Six Steps Toward Consecration

1

Once Full

It began when she was seen that afternoon. But perhaps it began even earlier, when she survived her own infanticide, when the milky latex traveled down the conch of her baby throat and she swallowed it hungrily, gurgling at her mother for more, still more. She was born in the southernmost tip of the southernmost state of the subcontinent, where the land was parched skin that cracked and bled and stained the soil a deep, cankerous red. Perhaps it began with a question of her differential survival, of heritable traits mutating over time. But perhaps it was none of these things at all.

2

Some Kind of Libation

That afternoon, heat and light rippled together in waves that rent the stifling air. It began when a tall, brittle husk of a girl was spotted quenching her thirst on the poisonous sap of the firestick cactus—its sugars, oils, tannins, alkaloids congealing into an opaline emulsion against the curve of her throat, against the fibrous loop of her tracheal rings.

3

The Hall of the Womb

News of this event spread through the town where the girl was last seen. The townsfolk lurched out of their habitual torpor with an energy that shone with an unpleasant radiance. They sounded the bells, the drums, the cymbals, and the loudspeakers—booming warnings between devotional songs, ritual gossip, and cheap film music about the pei in their midst, the ghoul that would snatch the menfolk away, away from their lives of ordinary solidness, transporting them into a foul vacuum filled with blood-soaked spite and virility. They scrawled indru poi naalai vaa—leave today, come tomorrow—on walls and ceilings and windows and pavements in lurid yellow-ochre letters, folding themselves within a topography of fear. They did this to dupe the ghoul perhaps, or even to evoke her reserves of pity for them, but especially so for the young men that exuded an inviolable ripeness.

4

Self-Revealed Manifestation

It began when she threw herself off an embankment. Her bloated corpse was discovered in the pale flush of daybreak, her veins blue-green glass under thin ribbons of light. Smoky clouds of tadpoles took refuge in her mouth, nostrils, ears.

5

Opening the Eyes and the Throat

They erected a stone at the foot of the river, a smooth granite monolith intended to quell her remains from curdling into a loathing that burned through the town in an inferno of fury. On some nights, they left her offerings of buffalo milk and honeycomb and mottled eggs, of red hibiscus flowers and pungent arrack, of oily biriyani prepared with deep-fried cashews, of chicken thighs wrapped in young banana leaves. They anointed her with pastes of sandalwood and turmeric and lovingly addressed her as amma: mother, their mother, their mother's mother. She stood sanctified and she stood defanged, their paeans of love and protection and universal motherhood girdling her in a hallowed sheath.

6

Inscriptions Of

It began with a girl that was once a ghoul, a stone, a goddess. Sometimes, it began with a girl that was once a woman, but no one could say otherwise.