Tamastara
Author: Tanith Lee
Date: 2022-03-22 00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: fiction; sf; fantasy; humble bundle
Publisher: DAW

DAW Books presents classic works of imaginative fiction by multiple award-winning author TANITH LEE

THE BIRTHGRAVE TRILOGY

THE BIRTHGRAVE

SHADOWFIRE

(originally published as Vazkor, Son of Vazkor)

HUNTING THE WHITE WITCH

(originally published as Quest for the White Witch)

TALES FROM THE FLAT EARTH

NIGHT’S MASTER

DEATH’S MASTER

DELUSION’S MASTER

DELIRIUM’S MISTRESS

NIGHT’S SORCERIES

THE WARS OF VIS

THE STORM LORD

ANACKIRE

THE WHITE SERPENT

AND MORE:

COMPANIONS ON THE ROAD

VOLKHAVAAR

ELECTRIC FOREST

SABELLA

KILL THE DEAD

DAY BY NIGHT

LYCANTHIA

DARK CASTLE, WHITE HORSE

CYRION

SUNG IN SHADOW

TAMASTARA

THE GORGON AND OTHER BEASTLY TALES

DAYS OF GRASS

A HEROINE OF THE WORLD

REDDER THAN BLOOD

Tamastara

Tanith Lee

DAW Books, Inc

Donald A. Wollheim, Founder

1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

Elizabeth R. Wollheim

Sheila E. Gilbert

Publishers
www.dawbooks.com

Copyright © 1984 by Tanith Lee.

All Rights Reserved.

Cover design by Lila Selle.

Illustration of archway courtesy of Shutterstock.

DAW Book Collectors No. 569.

Published by DAW Books, Inc.

1745 Broadway, New York, NY, 10019.

All characters and events in this book are fictitious.

All resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

The uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal, and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

Ebook ISBN: 978-0-6984-0454-0

First Paperback Printing, March 1984

First New Electronic Edition, March 2022

DAW TRADEMARK REGISTERED

U.S. PAT. AND TM. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

—MARCA REGISTRADA

HECHO EN U.S.A.

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

pid_prh_6.0_9001707_c0_r1

CONTENTS

Cover

Also by Tanith Lee

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgments

First Night

Foreign Skins: I

II

III

IV

V

Second Night

Bright Burning Tiger

Third Night

Chand Veda

Fourth Night

Under the Hand of Chance: I

II

III

IV

V

Fifth Night

The Ivory Merchants

Sixth Night

Oh, Shining Star: I

II

III

Seventh Night

Tamastara

About the Author

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank:

Doctor J. G. Chahal for her invaluable help, and kindness.

And also to acknowledge the spur to speculation gained from that nicely discorporate body, known as Michael, much of whose electrifying information is to be found in:

MESSAGES FROM MICHAEL

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, Playboy Press, 1979.

The author finally wishes to add that any conclusions jumped to, liberties taken, or errors made in this volume are hers, and hers alone.

Tanith Lee

1982

First Night

The First Night journeys a little over five decades back into India’s British past. But more than itinerants, it has to do with those hidden races which have always been; with darkness and noon, and lamps lit under the earth. And with a flicker like silken ribbon through the dry grass. . . .

Foreign Skins

I

After the summer rains, the road up to the bungalow was for a while a river of red mud. As the mud dried, drowned things came to light; rats, a long-tailed bird, a mongoose.

“There was also the body of an old woman,” said the man, uncaringly at his breakfast in the verandah. “A corpse some of them made a whole lot of fuss about.”

“David,” said the woman.

The man, her husband, glanced at her in slight though exaggerated inquiry. “What about David?”

“He’s listening, dear.”

“Let him listen.”

“But Chaver, dear—”

“Death’s a fact. Isn’t it, old chap?” Across the table, the eight-year-old boy, pale still despite the heat of a mighty sun, nodded. “That’s right,” said the man. “My God, Evelyn. He’s got to get used to it. He’ll see it all round him in this place.”

“Yes,” said Evelyn, and she touched her napkin to her lips.

“What was I saying?” the man she had called Chaver asked them. When they could not or would not tell him, he shook out his paper, somewhat late as it always was up here, and began to read, dismissing them.

That evening, as the stars were lit across the sky and grasshoppers whirred in the bushes, a woman came up the garden’s impeccable path, between the orange trees, and halted by the rhododendron under the veranda. Dark as the dusk, making no movement, she stood there for some while, until the doors of the dining room were opened. Then the thick amber lamplight fell on her and there was shouting.

“What in God’s name is all this noise?” demanded Chaver Finlay, striding up to the doors in his punctilious dinner jacket.

“A beggar woman,” said the house servant who had shouted. “I tell her, she must go.”

The man looked. He saw the woman by the ghostly rhododendron tree, in the light a creature of darkness, which folded its hands and bowed to him, and said in perfect English, “Lord, I seek shelter. I lost my home in the rains, and all I possess. I have been wandering a great time.” She was clad, he saw, in a piece of filthy sackcloth, probably come on at the wayside. Under the rag, she appeared supple and beautiful. Her hair was plaited into a black snake-tail that fell behind her. Her face was a fine one, with a delicately rimmed Asiatic mouth, the nose somewhat long but slenderly shaped, her eyes large and wide-spaced. On her wide low forehead, suggestive of intelligence and calm, there was no mark of caste. Nor did she have any jewelry, even to a glass bangle or a silver stud in the nostril.

“Well,” said Chaver Finlay, who was rather fascinated by these women. “Well. Go to the kitchen. Tell them I said you get food. And see if Asha can’t find you something to wear.”

“The Lord is very kind.”

He liked, the man, to be called “lord,” as they so often called him, in their own tongue or his. Tall and well-made, deeply tanned, hair and eyes black as the hair and eyes of any native, he found himself now, as often, stimulated by the contact of this world, so unlike his beginnings, so appealing to his spirit—or what he took to be his spirit. His work, which had to do with local government, was dry and uninspiring. He saw little connection between the work and the people, who continually intrigued him, that the work was ideally meant to serve.

Sitting at dinner, too, he compared Evelyn irresistibly and without quite knowing he did so, to the indigenous womanhood. Alas, poor Evelyn. How utterly unlike. Unlike to such an extent that it was almost a joke, Thin, but without any of the angular, heroic grace of the village woman. Fair, and suffering for her fairness, burned a dreadful pink that was not becoming, even when heavily powdered. The alien sun was not kind to Evelyn. It seemed to have bled out the color of her eyes which once, in a cooler clime, had enchanted him for two whole months. And the boy . . . the boy seemed set to go the same way. “Eat up your meat, David,” the man said absently. Milksop. Could he have bred a milksop? Little and thin and pale, if not yet burnt. The blue eyes were so rarely raised to meet his father’s, the father did not quite remember how they looked. Of course, Evelyn had spent a lot of time with the boy, and there were no other boys nearby for him to play with, to get some sense and some backbone thumped into him. Except the native children. But that was out of the question.

When the meal was over, the servant brought the decanter and glass and a box of cigarettes. Applying the lighter deftly, the servant said, “That woman is outside. She wishes to come in and speak to the Sahib, but I have said—”

“Whatever you said, go and tell her she may.”

Evelyn lifted her sandy eyebrows. She got a word of explanation, before the vagabond entered.

Finlay had a desire to draw in a great breath of pleasure at her apparition. Asha had obviously given of her best, an outfit of singing green and saffron, which the stranger wore as if it were her own. Even the black, black hair had been oiled before rebraiding and the oil’s somber perfume seemed to glow inside his nostrils like the whiskey on his palate.

She gave him again the obeisance, her eyes unlowered, huge black coals with all the lamplight held in them in two little golden beads.

“I have come only to thank you,” she said.

Finlay lounged a fraction. “But you’d thank me more if you could stay.”

She said nothing, and the other woman in the room gave a quick sharp rustle, like something in undergrowth. Finlay did not look at either of them. He refilled his glass.

“I assume you’d like to, because you told me you lost everything in the flood. Even your . . . Mother, would it have been?” There was a silence. When he looked up again, the dark ghost shook her head slowly. “It’s just,” he said, “an old woman was found about half a mile down the road, dead in the mud. Without clothing. The body was badly decomposed,” Evelyn made a verbal noise this time, “and rather curiously—but of course, the kites had got there, too, by then—” Evelyn’s noise was louder. “I merely thought, two strangers in these parts might have been traveling together.”

“No, lord.”

Finlay smiled, basking in that word.

“Well then, if we kept you, what could you do?”

“Really,” said Evelyn. “I don’t think—”

“Now, now,” he said, all velvet, “we can’t turn the homeless away, can we?” And she became once more dumb, only a pity it wasn’t permanent. His dark ghost meanwhile had turned her eyes aside. She had fixed them, those lenses of coal and gold, on his son. Ah, yes. The surest way to the father’s good graces, through his male offspring. As for David, he looked quite mesmerized, the little brute. “My son,” said Chaver Finlay to the woman, “is something of a dunce. At languages, particularly. Our dialects round here fox him, don’t they, old chap? On the other hand, your English is excellent, and I heard you exchanging words with my man, out there, in a splendid version of local lingo. Perhaps you might be helpful in this way. Do you think you could teach the boy something?” (And I’m sure you could teach him a great deal. Only he’s a touch young for that. I, though . . . ) He only felt Evelyn on this occasion, her loud protests were mute, a sort of vibration. Evelyn did not like the new schoolteacher. But David did. His small pallid face was full of expectation. And Chaver liked her a lot.

“If you wish,” she said, “I will try.” She went on looking at David, and then slowly she smiled at him. Chaver Finlay would have preferred to have that smile himself, instead of its being wasted on the brat. But never mind. She would smile at the man soon enough. He offered her board and lodging now, and a small sum in annas, which she accepted as if it neither insulted nor amazed her, nor mattered, part of the Eastern Act, as he sometimes termed it.

“Come up to the house after breakfast, about nine o’clock. All right? My wife will see David’s in proper order for you. What are we to call you?”

That brought her eyes back to him. She regarded him for some moments, as if considering. Why, she’s inventing a name for herself, he thought. Are you that notorious, my beauty? And he resolved to check this tomorrow in the official offices, which was an oddly exciting idea, and would make a nice change from memoranda on irrigation and outbreaks of fever.

Then she said the name, and he missed it and had to ask her to repeat what she had said, as if testing her.

“Agnini,” she told him, with no trace of reluctance.

“Oh,” he said, teasingly, “then will you keep lightning from striking the house, O daughter of Fire? That should be worth a pa’i or so more.”

II

He was a lonely child, lonely not so much for companionship as for peace. His mother was alternately irritated by him, or fussing him, calling him “Davy” when they were alone together, a strange intimacy he had come to find repellent. But then, she also referred to his father as “Daddy.” He was afraid of his father, of course. Mostly, these feelings were instinctive. Only when he had got out on to the withered lawn, able to lie hidden in a bush and watch a bird or small animal, or just the sky, did he discover quietness. Sometimes, taken up for a ride on his father’s horse (terrified), he had noticed the native children herding cattle, fighting or playing in the floury dust. They seemed as unlike himself as the free things which darted through the trees. Although he had left it less than a year before, he was forgetting Europe. The spot it occupied in his memory was a sort of sheet of whiteness, foggy, like an English winter sky. His mother sheltered him from this other sky as if it would hurt him, as, sure enough, once or twice it had hurt her, making her very sick so he was frightened and cried. “For heaven’s sake, David, don’t snivel!” his father said. The big tanned hand had caught itself back from a hard slap. It was clearly wrong to thrash one’s son for concern at his mother’s health. Punishment was reserved for deserving causes, failure at lessons, or lies to cover such failures or others that promised trouble. David was not a clever liar. He was not clever at anything. He had never asked as yet, What am I? Where do I fit in this unwieldy, unfriendly scheme of things? But because he did not seem cut out for life, obscurely he blamed himself. Everyone else managed. The fault must be in him.

When he saw sinuous motion coming through the orange trees, he watched it surreptitiously. Since it is possible to be in love at any age, David was in love with the adult person who had named herself Agnini. And since he loved her, he was rather afraid of her, and afraid, intuitively, of being disappointed in her.

Evelyn, who had left him there after breakfast, had admonished her child in various ways. She herself did not want to confront the native woman. To Evelyn’s eyes, Agnini was equally ugly and a threat. Thus the white wife ran to organize a bridge afternoon, abandoning matters to the wishes of the husband now already gone off to the male world of work, and to his allotted governess. Over the cards, Evelyn was prepared to say, gaily, “Guess what, suddenly we have an ayah! Oh of course it’s silly, so we know whose notion it is, don’t we? Chaver’s. You know what he is.” And they did know what he was, too, some of them. The ladies of the area much admired Mr. Chaver Finlay, who, stray as he would, was still Evelyn’s lawful property. Not that he had strayed much with his own kind, she thought. No, it was elsewhere that Chaver’s black eyes turned, after the black-eyed foreign women of this other planet, India.

The little boy looked up as Agnini’s cool shade fell upon him. “Greetings,” she said to him in Hindi. Pleased that he understood, he said in English, shyly, “Hallo.” And then Agnini laughed. Her teeth were as white as forgotten English snow. Entranced, David let her take his hand and lead him off the veranda, away to the shrubs and trees of the garden. Here, in his domain, which had long spelled release and relief, which he did not mind sharing with her since it seemed hers already, they sat down. In English, without preliminary, Agnini began to tell him a story. David listened, and as he listened he watched her. In the slanting sunlight she was like a shadow, and as she spoke she made lovely, luminous gesticulations with her hands and neck and head, swaying slightly like a flower on a stalk. Now and then, in the way of the story, she would say, “Attend, O Beloved.” And each time he would start very slightly, as if his mind had wandered, though it had not. It was grand to be told stories, though how it would help him master the ghastly chaos of another language he did not know.

“Attend, O Beloved,” Agnini said.

David attended.

His blue eyes were wide. These eyes were so far the only beauty he had, the only sign he might grow up into a handsome man, his mother’s lightness of complexion and his father’s coarse, effective looks, refined into something much better.

“‘Come,’ said the god,” said Agnini, “‘come, be valorous, and descend into the city of the wise and wicked ones. Who shall hurt thee there, seeing thou hast my protection? Thou shalt behold marvels. And maybe thou mayest recover what the shape-changer stole.’”

Evelyn, who had sneaked out after all, in spurious search of a dead rose bush, paused to eavesdrop. Useless, she thought with satisfaction. What good is it to sit there like a monkey and chatter at the boy in Hindi, when he can’t speak three words of it?

•   •   •

“Two weeks. She’s not teaching him anything. She simply lives off our fare, like a parasite. Like they all do, given a ha’p’orth of encouragement.”

“What does she do with him all day, then?” Finlay inquired lazily.

“She tells him fairy stories, I believe. Or rather, heathen myths. Only yesterday I heard him singing—howling is more like it—some perfectly grim sort of chant about Krishna, or Vishnu. Or somebody.”

“Oh? Singing it in English, do you mean?”

“No of course—” Evelyn paused, “not,” she added lamely. “Oh, it was in some dialect or other, but he’d learnt it off parrot fashion. He didn’t understand it, which was probably just as well. You know, dear, I’m very concerned about David’s religious—”

“Just a minute,” Finlay said. He got up from his desk, where Evelyn had disturbed him over a hunting journal and a pile of untouched paperwork lugged home for show from the offices. He walked past his wife, one and a quarter feet the taller, and went out on to the veranda. David, a small uncamouflaged white figure in his shirt and shorts, was pottering among the tamarisks. At his father’s shout, the boy jumped as if at a shot, and turned a frightened face toward the house. The man beckoned vigorously, and the child came quickly with the forced speed of total helpless unwillingness. When he had almost reached the steps Finlay barked at him: “Jaldi, bebkuf! Bhagio!”

“Jee, Pitaji, mai bhagta hu—” said David, and broke into a trot. Then faltered and stopped dead.

“Well I’ll be damned,” said Chaver Finlay. He stood staring at his son, an evil grin splitting his face and revealing the unattractive teeth less strong than the rest of him. “What did you just say?”

“You—you told me to run, and I said I would—”

“In Hindi.”

“Y—yes. I—I think . . . so.”

“Don’t think so, you did. Accent quite decent, too. Well done,” said Finlay, delighted at it all. In Hindi once more, plus a heavy dose of the local dialect, he added to David, “And did she teach it thee?”

“Yes, father,” David said in English. It was a fact, he was never more uncertain than when his father seemed pleased by him. It happened so seldom.

And sure enough, Finlay scowled. “God damn you, boy! Answer as you’re supposed to.”

Evelyn shuddered at the blasphemies, retreating to the wall of the house. David replied again, rapidly, in the other words and syntax which were coming to seem quite familiar.

Chaver laughed. He turned on Evelyn, laughing in her face. “You see, Cold Comfort, our Aggi’s worth her weight in rupees. If she can get the little owl to learn something—my God. I’ll go over to their quarters and tell her she’s done a good job. By God, I will.”

Evelyn had continued to shrink away and had now shrunk right back into her husband’s study. She watched him stride off through the brassy film of late day and into the dark of the peepul trees that hid the servants’ dwellings from the bungalow.

The other side of those trees, almost instantly, he came on her who had named herself Agnini. She sat by a brown wall on a little faded mat of Asha’s, cleaning her hair in the old way, by rubbing it with rice, then combing it through and through. He stood and watched her, leaning on a tree and hidden from the house, feeling his own power course through him, his blood stirring in the broad light and open as it rarely did now in an airless night bedroom.

Although she had acknowledged him politely, Agnini continued with her task. He took this as a kind of flirting.

“I came to congratulate you,” he said at last. “We’d better give you a raise, Lady of Fires. David starts to speak tolerable native talk.”

She nodded, a small bow, replied otherwise not at all. Finlay inhaled the scents of the earth and the tree, and the wholesome savage aroma of her hair with the rice rubbed through it. His investigations had offered no clue. There were no rumors of a female criminal at large in the area, or anywhere near it. Maybe they would come. Then he might say to her, Ah, Agnini-who-is-not. Now I know you. That game could be fun to play. For the moment he contented himself with, “But your husband, surely, must be pining for you.”

She did stop her combing then, looking at him stilly. It was an odd look, and he was not sure he cared for it. Presently she said something that did not really sound like Hindi, and which he could not understand.

He guessed. “Dead? Is he? But he’ll be back, won’t he? He’ll reincarnate, and fast, I’d think, to get with you again. Or are you a muselman woman, only one life and away to paradise? No, you’re not that. Thank God. The times I’ve come out on a fine evening and been confronted by a row of their men’s holy bums stuck up, faces at the other end to Mecca—”

Agnini rose. The movement was remarkable, like a dancer’s, yet even more fluid—the word mellifluous came to mind. Even to Chaver Finlay’s mind. Yes, flowing honey. But she had given him the obeisance, turned and gone in, flowingly stooping at the low doorway. Dismissed, the man stood and wondered, angry and tickled. Yes, yes, honey and fire, it would be a pleasure to have a rough wooing with this one, who seemed not to notice him as male flesh. And he had the sudden image of a darkness before him, redolent with the perfumes of night, and eyes and lips and strong hands on him holding him to insistent deeds of darkness, all awash with smoky hair and the elixir of a foreign skin.

III

“Is it dead?” asked David, staring at the little rumpled creature on the lawn.

“Yes. Oh, come away at once. I’ll send them to clear it. Don’t be so ghoulish, Davy.”

David did not know what this English word “ghoulish” meant, but knew better than to ask at such a moment. Obviously it was bad, obviously he was guilty of it. He walked quickly off to escape culpability and his mother as one, and sat down under a tamarisk. He watched Evelyn emit an exasperated sigh, and scurry in the other direction to find a servant. David was close to tears. The little animal was so beautifully made, so complex, the tiny pointed face, and the wonderful squirrelish tail, and all these marvels wasted now in death. It was of a category he had been inclined to call, in the plural, mongeese, since it was mongoose in the singular, and a plural goose became geese not gooses. The error had last summer earned him a light stinging cuff from his father’s riding glove.

Soon, sitting under the tamarisk, he was able to watch one of the men come and sweep up and take away the mongoose who did not become geese in the plural, and would now become nothing at all except compost. David, unseen, gave in and wept. He wept with a breaking heart for all the sadness and cruelty of a world he scarcely knew, this land of giants.

Then, relaxed, lying face down on the grass, he fell asleep. He woke once to hear the muttering of servants close by in a tongue he could now follow by means that were so simple they were inexplicable. What did these people say? Talk of the mongoose. Young and glossy, it had had no mark upon it. Of what had it died? No, not a touch, or an ill-wish, even, but the mere concentration of inimical presence. A presence not to be fought with, only to be bowed down to, and so, nature in revolt, an ultimate bowing down in death. After all, even the cobras kept out of the garden now, overawed, though of course they would come, if desired. But there was no need. One was careful. One did what was wanted. Even the Goan cook, a Catholic to the tips of his moustache, was courteous. And in turn, courtesy was given. Her purposes were otherwise; the male child. It seemed the lawless magic of the very young, or the bewildered anguish of the very young, this had drawn her here.

Me? Are they talking about me? But about who else then? Is it—?

The noon sun beat on the drumskin of the garden, dark-red behind his eyelids, and the voices melted away and he curled on his side and slept again, dreamless, which might mean only that he did not recall his dreams.

When he woke the sun had moved a little, burning on the linked arms of the peepul trees. A yard off Agnini sat, braiding her hair. David rolled over and lay watching her, smiling sleepily, for she had come to find him and she was beautiful and he loved her much.

“Beloved,” said Agnini, “tonight I must leave thee.”

David’s entire body altered with distress.

“When wilt thou return?” he asked her, using the fluent fast speech, the inner tongue that was the core of her teaching.

“Return I do not,” said Agnini.

“Not come back? Not ever?” he whispered, in English now.

“No, Beloved. Never to thee.”

“Why must you go?” he cried, his pain too large yet for further crying, the adult pain of loss. “Did I do something to make you angry with—”

“The doing is not thine, Beloved. Nor yet. This night, another than thee will anger me. Then shall I go away.”

In English still, though she had kept to the other tongue, he cried out: “Can’t I—couldn’t I—please don’t—” and fell silent. For neither did English have, it seemed, the sentences he needed. To tell her the nameless hell that was his existence, and which she had filled in moments with motes of light and notes of joy. That if the motes and notes of light were to be taken from him, now he had touched them, he could not bear it. That, though he knew none of those mighty, emotive phrases by which poets describe the deepest human despair, and the self-annihilation the deepest human despair invites humanity to embrace, yet that was all which remained of him if she were gone. He gazed at her, and though he did not realize it, his eyes told her everything that he or words could not. If perhaps even she had needed to be told such things.

In the garden there was now no noise at all. Beasts and birds slept in the last of the great heat of midday, and men slept or lay vanquished. The grass itself, the leaves on the trees, did not move. Even the wind slept somewhere, high in the hills, under the river, under a stone. There came then the great coolness of that great heat, which is not coolness but only the accepting of the heat, and therefore comfort in it. This David felt, and he sighed. There had come to him also the acceptance of pain, the finish of that business the doctrine of Jesus Christ conceives of as a kicking against tearing barbs, and the doctrine of the Bhagavad-Gita as the blown and scattered ships of broken thought.

“Yes,” said Agnini, as though she had read such sensations from him, “thou art brave, and thou shalt be wise, strong and blessed. Come, I will show thee truths.”

When she rose, David got up. She held out to him her beautiful hand that was like a somber, articulated flower. She led him away.

It seemed they went out of the garden, and on to the road, white and iron-hard now, and then they walked toward the open uplands, where David was forbidden ever to go alone. But David made no protest, did not even worry over this departure. The comforting envelopment of the heat was so intense, time itself seemed to have stopped. They might travel as they pleased, he and this woman that he loved as a mother and as an abstract dream of future love, and as a spirit. No one would come after them, or could find them. No one would ever know.

And a considerable distance seemed to hurry by them, under his enclosed shoes that he must wear against snakes, and under her bare feet, their darkness powdered with white dust.

So they were up in the hills where all was unfamiliar, being rocks and pitiless brown slopes, and an endless blue horizon beyond.

“Dost thou recall,” Agnini said, “the story I told thee first, of the young student, and the serpent that stole from him, vanishing into the earth, and of how the man pursued the serpent, when Indra had opened for him the way?”

David nodded. Glancing down, he saw a slender rupture in the ground.

“See,” she said, “the serpent’s way to the city of his kind.”

“But snakes don’t have cities!”

“Thou hast forgotten the story, O Beloved.”

He looked up at her, and watched her, the gentle movements of her hands, her body swaying like a stem in water. He remembered then the story, which was of the Nagas, that fabulous race of Serpent-People, demons; nearly gods, and of their tricks upon men, and their several cities underground.

David kneeled down by the hole. “Does it really go all the way into a city, Agnini?”

She smiled, and touched his blond skull.

“I have said, I will show thee truths. Thou art not afraid?”

“Not—if you’ll be there too.”

“I am here and shall be there. And now,” she said, “I open the way.”

And she spat. Her spit, like a bright star, went shooting straight as an arrow into the hole. At which, the rockside crumbled and fell inward to a yawning nothingness, and he was drawn softly down with it.

IV

He had not slept, or lost consciousness, yet he seemed to be waking up. There was a darkness, but not as one thinks of blindness; he was not afraid. He was standing, too, so he had not actually fallen, though he had thought he fell, slowly and easily, down into this place. And he was alone. Nevertheless, he believed he knew exactly what he must do next, and this, in a life of uncertainties, was such a reassuring conviction he obeyed it.

As he walked forward, another conviction began to come. If I go on, he thought, thinking in English still, something will happen. But he was not alarmed. It was only right and proper to go on. To go on was essential, like breathing. He went on, and the thing duly happened. At first he did not know what it was. It was as if he began to stretch, very pleasant and natural, and then as he stretched he threw off and cast something away from him, like the sheet on the bed. And then it was more as if he broke through water. Ah, he thought. That’s better. Much. But then the feeling started once more, more imperative and more pleasant and more urgent, and he began to run through the serene darkness, his arms spread out, with no notion of obstacles, and met the feeling head-on and ran through it, and this time it was like jumping through a hoop of crackling paper.

Now I shall be free of bonds, he thought. They will drop behind me.

And once again he passed through the invisible barriers, and then once again, and again, and there was almost a pain each time now, but a pain that was good and clean.

“Thus,” he thought, “thou art no more, and yet thou art.” He thought in Hindi now, or in the older language that was Hindi and was not, which Agnini had taught him. He raised his arms over his head and felt strength and fiery courage, and laughed aloud. And it was no longer the laughter of a child. He looked about him then, and by the light of a vague warm glow that was coming in ahead of him, he glimpsed the pale sloughed garments that he had shed, five or six or seven times, on the rocky floor. They were the skins he had cast, the empty bodies of boyhood, adolescence and youth. All these deaths that are the sum of life, the endless reincarnation of self.

As he advanced toward the light, the one who had been David Finlay, eight years of age, was a man. And the man was tall and strong as though from two decades of faultless exercise, repose and nourishment, beneath the mighty sun which had deeply tanned him and bleached his fair hair to a golden banner. While under the crown of the golden hair the man’s brain, innocent and educated, understood everything, and was made by it amused, and reverent. So he walked out of the tunnel into the light.

The opening was the shore of a lake, or an enormous cistern, under arching rock like a dove-gray sky. Light came from the rock, and from the water, which was crystalline, and out of which grew huge crimson lotuses, standing on their stalks well clear of the surface, like inverted parasols. Across the water, through the lotus forest, he saw the flash and glitter of the towers and walls of the underground city.

Though he had no intermediary memories of his own life after the age of eight, for he had had no life, yet his adult brain was equipped with adult knowledge. He was able to gauge the distance from shore to city as a little less than half a mile, and to predict he could swim it, too. He knew his stamina and abilities, none of which he had himself built up or learned, but which had evolved for him in the casting of the skins—making him what he could be, would be. With a joyous, reckless control, qualities never his till now, he dived in a graceful powerful swoop into the water, cleaving it, passing through its silken undertones, and coming up again with the crimson lotuses brushing his forehead and eyelids.

He swam, without effort, along the natural lanes among the flowers. The water gleamed, and seemed to do him good, like that of a mineral spring. The shining city of the Nagas came nearer and nearer through sparkling showers of water-drops. Presently, his fingers brushed a flight of great steps, brilliant with colored painting, which went up to a platform. Here there was wall, crowded with exquisite and complex carvings. In the wall there was an opening crowned by a horseshoe shape, and without doors. The way was barred only by pillars of red sandstone.

He drew himself from the lake, shook away the water and was instantly dry. As he climbed the marble toward the walls and their opening, he heard the sound of the city for the first time. It was a wonderful sound, of music mingled with action, and seemed imbued by energy and interest. Cities of men did not have this sound.

When he reached the platform, he saw that the seven sandstone pillars rose far up over his head, and each was roped by a serpent, living and golden, every one of which stared at him from its topaz eyes.

He made an obeisance to each of the seven. He had no right here, save the right of invitation, the rights of love and magic. The serpents were each large enough to crush him, but none had made a hostile move, only watched him as he approached.

He was perhaps nine strides from the opening they guarded, able to glimpse through it the extraordinary masonry of the city, when the serpents altered their positions on the pillars. Then each came sliding down. As they touched the marble of the platform they were changed. So he saw the Nagas as the carvings often show them. Upright on their tails of golden plates, sinuous as rope, they were from the waist upward almost men. The man-part was dark-complexioned, the musculature formidable, and hung at breast and arms with gold and huge polished gems. The dark faces smiled, as in the carvings they do, but cruelly, stilly, the long mouths closed. And the large eyes, black and bright as certain of the jewels they wore, were without any white. Each head was cased in a diadem or helmet of gold, and behind head and shoulders there rose, like phantom wings or the plumed lily of the fleur-de-lis, a triplex black and gold formation of serpents, hoods spread wide in the rage display of a striking cobra.

It was the snake-man of the central seventh pillar who spoke, and as he did so his double tongue, slick black as a sloe, flickered in his mouth.

“Thou standst by a city of the Serpent-People, of the limitless realm of the Great King Takshak. Thy kind is unwelcome here. What seekest thou?”

“A woman of thy people, known to me.”

The snake-men glared from their wicked eyes.

“Art a fool, thou. What is thy name, Fool, and who thy fool’s protector, that thou darest so seek one of our race, naked and unarmed, among the thrice-weaponed, the crushers, the venom-toothed, the shape-changers, we?”

He now knew that the name “Agnini” would be of no use here—it was a game she had played, an English anagram of her merely racial name, Nagini. He knew also that his own English name was useless, as the English concept of God was useless. But who in the Indian pantheon could he claim?

Before he could speak and maybe blunder, a woman’s voice came from within the gateway.

“Canst thou not see, Cunning Ones, which Guardian he has? He is the Lord Darvinda, of the Kashatriya. His Patron is therefore Indra Vajri, whose wrath we have felt before. Let him by, my gentle brothers. He is here at my request.”

Then the man-snakes turned away and flung themselves in corkscrews round the pillars, and became all snake again. There, between the seventh and sixth of them, stood the Nagini who had been hired for annas to teach a white child dialects.

She wore a crimson drapery sewn with gold discs. Her arms and throat and ankles were ringed with silver and soft gold, and clasps of gold and red coral and redder rubies were woven like fires in her hair. On her forehead was a star that seemed to have fallen out of heaven, and in her ears two more. Her breasts were bare, but for two white flowers. The palms of her hands were hennaed, and her fingernails paler than pearls.

She was so beautiful he could not immediately speak to her, but he greeted her with respect. He was not ashamed to stand before her naked. He had never learned that shame, though in his other life his mother had tried hard to teach it to him.

Inside the gate were two litters draped with gorgeous fabrics. It seemed men, her servants, bore them. But these too would be capable of the forms of snakes, or half-snakes, just as they were capable of putting on the form of mortals. His Nagini, also, was a serpent.

They rode side by side through the strange, busy, musical streets of the snake city.

“Why didst thou place me among the Kashatriya?” he asked. “I have no caste.”

“All men have caste,” she said, “of the soul, which never changes. And thou art Kashatriya. A Warrior.”

“But I was a coward,” he said.

“Who knows better than the warrior,” she said, smiling, “the terror of battle, the loss of comrades, pain of wounds and death. This may make afraid, after many lives; thou hast lived often. Yet also thou art and shall be brave.”

On every side there went up narrow painted towers and wide painted porticos, and pillars, and ascending, diminishing pyramidal slopes of stone, all blossomed with sculptures and burning with precious metal and enamel. Although there was a natural light throughout the city, every palace and temple seemed lit by lamps, and the colors of the windows and the colossal porches fell over them in slow and glorious lightings. Now and then a chariot would fly by, drawn by white horses, or red or black, with jewelry hoofs, and the charioteer braced forward, some lord standing and proud behind him. Palankeens also passed, hung with bells, and elegant pedestrians walked in a dance of gesture and conversation. In one place there was a smooth turf where riders played a fierce match with curved sticks and a golden ball. All these had taken human shape to suit their activities. But elsewhere snakes lay coiled along the ledges like heavy syrup, communing with each other mysteriously.

A river cut through the city. On its banks the steep ghats, lit by torches that shone in the water, climbed to the doors of magnificent houses. To one of these the litters were taken.

At the threshold, the Nagini kneeled, bidding her visitor be welcome, her hair sweeping the petals strewn on the floor.

•   •   •

He became in her house a prince. Bathed and anointed, he was dressed in the finest muslin and silk, garments such as the masters of the serpent race put on when they had taken the shape of men. There were ornaments, too, like the jewels he had once seen in a museum, behind thick glass. These things felt curious to him, yet not unfitting. All the rooms through which he was conducted were sumptuous, but it was in a chamber of golden walls and screens of pierced marble, that he sat down on cushions and ate wild and delicious foods, lightly spiced and pretty as mosaic.

Behind a curtain clear as thin smoke, musicians coaxed the strings of the sarod, and the bilancojel fluted like a bird. Then his hostess returned and seemed to light the room more brightly. They sat and drank wine, and played chess, which in his former life he had never learned, but which his adult brain knew well. When each had beaten the other once, the board was removed and they played a lighter contest, which was appropriately the business of snakes and ladders.

But though he had gained a name, that her servants used and that she used as if it had always been his, her name he did not hear. And so perforce fell back on calling her Agnini.

The city, too, was nameless. It had neither night nor day, and Darvinda sensed that time was of a different order on the earth, miles up over their heads. At last he stayed Agnini’s hand on the board, and said to her, “Why then am I here?”

“As my guest,” she said, “if thou wilt. But there is another matter, also, a thing of choice which I shall tell thee of, and which thou mayest then accept or decline to undertake.”

“And if declined?”

“Then thou shall depart when rested, an honored traveler who has rejoiced my house.”

“And if accepted?”

“To accept is to aid me.”

“Then where is my choice?”

“Hush, my lord. Promise nothing till you are informed.”

Then she did tell him, and if not everything, enough.

It was an edict of their Great King that sometimes some of his people must leave their cities, and wander the world of men above. So with Agnini and the prince who was her husband. And whether in punishment for some fault, or due only to the Inescapable, they were separated, these two, and their guests became different, and of different duration, so that when Agnini’s tasks were done and she might return to her own country, her lord had some while yet to spend in exile. Thus she returned alone to wait for him. And she was content to wait, for she loved him—they had been created for each other—and in the manner of the supernatural beings they were, for hundreds of mortal years they had remained together. This small absence of, perhaps, a century, could be borne. But then, another in the city claimed her, by the rights only of lust and vacancy. And since he was a prince, and since the Nagas were as they were, and her lord far off, and no kindred to intervene, she could not deny this unwanted companion. Her only recourse had been to escape once more above, and to wander the alien earth, homeless and desolate.

She did not have to tell him, Darvinda saw what he had been chosen to do. At once his mind, his senses, laid before him a panorama of skills which he perceived as his own. His surprise was mild, as was his excitement at them. Like the new clothes, his man’s body had come to fit him swiftly and well; the cast skins of his childhood and his weakness were foreign to him now he had outstripped them. So, he understood also that he had courage and confidence and need no longer be afraid of his fear.

Nevertheless, he considered. To be used by Agnini flattered him, and pleased him. She had given him a great deal, when he was a terrified little boy. The chance to repay her gifts was to be wished for. Yet he was aware of other things, shadows moving inside the substance of what she had said.

“It seems to me now,” he said then, “that I am strong and versed in combat. In any battle thine enemy may suggest, it appears I may attempt to match him. But it seems to me too, he is mighty. Can I prevail? If I go down before thy foe, what of thee thereafter? Will it go worse for thee?”

Agnini kneeled by him, smiling up at him, black-eyed as the nights of earth.

“Yes, thou mayest fall in the battle, dear lord. But if I swear that, even falling, even slain, he cannot triumph over thee, nor then over myself, wilt thou heed my words?”

“But thou sayest I may die in this.”

“This I do say. Thou mayest die. Yet shalt thou be the victor, and I through thee.”

What man of the world of men would not have flung her gifts and her words together back in her face? He said, “Die yet prevail? Well, I trust thee. Through thee I know the soul does not perish, and through thee I know love exists, lessons no other gave me. So then, I will do it. When will he come?”

Agnini touched his hands with her forehead; then rose.

“Already, Darvinda, he is here.”

He felt no alarm even at that. Rather he felt a surge of power and ferocity, the sword edge of the many faceted Kshatram, the essence of the Warrior caste of which he now, bemusedly, humbly and gladly, reckoned himself an adjunct.

It was as if he had cried out: Let him come in!

The doors were pulled wide and the enemy strode through.

He had come as a demon, maybe to appall, or else it was merely his jest. For though he wore a man’s form, yet he had kept the scales of the snake as his armoring, and in his wide mouth the white serpents’ teeth showed like tusks, gilded by ready venom. His eyes were not a man’s eyes, but blood-red and terrible. Only his hair was truly that of a man, long and black, falling far below his waist. Behind him walked an albino ape with cold pink eyes of its own, simpering with malice, that carried its master’s arms with a showy and martyred struggle.

“Yes,” said the enemy, “look thou long at me, O mortal tiling. Look at my skin which thou canst not pierce, and at my fangs which shall rend and poison thee. Stare into my eyes, red as the fire which shall burn thy corpse on the ghats, and my hair black as the River of the City which shall drink thine ashes. I am Rupanag. Or, thou mayest name me only Death, since I am thine.”

“Greetings,” said Darvinda. “Where wilt thou fight?”

“Below, on the bank above the water, where all may see. Or art bashful? Shall we set to in some dark place where none may witness thee?”

“Let me get arms, and we will meet below, where thou desirest, on the bank.”

“She will arm thee,” said Rupanag. “And arm thee well. Which is good. For soon everything of thine shall be everything of mine. And it is good too that we fight on the bank, the handier for the place where thy dead body shall be burned.”

“Dost thou fence always thus?” asked Darvinda, “with thy tongue?”

But Rupanag laughed, and was gone, and on the platforms below, beside the river, there was a noise of gathering and eagerness.

•   •   •

As Darvinda left the doors of Agnini’s palace, a beggar-woman plucked at his wrist. Her eyes were bright as the lamps and torches that flamed in the river below: This city had no true beggars. “Do not fight,” she said. “Thou shalt be sorely harmed.”

“Greater harm to another, if I do not.”

Massed crowds stood on the ghats, their finery ablaze. As he went down between them to the platform Rupanag had selected, a sneering youth caught at Darvinda’s elbow. “Do not fight. Thou shalt be put to shame.”

“Thou shamest thyself to boast of it.”

And as he reached the broad platform and stepped out on to it, a little girl child, no older than he had been before, ran to Darvinda holding in both hands garlands of marigolds, and pointed at his heart. And the child said, in a woman’s voice, “Fight not, Darvinda. For thou shalt die.”

But, “There is no death,” he said, and took one of the garlands and put it on his neck with the collar of gold and precious stones. The child smiled and vanished in the crowd.

And then Rupanag came and filled the horizon.

At once the platform of marble was altered. It had grown as wide as a desert, and the crowd was no longer to be seen, nor the palaces of their lights, nor the reflecting river. Even Rupanag was miles off, although his immanence made him perfectly visible still.

Darvinda beheld Rupanag take from the pale ape with the pale eyes a colossal bow, bend and string it, and set to its lip an arrow large as a spear, which suddenly the bow spat out. The arrow came like a bird of prey, high and sheer, and the air was filled by the sound of its cry. At the last instant Darvinda leapt aside, flinging up his shield to deflect the missile. But the great arrow carried half the shield away with it, plunging on into the platform until only the quivering flight remained above ground. Then Darvinda took up the bow Angini had given him, strung it, set an arrow to the string and let it fly. No sooner was the arrow in the air than it too, swollen with the warrior power of the Kshatram, grew great and terrible. But Rupanag had snatched another arrow and discharged it. Like a falcon on a pigeon this second arrow stooped, and met Darvinda’s arrow at the center of the marble plain. There was a crash like thunder and a flash of fire, and splinters hurtled downward in a rain. Neither arrow had survived the impact.

As the last smoldering fragments hit the plain, the surface of it shook. Rupanag was running, his bounds eating up the illusory or actual miles in seconds. He loomed like an angry cloud, blotting out the light. But Darvinda moved to meet him, and either his own state enlarged, or the image of his enemy shrank. They met as two lions meet, springing forward, and the sword that each had drawn rang on the other’s with a searing moan.

“Why,” said Rupanag, “thou fightest as one crippled, but thy crippling is to come.”

But for all that, Darvinda’s blows made him skip and spin and keep busy to get out of the way of them. There seemed no hope of penetrating the scaly dermis; Darvinda’s aim, then, was to bruise and stun, and to break if possible. So his sword smote down and down again. And all the while the blade of Rupanag hurtled toward him and away. Sometimes the impact was accepted on the half of Darvinda’s ruined shield, all the arrow had left him. Sometimes the impact was avoided. But now and again, the point of the sword ripped home. Darvinda’s red blood lay on his golden flesh and mingled with the red jewels of Agnini’s gift.

“Thou hast garnets under thy skin, and rubies,” cried Rupanag. “I find gems for thee brighter than those she gave thee. Yet alas, thou findest none for me.”

But on and on they strove, and there came at length a blow between the swords that broke them, and they burst in pieces, like a firework, just as the arrows had been burst.

Rupanag fell back, and flung away his sword hilt with a snarl. Then he jumped straight upward, turned in the air, came down upon his hands and so folded into a reeling living wheel, which rolled itself at Darvinda and caught him fast.

They fought then only with their bodies’ strength, with hands and limbs and feet. And as they wrestled, all the time Rupanag grinned and gnashed his serpent’s fangs, striving to bring them where they could close and inject a poison richer than that of seventy cobras into his adversary’s veins.

But Darvinda had not loosed hold of the hilt of his own wrecked sword. Presently, as they struggled, he dashed this hilt with all his might against the beautiful ghastly teeth of Rupanag, and smashed the uppermost of the great biting fangs.

Rupanag screamed, and in that moment of his anguish, galvanized by enormous agony, he thrust his foot against Darvinda’s breast and seizing the yellow hair in his hands he whirled him high. And as Darvinda fell down again across Rupanag’s shoulders, Rupanag snapped his spine like a reed.

So the combat ended, and the city came back, and the ghats with the torches burning, and the palaces and crowds beside the river. And all who looked saw Darvinda lying on the marble among the blood and the marigolds, slain in the way that men most often kill snakes.

•   •   •

The Serpent-People did this much for Darvinda, they wrapped him in a white shroud and left him ready on the platform for Agnini to honor with the death-fire. He had fought well and given them a show, for though they seemed far off, they had stood close and watching all the while. But he was a foreigner, neither of their race nor their kind, and mortal.

Rupanag went away to be cleansed and tended, to pray and sacrifice, and change his shape. He came back as a bridegroom behind a concourse of chariots and horses and musicians and colored lamps, though the ape-slave did not go with him; it was a female, and jealous, and had run to chatter on the tops of the city, like one mad. The conqueror stalked into Agnini’s palace. After which the doors were closed.

So he sat down in the room of golden walls and Agnini’s handmaidens served him. He frowned at her, for she too wore white, as if to indicate a widow’s death. As a man, Rupanag was tall and well-made, his eyes and hair black as ebony. But when he smiled now, he kept his mouth shut, for his teeth, in whatever form he took, had been forever spoiled.

“Well, I will eat, and drink wine,” said Rupanag.

“Do so, Lord,” said Agnini.

“Then I will go with thee to some chamber where thou shalt pleasure me.”

“Perhaps not so.”

“Why, who is there to prevent me now?”

“Listen,” said Agnini, “thou shalt hear the doors fly open before him.”

All this Darvinda saw and heard, in a detached way, as he drifted about in the air. Incorporeal, it seemed, he could see and hear anything he wished, and more than one thing at once. Nor did he see with eyes, nor did he hear with ears. Nor did he, exactly, see or hear.

There had been a time of quietness after death. Then curiosity had made him voyage through the atmosphere. Now some other thing drew him back to the platform. His death had not been a death, but only one more shedding of a skin. And returning, he was drawn down and in, and was once more clothed in body, thrusting his way from an envelope of torn flesh and severed spine, and lastly from the polite shroud, to stand upright and whole on the ghats above the river.

This, it seemed, was Agnini’s magic still, but it was true and sure as she had told him. Carelessly he stripped from the flaccid skin and the rattling bones, which had been himself, the garments she had given him, and put them on. If any observed him now they made no sign. And when he turned toward the palace, no one came to warn or mock at him.

Every door flew open with a bang in front of Darvinda. When he reached the golden room and entered it, Rupanag, who had been sitting upright with a look of horror, started to his feet. On this occasion no words were exchanged. The serpent prince grasped platters from the tables and hurled them, and as they came they seemed altered to knives and lances, but Darvinda stepped from their path, and they passed him by, each with a rushing shriek.

When he reached Rupanag, Darvinda had only to put out his hands and lay hold on him. Rupanag had by this time drawn a long dagger, but in striking it turned on a jewel at Darvinda’s hip. It was no longer the hour of Rupanag’s triumph. And Darvinda took the dagger from his enemy’s hand as a man takes a leaf from a bush, and drove it through Rupanag’s armorless skin into the furious heart.

So Rupanag ended, and his man’s body sprawled among the feast and the flowers.

“But even an immortal has a soul which cannot die,” said Agnini. “See.”

And at his foot Darvinda saw lying a serpent’s egg, and out of the egg at that instant came frantically wriggling a little brown venomless snake, newborn and bewildered, and it crawled away over the floor.

“So he must remain awhile,” said Agnini. “A little brown snake, dwelling in the lowliest crevices of the Naga city. For he died in lust and rage, and lust and rage were the cause. And they that die so deluded descend to the lowest way. But thou, lord, who died in the action of nobleness for another, aspiring to nothing more, thou art a man again, thy daylight path before thee.”

Then she murmured softly, “And thou hast freed me.”

There were other rooms to which her servants conducted him. Here he underwent a second time rituals of bathing and purification, and then, in a silent courtyard before a shrine of the god Indra, the Wielder of the Thunderbolt, Darvinda made his offerings, as was proper. And only in hanging the garland about the throat of the god did Darvinda pause a moment, a little embarrassed that once, long ago, he had thought him only a disreputable idol (his mother’s term) before realizing all gods were one and one many, and that they have a multitude of names. He begged Indra’s pardon, but from courtesy and gratitude, which are not fear.

And then there was yet one more room, hung with silks like running rivers, perfumed with incenses, with blue collyrium and smoky sandalwood, with oils and flowers. The light there was low and subtle. When Agnini had entered the golden room she had brought a kind of sunrise into it. But here, entering the dark, she was like a moon of darkness, furled in a night of blackest hair.

He kneeled to her, and placed his hand upon her foot, where the rings glimmered. His body was a man’s, and his desires also were those of a man. He knew quite well that he had won her, and better yet, that she would give herself. For there was love between them.

But when he drew her to him, her smiling eyes were sad. And he remembered all the rest of what she had told him. Of her husband, the prince for whom she had been created, her lord who was bound to wander still, and for whose sake—rather than accept another—she had returned to the bitter exile of the human earth.

So he stepped away from her, though his whole body burned and reviled him. And then the fires passed into a wonderful coolness, a sort of joy, because such a look of happiness had been borne in her face. She seemed younger than the youngest child. Her soul was dancing, and took his dancing with it. And there came in those moments, after all, a communion of love, if not of the love of the flesh.

When the summit of that marveling shared tumult had passed with no words at all, she spoke to him.

“Because of this final benefit thou hast rendered me, I may greet my lord, running to meet him at the first sound of his footstep, without debasement or deception. And for this, I promise thee one further gift. Valor and strength thou shalt have, beauty and favor, fortune and sweetness all thy days, but also a perfect and enduring love shall be thine, a love even as the love of demons and gods. Remember me, lord, but once, when thou hast found her.”

The darkness moved and flickered. It was so real it could not be possible it should pass. But the lovely moon, the somber moon of the woman’s face, swam on its night of hair. The walls of the room were fading. The towers and the lights beyond had lost their shape and shine.

Already the dream was ebbing away. It would soon be forgotten. There was a coldness at his back. Throat too dry, and eyes gritty from sleep, and feet sore from walking, raising his head, confused—to see the trees over the distant garden wall—The small boy stumbled down the dusty road, and through the swarming dusk, without music. . . .

V

Evelyn was hysterical, to the point of madness. Chaver Finlay stood and poured himself scotch, waiting until the cries had died, or paused for breath.

“And that’s why dinner is late, I take it?” he then said.

“Oh Chaver!” she wailed, reminiscent of the jackals he had heard on the road. But one threw a stone at them, and Evelyn was not so easy to be rid of. She wilted before him, soiled by hours of tears and squawking in broiling weather, her hair practically on end and her faded eyes starting from her head. “All morning, all afternoon! All day, and not a trace of him. The servants looked everywhere. I had them all out—and then he came wandering in after sunset. I couldn’t get a thing out of him. Just something about falling asleep in the hills. Oh, Chaver, he can’t have got all that way by himself.”

“No of course he can’t. Not on foot.” The man drank. He said, “A surprising sort of adventure for our delicate little pet.” His air of contemptuous approval did nothing to help.

Evelyn began to sob. “It’s that woman,” she sniveled. “That—that—” No epithet was both vile and polite enough to be utilized. “She took him off somewhere. I know it. You know what they are. Extraordinary things happen here in this awful country. Anything might have been done to him.”

“But I take it it wasn’t?” Chaver finished the whisky. “Where is he now?”

“I sent him straight to bed.”

“I see. Well, he’ll keep, then. I’ll go and have a word with Agnini.”

“Oh, no—Chaver—no—”

“Why not? You seem to think she’s at the bottom of the mystery.”

“No, you mustn’t—”

“Don’t tell me,” said Chaver, casting after all the stone, and unerringly, “what I may and must not do.”

As he crossed the night garden with quick eager strides, between bushes that flickered tonight with fireflies, he saw his quarry almost by instinct, shadow in shade, under an orange tree near the wall. The spot was secluded, an invitation. He walked up to her, quite hidden from the bungalow and the servants’ area, and said, “What’s been going on, then? Thinking of abducting my son, maybe, and your accomplices never turned up? Too scared. As you should have been.” She said nothing, and even in the dark her eyes glowed, as if they too held fireflies, or stars. He chuckled, roughly, to demonstrate it might all be a joke. “That’s what the memsahib thinks, anyway. Taking my son and heir away to sell for immoral practices. But I don’t think you’d do that, Aggi. Murdering an old woman now, that’s more your line.” Again he waited, and she said nothing. He put out one hand and let it fall on her shoulder, which was bare. He palmed her shoulder, liking the texture of her, as he had known he would. What she had on was a little puzzling. It was nothing of Asha’s lending anymore, rather some piece of cloth taken up from somewhere and casually wound on her, and as casually, perhaps, unwound. “You did kill her, did you? The men said there was something wrong with the body. They said, it was hollow, like an empty sack, but full of mud that had been washed in and then hardened. It looked like an ordinary corpse to me.” He moved his hand downward. “But you’re all alive, aren’t you? No, don’t move away. After all, I could give you some trouble, Aggi, if I wanted to. If I reported that corpse to the authorities, and mentioned we’d had a stray wandering around here. Come on, Aggi. I’ll talk Hindi-cindy to you, if you like.” He had both hands on her now, and pressed close to her, to let her learn his readiness. “You know you want to, Aggi. You pray doing it, don’t you, everywhere, on every bloody temple. You’re full of it, you darkies—” The sound came from her mouth, close by his ear, and turned his pounding heart to stone and the heat in his groin to ice. Before he could think, Finlay had jumped away from her, and gone on stumbling backwards until he collided with another of the orange trees. His reaction was out of all proportion to what she had done. Yet it had not seemed to be: She had hissed at him. There was nothing catlike in it, nor anything human. It was the exhalation of the hunting cobra. And the sinuous shape of her against him, the weave of her head scarcely seen in the night gloom, these things had seemed snakelike too. In that split second, there between his hands and grappled to his torso—something cool and evil and untender rustled and swayed, and the great jaws gaped, the long teeth glinted, readying to deliver the paralyzing and deadly bite. . . .

“For God’s sake,” he said hoarsely. But out of the black of his invisible foreign garden, her woman’s voice came back at him, speaking rapidly in English, and then in Hindi, so he did not quite follow it all.

“Do what you wish,” she said. “Tell whom you wish. My wandering is done. I go elsewhere. Thou canst not harm me, thou man. And that which thy slaves found on the road, that was only mine, no other’s. The shed skin of my mortal youth and age, gone from me now I am young again, and free. But thou. Go woo thy pink-eyed wife. And for thy son—go thou and lie in the dirt at his feet, for that is thy place. Thou shalt see the sun rise in him, soul and body, while thy tiny strengths wither like old leaves. Thy way is darkness. Remember me, once, in the long and lampless night of thy life.”

With his shoulders to the slender orange tree, his ears ringing and his intestines crawling, Chaver Finlay heard then something that made it seem as if a bundle of light material had been thrown down into the grass. It would take him months to erase the impression he had that the shadow of the woman vanished, while, about the height of his boot top, something whispered away like a river through the bushes, and all the fireflies winked out.

However, it took only half an hour to push the matter temporarily from his forebrain, with the admitted help of the whisky decanter and cigarette box. And only three minutes more to reach his son’s bedroom.

“Get up, David,” the man said in a cold, penetrating and level voice, as his hand shook like a terrier at the scruff of the boy’s neck. “Get up. We have some business.”

In the semi-dark, a drift of light coming in from beyond, where Evelyn stood whimpering, the boy seemed luminous in his pale pajamas.

“You’ve been damned disobedient,” said the man. “You know that, don’t you? Going off and scaring your mother. Telling lies. All right. You’ll take your punishment. Drop your trousers and lean over the chair.”

And then, after a moment, over the noise the woman was making, came the noise of a leather belt being applied to naked eight-year-old flesh. And the man panting at the work. But no other sound.

Outside, the woman wrung her hands, suffering every pain that the boy received, as if she herself bore it for him. Such chastisements drew them closer, a mother and son, both victims of the man. And it was a dreadful beating for a little boy. She was concerned he did not scream or weep. The former, lighter beatings had always caused him to cry out—would Chaver be able to stop, without this signal of acknowledgment?

In the end, the man did stop, tiring, and abruptly aware he had gone too far. Defensively he said, “All right. You’ve been brave, I’ll give you that. Lie down now. Go on, lie down.” And then, loudly, violently, as if to a savage dog, “Lie down!”

Not properly grasping what was amiss, the woman heard fear in her husband’s voice. Startled, on a reflex, she ran forward and pushed the bedroom door fully open, so the light sluiced in and filled the room.

Her son, David, stood at the center of the room, the light, clad merely in the unbuttoned pajama top and the blood that trickled down his legs. His fair hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat, but from the unfathomed day’s exposure to the sun, she saw his body had acquired at last a deepening tan. He was less than half the height of the man, his father, yet the child seemed to dominate the entire scene. His mouth was firmly closed, his eyes tearless and wide.

“Davy,” the woman said, under her breath. “Oh, do as Daddy tells you, Davy.”

But it did not matter anymore that she called him “Davy.” The dream had ebbed away, he had forgotten it. Nonetheless, brain and heart and spirit, it had bathed him through; nameless and unremembered, yet it had recolored everything, and the dye was permanent. Now he knew himself, and what he might become, nor would he ever doubt, nor doubt the daylight path stretched before him and could not be missed. Whatever shadows scattered that path, he would pay them no heed. They were nothing now, compared to what would be his, in the golden future only years, days, moments away. And though the blood ran and the man panted and though “Davy, Davy,” the woman muttered, there was even another name, a secret name, nothing would ever touch.

Less than half the man’s height, the boy looked up. Chaver Finlay, who had not recalled the aspect of his child’s eyes, now met it, blue as a jewel and falling like the blow of a seven-foot sword across his recoiling adult mind.

Pushing past his wife, the man went away, laughing coarsely. There was nothing to do save laugh, since his consciousness could not admit what all the rest of him already saw and shouted at. Though he did sense he had beaten his son for the very last time in his life.

Second Night

The Second Night belongs to the hunter, and is set with tigers like orange jewels between the black walls of the forest.

Bright Burning Tiger

Long, long ago in London a girl of my acquaintance, finding her ginger feline asleep by the gas fire, struck a pose, one foot lightly on the cat’s back, announcing: “Shot it in Injuh, y’know,” and she had so perfectly caught, in voice and stance, the pompous waking dream of the British raj, that it became a game often repeated; only ended at last by the intolerance of the cat to playing tiger’s skin. As for me, the joke summed up a basic personal attitude. I had then an allergic indifference to a type of man and his pursuits, as unlike myself and mine as those of an alien species. Later, when I learned more of the facts, some of the glibness of the joke had to be rethought. There are occasionally among tigers maneaters, which can prey on the remoter villages of the jungle-forest, cruel, maddened things that seem to hate, killing from lust rather than hunger, leaving the half-devoured bodies of women among the stalks of the fields at sunrise; by night a nightmare shadow, so a man will be afraid to go out of his hut to make water in case death has him. There is sometimes a need for a bullet, which the sneer and the attitude had formerly cloaked. Much later again, when I met Pettersun, I came to understand, unwillingly at first, maybe always unwillingly, something of what drives one hunter, something actually of the uncanny bond which can come to obtain between one who hunts, one who is hunted. Certainly to perceive the slender division that exists, always interchangeable. For the man may misfire, the weapon stall, the beaters run away, and the dark come down which is the tiger’s country, the land of night. And in the forests of the night, the golden beast with his nocturnal sight, the unalloyed weapons of his mouth, the blades of his feet, his great strength—the creature capable of eating men—that is no mean adversary. It isn’t in me to enter, to want to enter, the magic circle of any of this. Not merely that I lack the courage, though I do lack it, but because I could never kill anything either ritually or callously that I absolutely did not have to. And luckily, I never have had to kill anything, beast or man. For this reason, perhaps, I can tell my story, safe by a sort of mitigating accident. I wonder.

•   •   •

It was just outside the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta that I met the fat man. Part of my living comes from carrying out paid research for others, and my mind was still idling somewhere between here and the Jadu Ghar, my feet already turning toward the hotel. Softening the slums and palaces, an orange sun bled low over the Maidan. The fat man blocked the view, halting before me on the steps and introducing himself. I can’t recall who he said he was, but he knew me from an article that had carried my photograph. I was thinking with annoyance he would now engage me in argument over something I had written and forgotten, when he told me Pettersun was dead.

“How?” I was shocked by aptness, not surprise, and the query was half rhetorical. It was fairly obvious what must have occurred, nor was I mistaken.

“A tiger killed him. Funny business. Damn funny. I’ve given myself the responsibility, you might say, to let people know, people who knew him.”

“I never knew him well.”

“Didn’t you? That’s all right then. But still, a funny business.” I looked at the blankness of his dark silhouette with the amber sunset crackling around the fat edges of it. He wanted to say some more. “Funny,” he said.

“You mean amusing, or peculiar?”

“Oh, not amusing. Not at all. Peculiar. Yes, that’s it.”

“Why?” I said.

“Well, he wasn’t off hunting it, you know. He was in bed.”

“In—bed—”

“Exactly. And the thing came in, right into the bungalow, and tore him in pieces. Pretty horrible, I gather. Yes, pretty damn horrible.”

It certainly sounded odd. Monkeys, rats, snakes, these come into houses, not tigers that I ever heard of. The fat man stood, gloating over his own dismay, mine. I was compelled to go on, ask questions.

“Where did this happen?”

“North,” he said, and named a small town. “About ten miles from there. A couple of villages. One of the old rangers’ bungalows. He was living there, out in the jungle. Just drinking a lot, not doing anything. Then there was a scare apparently, a maneater. They’d heard about Pettersun and came and asked him if he’d take it on, and Pettersun said, No, he was through with all that. But he started cleaning his gun—you remember that gun of his with ivory—”

“Yes, I remember.”

“Then there’s a panic, you know how they are. The tiger’s everywhere. In the village. In the other village. Up a tree, in the fields, down the well—He was going out the next night, or that’s how I heard it, torches and beaters, the whole bloody show. A little before dawn he was lying there with the gin bottle for company and—whap! One of his beaters found him and ran out screaming. It was mucky.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Doctor at Chadhur was called in to look at the body. I know Hari pretty well. Second-hand news, but reliable.”

“It sounds unbelievable.”

The fat man didn’t take offense. He shrugged.

“It does, doesn’t it. But the Bombay papers had it, you know, a paragraph or two.”

“How long ago was all this?”

“A couple of months. Well, that’s life. I could do with something cool.”

The dim wild cry of sunset worship was beginning to rise from distant mosques. I excused myself to the fat man and went away to get a drink alone.

I digested Pettersun’s death slowly in the shadow of the turning fans, like huge insects in the ceiling. How else must a hunter die, but logically under the hoof or claw or fang of the entity he has so long himself stood over, his foot on its neck, the rifle smoking. Shot it in India. Though he had not been one for tigerskin rugs.

I hadn’t, as I said, known him well. I hadn’t liked him, God forbid, or admired him, except possibly for his bravery, for there had been stories of that I had heard from other sources. I suppose to some extent he fascinated me, the forbidden fruit of what our own ethic tells us is wrong, which to another is only an ordinary facet of existence. I’d met him at a sprawling English party in Bombay, full of men in penguin costume and women in gold lamé dresses, all of them brown as tanned leather, which made the coffee flesh of the waiters look almost blue. We spoke generally for a while, part of a group, which gradually drifted away, leaving Pettersun alone with me. He then said, smiling, as if he’d been waiting the chance, “You don’t like me much do you.” No question, no aggression; a statement. I said nothing. He swirled the last of his drink, drank it and said, “Or rather, you don’t like what I do. Orion the Hunter. The wicked man who kills the nice animals.”

I shrugged, considering the neatest way of escaping, which hadn’t yet suggested itself. One of the waiters came by with more drinks, and Pettersun took off four, the fourth of which he handed to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. He drank the first of his new drinks straight down, and said, “Call me names, if you like. I don’t shoot men.”

“Just tigers,” I said, before I could stop myself.

“Just tigers? A tiger is never just tiger.”

“For sport,” I said.

“No,” he said. Still the smile, throwing me, enjoying it? “I’d never call it that.”

This was becoming boring and uncomfortable.

“Well,” I said, helpfully, “a maneater obviously—”

“So you won’t stand up for your principles,” he said, and drank that second drink. “You think I’m an offense on God’s green earth, but you’re not about to tell me so.”

“Mr. Pettersun,” I said, “what you do is your problem.”

“Afraid I’ll hit you if you speak up, break the chiseled nose, is that it? I won’t. I’m a peaceable man. I like booze, preferably free. I kill tigers. Note, I didn’t say I liked killing them. That’s it. The sum of my parts.”

“Excuse me,” I said. As I turned, he put the third glass into my other hand, which duly stayed me, because he had obviously wanted it himself. “Have a drink?” he said.

I stood there with a glass in either hand, looking at him, wondering.

“What do you want?” I said.

“I think,” he said, “I want to talk to you, tell you—about the very thing you don’t want to hear about.”

“In other words, you want to be a nuisance.”

“No.”

“Convert me? Not a chance.”

“Well of course not,” Pettersun said. “There’s no pleasure in conversion. And debate is normally pointless, isn’t it?” I stayed where I was, caught despite myself because he had said something I myself believed. “So, what can it be?”

I started to drink the drink he had given me. I said: “Drunken egomania needing to find a voice?”

He laughed. “This affair stinks,” he said. “I know a place on the waterfront where a girl dances with cobras on all the tables. You like that kind of thing?”

“Yes, I sometimes like that kind of thing.”

In the “place” where the barefoot girl did her dance every two hours, swishing her black hair like a horse’s tail, the milked snakes knotted on her arms, at her waist, we drank something alcoholic curdled in lassi. I wasn’t even then sure what had made me go there with him. It would be easy enough, with hindsight, to say I sensed he needed to confess, last rites before execution. As someone I once knew said, there is something of the priest about me, somehow, somewhere, apparent both to myself and, under particular circumstances, to others.

The preliminary conversation rambled, I don’t recollect much of it, but when he began to talk to me, as he had said he wished to, there came a kind of clarity which I do remember and maybe always shall. No sentences are left, but I retain their kernel. For this was when the free-masonry of the hunt was made known to me, and I was just drunk enough that it came in over or under the barriers of my mind and ethics, and I understood, and I still understand, though I won’t condone. Condone it less, probably, since I saw the attraction, the religious element, the extraordinary bonding that might occur (at least in the human’s mind), which must then be sought after like a drug. While it was some bloody old duffer with his rifle and his notions of sport it stayed safely and obscenely remote. But the sorcerous quality of the ritual of the hunt, arcane and special, and there, I suspect, in many of us, had a seductive frisson that had to be resisted—which in fact made it all the more repulsive—the venus flytrap.

I recall too, well into the night, staggering back along by the seashore, the black water and the towering ghosts of apartment buildings, and the moon like ivory, like the ivory inlay on the rifle, of which he carried a snapshot, just as other men carry photos of their women or their children, or lacking those, their dogs.

In the morning, waking with a hangover, I thought it had been a waste of time, ridiculous. But very soon the teachings—for he had taught me his philosophy, under the wild fig tree of the dancing girl’s shade—came back. Hunter and hunted, the stalker and the prey, woven by reeds, by leaves, by shadows, by bloodthirst and fear, and by desire. And which was which? Then getting up to put my head in the basin full of lukewarm water, I thought angrily: Rubbish. A man with a gun. What chance had the wretched tiger? Who did Pettersun think he was fooling? But he hadn’t been trying to fool me. He had only been saying, This is how it is, for some, for me. Right or wrong. This. I had never had much patience with Hemingway, but I reread The Old Man and the Sea a week later, in the blazing Indian veranda. The relationship between the fisherman and the great beautiful hooked fish—aside from necessity, thick-headed, wanton, unaware—anything its detractors will prove it—but powerfully illustrative, in its way, of the mystique Pettersun had revealed to me. But if it is possible to murder with honor and love and pity, then all the more reason to stop.

I never met Pettersun again. A few months later, the fat man met me instead on the Memorial steps in Calcutta and said, “A tiger killed him. Funny business.”

So, then. Just over twelve months later, doing this time some research on my own behalf, I ended up more or less randomly in Chadhur.

Once I had my own professional affairs in hand, I went over to the hospital building. Here I loitered, pondering if I really wanted or intended to chase the matter. But someone asked me, as they do Europeans, who I was looking for. I replied with the name of the doctor the fat man had called familiarly, “Hari.”

Graceful and gregarious, Doctor Hari invited me into his office for very good coffee, and I broached my subject tentatively. The response was not tentative at all. Doctor Hari had had for Pettersun all the rage of the good physician for the intransigent patient. “If the tiger had not done for him, his alcoholism would have seen to it. His system was in revolt. On the path he had chosen he had a year or less.”

“But it’s true, then. I heard the animal got into—”

“—the bungalow and attacked him in bed? Quite true. Do you have a strong stomach?”

Pettersun had been disemboweled, the heart and throat torn out—the rest of the corpse had been bitten, rent, virtually slit like a sack. “It was quite a mess. The villagers are used to death and mishap, but they were terribly afraid and superstitious. I too have seen a number of men killed by tigers or panthers. Never a body exactly in this condition, and all uneaten.”

“Then it wasn’t the tiger he was out to get?”

“Well, perhaps. The second village trapped a tiger about ten days after—an old tiger turned to man-flesh, as they sometimes do, because men are easier game. I should say this tiger was not strong enough to have done to the body what had been done. Naturally, sometimes they will kill and not eat, but then not maul so savagely, splitting open, almost a dissection. While the room was untouched.”

“How did it get in?”

“The door was open. He had left it open—wide, like an invitation, one might almost say. Very strange. Very unpleasant. And sad. There are other villages in the area with cause to be grateful to Pettersun.”

I had a dead feeling, the letdown of anticlimax. I didn’t know what I had expected to hear. Then, as I was leaving, Doctor Hari said, “Of course, the drinking had made him do curious things. On the wall of the bungalow, for example, he had written something in big letters. A poem of some sort, some modern English or American verse, unrhyming. About a tiger, naturally. The villagers still refuse to go near the house at night.”

•   •   •

To go out to the bungalow was the next thing to do, so I put off doing it. Pettersun’s death was stale a year now, and nothing to me or to do with me. My interest did not seem purely ghoulish, but probably was. Against that, I knew I couldn’t leave without following events to their proper conclusion. Finally I got a car and took to the new highway, which bore me all the way to the town of the fat man’s tale. From there the wisest course was horseback, colonial style, along the dusty road and into the blistered, streaked, striped heart of the jungle. Here I almost gave myself entirely to the spirit of the place, the intense enclosure of the massive trees skirted with broad leaves and thickets of bamboo. A few times women passed me on the track, walking what I call the sari-walk, wound in their jewel-bright garments, basket or pot on head. They were lean and proud and sometimes beautiful beyond measure. Presently I saw a village, downhill in a valley, where the jungle broke and scattered. Grain stood straight up at the sky, children ran about, a herd of buffalo wallowed in summer mud.

The sky had turned briefly to a wall of glowing maroon beyond the trees, when I reached the bungalow—and nearly missed it. The jungle, as in Kipling, had been let in, vines and high grass all over everything, barely the glint of dirty-white veranda posts to show me. There was a cookhouse round at the back and a couple of huts, but these also were overgrown; the roofs had fallen in.

I stirred about for a while, the horse cropping the grass, unconcerned. The doors to the house had been boarded up by authority, and I had no intention of forcing them in the dark. There seemed nothing dangerous abroad, but as the night smoked through the forest, I remounted and made my way back to the village. Here I was greeted with curiosity amounting to joy. I didn’t mention my errand or that I had been to the bungalow, merely did a little trading over the rice and spiced vegetables. Later a child of five appeared, who spoke to the men in Hindi of his wife and family, the family cow and goat, the ailment of his youngest daughter. It was the memory of the recent past life. Such things are not uncommon in India. The child’s mother presently came in and comforted him, telling him all would be well. He would soon forget prior responsibilities, as this life and its obligations claimed him. When the child had been taken off, I mentioned tigers, and at once a deep silence fell. The men looked at one another. Eventually someone told me, “There are no tigers here. They have gone away.”

“But surely,” I said, “someone was attacked by a tiger in these parts, about a year ago . . . quite a well-known hunter—Porter, Potter—some name like that.”

“Yes,” said another gravely. “That tiger was killed. There are no more.”

I looked at their gaunt, passionless faces, so handsome some of them, enduring all. Outside, across the space of nighttime earth, the forlorn child, burdened by obligations he could no longer uphold, slept on his mother’s breast. They had shared food with me and would shelter me, and I could force no more of my own wants on them. I didn’t sleep that night behind their safe stockade, lying listening to the rustle of leaves and stars. At first light I left, walking the horse through endless-seeming ranks of goats being arranged for milking, and girls walking to the well.

Up in the jungle-heart the bungalow had not altered, still locked up in its boards and creepers. Leaving the tethered horse I forced one of the windows, and climbed through into what had been Pettersun’s sleeping room. The low Indian bed, its lacquer peeling and webbing broken, still stood dutifully at one wall, the rotted netting hanging down about it like cobwebs. Some shelves, a desk, a chair, these things remained, but no niceties, if there had ever been any. There was no idiosyncratic odor in the room. Becoming one with the invading jungle, it had the jungle smell, tinders and juices. Lianas had come through the foundations even, and covered the floor, so that any stains there were hidden.

The verse Doctor Hari had told me of was on the wall facing the bed, written in paint with long letters that leaned in all directions. It was dark enough, I had trouble making any of it out. When I did, an unnerving pang of recognition went through me, still displaced. Pettersun had written this:

Symmetry fearful thy frame could

Eye? Or Hand Immortal—What?

Night—the; of forests. The in—

Bright burning Tiger! Tiger!

I stood there, breathing audibly, startled, hearing the birds and the monkeys calling through the jungle, silently reading the words over, until suddenly, of course, that Tiger! Tiger! gave me the key. It was nothing else but Blake’s poem, but all bizarrely reversed, the last line first, the second to last second, second line third, first line last. And each word in each line also reversed, first word last, last first, and so on. Gibberish. No astonishment Hari had thought it some avant-garde piece coined in Greenwich Village. The punctuation, too, was scarcely Blake’s.

“Madman,” I said aloud, jolted to an abrupt disgust and compassion neither of which had I thought to feel so forcibly, if at all. “Poor bloody drunken murdering madman.” And, having spoken, I read the nonsense on the wall also aloud, to the quiet box of bungalow held in noisy jungle.

Something clicked in my brain as I did so. I stumbled mentally after it. Elusive, it was gone. In some preposterous manner, the lunatic reversal of the fragment of poem—made sense. As if, blindfolded, one touched a cat’s fur in darkness, not knowing, yet instinct to say: Ah, but this is—before the acceptable name came or light to disclose.

Then, letting in the jungle, something else was let in. Standing there with a shaft of olive green sunlight on the vine carpet, I visualized the tawny shadow of death-by-night shouldering through the opened doorway. Every hair stood up on my body and my loins were cold and empty with horror. It was imperative to escape. I fled through the window, tearing skin and clothing, pursued by demons of the mind. Pettersun’s mind.

When I had calmed down, I got on the horse and rode in the direction of the other village the fat man, and Doctor Hari, had informed me of.

The simple explanation of what happened next is that I misjudged my road, got off the track, blundered about and made things worse for myself, ending up the proverbial panic-stricken lost traveler of song and story. I suppose that is what happened, though generally I rarely lose my way, or if I do I regain it fairly quickly. Not so in this instance. The track all at once dissolved, and carefully retracing my way for some distance, or trying to, I failed to rediscover it. Various formations of trees, angles of illumination, which I had noted and which might have provided guidance, seemed mysteriously changed, though the greenish jungle sun streamed through and the shadows massed and the monkeys screamed to each other, all as they had been doing minutes before. If anything, something was at fault in my own perception.

I fell into the pit of compounding my error by then defiantly pressing on. I was sure I would soon pick up the path again, discover a fresh one, or merely ride through a break in the foliage and so into the village, by a sort of serendipity. None of these things happened. In the end sheer heat and exhaustion forced me to halt, dismount in the shade and drink water. Here I very foolishly went to sleep for almost an hour, an idiotic thing to do. As a rule, the beasts of the forest do not attack sleeping creatures, but Pettersun had probably been asleep when so attacked—what price faith? Besides, snakes haunt the wilderness, and sometimes itinerant human beings, the worst predators of all.

When I woke, irritated by everything, mostly myself, I had given up on my quest. The second village was plainly enchanted, and had vanished. Using the compass, and occasionally aided by glimpses of afternoon sun marking the west, I turned back toward the first village which was real. Although I had been floundering for some while and my bearings were hopelessly out, that group of huts and persons, and the reincarnated child, lay directly over to the east, and the tracks which led to and from the place were good. I had no doubts I should get there well before sunset.

Hours later, bathed in sweat, the horse shambling, the hollows bowing into shadow and the glimpsed sky throwing hot bars against the trees, I began to be dully afraid. It seemed I had now lost my clue to anywhere. The jungle had me, bound me in its veils and towering stems. There was no way back, no way out. I stopped then, and tried not to lose my nerve too. It was difficult.

The red flame died and the grayness came in a rush, and in another rush the black of night. I sat the horse, as the sounds of day receded and the choruses of the frogs grew loud, mocking me, for this black fearful interior was home to them. And to others.

The Ramayana, which speaks of the roaring of wild animals, the tangled walks, the fatigue and privation of this landscape of trees, says the forest is the realm of the wind, darkness, hunger and great terrors.

There was nothing now to be done till morning. I had water and some crumbs to make my magnificent evening khana. I possessed no weapon, save the means of starting fire, which I would arrange at once. My sleep I had had. I would watch tonight.

•   •   •

I kept my vigil well. Maybe tiredness came to assist me, for I passed swiftly into that Benzedrine state where sleep seems superficial anyway, an invention of time-wasters. Slight fear was here, too, a constant. Slight fear like a condiment sprinkled on the enormous lulling beauty of the night. Not that I could see very much, beyond the sharp gold splashings of my fire. The beauty was in the blackness, and only the blackness lay out there, fold on fold of it, vision coming solely through the ears. Everywhere was the steady burring of frogs and nocturnal insects, which frequently fell death-still, as it does, not for any sinister reason, at least no reason that might be sinister for me. A couple of times, too, came the pandemonic uproar of monkeys disturbed, bursting adrenalin through my bloodstream, after each of which alarums I relapsed, smiling a little. The forests, “realm of terrors,” are essentially and potentially dangerous, but there will seldom be actual violence. The venomous serpent, dropping on the neck like coiled rope from the ceiling of boughs, the big cat, famished and rearing from the bushes, these are the stuff of the book and film industry.

Periodically I looked at my watch, pleased at the timelessness I had achieved, where minutes passed like hours, and where two hours could go in what seemed only minutes. That sacerdotalism I’ve mentioned perhaps lay behind the sense I had of the peace of contemplation the sadhu pursues to such spots. For yes, here you might feel the depth and shallowness of created things, their oneness, the bottomless, endless, blissful nothing that is everything, and which contains the vibrating root of the soul. I was delighted also that I had avoided the cliché of supposing I had been brought there by fate. The idea of silly accident sustained me. At length, I could say it would be dawn in scarcely more than an hour, and with the new day I should find my way wherever I wished.

I had no thought of Pettersun, who inadvertently had caused me to be where now I was. He seemed far off from my contemplations. As if I were forgetting him.

The light came when the dawn remained most of an hour away. This was not sunrise.

It was separated light, like that of my own fire. I formed the opinion at once, with mingled hope and distrust, that mankind had arrived with torches, and whether friend or foe I had no means of telling. I sat on with my spine to the tree, my hearth before me, trying to make out figures round the alien glare.

Presently my uneasiness increased. I had realized whoever carried the torches was playing some sort of puzzling game. First of all, they did not approach, but seemed to be circling me to the left, the flame flashing on and off as stands of fern or trunks interposed. Secondly, unless small children or midgets were concerned, whoever flourished the brands must be crawling on their knees.

My blood was undiluted adrenalin by now, and rising I moved away from my fire as quietly as I could, taking up a position against a neighboring tree. My anticipation was of robbers, even some revival of the stranglers of Kali Ma. My horse, tethered nearby, was snorting and prancing in the undergrowth. Perhaps the answer would be to slash the tether with the knife I had picked up and now defensively cradled, leap on the horse’s back and make a wild dash through the pitch-black jungle. But such a headlong course was precarious and I was not sure I preferred it. Bluff, lies, and a gift of rupees might be handier.

I had reached this partial decision when something else struck me about the circling, low-down blaze of torchlight. And now I was rather stunned, completely disinclined to attempt or plan escape because everything seemed inappropriate, faced by the fact that, though the light stayed all together—some thirteen or fourteen feet of it—it reflected on nothing, lit up nothing, could not therefore be light at all.

Just then the vegetable strands of the darkness parted, and the lightless light flamed through.

I remember I said, “Oh God,” quietly, as if I were expected to. That was all. It was pointless to say or do anything.

There is a kind of terror that is no longer truly terror, but some type of refined and developed emotion that terror has bred—a sort of ecstasy in which fear, actually, has no part, nor the will to resist that fear usually supplies. I had heard it once or twice described. Now I felt it.

I could make excuses at this juncture, or alternately could pile the expletives up to mountain height and let off fireworks from the top—both methods resorted to out of nervousness. Because what I must put down now will, of course, not be believed. I didn’t imagine it, or dream it, I do believe in it myself, but only because I saw it.

What had appeared in front of me was a tiger; it was Pettersun’s tiger, and I choose that possessive with care. It had a tiger’s shape, and a tiger’s aura, from the canine swagger of the hindquarters found always in the greater felines, to the sculpted almost toylike modeling of the head. The blazon of the tiger it had too, it was the color of apricots laced with zebra stripes, as if the scars of a beating had been inlaid with jet. It stood longer and higher than any tiger I had seen or heard of; if it came closer, as undoubtedly it would, its head might nearly level with my own. But freaks occur in nature, men or beasts mightier, larger, than their fellows. The light was inexplicable. For the tiger, Pettersun’s tiger, burned bright, bright as the fire I had mistaken it for, and on this conflagration which shed no gleam to either side, or anywhere, the black stripes seemed like the bars of a furnace, holding the power of it barely contained.

The eyes were also fire, or apertures into the fire which composed it, not green as the lenses of cats become by night, but golden like the rest. The eyes saw me, perhaps not my flesh, but piercing like an X ray through to my bones. In my ecstasy of terror I understood this much: I was no prey to it. To kill me would be incidental—how it had killed Pettersun—death a by-product of the thing it was. And yet, this was not so, not the truth—even in that extremity I knew I had made a mistake and if I died, would die without the extreme unction of an answer. And then the tiger moved. It moved like a forest fire, plunging in a straight igniting line, right at me. My heart stopped. Started again as the gush of gold veered and crossed my path. At the last, its eyes avoided mine, uninterested. Its dog’s ears were pricked, listening, but not to me, the trembling of my body and my mind. The unstrung bow of its tail brushed through the grasses that should have exploded into arson, that only dipped aside, falling over to lave my hands with coolest dew not sparks.

Having seen everything, I then covered my eyes with my hands.

When I looked again, the forests were stirring; a subtle penciling in of forms hinted at the dawn; all other fires were out.

•   •   •

I put down the beginning of Blake’s poem, though so well known, to facilitate this final act, as one sets out each stage meticulously, when solving a mathematical problem. It runs:

Tyger! Tyger! Burning bright,

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

When the scald of morning lifted the black rind off the jungle, I started to walk, leading the horse, due east. If I had needed proof, which I did not, that something out of the ordinary had touched the vicinity, the horse would have furnished it. Sweating, shivering, and skittish, trying to kick at me, frothing, rolling its eyes—this was what my docile mount of yesterday had become. I led it with the utmost difficulty. It was clearly not afraid of anything that lay ahead, only unhinged; my own state, relegated to the primal.

After about fifteen minutes, I came into the clearing where a hint of dirty whiteness—a veranda rail and posts—announced the bungalow. This was how near I had been to it all night. I don’t think the knowledge would have enhanced my pleasure. To find it now merely added a suitable footnote to what had gone before.

I skirted the building with pedantic caution. I wanted no part of it, and once it was behind me, the urge to bolt was almost irresistible. Somehow I controlled it, just as, somehow, I controlled the horse. When we reached the village, we were welcomed with courtesy and without comment. No doubt, the wound of the supernatural was raw for all to see, but I was not theirs, and they did not try to pry or comfort me.

A week later, when I had got back to Chadhur, I hung about in the hotel, waiting for myself to go off the boil like a kettle removed from the scene of the heat. My nerves were jarred in such a way that I could not put my finger on what the disorder was, or how it should be cured. I had accepted that I had brushed with things occult, but they had done me no physical harm. Reasonably elastic and rational as it generally was, my intellect would surely learn to cope with this; already I had perspective. Time would resolve the rest. Yet so far time had only made me worse. It was nothing so mundane as loss of appetite or sleep. I slept perhaps rather more readily than was my wont. And if my dreams were hectic, they were not about tigers, rather about a multitude of unimportant stupid items, that awake one would dismiss—a fly in the room, a dull, unidentified noise, trying to recall the name of someone never met. Awake, I ate and took healthy exercise, was no longer jittery; sudden sounds did not bring me to my feet with a wail. No, it was nothing I could lay my hand on, pick up and examine and so be done with. And yet it was as if my balance on the tightrope of life were gone. I could do all I should, could even be relaxed about it. Yet I knew I had fallen and somehow was suspended in midair.

After two days, I walked across to the hospital and located Doctor Hari’s office and good coffee. He knew, without being informed, where I had been, and said nothing of it, only remarking as he poured the second cup, “You look a little not yourself. Can I do anything for you?”

“Only if you have a prescription for psychic whiplash.”

“Ah ha! The phantom tiger of the forests.”

I was not amazed he’d heard of it. I had come to believe that gaudy beast of golden fire was often sighted, and word passed on to credible and skeptic alike.

“Yes,” I said. “And there really is one.”

“Well,” he said. “And why not?”

“You haven’t said: Did you see it? Does that mean you’ve seen it yourself?” He only smiled. I thought perhaps he had not. I said, “What you can do for me, if you would, is ask your resident scholar if he’d consider letting me have a translation of this.”

Hari accepted the sheet of paper mildly. The “resident scholar” his pet patient, was convalescing in an unusual condition of hermitage.

“I realize I’m being a damn nuisance,” I said. “But I would be very grateful, and naturally I’d compensate him for his time in whatever way he felt was suitable.”

“I am not hesitating for that. Your Hindi is fine, and I know from what you have written that you can read the language perfectly well.”

“In this case, though, shall I say I need a second opinion?”

Hari glanced at the brief array of words. He may have recognized my own script, or some essence of text. He raised one long curved eyebrow, a dramatic gesture I respected, grinned and told me he would do what he could. Next evening, as the flying-foxes stormed the moon, he found me on the hotel roof and gave me the translation, its price an iced coconut juice. The scholar, it seemed, refused all payment.

I didn’t read the translation then. I waited until I was alone, and then I waited until the hotel was noiseless, and the streets noiseless, and then until the streets and the hotel began to sound again with dawn. Then I chided myself, and opened the paper and read it through and put it away, and took it out again and read it again, and sat a long while as the window flooded with light, hearing goats and coughing cars, and bicycles and bullock carts, and the relentless drumming of my own heart, as my balance came back to me.

When I had said it aloud, that writing on the wall of Pettersun’s bungalow, the phonetics had stolen in on me, and after gestation, offered themselves. They were basic enough; to replace “eye” with that which resembles it: “I.” And in the vernacular that employs the word “thy” to guess that maybe the word “the” might become the word “thee.” And primed by that, I had written out the back-to-front verse again, with its alterations, thus: Symmetry fearful thy frame could I? Or Hand Immortal—What? Night—thee; of forests. Thee in—Bright burning Tiger! Tiger! And again, a fraction closer, that click of intuitive knowledge—cat’s fur touched blindfolded—yet not enough. And then I hit upon the obvious. I translated the bizarre sentences, as they stood, flatly into Hindi, and gave them to a bi-lingual scholar for free and profound translation back into our native tongue, Blake’s, mine, and Pettersun’s. And so I received my answer. It wasn’t, I think, an invocation. Although Pettersun knew, he did not know. Although he wanted, he had no notion of wanting. Or at least of what the wanting was and how it might be satisfied. It had to tear him in pieces to get out, that monstrous and fantastical birth—the beast within, the glittering core of what he had tried to possess through pursuing, to become through destroying, the alter image, the bond, the magic circle, hunter and hunted—the place where the margin wears so thin that one may become the other. To the villages perhaps, it is the trans-migration principle. He died and returned to pay Karma as a tiger. But no, he is the tiger’s child, as surely as he gave birth to it—to himself. The Id foresaw, if Pettersun did not. The Id always foresees. And that was why, stumbling through the medium of Blake, knowing no other, he wrote on his wall what the kindly Brahman translated for me, this prayer to the infinite Possibility:

Flawless and fearful One, could I assume thy form?

Or, Immortal moving Fate, what is my portion?

Thou art Night, thou art the forests’ night. Thou art within—

Bright burning Tiger! Tiger!

Third Night

The Third Night begins before the moon rises. The Third Night is perception.

Chand Veda

How ill-named she was, he was thinking, in the moments before the train came off the rails. Gita—his “song.” But she was not like a song, this fat sullen young bride of his. It had been a terrible affair, the whole wedding. Because of the other girl, the one who had died before he could claim her, he had come to marriage later than most. Perhaps this, and perhaps the contagion of western skepticism, made him feel ridiculous as he rode in his tinsel headdress on the back of the tall red horse his foolish family had insisted on hiring (wondering all the while if he would fall off, his nervously gripped thighs aching horribly), while the band marched before and everyone else laughed and shouted.

Vikram had seen a photograph of the girl some months ago. He could tell it was a flattering photograph, even though it had not been able, actually, to flatter her very much. She was a lump of flesh, with small furtive eyes and, as he had found out only today, missing a top canine tooth on the left side. That could be fixed, of course. With his fine business, the book shop, on which everyone always congratulated him so vociferously, he could get money to buy Gita a false tooth. (Why then had her well-off family not seen to it?) But what else could he do? Starve her and work her, maybe, so the pounds of flesh melted away. There she had stood in her scarlet and gold bridal finery, and he had dutifully unwrapped her from her veil, wishing his short-sightedness, in the moment, were worse. And to make it more dreadful still, he beheld at once that she, too, thought herself cheated. If Gita was a poor bargain, so he supposed was he. Yes, it was all very well to talk of masculine pride, but a look in a mirror got rid of that. Thin and ugly and blind wed to fat and ugly and toothless. What a pair!

And in that second, as he remembered, as if to compound the nastiness of it all, there was a wrenching and squealing, and a long juddering, during which the world fell over on its side.

When Vikram had opened his eyes, retrieved his glasses and found both lenses to be cracked—yet perforce put them on again—he discovered it was the carriage and not the world which had changed positions. From every side now, within and without the carriage, came a wailing and crying and shouting. Soon, lights were pouring down the track, and through the upside-down window, in the scream of the flares, legs ran about insanely.

“Are you hurt, Gita?” Vikram asked his wife, who was kneeling beside him with a look of gross ferocity.

“No,” said Gita. And, as an afterthought, “Are you?”

“Bruised all over, but nothing broken.”

She seemed to sneer faintly at this and he could have slapped her. Coupled to the bruising the horse ride had already given him, the new minor, all-pervasive and inescapable pain made him feel like weeping.

In a while, a demented official appeared-at their upside-down window. After a lot of yelling, Vikram and another man, with some external assistance, succeeded in getting the door open. They, and others, were dragged out. They were not allowed to rescue their hand-baggage, and it was useless to argue. The scene outside was nightmarish, total chaos and confusion. The derailment was comparatively mild of its kind, and few had been hurt, but panic intransigently ruled. Nearby several Moslems writhed on the earth, praying. A goat, which seemed to have been on the train, skipped merrily down the line, butting and bleating.

Vikram stood and watched events through his cracked spectacles. At his side, a dollop of disapproving misery, Gita waited, immobile and witless. People pushed past them. “Well,” said Vikram after a time, “shall we walk over there?”

“You are the husband,” said Gita. “It is for you to say.”

Vikram clenched his fists. He strode, stiffly, up the incline beyond the pushing confusion and the goat, and sat down on a boulder. Gita followed and sat down on another boulder. Beyond the fallen train and the red stream of flares, the night was very black, and far above the stars bloomed bright. Vikram thought of the nights alone, sitting or lying up on the roof of the shop, the stars floating high over the mist of the streetlamps. Waking to find the moon on his face, whiteness soaking through him like water into a sponge. He worked very hard in the book shop. Things were always going wrong. For example, there was the European who came in and stole the glossy paperbacks of temple erotica. One knew he stole them—after he had come and gone two or three of the editions were always missing, and besides he left his cigar-ash along the lines of the volumes, like a calling card. Or the young assistant who took two hours for a midday meal; always some excuse. Or the books which did not arrive on time, or came in too great quantities. And then there was that account which did not balance. And what was he to do about the electric fan in the ceiling, part of which had flown off and damaged one of the stands. Next time it might decapitate a customer, probably with influential friends. Could he afford the new fan? Well, he would have to. And then all the expense and the time of this, which he had not wanted, this marriage to a monster. He could not stop himself thinking of the other girl, the one who had died. She had not been pretty, but at least only plain. And he had met her, once, at her father’s house, and she had not hated him and they had laughed together. She had had a lovely laugh, he could not help recalling it. It would have filled his life with silver bells. But there. She was dead and he was no catch and they had found him Gita, and here he was with Gita and a wrecked train, his body feeling as if it had been pounded between stones. It was no good looking at the stars, waiting for the moon.

Presently, another official came, closely pursued by a group of frantic people. Over the cries and imprecations, the official told them all they should follow the guard through the forest to the station. No, they could not go up the line. There was a land-slip piled across it; it was this which had caused the derailment. Everyone must go around. Yes, yes, they must.

An elderly woman clung to Vikram, sobbing. She was quite uninjured, but the despair of unforeseen inevitable mischance was upon her. He patted her. “There, there, my mother. It’ll be all right. Look, there is the guard coming now, with his torch. And we will go to the station and they will give us tea, perhaps, free of charge.” He glared over the woman’s veiled head at Gita. Gita should have been the one to impart comfort. Who did she think she was, some princess? Had she no compassion?

The guard set off into the undergrowth between the tall trees and the tongued bamboos, his live torch flashing, disturbing things. The woman detached herself from Vikram and scuttled after. Everyone followed, chattering or listless. The newlyweds brought up the rear.

Suddenly Gita said angrily, “Wait! My sandal is caught in something.”

Vikram stopped and waited. Behind him, Gita panted and puffed, and the bushes creaked. He did not turn to see. Ahead the flare became smaller. “Hurry up, Gita.”

“How can I hurry? The strap has caught in a root. I can’t see what I’m doing.” She sounded furious. It was all his fault, of course. “And you might help me.”

So he turned and helped, not wanting to touch even her sandal and unable to see her, fortunately, in the darkness. When it was all attended to he straightened, and the light was gone.

“Quickly,” he said then, and hurried forward, to fall headlong amid the eager claws of the forest. Scrambling up, scratched and hot with embarrassment that was invisible, while Gita stood like a rock, he muttered, “That way. Over there.” And taking her arm pulled her after the memory of the wholly vanished light.

•   •   •

All my life now is to be like this, thought Gita as she stumbled along with the thin ugly man, her lord. Already he has brought me bad luck. The train has crashed. My sandal is broken. He dislikes me and may refuse to buy me a new pair. She thought of her father’s house, but without nostalgia. Her father and mother had not cared for her, either. It was the pretty daughter who had the attention, the bangles, the silk, the attractive husband. Gita did not blame her family. She did not blame Vikram. Although he was so graceless, bony and pock-marked, his squinting eyes full of reproach, it was a shame he had had to marry someone like herself. But I am a good cook, she thought defiantly, as a creeper smacked her in the face. He doesn’t know that yet. Gita’s aunts had encouraged her in the domestic skills, while the other sister had been taught everything more casually. After all, if the rice was, for the first months, sticky, the nan of an imperfect lightness, this would be forgiven a slender-waisted young wife with huge deerlike eyes. No, Gita did not blame Vikram. She only hated him for hating her, as was quite proper. She had a vague hallucination of their old age together, when she would withhold his favorite dishes (her culinary talent being all she could blackmail him with). Presumably they would have children. She shuddered at the idea of his reluctance or perhaps brutality. And the child, also, as it grew, would probably not like her.

She stopped brooding because Vikram had abruptly halted.

He stood there, an element of hotter, denser substance in the hot black night.

“We’re lost,” he cried. He sounded in a rage.

Nervous, she could not, nevertheless, resist goading him.

“I knew we should be.”

“It was your fault, Gita.”

Her fault. Naturally.

He waved his arms, and she heard branches crackle and snap.

“Where is the station? Where? Where?” he shouted at the forest. “The guard has disappeared. I can’t see anything. What is happening to me?”

It was true, there was no glimmer of light or movement anywhere, and no sound to be heard in any direction.

“Haven’t you an electric pocket torch?” asked Gita innocently.

“A pocket torch? I? No, of course not. Did I think when I set out I should be in a train wreck, abandoned in the jungle?” But with my bad fortune, he thought, I should have done.

They stood then for a few minutes, gaping at the blackness to which Gita’s eyes at least had somewhat adjusted. It was possible to see shapes, or to imagine they were seen, but not to be certain what they were. At last, Vikram decided. “We must go on.” And he marched forward again, only to collide on this occasion with the trunk of a tree. As he scrabbled for his battered glasses in the undergrowth, Gita said, with an air of intolerable wisdom, “It might be better to remain where we are. Surely other people from the train will come by. Or if not, we shall see better in the morning light.”

“Morning? Morning? You expect me to spend the night in the jungle?”

“I shall have to do so too.”

“I must be in town tomorrow. I have things to see to. You don’t understand the modern world. My business—Already I’ve wasted so much time—”

“Yes,” said Gita.

Something in her voice stayed him, but only for a moment.

“No,” he shouted. “I intend to find the station. Come or stay as you please, woman.”

As he rampaged forward once more, Gita picked her way after him. He presented a kind of whirling in the darkness, but mainly she located him by the noise he made, thrashing and crashing, and wild cries of pain and frustration, at length ornamented by swearing. Gita attended with interest, but presently even the oaths died. She came upon him suddenly, seated on the ground, nursing a foot, all the toes of which seemed to him to have been fractured on a stone. As she loomed over him, he began to make a different noise, unlike all the others. It was a familiar noise, so personally familiar that she did not at once recognize it from another. Slowly, she realized he was crying.

The fool, she thought scornfully. What does he think there is to cry about? But she knew, and a wave of loneliness washed over her, terrible loneliness, for she too had shed tears very often, and now she could not help him, was as much the cause of his grief as anything else.

She sat down. She waited, listening to his sobs which, because they shamed him, he tried to quiet. She waited and waited, and listened and listened, and finally she said, “The moment the sun comes up, you’ll easily see the way. It won’t take long to reach the station. Then someone will take us to the town. They’ll be very sorry. They’ll be kind. And when we get there, you can rest. We’ll send a message to your shop. Let them do without you one day. You work too hard. Let them work for a change. I’ll make a thali. It will be very tasty. And you’ll find I won’t be a nuisance at all. You can be as free as you want. I shan’t fuss. Visit your friends, write your poetry. I understand.” She became aware he had stopped weeping and was listening to her. She said, “You’ll have noticed, I haven’t got a tooth at one side. When I was seven years old a boy from the next house used to run into our courtyard with my brother, and call out at me I was ugly. So one day I took a pan of milk that was curdling and threw it over him. He screeched and yelled, and I was beaten for wasting the milk. But the day after he threw a stone at me and it broke the tooth. So they took me to the dentist’s shop and he pulled it out.”

In the silence, Vikram gulped. “But that’s—dreadful, a dreadful thing,” he said.

“What did it matter? If I’d been pretty it would have mattered. But if I’d been pretty, none of it would have happened.” She hesitated, then said, “You see, I know how I am. But I’m strong. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be a dutiful wife. In time, we’ll get used to each other.”

“Oh, Gita,” he said.

How strange, he thought, astonished by her dignity, burned by compassion. He could not see her, and all at once, as her dismembered words were murmured in the blackness, he had become aware that her voice was beautiful. Yes, if he had heard her speak, on a telephone, say, never having met her, he would have visualized another woman entirely, a nymph with high heavy rounded breasts, serpent waist, dancer’s feet, skin smooth as much-caressed marble. . . . Although Gita’s skin was soft and smooth, he had noticed it, unconsciously, when he grabbed her arm so roughly. He had a sudden urge to reach out and touch her arm again, gently, investigate soft smoothness, and if it were true. But he could not make himself.

He sighed. He must say something in response to her own brave effort.

“Yes,” he said humbly. “It will be all right.”

He heard her settle then, and he himself mournfully settled, a tree against his bruised and aching back. If only it could be all right, he thought. She was, after all, a decent girl. She had comforted his sorrow instead of mocking him. She had even mentioned his poetic writing with respect. He removed his glasses in order to wipe his eyes. And at that instant, a dim white glow appeared, far over his head. Too ethereal to be anything sent by the railway company, he knew it after a moment for the rising moon. The light swept like a silver blade through the roof of thinner foliage above them. He did not put on his glasses, simply allowing the light to come to him in all its mystery, formless. By his side, Gita did not say anything about the moon.

If only. But if only what? The dream of the moon knew. Soma, binding the earth to the sky by a cord of white fire and divine nectar. If only—Not meaning to, Vikram’s glance fell on Gita sitting there passively. Viewed without the glasses, washed in moonlight—yes, that was it. A transformation. The light of the moon, chand, chandarama, the silvery, ever-altering one, altering all things—If only he and she might be altered, she for him, and he for her—for she had suffered. By magic, by prayer, by knowledge, by a wish.

He felt himself detached from the flesh, floating in whiteness.

By his side, Gita thought: Let him sleep. She lay back on the tree with him and, forgetting her punishments for his old age, mused, He is a sad man. Ginger is good for sadness. I will put a little extra in the thali.

•   •   •

When she woke, it was without haste, but with the sensation of something having touched her eyelids, a fingertip or a frond. There was a lot of light now from the moon, which was directly before her, descending the arch of heaven and shining through the clearing. For it was, after all, a clearing they had stumbled to the edge of. Bushes of flowers were all about them, which she had not noticed before, exuding a delicate sweet scent. The warm moon seemed to bring out their perfume, just as the sun might do by day. Despite the discomfort and catastrophe of the earlier part of the night, Gita felt well, soothed, optimistic. She rose to her knees, and looked round to see if her husband Vikram was still sleeping. Then let out a stifled shriek. For Vikram was no longer there, had vanished. In fact, there was someone deeply slumbering against the tree. But it was a stranger.

After a few seconds, Gita collected herself. There would be an ordinary explanation, no doubt. While she slept, for example, another lost traveler from the train had come by and Vikram had invited the man to join him. Then Vikram himself had had to go off among the trees for the normal reason. Meanwhile the newcomer slept and Gita woke. That was it. She had only to wait a minute or so and her husband would return. And while she waited, she was at liberty to study the stranger, was she not?

Gita leaned a fraction closer, holding her breath.

The moon described him fully, the long strong length of him, relaxed in his sleep like some graceful animal, some panther out of the rukh. He was mature, though still young, his skin of a velvety darkness on the beautiful musician’s hands, the arch of the throat, and face, into the hollows and over the plains of which the moon poured so completely. In all her life, Gita had never seen a living man so handsome. Asleep, soulless, he amazed her. But ah, behind the smooth discs of those closed lids, the thick fringes of these lashes, what eyes there must be—It was her desire to behold them, maybe, which caused her inadvertently to nudge against him. So he woke. So she caught a glimpse of his eyes, the eyes she had longed to gaze upon—large and gleaming, and filled by horror, by terror—

Gita sprang to her feet, gasping and humiliated. To wake him was to cause him to look at her. Yes, she was enough to make him recoil, leaning near enough to embrace him, with what emotions, what stupid desires scrawled across her hateful features? It was but too plain. In wretchedness, she longed to obeise herself in apology, but that also would be improper.

“There is no need for alarm,” she said. “My husband will return shortly. But I was surprised, and wondered who you were.”

The princely man relapsed against the tree again. He breathed hard, staring at her, trembling, she thought, for his thick jet-colored hair shivered to the momentum. What should she do now? Too late, she greeted him politely. He did not respond. He said hoarsely, “Your husband?”

“Yes, my husband. My Vikram. Didn’t you come from the train and meet him by accident here?”

His mouth, that fine chisel might have fashioned for a god-being on a temple, was ajar, showing the white teeth. Then his shaking hand came up and set in place on the carven nose, before the wonderful eyes, a pair of cracked and battered spectacles. They did not mar his beauty. Oddly they enhanced it, a little pinch of the spice of humor, a tiny laughing flaw in his marvel: See, I am not perfect. I am human, too. I may be approached. Oh, one could love him for the silly spectacles perched on his god’s face above his hero’s body. It seemed he was half-blind, just like Vikram. Gita checked. For not only was he half-blind like her husband, but he had just put on the glasses of her husband. Then with a throb of terror all her own, curiously protective and tigerish, Gita cried at him: “Where is he? What have you done with him—” for surely it was madness that one man might murder another for the use of his broken spectacles, yet this was the forest and who knew what went on here by night—“Oh Vikram—where is my Vikram?”

The man coughed. He said dully, “I am here.”

Gita gave a scream of laughter. But the laughter was brief and left her. Then she sank down again and peered at him, fighting away the urge to cry, at which fight, in her seventeen years, she had become a veritable champion.

“You? How can you be Vikram?”

“See,” he said, holding out his hands to her. She looked and saw rings that she knew. Then she looked again and saw the heroic body clad in Vikram’s clothing which somehow fitted it. Then her eyes went back to his face, and the tears came despite herself.

“Oh,” she whispered. “What has happened?”

“Don’t cry,” he said. He seemed to try to touch her, but his hands fell away.

She could not bear it. Some spell or curse had come about, and here she was, the most abject made more abject still. She turned her head and hid herself in a fold of her sari, instinctively.

“Gita,” he muttered. “Are you Gita?”

Wild anger then in the sari fold. “Who else? Who do you think?”

Vikram was not thinking at all. He leaned back on the tree, struggling with great inner turmoil.

At the soft nudge he had awakened, the moon across his eyes, and there in the blast of the moonlight was a woman, kneeling close enough that it seemed she had been about to embrace him. Close enough, too, to be easily seen. For an instant he thought it was a dream, but then he knew it could not be, and he was frightened. A poet, he had often read and written of the creatures of the forests, the demons, the nymphs. Her hair was a foaming cloud, her body, traced by silver, flowed and curved, inviting the hands to rest and to journey upon it. Her face had truly the loveliness of something unhuman, an image sculpted from a poreless almond colored material that lived, reigned over by two eyes like great black stars.

And then she spoke of her husband. Her husband would be returning. How would it seem? Somehow Vikram had fallen asleep and wakened by this gorgeous one, whose spouse would shortly approach and find them. Compromised, attacked, slain—what else could follow? Then he recollected Gita. And then the gorgeous one began to refer to her husband by Vikram’s own name, a coincidence that seemed peculiar. He had put on his glasses, to see if she would look differently, but her splendor was only increased. And then she had shouted in fear, and Vikram had seen that she lacked the upper left canine, just as his Gita did. His fat, ugly Gita. And that Gita, fat ugly Gita, finding the nymph had also lost a tooth just as she had, and the same tooth at that, being kind, had gifted the nymph with her garments before running away.

But now the beautiful, the fantastical one wept and shuddered in Gita’s sari fold, and he wished only to console her, drinking the tears of her eyes like nectar. Gita? No, this was not Gita. Although she had snarled at him Who Else?

He did not dare lay a finger on such excellence. It was the stuff of fantasy and of poetry. And yet—and yet, in those seconds of her gaze, it had seemed to him that she too saw—

Vikram had not forgotten his demented semi-conscious prayer to the moon. It was solely that the memory was preposterous. In the end, however, he took a deep breath of the perfumed night. He fixed the demon-girl with his impaired vision that somehow consistently beheld her clearly, and said, “Gita, look at me. Look at me and tell me what you see.” At which she slapped the earth in a fury with one hand, over and over. So he took the hand, to calm it, and sure enough the hand relaxed. “Gita,” he said, “I will tell you firstly—when I look at you—you are beautiful, Gita.”

It was possible, he knew, she might berate him, might go mad and tear at him. She had been ugly so long, and unloved always. And if, when she looked at him she beheld the complement of what he beheld, looking at her—She did not know, as he did, what he had asked of the moon. Did not know it had been . . . granted?

But there was knowledge, after all. The moon had filled the darkness with it. Presently, she raised her head and her eyes, and out of her glory she gazed at him. And timidly, but hopefully, she said, “I—also?”

Vikram laughed. “Also.”

He laughed louder and she laughed, too, and both their hands met, and their voices went up like a song into the tops of the forest.

•   •   •

In the dawn, as she had said, it was no trouble to find a way through the trees and thickets. The station appeared against the freshly lit sky, huddled over by the flocks of people who had had to spend the night there.

They walked closely, Vikram and Gita. Sometimes they glanced shyly aside at each other. The burning arrows of day had no power over the enduring gift of the moon, and the spell had not faded at sunrise. Each of them stole onward with a supernatural being at their side, tender and accessible, a dream that was also a beloved. And, though they did not yet know, a third person went with them now, who was to be the first of their sons.

The refugees on the platform paid them little heed, the skinny squinting man and his fat ungainly wife. There was nothing remarkable about them, except perhaps the profundity of their intimate silence.

•   •   •

In the eyes of others, then, in the mirrors on their walls, reflective surfaces of all types, they saw the truth, or one truth or two. But in the expression of Vikram when he looked at her, Gita saw the second truth, and he, in her eyes, beheld it also. They were, for each other, the one true mirror.

“Well, it is a good marriage,” said the relatives and friends, with some surprise.

The book business was booming, that house was a wealthy one. And yes, Vikram had gained some flesh, Gita’s cooking, no doubt. Though strangely Gita had lost weight, despite her childbearing. She would never be a comely woman, even without a gap in her teeth, and yet there was something, her walk, her gestures; not unpleasing. And her happiness was gratifying to those who thought they had aided it. He was a solid proposition, was Vikram, and had added dignity to himself as his fortunes steadied. He no longer squinted, but looked levelly through his spectacles. Authority, yes, Vikram had authority. One could ask his advice. And the poetry had won prizes, of course. Who had inspired some of those passages? Well, best not to worry about that. Gita was happy, and there were plenty of children.

And the children really were a miracle. Like gods and goddesses they stalked the lawns and the rooms, turning to their parents with looks of love one all too rarely noted in these unsettled times. Handsome sons, dark as Krishna, and dark amber daughters, all set with jewels for eyes. It was, the relatives and friends observed privately, something of a curiosity, this. For how could offspring of so much—one must say exceptional—beauty, have grown from such a very beautiless match. . . .

Fourth Night

The Fourth Night begins where each of us begins, at the gate of life. Every birth, a thrown die. Oh, what will the child be—boy or girl? Fair or ugly? Blessed by luck, or hunted by misfortune—

Under the Hand of Chance

I

When the child was born, the mother cried bitterly, because it was a boy. But the midwife scolded and consoled her. “Don’t worry. He will be beautiful, this one.” Which, as it happened, turned out quite true.

For eighteen years, then, he grew up in the Pathar-Kataal, a male flower of a child unfolding through adolescence to young manhood, beloved of and cared for by all.

•   •   •

The great sprawling compound, held in by its pale orange walls, was a world. From the beginning he dwelled and came aware among the sounds and smells and images that world comprised and invented. First and foremost there was tremendous heat and closeness, and this drew out the odors of everything. The air he breathed was not composed of oxygen and hydrogen but of incense, spices, cooking, perfume, perfumed hair and flesh and sweat, opium, betel, urine, kerosene. It was also composed of musical noises that went on continuously all night and spasmodically most of the day, as if the whole compound breathed in and out in bells and pipes and sarods, and sweet wild human song. The variety of all these, the smells and sounds, seemed limitless. But in the very beginning vision was rather restricted. There was only one room, and sometimes only part of a room behind a screen. It had a tall blue window by day that turned to a tall black window after sunset. Later, this room expanded, however, to a narrow staircase with landings and other rooms, and eventually to a courtyard with a water tap and washing. The window expanded to a little balcony.

By night, the only stars visible beyond the balcony were those of the naphtha flares and colored electric bulbs below on the stalls of the compound’s night bazaar. There were also the lighted windows all about. Most were so near you could make signals to the other persons framed in them, and sometimes they would laugh and wave or even toss a sweetmeat you were also close enough to catch.

By day, these windows did not cease to be interesting. Musicians sat practicing in them, and often, particularly toward evening, beautiful girls appeared, sparkling and shining, and with white jasmine in their long, long hair.

Even these things gradually evolved to reveal others. The courtyard grew out into an alley, so to a street, so the bazaar itself, which had been only a view before, and so to all the streets and apartment blocks and tall houses full of rooms—the entire quarter.

Then night and day became active rather than passive. To go up in the dusk to sit on someone’s roof was pleasant. There would be singing and dancing on each, as all through Pathar-Kataal after dark, and often delicious food was brought out. The world then was just lights below and lights around, and it seemed every glint of a string or flash of a sequin or passing bottle was cast to the high black sky like an offering for the gods to devour. In the daytime it was good to run errands for the girls or their men, for they would give rewards of cash or sweets. Or merely to roam the quarter up and down was very good, lying to rest under a shopkeeper’s awning or on low walls in the sun when tired.

Almond colored, rose, or milky orange, the buildings pressed close together, in parts gilded by a sudden scarlet or an ice-cream green. Parapets and pierced lattices, balconies overhanging balconies, shutters hanging off like damaged wings, heavy upper stories bulging, crowned by the most fragile balustrades. Doors and windows, always open. It was like a colossal hive, and like the hive was full of busy, gorgeous bees.

•   •   •

Ramaji, for so they called him, was a flower, a drone of the hive. In a place where most had something to do, he need do nothing, need only exist. He was so beautiful, so handsome, that from childhood on he had enchanted. In the world of entertainers that was Pathar-Kataal he had merely to be in order to entertain. All the girls, and some of the men, were “in love” with him. “There is Ramaji!” the girls cried, leaning from their clustered windows. “Hallo-oo, Ramaji!” And Ramaji, strolling beneath, would laugh at their fluttering hands and muslin, and their smiles, and sometimes go up to be petted for an hour or so, to have tea and delicacies lavished on him, and to be offered free, and from the fairest, what other men paid for.

His mother, at her death hour, had said, “You’ll never starve.” She had said it bitterly, for she had died in pain and darkness; and this searing ray of sunshine, her wonderful son, had always rather offended her. At the age of eleven—that year of his mother’s death—he had scarcely known her. Every women in the compound was to him mother or aunt or elder sister. “He has only to sigh, and one hurries to comb his hair, another caresses his face or feet, another brings him fruit.” His mother had wanted a girl to train up in her own trade, a pretty girl who, if they were lucky, could at fourteen or fifteen be found a rich protector. The protector would “marry” the daughter and thereafter see that she and her mother lived well. A boy—one must pray he would have talent for making music. Or love. Ramaji, surely—She foresaw him as he would be and as now, seven years later, he was, in one of several silk shirts, a bar of soft gold bent around his smooth young column of a throat, and rings of gold on his long musician’s fingers that could play no instrument at all. Except, perhaps, a woman’s body—but this had yet to be discovered. His jealous dying mother had not foretold he would be a virgin still at eighteen, and a virgin in every way, for where the beautiful girls had not successfully wooed him, neither had their brothers. (Even the greedy wolves who came by night, their purses stuffed with rupees, whispering about certain temple carvings, even they had not persuaded the handsome boy.) For he need do nothing. Not play or sing, not even cheat at card games outside the sweet-sellers’ or behind the illicit drinkers’ booths of the bazaar. To survive he need only exist, beloved of and cared for by all. Certainly, there was no need for prostitution.

•   •   •

There was to be a wedding. One whole floor of his apartment block was going to it, to dance, play music and sing. How the girls laughed and shook their earrings.

“Come with us, Ramaji.”

“Come with us, and sit by me on the bus, and I will feed you sugared melon.”

“Sit by me, Ramaji, and I’ll buy for you that wristlet shaped like a panther, with the emerald eyes.”

The wedding was outside the quarter, of course, for few ever truly married here. It was outside the city, too, up in the hills, a rich man’s house; they could expect to be treated generously. Ramaji had been outside Pathar-Kataal very seldom. The city was only the outer space about the world, interesting, uncertain. He did not crave its excitement, any adventure or any new thing. He was serene and happy. He never tired of the almond stones of the hive. But he dimly remembered once, as a child, going somewhere with his mother in the open land above the city, and that it had been nighttime and he saw the stars. There were no earthly lights, and so they were perfectly visible, the lights of heaven. Some were white and huge, almost blinding him with their intensity, or his. Others lay in drifts like thin gauze or smoke. It was very wonderful. He had half supposed someone had painted them there, up on the roof of the sky, perhaps a god in a frivolous ecstatic mood.

On the day of the excursion the entertainers of Pathar-Kataal filled the bus with color and noise. The journey took two hours. There were large shiny cars to take them on the last stage, and at their destination they were provided with the most fascinating facilities for refreshment. Ramaji, pretending to be an indispensable member of the troupe, joined in merrily.

The house was wide and long, and cold with air-conditioning. Its smells were strangely false, being mainly of synthetic things. Outside in the flow of gardens were water sprinklers and fountains and rose bushes and the tall pineapples of palm trees. There were servants everywhere, unlike any servants of the quarter, a race of new creatures come on in this alien planet. The family and guests were also odd, speaking a lot of English, or quoting Persian poetry. Meanwhile the bridegroom was fat and not comely, the bride discovered to be plain under her garlands of gold and mist of golden tissue. This depressed Ramaji a little. In the quarter, young and lovely women were often “married” to old or ugly men, but that was a different thing altogether. He had had some vague illusions, obviously, that marriages in outer space were between the handsome and the well-matched, like a pair of first-class earrings. But that was foolish. And anyway, what did it matter? They would be kind to each other and live in comfort. Like many who are themselves flawless, the unbeauty of those about him did not trouble Ramaji beyond a certain point.

When the darkness came the stars were not after all to be seen. As in Pathar-Kataal, the lamps were lit and in the light of red fires the girls danced, fire-freckled with sequins and bangles, and the drums thudded, the voices and pipes entwined.

Circumspect but restless, Ramaji, who had of course nothing to do, wandered the borders of the party. He was so exquisitely and tastefully dressed and had such charming manners that no one challenged him, although once or twice some unsegregated bold woman demanded from him a light for her cigarette. This he gave graciously. But he did not linger long in talk. He knew quite well how women were with him. He enjoyed their attentions, and had never won anyone’s hatred because he had never manipulated another. If his looks acted as a spell—well, he could not help it—there was even something gentle and politely apologetic in his manner. It is not my fault, he seemed to say, but there. The gifts which rained upon him he took with such genuine and ingenuous pleasure, the giver seemed rewarded at once. He never sneered at or made fun of any of those who loved him, not even the hunting wolves who came by night and squeezed his arm in the shadow of an alley. And, because he himself had never given anything save his willing laughing company for a short while, he had nothing to snatch away from them, and so to shame them or to threaten them with. And this, in their souls, they understood.

Near the bottom of the garden was a picturesque well with a small floodlight. Beyond, one found a break in the wall and a path that led away uphill to a neglected shrine. Here Ramaji ended up presently, lying on his back under the walls, screened from the lamps, watching all the stars in the sky. In the end perhaps the stars dazzled him asleep.

It seemed he had traveled somewhere far off, and come back suddenly but without any undue haste—if such duality was possible. He thought he had heard a sound like someone singing or calling, but the music below had fallen quiet and there was no sound at all. Only the darkness and the extraordinary flowering of white stars were there with him. It was as if years had passed as he lay there, the rich man’s party and his house and all his guests had passed away, and just the hillside remained and the ancient shrine, under heaven which, of course, was forever unalterable.

Very slowly, Ramaji sat up. He was thrilled and almost fearful, but the magic of it held him. In his heart he knew such things did not happen; he was quite safe.

Then he saw someone walking over the hillside. It was a young girl about sixteen years old—or maybe a little more, his own age. Although there was no light but that of the stars, he felt he saw her clearly. Her sari was of a silvery-green, but the shoes on her feet, the bracelets on her arms were gold, and there were gold combs in her cloud of hair, and a pale yellow flower. She was beautiful, but not in a way he had ever seen before. He could tell from her manner of walking that she was a dancer, and he thought at once she must belong to some other troupe who had come to perform at the wedding party. Yet, if she were from the Pathar-Kataal, surely he would have heard of her? She would have been, like himself, one of the great beauties of the honey-hive.

She moved straight toward him, and Ramaji imagined that she looked at him, and on her face was an expression of startled gladness, just such as he believed there must be on his own face at this moment.

He jumped to his feet and in that instant found himself lying under the walls, a paleness in the sky that was not stars, and two of the girls from Pathar-Kataal laughing and tickling him to wake him up.

“Hallo-oo, Ramaji,” they cried. “It’s almost dawn. Come, lord and master, we must be going, we, back to the city, with all the money we have earned. And what shall we buy him today, our darling?”

“Wait,” he said. He got up again, slowly, as before. A flame was burning behind the east, in another second or so the curtain would rise on day break. The hillside was empty and down below he saw the smart servants moving like robots in the rich man’s gardens.

“No, we don’t wait, or we miss the bus.”

“But there was,” he said. He stopped. Could a dream be so real?

“Oh, he is so sad, so sad,” they lilted, sighing and embracing him, almost as a mother embraces a child.

•   •   •

All through the first hour’s rattling journey in the bus, he could not stop thinking of the girl in silver-green and gold. He could not bring himself to join in the chatter, and so pretended to sleep, his head flung back and forth at every frequent lunge of the vehicle. He created reasons for her being. She was a woman of the rich man’s household. She was a dancer from another city. He had thought he sat up and looked at her but in fact he had been partly asleep still and had not done so. She had not dared to wake him, but had stolen away. And now the bumping bus carried him farther and farther from her vicinity, and from any hope of finding her again.

He “woke up” then, and began vigorously interrogating his companions, even waking up others who were not feigning sleep, to put questions to them. At length everyone was in an uproar. Who was this mystery girl? No one had seen her at all. Oh, Ramaji was inventing her to make them envious. But he had never played any spiteful games before and besides, he seemed very earnest, now half laughing, now imploring them. But it was true, no one could help. No one else had seen her. And the collective opinion of the bus, even of the driver, was that Ramaji, benighted by the old shrine, had beheld a ghost.

In the second hour of the bus journey a sharp flint punctured the left front wheel, the tires of which were in any case very bald. There was a terrifying moment when the earth spun round and round, itself like a wheel, filled by the collision of bodies and screaming and the shattering of glass. Then came a tremendous cessation when everything that moved for a few moments continued to move inside a sort of stasis and until it was too brought up short.

Trembling and bleeding, they climbed out of the bus, which now lodged on its side in a ditch. All around lay broken instruments flung from the roof-rack. A huge cloud of disturbed dust seemed to rise a mile high over them and to fall back very softly, coating their pain and horror with white powder.

Five girls kneeled around Ramaji in the ditch, their tears dropping into his blood. “Is he dead? Oh, he’s dead.”

“Be quiet. No, he isn’t dead. He’s breathing.”

“He is dead.”

“No. No.”

II

When the child had been born, the mother had giggled with pleasure, even in her weakness, because it was a girl. And the midwife announced, without any prompting, “She’ll be a beauty, this one.” Which as it happened turned out quite true.

For seventeen years then, she grew up in the Pathar-Kataal, admired and worked almost to death at learning her proper trade.

•   •   •

The room in which she lived with her mother had been made very attractive. In the tall window hung a birdcage containing a turquoise parrot, and on the balcony plants climbed from their brown pots to the sky. The walls were painted and hung with figured cloths. On the floor was a patterned dari, crimson fringed, and cushions and bolsters scattered the mattresses where they or their visitors—and later the paying customers—reclined.

Life was made of rooms. Little rooms with peeling walls and lacquer screens or screens of silk, and incense burning. First she woke in one room, her mother’s. Then she went down to another on the third landing and here she worked to the thud of feet. Later she went up to another room on the fifth landing and worked again to a wheezing gramophone. Sometimes, in the evening, she was taken to the roof of the building or of some other building, and found herself in another room with a black ceiling of sky and a slowly swinging dim bulb of moon. The walls of this room were composed of people who clapped and called. Here, she watched the skills of many dancers. She must notice—there! The little flick of bells and shiver of the hip, and now the whirling, like a flame.

In the beginning to dance was simple and easy. But as her lessons grew more taxing, to dance was no longer any simple easy thing. There was a time when to dance was a labor and a curse, when she would fall asleep weeping and dream of scolding and failure and wake with a cold heart. But this passed, too. Eventually to dance was a joy but also a task, two elements combined. There came moments of perfection when even her teachers cried out as if she had struck lightly, piercingly, some vital emotional nerve. And more often times when the crowd cheered and threw money or placed money reverently in her mother’s hand, when still she knew, dancing, she had not achieved her best and the gifts came for other reasons.

By the year she was fourteen, their room was generally filled at night, as it had been in her own mother’s youth. The patrons brought jasmine for her hair and neck and five rupee notes like singed petals.

Then the importuning began.

“Oh, sweet Sunita—” “Oh Sunita-who-is-the-moon—”

Men touched her. She must smile but not acquiesce. She did not like to be fondled, yet she must seem pliant. She must not anger anymore, yet she must always say No.

“Someone will come,” said Sunita’s mother, lying on the mattress chewing betel placidly. “A great one, for you, my child. And you must be saved for him. Oh yes. There’ll be some rich sahib who will want you very much. We shall be rich. You will be dressed in silk and have diamonds for your ears and a diamond lotus for the nostril and a ring with a ruby for each finger.”

At first Sunita visualized this protector, this prince, as a young and handsome man. He came with a caravan of wealth and retainers into the quarter, riding an elephant sometimes, and swept her up to a cloud in his arms. Jewels and benefits rained on Pathar-Kataal and Sunita’s name was blessed. She saw girls from her dance classes, and beggars, and the old silversmith, and the one-eared player of the shahnai who so often said to her: You are dance itself, but this you do wrongly—all kneeling, their hands upraised and eyes bright with happiness and tears.

Sometimes she would slip away to a courtyard where marigolds grew around the water tap. She would dream of her beloved who was to be, behind the curtains of washing.

When the customers who pined so at her dancing gave her money and took her hand in exchange, when they touched her too often, or crudely, she put them from her mind with the dream of what was to come.

She was a bee of the great honey hive. She worked, she created sustenance. She did not realize dreams were useless, since they created nothing that was worthwhile for anybody.

•   •   •

One day it was very hot. The flowers, wilted and the turquoise parrot lolled in its cage. The girls were let go early from their lesson, which concerned movements of the arms, hands and fingers.

“Come, Sunita,” said one of the other girls.

“Come where?”

“To the Witch’s house.”

“Such nonsense,” said Sunita, but she went with her. Tomorrow, outside the city in the hills, there was to be a wedding. Sunita’s own floor of the apartment block, all of it, was going to entertain the guests, and some of the younger girls were full of excitement. There was a story a great film producer had once “spotted” a girl of the quarter singing or dancing—the story was adaptable—at just such an event. She was now a famous film star. Who knew what might happen? The Witch would tell.

The Witch’s house in Pathar-Kataal lay at the end of a narrow alley-way. It was an old house of carved banana-colored galleries, and unswept mosaic floors. Conjurers lived below and monopolized the courtyard, smoking opium and playing cards, while a mongoose with wicked eyes groomed itself at their feet. Above, the cells of the rooms contained sorcerers of several kinds. Bhutnai was the choice of Sunita’s friends, who paused in the bazaar to buy sweetmeats running with honey to tempt her.

Bhutnai was very old and thin. She poked out her veiled head, and glass bangles clattered on her bones of arms. Propitiated by the offering, she let the girls into her lair, which was in half-darkness from a tawny blind let down over the window.

She read their palms swiftly. She promised them good fortune, wealthy patrons, a few choice healthy children and a content old age. Plainly her own old age was far from being so. Her mouth was bitterly puckered as she sucked and gobbled at her sweets. She had a daughter, they said, but the woman had left the compound long ago and, either dead or over-prosperous, had not come back to inquire after Bhutnai.

Sunita was not impressed by pity or satisfaction. As a professional herself, she resented such a feeble show, the sham of knowing and imparting knowledge not properly carried out.

“But is this all?” she asked. “Anyone could do as much. I see this and I see that and now give me the rest of the sweets.”

Bhutnai’s eyes flashed and the other girl drew back uneasily.

“Well, what else would you have?”

“An idea of my destined lover,” said Sunita, “and if I shall meet him tomorrow.” This was a challenge. Her eyes said, Do it then, if you can.

Bhutnai wiped her hands and then her mouth upon the edge of her veil. When she had done this, preening a little as the mongoose had preened itself outside (they were in other ways also rather alike), she beckoned Sunita back to her. Unwillingly, and haughty, Sunita sat down once more before her on the dirty floor.

“You want to learn too much,” said the Witch. “Don’t you know the road we travel we choose before we are born, and the meetings on the road, these too are for the most part ordained by ourselves, and by those we must deal with. And beyond that, too, each of us moves in the shadow of that great hand which is called Unavoidable Chance, the hand of an idiot which, at a single cast, can sweep everything, the worst or the best, away from us.”

“No more, Bhutnai!” cried the girl who had brought Sunita. “We didn’t pay with honey for such talk.”

“Go out then,” said Bhutnai. “Wait in the yard.” And to Sunita: “Close your eyes.”

And, not wanting to, Sunita closed her eyes.

Then she tried to open them. Too late.

She was walking up a hillside and it was night, and she wore her most beautiful sari, which her mother was preparing for her to wear tomorrow for the dancing, and her gilt combs and her three gold bracelets and her lacquered sandals. And in her hair was a yellow flower someone had brought to her which had contained, bruising its heart, more rupees than she had ever seen before in her life. “She must slip away, go to the old shrine,” the servant had said to Sunita’s mother. Sunita’s mother, feeling at the neck of her blouse where much money had also recently been tucked, smiled and laughed with pleasure as she relayed the message. “It is irregular, but I have had reassurances,” she said. “Yes, you must go. But don’t yield. Only promise.” Sunita was afraid. Sunita’s mother slapped her arm. “You have always known. Go now, go.” And then the tears came. “I’m not well. Do you grudge me security in my old age? Is this a dutiful daughter?”

Sunita walked up the hill. She had always known. This was her fate—her “chosen” road.

And now there was the shrine before her. In the darkness someone reclined beneath the wall. Although there was no light but that of the stars, she felt she saw him very clearly, and her heart started in her body. How handsome he was, this young man she had been sent to meet—and all her dreams returned to her, of the prince and the cloud. And she opened her eyes wide and saw the shape of the old Witch crouching against the tawny blind.

“Yes,” said the Witch, “and here you are again.”

Sunita rose slowly, with the grace of her art, from the Witch’s mosaic floor. The Witch, who had once been a great dancer, though never beautiful, before age and rheumatism crippled her, turned her mongoose eyes away from Sunita’s frightened joy.

•   •   •

There was much laughter and rivalry in the jouncing bus. When they arrived at the rich man’s house in the hills, great comparisons were made between it and other reputed dwellings. It was a fact, the place was falling rather into decay, the lawns were dry, and weeds choked the pools. Inside the large building there was not, seemingly, enough electricity to maintain the marvel of air-conditioning. Nevertheless, vast fans roared round and round like monstrous flies.

Sunita caught a glimpse of the bride—a pretty child—and of the handsome groom. She paid them little heed. She had, since the uncanny vision in the house in Bhutnai, become more and more nervous.

She went to dance in the last shout of the sunset, and as she moved the night rushed closer, and fireflies broke alight in the bushes. Open fires and lanterns fluttered in Sunita’s eyes and she swayed and turned. And when she raised her arms, coaxing, flirting, inviting yet shy, timid yet bold, her arms seemed to flame with the lights reflected on her bracelets.

She was no longer nervous. Now she felt her power. She had never danced so well as this. She sensed how the players wooed her, wrapped her in the unfolding theme. And she heard, beyond her circle of flame, the sighs and cries of the men watching her. But she danced solely for him, the one she had seen in the Witch’s prophecy, and the more she danced the more certain she became that somewhere beyond her light he waited even now, his heart in his eyes, watching her, anxious to claim her and about to.

When Sunita had danced a long, long while, the music began to fade away from her as if she had drained it. The musicians concluded. Sunita came from the place through a shower of flowers and tokens, like one drugged. Her mother caught her by the arms. “See, see,” and Sunita saw the pale yellow flower that birthed the fat wad of money into her hands. “Go now, go,” snapped her mother. But this time Sunita was not afraid. It was the strangeness of the perfectly repeated thing that made her hesitate. Presently she left her mother mopping at her eyes with her veil and counting the rupees from the flower.

Sunita walked up the hillside.

As she approached the shrine she looked for him, where he had lain before under the wall. But no one was there. Then a shadow came from the doorway. Though there was only the light of the stars, she saw him clearly. Sunita turned to stone. It was the father of the bride, a man some fifty-five or sixty years of age. Obese and eager, he waddled toward her.

“‘See where she walks, she who is the moon’s mirror,’” said the man, her would-be protector.

Sunita stood and did not move and he came near and spoke with a respectful intimacy, assuring her of all that would be hers. Tomorrow he would drive into the city, he would come all the way into the Pathar-Kataal for her sake. Every arrangement would be seen to honorably. Ah, such happiness he would have with her. It was his fate to find her tonight, the evening of his daughter’s wedding.

Sunita stood like a stone and did not speak to him. But neither did she draw away when he touched her, nor look about to see if any other rose up from the grass under the wall.

•   •   •

Darius, for this was his name, did great things by Sunita. He set her up, with her mother, in their own small house on the outskirts of the city. There were three servants to wait on them, one to be especially alert for the mother’s comfort. The house had four rooms and a charming courtyard with a fountain and some orange trees. Darius’ dependents lacked for nothing.

At first, Sunita’s protector would visit twice, even three times a week. After a month or so, this lessened to a steady once. After a year he did not visit so often. Then it was “very peaceful” in the house (the mother’s words), just as it was “very busy” when he came.

Sometimes the two ladies would walk through the suburbs, escorted by the servant boy, with pink parasols. Now and then, they went to call on friends in Pathar-Kataal.

“How odd and proud Sunita is now she has a rich man’s protection. Her eyes are flat as glass. In a whole hour she never moved once and never spoke, except to tell me the tea wasn’t strong enough.”

Once Sunita did ask a question. She asked if Bhutnai still lived in the quarter, but the Witch had died. This was two years after Sunita had gone away, and perhaps two months later she had recourse to some women in Pathar-Kataal, but unfortunately ended up in hospital. After that she could not bear a child even should she wish it. She did not wish it.

•   •   •

On her twentieth birthday, Darius came to visit Sunita. He brought her a necklace that was like the necklace once worn by a most beautiful queen. It was a copy he had had made for her, exact to the last gold butterfly and oval pearl.

When Darius’ chauffeur had driven him away and Sunita’s mother, complaining of her weak stomach, for she had overeaten again, was at last asleep, Sunita went out on to the lawn at the front of her house. It was only an hour before dawn, the street deserted. But as she was standing there, Sunita caught sight of a shape at the edge of the grass. He was a beggar, unclean and ragged, and with only one arm. His face, too, seemed disfigured, she could not be sure. Nevertheless, the sight filled her with an awful compunction. Going again quickly inside the house, Sunita lay down on her bed. Still wearing her queen’s necklace, she swallowed a poison she had bought weeks before in the bazaar of Pathar-Kataal.

III

After the bus accident he had lain in the hospital for a very long while. At first there was so much pain, and confusion from pain and from drugs, that time itself did not concern him, nor the terrible odors and noises of the hospital, where others too cried out or groaned. Later, though, time became evident and the prevalent horror with it. Even in dreams he saw his everyday surroundings, but carried to ultimate proportions, towers of beds going up into the sky, each with its writhing occupant, and endless lines of porters trundling back and forth with slops and corpses.

Girls of the Pathar-Kataal had sold their jewelry to help Ramaji. Initially he did not understand, and then he was very grateful and sometimes wept, and they wept with him, grouped about his mattress like magnificent fiery flowers in the brown-gray-white garbage heap of the crowded ward. But his gratitude only lasted as long as he failed to comprehend that things now would never change for him. He read this first in the faces of the flowers. He could not grasp it quite, the way they gazed at him. No one had ever gazed at him in this way, or looked aside from him in this way. There came after that a brief time of rage. The time of rage passed. Then there was a sort of nothingness.

One girl who had been in the accident said to him, “Oh, I know, my poor boy.” A bad scar on her arm would now have to be camouflaged with makeup when she sang.

But she insulted, she mocked him, by comparing her little hurt to his.

The bones of his left arm had splintered, and the doctors duly robbed him of it, stole it from him as he lay unconscious. They had also sewn up his left cheek, and as the sewing healed him, his face drew itself into new lines so that when he peered at himself in a mirror he did not, for some moments, believe it was himself at all that he saw. The time of rage, the time of nothingness convinced him. The sight in his left eye was now very poor. Day by day, hour by hour, the eyelid sunk lower until it had almost shut out the blurred and murky vision which was all that remained to it. We are tired, the lid seemed to say. Let us sleep.

It transpired the dying were stacked on the hospital steps. His bed was required and Ramaji went home to the quarter where he was welcomed gently by those who seemed fearful to touch him, and could not look in his face.

At first they were kind. He lived on their lavish charity, as always, but Ramaji was not what he had been. He could not pay them with his beauty or with his happiness. He had grown surly. He hated them. It was a bewildered childish hate which had as yet no name. His own name altered. He was called Poor Ram. “I am taking nan and meat to poor Ram.” “Sleep, Poor Ram, it will be good for you.” And in the streets of the quarter along against the mildly orange walls, the children: “See! There goes poor Ram!”

He sold the gold bar and the wristlets and the rings. He sold his gold shirts and trousers. Why dress himself for beauty now? Cripple and beggar, he wandered the almond hive in shabby pajamas, filthy hair. He had space in a courtyard, where he slept or lay. The sweeper came and swept around him. When he felt that he starved he went to someone and asked for food and they gave him dhal or some sugar or a half-rotten fruit. He was pointed out as evidence of Inescapable Chance. The shadow-fist of fate had hung over him in his glamour, and he had played under it, unseeing.

He named his hate in the second year. By then the sight was all gone from the damaged eye, and he limped awkwardly for some reason, and an irritant infection periodically scoured his skin, but he scarcely noted these things—they were all one with his misery. His hate however was clear and called Jealousy. He was jealous of the dull and the ugly, because they had more than he. And sometimes he wept from hate, there in his courtyard. He thought of gods. Some part of him seemed to say: Weep loudly enough and they will hear you and be sorry. But this was not so. None heard but the sweeper, who spat bloody betel-juice where he had swept up only peels and dust. Poor Ram. No one heard him. No miracle occurred. Better he had died. The next life . . . But he did not anymore believe in religion or justice or hope of any sort. Poor Ram.

•   •   •

Occasionally, the young men who sat at the north end of the bazaar, handily close to the three barber shops, drinking beer and smoking opium, would permit poor Ram to come among them. They mocked him, having no unconscious reverence either for Destiny or human despair. Now and then, thinking him insane, and in this way, funny, they let him smoke opium with them. Sometimes it made him vomit, but that would be later. At the time the drug induced a pleasant drowsy sensation which was not euphoria, but was a type of peace he obtained nowhere else.

One evening, having smoked rather heavily, Ram crept off and lay against a rose-red gateway in the shade of a tree. A few dogs slept in the same place; it seemed none of them would be troubled.

The familiar sound of Pathar-Kataal faded to a soothing murmur. Ram wept, from habit more than pain, and fell asleep.

He seemed to fly, unhampered as a bird, through a great tunnel of space. At the other end there was a street quite unfamiliar to him and far beyond the quarter. The houses were very neat, though not large. Small gardens, some with trees, stood before them. It was night, yet the darkness had a strange clarity; he saw right through it, even with his impaired vision, and so to a young woman standing by her veranda.

She wore silk of a beautiful soft red, bordered with sapphire and silver, and round her neck was a fantastic necklace of gold and pearls—but he recognized her, of course. It was this creature he had seen once before, a ghost or demon, if such things existed. It seemed to him she had come that night in the hills to foretell disaster. Perhaps now he made some gesture of horror or threat. Perhaps he only thought these things. But the woman appeared to react violently to him, starting on seeing him for the first, next hurrying swiftly inside her house. Obviously, transported here in a dream though he was, he would not be an apparition of charm to any able to detect him.

Partly he wanted to pursue her. To go to the house and shout, forcing an entrance. But if he was tangible enough to be heard, her servants or her husband would be able to come out and beat him. He sank down on the grass of the lawn. He did not wander away. Maybe it was impossible to do so; he must stay put until he woke.

After a while a commotion broke out in the house. The sky was beginning to lighten and birds to lift, and as if in complement windows lit up and figures darted about. One darted straight out onto the lawn and so off up the street. It was possible that in the dream-state time had become elliptical. It seemed only a minute after that the first figure ran back with a second, and then another before the second figure was out and off again, and another final minute before he returned with a car, and from out of the house everyone who had been in it before burst forth in agitation. The sky was open wide on the dawn by now, and all the neighbors had come on to their verandas to watch. No one seemed to notice Ram. Indeed the second man, coming from the car, retreating into the house, presently coming back carrying a bundle in his arms, rushed directly past Ram in both instances.

The bundle carried in the man’s arms was the phantom woman. She was flaccid as death now, and her hair spilled down onto the ground. She still wore her necklace.

She was put in the car, and the second man got in and they drove off. An old woman in a rumpled sari stood wailing and grunting on the lawn.

What did it mean? This creature which had symbolized Ram’s misfortune—it was dead? No, no.

“No,” Ram said, twisting and turning, “no—no—”

He woke and came to his feet at once, and staggered against the archway.

Pathar-Kataal was black with night and blossoming with windows and naphtha.

Ram leaned on the wall and held his head, his vanquished eye. There was no sickness, only enormous confusion.

He stumbled from that place and after a time reached the night bazaar.

“There is poor Ram.”

“Look how he walks. Is he drunk?”

Ram reached the kernel of the market. He stood in the glare of naphtha flares and raised his one arm to the light-blinded starless sky.

“Who listens?” he cried. “I walk over you and tread stars under my feet. Death lies in the arms of a doctor. Death, dying.”

“What does he say?”

“He’s reciting a poem. Or is he telling a story?”

Some, in twos and threes, moved closer, curious.

“My life, as a beautiful woman, walked across the hillside—”

A small crowd surrounded him now, surrounded poor Ram. Those approaching, who could not yet see him, said: “A teacher! What does he say? What a voice he has—so strong, musical.”

Ram spoke, on and on, to the sky, to the earth. Almost, he sang now. It was true that his voice was melodious and, fired by passion and all the terrible emotions, locked up for years inside him, bursting free, it gained power and conviction. Perhaps, growing up with entertainers, he too had always been destined to be an entertainer, of sorts. Perhaps it was only that his pent up outpourings, released by the drug and its unnatural vision, matched exactly with a crowd’s desire for drama and for instruction (whether to be found in a storyteller, a street display of the Rama-Lila, a snake-charmer, or an ancient soul incarnated as a sage beside a holy river). All things have their perfect moments. That so many are missed is the sadness of the physical world.

Ram’s moment was not missed. His spoken song, sung prose, prose-poetry of anguish, went on. It touched strange depths and stranger heights. Much was read into it that Ram himself did not know of. Which does not mean to say it was not there. His voice, played like the sarod, the sitar, developed on the theme, developed upon the development. His music went on and on. By then three hundred people crowded about him, and at the borders of the crowd, the sweet sellers and the milk sellers were doing good business, while Coca-Cola cans littered the ground like cast-down worldliness.

In the end, and the end was far off, Ram fell over, exhausted. He had by then, among the flowers and jewels of the Pathar-Kataal, disciples. His disciples bore him away to an old house with banana-yellow galleries. He slept on a clean mat, a pillow under his head.

•   •   •

When he woke, he was bewildered.

“Master,” they called him.

He realized, as the day went by with its tributes, what he had—inadvertently?—done. When evening came, the press of people in the courtyard had been swelled by tourists, and everyone was calling out for him. It was the old name again: Ramaji! Ramaji!

Ram laughed. He was still bitter and energized by hatred. He wanted to play a cruel game. He ate the good food that had been brought, and then demanded opium. It was brought in and prepared for him reverently. He smoked it, and chewed a little scented betel. Then he went out leisurely to the crowd, laughing in his soul as the tiger laughs when he sees young goats tied to a tree.

It was a year before he learned he laughed no more. By then the opium was so far into his system he must take it as medicine, though never very much. It was, conversely, when he spoke that he did not use the opium at all.

Sometimes musicians came, augmenting his words. There was one young man who had taken to writing down the wild and beautiful phrases that flowed from Ramaji’s soul. These in turn became songs. The players of Pathar-Kataal took the songs away and scattered them like seeds. The name of Ramaji spread beyond the hive’s walls. Once, someone told him a government minister had heard of the teachings, and had sent to Ramaji, inviting him to his home. But Ramaji only smiled. It was not that he did not, now, credit such news. He did credit it. Ramaji supposed the gods, playful enough to paint stars on the sky, cruel enough to destroy beauty with a smashing of glass, were yet profound enough to take the frail loud-hailer of a mortal man and cast their wisdom through his mouth, astounding him and all others. Proving thereby that they had not actually destroyed beauty, merely altered its method of expression. The smile, therefore, meant only this, that if you were chosen by God, the choice of men was immaterial. And Ramaji did not go to see the government minister. And for this reason, too, he did not accept the advances of certain of his disciples who, coming to him in darkness or noonlight, wept to embrace him carnally. “I am crippled and ugly,” said Ramaji. “To me, you are fair as the Infinite.” “Then seek the Infinite. It will serve you better than I.” They recalled that even in the beginning he had never gone with woman or man. Chaste always, surely a saint.

He himself did not question anymore. He shook his head over his celebrity. Words came from God into his mouth. A poet, a saint. There was now a reason for everything. Perhaps it was really only this: miraculously, his innocence had come back to him.

When he walked through the quarter, the sight of his one working eye filled him with the loveliness and sheen of all things. And yet all things were nothing, for no physical aspect, in the end, could remain, or would be wished for, to remain. The Pathar-Kataal was the world of symbol, and the world too was only a playground, a place of entertainment, where even suffering had its dramatic value and despair might be employed as a lesson.

•   •   •

A woman weeping over a stillborn child came to Ramaji to be comforted. He comforted her, for nothing died, and he convinced her.

But he dreamed that night of the stillbirth. For some reason he did not understand, it comforted him in turn, this picture of the infant which had not lived, or barely.

In the morning it was found Ramaji had suffered a stroke. Hordes of people gathered about the house, Ramaji still smiled, hearing this swarming of bees of the honey-hive. He thought of a witch eating sweets, reading the palms of young girls, and quite suddenly saw just such a witch, and also a girl, veiled with her indigo hair, dreaming of a lover as she sat on the mosaic floor. And the girl was his phantom girl again, love and life and death. There she sat, her eyes closed, so gentle and charming.

Without a backward glance at his howling disciples, Ramaji left his body at last to go to her. . . .

IV

The hospital was a terrible place. Sunita wanted to be out of it as soon as possible. She was very sorry the doctors (one of whom was a close friend of Darius’) had saved her life. She did not really know why she had made the attempt on it. She had bought the poison without any clear intention, because she had heard of a woman dying horribly and slowly of some disease, and thought she, placed in such a position, would prefer not to linger. Then the birthday necklace, the beggar—something had frightened her into wanting to be free. She had had no definite notion either of a physical immortality or oblivion. She was not feeling religious as she drank from the bottle. Presently the ghastly pain made her cry out. She had tried not to, but in the end she was delirious and shrieking at the top of her voice, hearing the noise far off, knowing she had roused her mother and the servants. By the time she was carried out she was unconscious. She revived to be upbraided. She had “ruined” her insides. She did not understand. Something similar had been said to her after the abortion and hemorrhage, that she had “ruined” herself, and could never thereafter bear a child. Now it seemed there might be other difficulties. Altogether it would have been much better if they had let her alone, let her die, as she had presumably wanted. The almost constant nausea and griping in her stomach made her confused. Generally now she only felt half alive in any case.

The hospital was very much of the real world, though, and it depressed her. Despite the fact that Darius had arranged that she have a private room and all things for her comfort, the public ward lay just beyond the partition, with every one of its stenches and sounds abnormally apparent.

Each day Sunita’s mother came and sat beside her and sobbed. Not only the doctors, but her mother complained about Sunita, and lectured her on herself. No doubt Darius would do the same, except he could not, naturally, visit her in such a place. One evening Sunita lost her temper and shouted wildly, waving her fists. After her mother had departed, grimly Sunita left her bed, wrapped herself in the silk robe Darius had sent her, and wandered out of her room, looking for a veranda and some air.

First, however, she must encounter the public ward head on. How she had grown away from the sights of such wretchedness. Here and there groups of relatives did their duty over the gray heaps, trying to calm or cool or feed them. The gruesome cacophony of illness and near-death filled the atmosphere, and over all the fans spun in the ceiling, making their own inexorable noise, as if to specify that all things went on and on relentlessly, and no wail or gasp for breath would sound any louder or continue as long, though equally it would be repeated endlessly forever.

Sunita hurried listlessly toward another partition, but before she reached it, she came upon an old woman. What made Sunita pause was something of a mystery. Perhaps it was the old woman’s relaxed stillness. Then Sunita met her eyes; the woman saw her and smiled. It was a tired smile, but serene. She was busy dying, but still she had time for any who might need her. This message was so apparent that Sunita now was actually drawn forward and kneeled down there in her silk wrapper by the mattress.

“Ah, but you don’t look well,” said the old woman softly and kindly.

Sunita was so struck by the old woman’s awareness of her own trouble in the midst of the ultimate struggle, that she did not know what to do. Actually, the old woman seemed not to be struggling, only gliding peacefully along a predestined course she had quite accepted, even helped to plan. Sunita felt in that moment her own futile suicide attempt, her debility, her disappointed flavorless life, and even, strangely, her loss of motherhood, like nails driven through her sides. She covered her face and wept.

“Hush,” said the old woman gently. Yet there was a certain irony in her voice. Nothing bitter or resentful, it was almost playful. Sunita suddenly realized how it must look, as if she lamented by the bed of a dying relative, her own mother maybe. At this her tears stopped. She looked intently back at the old woman.

There was that in the old woman’s face which promised some sort of teaching but in fact she did not say another word. Conceivably she was too exhausted. Even so, her eyes met Sunita’s very often, and they were full of humor and compassion and total indifference to squalor, misery or death—even to life. In a little while, Sunita held the old woman’s hand. It was very fragile as if the flesh, too, were ebbing away. Yet comforting. No one had so far comforted Sunita. They had scolded her. They had told her she had “ruined” herself.

In a short space the old woman gently died. Sunita let go her hand with reluctance. There was, even with death, no complete distancing, and she continued to sit there for some time until brusquely told to go away by medical personnel.

•   •   •

The next morning, Sunita felt better. She was able to eat curds and rice and to drink buttermilk. There was no nausea and no pain.

About ten o’clock a letter was brought to her. It was from her protector, Darius. He explained that he had to be going away on some business and thus could not hope to see her for a very long time. The house was still hers, of course, and everything he had given her, including her medical expenses. He enclosed (he had done so) an order which his agents would honor and which was for quite a generous sum of money. He hoped her mother was not too upset and had recovered from the shock of her daughter’s unfortunate accident.

Sunita sat on her bed. She saw her mother shouting and whining, calling on God to see how Sunita had failed her and how they were both now doomed to perish in poverty. So what? Sunita laughed aloud. She had been a talented dancer and might do anything. She was free—She laughed again and a doctor hurrying past the open door of her room scowled at her, because his hospital was no place to laugh in.

•   •   •

She left her mother in the house with the four rooms, and she left her the servants—the cook, and the girl who had such nice manners, and the boy who carried things—and the gold necklace of a queen. “I will send money,” said Sunita. “But where—?” said Sunita’s mother. Sunita shrugged. “The quarter.” Where else? She left her mother, worrying and whining like a fractious child, and went by taxi to the Pather-Kataal, with a few possessions. Here she took two rooms, one for her comfort, and another in which to entertain and to teach. Sunita taught the young girls something of dancing, and for this she was well if haphazardly paid. It was recalled how fine a dancer she had been, and how wealthy her protector. Sunita told everyone her protector was obliged to cast her off due to trouble with his wife’s family. Such a thing was unusual but not quite unheard of; it furnished a respectable excuse. Sunita herself also took dancing lessons and worked hard, coaxed and cursed by her teachers, to regain the lapsed skills of her youth. Much came back to her. Not all. But she was still beautiful. Men also came to her rooms. She did not hate their attentions as she had hated those of the unfortunate Darius, since these men she did not belong to. If she truly wished, she might say “No.” For that reason, it was never necessary. And as the men brought themselves to her, they brought their money. A year passed and Sunita and her mother lacked for nothing.

“I never see you,” the mother grumbled when her daughter came on her fortnightly visit. “What a life you lead. When I think of what we had and how it was—” But Sunita put down the boxes of sweets and the jars of pickle and the lengths of silk she had brought as gifts; she was smiling, smiling. She never now lost her temper with her mother. This was another skill of her youth she had regained completely.

•   •   •

Late one afternoon, Sunita had washed her hair and sat combing it on her balcony. She seemed lapped in a sea of soft colors: all around the rose-pink-amber walls of the hive translating sunlight, and the flowers in their pots, and the flower of the turquoise parrot, which was still with her, and which slept and baked, a blot of blue, in its cage. A scent of dust and red-pepper and oranges hung on the air, sharp, seeming to promise something. Sunita looked up through a skein of hair, and saw a man walking toward her through her room. It was no one she knew, but as she put back her hair to look at him, she was not so sure. He was her own age, or a little older, exceptionally handsome, tall and strong, and beautifully dressed in the western clothes that infallibly made an impression on the quarter. For a moment, too, there was a fleeting recognition—the image she had seen under Bhutnai’s spell: This man was like the youth she had glimpsed beside the old shrine. The youth who was a lie, Darius being the truth, the always-disappointing truth of real life.

“Below,” said the man, “they told me I would find Sunita here. You are Sunita?”

“Yes,” she said graciously, “but it is not yet—”

“Excuse me, I’m not here for social commerce,” he said almost angrily. Then he smoothed his features and his voice and said, “You were at the hospital last year?” And named it.

“Oh, indeed yes.” Surprised, she let her hands fall in her lap, no pretense of coquetry anymore. The young man sat down facing her, on the floor in his smart clothes. He gave her his story swiftly.

His family was a wealthy one, from outside the city. After the death of his father and the marriages of his sisters, the young man’s mother had turned from the world, and, despite all protests, journeyed away, clad like the poorest, causing rage in her sons with her calm, kind rejection. For months they had tried to find her and bring her back to security and sanity. “She was precious to us,” he said now to Sunita. “There can have been no better woman. But she convinced herself she had reached her last life in the physical world, and that, now her duties to others were fulfilled, she might abandon us and wander about like a beggar, taking a final leave of the earth. I ask you. Ridiculous. For a woman such desires are absurd—She had so much to offer. To waste it on strangers—” and then he smoothed himself again and said humbly, “Of course. . . . this was precisely what she wished.”

By this time, actually almost at once, Sunita had known what was coming. The pure loveliness of it made her hold her breath and wait in stillness.

Soon he told her how his mother had collapsed on a street of the city, and been taken into the hospital by mere luck. There she died, as it seemed quite alone. Because of her assumed anonymity, it had taken a very long while for him to discover her death, then to locate the place of her death, the hospital, and to be sure of all the facts. The ultimate fact had been that one young woman had sat with his dying mother and held her hand. Thereafter he had set out to trace Sunita. He wanted, he said, and now his eyes were wet, to thank her for giving comfort to a foolish damnable old woman who should have stayed at home with her sons, who loved her.

“But,” said Sunita softly, “it was she who comforted me, and gave me strength. Who cleansed me and cured me of the darkness in my life.”

“Yes,” he said, “that would be her.” And then he buried his face in his hands, just as Sunita had done beside the old woman’s mattress, and wept.

Presently Sunita rose, and went to console him. He seemed very familiar to her, as if she had known him many months. He laid his head on her breast, knowing her, too. In a while she made him lie down, there in her private room, which was sweetly scented and piled with cushions, while her servant prepared tea.

That night Sunita shut her doors, but she was not alone.

It was a sublime night, lit by far more than lamps.

Sunita’s visitor did not leave until well into the next morning.

That their liaison was passionate, and brought delight to both, did not startle either of them. It was as if his mother had arranged it. Before he left her, the lovers discussed matters. The man was, naturally, married, but this did not prevent his offering to become, and so becoming, Sunita’s new protector. He would then have given her anything she asked, but she preferred now to stay in the compound, although in a set of rooms made very gracious by his presents. Here she was guarded by a strong servant he found for her. She continued to teach her art of dancing to others, although she had now given up her second trade.

She was the talk of Pathar-Kataal, for her protector was like a god. It gave hope to all the young girls. If they could not be discovered for film stars, at least they might get one like Sunita’s sahib to care for them.

Once or twice he was kind enough to pay a call with Sunita on her mother. After the first of these meetings Sunita fell at her mother’s feet and cried: “See! Didn’t you always tell me there would be someone for me better than all others. What a dear wise mother you are.” There was no malice, or very little, in this, for Sunita’s heart was full of happiness, and she had become sorry for her silly elderly mother with a queen’s necklace around her throat. But in the end the mother only muttered in her veil, “It is not as it was.” With every hour that passed, Darius grew more estimable in her memory. Who could compete with memory?

•   •   •

One night when she was alone, Sunita had a strange dream, in which the street below was filled by people who were shouting out the name of some poet or sadhu. When she woke next day she felt for a moment it had been her own name they had been shouting. A preposterous notion. Strangely, too, the dream made her very restless, and soon she went out and walked through the quarter. In the bazaar, she sent her servant to fetch her some sweets; she had a sudden craving for honey. Then she had an urge to go and look at the Witch’s house.

Alone then, under her cucumber-green parasol, and hung with the bright jewels of her lover’s last fit of generosity, Sunita idled to the yellow house. Today the courtyard was vacant, though sounds of conjuring and flutes came from various windows. With no real thought, Sunita climbed the stairs and went in at the open door of Bhutnai’s room. It was empty now, but for some boxes and a dry cracked water jar in a corner, although the tawny blind still hung down over the window. The room smelled foul and sad, yet Sunita, poignantly aware of the dream she had had here, of the intervening muddled anguish, of the coming of love that was the dream’s justification, sat down on the dusty mosaic as she had done that day, and closed her eyes.

The European thief who had followed her had first penetrated the land looking for Enlightenment. It had eluded him. Next he penetrated the quarter from the city, looking for lax full pockets. Just as the gems of the spirit had once appealed to him, he had not been able to resist the glint of diamonds in Sunita’s ears.

He would not have harmed her much if she had not struggled. But she was confused and afraid, maybe of the ghost of Bhutnai the Witch coming up behind her for fresh payment. So she struggled. So the thief stabbed Sunita, ripped out her earrings, and fled with the agility of a monkey, long before any came and found her.

She lay a brief while dying. She was stunned, not properly aware of what had happened; she dimly thought she would be better in a moment. But then she spied a one-eyed man sitting looking at her in the blind-tinted darkness. His face was scarred and terrible, yet full of sweet pleasure. And all at once Sunita felt that she must go to him. So, leaving her body without hesitation, she did so. . . .

V

When the child was born, the mother lay silent and waited to be told, already knowing. “It is dead,” said the midwife, sourly, afraid of a bad reflection on herself. For this reason she began to expound her philosophy on the role of chance, and to air, modestly, her credentials. The mother stayed silent. She was too tired to mourn as yet.

•   •   •

The soul, rather disquieted, hung between the physical and the unphysical, trembling, regaining its equilibrium.

It had envisaged a life here, actually two sorts of life, depending on its gender at birth. And it seemed to the soul it had experienced a life . . . or two lives—a handsome boy who lost his looks and became instead a poet or swami—or had it been a girl? A dancer, tied to one man, breaking free, finding a wondrous lover—

But no. Nothing had happened at all. It was only anticipation. In those few seconds as the newly birthed child hovered between sentience and death, the soul had foreseen its two possible adventures and all their possible lessons. Seen so vividly, it had thought it lived them through. But the envelope of flesh was not in fact able to sustain it. The soul let go. It drifted quietly away from the world, neither male nor female, capable of both, seeking the calm beyond it now remembered perfectly.

It had no regrets. For after all, it would soon find another vessel to house it. So many children were born, there.

Fifth Night

The Fifth Night should properly be haunted by the ghosts of dead elephants robbed of their tusks. It is a game of hide-and-seek, spiced by murderous jealousy and the occult. And also, perhaps, by demons.

The Ivory Merchants

Here we sit comfortably in the Willingdon Club, with Bombay’s green and pleasant lawns about us, our cool drinks to hand. And so I shall begin. But you must listen very carefully, my children, and concentrate to your utmost. For I am going to begin at the end.

There was once a great man. And to expose my grasp of language, I do not mean a fat man or a tall man, but a man endowed with a luminous and admirable mind. He was a writer, a novelist and essayist to some extent, but mainly known for volumes of quite astonishingly good short stories, that had to do with many lands and various peoples. Generally he was thought to be a genius. I say generally, for it is a fact that anything and everything will find both support and detractors. Let me then only remark that, thrown in a scale, the supporting would outweigh the opposing faction. And malignly add that Egyptian mythology tells us even a featherweight discrepancy may prove fatal.

However, let events speak for themselves. Possessed of fame, laved by adulation, anchored by wealth, and on the very morning after receiving a privately inaugurated award, well-known and highly regarded in the literary world, this fortunate genius lay down on the floor of his dwelling, somewhat bloody and particularly dead. This is how it was reported. About four o’clock, as the sun burst across the horizons of the city, a shot rang out, as they tend to do when a gun is fired. Going to investigate, those who gained access discovered the great man—whom I will call, discreetly, Roland Michael Smith—with the revolver still gripped and a neatly penned note laid nearby. The note said nothing much, it was mainly a courteous and restrained apology for the trouble about to be caused his retainers and friends. Otherwise, his affairs had been put in scrupulous if hasty order.

All the subsequent inquest established was the patently obvious, a verdict of suicide, and Mr. Smith was duly cremated—a concession to his sympathies with the Hindu religion.

Thereafter, the sudden and inexplicable drama, which was and which remained a mystery, became a talking point of considerable moment. You, my children, may also have discussed the matter; ah, yes, the little smiles assure me that you did. Then you too will have listened to, or formulated, the suggestion that there may have been the onset of a serious and incurable illness, which Mr. Smith decided to shorten with a bullet. Then again, no doubt you became aware that an autopsy had already revealed Mr. Smith in such a radiance of health that a younger man (he was forty-two years) might well have envied him. Following the first wave of suppositions there began to be other rumors, preposterous it would seem, that Roland Smith had actually been murdered. The evidence was and is quite at odds with such a notion. There can be, let me assure you, no doubt that Mr. Smith himself bought and loaded a revolver, placed its mouth in his own, and blew out his brains. No doubt at all. Having reassured you of this, I will now reveal that our genius was in reality the victim of a most cold-blooded homicide. Yes, yes. By all means take sips of your iced drinks.

I will now move to the second concluding scene (the first having been that of the corpse of Mr. Smith on his Persian rug). More attention even than before is now perhaps recommended. For I am about to show you the assassins.

There is, on a hill not a thousand miles from here, a curving boulevard of Victorian houses, which I will call, without discretion this time, purely for amusement, Bomb Station Street. From these high sashed windows that face west, one may see other houses fall toward the Arabian Sea. There is one high Bomb Station Street window, however, veiled by a yellow blind. The light is not good in this room. That the light is not good is not my device to keep from you the appearance of the assassins about to occupy it. I am afraid it is their own device, part of a stipulation of the partnership, that neither shall be too sure of the looks of the other.

Well now. In a corner there sits a European woman in a somber dress, a straw hat, her stockinged legs crossed. She is smoking, and you can see the smoke rise, pale on the gloom, dark blue over the yellow blind. This is exhibit No. One. Now the door opens, and enter the second murderer.

The second murderer, and again I have recourse to an invented name, is to be known as Rakshas. In this instance, the name is not my own invention, but what the woman, who is Rakshas’ client, has had suggested to her as a label whereby to hail him. There is an apt reason for the second murderer’s having adopted this label, as you will come to see. Meanwhile, other than the name, there is some difficulty.

He came up the creaky stair noiselessly and now noiselessly he melts forward through the blinded light. One thinks of something in the jungle, yet he is not truly animal in his movements, nor reptilian. No, not even though it is not properly human, the way he moves, and is. He does not seem to be of any of the many regions of India, nor of the adjacent places on the map. Nor is he a westerner, though his dress suggests, perhaps, a well-to-do Frenchman. Then again, there is an Eastern element. . . . Something—a movement of the hand, turn of the head on which hair seems to sit smooth as if poured. The features are nondescript. One forgets them at once. Not handsome, not ugly, not beautiful or grotesque or even plain. Flavorless. Or so it seems. And yet, it is rather like the blind on the window. Atoms are being obscured, in some curious manner. It is all there. One simply is not permitted to see it.

The woman speaks first. She says, “I gather from a headline or two that you succeeded. My dear elusive Rakshas, how very clever you’ve been.”

Rakshas bows. No more than that.

The woman uncrosses her legs and stands up. If the light were better we would see she is attractive, with pastel, devilish eyes. The eyes have it, my children. She is not a nice lady. She has employed this Rakshas to remove Roland Michael Smith from her planet. That is why she congratulates him now.

“Really brilliant. How ever did you manage it? But don’t tell me. Not that you would.”

Her motives for wishing the genius dead are not those of stupid healthy passion (an antique blood-feud, unrequited love for or jilting by Mr. Smith). No, the lady’s motives spring from sheer darkness. She too is a writer, in fact rather a fair one. But she is tired of Mr. Smith, so much the fairer, breasting the tape of every prize. Jealousy is a strange worm in the heart.

“The money’s there. The currency you requested. All told, you’ve cost me a lot—but well worth it. Please, do count your loot. No? Is everything satisfactory?”

Again, Rakshas bows.

“Don’t think,” says the woman, “I haven’t taken steps to protect myself, just in case you should ever. . . . Well. I mustn’t impugn your reputation.”

She is unbalanced, too, our attractive, talented, jealous lady. She has just proved as much by thinking, even joking, that she might escape Rakshas if ever he were to decide he must turn his attention on her. But he will not. That is not Rakshas’ way of doing business.

He turns and goes silently out. Recall. We have not heard him speak. Not that it would have made any difference if we had.

Nevertheless, as far as is possible, you have seen the assassins, the desirer-and-hirer, and the hired. You are primed by the crime, the motive and means of the crime, but not yet its explanation. Since a detective is entitled to a clue, I shall now provide one.

It is possible, if you recall the affair, or it may have slipped your minds, that something a little unusual had happened exactly prior to Mr. Smith’s death. Happened on the very evening that he received the glorious award I mentioned earlier, the very evening before the dawn shot shattered the two-faced serenity of Bombay.

As Mr. Smith was entering the grounds of the building where the award was due to be presented, amid the usual banqueting, junketing and pontificating, persons began to appear around the cultivated bushes in the moments of the dusk. Initially, they were thought to be the normal horde of beggars that a new car or footfall tends to stir up like sediment. But, rather than the open palm, these bore, like gifts, pale glowing items held for display in their hands. This weird overture, which Mr. Smith, and those who shared his car, seemed to think first surprising and then funny, did not diminish. By the time they reached the entrance and were getting out, quite a mob of people had gathered, smiling and waving these pale objects eagerly in the air. Roland Smith’s laughter had by now become forced. No one was much pleased. The congregation, though smiling and cheerful, was swelling to riot proportions when ushers and presently security police appeared. At which the multitude vanished in the general practiced way. Sweating, noticeably disturbed, and hoarsely persisting in trying to laugh it all off, Roland Smith was escorted inside. The peculiar incident might have been forgotten. Please note, I merely say it might.

The celebratory feast began and continued, and then the speeches began and, alas, continued. A friend has been recorded as saying he believed at this point Mr. Smith was not quite himself, perhaps a touch of those summer fevers to which the occidental is prone. But Mr. Smith laughed this off, too, and sat staunchly on until the moment came when his success was publicly announced, the trumpets of fame resounded, and rising, he went forward down the aisle to receive his garland.

“True genius,” the lady in the smoke of Bomb Station Street has said, “is never recognized in its own lifetime.” (It must be mentioned that by this, she meant her own. It must also be mentioned that, despite her personal preference, she was for the most part correct.) “Look at Mozart,” she would say, and has gone into print as saying, “a pauper’s grave. But no sooner in the earth than a standing ovation is heard. He’s dead! He’s safe! Now he can be recognized. But there are others,” she would sinisterly affirm, “of no merit, treated as geniuses while they live. Why name them? We know who they are. While such as Mozart die in penury, the darlings of the rabble thrive. It may be accepted as a truth,” our lady of darkness says, “in this world, failure is the hallmark of success.”

As Mr. Smith walked toward his crown of laurels, people stood up to applaud him. He was seen to pale, by several of them. As he mounted the steps he stumbled. Always polite, he thanked the hall for the prize, but brokenly, as if very nervous, almost ashamed. Then he tottered from the stage and went away directly to an illicit emporium of firearms. And next morning the silver atmosphere was ruptured by the crack of a revolver.

Here now is the clue.

Mr. Smith’s friend, who commented on Mr. Smith’s debility during the feast, also said, “I never saw so many women all at once wearing ivory ornaments—bracelets, hair-combs, rings. There’d been a perfect avalanche of the stuff the week before—half the bloody elephants in the forest must have carelessly dropped their tusks.” He had, he admitted, known of the glut and only been struck again by it so forcibly because “that was what they were holding up outside, you know. Bits of ivory. Bizarre.”

And so it is.

•   •   •

A Rakshas is a demon, a shape-changer—but not in, for example, the fashion of the Naga, which may be human or serpent or some variation upon both. No, for a Rakshas can take any form it wishes, male or female, infant or ancient of the human tribe, but otherwise any sort of bird, fish, reptile or animal. Which in turn leads one to believe, does it not, that in essence the Rakshas has no intrinsic shape of its own, that it is gaseous, perhaps invisible—perhaps even nonexistent, when not involved in impersonation. Also, the Rakshas is inimical to humanity by the laws of Dharma. Though both the Naga and the Rakshas play tricks, the Rakshas plays them in a lower, less tuneful key. It is war, you understand.

And, as I mentioned, the hired assassin was well-named on all counts.

Nothing, so far as I am aware, is known of him or (and now we arrive at it) of her, or of it. Nothing, that is, save what I intend to tell you here, my children. Always assuming this new round of cool drinks will sustain you, and you have no urgent previous appointments.

The assassin Rakshas’ stock in trade—this I think we may guess, even at such an early juncture. He (it is easier to grant the male gender, at least for the present), he was known, in those unlit circles where he was known, for an ability to kill in such a way that it allowed no hint of blame to attach either to those who had employed him for the purpose, or to himself. As you perceive, in this instance the murder weapon had been suicide.

The term “assassin” brings to mind, in this day and age, a man, or a woman, indeed, skilled with a rifle, or violent and swift with bomb or blade. But there is a more imperious echelon of killers, who wear their anonymity like a decoration (for make no error, like the demons, they are at war with the rest of us). It is to this guild that Rakshas belongs. Such do not prefer a single gambit, and so are never known by it, as the master painters and the master butchers of the world are always ultimately known, from their brushwork, and their signature. The slaughterhouse elite works in quite another way, fashioning always a type of death from a type of life. Examples are obvious. A victim who climbs mountains falls from one. A flying enthusiast is lost over the sea.

How then, and from what in the quiet life of the genius, did Rakshas fashion the excursion to the gun-sellers by night, and the exodus via a dawn shot?

For Mr. Roland Michael Smith’s existence was a model of the unassailable. He was mature, but not old, healthy but not an extremist, not unattractive without being handsome, broad-minded and adventurous without being foolhardy. Interested in all things seemingly, to a degree, and in nothing too much. He liked good food, but not in excess. He drank, but not continuously. He had had no homosexual or extraordinary relationships, or apparent desire to have any; he had been married once, divorced once, to a woman who spoke highly of him and had remained not unfriendly toward him. He had raped, robbed and slain none. He had had no dealings of a suspect or illegal nature, and at no time that anyone could see had he been implicated in anything scandalous, or even merely eccentric, save in the most acceptable format. Above all, his writing revealed him as a creature of strong character and unbiased opinion, aware of all sides to all questions, who, while sympathetic to many ideas not his own, firmly came down himself on the side of the angels.

It may be, my children, that to the killer-elite, those such as Mr. Smith present a challenge. Where oh where in this unruffled pool, just properly dabbled with suitable cloudlets—wholesome divorce, an infrequent hangover—lies there the awful murky fish that may be drawn up shrieking to the surface?

But, you murmur, it is the ivory. You have told us. The ivory.

Yes, I have told you, and it is. But I have not told you how. Be patient. You shall learn.

•   •   •

The pleasures of the storyteller: I press a mental switch and Voilà! We have returned through time. It is now three and a half months before the death of Mr. Smith. The first scene, which took place some ten or eleven days ago—the hiring of Rakshas by our lady of jealousy—I shall dispense with. It was prefigured in the last.

Envisage then, if you will, a morning street in another city somewhat farther north—for the genius has more than one domicile, both in this land and in others. Fame, as I said, has been kind to him, so far.

The house is not ostentatious, but tasteful. Outside by the high wall, one of those quaint carriages, drawn by a stoical horse, is waiting for Mr. Smith. A journey has been organized; the celebrity will be away a week or so in the hills at a retreat he values. Here, dreaming as he stares over a sea of mist at the vision of mountains afloat like frozen cumulous, he will compose his thoughts and his sentences, writing what is to become, though as yet few know it, the last short work of his life. Baggage has already departed to the station. Now Mr. Smith himself emerges, healthy, white-suited, and faintly habitually smiling, his head bare, holding his briefcase (containing notebooks and other vital material) and one small bag. This is that bag the experienced nomad bears always with him at such times—the vade mecum of essentials. It will hold those items of necessity from which he cannot or will not be parted, even for an hour.

The street is select, no one is about, except for the inevitable cow which has wandered up and is eating fruit over a neighboring wall. Ah yes, and a beggar, idling, who now comes to the carriage as a matter of course, extending the open palm. Mr. Smith nods to his servant who places in the open palm some money. The carriage starts and rattles away, the servant withdraws. Somewhere in a garden a bird assays a few sleek notes, and the beggar moves off. The scene has ended. What can it have meant?

There was nothing special about this beggar. Dark-skinned and small, turbaned and verminous and unclean, sucking a piece of lemon-rind. Unmemorable, but I suggest we do remember him.

His eyes, for example, glazed and black, unfathomable and mindless, seemed to note nothing about Mr. Smith except his western opulence. And yet, the strong grip of the manicured hand upon the vade mecum leather bag: That may have been obvious, even to a lingering beggar. It is possible, is it not, a destitute who had visited the area before in search of pickings, might have learned certain things about the house and its occupants? May even, while noiselessly scrounging a scrap from the garbage along with a jackal or two, have seen how lights go on and off behind the blinds, or without benefit of blinds. And how things vague, tiny foibles of human nature, begin to form a composite. . . . Something—Just suppose. Just suppose, too, that there have been other beggars, other passersby who, until now, have seen nothing of interest.

So, the dream of the Himalayas claims Roland Smith, glorious, ethereal, and the artist’s eternal compulsion to rework that which does not require reworking, into another form.

It is late on the night that the genius returns to his northern city residence, by car on this occasion. Lights roar in the windows. Nothing much has happened on the return trip. Only that someone brushed against Mr. Smith in the corridor of a train, and later he found a pen, dropped carelessly into a pocket, was missing. The pen was not very valuable. Mr. Smith reckons its loss a token sacrifice to the gods of exchange and mart. For he is pleased with his excursion and its harvest. He has been followed in many places, here in the north, and will be in the coastal west when he goes back to it. But there are followings and followings. Can mist or shade be said to follow? And there are beggars everywhere. No, nothing much has happened on the return trip.

Next day, a young student calls at the house, wishing to see Mr. Smith. Fair-complexioned, with a trace of bad skin on the forehead, and wise innocent eyes, the youth is shown into an arena crammed by books, typewriters and curios; the great man’s study and workroom. Here, in obvious awe, the student returns the pen lost on the train.

It seems he saw it fall, and due in the city, has used the excuse to meet his idol, recognized on sight from book-jacket photographs. The student’s English is perfect and his diction beautiful as an actor’s. Mr. Smith is rather charmed by it all, though wary, as the famous beast must always be of its trackers. They discuss literature, and Mr. Smith’s literature, and Mr. Smith, who knows he is not immune to flattery, allows the boy to stay for coffee, and even shows him certain items of interest, a folio Shakespeare, a jade Buddha, Rajput gold. At no time is the student shown, however, the contents of the black box, no larger than a small biscuit barrel. This the beggar and the jackal had observed, close to midnight on the eve of the mountain journey, brought wrapped in a cloth as if hot, and packed by Mr. Smith personally into the vade mecum bag his servant had already filled hours previously: Indeed, a secret. That the box has also come back with Mr. Smith, be sure, is known. Did Mr. Smith not lock himself into the lavatory on the train on one occasion and glance in at the box? (The bolt was faulty on the door, an old man stumbled in looking for somewhere to sleep.) And was the box not also unpacked on return and borne, in utter blackness, to the study, and put away—somewhere—behind the mask of blackness, and blinds?

Please notice now, if you will, the gentle student, hanging on everything, every word and gesture and drop of coffee. Enslaved by genius, he does not miss a thing, even to the way the windows open. When he leaves, his eyes shine with love. Mr. Smith is touched, and glad to have got rid of him so easily, nicely.

Two evenings later, Roland Michael Smith gives a dinner party, and while one end of the house blazes with yellow light, the study lies in darkness and is penetrated by a shadow. Softer than silk, it moves about, slips over and by furnishings like oil. From the previous visit, it knows where all things are. From astute observation, it knows too, which portions of the room, desk, drawer, shelf, cabinet, were always avoided.

The shadow turns its attention to these, then. So, at last, disdaining the manuscripts, jade and gold, it unearths from a chest, where it is casually but thoroughly hidden under papers and folders of no significance, the box. Even now, not a match is struck. Things of the dark see in the dark, my children.

The box is comparatively light, tin perhaps, covered by black felt. Once Rakshas the shadow has persuaded the lock to open, though, he finds a second box within the first, this one of thin wood, with a padlock. The padlock is dealt with. And so, a third box is arrived at. Ah, this is like a puzzle-game. Or is it more reminiscent of the lead-lined containers, one inside another, whereby radioactive isotopes are stored? So dangerous? Rakshas masters a third lock and so the inner box, which is only cardboard and might actually have been torn apart, is opened. Now he must see by touch, by touch and cat’s eyes and the faintest glimmer of starbreath through the slit of the window. A scatter of pale motes lie inside the third box, little and smooth, able to be taken up and held in the hand. Rakshas tries them, and sets them down again, just as they were. Then he reseals each of the boxes, inside each other in the proper order. He replaces the ensemble, and scatters and heaps the papers over it. They have been often disturbed in this way, evidently, and fall obligingly in familiar piles. No sign now anyone has tampered, but the one whose right it is.

As laughter and the clink of fine glass sprinkle from the dining room, darkness glides out of the window to darkness, and the window closes.

“I thought I heard something prowling in your garden,” one of the guests says over the dessert. “Jackals, I fear.”

With no more outcry than this, the shadow once more passes.

•   •   •

In all scientific or aesthetic endeavor, there must occur many tests, watches, experimental procedures, both repetitive and unrewarding. With the privilege of the storyteller, I will omit these. Suffice it to say, they took place, those random series which did not produce either blossom or nut. And move on to those which did.

There on the hard court a European and a Dravidian are playing tennis. The Dravidian wins, most beautifully, and is acclaimed. There has been a bet laid, and now everyone is eager to buy drinks. It is delightful for the loser to find that someone wishes to buy him a drink.

“That Sitali is a demon. Of course, I’m going blind. Terrible thing to go blind at thirty-five.”

The other, who seems to be of Danish extraction, blond, red-skinned and sweating in the heat, agrees with this. The Dane is dressed enough and couth enough to be in this private bar, but only just. He had the look of the western searcher after Enlightenment many have come to fear as the spit of the mad dog. The European, scenting it a whisper too late, is planning already his escape, as he downs the free beer.

Presently, “Must go over and arrange a replay,” he says. And, to soften the edges, “Of course, she wouldn’t have beaten old Rolling. Oh no.”

“Roll-ing?” queries the Dane.

“Ah, silly nickname. Roland M. Smith.” Unfortunately, now he must hesitate, played out again by one of his own volleys.

But the young Dane looks blank.

“Novelist, short stories,” says the going-blind European, gazing at him keenly, because to name-drop to no response is sometimes hurtful. “Know him quite well, actually.” The Dane blinks. Now the name-dropper writhes on the line, unable to let go.

After a pause Rakshas says, as he has done maybe thirty times, in thirty various places, “A Mr. Smith who collects ivory?”

Crestfallen, the tennis-player sits down again.

“Ivory? Rolling? Well, I never thought—although—”

To the one who studies, and has majored in, the ways of Man, this is a classic case. The tennis-player has just been beaten, before witnesses, by a lovely young woman whose fleshly forebears, both of race and of gender, were the servitors of his. Now the loser has declared close acquaintance with a great man, but does this wretched guru-seeking Dane perhaps know something about Mr. Smith that his close acquaintance does not? It becomes necessary, in the heat of the moment, to prove one knows it all.

“Well, frankly I’ve never seen any ivory in his flat here, or in the house at Delhi, or that place at—well. Absolute dearth of ivory, actually. I thought he was a jade-fancier. And he’s stocked some nice gold bits, and a bronze or two. On the other hand, I remember I once showed him a piece of carved tusk I’d picked up. He carried on rather strangely, I may say. Thought I must have stumbled on a good thing.”

Over at the other end of the bar, Sitali is being feted. The Dane orders more drinks. He thinks he had read one of R.M. Smith’s stories, but failed to understand it.

“Oh, a deep one, Rolls.”

The Dane, at long last, shows signs of being impressed. Rashly, the tennis-player switches to whisky, and later, much later, the pair of them career away into a cloudless indigo night, necklace-strung with the greenish streetlamps.

They fetch up, having noisily admired Victoria Station, sat through a reprehensible film reprehensibly, and almost therefore come to betel-spattered blows with some Bengalis, at the tennis-player’s apartment. How all this happened the latter is unsure. But the Dane has turned out not to be a bad friend in a storm.

As they while away the last straws of the night, the tennis-player comes upon the small carved chip of elephant tusk.

“See? You see? This was it. And still is.”

Then the tennis-player tells the story in detail, and the waste of the long, overacted night is justified.

Proud of his find (which is indeed a not unvaluable one, just as Mr. Smith’s much-locked-away collection is without any startling value whatever), the tennis-player had thrust his curio under Roll’s nose, forced it on him, in fact, when Rolls seemed reluctant. “What do you think?” the tennis-player had demanded. But Roland Smith put the ivory fragment down and stepped away from it, backwards. Abruptly flushed and nervous, he had fumbled for words, then gone into a diatribe about artifacts that had nothing to do with ivory. “He was shaking,” says the tennis-player, in fascinated retrospect, “all over, like the proverbial leaf. Then he walked out. Out like a—straight out.” Curious and concerned—“thought he might have been taken poorly”—the tennis-player had watched him from the window here, as he crossed the street. It had been then midday and shiveringly hot. “He went off like a rabbit, almost running, I recall. Down there—look. There.” And they peer out across the glitter-bugged lines of the city, toward three close towers straight from New York. “Have another? Got some Martell somewhere.”

Five minutes later, Rakshas engineers a brandified row about transcendentalism, and is thrown out into an exploding dawn.

•   •   •

The mist and the shade, the beggars, the jesting alley-princes, the Moslems hurrying after the muezzin’s cry—these have continued to dog Mr. Smith’s footsteps, north and west, unseen or at least unconnected by himself to himself. That the tennis-player knew him, for example, had been ascertained days ago by a seller of bananas. While, also days ago now, a serene, corpulent Brahman, borne in a ricksha, beheld Mr. Smith enter a particular apartment in a modern many-story block near the bay. Actually, the third of the three blocks visible from the tennis-player’s window.

So do the patinas of honey and gold flow together, the currents of the rivers to the sea. Have you never indulged in the jigsaw, my children, and known the logical sweetness of two baroque pieces fitted suddenly as one? Thus.

•   •   •

The white building is modern, the apartment ultra-modern. Yet, once the door has been opened, there are glimpses of decided Vatsyayanism: Many of the select few who call being westerners.

The maid, wound in a graceful sari, and regal as a princess, makes obeisance. “You do not have an appointment,” she remonstrates gently in English. The arrival is probably an aristocrat, wealthy, worldly, educated elsewhere, and handsome. His black eyes flash black lights, and he murmurs in the accents of Oxford, “Alas, no. But recommended by my friend.”

Presently this handsome raja finds himself seated in a room crowded by dreamlike erotic statuettes, cushions, and incense. Faintly the soft churnings of a sitar break like ripples from a record-player, but when the apartment’s mistress enters, she wears western clothing, cosmetics, and even Chanel, to suit the probable taste of the guest.

“And who is your friend who recommended me?” she asks, powdering discretion with a smile.

“You mean Roland. My very good friend, Mr. Smith. I am only in the city for a day, then I must go south. This was an impulse. If it is inconvenient—”

“No, not at all. A great pleasure.”

The beautiful one claps her hands with their long painted coffee nails. A tiny gold flower glitters above her left nostril, hardly larger than a freckle. Exquisite snacks are served, and hard drink, for everyone has lapsed from everything here, or almost everything.

By the afternoon’s end, the young lady, who shamelessly has called herself Devadasi, for the benefit of her clients, is well pleased for sure. The new booking is courteous and active, wanting nothing nasty or too time-consuming, generous beyond a fault, and pretty into the bargain. She hopes he will honor her again, and he seems to think he will. He let drop, with his western pants, that he has some connection to the film industry. Though this is the oldest trick on earth, or at least as old as moving celluloid, Devadasi Khubsurat is inclined in this instance to belief. She has done all in her power to make him happy. He seems happy. The scatter of questions he asked concerning Roland Smith, whom obviously he knows well, she has answered. There was nothing of a difficult nature, for Mr. Smith is a rare visitor, polite, straightforward in his needs, a generous, valued customer. He has even been granted the privilege of calling without an appointment, on the off chance as it were, a treat Devadasi intelligently accords seldom, and which Mr. Smith has not often utilized. Yes, of course, it is only that the raja of Hollywood is rather sensitive about his dear friend’s health. The young man trusts she will not tell his dear friend that inquiries have been made, since such information would only worry him. . . . The alienation of patronage is something Devadasi is acute in avoiding. She receives her extra recompense delicately, and will be discreet. If she seems to place a handsome, princely lover of her own blood higher than a merely literary foreigner, one cannot altogether blame her.

Now all this is very well, a most attractive scene we have all been privy to, the lovely lady in her white plastic tower, and the koftas and the perfumes and the union of the lion and the creeper on a couch. But what is the purpose of it all? What have we learned? What has the dread Rakshas learned? Do I only seek to confuse, delay and exasperate you, my children? Not at all.

To Devadasi, Mr. Smith, after the startling reaction to the elephant’s tooth, had hurried. And yet, to one majored in the human condition, it has been apparent that the charming prostitute associates nothing fearful or lawless with her companionship of Mr. Smith. His needs in love are “straightforward”—he bores, but does not offend. And there seem to be no other links, no vile element lurking in the past that has to do with ivory and might send him scuttling to her white tower for mutual exclamation. Whatever plot exists between R.M. and Devadasi, she is apparently ignorant of it. As to the day in question, yes, she remembered his visit, and has spoken of it to Rakshas, her handsome new purchaser. But no, Mr. Smith had not been ill. But no, he had had no anxieties she was aware of. And in speaking, she has revealed herself, as do most of us. Rakshas has perceived she too has no anxieties about that meeting. Rakshas has dealt often with the devious and cunning ones, and knows this “temple-girl” is not of their number.

Having paid her liberally, then, from the funds of that other lady, the jealous lady of Bomb Station Street, he becomes an ugly man of no material worth and wanders, casually finding out in turn a great deal about Devadasi, from those who know. Nor was any of it of spectacular usefulness. Until at length one small aspect of the game runs full circle. An informant, seated under a shade tree chewing pan, remarks, “Ah, the little one has good fortune now. A glorious master in the business of filmmaking. So she will rush to consult the Red Mother, as she always does, when luck or darkness comes upon her.”

It seems Devadasi is superstitious. It seems the false persona who called on her, the handsome lord who was really Rakshas the Shape-Changer, has thrown her into a panic of optimism. And so she will take a bus out into wild country, and go to a village I shall refer to as Low-Door (which is just how the informant referred to it through his betel) and consult there a witch.

Here I must pause, to tell you something that may indeed be obvious to all the wise among you. Rakshas, who has spent so much of this tale in altering himself like a chameleon, and in pursuing and in spying, all in the cause of gaining means to destroy Roland M. Smith, has also accomplished one further thing. It is a truth that a writer reveals much of himself in his work, and the better the writer, it is suggested, the more he will reveal. It is done without conscious thought, although conscious thought is sometimes employed in concealment. (For example, you may search the volumes of Mr. Smith in vain for any mention of ivory, even so much as a pen-holder constructed of it.) Otherwise, details of his life, though occasionally camouflaged to protect the guilty, regularly appear. Devadasi is even to be found, in the roles of three separate and superficially dissimilar Hindu and Urdu women, each of whom, more or less, dwells in a tall white tower of plastic, pure as a lingam. What Rakshas has done, of course, is to read the works of Mr. Smith as avidly as the fanatic. So he has been able to make all manner of deductions more swiftly than otherwise possible—even to knowing precisely what novelty might be offered when the door of the white apartment was opened.

Now he knows another thing. From having read a very famous story I need not title here, Rakshas sees that Roland Michael Smith is himself familiar, since she exists, with the witch of Low-Door to whom Devadasi is rushing. The witch has somewhere a streak of Irish blood, and her hair is red. For this, and for her arts, she is called Laal Ma, and both eschewed and venerated, a revered pariah, living on a mound half a mile from the village. And yes, again the little smiles. Some of you do indeed possess a literary acquaintance with her.

Devadasi, turning out herself to be something of a chameleon, boards the bus in cheap cotton wear, and rides off in a slough of beggars, amid coops of chickens.

Rakshas follows at leisure. The informant under the tree has furnished directions.

•   •   •

The gods’ courtesan, having given her gift, receives her interview with Laal Ma in the afternoon. Picture then the hut upon the mound—which may conceivably be the head of a sunken stupa, but who has dared shift the witch and find out? All about, the land undulates, and the stands of trees whistle dryly with birds. There is also a steady clock-clock, like some strange insect, that goes on and on. But it is only the noise of village washing being beaten by a narrow channel of water. From out of the hut come other sounds, things being rattled and slapped down, the fluttering of disturbed air like wings, sometimes the old woman’s singsong, and then a cackle resembling drunken hens.

Eventually Devadasi comes out. She is ring-eyed, staggering slightly and drugged with bhang. She hurries down the foot-worn path Laal Ma’s clientele has made, and off to catch another rackety bus. It must be said, the young woman does not seem gladdened by the Karmic news the witch found for her. Which leads one to wonder, even so soon, if there is not some real power in the red-headed hag Mr. Smith’s story describes simply as a charlatan.

After Devadasi the fair one has gone away, there is silence in the hut. Half a mile off, the clock-clock goes on, and sometimes there is the barking of dogs. The bus is also heard, and seen to pass in miniature, a comet of white smoke which is dust.

Then the sudden sunset comes, brilliant topaz, and folds over into darkness.

In a while, Red Mother struts out of her hut and lights two naphtha flares on the sides of the mound. The gaudy beacons betoken her readiness to do nocturnal business, and sometimes they work. Once (it is recounted), a party of young men returning from a wedding stood in the path of the orange naphtha light, and called dirty names, at which Laal Ma appeared and cursed them. Not one survived the year; they died in the wild nights of water when there was rain, or were broken in bus accidents. One must be careful whom one insults. Now Red Mother stands alone in the glare, peering out among the trees and the clear dark before moonrise. She seems to guess the shadows are about to give birth to life. But only a jackal wails, then another. Perhaps they have caught sight of her.

She is an arresting spectacle. Squat like a frog, swathed in filthy garments, but hung with the gold none is brave enough to steal. Gold on her heavy bosom, her arms and fingers, and in her ears. Her skin has the Aryan lightness, but her scarlet hair has been helped from a bottle. Her savage eyes, part mad and part too sane, are painted round with a black mess. She grins her broken teeth at the night. She says, “Come you, when ready,” and retreats into her hut, behind the blare of light. And the slap of the cards starts again. It is not the westerners’ adopted Tarot she uses. Red Mother deals with the Khartis, that hybrid Graeco-Egyptian pack it is better to be afraid of. Yes, she is much as Roland Smith described her, is she not? And the hut, too, with its Victorian oil-lamp, its piled-up glooms and bad smell mingled with that of the bhang she drinks, nor would she thank you for Bombay gin. Even to the odd bird that sits caged above her mat, sometimes swinging its world a fraction, ruffling its wings, but never speaking. It is named Shiva, because of the blue ring round its throat, and that Mr. Smith changed or got wrong, my children, for he named it aspectively Nilakantha.

Yet, remember, Laal Ma has invoked the dark—Come, when ready. And now, something does come. Shadow piercing shadow, passing between the flares, walking up the flank of the stupa mound. On the threshold.

But it is only the silhouette of a young girl, hardly more than a child, wrapped in cheap cotton, as Devadasi had been, the long hair running down her back.

Laal Ma looks. Just once. Then she looks away, to her cards on the earth floor.

“So it is you.”

“I,” says Rakshas, and sits before her on the ground.

Laal Ma does not know Rakshas; does she know of him? (Her, now. It.) And if so, in what context, for it seems the witch, who reckons she has tangled with demons, truly believes that one is now in front of her. Against the lamp the girl is only a shadow. But Laal Ma, if she looks, sees the glow of the lamp on a face. So she does not look.

Down go the cards. It strikes the watcher as a somber hand—an angel of darkness and one of depths, with, centered, the Wild Dancers, and there a tower, falling.

“I have brought you something,” says Rakshas, and he holds out money.

“No—nothing, nothing,” hisses Laal Ma, staring at her cards.

“Take it.”

She does not, so the gift is put down beside Laal Ma on the mat. Then the bird rocks its cage and Laal Ma says, “I serve you. What do you want?”

“A rich European man came to you, do you recall? Devadasi told him of you.”

“Sometimes they come, those ones,” says the Laal Ma. She chuckles and reaches out for a gulp of bhang, then does not take it.

“He was this way,” says Rakshas, and she describes Roland Smith very accurately, as one would expect. Then she says, “His question concerned ivory?”

“But I,” says Laal Ma quickly, “am not meant to know this.”

“How is it done? As you did with the whore?”

“Yes. You have seen?”

Whether she saw or not, Rakshas knows. The process was described in Mr. Smith’s graphic short story. In that instance it was a western woman searching for her lost child. In that instance, too, Red Mother lacked any powers, invented despicably, and was ignominiously proved mistaken. But I should add, for the benefit of those of you who have not read this cruel little work, that the lost child the woman sought had died in an earlier life: “Constantly I lament and mourn for a child of mine who perished, but that I never bore, that I never conceived.” For not only does Laal Ma trade with cards, she will summon the images and evidence of former existences. It may be some fear or trouble has its root, not in the present body, but in some prior role two, or four, centuries ago: Karma. Mr. Smith, while damning her, respects the reasonableness of this premise, and sets all down. Thereby he makes her look the worse, since he shows her as a fake operating amid the battening upon the apparatus of cosmic truth. He was sure, no doubt, that Laal Ma will never peruse what he has written. Though she speaks a smatter of English, she cannot read much of her native Indian tongue, let alone another.

But how vitriolic an attack upon a village witch it was. Even we might have guessed, from this venom, that he had asked her something and received an answer. There is this one trouble in his life, the trouble of ivory, as yet unexplained. It appears that, crediting reincarnation as it is well-known he does, he had sought beyond himself, beyond Roland Michael Smith, backward to some other he has been. One who perhaps possessed the key. And the search must have been quite desperate. All his own desperation is there, revealed in the story, though placed in a different cause and upon the young Alsace virgin who comes to the witch despairing.

Yes, one may tell the business of the ivory has a profound effect upon Mr. Smith’s smooth days and nights. And, curiously—since he seeks an answer—that he too does not understand. That he was answered is obvious, and answered near the bone. Why else would he feel afterward bound to cover his tracks by discrediting the sybil, even to those who will never know she is a fact?

Now Laal Ma, still staring steadfastly at the Khartis on the floor, relates her own story of Mr. Smith.

It seems he came in the middle of the night, having driven up the long strewn roads by car. He was rather drunk, frantic in the way the westerner grows frantic, as if straining against bonds. Devadasi it was who had once told him of the Red Mother and her commerce. Now he is willing to reckon her all-powerful, for we must trust the surgeon who will cut open our bodies.

There was a shower of money, and then a shower of confused speech during which he made sure he could ask his question of her spirits, or her gods, or whatever they were that brought the responses, without words. For this, Laal Ma has a special method. The secret query is written—any language will do, even of pictures—and then the paper (and sometimes it is the wrapping from a cigarette packet, or a leaf) is burnt.

We might say she picks up the question by telepathy. Certainly something does.

She gives the visitors some of her sorcerous drink, which is enough to poison them, then lets Shiva out of his cage. As he flies about, it seems the vision comes. Perhaps the suppliant sees what he desires. Or else he sees what Laal Ma and her familiars conjured from the treasure house of past incarnation. The wicked thing, which her clients do not know, is that she sees the vision, too, printed on the foul air of the hut.

Roland Smith was drunk, and when he took the liquid cannabis he slumped over on the ground. In this way there were no distractions. Red Mother beheld a progression of events, all in fine color, and even fitted with a sound track. So, though she was not informed of the question Roland Smith had asked, she learned the reply. Which she now offers to Rakshas.

When she has finished, Rakshas gets up. (Laal Ma does not look.) When the shadow reaches the doorway, Laal Ma says, “Take back the payment.”

“No,” says Rakshas. And is gone.

It is not that Laal Ma, a priest who has broken the sanctity of the confessional, is ashamed. It is because she feared Rakshas that she told Rakshas without hesitation, and from the same fear springs the desire to keep nothing that Rakshas has offered. So she sits on, riffling her cards, drinking her bhang, while Shiva goes back in his cage of his own accord, to sleep. A space before morning, the witch grubs up the wad of rupees and waddles out. In the earth behind the mound, she duly buries it, muttering, then returns, the dying naphtha jerking her own black shadow through the door ahead of her. For remember, there is not one without a shadow. And very few, indeed, without some hidden thing they keep from the light.

•   •   •

It was in the last few days before the giving of the prestigious award, that a glut of ivory appeared in the city. It seemed as if the goods might have been come at illegally, for they were of a fair quality and cheap. But there were no reports of a crime, and the articles were snapped up by ivory-fanciers, or by those who took joy in a bargain. The usual method was for a seller to appear at the house. Sometimes this was a handsome youth or pretty girl, who got around secretary or servant, or around the wife, daughter, sister or woman of independence who dwelled therein alone. Then again, sometimes it was a stately Brahman with the thread across his shoulder, who handed the ivory over through an intermediary, on the street. Sometimes even, a disreputable jester in the bazaar, offering the stuff from his booth. And once, a Black Jew of Cochin, pausing for chat in a railway carriage, left an ivory absentmindedly on the seat, and could not thereafter be traced.

There began to be talk about this proliferation of the teeth of elephants. General discussion was aided, in that the purchasers or recipients belonged to the same wide circle. All of them, as it turned out, knew Mr. Smith. Some of them knew him well. The ivory trade was even mentioned to him, now and then, and particularly one night at dinner in a popular hotel. But it seemed he alone had not heard of the glut, or been offered any of it. As the subject appeared to bore him to unusual frigidity, it was changed. In fact, Mr. Smith had not been overlooked. One little piece of ivory had arrived in his study, courtesy of the post office. The donor went unnamed. All those others who had received their talismans, bangles, pendants, earrings—with such glee—would have been surprised to witness R. Michael Smith’s obvious unease on opening the wrapping. An unease which mounted in a storm to cringing terror, and was then agitatedly suppressed.

But it was not alone to the prosperous literary circles, the English professors and Shakespearian rajas, that the rogue ivory found its way. The poor, too, are game for anything, since anything may bring a little cash. Squadrons of them were now recruited, instructed, and given their shards and flakes and lumps of ivory, paid and promised a second payment. We know, do we not, how their services were employed on the night of the award? We think back and recall the riotous crowd rushing around the bushes and about Mr. Smith’s car. As to the wearing of so much ivory by those free minds inside the hall, well, what was it but a chance of display, an instinct the human retains from his animal beginnings.

And as each fragment of the ivory gave off its creamy glowless pallor, Mr. Smith noted it. After the week of frightened suspicion, when all about him his fellows spoke only, and pointedly, it seemed, of ivory, and after the mysterious present of a little ivory figurine which brought him to terror, now he must walk bravely through the horde that waves the ivory before him, shouting, and then pass among others, those he has known almost all his days in India, and see them in their display of ivory, flaunting it, grinning. . . . And the realization will no longer be fought from his brain or heart—they know. They know his secret, and they stand there to show him they know it, laughing at him the while and at his awful insupportable humiliation. Suffocated in his own clammy sweat, trembling with fear and with that worse-than-fear, his appalling embarrassment, he takes his prize and stands to thank them, stripped naked before the mockery of their ironic clapping and their jeering smiles. Blinded and numbed by shame, he hurries thence to the hole-in-the-wall gun shop, and so to his house and so to his death. For the world has become a country he can no longer inhabit, displayed as he has been, the huge label pinned to his back and branded on his fore-head, now and forever. The agony of the bullet, the Russian roulette of the soul’s survival, these were far preferable.

Of course no one knew anything. The enthusiasts in their ivory baubles were not aware they destroyed him, even as he stood there with them, so oddly discomposed. Nor the crowd, vanished away to receive its second payment from the fat Spanish-looking gentleman who had hired it. Hundreds had become a murder weapon, in ignorance. Even the lady of Bomb Station Street, uncrossing her stockinged legs as the smoke rises from her cigarette, even she does not know how it was done. Or Devadasi, unwitting accomplice. While as for Laal Ma, the gossip she listens to drops from another sphere. Only Rakshas knows. And perhaps it pleases him briefly, this successful campaign of the endless war on humanity. He may have the satisfaction of the great artist, after all, as he steps away from his completed canvas, but does not, as ever, sign his name—

•   •   •

And so now I will tell you, before there is some violence done me which would gain the Willingdon Club a bad name.

Once upon a time in India, about the era of another writer, called Mr. Rudyard Kipling, there was a prince. Now I will not bother you with his name, if even his name be known. But he had considerable wealth and his palace was very beautiful, and filled by beautiful women whose only task was to please him and to bear him sons. But it transpired that, although healthy and in the bloom of his strength, the young prince—accomplished in all other fields—failed to show any ability on the plain of desire. And though the ministrations of his handmaidens and wives had been able to demonstrate him physically capable, they had not been able to retain this capability for sufficient time that it should be of use for future generations. Let us suppose how serious things must seem when a dynasty is threatened.

Doctors and yogic healers are summoned, priests and magicians, but all to no avail. The tantras do no good, the potions and distillations are useless, the disciplines of the body tone the body to perfection, but leave it nothing to perform save more exercises.

Finally one arrives who is greater than any other. And who is this astonishing one? Why, my children, none other than that master magician, Love. Our prince sees, inside the ring of mosaic that holds the dining-room floor, a young dancing girl, turning on her toes, her fingers playing bells, her hair flying. Such grace, such art, such youth, pure as a newborn flower. He is smitten as if by a flung lance. And when he calls her to him, she comes shyly as a hind, trustingly as a tamed bird. And before the night is over, lying down with her in a pavilion by a lake, he finds he is as other men, to their mutual delight. And it so happens that, as he attains those moments which in their crucial sweetness open all doors of mind and spirit, and make it possible even, for one so trained, to glimpse the All, the clenching hand of the prince encounters a small ivory ornament which has fallen from his lover’s scented hair.

Imagine then, surely it is not difficult, the effect of all this upon one who had despaired of his manhood. Not only is the girl who has rescued him made into a goddess, and being of suitable caste, married, but all the subsidiaries of their union assume a special quality. So it is the pavilion is extended and becomes itself a palace. So it is that the sound of the lake water is conducive to lovemaking. And so it is that ivory, smooth and yellow-white, grasped in the hand, will induce ecstasy. And thus, the prince’s new wife is hung with ornaments of hathi dant by her adoring lord. And when, in later years (for alas, even true love sometimes seeks variety), he strays from her, his courtesans also are given ivory to wear. Merchants come from all the kingdoms, bringing items of ivory for the prince’s happiness and the increase of his family. There are no secrets here. The right of the lord to his pleasure is never in question. Sex is the format of creation. Without that blaze of yoni and linganty which of us should have been born? It is the gateway whereby, at length, the soul may enter in, as in the blaze of crematory fire it departs. No, no stigma upon the prince’s life or bed. The merchants bring their wares and he smiles upon them and rewards them. His days pass in ease. His sons follow him, the children of the ivory.

All this Laal Ma saw up in the air, and all this Roland Michael Smith beheld somewhere inside his drink-and-bhang-besotted brain. So he knew how the blessing had been which, in his present life, that of a repressed and clever Englishman, becomes a curse. For there is no religion or purity in sex for Mr. Smith. It is a messy hasty affair which he regrets. Thrusting it behind him, as his marriage was thrust, politely, kindly; it can only flow into a deeper channel. Can it be that returning to India, scene of that earlier life, is the catalyst which finds out for him the fierce focusing atom, the fetish of the ivory? Now, whether you credit reincarnation or not, my children, credit at least that Mr. Smith credits it, and so believes all the rest. He knows that to grasp a piece of ivory brings upon him a flood of weakening, delirious, barely resistible desire. He must fondle it only in private, or, empty-handed, armed only with memory, rush to his bought companion for release. There is no happiness in the fetish for him. It is a madness in the prelude, a scrambling and instantaneous explosion in achievement. And in retrospect, a shamed and eerie beastliness, the squalor of which haunts him, so that for months he is chaste, as in former times, the box of the fetish locked away and buried. And he is also afraid, of course. Afraid, and that is why he must take the box with him whenever he goes on a journey, along with the shaving soap and toothbrush. Which in turn may lead to the use of the box, the scramble, the explosion. The chilly and depressive shame that follows.

Not for Mr. Smith the smiling merchants with their camels loaded with the accessories of Life’s Gate. Or the women who love him and share with him his rapture. There is no rapture. There is no love. Only the shame, the complementary fear of discovery. And at the last, only the discovery itself, the grotesque alter-image of his merchants, holding their wares in their twilit hands, and of his palace women with the aphrodisiac on their necks, their breasts. And thus the abyss, the bullet fired into his screaming brain at sunrise.

And does it seem to us so terrible a thing, this thing he could not bear to be known? A little affectionately amusing, perhaps, eccentric, original. If we had learned of it, if he had told us all, should we have hated and despised him, spat upon him, jeered and made a mock of his genius—which the fetish does not touch—or the man which the fetish barely clouds?

No. Only in that excellent mind, holding close its foolish little secret, only there did we do these things. And now that mind is darkened and the life, whatever we credit, elsewhere.

So yes, by all means, one last cool drink, although I see the smiles are gone. My children, I beg you, do not go inwards now to find out your own shadows, to examine them, to check the locks that no one shall break in. Remember, we are all naked, all open, and all-seen, therefore it is unwise to fear. Let us hire a loud-hailer and mount the heights of the city, or go north to Delhi’s Connaught Circus, and there roar out in several languages our deepest shames, so the slime and the darkness we invest them with may fall away. Then summon the merchants with their ivory and greet them boldly and truthfully and smiling. Or yes, for sure, they may come in the dusk half seen, when the jackals cry and the sun goes out, with the shadow brandished in their hands.

Sixth Night

The Sixth Night travels forward, some distance beyond tomorrow, and concerns the magic element known as celluloid. Watch carefully the flutter of the glowing screen reflected in a million avid eyes. . . .

Oh, Shining Star

I

Up there, floating on darkness, the goddess widens her eyes, and two gleaming tears fall out of them. Many times larger than life, the eyes of the goddess need to be perfect and perfect they are, white onyx and black; her skin seems poreless as a leaf. And down the poreless skin the tears so beautifully fall. She sings sadly as a bird at sunset. It is the love song again, which is going to be so popular.

•   •   •

“I have your monitor-record in front of me,” said Mhal. “It shows me you hadn’t been out of your apartment until you were called here. That is for three consecutive days, four consecutive nights.”

“I was exhausted. The last picture—”

“Yes, that’s all very well. But you know what it says in your contract.”

“Of course I know!” Indu rose to her feet angrily. “If I didn’t, you tell me often enough. No more than two days in one’s apartment at a time, per month. It’s inhuman, Mhal. It’s monstrous!”

“No, it is not. It’s just.”

Indu stalked up and down the main chamber of Mhal’s office suite. It was spacious and comely as were all places and things in the Taja. As she moved, the solid gold anklets clashed above her four-inch high heels on which, for two and a half years, she had known exactly how to walk and stand and dance most gracefully. “How can it be just? I’m so tired. Do you want them to see me with bags under my eyes?”

“They would find that romantic. Touching. Yes, I want them to see you like that.”

“Oh, I can’t listen to such—”

“Hush, Indu. This is no good. You’ve always been a model of our values. Why be different now?”

Indu paused. She was fair, the palest color of cloves, framed in black hair that grew long and thick as grass to her slender, pliant waist—hair it was illegal for her to cut or style without the Taja’s permission.

“In the beginning it was exciting. Everything I wanted, and always to be admired. Now I’m worn out. I work very hard. And they—they’re always watching. I can feel it. When I rehearse. What I eat. Where I turn my head. If grit blows into my eye, they know about it. It’s vile, Mhal.”

“It’s the price of fame,” said Mhal. “Pay it.”

“I do pay.”

“And, ‘they,’ you said. You were one of them, once. Can’t you be a little compassionate?”

Indu widened her eyes, as she had done in the picture, and therefore now did many times over every day and night all across the State, in several thousand luminous screens. No tears came, however, and no sad song. Nothing came. Very slowly, she relapsed, sitting down in the chair that reformed itself to assure her total comfort.

“Good,” said Mhal. “You’re starting to think again. So I can go on to more important matters.” Indu did not reply. Mhal said, “With the success of the Prince and Slave-Girl picture, the Taja will be promoting you to the Sundah-Sona. Your fee automatically trebles once you are in the Gold. Are you quite happy with your apartment? There’s a new twenty-room roof accommodation in Rose Dawn. You might like to look it over.”

“Yes,” said Indu. Her voice was flat.

“And Vashari will be your leading man for the next five pictures.”

“Yes. I see.”

“Do you? I’d have thought you would be more excited than that. Most of our actresses in the Gold are on their knees to work with Vashari. No non-Gold, of course, ever has the chance. While the women outside tear their hair out by the roots as they watch him. And three years ago, when you came here, you—”

“When I came here I was lovesick for Vashari like all the rest. Yes, yes. But I never met him.”

“You’ll meet him this evening.” Mhal got up. The vista of suite doors, anticipating his wishes, began to melt open. “Now, go and stroll in the park. Look at the new apartment. Swim. Ride.”

“While they watch me.”

“While they watch you. Oh, and Indu, no more meals for a while in your rooms, please. Breakfast on the balcony or the terrace. Lunch—wherever you please, outside. Remember, I’m not asking you to leave the Taja. At some point there will be an interview about your entry to Sona. And your feelings at the prospect of working with Vashari.” The doors stood wide, ready for Indu’s departure. “Be more enthusiastic at the interview than you have been with me, just now.”

“Yes,” she said. She walked out, and down the glowing corridor.

•   •   •

The Taja rose at the center of a low brown plain, its colossal towers white as snow from the Himalayas, against a day sky that was always cobalt blue.

It was the dream, the Taja, almost as soon as you could see and reason. One of Indu’s earliest memories, a little child sitting in the village dust, was of her mother’s hand upon her neck and the words, whispered from superstition, “She is so pretty, perhaps pretty enough to try for the Taja.” And that explained why, as she grew up, Indu was spared certain of the hard chores. She was the one who would walk to the well with the red pot balanced on her head, and she was the one who prepared bajara and stirred the rice, coaxed to sing as she did so. But never the one who worked bent double in the fields or out on the new highway with the pans of cement. And the family went regularly without food so that Indu could go twice or three times every week to the cina. She could sing all the songs. “Sing, Indu!” And the stereophonic radio, the pride of their hut, played all day so Indu might sing with it.

When her sisters, who came to hate her, tried to vent their hate in blows, Indu’s father ran up with a stick. How well she remembered that, too, the screaming girls chased in a circle all about the space of baked earth, till they fell and screamed louder, and were left weeping.

The year Indu was fifteen, it was time. The family had been starving once more, to save enough to buy two tickets on the Hunting Hound, the hover-train that ran the fastest of any train in Azadi Asia. Still, the journey took twenty-eight hours. As the other passengers, wedged in the fifth-class carriage, slumped and snored, Indu sat wakeful with fear beside her mother. There had been a story in the village, told from malice (though no one officially knew Indu’s destiny, it had been fairly obvious). Another girl in a village to the east had been pampered and sent off to the Taja, and the Taja had not required her. Outside the Taja gates, the girl’s mother had handed her a dagger and the girl obediently killed herself. Would Indu’s mother also offer her a dagger?

When they arrived in the city, they bought a gap under an awning and slept in the street. The next day there was no time to stare at the height of the buildings or the swarms of traffic. In many ways, the city was like the village. Gray-white cows wandered the pavements, women gossiped at public wells or water taps, and washing hung like banners. But there were stretches of steel, concrete and glass that seemed to have nothing to do with human life. While on almost every corner there was a kind of box with a slot for coins, men and women clustered thickly around like flies on meat. Also there were beggars everywhere. Indu’s mother pointed. They raised their eyes and saw the sparkling facades of the cinas dominating the city.

In the noon heat, Indu and her mother set out to walk the twelve miles across the plain. Even before they left the city outskirts, there it was, the Taja, blazing on the horizon.

There were other pilgrims on the road. Some walked praying, and some rang bells. Others went in silence. A thin crowd lined the first part of the way. Occasionally there would be a muttered curse, or blessing, or a comment on their chances. The cherished children, males and females, were sometimes taken to the roadside to be dusted, tidied, fanned, given sweets and milk purchased from vendors who wandered the crowd along with small groups of police. Mothers on the road held parasols over their sons and daughters. The maternal hands trembled with fatigue, while the children trembled with fear and craving. Some of the young girls murmured, not prayers, but the names of favorite actors, particularly that of Vashari, a litany in which the staring crowd now and then joined. But when Indu thought of golden Vashari, who for a year then had been the prince of the cinas and of the fantasies of all women, she could not believe he too had traveled this hard road with feet bare as her own. Though they said he had. His publicity announced he was the son of a snake-charmer in the north. He had run off, bluffed and begged his way south, entered the Taja gates alone, arrogant and afraid. He had been older than Indu’s fifteen. Vashari had been twenty. In one year more he was the idol of the people and received into the Sundah-Sona, the Gold, the actors’ high Caste, and attainable only by actors. The Taja must have educated him well. When the reels of film sometimes shown before a picture revealed him working or relaxing in the Taja, or elsewhere giving autographs, he did not seem to be a snake-charmer’s son from the bazaar. And though Indu worshiped him like the rest, golden Vashari gave her no courage that day as she walked toward her fate.

The season of Thundama came every year, like the Rains, though no rain fell on the Taja, under its canopy of controlled weather. The gates, electronically guarded, were already open to the weary arrivals.

Marveling and terrified, the shambling stream trooped in onto the gilded avenues between the fantastically sculptured snow-white towers like columns of hibiscus. Some were three hundred or four hundred stories high, making nothing of the rectangular sterile blocks of the city.

It was in one of these hibiscus towers that the choice was to be made. Ushered into and left in a wide hall with a floor like a pool of water, suddenly the jumble of applicants was broken up, hurried away in different directions. Indu found herself bereft of her mother, whisked upward in the elevator into the sky. A new room. She was given instructions by a voice out of the wall: Go there, do this. Walk, sit, kneel. Then two women came, dressed in wonderful garments. Another new room, with a waterfall for a bath and great mirrors which abashed Indu. She was washed, anointed, tinted, burnished. Her eyes were inked in by kohl and became the eyes of the antelope. She too was dressed in wonderful alien clothing. In the next room, blinding lights stabbed down at her, how this way and now that, and again she must go there, do this, walk, sit and kneel.

You see a tree in bloom, said the disembodied voice, and there was a subtle difference in it, it had particularized. Pluck one of the blossoms, as if you think of your lover. Indu blushed, and did as she was told, and thought of Vashari, who else?

Did she know, asked the voice, the song “Chamakata Tara”? Of course she knew it. It was the hit of the month, sung in Vashari’s latest picture by a golden goddess in a swing.

Music played. Indu grew rigid. But singing had become natural to her, pounding bajara under the radio. All at once her voice sprang from her throat, wild and sweet, twining the notes of the sitar-maya.

He is like the light to me, the sun and moon to me,

Without such light I could not see.

But he says I am the light to him,
like a bright star to him,

Oh, sun and moon, my lord. Oh, shining star.

They chose two girls at that season of Thundama. The first acted in only one picture, which flopped. She was heard of no more. But Indu, the other, was a success. She played a dancing girl, and a demon, and a princess. She made picture after picture, more and more expeditiously as she learned more of her craft.

Inside half a year, her family had migrated to a fine apartment in the city. Each sister had a bedroom to herself. There was controlled atmosphere, a freezer, a radio that took up almost one whole wall and a viewer that took up another. They had a free pass to the best seats in any cina in the state. Indu seldom saw her family, and then only by appointment. No one expected anything else. She had become a maiden of the Taja. Men watched her every night and day on the screens, watched her and began to fall in love with her, bought radios to listen to her songs in their huts. And women envied her, tried to copy her walk and her smile, to laugh like her and cry like her.

When she met them, her father too shed tears of gratitude, and her mother reminisced about the long train journey and the burning road to the Taja. Indu’s sisters fawned on her, cold-eyed. By the end of the first year, Indu did not see her family anymore.

She was so busy. She had made ten films that year, and was contracted for sixteen the next. She was a star, and not only in a song. And stars must give light.

•   •   •

“You see,” Mhal said, early in the second year, “how the people are responding to you. How you fulfill their need.”

They were crossing the Taja’s thirty-acre parkland. A tiger rustled by through the silken bamboo. The animals of the park were kept gentle and tame by their drugged food, and this one came to eat from Indu’s fingers. Mhal and Indu had paused under a giant bo-tree that rose a hundred feet high and spanned half an acre with its shade. They gazed up through the branches, and a flying peacock spread its fan over their heads. It was very flattering to Indu, a young actress not yet into the Sona, that an executive of Mhal’s importance had taken time to discuss her work with her.

“This is your home,” said Mhal. “You’re happy here? You have everything you want?”

“Oh yes, oh yes,” cried Indu.

A fountain flowed against the eucalyptus trees, but it never rained in heaven. Miles away, the city was hidden behind a curtain of rain. There had been floods to the north, crops lost, and lives. But that was there, not here.

“In times of hardship,” said Mhal, “we’re needed the most. Do you see that? With only a handful of beans, still they queue up outside the cina for two hours of solace. We can give them something beautiful to alleviate the misery of this life. And the hope that, in some life to come, some other turn of the Wheel, such a life as this may be their lot, too.”

He spoke of reincarnation so respectfully that Indu guessed he had no religion. The shock was sudden and brief, for the Taja was not the village; she had soon learned that.

Mhal said: “Will you do something else to help them, Indu? Something that will be of great benefit to the masses that already adore you, and which will increase the number of your fans, and therefore your returns as a performer.”

“ . . . If you think—”

“Yes, Indu. At this stage, I always advise it.”

It was quite simple, Mhal told her. This evening, in the seclusion of her own apartment, a small device—“Very small, about the size, say, of a ground nutmeg—” would be painlessly inserted under the skin of her left earlobe. “There’s no discomfort, I assure you. Would we let any of you, our precious children, suffer?”

“What will it do?”

“It will make you more accessible to the people who love you and depend on you to brighten their hard lives.”

The device was a relay monitor. Once it was in place, her image and her voice could be broadcast anywhere in the State, at the selection of the proper viewing channel. Indu herself had seen, had she not, the public viewers in the city where, once a coin was put in the slot, you could watch for ten minutes, live, your favorite actor? “Your family have a large private viewer, don’t they? Just think what a delight it would be to them to see you whenever they wanted to.” And did she recall the reels of factual film the cinas often showed before a picture? Much of these was compiled from the recordings of such monitors. “Naturally, there are areas where your monitor does not operate—the dressing rooms, the cubicles at the pools, for example. And in your own apartment, the relay is nullified.”

Indu, on the crest of all that had happened to her, recently sixteen, touched one of the silver bells on her bracelet. “But I’d be afraid of—saying or doing—”

“Ah, no. Don’t worry. The Taja monitors include a delay principle, and automatically edit anything that might—shall I say surprise?—your fans. An indiscretion, a bad word . . . the gods of the Taja are human after all, aren’t they? No, no, nothing to your detriment will be seen or heard. And remember,” said Mhal, “you can retire to your apartment when you need to. You’ll still have your privacy.”

Indu thought of the staring wretched ones who hung desperately on the vision of her.

“You may have noticed,” said Mhal, “those factuals you saw at your village cina, of Anba-Jeet, or Vashari—the faces of certain other actors were blurred and obscured by obstacles—ferns, veils, the pole of a sunshade. . . . These were the artists considered of not much interest to the public, those without monitors.”

A venomless snake danced in the grass before a painted mechanical charmer.

“Do you see, Indu,” said Mhal. “Privileged person, you can give joy to millions, merely by being alive.”

She felt a rush of nameless emotion as she consented.

Yes, in the beginning it was exciting.

She had been taught to move and to speak beautifully, to pose, her body, tensing or relaxing, falling always into graceful lines. Before the cameras, it was a commonplace. It gave her life outside an extra zest to know cameras still turned. Even when she rehearsed, much of her work would be relayed. That moment when she had had, she thought, an exact interpretation—and the voice of the director had called her back . . . That moment was not, after all, lost.

She was used to it, yet still entranced by it, when she was asked to go on a mission out of the glorious haven of the Taja. The days picked for such excursions into the city or the surrounding landscape were carefully computerized, so the season would be fine and the journey seamless. Police dotted the crowds as she drove with Anba-Jeet in the shut, air-cooled limousine. At the stops, the people plastered themselves to the car, pressing their hands against the windows, tracing her face and Anba-Jeet’s face on the impenetrable glass with their fingers. Anba-Jeet was Sona, and little older than Indu. Her rounded arms, the shade of dark honey, were patterned by traceries of golden beads. She smiled and nodded at the crowd, showing Indu how to be enchanting yet aloof, a true goddess. There was no rivalry. Relationships in the Taja were expected to adhere to a flawless moral and ethical code.

“You do this, you see, like this?”

Indu did what Anba-Jeet suggested and demonstrated. Wave on wave of faces grinned and desperately gazed and fell away as another wave came in. Sometimes the cluster of people was so great the car could no longer move. Then the chauffeur calmly pressed a button. The outsides of the limousine began to grow very cold. Repelled, the hangers-on unpeeled and jumped away, shouting with outrage and fright, or a sort of strange mockery, it seemed.

They arrived at a multi-story shop on one of the city’s main boulevards, and drove up into a private garage. Escorted by an impeccable police guard, the goddesses were elevated to the fiftieth floor. Here, the store sold radios and film-tapes for the private viewers of those who had somehow afforded private viewers. Such tapes were not very durable and were generally played to death in a month. There were also film posters for sale, nine, ten, eleven feet in length when unrolled, and exquisitely tinted photographs of the stars.

The two goddesses sat down in a cubicle scented by flowers from an aerosol. They drank iced sherbets. One by one, the people who had been queueing in the basement days and nights, passed through the electric guard and laid the article they had bought, the radio, poster, photograph or tape, uneasily on the table. The goddesses marked each item, not with a signature, which would have taken too long, but with the personal seal the Taja provided and by which each artist was known. Anba-Jeet’s mark was a hummingbird, Indu’s a bell.

Thousands had waited. The session, roboticized by the police and the guards and the changeless cubicle smelling of flowers, dragged on and on. To smile too often became uncomfortable.

A young man flung himself down before Anba-Jeet. Police lifted him up. “I love you,” he said. Anba-Jeet smiled at him wistfully: “It is such love that gives me life.” He began to cry, and was taken out, his tape unsigned after all. There was no need for Indu to feel envious. A little later, a youth fell also at her feet with similar words.

“You look pale,” said Anba-Jeet presently. “And I’m tired.” She added to the police, “How many more in the vestibule? Six? Very well, that’s enough.”

Indu was startled. “But—”

“Oh, dear child, there are hundreds more. When you’ve undergone as many sealings as I have, you’ll know it’s impossible to cope with all of them. The Taja asks that no session be less than three hours. The three hours are done.”

Although their monitors were relaying the sealing session, they would edit out, of course, what Anba-Jeet had just said.

After the six last fortunate fans were gone, the goddesses went back to their car. The unlucky ones, Anba-Jeet told Indu, would riot in the basement for about a quarter of an hour, then give up and disperse apathetically.

Indu was drained. The mob pressing again at the windows began to frighten her. “There, there,” said Anba-Jeet, patting her gently, as the editing monitors erased. (One heard that when a prolonged sequence must be removed, a “fault” appeared on the viewers. Was each watcher’s coin wasted then, that money which could have bought essentials—clothing, food?)

Returned to the Taja, for the first time Indu felt guilty and unnerved. It was a month before she had broken free of these feelings. Three months before the Taja asked her to perform the task again.

She did so, since it was an edict of the Taja, and because she still loved to be loved.

Her friendly acquaintances, the actresses who were her peers, were of one mind with her. It was a heavy burden, this consolation of the people. No one ever refused. It would be unthinkable.

One day, after a sealing, Indu burst into tears of nerves on the set. The director, who could be harsh, did not chide her. He merely sent her to her dressing room, where the monitor did not operate.

In a short while Mhal appeared, and Indu’s dressers went away. Mhal told her those watchers who had seen her cry would be sympathetically moved. It was no bad thing. But the Taja understood that the sealings exhausted her. They should therefore be limited until she was in the Sundah-Sona, older, more used to her own impact; its duties.

She had still trusted Mhal, then.

•   •   •

Indu sat up, for she had fallen asleep in Sandalwood sun-lounge, and dreamed of millions of eyes. They were watching her now, of course, her awakening, those eyes. They had watched her as she slept. How many men, having placed money in the slot of a street viewer and selected the channel marked with her mark of the bell, had fantasized in those moments that she slept in this way in their arms and on their ragged mats?

She would not think of it. She must not. That was the advice Mhal had given her, months after the outburst of tears. She had gone to him and said, “I’m restless. I can’t concentrate. I remember how they were at the sealings, and in the streets. And now, always, I feel them—looking at me.” Mhal had said, “Yes, Indu. Of course you feel it. But that will pass. Any sensitive actress has moments like these. What you must do, when the idea of your audience troubles you, is to forget your audience. Trust the editing monitor, and put everything from your mind. You’re charming, modest, very talented, and most beautiful. There’s nothing for you to fear in being observed.”

And Mhal had still seemed her friend, though she trusted him rather less.

How had things built up to this impossible pitch? Hiding in her apartment, when in the open—afraid to yawn, afraid to speak to a companion—and was the companion also afraid? No. It was a neurotic phase. Mhal, though she no longer trusted or liked him, was right. She recalled a one-armed man in the village, who had answered her childish query: “Dharma. I am used to it.”

II

When Vashari arrived, some hours late, his skin seemed made of the dark gold of the candlelight. Here and there across the night terraces, other tables, lit like stages, stood as he came by to call Vashari’s name and applaud him. He bowed to them as he passed, then ran up the steps, laughing.

“Forgive me. To be late—what can I say?” His hair, thick and shining, falling across his left brow, was like black water.

The couple of directors at the table laughed with him. “As usual late, and what can he say?”

“Sit,” said a golden actress. “Sit by me?”

But Vashari contrived to sit by all of them, and at last he sat by Indu.

“Welcome to the Sona.”

She thanked him, and turned her head from his handsomeness, for which she was not prepared. She had grown used to it on celluloid.

“Why do you turn away? Look at me, beautiful Indu. I saw your last three pictures.”

She had been thinking, People are watching. Out beyond the light, the slender pines which moved in the breeze—eyes. Like the eyes of jackals round a hunter’s fire. But for a moment he astonished her, and she forgot.

“My pictures? Do you mean—”

“I’m your fan,” said Vashari, the High Prince of the Taja.

“My pictures,” she repeated.

“Yours. And in—what is it?—one more day—you and I make a picture together. Your last role wasn’t right for you.” (Did the monitor edit?) “This will be better. I can help you. My one criticism, you seem too aware of the camera. By all means allure and flirt with it, but not quite so deliberately.”

She thought that, of course he knew how it must be done, and did it with ease, this moment. Aware, unaware . . . the only balance. But his eyes held hers. The Invisible that watched had faded.

“You will get used to it,” he said as if he had read her thoughts, now, earlier. Indu blushed, for the blush had been mounting, through the soles of her slippers, her spine, her throat, all this while, since he ran up on the terrace.

“Ah,” he said. “Ah, Indu. And I thought you didn’t like me.”

“All women like you.”

“No,” he said, “but enough. And it’s good to be liked, little Indu. Love is food to the Sona.”

He was modest, too; he had not said “food to the gods.”

He spoke for a minute with the others, trivial conversation, but not leaving her. Nearby a man of the musicians’ castes played the sitar-maya. Vashari turned Indu’s head lightly with his hand, to look. “In order to play, the fingers must bleed and form calluses, and the calluses themselves be torn on the wire, and torn again, until in the end the fingertips are hard enough to master the strings. Then, there is music.”

He looked at her a long while. With his eyes on her, no other eyes mattered. She said, quietly, “But were you a snake-charmer’s son?”

“Yes. And once I was bitten by a cobra.”

Indu’s eyes widened. He laughed again—it was the mannerism she had become known for.

“Walk with me,” he said. “I’ll tell you.”

They got up and left the dinner party, and the golden ones gestured them amusedly away. As they walked down the terraces, one by one the glittering tables which had called: Vashari! dimmed and were gone. They walked into the umbra of the pines, where crystal rivulets of water ran. The moon had risen, made misty by the weather shield. The white towers were like distant ghosts, moonlike, and far off like the moon. In the shadow, Vashari’s color altered from gold to bronze. It was simple to believe they were alone.

He told her of the cobra’s bite, the traveling snake doctor and the medicines. An old woman with glorious eyes saved him, he said, by a magic song. Indu’s own glorious wide eyes filled with tears. (A thousand women wept, maybe, hearing him, seeing him, tell the story. No matter.) They walked a long while, talking, not talking, now laughing, now serious. She thought, I am with Vashari. How can it be so?

Where the great elephant of ivory stood by the lake, he helped her climb the rungs, and they sat together in the cushioned howdah, looking out across the soft water where the moon reflected. When she sighed, he said, “Rest if you want, Indu. I’m here,” and put his arm about her. She rested her head on his breast and the world was only Vashari and Indu and the dreaming lake and the moon.

After the long stillness they had shared they climbed down from the elephant. As they returned across the park, black panthers lay along the boughs above them, birds called, and the dawn began to lift the sky. Vashari broke a flower from a bush. He marked the stem of the flower, slowly, with his white teeth, and gave it to her, unspeaking. Unspeaking, she took it.

•   •   •

What do poets and scriptwriters know of love? she thought. I love Vashari. She said the words within herself, with joy. For now it was not the love of an adolescent girl for an image floating in darkness, it was the love of a woman for a man.

His first letter to her came at noon. She read it in the privacy of her apartment in the Rose Dawn district. Yet she did not remember the question of privacy. She stood at the window, reading, and so perhaps was glimpsed. He spoke of her beauty in the first letter, a spell she had put on him. It was quiet usual, almost formal, and she was disappointed. But she selected a new outfit, soft fabrics and hues. In the later afternoon, Vashari was at her door. They rode up to the high places of the Taja. They sat together, were very silent together. No one came to disturb them.

When it was dark, the palatial macrocosm of the Taja glowed like a spangled carpet below them, though still some of the towers touched the stars. Indu and her lover glanced about them. He said, “There is only you. Nothing else. They say, the truth of all things is to be found in love.”

When the moon rose that night, they parted. Their picture began its relentless schedule the next morning.

His second letter arrived at sunrise, a moment before she left her apartment. His second letter was very brief, but Indu was not disappointed by it. There was one word only on the paper: Karma.

•   •   •

The first picture which Vashari and Indu made together was finished quickly. There seemed to be an electricity in the air. Before the camera their characters met and fell in love. And it was true. Each time they also met, they also fell in love, freshly. That the whole earth knew they loved seemed to Indu quite reasonable. And it appeared their love found favor with the Taja. Wherever they went, a kind of spontaneous good wish burst up about them with flowers, lights, songs. And there was no jealousy, of course. The code of the Taja did not permit jealousy.

The second picture followed the first, the third the second. By then the first picture was breaking records in the city and there was every reason to suppose it would do as well or better in other cities, and throughout the whole State. Undoubtedly, factual films of the lovers’ meetings had spiced their audiences’ hunger.

Vashari the screen prince, the idol, and the chaste, mysterious Indu. . . . The film posters blossomed everywhere, the god and goddess, in their historical film garments, smiled and shone their happiness over the stained walls of the metropolis, and the squall of traffic on the highways, the yellow dust of tracks far away in the hills.

There were countless interviews, but these no longer troubled Indu. She had only to speak the truth. She loved him. And he, who might choose from so many, had chosen her.

That they would marry there was no doubt. They were of the same artistic caste. Their working partnership was spectacular. The Taja gave its sanction. It would be one of the most lavish and beautiful weddings of the cinematic calendar.

“But you must gain your family’s blessing,” said Mhal.

“Oh, my family. How would they object? I’ve written to my mother, and she will have the letter read to her and—”

“No. Indu, Indu. You’re not usually so heartless. Don’t let excitement make you forget too much.”

They stood in a pavilion on the lake. A midnight party went on all around the sudden bubble of silence. Whenever Mhal approached her, now (she had obeyed all the strictures for the past two months, ever since meeting Vashari; there had been no need for her to be summoned to Mhal’s offices), this little chill silence grew about them. Indu stood inside it. She looked the length of the pavilion and saw Vashari garlanded with flowers, singing, while the grinning drummer beat the time for him. Across the distance, she could not hear Vashari’s voice, nor any words.

“Then, what must I do?” she asked Mhal.

“You need ask me? You arrange to go with Vashari to your father’s home. Vashari naturally knows what must be done. You have merely to be a dutiful daughter.”

She remembered, as she remembered only in vague flashes now, that the watchers watched and listened. This conversation would be edited. It would not be good promotion for Indu to be seen as lax in filial duty, if filial duty was what the Taja desired.

“And Vashari’s father?” she said, to cover a dull confusion.

“Vashari’s parents are dead and his relatives scattered beyond trace. The Taja is Vashari’s father, and has arranged and condoned your union already.”

“Arranged. . . . The Taja arranged—?”

“Of course, Indu. What else? You are, all of you, the Taja’s children. We encourage you to meet and mingle, those of you who are suitable for each other. A flexible program, always. A long time ago, the Taja believed that you and Vashari might partner well. His magnetism, your sweetness. You were groomed for him, and he was kept for you. And how cleverly the Taja selected you both, didn’t it? Look at you. A pair of lovers fit for—”

“Stop,” she said. Her breath choked her. “I was so happy—How could you ruin my happiness? Oh, how could you do anything but ruin it.”

“You must face facts.”

“I’ve no choice. Does he loathe me?”

Mhal smiled. “You know he loves and cherishes you. In confidence, the moment he saw you on the screen, he was smitten—”

“Then you’ve made a fool of Vashari too—”

“Not at all. Vashari understands our system. Inescapable Chance may rule the world, but not the Taja, Indu. In your village, you wouldn’t have met your bridegroom until the wedding day.”

Mhal’s face spun and bloated before her eyes and she covered them with her hands. When she looked again Mhal was gone, and Vashari was there in front of her.

“What’s the matter, Indu? Tell me.”

She looked at him, not knowing what to say to him. If he did not love her, her life was worthless.

“Mhal is a trickster,” she said.

Vashari laughed. “Does that matter?”

“It’s not a joke. How many lies have there been?”

“Some perhaps. None mine,” he said. He took her hand. “I can’t prove anything to you, except in our future life together. Then, I can, and will, prove everything.”

They walked out onto a bridge that led from the pavilion to the shore. They stood there, suspended above the water. Was the monitor still editing? A “fault” of this duration—how many coins lost that could not be afforded?

Her anger left her. She cried bitterly. Vashari held her. Every line of his body, the incense of his flesh, assured her he loved her. And tears could be construed as for many innocent reasons, and so would be shown.

She imagined them very clearly, the eyes that watched her weeping in Vashari’s arms.

III

The car had a police escort. Even so, at the stops, the crowd surged forward. Indu smiled, her eyes sliding always away and away, never resting for more than a moment on any particular face—the gambit Anba-Jeet had taught her. During the drive she held Vashari’s hand, and he smoothed her fingers. His touch said, Hush, Indu, It’s all right. I’m here, while his own smiles dazzled the crowd like lightnings, and women swooned against the car sides. Indu thought, If it weren’t for the coldness that can be made to some on the exterior, they would clamber up onto it, on top of us. The crowd would submerge the limousine, lying many bodies deep all over it. And then what? A boy, as the car began again to move, clung for a moment to her window, licking at the glass. She thought: They would eat their way in.

As they reached the block where the apartment building stood, banners had been hung in the streets, scarlet and dark red, and orange and gold. People extruded from windows and doors. The police sirens wailed, and they roared into the apartment garage where the automatic doors closed tight.

The elevator had been cleared, but a number of people had paid to wait in the lobby. They came forward quietly, bashfully, insistently, and Indu and Vashari sealed autograph pads and pieces of clothing.

The apartment was on the top story, its rooms set around a fine open court with an ornamental cistern. Washing had been brought out to dry, deliberately, for the clothing was of good quality and modern cut, and against the washing, Indu’s family stood stiffly as dolls.

The greetings were formal and courteous. Indu watched the sweat rolling off her father’s face, and how her sisters breathed in quick sharp pants, looking only at Vashari.

Presently the men went into the main room to drink tea. The sisters hung about in the courtyard by the open door. Indu’s mother showed her a huge new freezer, crammed with provisions, capable of feeding hundreds of people for several weeks. With great pride, her mother selected frozen stuffs in brightly colored bags, and bore them across to the kitchen on the far side of the courtyard. Here, Indu was shown the wonderful “atomic” stove, as her mother called it, and then all the gadgets were produced and demonstrated. There was also the decor of the sisters’ bedrooms, the new carpet, the new stereophonic tape machine. Indu had never been to the apartment before, since her family had formerly come to her, when they still met by appointment, in the Taja. Indu realized she was a visitor. Her mother never touched her, except once or twice by accident, apologizing. Nor did Indu want to be touched. She stared about politely, working hard at her role though unsure what it was, dismayed.

Now and then a burst of laughter came from the main room, where the men were. No one came out, and at last Indu’s sisters gave up and stole to the kitchen door. They came in a little way, like cats, sniffing at her perfumed body from a distance, then advancing and fingering the edges of her dress, which brought her close to panic. They kept their eyes lowered. Their eyes were full of hate, as usual. They chattered on and on about Vashari. “How handsome he is!” “More handsome than in the cina.” One said boldly, “When he’s my brother-in-law, will he find me a husband as good-looking as he is?” “Shush!” cried Indu’s mother, tickled and appalled. The sisters retreated sullenly into the courtyard again. An outdoor radio stood by the cistern and they turned it on loudly, and abruptly, with no warning, Indu’s own clear bell-like voice came from the speakers, singing a love song from her second picture with Vashari.

“Oh,” said Indu’s mother, “do you remember when—” But compunction overcame her. She opened a cupboard and showed Indu all the modern culinary implements for the third time.

Later, as the sky bronzed, Indu’s mother and sisters carried cooked sweets into the main room, token foods, and the two sexes mingled. Indu went up to Vashari, because it was expected of her, but in that place, surrounded by her family, she felt no closeness to him; she was almost in awe of him. Even so, she saw the hollows strain had made under his eyes. He was so easy and charming, eating laddu, talking of films, allowing the men to discuss them, as if their opinions might be helpful. He aided the others over their hills of awkwardness as Indu had failed to, and it wore him down.

They went out into the roof-courtyard, and looked out over the fume-hazed sunset city. Indu’s father made a proper show of giving Indu to Vashari, but it was embarrassing to all of them. Under everything, the swarming noise the crowd made below, waiting for the film stars to come out again, blotted any other sounds from the streets.

And under everything too, the monitors, meanwhile, went on soaking up the ghastly business, editing out, probably, such things as Indu’s mother’s apologies for tactile contact, or the way the eldest sister had seized Vashari’s arm and the father reprimanded her.

The pink sun leveled behind five apartment blocks. A flight of birds went over, and Indu knew the viewers would show them, herself, Vashari, her father shaking Vashari’s hand, her mother tucking her face into nervous little wincing laughs, against the romance of the bird-flown sunset.

At last it was possible to leave. Mhal might say, “There were too many edits, Indu. And you should have embraced your mother.” But Indu and her mother could not help it.

The betrothed pair stepped out into the lobby, smiled, sealed photographs and clothing, got into the elevator, and went down to the car.

•   •   •

“Vashari,” Indu said, “why did we do it? It was so horrible.”

(Edit.) Indu thought, All our conversations could be private, if always we said things that must not be said.

“Oh, Indu,” Vashari said, his temper short, his nerves mauled. He did not sit close to her, giving love-looks to the crowds about the car, but not to her.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she said.

“Of course not.” He sighed harshly. “It had to be done. It’s done.”

“But why?” she said again. “We have no peace from it. To be seen—”

“Forget it. When we’re married, there’ll be privacy—”

“In our apartment, for two days at a time, per month.”

“And all the nights.”

Furiously she said: “How do we know?”

“Don’t be absurd.”

“Very well. But supposing the policy of the Taja changes, supposing Mhal comes to us and says, Let them see you, in your apartment, man and wife, one kiss, or—”

“Indu, the Taja wouldn’t ask such a thing. Don’t be such a baby.”

The sea of faces surged and broke on the windows. For the twenty-third time, as the car tried to move, behind his partition the chauffeur pressed the button for coldness. Screaming and fleering, the crowd fell away.

Indu said, “I don’t understand anything. Even you—”

“What about me?”

“Can I trust you, Vashari?”

“Yes,” he said shortly.

“Yes? But you’re a part of what they want. In your second letter to me you told me you believed we were destined, by the actions of other lives, to be together. It was so wonderful to read that, Vashari. And so simple to write down.”

Vashari’s calm gave way. “Be quiet, Indu!” he shouted at her, as the crowds flowed by the moving car, shadows now, for the city was darkening, its huge neons erupting on the skyline, and above all, the neons of the cinas, where he and she stood gleaming in unsullied happiness on their poster.

Indu held her tears in check.

“Forgive me,” she said.

“Yes, Indu, of course.” They were slowing again, another stop. Darkness rushed to their windows, lit with eyes and teeth. Through the thick glass came the noises of slipping nails, like claws. “Smile at them, Indu. They have little enough. And let’s talk about something else, or our channel on the viewers will be blacked out all night.”

So they made conversation, acting, for they were used to acting. And the outskirts of the city retreated, and the crowds were thinner and thinner, like crops in a dying field.

Halfway across the plain the police escort veered and turned back toward the city. None approached too closely to the Taja without invitation. Before the god and goddess now there was only the road they had once walked barefoot to fate, as the tall sheen of that crown of towers pushed continuously higher into the sky.

“Not yet,” said Indu. Vashari looked at her. “Tell him to drive on, into the hills. Just a short distance.”

“It’s unusual.”

“I don’t care.” They both laughed brightly and frivolously, still acting to avoid edit. To drive anywhere was something the children of the Taja did not do, unless requested to do so. “Please, Vashari. The stars. . . . I want to look at the stars from the hills.”

Vashari tapped on the chauffeur’s partition, and told him to drive into the hills. The man hesitated, then acquiesced. Perhaps he had been warned over his radio-link about the multitude of cuts which the monitors had had to make, and which an argument might swell. Certainly, no one, nothing, denied them.

Presently the limousine turned smoothly aside from the road, taking an upland track into darkness.

•   •   •

Blackness soon surrounded the car, the lights of the Taja and of the city had ebbed away. Up in the black sky the hot stars burned, and the headlamps beat their path before them, but through the windows there was nothing, only night. And nothing came from the night to peer, to touch.

After ten minutes, the car began to slow.

“Tell him to go faster, please,” said Indu.

“I think he wants to turn back.”

“Not yet,” said Indu.

Vashari shrugged. He rapped on the glass.

“Go on and go faster.”

The chauffeur said nothing. There was a pause, and then the engine gunned. The car sprang forward, its stabilizers carrying it lightly over the bumpy rocky track.

Vashari leaned back in the cushioned seat. He did not look at her. His face was tired and empty, the profile of a magnificent stranger.

They drove for perhaps half an hour, and covered maybe seventy miles. None of them knew where they were by then, and the chauffeur insisted on a stop. He asked where they wished to go. “I want to go on,” Indu said, and Vashari, dismissing the editing device, rounded on her suddenly like a tiger. “You only want to escape, and there is no escape. Do you want to lose everything you have? Would you prefer to be an outcast of the Taja? No work, no money, nowhere to live? Without comfort, without—”

“Without you?” she said.

“Yes, and without me. This life is the life I chose. I want it. Oh Indu, Indu, stop this foolishness. Be my wife. Let me protect you. I love you and honor you and need you. But I can’t be a beggar again for you.”

Indu opened the car door and got out. She began to walk away into the blackness under the pinpoints of the stars. The chauffeur made a noise. Vashari sat for a moment. He ran his hands over his face, through his hair. The chauffeur waited, then began to speak to him rapidly.

“Yes, it’s all right. I’ll go and fetch her,” said Vashari. “Stay here with the car.”

Vashari left the car and started after her, but she had already disappeared over a hill.

Indu heard his voice calling to her, behind her in the darkness. She walked on, stumbling in her high-heeled shoes, feeling before herself with one hand as if blind, the other over her eyes to wipe away tears. But when he reached her, she said his name in a small voice, expecting his anger. He only put his arms around her, and she felt the savage drumming of his heart.

“Come back to the car,” he said at last.

“Even here,” she said, “they watch us. Can you sense the eyes, Vashari? Even here. But not, listen to us, not while I say, ‘Can you sense the eyes, Vashari?’ Not then.”

“Indu, Indu.”

“When we’re married, alone in our apartment in the Taja, I shall feel them watching us and everything we do. They do see everything. They imagine it, when they can’t watch us. They think of us always. They haven’t got any lives. They have only our lives. And we have no lives either, because our lives belong to them.”

He held her and she buried her face in his chest, aware of the eyes, glinting and unblinking, encircling the light of their glamour and fame, the eyes of the jackals around the hunter’s fire.

Then she felt him start violently. She drew away and looked, and there was a dull light somewhere nearby, then another and another, scattered around them through the darkness.

She had wandered down into a village it seemed, unlit, and so meager and ramshackle she had not made it out from the hills. And she had mislaid the smells of the lower human commune, smoke and spice and goats, dung, flesh, gasoline. But now, as the lights came up in the huts, the oil lamps and the one or two murky electric bulbs, she saw surrealistically the scenes of her childhood returned. There, the well with a tree growing over it, and beyond, the mud-walled hovels with their cavelike doors that had seemed only caves a minute ago. And there, yes even in the midst of this poverty of all things, looming over everything at the end of the beaten earth of the street, the building that served the village as a cina, with the pale posters glimmering on its sides.

Indu giggled. “Look, Vashari.” She pointed. Just discernible in the light, the perfect faces of the god and goddess, themselves, shone down upon the wretched huts.

But Vashari was only looking at the straggles of people who were coming out of the huts. Some brought their lamps with them. The lights glinted in their eyes, but the lights were also like eyes themselves, the lights, the eyes-which-were-lights, forming a circle of which Vashari and Indu were the center.

None of the villagers seemed surprised, and clearly they knew who the man and woman were—as if, even now, they were images on celluloid, projected on the darkness.

At first, the circle was motionless. Then it moved a little, coming closer.

“What do they want?” Indu whispered.

“Money, perhaps.” But Vashari made no move to take out money to give them. He stood very still, and Indu, by his side, was also still.

And the circle drew in again a little more; paused, quivered, and once more drew in. Some of the people were grinning with what seemed to be pleasure yet, lit by their lamps, the expression was frightful. A hand came softly on to Indu’s sleeve, her skin. Indu snatched her arm away. She was terrified. But no sooner had the hand gone from her arm than another settled gently on her hair, and uncontrollably she screamed. Wildly she looked up and saw Vashari nodding at the circle. Holding Indu against him, he began to walk forward, and responding to his apparent ease of manner—though she felt him trembling, as she was—the human barrier swayed as if about to give way. But there was a woman directly in front of them, and she would not let them through. She was gaunt and ugly, but she stretched out her hands to Vashari, and as her fingers brushed him she breathed a great Aah! And this cry seemed to release the vast, unnamed and unknown greed that inspired the crowd.

Vashari had ceased trying to force a way through. He held Indu tightly, as if to protect her, and she clung to him, as the endless rain of touches came down and down on them, first in the nature of a rough shy caress, but a caress which grew ever more eager and more possessive and more certain.

As the first small fragment was ripped from her dress, Indu understood, and for a lost moment her terror submerged in a frantic wish to mark indelibly, against all the odds of the turning Wheel, her love for Vashari, so that this at least should remain.

But she could only shriek his name as they were pulled apart, while his face was filled by desperation and fear, as if he had already forgotten her.

Only up on the poster over their heads did she catch a final glimpse of the real Vashari, and the real Indu, invulnerable and beautiful, smiling down on the village through the dark.

•   •   •

The cremation, performed inside the Taja but relayed to all the operating screens in the State, filmed and played over and over in the cinas, was spectacular. A structure of wood a hundred and eighty feet high, painted, gilded, carved, scented, draped with colored flags of costly materials, went up in a rush of smoke and flames, forming a lurid cloud above the towers that was visible far across the plain, and, in the case of some high buildings, from the city itself. In the midst of the wooden architecture, the bodies of Vashari and Indu were consumed. It had not been possible for these bodies to be displayed. The car accident which killed them had inflicted mutilating injuries.

The dual tragedy had been widely reported throughout the State. The radios carried little other news for thirty-six hours. What had happened was still unsure. As those who had been watching the Indu-and-Vashari channels of the viewers were aware, the couple had driven up into the hills. Faults on the viewers became pronounced shortly after, and soon the screens went blank. It was thought there had been some mechanical failure in the vehicle. The driver, flung clear, sustained head wounds and was amnesiac. The Taja had not required him to give any interviews.

Following the first death bulletin, fans of the two stars had spilled from the city to stand or sit all across the plain, in abject mourning. By dawn the next day visiting mourners were pouring into the area by train or on foot. Police patrolled the crowds in great numbers. But, enclosed by its walls and electronic guards, the Taja remained impervious and calm.

On the day of the cremation there were scenes of hysteria on the plain. As the wooden sarcophagus went up, a colossal firework on the deepening sky of evening, countless women and a number of men chose to immolate themselves, frequently by means of petrol and matches.

The second and third of the pictures Indu and Vashari had made together, released posthumously three days after the cremation, commenced to break all previous records at the box office.

In Mhal’s suite, this data was noted and filed as all, or almost all, data was noted and filed. From the core of this suite, too, had come the fiction of the accident and the details to uphold it, and the authorization for the use of a minor amnesiac process on a member of the transport caste of the Taja. While, locked away in the suite prior to being destroyed, was the monitor-record which only a select few of the Taja’s internal viewers had been able to receive, and to record, unedited.

Those hired by the Taja for the work found the village docile and mindless, persisting at subsistence level. The anticipated famine or outbreak of disease would wipe it from the face of the earth before much longer. What certain documents called The Remains, had been flung into a ravine, from which the Taja’s officers retrieved them.

There was not much left of the bodies. As the reels of film, soon to be dissolved in acid, revealed, they had been torn apart, wrenched into pieces, just as their clothing and hanks of their hair had been ripped from them in the preliminary. As the film had shown, too, the act had not been truly frenzied, not even actually bestial. It had appeared less like hunger than love.

•   •   •

Up there, floating in the darkness, the lovely goddess widens her eyes, and the handsome god takes her hand and leads her through the shadow of a forest where birds fly upward. Though they are ashes they can still be seen, these lovers, still be looked at, up there on the celluloid, in the darkness, flawless and beautiful and bright. For, like all stars, their light continues to shine down on the world, long after they are dead and cold.

Seventh Night

The Seventh Night is far off. The Holy River has turned to gold; the great machines oversee destiny high in the air. The Sixth Night is the soul’s night.

Tamastara

Mise en Scène

The sunset. It shocked him.

Natural things sometimes did startle Renard. It came from having spent so much time in stylized environments—not necessarily orderly, not predictable, but simplistic. Or else it came from spending so much time inside the world of his own skull.

The sun had almost vanished when there had been a sudden throwing open, as if of colossal doors. A blast of marigold light burst out like a wall of water from a broken dam. Everything flamed in it, and drowned. The shoulders of the ruin seemed made of molten honey, and from the jungle rose a swarm of parrots which dived upwards to their tenements among the carving. And then the light, the entire day, faded and went out, and in eighteen seconds there was darkness. Quietness came, too. The never-ending clink-k-k of a coppersmith bird miles off in the valleys below, which had driven him crazy all afternoon, fell silent at last. Only breezes and beasts moved now, rustling and breathing through the jungle forests on every side.

Renard had landed the ten-foot shuttle untidily between the temple roofs, then let the craft nose forward until hidden deep in the vegetation which sprang from them. From above, or beneath, it was invisible. He had also smashed the controls, anything that might be detected by sensors. Only heat-seeking devices were a threat now. But there were many warmth-radiating live things all about him on the surface of the Asian earth.

Further procedures were straightforward. He would stay put a few days, in case any of the others should reach him. Then move on to the border. But relentlessly, despite this lucidity, his mind shifted and went back, and he clenched his fists. The strato-station, weather control for half the northern states of the Azad, was a prize they had deemed worth gambling for. But they had failed. The violence, panic and confusion of the aborted mission filled him again with wrath and fear. He had escaped with others of his party, the sirens wailing, the guards running with their guns. The life-shuttle had stalled in the lock as automatics tried to block the exit, but he had fought and cursed and screamed and torn the craft free as if by will alone. The lock had blown behind him, he heard it go, a dull soft boom of sound.

He shuddered and wrapped his arms about his thin body in the heat of night. Even when there had been success, he would be devilled in the aftermath by possibilities of calamity that had not occurred. This time, calamity was real. (Don’t think of it then, Renard, if it bothers you. Make plans. Look about.) But it was black now, the temple had turned to ebony. The trees that rooted in the paving sighed, and up there they sighed too, where they stretched out through the roofs of the pavilions with the lacelike walls. Where the shuttle was hidden. Hansjosch had taken a shuttle, too, and been behind him, entering the lock. Had Hansjosch run clear before the pressure blew? Oh God—and why say that, when he believed in no such thing—what a mess they had made of it. And after all, for what?

Something about the temple, eons old, had leaned on him harder than heat or cold or fear. The relentless note of the barbet, hammering out its eternal order of minute copper implements in the jungle, had tortured his ears like drops of scalding water. And the shock of sunset, an incendiary blast—There had always been doubts, always inevitable depressions after the great highs of anger and power. But these doubts were more terrible. For suddenly he could make no sense of any of it. The politics to which he had devoted his life, for which he had been prepared, in moments of extreme passion, to give his life—what had he done? Why? How did it happen that he had felt called on to do it? It was no use. No act of his had achieved anything. While every act was clothed in bloodshed, misery for the massed faceless peoples, that in setting out they had howled to liberate and save. But there was worse, far worse. For who was he, and what did it matter, these things he had courageously or stupidly or mistakenly done, or what became of him, as a result?

•   •   •

Tamas

For a quarter of a century, the waters of Mother Ganges had not flowed beside the holy city; instead the ghats descended to a saffron marsh. Yet here still the pilgrims sought their ritual ablutions between the mud and reeds, in bubbling ponds like clear champagne. Sometimes, as the sun rose, they were distracted. Half a mile downstream from the marsh and the ancient suburbs, High Varanasi dawned visible, a cloud floating in the early sunlight, an island on long legs balanced over the river.

High Varanasi did not replicate the Islamic architecture of the old city. Up on its milky pillars, it had blossomed with the flowerlike shapes of India’s morning kingdoms, made over again in the materials of her future. At sunrise the cloud-island shone. But after dark it glowed and glittered fantastically. Every night was Diwali for High Varanasi, a festival of lights up in the air.

Easy enough to access, it too had its pilgrims. As the Ganges served the dream of the soul, so the cloud-island served the spiritual intellect. More esoteric, less dependent on faith than on technology, High Varanasi was a sphere of secrets. Religion being the fount of ideals, it had also acted as a perfect camouflage against the prying generalized interest of more worldly regimes. There were several secrets here that went unknown by any, save those in need who blindly sought them. A kind of faith, then, after all.

When the young woman began to scream in High Varanasi of the secrets, a computer relay in the adjacent room thrummed with activity; and fell silent only as she did.

“You see, Controller,” said the pandit.

The Controller said quietly, “She is Kasha-Triy?”

“Yes, by birth and also by caste.”

“Warriors are the most prone we find, do we not? And sometimes the priestly Brahma. So far, the scholarly Brahma remain immune, to our knowledge.”

“There was the young Brahma-born Slave who came to us.”

“Quite so. I’d forgotten. But the Slaves are the saints-to-be. Distress is often adapted swiftly into learning for a Slave. Do I mistake, or did the Slave not extricate himself?”

“Exactly, Controller.”

“But the Kasha-Triy will not be able to. We must see to fight, eh, my pandit?”

The pandit smiled. “She said to me today we only tortured her, for amusement.”

“Well. She’s been suffering some months. I think I should visit her now.”

They went along the corridor together, walking slowly, two slender straight old men stepped from a stupa-carving. The eyes were very young in the old heads, the slow walk very limber.

At the door of the cubicle they announced themselves, and paused until let in.

It was a small room, open on one side to the stars of the warm night, and the starred lights below, and below that again, far, far down, the ghost-shimmer of the antique city on the river. The girl stood by her window. She said, “Have I performed enough for you, masters?”

“It’s not unusual to feel bitterness,” said the pandit. “Others have passed this way, in rage and terror, as you do.”

“And what happened to them? It’s a fine high window. Is suicide common?”

“Exchanging one act of darkness for another? We don’t encourage it. Turn round, if you will. The Controller has come in with me.”

The girl did turn. She stared at both of them. Her look of fear was absolute. Her eyes had it, her mouth, her hands, the line of her shoulders and her spine.

“The computer has all this while been working,” said the Controller quietly. “Your match is now established.”

The girl relaxed, but it was the toppling relaxation of another wave of fear, a different wave. Then, generative and spiritual Kasha-Triy, she stood up in the midst of the wave and said, “Tell me what I have to do. I’ll do it. I’ll do anything.”

“I know,” the Controller said serenely, with great compassion.

•   •   •

Entr’acte

Renard woke because the barbet bird, like an infallible, unnecessary alarm clock, had once more begun its copper-smithing in the jungle. Clink-k-k; clink-k-k. “Taisse-toi,” Renard said aloud, and in Hindi, for the bird’s benefit, “Be quiet.” But the coppersmith paid no attention. Presently the man got to his feet, stiff from his sleep on the hard stone and the roots which pierced it. Light poured through this cell of the old temple. It showed faded red worshipful daubings on a phallus of yellow marble, and the blurred sweet limbs of stone dancers twining the columns. It showed also Renard himself, the tension of his features, brooding, unattractive, the long Frankish nose, the twisting mouth and the beautiful eyes.

Someone seemed to be watching him. He had felt this sensation last night, after the sunset, writing here in his agony of doubts. But he had taken a reading from the small analyzer his organization supplied him. It was negative. No one watched. As for doubts, sleep eased all that. They would return, probably, with the dark. Or if he thought for too long.

He sat out in the sunshine and ate two slabs of the concentrated food from his shoulder-kit, then reached for the crumpled cigarettes. The rainwater in the handy cistern was full of creepers and scum, but he drank it, swallowing with it an antitoxicant capsule. A day or two now, that was all. Wait to see if Hansjosch had made it, or the others. They, but they alone, could trace him via the locater.

Later, he explored a little, the rambling stairways, the broken pavilions. The upper terraces reeked of the bats which hung inside the towers like ripe black fruit not to be plucked. The wholeness of the ruin troubled him, and eventually he lay out on a high open roof, absorbing the sun, smoking, listening to the ceaseless metal note of the bird. The sensation of being watched, which he supposed was guilt, did not abate.

•   •   •

Tal

Below on the ghats of the ancient city, the body of a Slave was being burned with great ceremony. The passing of a saint-to-be seldom went unmarked. The chants were robbed of force by distance, but great coils of smoke rose and fireworks exploded as the sky darkened. Who knew but that the next incarnation would bring fulfillment? The next incarnation. Whatever the caste, one looked forward, with joy and a certain consternation, and with hope, always with that.

“Karma?” the young woman said, standing beside him. The Controller turned to her gravely. “I mean,” she said, “am I now paying the price for previous wrong-doing?”

“Karma isn’t paid in suffering, but in work. Hard work, often. And sometimes indeed the labor involves pain. But pain, suffering, is the by-product, not the goal. The system of Karma promotes learning, never punishment.”

“Then—”

“You are a musician,” the Controller said.

“I was, before all this. . . .”

“Visualize Karma as a rhythmic musical cycle of the raga. A deed repeated, developed upon, so altered. Remember also that through a talent, one may often achieve whatever one needs to achieve, and pay whatever needs to be paid. While learning all one has set out to learn, in this life. Or, all that one is willing to learn. Time is endless. No lesson need be hurried, unless the need to hurry is itself integral.”

“You’re saying what’s happened to me will stop?”

“Exactly. If you are brave enough.”

“Yes. Most cowards must learn to be brave in the end.”

“Your pandit took you to the main computer this afternoon. You’ve been shown where it is due to happen. You have viewed the apparatus involved. Also, I believe you were tutored in the forms you will need to adopt.”

“Well tutored.” The girl turned back to the visits of the city and the golden marsh that was the Ganges. Centuries ago, she had bathed in the flowing river. She was not a stranger to this place. “Then I know everything. But he doesn’t know—doesn’t credit—isn’t—”

“He?”

She paused, thoughtfully. At last she said, “What is it the poet writes? To look into the fire and behold the dark star borne of the light, and the mirror which shows the face of a stranger.”

A firework burst in the smoke below, like a fountain of sapphires, and left an after-image of black veins.

“Come along,” the Controller said, still very gentle, like an uncle she had once loved, long dead, long become, maybe, some other she did not know. “It is time, now.”

•   •   •

Etat; Rajas

Just as it had awakened him before by staring up, the barbet in the forest woke him on this occasion by unaccountably ceasing. He opened his eyes to intense day sky with the temple towers leaning into it and the arms of trees reaching across it to clasp each other. Before he moved, intuitively, trained, Renard listened and took note. But nothing seemed very different. The shadows were longer, and the air heavier, the dust more peppery, with the approach of sunset. That was all. Then the coppersmith began again, so he cursed it and sat up. And so saw the girl sitting fifteen feet away.

Something happened then that was very strange. He said, stammering slightly because he was surprised at her arrival—noiseless, not waking him—“Oh, it’s you.”

“Eh bien,” she said. “C’est moi.”

Only then, because she spoke in Eurofrench, the truly familiar reacting against the false, did he realize with a peculiar start that he did not know her at all.

What was it? Still half-asleep, so sure only his confreres could find him, he had assumed that therefore she was one of the women of his organization, some girl he knew well and had often worked with, probably slept with, that familiar, that known.

Renard kept still now, save for the hand darting into his jacket, coming out with the little battery gun.

“Don’t move,” he said to the girl. “You know what this is? It fires electric volts. It can kill you. Do you understand?” He stared at her hard, but she said nothing. Perhaps he had frightened her too much to speak. “Just do as I tell you, you won’t be hurt. How did you get up here?”

She smiled then, coldly. She was not afraid after all.

“How do you think?”

Her smile flattened out. She looked at him intently, but he could not really decipher the look.

“I have nothing to do with the government you are hiding from,” she said. “Or with any government. I know, however, about your organization. The taking of hostages, the destruction of property and life. In the name of freedom. Do I have that right? A terrorist.” She spoke with an extraordinary loathing. He had listened to similar speeches, from the hysterical, the damned. But there was an extra emotion layered over her words, her voice, her whole body, as she spoke to him. He could not place it. But it bit into him. It followed and joined with his own previous thoughts so seamlessly, so pitilessly.

“Then I know what you think,” he said.

“No. But you know I’m not armed. Your clever detection device has told you that. And I’m not here to harm you. And there are no police or soldiers down there, in the jungle.” Involuntarily, the gun twitched in his hand. “Also,” she said, “you could fire directly at me, and not kill me. Not touch me.”

He looked her over. He had heard of weapon-shields, deflective auras that could be switched on from a power-source in, say, a belt. But that was only rumor so far. There was no proof that they existed, or that she had one. She had, rather, the smug assurance of the insane. Which could explain everything. Some rich (yes, she looked rich) warp-brained technocrat of the Azad, joy-riding in an expensive silent hover-cruiser, coming on him by accident, wanting to play games.

She was also attractive, lovely in fact. That might have had something to do with the bizarre sense of recognition; the way all beautiful things tended to produce déjà vu. Her hair was blonde-white, but the rest of her was from a purely Eastern palette, rose-umber on the skin, liquid jet for the eyes.

“All right,” he said eventually, “I believe you think you’re safe with me. I think you are mal de folle. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Une folle,” she said, “as you say.”

“Watch yourself,” he said. “If you make me nervous, something bad may happen.”

“I told you, you can’t hurt me.”

“You told me.”

She sat relaxed, and perfect. Suddenly there was a feeling of tenderness so painfully within him, some memory or nostalgia that had no name, he could have wept. Not knowing what to do, he put the gun away. He stood up and said brusquely, “Show me where you left your vehicle.”

“I didn’t think we established I had one. Did we?”

“Then you walked from where?”

“Oh. Somewhere.”

He went over to her, and leaning down he grabbed her arm and pulled her up. The touch of flesh and muscle was somehow astonishing. It was as if he had expected her to have no substance, to be made of paper or of light, a holograph of some sort. But she was actual. He could even smell faint perfume and the underlying scent of young skin, clean pale hair.

“Stop playing.” He raised a hand to strike her, the last thing he wanted to do, and she laughed and suddenly tears brimmed out of her eyes. She said: “You make me ashamed.”

When she said this, he too felt a kind of shame, so strong it amounted almost to nausea. He let her go, and they stood off from each other. It came to him abruptly that their expressions were now identical, breathing fast, their eyes full of tears. It confused him. He backed away a pace or two. “All right. Sit. Sit down.” She seemed only to decide to obey him, to humor him, but not from fear. “Now you’re with me,” he said, “you must stay. There will be others coming.”

“Yes,” she said.

She seemed very certain. He wondered if despite her opening gambit, she was one of Hansjosch’s couriers. But she must have told him by now. Unless Hansjosch-ji himself was playing some game. You could not be sure of Hansjosch.

Renard, too, sat down again. He took out the second to last cigarette and smoked it, watching her, thinking all the while she might try to run away, knowing somehow she would not. He had nothing to tie her with, but he would need to tie her, probably. Her dress was a mingled Euro-Asian style, of one of the new fabrics that did not tear. Perhaps her underclothes could be employed. He had roped plenty of women’s ankles together by their ripped panties or brassieres.

“If you’re good and quiet,” he said, “we’ll let you go when we move on.”

“That’s not your usual method,” she said. She did not look at him now. She seemed appalled by him, sensitive to what she saw as his offensive villainy. (Like some sweetheart or sister he had let down.) It enraged him. She did not respond like any other he had ever come across, and again he thought of Hansjosch and some curious trick. “You kill,” she said now, “normally. Frequently. You have killed frequently, in person, by hand. By other means. You needn’t answer. I know a lot about you, Renard.”

She knew his name, too. That was not possible, unless she came from Hansjosch. Then, she was safe, for all he did not understand. Safer than the one who had sent her, certainly. And yet, how had Hansjosch known Renard would bring the shuttle here? Even he, Renard, had chosen the ruin randomly. The locater must already have found him out, it was the only solution, and this emissary sent on ahead. (No—don’t try to solve the mystery. Smoke, keep calm. Watch.)

“You’re not very polite, ma belle,” he said. “You’ve been told my name. What do I call you?”

She raised her eyes and looked at him again. She was so beautiful it began to disturb him, not sex exactly, something else, like all of it—just beyond his comprehension. The French that had slipped back into his dialogue also surprised him. His native tongue; he had not used it aloud for years. His organization kept to an argot all its own. In Asia you talked Hindi or Urdu, or English, or Franca-Rus. In these languages the cryptic messages and the threats were made, the orders given. Yes, he had killed. Yes, he had done all she said and mooted.

He shook himself. Come back. He must question her, not himself. Keep a grip on what he meant to do.

“No reply,” he said. “What can it cost you, telling me your name?”

She might say, I don’t want you to speak my name, you filth.

She said, “Tamastara.”

He waited. That was all. An Indian name, genderless and poetic. He sensed she lied. It was not her name. And yet, from the way her eyes shaped themselves as she pronounced it, it meant . . . something.

“Dark star,” he said.

“My name. Or yours.”

He grinned. “Black hair, sallow skin. Shadow-with-the-knife; black heart. Why not? Is that what you mean?”

“No,” she said.

The cigarette was long finished, and he tossed the butt away into the cistern. It occurred to him, stupidly, how in the far future it might be found, some scrap of symbolic tobacco or plastic filter. Evidence of modern man among the carvings of the temple’s antiquity. He had a rushing feeling, as if the world moved differently, or time itself, and the passage of time were visible, audible and tactile. He would be dead by then, when the piece of cigarette was found, dust, bones, rot. Finished. And then none of it would bother him at all.

He looked at the girl. She wouldn’t believe that philosophy, of course. She would believe in the eternal inner life, in Samsara, the transmigration of the soul, and in herself as a particle going on and on. There had been one of the Brahma, once, under a palm-leaf umbrella on a river bank. Renard had paused to listen. In a couple of decades the castes had altered, or been amplified. Uninterested, Renard had not fathomed how, only that things were freer among those who favored the system. In sophisticated circles, there were no “unclean” anymore, that much he knew. And birth into caste was no longer predictable generation to generation. Warrior Kasha-Triya might be born of the Artisan class, for example, so one heard. Scholars and Priests came from the households of Warriors and Slaves. And the Slaves themselves, often menials (where machines had not ousted menials altogether), were held in esteem. (On some street a young man sweeping up the orange peel, the Brahma bowing as they passed.) There had been a Slave’s cremation he had seen—fireworks, cries of joy and loud swinging—the brotherhood of life, of man, continued forever. Liberty, equality, eternity—

Why was he thinking of that nonsense? It was as if the girl made him think of it, merely by her Indianity. In Casta, what was she? Idly, he considered. A Brahma? No. A fighter: Kasha-Triy.

“Kasha,” he repeated. “That’s your name.”

“Kasha,” she repeated. “Your name, too.”

Renard laughed, nastily. “Exclude me, if you please. I have no caste.”

“All have caste.”

“Only if they believe so.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said, “if you believe it or not. It w.”

“Oh,” he said, “and is Hansjosch-ji Casta, too?”

“Hansjosch and I have no connection. He didn’t send me to you.”

“He sent you. To irritate me, get on my nerves and soften me up. For something.”

“I could very easily hate you,” she said. “And that’s funny, Renard. But there’s no time for joking. There’s a limit, a radius, just as trauma is limited. Less than three hours now.”

“Yes, yes, talk on,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know yourself. But I like to watch. Why don’t you come nearer? We could have some fun, while we wait for him, for Hansjosch who didn’t send you.”

There was a sudden sound. For a moment it meant nothing. Then the sky split above them. Renard flung back his head and saw a white scar all across the brassy blue. The second shuttle from the strato-station, the shuttle Hansjosch had commandeered—Sweat broke out all over Renard and there was an acid taste in his mouth. He stared at the girl again. “Now we’ll see.”

She had stood up. She looked frightened at long last. Scared of Hansjosch? Well. They all were.

After about twenty seconds, the tearing note came again, and the white smoke penciled over, fast and thin, a dark arrow-head leading it. It was closer now. The roots of the trees seemed to tremble, and the stone walls. The craft was larger than Renard had thought. It might carry three or four of the others. They had traced him through the coded locater, which carried all their body signals like fingerprints. It seemed likely they would be coming down in the thinner scrub on the western side of the terraces.

“Renard.”

He glanced over. The girl, Tamastara who was not, had moved nearer. She was very pale, ivory beneath the soft umber. Her blonde hair lay over one shoulder like a white bird’s battle-wing.

“Don’t worry. I’ll tell him you did a good job on me. Pulped me. Made me dance and scream.”

“Pourquoi?” she said. “Why? Why?” She did not mean Hansjosch or the landing.

“Leave me alone, you bitch.” He turned his head and she caught him a stinging blow across one cheekbone. He said, “I wanted to end the pain, a whole world of it—ambition, you concede.”

“You resorted to murder to make the murder stop.”

“Maybe. I don’t know anymore. Yes. I murdered from ideals, from love—I was right, I was wrong. I’d do it again. Will do it. All of it.”

“No,” she said, “you will not.”

The shuttle was making a third turn over the sky, much slower. It began to descend through its own three curdled rings of smoke, roaring. Then its motors choked out as the automatics came on. Trees wavered at the downdraught.

Renard swore at the girl.

“Am I real?” she said. “Do you see me?”

He switched to Hindi and spat the dirty words at her. She let him finish.

The stolen shuttle fell inch by inch like a gleaming fish through the sunlight.

“Ça et là,” she said. She stood before him, her hair thrust back by the wind from the shuttle, her garments pressed over her body, like the muslin carving on the statues all around. She was so clear, the scent of her so exact, sweet, and the tingle of the blow on his face not yet subsided. Then she was gone.

He was alone.

There was nothing else in front of him but sky, the low sun, the ruin, the empty baking air. While behind him, when he turned, only the shuttle landed in the forest and the trees curtseyed as if afraid.

•   •   •

Sakti

Just beyond the luminous bank of the computer, the pandit stirred.

“This is the crudest portion,” he said.

“No, that is still to come.”

“But, to stand by, as she must.”

“She knows. Was she not instructed? She understands the ethics of these things. Without this, she would go mad, or die. The worst is still before her, and she may survive it.”

“Sometimes, Controller, as we know, they break on these rocks.”

“The Kasha-Triy break most often. But the ego is feminine. This may be of assistance.”

The pandit folded his hands. His face now was as calm and still as that of the Controller. Each of them had passed, a survivor, through these same waters and these precise rocks, long ago. They knew. Now they prepared, lessoned, guided others, utilizing the mighty science which comprised this particular sector of High Varanasi, the intellect of the soul. Until finally, helpless, patient, they too waited, as all men wait, the outcome of destiny and Inescapable Choice.

•   •   •

Coup d’État

The edges of the forest seemed to burn as the sun again began to set. Out of the burning, Hansjosch walked. There were two others behind him. Renard raised his hand in greeting and one of the two, a man called Asok, waved back, then let his arm fall as if embarrassed. But Hansjosch was smiling. Thickset, with grizzled tawny hair, his face was vividly marked with brows, nose, eyes and lips. There was one peculiarity, the third fingernail on the left hand was always painted black, a trademark of hidden significance. No one mentioned it, for he had once half killed a man of the party who did so. As a group leader, Hansjosch was a hero, daring, inventive and slippery. He was feared. Renard feared him.

The bird in the jungle had fallen quiet when the shuttle came over, and not resumed. The girl must have sprung that way, into the shrub and the roped lianas. But she had not. She had vanished, gone out like a light, directly in front of him. An hallucination, then. Or he himself was going mad. There was no space to think about it, Hansjosch thirty feet away, then twenty, ten, five.

“Well, Renard,” said Hansjosch, smiling broadly now.

“Well. We got out.”

“Yes,” said Hansjosch.

Renard was shaking, which must be visible. The way the girl had disappeared, but also Hansjosch half a foot away. Renard tried to laugh. “When the lock blew I—” He saw a flicker, the enameled black fingernail catching the sun. Then Hansjosch’s fist slammed into the side of his jaw. Renard’s head snapped back, his neck giving an agonizing twang. He landed on the stone, dazed, dazzled by the light in his eyes, and Hansjosch loomed over him, and Asok and Baur craned behind.

“Why?” said Renard.

“Why?” Hansjosch kicked him delicately, not hurting him. “You ran.”

“Everybody that could,” Renard said; he began to stutter and started again, “everybody ran that could run, Hansjosch.”

“Yes. But you. You got ahead of me. You fouled it for me, that exit. You nearly did for me, for us, Asok and me, and Baur.”

“I didn’t—know—”

“And the mission failed. Three of us died.” He jerked his thumb up at the sinking sky. “Up there, in the weather station. And five or six with the guards. If they get a trial, how do you think it’ll go for them, eh, Renard?”

Renard lay on the ground. Sweat rolled into his eyes. Behind Hansjosch Baur said sullenly, “So who is to blame? No one. Everyone.”

Hansjosch smiled, not turning. He said to Baur: “Close your trap.”

Baur shrugged and moved away. Renard saw him sit down against a vertical of carved masonry, looking off into the jungle while the stone nymphs gracefully gestured over his head.

“Are you going to let me get up?” Renard asked.

“Get up. Get on your knees.”

Renard moved into a sitting position, all the time waiting for Hansjosch to knock him flat again, but Hansjosch did not.

Renard said, “I carried out my orders. I did nothing wrong. You can’t say—”

“No, no.” Hansjosch nodded. “It’s all right. You did fine.” He had stopped smiling. A look of earnest seriousness had come over his face. Suddenly he squatted down by Renard. “We all made mistakes up there. I admit even I, even Hansjosch-ji, made a mistake or two. But you see, Renard, your attitude isn’t what it was, your resolve isn’t firm enough. You argue, you have doubts. That’s bad for the others. And when we go back, accounts have to be squared.” Renard did not move now. Hansjosch said, “You see, someone has to carry the can of cream.”

Baur was not looking. Asok stood with his eyes solemnly on Renard. As Renard stared back at him, Asok shrugged slightly. He was fatalistic. His eyes said, It could have been me. Next time, it may be me. “That’s how it is, Renard,” Asok said aloud. Then the embarrassment returned. Asok also turned and walked off.

“You mean,” said Renard, “I take the blame for something.”

“I mean you have to die,” said Hansjosch. He was apologetic now.

Renard struggled to his feet and Hansjosch was up like a tiger, in front of him.

“Die—kill me—for what?” Renard screamed. He lashed out, but Hansjosch avoided him, politely.

“An example,” said Hansjosch, explaining, reasonable.

Renard dodged by the heavier man. He started to run toward the forest, a blazing coil in his guts and his legs like rubber. Somehow he felt Baur and Asok would not stop him, and he still thought this was the volt from Baur’s battery gun shocked against his thigh. The muscle went at once into spasm and he fell, yelling and mindless with pain, aware and not believing that this was the end.

•   •   •

Tan: Tamas Tara

The pandit sat before certain disciples in a garden high in High Varanasi. Those he spoke to might look at him, or beyond him into the frames of luminous sky where the stars were beginning to come shyly as young girls to a wedding. Away and below, the evening marsh of the Ganges lay still, gilded by a soft dying light.

“The reason for physical life?” the pandit said. “Insofar as it is understood, we are persuaded it is a means to growth. That is, a type of growing, of expanding in knowledge, which is not possible for the soul when in its incorporeal form. The soul, for example, is always happy and tranquil. Happiness and tranquility, while being of great worth, in themselves are not perfect states.” He bowed his head.

“Once,” said the pandit, “there was a beautiful garden; ah, far more beautiful than this. It was a wonderful place. All who dwelled there moved and existed in a perpetually gentle though ecstatic condition. But it happened that now and then the Infinite walked in the garden, and on one occasion of His walking, certain of the inhabitants approached. ‘Lord,’ they said, ‘we know that, for all the joy which is our lot, there is a greater joy we have never known, and beyond that greater joy, another greater, and so on, to the unlimited limits of eternal things, joy upon joy. But how are we ever to reach these marvels, for time is stationary here, as we are. Can it be joy greater than joy is to be come on only by standing quite motionless?’ The Infinite smiled (for the gods are never without humor). He told those who had approached Him that indeed, there were roads that might be traveled whereby to reach the greater joys, and the joys greater than these. But the roads lay outside and garden, through arid deserts and savage forests, through darkness and sorrow and fear. And the gate to each was a gate of alarm and often of pain, as too was the gate at the road’s end that returned them into the garden. Those who had asked the question turned to each other in surprise. They discussed the matter. At last, they said to the Infinite, ‘Though it is pain and sorrow and a wilderness, yet we will take this adventure on. We cannot stand motionless. We must go forward. Let us try to learn the way.’ The Infinite nodded. And so, bravely they went forth into the harsh and devastating lands beyond the garden. And there they toiled and strove, and flourished and suffered. They invented deeds and dramas for themselves and for others, and enacted them. They laughed and wept. At length their traveling garments and the shoes on their feet were worn out. They cast them off and returned, often with great misgiving, back through the gates of the beautiful garden. And there they cried out in pleasure, for they had mostly forgotten it in their wanderings, and all its refreshment and loveliness. Then the Infinite came walking, and He said, ‘What have you learned?’ And there was a babble of excited voices as they told Him. ‘Good,’ said the Infinite. ‘Very good. But there is still much more to learn.’ And to this, now knowing something of the business, they agreed.” The pandit also smiled.

“In this way,” the pandit said, “they come and go from the garden, seeking the world, this world and others, toiling and striving, flourishing and suffering, laughing and weeping. And all the while they learn. And all the while they move forward toward the greater joys; never standing motionless. And they are we.”

Then for a time his disciples spoke to him and with him about the nature of suffering and weeping, and even of the nature of pleasure, and of laughter. And sometimes the discussion broke in laughter that rang down across the lawns, through the dhak trees and the mutant banana palms. Eventually they came to a debate upon Karma, of the deeds of one life which might influence the next, and thence to the modern notion of samsaranic trauma. It was rumored that High Varanasi held a secret method of dealing with this ailment. The pandit did not deny or acquiesce. He did affirm that he was familiar with the poem of the Dark Star, the Tamas Tara.

“The comparison is a fair one,” said the pandit. “Look at a strong light for a moment, then look away, and a dark patch, the after-image of the light, interferes briefly with vision. This is the dark star of the poet’s imagery. The darkness fades swiftly from the eyes. But if the soul, the atma, has been exposed to some such strong glare, the result and after-image is not always eradicated so easily. The tamas tara which marks the atma is caused by the strong light of some terror or horror. Though unremembered memories of profound happiness may be retained in a similar way, delight never leaves raw tissue in its wake, unless seriously misinterpreted thereafter. The tamas tara is a scar—more accurately, a wound which has not closed. Free of the body, the soul of course understands all this. But on rebirth, when true vision is generally clouded by the flesh, and the atma translates itself in part as a function of the brain, the dark star may begin to bear upon the physical persona which does not remember it and sometimes cannot tolerate it. Sometimes too the darkness has lain dormant, then by accident the psychic memory is jogged. These are often the worst cases of all. For, while the expressions of samsaranic trauma are mostly mild—the dislike of a particular odor, an inexplicable phobia, a minor illness—now and then a grave disorder to disease may result, even madness. Here in the High city we employ counseling to dismiss, or at least to modify the condition to controllable proportions. Consider, however, most men and women bear such scars. They are rarely if ever much inconvenienced by them. With so many lives behind us, we have each of us received many wounds. They fade.”

“But suppose, master,” one of the more wicked students said, “the wound is too deep, and counseling isn’t enough?”

The pandit thought of the great computer. He thought of the musician, the ruined temple, the night blackness settling there like the wings of kites, as it had settled here with such kind wholeness.

“Yaksha,” said the pandit, with some charm, “there is no necessity to demonstrate to you whether or not I can set a broken bone. At least, not until you have broken one.”

•   •   •

Samsara; Mort

Renard lay on his back, as he had lain now for perhaps two hours. The others had brought with them means of binding, and he had been duly bound. The cords were wound tightly, like swaddling bands, around and around his body, containing all of him and allowing no part of him to move. Like a snake with a smashed spine, legless, armless, he had then been dragged and lodged against an angle of wall. The crooked position and the restriction of his limbs had caused evil rearing pains throughout his body, but mostly now all feeling was gone, save in the muscles hit by the volt, which ached on and on, steadily.

Hansjosch hung about, smoking, eating, poking around the site. So far he had done nothing further. When the darkness came he ordered the small fire lit in the middle of the roof, careless, where any low-flying aerial traffic could spot it. He was not nervous. He would leave Renard the fire, he said, when they went. To keep him company.

Since Renard was to die, to be an example, it was important that his remains be found, of course, by the government troops out searching.

Now Hansjosch came over to Renard and sat down a yard away.

“Not too uncomfortable, Renard? Heh? The circulation stops, then the pain stops. Until the rope comes off. By then you’ll be dead. No problem.”

“How?” Renard said, but his voice was a croak, the word just a noise. At first he had been so afraid, so startled, his bladder had given way inside the snake-case of cords. He had fought against the griping of his bowels which tried to do the same thing. God knew why. It hardly mattered, did it? Then terror grew leaden, and moved to other areas, a cerebral torture, that made him want to cry. But somehow he stopped that too. Crying would not change Hansjosch’s plan. Nothing would change it.

He had passed through a stage, as Asok and Baur made the fire, glancing at him sometimes, when he believed rescue might be solicited from them. He had asked Asok for a cigarette with this in mind. Asok had started forward, Baur had pulled him back. “One cigarette,” said Renard. “Please.” “Geen, frend,” said Baur. Odd, how each native vernacular returned under stress. But there was apparently insufficient stress. Hansjosch ruled the men, and they had no intention of disobeying him, even in disgruntled disagreement. Renard himself had also acted in this way under Hansjosch’s command. He knew how it was. It was useless.

“What?” Hansjosch now said, kindly, trying to be helpful. “Ah, you want to know how it will happen? Don’t worry, ami. I’ll see to everything.”

A sadist, could it be that Hansjosch was only pretending, bluffing about the proposed murder in order to enjoy Renard’s obvious terror? (No, stop dreaming. There’s no escape, as you thought at first in this place. This is punishment, retribution. And you don’t matter. A tiny insect crushed between two palms. Tell that to the heart, the brain. They fight on, they go on crying out—let me live!)

A new white pain shot through Renard’s left leg, into his ribs, up through his skull, and he saw Hansjosch had secured some extra cord to his trussed body. The rope was slack, trailing away beyond the fire. Asok was working intently there in the shadow, and the new cord twitched. They were rigging something up.

“Yes,” Hansjosch said. “You see? It’s all in hand.”

There was no point in begging Hansjosch. Renard had seen men beg from him before. Three years ago, forced to watch the spectacle for the first time, Renard had walked out of the room and vomited. A premonition, perhaps.

“Please,” he whispered. He tried to keep quiet. “Please.”

“Yes?” Hansjosch crowded him attentively.

Renard drew back his lips like a sick dog and spoke rapidly in French. Hansjosch followed most of it. He grunted, and buffeted his prisoner across the head, one-two-three—The fourth blow blotted everything out for a while, not for long, probably. When Renard came to, whatever the men had been arranging was complete. They stood close by, talking to Hansjosch, who suddenly ordered them off. Then they ran, toward the jungle and the large shuttle craft, not looking back. After the footfalls died, there was only the faint crackle of the fire, and the noise of Hansjosch, whistling. There he stood, looking up at the stars, tweeting an aria from some popular opera. Presently he seemed to recall he must say farewell to Renard, and looked down at him.

“You see the rope, the rope that goes away over there? Moist-heat seeker fuse. That’s it. The end’s sitting in dry ice right now, but that’s decaying fast. Then it’ll come for your body heat. And when the spark inside the tube gets level—well, you know how it works. It should take about ten minutes, fifteen if you try not to sweat too hard. And so long as you don’t snap the connection. You remember how the tubes are, once they’re fixed? Remember that agent in the Hague, the one who cut the rope off his boss’s wrist? Blew both of them out all the windows, huh?”

Hansjosch whistled another plaintive phrase. He took a few steps, turned, looked back. Sincerely, he said, “You were good. It was a pleasure working with you. I’ll miss you. I should have dropped this on Baur. Now I’ll have to put up with his belly-aching all the way to the border.” He glanced at the sky. “With luck, someone might come looking and see the fire. Then you’ll have company, going.”

He stepped off the roof and downwards; the jungle rustled like harsh paper, and then there was the heavy pounding gallop of his retreat.

It seemed only seconds after that the shuttle roared to life. It rose without lights. A wind swept over, smelling of burned ions, and a blacker blackness that put out the stars, and then the stars and the silence returned.

In the silence there came a small dry pop. The noise cut through Renard’s system like a jet of acid. Reflex caused him to lurch, and agony broke in his helpless pinioned body, and the sphincters of his sanity gave way as he gagged and howled in terror. But death was running toward him. There was no means of evasion. Even if there had been rescue, now it was too late. These devices of his organization could not be detached or rendered harmless. There was nothing to do but to lie and wait for the explosion that would tear him open and hurl him free and bleeding and in fragments upwards and sideways, all about. Nothing but to lie and think of it and know it and wait for it to be—And again he rolled and cried out, and fell back. And again the silence of the night came in like water, although soon, soon, he would hear the little hissing sound of the spark searching toward him along the tube in the rope.

There was a seasick haze, sweat and fear, mixed with smoke, thick in his eyes. And something pale in the haze. And then the girl walked out of the dark, the haze, stepping over the deadly rope, and kneeled down beside him.

“Don’t touch—” he shouted. “Don’t touch the cord—”

“I won’t,” she said. The fire behind her, her pale hair was like a halo of white flame.

“You can’t stop it,” he said.

“I know.”

“Then get out—go on, run! Five minutes and it reaches me. It’s a bomb. You want to go too? Oh God oh God,” he cried. He screwed up his eyes so as not to see her, his ears alert radar bowls for the approach of death.

Her hand brushed his face, and he writhed away from it. She had not been real. (She isn’t real.) Some figment of the mind. Or of dying.

But the hand returned, hard and cruel, gripping his face. He opened his eyes, and he saw her face, her eyes were also wild with terror, and yet she did not leave him. Her terror was held as she held him, cruel and hard, without pity. He could only stare at her.

“The river,” she said. “The river flowed by and you sat on the ghats, listening to the teachers. Tell me you recall.”

“Benares,” he said. “Why—why—”

“Now there is High Varanasi,” she said, hard as stone, her eyes like stone, her face, the one hand holding him. “Twenty-five years after tonight, the Ganges will have congealed to a golden swamp. But up in the air the secret machines are very busy.”

“Get out,” he muttered. “If you’re really here—”

“Listen to me,” she said, “there’s only a little time.”

“I can hear the spark in the tube.” He arched upward inside the ropes, pushing against her. “Pain—”

“I know about the pain. And the explosion that will rip you apart. I know.” She frowned at him. “You’ve reminded me in dreams every night, for half a year, over and over.” As he slumped away, she leaned to him. “Listen. You—have only minutes. And I must make this work. But you are an atheist, Renard, aren’t you? You call on God, but that is a child crying a stranger’s name in the dark. The soul exists, Renard. Your soul. It goes on. Men live for ever, they never die. Only the body dies.” He laughed, coughing and retching at the same time, and she continued relentlessly, her eyes burning down into him. “Your body will die in four—three—minutes. In agony. But the agony was—will be swiftly over. Then the soul is liberated. I can’t tell you anything of the liberation. That is the secret place beyond all secrets. We remember only when we return. I’m not your pandit. I’m not speaking of Heaven, or of naravana. Only of the body. Rebirth, Renard, do you understand? Rebirth will come after this death. A swift rebirth. But the trauma of this death will haunt you, the dark star, the scar on the soul, and the new life will be destroyed and wasted. Unless I can make you see—” “Lives,” he said. “Lives. Get away. Or you’ll go with me.”

“High Varanasi of the secrets has a secret machine. It can project the consciousness beyond place and through time, and with the consciousness an aspect of the body. Which appears quite physical. It may be touched, as you have touched me, and itself touch, as I touch you. But it is not physical. Though I’m here, I am not here. The explosion that will kill you can’t harm my body. I shall be with you, Renard, as you die.”

“The fuse—the spark,” he cried. He battled against her grasp and her look.

“Death,” she said. “There is no death. Whatever the horror and despair and hurt, you will live. Why else have I come to tell you this?”

“Who sent you?” he said. His ears were filled by the firm loud hiss of the running fuse. He had no strength left, to right her or to be afraid. “What are you?”

“You knew me,” she said.

And in that moment he heard the fuse meet his flesh, and sizzle, and stop in a hammer blow of nothing. And in the spaced moments of the nothing she said, “In the future you will be reborn. I traveled here through time. I am you.”

Then the blast came, the thunder, blindness, agony red and white and black, and the words were driven like scattered seeds before a whirlwind, away, away.

•   •   •

Vedanta

The notes of a bina came in from the terrace, the little yellow bina the young woman had brought with her, as a child brings a favorite toy to hospital. There she stood now, playing mildly, occasionally altering the frets, the instrument resting left to right across her body, the rising sun gilding the wires and the strands of her blonde hair.

A golden oreole was making music, too, in the gardens below. Further yet, the pilgrims would be wading in the holy marsh.

Religion and mysticism and teaching. These respected, ethereal things cloaked so much. In an era when repression of action and speech were not unknown, the soul was yet permitted its insubstantial course. In High Varanasi, this course had necessitated many wonders. But the great machines were nameless and unknown to the governments of the earth, who might for example see time travel as a thing of temporal power or weaponry, rather than is a means to heal astral wounds.

Presently the girl closed the bina’s sequence, and turned. She greeted the Controller civilly.

“Did you sleep well?” he asked.

“Oh, I did. For a week I have slept well. And for all the weeks of my life, I now anticipate sleeping well. It’s over. A miracle. The wise computer of High Varanasi did all you promised it would.”

“The computer is the servant of your need. It locates the past life, it enables you to reach and communicate with that life. But you yourself perform the miracle. You were cured of your malady only by you.”

“Then I must have made him believe me—He—myself—must have accepted. . . . But why not? We recognized each other at once. He didn’t understand why. I, of course, knew. He was as familiar as a lover. More familiar. And I can see, too, the strangeness, the way I was instructed to behave at first—these things would lend credence to what I told him later. While in such terror he would want to believe me. And then again, in the replaying of time, he didn’t die alone. Though nothing fundamental might be altered, yet I shared that terrible death. As I’ve shared it so often in nightmares. But the nightmares have stopped. Perhaps the fault was in me as I am—but in reliving the trauma, second-hand at last—” she broke off. “Complexity doesn’t matter, or explanation, does it? I died as Renard. But it’s finished. Here I am—myself.” She smiled. “Until the next life. What then, I wonder.”

“The function of our system, as you know,” said the Controller, “is to assist, but not to anticipate. For this reason we open the door only to past time.”

In English she said, “‘What’s to come is still unsure.’” She nodded. “All I do know is that I shall receive a hypnotic this afternoon.”

“In order that you can never, even inadvertently, betray us, or our technology. You will never forget, you may think and feel as you wish. But never again will you be able to speak of what has happened. This is unreasonable?”

“Oh, I’m more than willing. Anything to protect this place. Poor Renard,” she said, gazing across the garden, “fighting in the wrong way against a regime that hasn’t altered. Should I be fighting? Should I be humbled by him, by his struggle, while I’m playing my music, so easy and so safe? No,” she said, answering herself, “that I did, and may do again. After that, it needs this. And besides, the Kasha-Triy are always in battle lines. The nature of the combat is all that changes.” She looked serious and very young. The mark of tamastara lay behind her look, like the cicatrice of an ancient blow, long forgotten. The rest of her was fresh and new as if sprung from a chrysalis. The lesson was complete, the end of knowledge. But the end of knowledge is where knowledge begins. Suddenly, irrelevantly, she said, “He had beautiful eyes. And artist’s hands that were never used for anything artistic.” Then she lowered her gaze, and began again to bring life out of the yellow bina in smooth unbroken spirals.

It was not unusual for the physical component of the soul to fall in love with itself when glimpsed in another body. Renard, who had died in blood and anguish at the very age this young woman now was, had taken up again, through her, the adventure of search and growth. And she was exhilarated by her awareness of this, which seemed almost a benign possession. All that had been curtailed in execution, all that had been left unsaid, could now be resumed, vocalized, given expression, through the one he had become, and that one herself. The messages now were not written in incendiaries or theft or slaughter, but in long skeins of music, folding each into another. But the passionate fight went on, to reach the minds of men, to destroy obscurity and darkness, causing to flow between all life the current that all life contained and was a portion of.

But no profound melody drifted from the terrace. The golden oriole shut off its song as if affronted. A strange noise, a quarter tone enactment of the French “Marseillaise,” obtusely played on a bina, squealed over the garden in the risen sun.

Morning had come back to India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tanith Lee (1947–2015) was a legend in science fiction and fantasy writing. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Awards, a British Fantasy Society Derleth Award, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror.