Flights

SARIRA

A beautiful bald-headed nun in robes the colour of bone bends over a tiny reliquary where, on a little satin cushion, there rests what is left of the burned body of an enlightened being. I stand beside her, both of us just looking at that speck. We are aided in this endeavour by the magnifying glass that is a permanent fixture of the room. That whole enlightened essence takes the form of this tiny crystal, a little bitty stone barely bigger than a grain of sand. The body of this nun, no doubt, will also be transformed into a grain of sand, in some years; mine – no, mine will be lost: I was never practising.

But none of this should make me sad, given the number of sandy deserts and beaches in the world. What if they’re entirely made up of the posthumous essences of the bodies of enlightened beings?