Before We Visit the Goddess by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

imagining what he might find when he reached the other end. It was a long journey; in between, he dozed and thought he was back at Durga Sweets, sitting at his desk in that windowless back room lit by a bulb hanging from its wire, sweating because it was always too hot there. Sabitri leaned over his desk, looking at the slogan he had just come up with: We Make the World a Sweeter Place . Her hair, its silky hibiscus smell, fell tangled onto his neck. “It’s perfect!” she exclaimed, clapping her hands. That was when he knew it was a dream. Sabitri would never have come to work without her hair tied back in a bun; she would never have clapped with such teenagerish abandon.
    Awake, he felt bereft. Then something Rekha had mentioned on the phone swam back into his mind. Ma said that if anything happened to her, I was to call you first, no one else.
    But of course, Bipin Bihari thought as he waited for station after station to pass, for the sooty factories of suburban towns to give way to young paddy fields so brilliantly green they hurt the eye. For as long back as he could remember, wasn’t he the one Sabitri had turned to, in good times and bad? In the midst of his anxiety, the thought made him smile.

    Walking into the small house that Sabitri had built after retirement on the plot where her parents’ mud hut had once stood, Bipin Bihari knew he was too late. Not because the front doors were carelessly ajar on their hinges. (He closed them behind him; Sabitri would not have wanted flies in her home.) Not because there was a gaggle of servant women, Rekha in their center, gathered in the inner courtyard, rocking back and forth, keening. (He instructed them to control themselves; Sabitri detested histrionics.) Not even because of the body (it was not Sabitri; it would never be her), laid out on a mattress on the floor, covered with a white sheet. He knew it because his heart had not stuttered and stumbled the way it always did when he was about to see her. His heart, now reduced to a mere muscle, resigned for the rest of Bipin Bihari’s life to the task of stolid pumping.
    Fortunately, there was no time to dwell on such things. He sent for the doctor, ascertained the cause of death (failure of the heart), and set in motion the process for getting a death certificate. He phoned the village cremation grounds and asked them to make the necessary arrangements. He told Rekha to inform Sabitri’s friends of the funeral (but Sabitri had kept mostly to herself, so there were not many). Searching guiltily through drawers, he managed to locate Sabitri’s address book and phoned her daughter in America. He made several calls, each time leaving a detailed message, trying not to think of the bill, and who would take care of it. But Bela did not pick up. In this heat, the body could not be kept in the house any longer. Already the room was filling with a sickly sweet stench. Finally, Bipin Bihari had to tell the cremation society folks to load the body into the back of their lorry and take it away.

    Sabitri’s village was small and old-fashioned, and so were the cremation grounds. Unlike in the electric crematoriums in Kolkata, here the body would be burned on a funeral pyre in the open air; then Sabitri’s ashes would be scattered in the sluggish brown river that ran by the cremation grounds. A deep tiredness overtook Bipin Bihari as he climbed down from the back of the lorry where he had accompanied the body. His bones ached, and the fillings in his teeth seemed to vibrate, giving him a headache. Still, he stood next to the pyre to make sure that the workers placed on it the right amount of sandalwood (for which he had paid extra) and that the corpse, draped in Sabitri’s best sari and covered with garlands, its face now uncovered so that the spirit might leave more easily, was handled gently.
    When the priest asked who would light the funeral fire, since Sabitri had no blood kin in the village,