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This is that kind of evening - the dark hills outline the horizon where white sheets of lightning flicker in and out of the clouds. The wind flicks its whip and waits to lash the trees. When it begins to blow with its full force it shrieks like a thousand horses tearing through the night, dragging destruction behind them. Hoofbeat thunder drumming through the streets followed by the pounding rain. None of this is as loud as the dhakbeats, of course, though some poets, when their pens run away with them, compare thunder to drums.

I have seen palm-leaf scratches with an iron pen that confused drums and thunder, the rolling of the hill signalling the death of the goddess. Her physical end to rise in spiritual triumph beyond the hills beyond wherever the river carries her. Fragile brittle material for such strong words. They keep a few of them trapped in the dusty glass cases of the Mufassil library guarded by our fusty curator who understands less than half, blinking behind his pebble thick glasses. Dark drum words and the fear of the storms that rise in the region in September and October, to coincide with the puja months.

Few people come to this village - some stray scholars looking for those palm-leaf poems. After a day they are usually gone. Except for that one, the girl from America, the white girl. They always called her that, gora mem, white mare, though she never knew, at least not till the end.

She was white and pink and boiled looking as if she had come fully formed out of a stainless steel saucepan dripping milk wherever she walked. A harmless thing with pale blonde hair tucked firmly behind her ears except for the stray tendrils. A bus decanted her in the middle of nowhere, on the edge of a long strip of dirt road bordered by dusty green fields and squares of water, and she walked down the road bowed under her backpack followed by the urchins who swarmed as suddenly as flies out of the fields. Some of them pelted her with small stones and she would stop patiently to say, "What do you want?" while they ran around her screaming, "Paisa, paisa," or skittering out of the way in case the white witch attacked them.

When she got to the edge of the village some of the elders saw what was happening and came out and shooed the children off. "Good morning? Where you go?" That was the extent of their English while her Indian was "Namaste, namaste, dhanyabad." The children flowed around them as they walked rippling close in and out again once they caught a glare. They took her to the curator as if they had caught a fish, exhibiting her dripping, fresh. He did speak English of a kind and had a letter in a deep brown drawer that testified to the girl's identity. He held the letter up muttering, "Kolkata" and she answered, "Calcutta." Her midriff flashed skimmed-milk white between the rim of her blouse and the edge of her blue jeans, and all the young men had their eyes on that sliver of skin.

It was not that midriffs could not be seen in the village. Most women showed more. Lithe golden brown or mahogany waists bending over rice bowls, straightening in and out of rooms, twig brooms in hand as they cleaned. That was on easy view. Perhaps it was this now-you-see-me-now-you-don't peekaboo peep show that fascinated them. From that day they were at her heels.

She had to stay somewhere, that was obvious. For as long as it took for her and the curator to work on those dhak cloud-poems and translate them. The few women who were on the fringes of the crowd outside the library tugged at the edges of their saris with their teeth and looked down with murder in their hearts for the easy eyes of their menfolk. The girls skimmed backwards and forwards muttering things about jobs in the big city or jobs in Belait Amrika and jostling each other eagerly and feverishly.

People look at villages and think of nostalgia and beauty, the sun sinking in scarlet glory behind a white cloud or a tribal boy coming up to you with wild flowers clutched in his hand while white butterflies drift behind him, another poem in motion. No one thinks of a hard dirt road where chickens scratch signs as meaningless as life. Where winter is bone cold and parched with a wind that shrivels you at forty paces through your thin summer gamchha. Chadors? Did I hear talk of chadors and tribal weaves - that is more city talk. The rich farmers have woollen chadors. The poor drape gamchha over gamchha and pray for warm winters as they walk in the wind.

Summer is a burning cloud of chillies, a white-hot searching fire of sun that strikes you down at twenty paces in the fields. And here there is the evening thunder, summer or winter, the hammer lightning and sheets of rain. We drown with the harvests just turning gold, the tender green shoots barely tinged yellow. They rot on their stalks, tarnished, drooping, dead. And no one, rich or poor can stretch out a hand to save them. Is it any wonder that the girls want quick easy city lives? They see it on the television screens when they cluster in the evenings outside the panchayat hut. If they can, they creep quietly up and touch the screen in wonder. And this was the first live white mem they had ever seen.

Is this a plea for forgiveness? Is that what is in my mind when I write this? Forgiveness is too easy and too difficult a word - perhaps what I expect is understanding for a place that everyone except the thunder has forgotten.

The panchayat reluctantly volunteered his home and earned a glare from Samirer Ma that practically burned the front row of the crowd. After that, despite the men nudging each other there were no more offers. Some women have power - not the kind you would expect, though. This is the power that comes from enduring. Bearing the same body night after night with wisdom. Bearing three sons one after the other with no sign of a daughter. Three sons who grew as tall as date palms with nothing to blight them, with the good food cooked by their mother filling their stomachs. And then being crowned with the name of the eldest son.

She and her husband were the lucky ones, the ones whose faces everyone in the village fought to see first in the morning, even before the sun rose, so that a little of their luck would touch the day and transform it from the usual grim defeat.

No, not me, what does a village schoolmaster have to do with luck? Like the curator my world was in the word, and the word that I taught was the key to the universe. They did not listen of course. Greed made them impatient, the greed for a full belly, for four brick walls. So they groped when it was too dark to even distinguish a white hair from a black one and waited for Samirer Ma to come out onto her verandah, eyes shut, ears straining to hear the noise of footfalls or the clink of an onoon edge. Some saw her faster than others and those were the ones who swore that they had lucky days.

The girl stood there in the pool of eyes without understanding anything, since of course the curator would not explain. "Call me Leila," she insisted shifting from one foot to another. "I'll be comfortable in a hotel."

"Leela, that is Indian name. Very good name," shuffled the curator, farce spilling over out of the chasing children and the hungry male eyes.

For a while, standing in that one street village between the empty sky and dirt road, everyone there was lost and no one knew what to do except hope that the women had hearts. But, as far as the women went, putting up a mleccha untouchable memsahib was beyond the call of duty. Especially one whose whiteness seemed to be beckoning the men into some strange undiscovered country where the sky unrolled as white as her skin and the sun shone mild. Samirer Ma pulled the edge of her sari deeper over her head and looked at the ground hard as if her eyes could blaze holes through the red dirt. The others, Basanti, Malati, someone's mother, someone else's wife, shuffled from side to side behind her, a quicksand of cloth. They followed her lead as they always did. How could they do otherwise? They went where their luck told them.

The panchayat had not taken his offer back. It was still there extended between Leela, the curator and himself, a banner in the air though not a white flag. The curator had a just-about-pucca home where his daughter cooked on the verandah every morning, the mud chula belching dung clouds. When the thunder rumbled and the rain sent down its sheets the roof would lower its straw edges and let the water through. He murmured, "My home yours," inadequately looking in the direction of Samirer Ma's veil and well aware that it was no home for a memsahib. Aware also that he was the safest of the men. The panchayat could have offered to beat his wife and so force the Leela girl into his new pucca hut - it was rain proof at least - but he never went against his wife in public. Those two were united in power as they were united in luck. Finally I reached up, took down the panchayat's banner, and said, "Call Siddiq Mian."

In the middle of the clouds stranded among the fields there was a circuit house with a caretaker so old that he was like a tree, all knobbly arms and shrivelled legs that for some reason did not burst into green shoots at the ends. Siddiq Mian said he had looked after hordes of memsaabs more impressive than this one. He came hastily bustling, his kurta all crumpled from his roza morning sleep, led by one of the stone pelters now bursting with self importance - that year the ten days of puja coincided with the month of Ramzaan. No one remembered seeing Siddiq during the day - the huge door of the circuit house was always locked and barred. I knew that in the circuit house she would be guarded, out of Samirer Ma's gaze at least. It was from every point of view the obvious place, the only place where I thought she would be safe, itching and bed-bug ridden though it might have been. Did the question of who had last used the bed matter when this crisis confronted us?

And so it was - she was led away by Siddiq Mian, the tips of his brown fingers grazing her white arm. I half expected them to shoot out scarlet flowers at that fleeting touch.

***

It was goddess forging time and Potter Pal had started with his stick scaffold from Ratha Yatra day. Now it was almost on us. Every morning he would have a troop of my students clustered around him demanding to know how far it had gone and how many days were left. A few of them patted their own palm prints on the swelling thighs as high as they could reach. Samirer Ma stalking past, pot balanced perfectly on her head, looked at them, clapped her hands sharply and sent them scurrying. Luck can have that effect on you - you never know how it will strike, especially when it strikes stately and soft footed draped in white. In another village they might have called her a witch. She swung her head to look at me and I dropped my gaze - needless to say that I was not one of those dawn birds that sang outside her bedroom windows waiting for her to rise like the sun. "That was a good thought you had yesterday," she said mildly. Her shadow almost touched my toes and I pulled my feet back quickly, involuntarily. "My husband is grateful to you. A white mem in this village now and at this time. Her presence is enough to…" She realised she was saying too much and dropped the rest of what she was saying into the dirt. Then her shadow was gone and my feet uncrinkled in the warmth of the sun. Who am I to criticise luck?

I scurried to the classroom after my children and spent the day safely buried in the bare concrete walls. Our classroom was the panchayat room, the marriage room, the anything room. It would have been the goddess room, but that year Potter Pal was determined to sculpt the goddess of goddesses, the most powerful and potent of them all. She stood sixteen hands high and giantess tall, almost as tall as the meeting tree. She would have to be hacked to pieces with axes in the old way before they could take her to the river.

Once on a stray visit to the city I saw the goddess on her way to the river, all drums and lights loaded on lorry after lorry. She paraded through the night trailing men in strings behind her and in front of her, her great arms outspread over their leaping heads. I saw one with the red border pulled over his head and shirt bobbing up and down on the waves of frenzy, turning as the ripples took him, unaware of what he was doing. If she had been a woman in flesh and as beautiful as she was in the earth they would have pulled her down like a ravenous pack of hounds, tongues lapping in their lust, that man turned woman with the white and red-bordered sari still about his shoulders as eager as the rest.

Here the immersion is quieter, two lorries borrowed and paid for with the landlords' money; fewer lights though strung as tight budded as flowers. Here the women dance on the trucks before her with the gongs clashing in their hands. That was what Samirer Ma's luck had done for the women of the village. If she had been younger, still a virgin, they would have worshipped her. Now they offered her the gifts of power.

Later morning brought the white girl with her notebooks, on her way to the library. Siddiq Mian was escorting her with those furtive touches of his gnarled fingers. She was displayed for the men in a white sari, red bordered and discreet, pinched here and nipped there. As she walked through the streets they crept out of the fields like the motes of dust that the sun inevitably draws out, following her here and there, watching the sari tail drift after her. Someone said she had learnt much in Kolkata, though perhaps not enough, because the material slipped out of its pleats and puddled in the dust in front of Potter Pal as he stood immersed in his act of ecstasy. He said it was his only act of worship, repeated every year and drowned in moonshine after the ten days of sculpting were over.

A fold of the material must have touched him - she was that close - because he flinched and his fingers convulsively came together. There was a welt on the goddess' thigh when he raised his hand, a slight pinch, you would have said, on a human woman's thigh, though not seen on the living flesh. He looked around with the hill dew brimming in his eyes and saw the white woman standing there. His head swivelled back again and he was patting the clay smooth. It was nothing, it was less than nothing, the goddess was not alive, not armed with power by the priest, her face was yet to be veiled, but a little whisper of contamination pinched the village women into life.

The white girl quickly put her books down in the dirt with the children dancing around her and picked up her pleats. The white was blotched with fresh dirt. She shook it out and tucked it carefully back in, laughing in a silly helpless way while the girls made quick darts to help her. The Potter did not look at her any more - he went back to singing his hooch devotion songs and patting the wet clay smooth with palm prints and pinches. Arranging her sari, the girl moved on.

While she sat in the library, people peeped through the window bars at her and nudged each other. "See see, what is she doing now?" "Turning over the book …" Every time she got up to fetch a new book, there was a further rustle. There were no women there - it was bathing time and cooking time and house cleaning time. But they already knew, as I already knew. The breezes blowing through the street had voices. In a village where a missing cow was news, this was scandal.

Samirer Ma returning from her bath draped in fresh wet cloth halted by the Potter and watched him. "Did her shadow fall on the goddess?" There were no children there by then - her times were known. The Potter did not answer her, he was deep in ecstasy and hill dew again and, after a moment, she moved on.

The girl did not know. No one had the words to tell her. I did not know - what was there to know after all? It was still, as I said, a statue of clay, not a goddess at all. Nitish Babu the curator came babbling to me with the news, though it had already blown through my classroom, and asked me what was to be done. There were the open fields between the circuit house and the museum, she could not be herded like a cow. She would wander here and there and everywhere, looking at the sweet real things around her, the rain in the hills, the stones of the old temple where no one prayed anymore. She said it was the most real place that she had ever seen in her life, shifting from one white gym-shoed foot to another.

Yes, yes, I had forgotten the missing-earth incident - we thought nothing of it at the time. A pinch of earth taken from outside the circuit house door. Siddiq Mian said he had seen a figure, a flash of white through his fasting daze somewhere outside the peeling green shutters in the fringe of a creeper, just a movement and a flash of some other colour that did not belong to the flowers and trees, and which his bleary eyes could not be sure of. He had thought it was suspicious even then and half asleep, so he swung his legs off the string bed and went to the window and then to the main door. There was nothing, just the sun shadow passing over the earth and a slight scrabble of earth in a corner, no larger than a worm's cast. He went back to the charpoy to sleep. What could a worm possibly upset?

A little pinch of whore's earth was handed to Potter Pal later that afternoon. It was late, the person had said, and they had almost forgotten to give it to him, but there had been no need to go to the house in Sonabazar to get it. So he took that and patted it into the goddess' thigh where his pinch had fallen, and forgot it. All he prayed for was a clear evening without rain so that his work would dry. We all forgot or ignored it though we know the traditional things that go into arming the Mother. Whore's earth - who would have remembered the whore's earth, a pinch of every man's virtues left outside a brothel door?

The girl went from the library back to the circuit house when the thunderclouds were piling high. The goddess was being draped in plastic sheets taken from the rich farmer's new tractor wrappings. Leila Leela would have stopped to watch the draping, but the wind was already rolling balls of dust down the paths and tugging at her jute strands of hair. She clutched the folds of her sari and ran to the circuit house, shutting the door behind her just before the rain came down and erased that worm trail outside the door. The wind seemed to blow harder after her. One or two of the women came out on their verandas to watch. In the half-light, glistening in plastic, the goddess seemed like a warning, ten armed and bristling erect. An angry spear of lightning shafted behind her running down the edges of the plastic in fire.

No, nothing happened in the middle, in all those days while the goddess' shell hardened. Yes, the children still followed the girl, as did a few of the young men who thought that if they slept with her she would take them to America. None of them did, though there was one who followed her with a flute and stuck a peacock feather in his hair - the panchayat's younger son. He took his luck elsewhere, not from his mother's threshold, that is for sure. He played Krishna for her, thinking that she would dance to his tune, and charmed her with songs whenever he was certain that his mother was elsewhere.

Samirer Ma saw them sitting in a field of kaash flowers while she was looking for a lost goat. Most probably her son was the goat she had lost, because she had her husband's herdspeople to go goat hunting for her if she wished. He scrambled up looking stupid. The white girl did not understand a word of what was said between mother and son though she understood enough to try to intervene. "He was explaining the poems to me," she offered, though they had no bridging language.

"No, no," said Samir's brother shaking his head at her. "Go please … explain later …"

She walked away, her blue jeans glimmering through the feather-white flowers. Tight globes of blue dancing away like the tune of a forgotten love song. Samirer Ma stood among the flowers, her hands on her hips, watching the girl go before she turned back to her son.

The flowers carried the news of that encounter to the village - no one else could have, because no one was there, unless it was a herdboy watching his lonely cow. Who knows how these things spread?

He has been sent to his uncle three villages away while he prepares for his exams; his father wants him to go to the university in Kolkata. The official word is that he was sent before the incident happened.

***

The goddess finally dried and Potter Pal took up his paints, applying the white base coat, the clear lampblack outlines for the eyes. She was to have been golden, like a girl from the mountains, but for some reason there was not enough yellow paint. There were chains of people watching, the children, the girls growing out of frocks, their eyes glancing over the goddess' curves, the sly young men and the white girl locked into them. With each stroke of the brush the goddess grew as white as the girl. The Potter had seen it in his dream, he said, this was foretold, the goddess herself had taken the yellow paint - he was not to blame; he had ordered enough and ground the pigments himself.

A white goddess ten armed and strong. She reflected the sheets of lightning. Samirer Ma and her sakhis stood on the verandahs and gazed at her with thin tightened lips, but there was nothing that anyone could say to the Potter. We had never had a white girl in the village before and certainly no mlechha had ever seen the goddess-worship, which in our village dates back fourteen generations. She brought out her camera one day along with her notebooks and flashed small lightnings at the white goddess and showed the photographs through a window in the back. No one stole the camera at least. It is there with the last photographs that she took, the bare armed white goddess with the veil over her face. You can see Samirer Ma standing in one corner on her verandah - that dried red edge that almost looks like blood: that is the border of her sari.

The priest had not had any dreams. He came clear-eyed with his pots of water and flowers and began his task of breathing life into her. She was there every moment, her poems of hoofbeats in the mountains forgotten. The tide had turned by then - they were at the circuit house window before dawn, many of them, not just the men, and there was breathing room in front of the panchayat's window at least. The reason for it? I cannot see any reason except that she came from another country and had white skin like the Potter's dream. He was loud about his dream - the goddess had walked through the kaash feathers as white as their tendrils, leaving her footprints on the red earth. Perhaps two more bottles of hill dew would have brought blue jeans into his dream as well - who knew? These dreams are doubtful things, and potters have as much right to them as priests. The earth from outside the circuit house had also gone into her, though he did not know that.

So much jostling and shoving every morning shook Siddiq Mian out of his early morning prayers. "The luck has changed has it?" he asked us. We did not know.

But something had changed. Samirer Ma, chewing paan, her mouth as red as the rouge of her feet, accompanied by the other village wives, came to take Leela to the sixth day puja and to the seventh. They brought saris for her and draped her in them, while I stood there croaking, "New, new," their interpreter. They surrounded her so that no one could get to her and jostled to bring her sweets. And she went with them saying, "This is so special …I feel so honoured."

"What is this special special thing that she chirps like the train chaiwala?" Siddiq Mian demanded.

"Americans," shrugged the curator. "Who understands them?"

We understood that it was not her city, that place of the tall stick buildings that were cut down in half as the planes flew into them - we had all seen that on the panchayat's television, called out of our evening meals and our half slumbers. "What use is that?" we asked thinking that the thing was not real at all but some kind of jatra staged with bricks and toys.

"She comes from there?" asked Siddiq Mian. He had seen another kind of jatra about Osama Bin Laden on a field at the Katra Mela two summers ago. Perhaps she came from that strange world where there were no cows and the trees grew out of stone and buildings could be snapped in two by airships, perhaps that was why everything was so real to her.

We watched her come and go, babbling to people who did not understand a word she said, happy with the new bolts of material that came every morning. "You must let me pay for it of course. Tell them I will pay for it," to me. They led her away, backwards and forwards morning and evening, stuffed green paan leaves into her mouth and pulled her into their dancing. There was one more thing we should have noticed: the children did not go near them. They stood and watched the puja from corners or came to offer flowers when the priest called them, but otherwise melted away whenever the women walked. Given their fascination with the mem we should have seen that, but puja times are not like other times and our village has its own rituals - you can find some of those scratched into the palm leaves in the library. Paan juice trickled red out of the corners of their mouths, out of her mouth too.

Dhakbeats shook the village like the thunder and she was ecstatic about that too. Ecstasy came so easy to her. She marvelled at the cowpats that the children collected and the women dried on the wall in round circles as fuel.

She would wear her red and white shoes under her saris, but the women said no and gradually coaxed her into bare feet. They brought out a flat pan of rouge and milk and made her step into it till the white skin blushed and I and the curator stood by staring hard at the earth in case we saw forbidden things, muttering, "Holy thing, holy ground," like two crows on a thorn branch.

You say we should have stopped it, but she danced on, happy that the women were involving her in such purely women's things, with none of that drawing the hems of their saris away or mutter of, "Mlechha!" Perhaps they went home and poured holy water over themselves in the back courtyards when we were sleeping off the liquor and moonshine madness. Because for those four days there were no rules except the drumbeats and the incense smoke.

On Navami, after the priest had hefted the lamps with the 108 flames, she did not come home, but we knew where she was. She had collapsed with the others there in front of the goddess, worn out by the incessant drumming and the emotion - the dhak, gongs and smoke on the ninth night can bring tears to your eyes

Samirer Ma was fasting and the other women with her. We knew that too, my hand knows it as I put it down. But then the women were always fasting - you can read it even in those poems that detail every aspect of our life. No, not that last aspect, there was a failing there, a patch of brittle palm which might or might not have carried writings once. In any case we had never had a white woman in the village before.

In the morning they dragged themselves home and she came home too, all bedraggled, her sari trailing behind her in the dirt. Siddiq Mian was anxiously waiting at the door, though he knows Navami nights well. She came in, went to her room and he did not see her again at noon when her new friends came to take her to the last day ceremonies. No, we did not know if she was married; the easy way she walked with the men did not suggest marriage to us. But they were careful - they made her stand to one side with the children while they scattered the sindoor, showers of it all over their new saris, the married women had red palm prints over their cheeks.

The drumbeats had changed for the immersion. She stood by the dhakis listening to them play, and as she did the clouds began to beat out their tune. "See how lucky you are!" Samirer Ma cried, coming up to her, red handed. "Was I ever this lucky? No. For you the clouds have brought out their dhakis to beat the departure drums." Every one standing there heard that. No, there were no men present; this was the women's time. Samirer Ma forced a crumbling sandesh into her mouth so that her lips were as white as the goddess'. It was all love, we thought, though perhaps it was a game, a kind of leela in itself like the girl's name. Anything is possible during the festival, as I said before; the goddess has the power to transform the untouchable. It is a divine game.

They had brought in two lorries from the neighbouring town, but the goddess was truly too tall to carry onto the trucks. The women went in twos and threes to their homes and brought their axes, the wood cutting ones, or the butcher blades. Then, still red handed and red faced they hacked her to pieces. "There is something in a poem," the curator muttered to me - his daughter was part of it, even though her husband has not been seen for two years. He was supposed to have gone to the city to find a job - he kissed her goodbye, promised to write and was never heard of again. The men whispered that he was living with a woman in the hills, but it was a low whisper.

There was an overflowing of moonshine. Men were hugging each other in the streets, the children were running like a spilt anthill. And inside the tent the women were hacking the goddess to pieces. If you listened hard you could hear the sound like a muffled refrain under the drumbeats and the rolling thunder. The lorry men had been given moonshine too - their eyes were bright with it. Then Samirer Ma came out holding the goddess' head in her hands. "Come get everything ready …"

Leila might have looked and squawked, "Oh, what a quaint custom." The arms and legs and pieces of body came and went in the flickering lightning. Then everything was on the truck and the women were ready to climb up. "One more thing!" Samirer Ma said, "We need someone to stand there at the head to stand in for the goddess. You, white one, lucky woman, come here!" Her beckoning was unmistakable and Leila came forward, to be hustled up by the women over the tailboard and the arms and legs lying higgledy piggledy on the wood. While the curator standing on tiptoe - not me, I am glad I did not mouth those words - said to her, "You stand head of truck, be goddess."

She stood there proud, shining white like milk, swanwhite like the goddess that Potter Pal had painted in his dream, squeaking, mouthing her 'special special' mantra and waving to us while the other women piled in. Then the trucks started and they were gone, all except for the lone drummer beating his plumed drum to the thunder.

And then, and then the sky broke into pieces and rain came down and washed the moonshine out of us and the rivers rose. Who knows when the women came back? We were too busy scuttling for shelter, trying not to drown, as if the goddess wanted to take all of us with her. A thousand years ago, she had, the curator said, but since then they had sacrificed a milk white cow to her so that her anger was appeased.

Miraculously it stopped. In mid thunderclap, a gust of wind ordered the clouds away. The stars came out one by one. I had never seen that before in all my years in the village, a flood stopped in the making, it was luck, pure luck - but then, miracles do happen on immersion day.

A white cow, yes, a white cow. Spotless white from head to tail. No, we did not tell the police that. What relevance did it have after all? We had no white cow that year in village.