Excerpt from the book Where The Long Grass Bends

From "Possession at the Tomb of Sayyed Pir Hazrat Baba Bahadur Saheed Rah Aleh"

The Spirits, Anger and Sorrow

My name is Gussa and last Thursday I came to live inside this woman. As she rolled out her prayer rug I was shaken loose from the crook in the Tree of Life where I had lazed for forty-three years. Out of the carpet weft, past the easterly mirab and shabby fringe, I sailed into the woman's intestines. For a week I waited, wandering by her bladder and squeezing around her sockets. I missed the dry rug, the opinions of the wool, sometimes irritating and judgmental like the sheep it had grown from, but still, a familiar voice. It is never easy to leave a place of comfort. The dangerous pumping of this woman's heart and the emissions of her liver frightened me. I hid at the base of her skull, an area of some peace. Then the woman and her daughters were invited to a wedding where she ate seven and a half ladoos. In her veins, I saw the linear structure of glucose sweep by. It excited me. Lengthening, I soused the woman's lungs. She ran to the tomb. It was Thursday. Up her throat I spiraled, branching off and down and plunging into her arms. She pounded on the floor, she hollered and grunted, and I, I minced along her tongue. Reaching her teeth, I pushed through the stained gaps. And all of this I did, all of it, so she could roar, "Why did you not ask me how I felt?"

My name is Dukkha, and twenty Thursdays ago, I came to live inside this child. From the smoke of her mother's funeral pyre I detached myself and flew up her nose. Warm and moist, I stayed hidden in the short cilia, gripping tightly when she sneezed. For five weeks I swung there, small but persistent. When she slept, I elongated and spread myself into the bumpy folds of her cerebellum, the canals of her tiny ears. I was sneaky and silent. And one afternoon, the child stepped down from the stool that she used to reach the stovetop. She left the lentils to burn in the pot. She left her brother's math equations blank, and her father's shirt, twice her length from skull to toe, she put aside with an unmended tear. The tires of her uncle's bicycle flat she left flat, and her grandfather's gritty feet, she ignored. As she walked to the temple to garland Ganesha, to pat his trunk and say hello, I sloshed back and forth in her ears. It was the scent of marigolds that finally released me. As the girl extended her hand to the Lord's nose, I shot into her legs, down past her pointed knees and wormed into her toes, as small as peas. She ran to the tomb. It was Thursday. On the ground she curled up, puny and tight; she rocked, rolled, back and forth. I slid into the corners of her eyes, careful to avoid the gravel there, and then she cried, she moaned and grieved, and sometimes she shouted in her squeaky voice, "I miss my mother, I miss her. Let me have a life of my own."