The Throwing of Bones

Christina Martin

In India they still burn the bodies of the dead on the banks of the Ganges River. Perhaps the feet are last to go up in flames, sticking out over the edge of the burning pyres like those of a grown man made to sleep in a child’s bed. She imagines them falling awkwardly to the ground, first one and then the other, before they are hurried back onto the scorching mounds by burners wielding two poles like long chopsticks. The burners spit great gobs of betel nut juice as red as blood alongside the piles of ash and charcoaled bone that line the steps leading down into the water. Just think, she wonders, how as a mourner you might recognize that foot. She looks at her own feet, dusty but still attached and swinging slightly with the movement of the train, and scrunches her toes. In Varanasi, where Katie is now headed, and where the dead are cremated, the dust is dark and sooty; it creeps under your nails and into the creases of knuckles and palms. In Rajasthan, where she is coming from, the dust is different, a fine dry sand that seeps down through nose and mouth and sticks in the lungs.

Katie has been on a train for eight and half hours now with another ten more to go before reaching the station in Varanasi. Her bunk in the second-class cabin is small and cramped and pale blue, the woven plastic upholstery sticking to sweaty calves every time she rolls over in her sleep. Sometimes it startles her awake with an unattractive ripping noise that she hopes isn’t misconstrued as a fart by the family asleep on the other side of the curtain that separates her bunk from the general compartment. They make for an odd trio and she wonders what their story is. There is an old Indian woman dressed in mourner’s white, and an Irishman of about 40, who speaks to the Indian grandmother with the sort of deliberate care that to Katie’s mind belies a lack of intimacy. The party is rounded out by a small child, half-Indian with his father’s hazel eyes, who walks like a toddler but is no bigger than an infant. The boy has found a pink ticket stub that he is licking and sticking to the wall. Every minute or so the spit dries and the stub flutters to the floor where the boy picks it up and begins the pattern anew. Neither the father nor the grandmother seems to notice. Katie wonders if she ought to bring it to their attention. His limbs seem foreshortened somehow, and she wonders if there is something developmentally not quite right about this boy.

“She wants to tell you that you’ve got lovely bones.”

“I’m sorry?” Katie realizes that the Irishman is speaking to her. With a start she also becomes aware that she has been picking distractedly at the black dirt on her big toes, oblivious to the fact that the family as well as a passing train conductor have all been staring. The Irishman seems embarrassed.

“I said she wants to tell you that you’ve got lovely bones. I think she means to say that your bone structure is beautiful.” He gestures toward the old woman with a wave and the woman nods emphatically, scooping the dwarf boy off the floor and into her arms. “The grandmother of my late wife,” he explains. “She is a holy woman. We are taking my wife’s ashes to the river…” He seems to lose all sense of words. “The Ganges,” he says, recovering. “That is why we are here.”

“I’m so sorry.” Katie never knows what to say in these moments. She has never been good at enacting the traditional ceremonies of grief. The Irishman nods solemnly at her, thankful for her acknowledgement. Sorry seems to be enough.
The little dwarf boy holds out his hands in the universal sign for ‘mama’. He is reaching out toward Katie, who freezes.

“Arjun, don’t bother the nice lady.” The Irish father gestures toward the grandmother as though imploring her to calm the little boy, who has now begun to fuss, his gaze still fixed on Katie’s neck and chest.

“It’s alright,” Katie says. “I’ll take him.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’ll take him.”

“Yaha chātī hai… the bosom.”

The grandmother motions at her own frail chest as she spills the child out onto Katie’s lap. The grandmother is right, and the little boy immediately presses his tiny hands onto the top of Katie’s breast, right where the sweat has made her shirt cling. The father blushes and looks pointedly out the window. The child begins to nudge his nose against the collar of her loose linen shirt and his chubby fingers tug lightly on her bra strap. Her breasts are so much softer now. Katie wishes she had something for him to play with – she’d returned all the shower gifts by mail except for a newborn onesie from her cousin Alex, the herpetologist, which she’d saved to give to a neighbor. It had geckos on it.
The Irishman’s skin where it peeks out underneath his watchband is white and lightly freckled, but the rest has been browned and leathered by the Indian sun. He tugs absentmindedly at his forelock when speaking to her, a tick that is annoying at first but soon becomes almost distractedly endearing. He tells her that he is named Alastar (Irish-Gaelic for Alexander, because my mother wanted to keep the old language up) but that she can call him Alex if she wants to.

“Do you like lizards?” she asks. He stares at her, confused.

“I think I’ll call you Alastar, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I’d like that a lot,” he says.

“His mother died in a car crash,” Alastar goes on, looking over at his son. “It was a nightmare. Rima always wanted to take Arjun to India. I brought him here to meet his great-grandmother. He isn’t growing and now he is sick. There is something wrong. I’ve never been any good with him. Rima was the one who had everything under control. She would have understood what to do.”

Katie tells Alastar about her life in New York, her struggles with the cost of rent and the noise, about how she’d left her masters program at Cornell just to move to the city in the first place. They smoke a cigarette together in the space between the train cars. They share a ceramic jar of spiced Indian tea that Alastar buys for three rupees at the station in Kunda, and he holds her hands above her head while they make love against the bathroom wall. Afterwards they sit cross-legged in silence together on Katie’s blue upholstered bunk with Arjun in between them, still playing with his little pink ticket stubs. Sometimes mercy manifests itself in unpredictable ways.

It is just past dawn when she finally descends the steep ghats leading down into the Ganges. The burners have already started up, just visible through the smoke and smog that obscures the other bank. Katie has an incredible urge to go swimming.

She takes a deep breath, opening herself to sound, sensation, the ceramic clink of jostling cups in the basket of a passing chai wallah, the strange thwapping rhythm of women beating laundry against the rocks along the riverbed, the smell of everything at once. She tugs off her sandal and dips a toe into the murky river. The water feels silkier than it ought to, almost brothy, like there’s oil in it. She sinks a foot in, and then another, goes up to the waist, chest, neck.

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Christina Martin is a New York City native and a graduate of Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where she studied English Literature. She currently resides in Harlem.