Naming Maya Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m fine.” I get up and dust myself off. I pick up the shopping bags and begin gathering the scattered potatoes and greens. And then all at once, I feel a familiar sticky hot trickle in my nose and watch in dismay as the first warm drop of blood falls on my pale-green cotton kameez.
    Terrible timing.
    When I was younger I used to have frequent nosebleeds. Not the little drippy jobs some kids get. These were gushing fountains that spouted out of my nose and over everything in sight. By the time I’d put ice on my forehead and pinched my nostrils together, and reassured people, “Don’t worry. It’s okay, I’ll be all right,” I’d be covered with enough blood, you’d think I was the goddess Durga herself, coming back from battling the buffalo demon Mahisha. No lion for me to ride, though.
    My mother is funny about blood, so she’d get really
flustered whenever it happened. Dad would get me to sit up, lean my head back, pinch my nostrils, cool down. Then he’d get me a big glass of juice.
    Over the years he was there less and less. Sometimes he’d be around, but too wrapped up in work to help me. He’d say, “Coming, Maya, I’ll be there in just a minute,” but then I began to figure out that wasn’t always true.
    He had quit his job and tried to start a business, something to do with the stock market. The basement became an office, where before it had been one big playroom for me.
    One weekend when I was eight, Mom was out grocery shopping and the telephone rang. Dad was in the office, which was where he’d begun to spend a lot of time, sometimes even falling asleep at his desk. I picked it up.
    â€œPreeta, is that you? How nicely you answer the phone!” My grandmother asked to speak to Dad.
    â€œDaddy,” I called. “It’s Ammamma for you.”
    He picked it up in the basement. I tiptoed to the bottom of the stairs and listened. He kept on clacking those keys and talking on the phone, but soon his voice rose higher, drowning out the frantic tap-tap-tap of his fingers on the computer keyboard.
    It was then that I felt a tickle in my nostril. I stood in his office, but he didn’t even notice me. He was too
busy arguing with his mother on the phone. When Mom came home I lied to her. “I had a nosebleed, and Daddy helped me,” I said. Because of course I knew that if he could have, he would have.
    Ever since then, when it happened, I’d go in the bathroom to take care of it, then I’d wash up and cool off when it was over, and I’d get a drink afterward. And I wouldn’t tell my parents about it.
    Here on the sidewalk, with a hundred people gathering around to gawk at me, I don’t feel so capable.
    No problem, as it turns out. Kamala Mami handles the crowds. She swears and fusses (“Fools! Madaya! Muttal! Don’t you have anything better to do than stand around and cast evil eyes on this poor child?”) until they leave us alone. She gets me into a little grocery store crammed with tins of everything from cooking oil to baby powder. Mami makes me sit on the dusty floor and lean back on a sack of rice. She gets the man in the store to turn on a giant electric fan so the cool air swishes on my face. She buys a green coconut from the old man selling them on the sidewalk, and asks him to hack it open for me. Then she sticks a straw in it, and holds it in her cracked old hands while I drain it gratefully.
    â€œSit still and don’t try to talk,” Mami warns.
    That’s fine with me.
    She chants the way she does at home, in the
kitchen, or while she’s lighting incense sticks in her little shrine. “Annapurni, sadaapurni …” She chants the names of Devi, the goddess, giver of food and killer of demons. She tells stories of all the forms the goddess can take when she comes down to earth, some sweet and loving, and some strong and fierce.
    â€œThe buffalo demon thought he