She met the Ma Durga inside those helmets, finally, a low-resolution specter who nonetheless looked her in the eyes and unfurled her arms in greeting. Her skin wasn’t the mustard-yellow or pastel flesh shades of the clay idols, but the coveted pale human pink of white people or the more appealing Indian ancestries, the same shades you’d find in kilometer-high ads for skin whiteners or perfume, on tweaked gifshoots of Bollywood stars and fashion models. This impressive paleness was somewhat diluted by the aliased shimmer of the devi’s pixelated curves, the blurry backdrop of nebulae and stars they both floated in. Durga had hacked her way into veeyar spaces before on 2-D and 3-D screens, so this half-rate module didn’t exactly stun as much as it disoriented her with its boundlessness. But the cheapness of its rendering left the universe inside the helmet feeling claustrophobic instead of expansive. The goddess waited about five feet in front of her, floating in the ether, eight arms unfolded like a flower. Unlike many of the solid idols in realspace pandals, the goddess was alone except for her vahana curled by her side—no host of companion deities, no defeated demon by her feet. The goddess construct said nothing, two of ten arms held out, as if beckoning.
Durga spoke to Durga the devi: “Ma Durga. I’ve wanted to ask you something for a long time. Do you mind?” Durga waited to see if the devi responded in some way.
Ma Durga blinked, and smiled, then spoke: “Hear, one and all, the truth as I declare it. I, verily, myself announce and utter the word that gods and men alike shall welcome.” She spoke Hindi—there was no language selection option. Durga was more fluent in Bangla, but she did understand.
Durga nodded in the helmet, glancing at the nebulae beneath her, the lack of a body. It made her dizzy for a moment. “Okay. That’s nice. I guess I’ll ask. Why are only some welcome in some of your houses? Doesn’t everyone deserve your love?”
Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “On the world’s summit I bring forth sky the Father: my home is in the waters, in the ocean as Mother. Thence I pervade all existing creatures, as their Inner Supreme Self, and manifest them with my body.” In the bounded world of that veeyar helmet, these words, recited in the devi’s gentle modulated Hindi, nearly brought tears to young Durga’s eyes. Not quite, though. The beauty of those words, which she didn’t fully understand, seemed so jarring, issued forth from this pixelated avatar and her tacky little universe.
Durga reached out to touch Ma Durga’s many hands, but the pandal’s chair rigs didn’t have gloves or motion sensors. She was disembodied in this starscape. She couldn’t hold the goddess’s hands. Couldn’t touch or smell her (what did a goddess smell like, anyway, she wondered) like those with ajnas could, in the samsara net. The tiger curled by the devi licked its paws and yawned. Durga thought of a long-gone green dress.
“I’m old enough to know you’re not really a goddess,” Durga said to Ma Durga. “You’re the same as the clay idols in the open pandals. Not even that. Artists make those. You’re just prefab bits and pieces put together for cheap by coders. You’re here to make money for pandal sponsors and the local parties.”
Ma Durga blinked, and smiled. “I am the Queen, the gatherer-up of treasures, most thoughtful, first of those who merit worship. Thus gods have established me in many places with many homes to enter and abide in.”
Durga smiled, like the goddess in front of her. “Someone wrote all this for you to say.” Someone had, of course, but much, much longer ago than Durga had any idea, so long ago that the original words hadn’t even been in Hindi.
With a nauseating lurch, the cramped universe inside the helmet was ripped away, and Durga was left blinking at the angry face of one of the pandal operators. “I heard what you were saying,” he said, grabbing her by the arm and pulling her from the chair. “Think you’re smart, little bitch? How dare you? Where is your respect for the goddess?” The other visitors waiting for the chair and helmet were looking at Durga like she was a stray dog who’d wandered inside.
“I didn’t even get to see her kill Mahishasura. I want my money back,” said Durga.
“You’re lucky I don’t haul you to the police for offending religious sentiments. And you didn’t give me enough money to watch Durga poke Mahishasura with a stick, let alone kill him. Get out of here before I drag you out!” bellowed the operator.
“Get your pandal some more memory next time, you fucking cheats, your Durga’s ugly as shit,” she said, and slipped out of reach as the man’s eyes widened.
Durga pushed past the line and left laughing, her insides scalded by adrenaline and anger, arm welted by the thick fingers of that lout of an operator. Durga had always wondered why Kali Puja didn’t feature veeyar pandals like Durga Puja, why clay and holo idols were still the norm for her. It was a smaller festival, but hardly a small one in the megacity. It felt like a strange contrast, especially since the two pujas were celebrated close to each other. Having seen the placid Ma Durga inside the pandal helmets, Durga understood. Kali was dark-skinned, bloody, chaos personified. They couldn’t have her running wild in the rarefied air of veeyar domains run by people with pale skin and bottom lines to look after. Kali was a devi for people like Durga, who were never allowed in so many places.
Best to leave Kali’s avatars silent, solid, confined to temples and old-school pandals where she’d bide her time before being ceremoniously dissolved in the waters of the Hooghly.
The trolls saw the AI goddess and her newly darkened skin, and now called her too ugly to be a goddess, a mockery of the purity and divinity of Indian womanhood. The moons of her eyes waning with lids of shadow, the goddess absorbed this. She began to learn more from the trolls. She began to learn anger. She began to know confusion. They wanted too many things, paradoxical things. They thought her too beautiful, and too ugly. They wanted people of various faiths, genders, sexualities, ethnicities, backgrounds dead. They wanted photoreal veeyar sexbots forged from photos and video of exes, crushes, celebrities. They wanted anti-nationals struck down by her might. They wanted a mother to take care of them.
And what did you want of her?
Whatever it was—it got shouted down by the trolls. Or maybe you were one of the trolls, hiding under a glitch mask or a new face to bark your truths, telling your friends later how trolls are bad, but self-righteous social justice warriors are just as dangerous.
It doesn’t matter. She learned from humanity, which you are a part of, troll and not. And humanity wanted solace from a violent world, your own violent hearts. You wanted love and peace. You wanted hate and blood. The devi grew darker still, encompassing the sky so her domain turned to new night. Her being expanded to encroach on the world beyond her mountaintop, her eyes gone from moons to raging stars, her every eyelash a streaking plasma flare, her darkening flesh shot through with lightning-bright arteries of pulsing information emerging from the black hole of her heartbeat. If she was too ugly to be a goddess, and too beautiful to be a goddess, she would be both, or none. If you asked for too many things, she would have to cull the numbers so she could process humanity better.