Kali

The city is her cradle, is her hunting ground, is the ratta-tatta rhythm of her steadily beating heart. She comes and goes. You may catch a glimpse of her, here and there, too dark to be beautiful, too terrible to be really loved. It’s a toss-up, see? It’s a bargain that you make. She is young and she is also old, rings on her fingers, the music of silver skulls at her belt. She wears her hennaed hair in careful coils…the palms of her slender hands are red like blood. She was sari silk and denim scarred with acid. She is beautiful and terrible and lovely as an electrical storm at sea. She is Kolkotta’s heart, and hearts are bloody too.

The world could turn on a penny, on a copper coin. This moment here; this moment is the entire of history. Stories have a beginning and a middle but it’s the endings which take skill. Not everybody can tell a good story. It takes heart to end something. He is closing. He is ending. He doesn’t know it yet. They never, ever know (he couldn’t tell a story if he tried). When he saw her in the bar, it was like lightening striking, like eclipse – like all of the world went dark, except for the shadow which she threw against a darkened sky, arms raised and dancing, like Love, like God. He was dumbstruck, dazed; the dull copper penny tones of her hair, the smooth slope of dark skinned breasts. Her wrists were heavy with gold jewellery. Her lips reminded him of blood. She was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. She was like a loud noise happening in a quiet room. She echoed.

He thinks that he saw her first.

They always think that but what he doesn’t know was that they were her girls, hers only. Each of them was another of her beating hearts. She is a mother spurned and betrayed. He has broken her hearts, thinking that they didn’t matter – if they walked the streets then nobody loved them. If they sold their love then nobody cared. She cares. She has always cared. She has so much love. She used to have so much mercy. Her heart is solid iron to him now. He took away all the words that she had to refer to herself, and left her empty.

This has nothing to do with love now.

The room is nothing special; garish prints and dirty tile, grime around taps, a bag made especially for carrying business suits. The room is not important. They are on the bed together, which is important. They are the centre of the known world. Nude, now, she rises above him, pulling pins from her hair and scattering them on worn sheets like omens, like spells. She bones over him and whispers to him that, when he’s gone, she’ll miss him like bones. His hands are on her hips. Her hands are on her breasts, in her hair. Those girls were soft, their bodies parting and bleeding like delicate flowers, but she is wo-man, and she is better than he is. Every man she’s ever known was desert, built on shifting sand, but she is wet earth, and in her, things will grow when she needs them. She guides him inside her, imagines him pushing against her heart. She bends over him and presses a kiss to the taunt skin of his chest, sharp with sweat, and then she bites.

He screams, at first, but he stays hard inside her too. Mine, she murmurs. Price.

She takes what she is owed in blood. Sometime after the screaming stops, she rises, leaving him low. He will always be low now; this is the price that he paid for mistaking life as something cheap. Life is never cheap, and children’s lives are as gold to mothers. A baby is a prize bought for blood and sweat and tears and years. She is a mother. She was their mother. She will be a mother again (her daughters and sons are legion). She leaves bloody prints on walls and sheet and pale skin gone slack…he had too much skin and too much hate. She leaves her mark in scarlet which will dry brown, be washed away by careful hands, a girl on her knees with her hair carefully wrapped and a gold ring on her finger so thin that it would bend out of shape. She winds her hair with fastidiously collected pins. She dresses last, the storm-breeze from the window drying blood on her skin like tattoos, as telling as wrinkles or scars. She empties his wallet and leaves a wad of dollars in a fold of sheet, present for the girl with the carefully wrapped hair. It’s still night-time when she finds herself back on the street. She soft-shoe shuffles a dance step at alien angles with the clothes she wears, and she blows kisses to the doorway, alleyway, kohl-smeared girls. They’ll sleep sounder now, when they go to sleep. Those ones, and the others, her poor dead beautiful girls. A little rain is starting, as she ducks under archways and goes on her way, his raincoat keeping out the worst of it, belted tight. She is a Goddess but not just a Goddess here. A mother also, here. Kolkotta sees her coming and shelters her.

Kolkotta is her lover, her cradle and her hunting ground, the ratta-tatta rhythm of her rapidly beating heart.