors curiously, each carrying their private lives upon their brows as they experienced the very same moment I was, our separate worlds moving between and along side one another like bubbles floating through air. I was an outsider looking in, afforded only a passing a glimpse of their worlds; the lovers huddling by the shrines, the mourners sobbing beside the marigold-covered corpses of their dear ones, the priests packing up their arathi stands…

A little old lady in a faded red sari and woolen hat danced ecstatically by the cremation fires, deep in the throws of her devotion to Mahadeva. I watched her hungrily, for her joy was palpable. She moved with such ease and lightness of foot, her round face crinkling with laughter as though the weight of the world had been shrugged from her back long ago. I couldn’t help but envy her…

“Are you ready?” Nabh squeezed my hand, glancing at his wristwatch.

No…

I wanted to run from him, to yell, to dance with that woman by the banks of Bagmati, to feel my feet grow raw as they drummed the earth. Instead I smiled, nodding weakly.

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