The Beastly Bride

GANESHA Jeffrey Ford

On a floating platform adrift in the placid Sea of Eternity, Ganesha sat on his golden throne beneath a canopy of eight cobras. The eyes in his elephant head gazed out past the moon; his big ears rippled in the breeze. Each of his four human hands was occupied, so his trunk curled up to scratch his cheek; the itch was a manifestation of evil in the million and second reality. In one hand he held the pointed shard of his broken tusk, using it to write on parchment held by a second hand. In his third hand was a lotus flower, and his fourth hand was turned palm out to show a red tattoo of a cross with bent arms, meaning, be well. He wore baggy silk pants the color of the sun, but no shirt to cover his chest and bulging gut. His necklace was a live snake, as was his belt. At his feet sat Kroncha, the rat, nibbling a stolen modaka sweet.

In the west, something fell out of the sky, sparking against the night. Ganesha watched its descent, and when it collided with the sea, a great sizzle and a burst of light becoming dark again, he marked the spot by pointing his trunk. He stood and stretched. “A journey,” he said to Kroncha. The rat followed, and they went to the edge of the floating platform where a boat had appeared, an open craft lined with comfortable pillows. In a blink, they were aboard. Ganesha rested his weighty head back, one hand holding a parasol to block the moonlight, and crossed his legs. They remembered only after they had pushed off to bring the modaka sweets, and so the sweets appeared. The wind picked up and gently powered the boat to sea.

After a brief eternity, they reached the spot where the object had fallen.

“There it is,” said Kroncha, who was sitting atop the parasol. As Ganesha rose, the rat scurried down his back.

The boat maneuvered next to the floating debris. Ganesha leaned over and picked something out of the water. “Look at this,” he said, and held up a prayer. It wriggled in his hands for a moment before he popped it in his mouth and ate it.

“Where to this time?” said Kroncha, leaning his elbow against the bowl of sweets, shaking his head.

“My favorite, New Jersey,” said Ganesha, and his laughter, the sound of OM, gave birth to realities.

They took the turnpike south from the Holland tunnel, Ganesha perfectly balanced on Kroncha’s small back. The rat did seventy-five and complained bitterly of tailgating. At the traffic tie-up, they leaped in graceful arcs from the roof of one car to the next, landing in perfect silence and rhythm. Back on the road, Ganesha eventually gave instructions to take the number 6 exit south. Kroncha complied with relief.

In the next instant, it was the following afternoon, and Kroncha carried Ganesha across a vast, sunburned field toward a thicket of trees next to a lake. In among the trees, there were picnic tables, and sitting at one of them, the only person in the entire park, was a dark-haired teenage girl, smoking a cigarette. She wore cutoff jeans and a red T-shirt, sneakers without socks. When she saw the elephant-headed god approaching, she laughed out loud and said, “I thought you might show up this time. I burned five cones of incense.”

“A tasty morsel,” said Ganesha as he dismounted from the rat with a little hop. His stomach and chest jiggled. The girl stood and walked toward him. When she came within reach, he lifted his trunk and wrapped it around her shoulders. She closed her eyes and patted it softly twice. “Florence,” he whispered in an ancient voice.

“I changed my name,” she said, turning and heading back toward the table.

Ganesha laughed. “Changed your name?” he said and followed her. “To what, Mithraditliaminak?”

She took a seat on one side of the bench, and he shimmied as much of his rear end as he could onto the opposite side, lifting hers a couple of inches off the ground. The wooden planks beneath them quietly complained as the two leaned back against the edge of the table.

“Call me Chloe,” she said.

“Very well,” said Ganesha.

“Florence is a crappy name,” she said, “like an old woman with a girdle and a hairnet.”

“You have wisdom,” said Ganesha, and allowed the bowl of sweets to appear on the table between them.

“Chloe’s much more. I don’t know. I love these things,” she said, lifting one of the golden rice balls. “How many calories are they, though?”

“Each one’s a universe,” he said, lifting a modaka with the end of his trunk and bringing it to his mouth.

“I’ll just have a half,” she said.

“She’ll just have a half,” said Kroncha, who sat at their feet.

“If you bite it, you’ll be compelled to finish it,” said Ganesha.

Her lips were parting and the sweet was just under her nose. Its aroma went to her eyes, and she saw a beautiful garden alive with butterflies and turquoise birds, but even there she heard his warning.

“No,” she said and put the sweet back into the bowl.

“Ah-ha!” he said and picked up the abandoned modaka. He stood up suddenly, her end of the bench falling three inches, and he waddled a few feet away from the picnic table. Standing in a small clearing amid the thicket, his elephant head trumpeted, his human legs danced, and his four arms spun. As his clarion note echoed out through the trees and across the field and lake in all directions, he gave a little kick and threw the modaka into the sky.

Her gaze followed its trajectory, first golden against the blue day and then, of a sudden, a ball of fire streaking away through the night. The eyeblink replacement of sun with moon nearly made her lose her balance. Still, she managed to watch until the sweet became a star among the million other stars. When Ganesha, glowing slightly in the dark, turned to face her, she clapped for him. He bowed.

Once they were situated back on the bench, the girl lit a cigarette. Ganesha gently waved her smoke away with his ears and curled his trunk over his left shoulder. Kroncha climbed on the bench between them, curled up, and went to sleep.

She leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, and turned her head to look at him. “It’s night now?” she asked.

He nodded, pointing to the moon and stars with three of his hands.

“What happened to the day?” she asked.

“You’ll get it back later,” he said.

“Got my report card today,” she said, and took a drag.

“A triumph, no doubt,” he said.

“When my father saw it, he checked my pulse. My mother was in tears. I can’t help it, though; their frustration is comical to me. A report card. What does it really mean?”

“An excellent question,” said Ganesha.

“Should I care?”

“Do you feel as if you should?”

“No,” she said, and flicked the glowing butt away onto the dirt.

“You’ve outwitted that conundrum, then,” he said.

She leaned over slightly and began petting the sleeping Kroncha.

“When I saw you in the time of the red leaves, you told me you were in love,” said Ganesha.

She smiled. “An elephant never forgets,” she said. “I hate that part.”

“The young gentleman with the tattoo of Porky Pig on his calf?”

She nodded and smiled. “You know Porky Pig?” she said.

Ganesha waved with all four hands. “Th-th-that’s all, folks.”

“Simon,” she said. “He was okay for a while. We used to bike out to the forest, and he helped me build a little shrine to you out of cinder blocks from the abandoned sand factory. I brought out your picture, and we’d go there at night, drink beer and light incense. He was really cute, but under the cute there was too much stupid. He was always either grabbing my tits or punching me in the shoulder. He laughed like a clown. After I dumped him, I rode out to the forest to the shrine one day and found that he’d wrecked it, torn your picture to scraps, and kicked over the thing we’d built, which, now that I think about it, looked a lot like a barbecue pit. Then he told everyone I was weird.”

“Aren’t you?” asked Ganesha.

“I guess I am,” she said. “Poe’s my favorite writer, and I like to be alone a lot. I like the sound of the wind in the trees out by the abandoned factory. I like it when my parents are asleep at night and aren’t worrying about me. I can feel their worry in my back. I have a lot of daydreams — being in a war, being married, making animated movies about a porcupine named Florence, running away, getting really good at poetry, having sex, getting really smart and telling people what to do, getting a car and driving all over.”

“Sounds like you’ll need to get busy,” said Ganesha.

“Tell me about it,” she said. “My specialty is napping.”

“A noble pursuit,” he said.

“The other day,” she said, “when I took a walk in the afternoon, I went all the way out to the factory. I sat on that big rock next to it and watched the leaves blowing in the wind. In a certain configuration of sky and leaves, I saw this really detailed image of a mermaid. It was like she was there flying through the air.”

He closed his eyes and tried to picture it.

“A rabbit hopped out from behind a tree then, and I looked away for a second. When I looked back to the leaves, she was gone. No matter how I squinted or moved my head, I couldn’t find her there anymore.”

“Nevermore,” whispered Kroncha from sleep.

“I thought it might have been a sign from you.”

“No,” said Ganesha, “that was yours.”

“I’ve wanted to write a poem about it,” she said. “I can feel it inside me, there’s energy there to do it, but when I sit down and concentrate — no words. All that happens is I start thinking about other stuff. I’m afraid I’ll look away from her one day, and she’ll be gone, as well, from my memory.”

“Well,” he said, sitting forward, “am I the destroyer of obstacles or am I not?” As he spoke, the color drained from him and he became gleaming white. Out of thin air appeared four more arms to make eight, and in his various hands he held: a noose, a goad, a green parrot, a sprig of the kalpavriksha tree, a prayer vessel, a sword, and a pomegranate. His eighth hand, empty, he turned palm up, as if offering something invisible to her.

“You are definitely the Lakshmi Ganapathi,” she said, laughing.

The seven items suddenly disappeared from his hands, but he remained the color of the moon. “Show me the things you think about instead of the mermaid,” he said.

“How?”

“Just think about them,” he said. “Close your eyes.”

She did, but after quite a while, she said, “I can’t even picture. Oh, wait. Here’s something.” Her eyes squinted more tightly closed. She felt the image in her thoughts gather itself into a bubble and exit her head. It tickled the lobe of her left ear like a secret kiss as it bobbed away on the breeze. She opened her eyes to see it. There it floated, five feet from them, a clear bubble with a scene inside.

“Who’s that?” asked Ganesha.

“My mother,” she said.

“She’s preparing something.”

“Meat loaf.”

“Do you like it?” he asked.

“Gross,” she said.

“Not exactly a modaka,” he said. “Let’s see more.”

She closed her eyes and thought, and eventually the bubbles came in clusters, exiting from both ears. Each held a tiny scene from her life. They bobbed in midair and sailed on the breeze, glowing pale blue. Some had risen to the tallest branches of the trees and some lit snaking paths through the thicket toward the lake or field.

“There goes Simon,” she said as the last few bubbles exited her right ear.

“Call them back,” said Ganesha.

“How?”

“Whistle,” he said.

She did, and no sooner had she made a sound than all of the glowing bubbles halted in their leisurely flights and slowly reversed course. She whistled again, and they came faster and faster, flying from all directions, each emitting a musical note that made their return a song that filled the surrounding thicket. Their speed became dizzying, and then, at once, they all collided, exploding in a wave of blue that swamped the picnic table. The blue blindness quickly evaporated to reveal a man-shaped creature composed of the bubbles. Now, instead of scenes, each globe held an eye at its center. The thing danced wildly before Chloe and Ganesha, sticking out its long, undulating tongue of eyes.

She reared back against the table. “What is it?”

“A demon. We must destroy it,” said Ganesha, and leaped off the bench. The ground vibrated with his landing, and this startled the demon, which turned and fled, its form wavering, turning momentarily to pure static, like the picture on the old television in her parents’ den.

“Kroncha, to the hunt,” said Ganesha, his color changing again, blue and red swirling through moon-white and mixing.

The rat rubbed its eyes, stood up, and jumped down to the ground. As Ganesha squatted upon Kroncha’s back, the rat asked, “A demon?”

Ganesha now brandished the point of his broken tusk as a weapon. “Correct,” he said. Kroncha inched forward, building speed.

Chloe was stunned by what she’d seen. She wanted to follow but was unable to move.

“I suspected as much from the moment she refused the modaka,” said the rat.

Ganesha nodded, and they were off.

It wasn’t until god and vehicle were just a faint smudge of brightness weaving away through the trees that Chloe overcame the static in her head and woke from amazement. The thought that called her back was that the demon could easily return and she would have to battle it alone. She tasted adrenaline as she bolted from the bench. Across the clearing and into the trees she sprinted, afraid to call out for what might be watching.

At one point, early on, she thought she would catch them, but Kroncha moved deceptively fast, and suddenly the path had disappeared. The ground was uneven and riddled with protruding roots. She hurried as best she could, still driven by fear. “Where’s my day?” she whispered. The night was getting cold. She passed through a forest she’d not known existed, waiting for the demon to pounce at any moment and thankful for the moonlight.

The trees eventually gave way to a sandy mountain path littered with boulders. She knew there were no mountains within a hundred miles of where she lived. I’m in a dream within a dream, she thought, and climbed up onto a flat rock to rest. Her legs hurt, and she realized she was exhausted. She lay back and looked for her star, but it was lost among the others.

If I fall asleep here and then wake, I’ ll wake from this dream and be back at the picnic table in late afternoon, she thought. She closed her eyes and listened to the breeze.

She knew she’d slept, but it seemed only for the briefest moment, and when she opened her eyes she groaned to see more night. There was soft sand beneath her, not rock, and it came to her that she was in a new place. Remembering the threat of the demon, she stood quickly and turned in a circle, her hands in fists. The moonlight showed, a few yards away, a mountain wall with a cave opening. Within the cave, she perceived a flickering light.

It’s in there, she thought, and at that instant, Ganesha’s broken tusk appeared in her left hand. “We must destroy it,” she remembered him saying and realized that she’d never retrieve her day unless she confronted the demon. An image came to her mind of her mother making meat loaf and it weighed her down, slowed her, as she moved toward the opening in the mountain. She fought against it, as if against a strong silent wind. And then a cascade of other memories beset her — Simon, her father, her condescending English teacher, a group of kids snickering as she passed, her image in the bedroom mirror. Still she struggled, managing to inch along, drawing closer to the light within. At the entrance, she hesitated, unable to move forward, and then holding the tusk in front of her, point out, she swung her arm, slicing a huge gash in the malevolent resistance. There was a bang, the myriad bubble eyes that composed her demon exploding, and its power over her bled away quickly into the night.

The cave’s interior was like a rock cathedral, the ceiling vaulting into the shadows above. Instead of the demon there was a shining blue woman holding a lotus flower, floating six feet off the ground. She wore a jade green gown and a helmet made of gold. The blue vision smiled down upon Chloe, and the girl felt a beautiful warmth run through her, putting her at ease and filling her with energy.

“I am the shakti,” said the blue woman.

“The power?” asked Chloe.

The woman nodded. She motioned for the girl to sit at the table between them where lay a blank sheet of paper. Chloe sat on the stone bench and turned the tusk around in her hand, from a weapon to a pen. The shakti gave her light, and she wrote, the tusk moving like an implement made of water over the page, birthing words almost before she thought them.

Back in the late afternoon, at the picnic table in the thicket by the lake, Florence folded the piece of paper that held her poem and slipped it into her back pocket. Then she capped her pen and climbed up on top of the table to sit with legs crossed, staring out at the sun’s last reflection on the lake. She had a smoke and watched the world turn to twilight, the stars slowly appear. Among them, she was surprised to be able to identify her own, and she reached up into the sky for it. It burned in her hand at first with a cold fire, but as she drew it toward her mouth, it became the sweet modaka.

“A universe,” said Kroncha, sitting at the foot of Ganesha’s throne on the floating platform in the Sea of Eternity. “She’ll have no room for meat loaf tonight.”

Ganesha nodded and his stomach jiggled when he laughed, the echo of his mirth pervading a million realities, crumbling a million obstacles to dust.

JEFFREY FORD is the author of the novels The Physiognomy, Memoranda, The Beyond, The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, The Girl in the Glass, and The Shadow Year. His short fiction has been published in three collections: The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant, The Empire of Ice Cream, and The Drowned Life. His fiction has won the World Fantasy Award, the Nebula Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, and the Gran Prix de l’Imaginaire. He lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons and teaches literature and writing at Brookdale Community College.

I can’t recall when I became aware of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god of the Hindu religion, but it was quite a few years ago. I do recall that his image was immediately pleasing to me. I felt a cosmic mirth behind it — the idea of an elephant head on a man’s body, his shameless girth, the fact he rode on a rat, his many arms. After my first meeting with him, I occasionally, over the following years, did haphazard research about his story. What I didn’t suspect from the beginning was how very powerful this god was. He’s one of the most important figures in the Hindu pantheon. The stories told about him feature earthly desires and mythic implications. He’s the Destroyer of Obstacles.

I’d wanted to write about Ganesha for a long time. I could readily see him behind my eyes, involved in a drama. There was one huge obstacle, though. I really didn’t know that much about him. The Hindu religion is extraordinarily old and complex, and the more you study Ganesha the more your perception of him changes to reveal some new aspect you’d been previously unaware of.

A few semesters ago, I was teaching a creative writing class, and one of the students was an older gentleman, a retired physician, Dr. Patel. He was a good guy, very smart but very laid-back and with a sense of humor. One day after class, I asked him about Ganesha. Having been born in India and brought up in the Hindu religion, he had what seemed to me a very deep understanding of the subject. He had all kinds of interesting insights and stories about the god.

I told the doctor my plans to write about Ganesha, and I also told him about my trepidation, worrying I didn’t know enough. He thought for a moment or two and said to me, “If you write with an open heart, Ganesha will accept it.” I thought about that for a year and a half, and then I wrote the story.

If you’re interested, there’s a lot of information online about Ganesha. As a reference for this story, I used the book, Ganesha: The Auspicious. The Beginningby Nanditha Krishna and Shakunthala Jagannathan. It’s a general source with stories and information and has a lot of great pictures.