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

the temple. When a particularly aggressive man grabbed Andie by the front of her sari, she gritted her teeth and swatted his hand away, resisting the urge to lay him out flat.

Keep your cool, Andie. Stay in control. We can’t cause a scene.

The smells alone were overwhelming. Spice and incense and sugary treats, rotting flowers and fresh flowers, the saccharine fruits of lush foliage snaking through the cracks in the buildings. Overhead loomed the temple itself, the central tower a multitiered dome painted silver, reminiscent of the fairy-tale Bengali architecture she had seen in countless photos. Bands of bright color curved around the tower below the dome, and the temple walls bore a green-and-white chessboard pattern. The entire complex was ringed, at least the portion Andie had seen, by canvas stalls selling a mind-boggling array of costume jewelry, sweet treats, animal skulls, flowers, and other votive offerings.

The closer they drew to the temple, the more the crowds and the frenetic energy increased. As they passed through the open-air entrance and joined the crush of people in the courtyard trying to climb the steps to the mandir proper, Andie felt as if she might pass out from the heat of so many bodies pressed together in the hot sun.

She took a few sips of bottled water, wiped sweat off her brow, and took deep breaths to stay calm. The bumping, jostling, and shuffling into place made her feel as if she were at the start of some nightmare marathon.

She was not scared, though. Except for the horrid touts, the energy of the crowd was not aggressive. It was unlike anything else, or at least anything she had ever experienced. She marveled that the source of all this furor was a belief in a deity, an embodiment of invisible cosmic principles that drew these people together and had shaped the course of events on the subcontinent for millennia. Whether the goddess was real or a product of a collective cultural imagination, the devotion she inspired in her worshippers—the sheer phenomenology surrounding her religion—was a thing to behold.

The people pressing into this building believed in the visceral reality of Kali. Of that Andie had no doubt.

In the center of the crowd, sitting cross-legged on a blanket on the steps leading to the entrance, was a middle-aged woman with one arm and a braid of graying hair. Her face was upturned to the sky, her eyes rolled so far back the whites were showing. She rocked slowly in place as she chanted Kali’s name, over and over. Beside her on the blanket was an emaciated boy of nine or ten, with no legs below the knees and pus-filled boils on his face. His back was against the woman, presumably his mother, and he held out a cracked wooden bowl to the crowd, pleading for alms.

The crowd flowed around the pair as if they were a block of granite, somehow never touching them. As Andie passed by, she noticed the woman’s bindi was a smear of crimson across her forehead.

The boy caught Andie’s gaze. “Please, money from you? We have nothing.”

As the boy shifted his position to lift his bowl, he grimaced in pain. She realized he had an open sore on his knee from scraping the ground for so long. The look in his eyes, an absence of life and hope and basic humanity on a level she had never before witnessed, made her stop where she was and risk being smothered by the crowd. Emotion welled up deep inside her, bringing tears she worked furiously to blink away. The boy didn’t need her pity. He needed help. As she dug in her cross-body handbag for rupees, she noticed the skeletal outline of his ribs, the dirt-encrusted nails, the sunburned lips stretched over white teeth that were the sole remaining mark of his innocence.

A child. A starving child, surrounded by thousands of people walking right by him.

I know this is an entirely different culture, and there are starving children at home, and the money will probably go to some evil handler, and nothing I do will make a difference, and we have to hurry inside the temple. And I don’t. Fucking. Care.

Cal pulled her gently by the arm. “We should go,” he said quietly.

After dropping a fistful of rupees into the bowl, earning a gush of thanks from the boy and not a shred of recognition from the mother, she let Cal pull her away, wiping away a tear as they reentered the flow of people. The pungent smell of humanity pressing against them made her so dizzy she had to lean on him for support.

“I know,” he said. “It’s overwhelming.”

She could only nod, worried the nausea would induce another vision.

“Anything yet?” he asked, his eyes flicking to the Star Phone concealed in her left pocket.

She shook her head. On the way, she had pointed the device at the temple walls, and anything else that looked symbolic or important.

“So we’re doing this?” he said as they neared the main entrance. “It’s going to be chaos in there. What about circling the complex first?”

She gripped his arm as a man with gold chains draped across his shirtless chest bumped into them. Another worshipper was entering the open doorway to the temple with his back arched, thick red scars crisscrossing his stomach, supporting a lit candle with his tongue. Andie clenched her other hand as they approached the sluice of a doorway leading into the temple. “The Kali yantra is inside the main hall. We should start there.”

Cal grimaced as he stood on his tiptoes to scan the crowd. “You’re probably right. But I don’t like it.”

“Me either. What happened to calm museums?”

“Let’s just hope this is the right place.”

Once inside, the bedlam spilled into a vast room called the natmandir. People poured into the open-air hall from a multitude of entry points, jostling to enter a line headed toward the Kali idol at the far end of the hall, chanting and singing and talking, clutching