Unknown 9 by Layton Green (each kindness read aloud txt) 📕

driver said. He closed the door and guided the private car through a maze of parked planes and utility vehicles before leaving the airport on a service road.

The inside of the sedan smelled of curry, and cottage cheese left out too long on the counter. Though the back seat was clean, clothes were heaped on the floor of the front passenger seat, and a pile of greasy discarded food wrappers cluttered the console. Attached to the dash was a bobbing goddess figurine with blue skin, six arms, pendulous breasts, inflamed red eyes, and a blackened tongue protruding grotesquely out of her mouth.

The driver must have noticed them staring at the figurine, because he patted it and said, “Not to worry, she takes no notice of Americans.” He gave a high-pitched giggle. “You are American?”

“Canadian, actually,” Andie said.

“Ah—very sorry. You know, they are very close.”

“It’s fine. How long will the drive take?”

“One or three hours.”

“I’m sorry,” Cal said. “Did you say one or three hours?”

“It is I who is sorry. The traffic in Kolkata is most unpredictable. In fact, the traditional route to Howrah is blocked, and I must drive through the city. I do hope very much to arrive at our destination as soon as is possible.”

The change in route made her nervous, but they were already in the car, and there was little they could do. As they merged onto a busy freeway with flat, unkempt grassland on either side, Andie let her imagination wander to the vision the Indian subcontinent had always conjured in her mind: crowded megacities that merged into impenetrable jungles where tigers still roamed; steamy deltas rising to the snowcapped majesty of the Himalayas; a wealth of palaces and shrines and hilltop forts; devout pilgrims flocking to holy rivers reeking of human waste; a caste system that had produced both the opulence of the Taj Mahal and some of the most grinding poverty on the planet.

But most of all, more than anywhere except the beach, India made her think of her mother.

Throughout Andie’s childhood, Samantha Zephyr’s infatuation with the subcontinent’s culture and history had registered loud and clear. Andie still remembered the mandalas her mother wore around her neck, the sacrosanct visits to the Ashtanga yogi every Saturday morning, and her mother grinding fresh spices for a curry as she regaled Andie with stories from Hindu mythology. Unlike her father’s half-hearted Methodism, which seemed hopelessly dull in comparison, young Andie had the impression that Hinduism, with its thousands of deities and wildly varying practices, was a fascinating milieu that seemed to wallow in all the glorious, barbaric, insane complexities of human nature.

Her mother had been attracted to all places on Earth whose cultures she considered spiritual in an ancient way, where there was a more direct conduit from the past to the present than in Western nations. She was just as eager to teach Andie about the Incan or Siberian shamans as she was to discuss physics or astronomy. But Hinduism in particular fascinated her. This was one reason Andie had so readily accepted her father’s story that her mother had left to join an ashram in India. It fit the narrative.

Because of this past connection, being in India as an adult felt strange to Andie, as if she were revisiting a familiar place she had never been, exploring memories she had never really had.

“Oh my,” Cal said as they merged onto a highway with a crush of traffic unlike any Andie had experienced. The lane dividers seemed to be suggestions rather than rules, and their driver had to swerve to avoid piles of garbage and industrial waste clogging the road. “We are most definitely not in Kansas anymore.”

“Have you been to India?” she asked.

“Never been east of Europe, unless you count Koreatown in LA.”

Andie had done a bit of research before they left Sicily. A former capital of the British Raj, known as Calcutta until 2001, the city’s name originated from the Bengali word Kalikata, which in turn meant land of Kali.

Kali, Andie knew, was a major figure in the Hindu pantheon, a complicated goddess who had become infamous in the Western imagination. Often portrayed in a similar manner to the fearsome avatar bobbing on their driver’s dashboard, Kali represented the void from which all life sprang. Her lustrous hair was a symbol for the freedom of the natural world, her many limbs signified both creation and destruction. The weapons in her hands and the severed heads of her enemies spoke of her strength and cruelty as a mother goddess, a protector. She was often depicted standing with a foot on the chest of her consort, Shiva, and had long been a source of feminine strength, a slayer of demons who suckled the universe at her breast.

Andie could see what her mother once saw in the goddess.

Andie kind of admired Kali, too.

She remembered the pilot’s warning about the city. Though she tended to scoff at urban legends—all cities had their unwholesome areas—she knew of the rumors of Kolkata’s dark side, and not just the horrific slums. When she had spent time in the world of the occult, searching for answers to her visions, she had heard tales of Kali worshippers prowling city streets at night, looking for sacrifices among the poor and unguarded, keeping ancient traditions alive.

Which she gave absolutely no credence to.

That might have been true hundreds of years ago, when the British had stumbled headlong into a millennia-old culture it did not understand. But modern Kolkata was a city of over fourteen million people, considered by many to be the cultural heart of India, and home to countless artists, scientists, and entrepreneurs.

She believed there were about as many ritual sacrifices in the inner sanctums of Kolkata’s temples as there were murders with voodoo dolls in New Orleans.

By the time they entered the city proper, the drizzle had become a monsoon, vomiting buckets of water on the windshield, limiting visibility to a few feet. Andie cringed as the driver continued at high speed