For Love of Audrey Rose

10

Janice stared into the transient forms of pure space. Low drones, like Tibetan mountain horns, reverberated around her while the ragged clouds flew by and disintegrated. She stretched her legs against the narrow seat in front of her and leaned down to examine the folders in her leather handbag. Belgian printed fabrics, cost analyses, and a spiral notebook of charcoal sketches. Next to that was a bulging envelope of Marseilles summer design, nearly fifty brochures from an international design conference. Janice found her third packet, a collection of leather designs from Christine Daler Ltd.’s newest outlet in Tel Aviv. It was all there, plus photocopies of several disputed pay claims. Janice leaned back, still weary from the past two weeks of travel, delegations, hotels, and indigestion. She took pleasure in watching the clouds roll by beyond the metal wing. At five hundred miles an hour, she was going east, not west.

Her traveling case looked like a portable pharmacy. Antinausea pills, digestive liquids, antibiotics, and even powders to purify water. Passport, visa and, wrapped around the visa, a white paper. For the tenth time on the flight, she made certain the paper was there. It was an address, the only known conduit to Elliot Hoover.

Sesh Mehrotra. Hindu University, Benares (Varanasi), U.P.

The sunlight slanted in through the small curtains, white and pleasant on her hands. Janice realized she was nervously twisting her fingers into a locked mass, and she straightened her hands. She leaned back against the pillowed headrest and closed her eyes.

Once again she saw the same crowds. Crowds hooting on the ice-slick, night-reflecting alleys of Spanish Harlem. Crowds leaning over the police car as Wilkins drove her away. Crowds in the Criminal Court Building. She even recognized the corridors that led to the hall where Hoover had stood trial a year before. But this was a small chamber, and held only one lawyer, Dr. Geddes, five police officials, a stenographer, and two court psychiatrists. It all moved swiftly, like the extraction of a tooth. When it was over, Dr. Geddes grimly took her by the elbow and escorted her through the crowds.

It was then that the shock began to wear off. Janice found herself in a black limousine next to Dr. Geddes. A lawyer was next to the driver. It was a slow ride, the traffic was dense and gray in the filthy slush, and the limousine fought its way to the immense slabs of the parking structure behind Bellevue Hospital.

Bellevue was so large to her, it felt like dying to walk into its catacombs and chambers. There was no sense of emergency anywhere, only a sad, hopeless atmosphere that breathed despair from every dank corner. In the inner corridors, past the security wardens, the patients and orderlies shuffled with identical slow, lead-weight steps, as though they had all been condemned to New York’s sepulcher for the insane.

Dr. Geddes impatiently showed his credentials to yet another desk official. The lawyer demanded entrance, and threatened to telephone the court. Janice signed long forms, short forms, a declaration of intent, and waivers. They were led into an older wing of the complex, where a system of metal grids blocked off the corridors.

Now there were sounds. Inhuman sounds that sent chills up her neck. There were cries, half barking, half howling, as she went by rooms where the inhabitants were unseen. The floors were covered with small drains, glistening ominously.

Janice followed Dr. Geddes and the lawyer into a room with two cots, only one of which was occupied.

It was Bill. They had shaved his hair. There were two bright scars at the back of his neck and an oblong purple bruise on his jaw. His fingernails were cracked and grimy. According to the orderly, he was in isolation now because an inmate had tried to bite off his nose.

Janice stared at his eyes sunk into a strange, hard skull, unseeing, uncaring. The marks on his face were as though painted on by a sadistic artist. He did not seem like Bill. Janice reeled, then touched his cheek, and when he made no response, she burst into tears at his feet.

Dr. Geddes gently comforted her. “The important thing is that we get him out of this hellhole.”

“Where is he going?” Janice stammered.

“I couldn’t take him back to Ossining,” Dr. Geddes confided. “We don’t have the facilities. But there is an institution on Long Island — Goodland Sanitarium, part of the city’s authority — and I know the administration very well. It’s a very good hospital, very humane and decent, low density. Bill can get good, individual care.”

Dumbly, Janice listened. Later, out on the streets of New York, the nightmare sensation escalated. From the hospital garage a car drove up with a guard and Bill in the backseat. Bill had been changed from his gray pajamas into his own clothes, but they no longer seemed to fit. He looked shrunken in the darkness of the thick upholstery. The driver and the guard were both broad-shouldered and ham-fisted, and they kept their eyes on him.

As the car glided over the long system of bridges and thruways, Dr. Geddes began telling her about the institution. He had gone to medical school with the chief psychiatrist. The institution was opposed to the use of drug therapy. It had a relatively high rate of success. The landscape of Long Island swept by — marshland and distant stately homes obscured by clusters of brown apartment complexes, and then the lonely sweep to the sandy dunes again — and Janice saw none of it. She looked searchingly at Bill, and she knew that he was more dangerously sick than he had ever been before.

She said good-bye to him in his small, private room high on the ninth floor of the institution. There were bars on the windows, the furniture had no corners, and there were no implements of any kind in the drawers — no pens, no pencils, no scissors. Even the coat hangers were rounded plastic. Janice kissed Bill on the forehead.

“I’ll get help for you, Bill,” she whispered, stroking his cheek.

Now the airplane banked slightly, a warm shaft of light fell over her eyes, and she woke up. Janice strolled the aisles, her body lethargic and anxious from the two weeks

of conferences, arguments, and cables back to Elaine. At least that tension was gone. But it had been good for her.

Janice looked out the round window at the endless, hot sky over the ocean. A curved horizon demarcated the end of things that could be known, things that could be felt. Beyond, an obscure haze, born of heat and dry wind, desert dust and the glare of the sun, faded to a blue white.

One senses these things. One has training. My perceptions, after the holy utterance, were heightened….

Janice remembered pounding on the door of the Temple. No one was in the sanctuary. When she went to the alley and looked into the Master’s room, it was empty. A pane of glass was already broken, and beyond it a few bare shelves were visible. Even the makeshift desk had been removed. At the front door black graffiti had been sprayed in large script. Two men stood there, contemplating the dimensions of the room inside through the glass panes.

“Excuse me,” Janice said. “I’m looking for the Master.”

“Who?”

“The Master of the Temple, Sri Parutha.”

The two men looked at each other and shrugged.

“Lady, this here is a vegetarian restaurant.”

They turned away, examining small diagrams and a section of blueprint.

It was true. There was not the slightest evidence that there had ever been a temple on the site. Not a flower remained inside or in the garden behind. None of the neighboring shops had cared to learn what had happened to the Master or his dwindling group of would-be ascetics.

At Des Artistes, Janice telephoned thirteen religious study centers in Manhattan. None had heard of the Temple. None had any answer for her.

One has to go by impressions — strong impressions — in the divination process.

Janice started, caught herself staring vacantly into the blue white haze, so evanescent, yet so impenetrable that it seemed the place to which all answers had fled. Reluctantly, she sat back in her seat and tried to nap.

The first days of seeing Bill had been an all-too-familiar kind of torture. He sat unresponsive, dead to her and the rest of the world. By the end of the week, however, he had begun speaking. Incoherent secrets whispered out of his mouth. He begged Janice to bring his daughter to him. He did not hear her answer that the Hernandez family had virtually boarded itself inside its dark apartment. Bill only leaned forward, finger gently tapping her forearm, insisting that his daughter was waiting, crying; she wanted him, he wanted to see her.

By the end of the second week, Bill seemed oblivious to the presence of humans. He stepped on their toes, bumped into them, as though they were fixtures of furniture. Halfway through the third week, Bill was reduced to violent gestures, moody silences, and occasional periods of gentle crying.

“He’s slipping,” Dr. Geddes admitted. “Slipping badly.”

“Maybe if he could be disabused of his obsession,” commented the chief psychiatrist. “This fantasy of reincarnation.”

But Bill was not disabused of his fantasy. He clung to it with a passion that startled Janice. Unable to articulate coherent sentences, he wrestled with his emotions, his neck muscles straining, the veins in his forehead bulging. He pleaded, wept, and collapsed in misery on his bed. The hospital staff began to consider mild drug therapy if his symptoms turned self-destructive.

When April ended, Janice felt ruined. She had neither the strength nor the hope for continuing the marathon trips to Long Island. A feverish, permanent fatigue assailed her, and her work became confused. It was late twilight with the rush-hour traffic already thinning out, when Elaine pulled up a chair near Janice’s drafting table.

“Janice,” she said softly, “I think we’d better talk.”

Janice looked up with foreboding.

“Am I slipping that badly, Elaine?”

Elaine smiled thoughtfully. “You’re tired, Janice. You’re exhausted. Running back and forth between Manhattan and Long Island. You’ve got all the symptoms of being worked to death. I’ve seen it happen. I want you to take a break.”

Janice paled. “Elaine, please, my job is my life.”

“Don’t jump to conclusions. There’s a couple of assignments in Europe that we need to look up. I want you to go.”

“But I couldn’t,” Janice protested. “Bill needs me. He’s helpless.”

“So will you be in another week. Janice, you look like wet newspaper. You’re going to disintegrate at this rate.”

Janice put down her ink brush and swiveled away from Elaine. The idea was totally unexpected, yet it had the clarity of a burst of sunlight through dark clouds.

“I suppose I could tell Dr. Geddes.”

Elaine smiled. “Excellent,” she said. “And if I were you, I’d start packing. The first conference starts next Tuesday.”

Janice nodded, but the suddenness caused a strange vertigo. Somehow, she had never thought that any kind of escape was possible, not now, and not in the future. Guiltily, she realized how she hungered for a few days’ liberty. She needed it the way a drowning animal needs air.

Suddenly Des Artistes did not feel so dark, so cold. The sight of her packed luggage was a visible symbol of a new possibility: a resurgence of hope. She checked and rechecked her itinerary. Brussels, Marseilles — and now Elaine had added the Israeli market. The passport on her desk, the letters of introduction, her confirmed hotel reservations made hope not only real, but imminent. Late at night, she spoke one last time with Dr. Geddes.

“Perfectly appropriate idea,” Dr. Geddes said. “I’ve told you that. You need a break.”

“But what if something happens? Suppose he calls for me?”

“I doubt very much that Bill will be calling for anybody in the near future. Except Ivy.”

It was shortly after the Brussels conference that the idea came to her. Back in her hotel room, she raced to her luggage and pulled out her battered leather address book. There was a name, a name that had known Hoover, though she could not remember it.

Halfway through the address book, she found, simply: Mehrotra, Sesh. Hindu University Benares (Varanasi), U.P. She recalled very well that after Ivy died, she had written to Hoover, to explain to him her feelings. It was to Mehrotra that the letter was sent.

As the warm spring night drifted in, she thought of Hoover. She thought of his pale, almost recessive eyes, eyes that were handsome except that they had seen too much suffering. Pale skin and a burning sincerity that swept everything away — reason, logic, normalcy — in one tidal wave of charisma. It was Hoover who had told her Ivy was in danger. It was Hoover who could have saved her child. If Juanita was, in some way — if Juanita could be in a god-awful but logical way — Ivy, then Hoover would know.

I’ll get help for you, Bill.

Janice cabled Elaine from Tel Aviv, asking for another five days. Elaine quickly agreed. A half day at a branch of the Chase Manhattan finally produced a draft for nearly a thousand dollars.

The travel agent looked up, his tie loosened, an ashtray bulging with half-smoked cigarettes.

“I’d like to go to India, please,” Janice said softly.

“Where would you like to go? India is a big place.”

“I must go to Benares.”

“Ah. You’re one of those pilgrims,” he said, smiling. “It’s Varanasi now. Not Benares. Though to everyone, it is still called Benares. You will transfer in New Delhi.”

That night, Janice watched the concrete runways glide by as she walked toward the gleaming steps of an Air India jet. It was all a dream, she thought. Life had become a series of disconnected dreams. The engines roared into life, there was a terrific pull at her stomach, and she seemed to wake up in some mysterious way. She was truly flying to India.

Below, a series of white lines, in immense parallel curves, came quickly to view. Beige sand. Dark green of tropical plants. Wide roads, where trucks carried clouds of white dust. Then an immense continent, so large it seemed to bend with the earth, dark and mottled, glinting with small patches of moist ground, paddy fields, and tiny rivers. It was India. It looked like an untended world, violent and crude.

Janice swallowed. It was really India. Anxiety overcame her. She drew back into her seat, away from the window. There was no escape. The idea that she should have come so far, so suddenly, to look for Elliot Hoover, seemed obscene. Nervously, she checked for the hundredth time that Sesh Mehrotra’s address was still in her travel bag, though she had long ago memorized it. She tried to imagine Mehrotra. She tried to imagine Elliot Hoover. All she saw was a kind of nervous cloud, where everything was unclear, turbulent, unformed.

11

Taxi? Taxi? You like a taxi?” said six men together, running up to her.

“Yes, I—”

“Come. You come with me. Cheap.”

“Please, miss. Beautiful Buick. You come with me.”

“Lowest price. No detour. Come on, miss.” Distraught, Janice fumbled in her purse for the card upon which was printed the name of her hotel. In that instant, three drivers grabbed for her suitcase; one was successful and, alarmed, Janice ran after him. The lucky driver opened the trunk of a small black Ford, dropped in her suitcase, and slammed the lid. He turned to her and smiled.

“Where to?” he asked, proud of himself.

Janice had no choice but to show him the card.

“Varanasi Palace Hotel,” he read slowly. “Number one in city. Get in, please.”

Janice’s heart was racing so fast, she felt the pulse in her throat. There was no retreat, no going back. The highway raced forward to glide under the wheels of the taxi. To the sides were patches of mud and clumps of grass, littered with white paper and broken bottles. Filthy goats stood by mud ridges and chewed, unblinking, at pieces of fabric.

By the time the taxi entered the outer reaches of Benares, Janice’s face was covered in perspiration. It plastered her blouse to her skin, her hair to her scalp. Dust and grime coated her shoes and even her fingernails. Exhausted, she stared out at the city that rapidly approached.

The highway was filled with groups of old men wearing absolutely nothing but loose, skimpy loin cloths. They seemed not to be casually walking but to have a mission, a barely concealed energy behind their movements.

“They have come to Benares to die,” said the driver in a gentle English. “It is blessed to die in Benares.”

“Benares,” Janice whispered to herself. The sound of the city conjured frightful images. The Ganges, she knew, flowed through the city, and it was holy — and it would be noisy, and somewhere deep in the outskirts perhaps, at a study center or in a small home, was Elliot Hoover. It was as if she were keeping a rendezvous. Was he waiting for her, too, in some disturbing, almost occult foreknowledge? Or would he close his door in her face?

The Varanasi Palace Hotel was small, only five floors, and it was old. It was located at the edge of the “containment,” or residential compound once built for the British and still mostly Western in character. The avenues were straight, clean, but the noise of Benares submerged the elegant palm trees in a turbulence of sound: a thousand bulls lowing, ten thousand men shouting, and everywhere, clanging through the sky, the hundreds upon hundreds of temple bells, some heavy as gongs, some light as tinkling glass, making a cacophonous music that shook the city.

The taxi came to a halt in front of the doorman. Under the awning, a turbaned Punjabi slowly opened the door for Janice and waited for the driver to take the suitcase from the trunk. She paid, took a brisk look at the spare lines of the Varanasi Palace, and followed the doorman into the hotel.

“To the desk, please,” the Punjabi said, pointing.

Inside, lazy black fans turned high overhead against white ceilings. Enormous red rugs covered the floor, and the couches and chairs were also red, so that the interior looked like a huge Matisse. Glass chandeliers glittered in regular sequences through the lobby. A gentleman in white cloth read a newspaper with the aid of a magnifying glass. Janice walked slowly to the desk.

“Yes, please?” inquired a short, dark-haired clerk with a red coat.

“Mrs. Templeton. Arriving from Tel Aviv.”

Fingers the shade of cocoa rapidly skimmed through a rolling file. Then he looked up, smiling, and raised an eyebrow in the direction of an aged porter. The old man immediately hobbled to the desk. There was a brisk command and then the clerk smiled obsequiously to Janice.

“Room 507, please,” he said.

Janice nodded, still confused by suddenly being in India, but now reassured by the Western efficiency, even impersonality, of the Varanasi Palace.

The old man, who also wore a red coat, heaved the suitcase onto a back already bent with age. Strangely, at the elevator, he only instructed the operator, then proceeded to walk the entire five floors up to her room. Puzzled, Janice waited for him. At length he arrived, breathing hard and sweating. His hands were permanently curled by a life of hard labor.

He opened the door to room 507. Janice walked in. It was cool. The walls were white. Fresh flowers bloomed from glass bowls. The bedspread was white, patterned by its weave of fresh cotton. The bathroom was clean. There was nothing that indicated she was in India except the bent porter at the door. She gave him what she thought was a fair tip. He stared at her in mixed gratitude and defiant, almost hostile pride. For a second, she thought he would refuse it. Then he nodded, blinked his rheumy yellow eyes, and departed, closing the door.

Janice sat down on the bed. It had silent springs, firm yet resilient. Strange, confused emotions swirled inside her. She felt like laughing. She felt like crying. She felt like running around the block, overflowing with nervous energy.

Janice called down to the desk, found the correct time, and adjusted her watch. It was only 12:30 in the afternoon in Benares.

She undressed, stepped under the shower, and found the water hot and delicious in its sting. She shampooed her hair twice, rinsed thoroughly, and combed her hair down. In the mirror, she looked into her own eyes and could not decipher the look she found in them. Was she courageous or insane? She dressed carefully in beige slacks, white blouse, and sandals. The afternoon was hazy, the clouds spread evenly over the serrated skyline of high-rise apartments and slums. Down at the desk she composed an express letter to Bill.

Dearest. Am searching. Will find help for both of us. Trust and believe. All my love. Janice.

She addressed it in care of Dr. Geddes, asking him to give it to Bill or withhold it, as he thought best. The stationery had the hotel’s address if Dr. Geddes needed to contact her.

A taxi took her quickly from the hotel, out of the residential compound, and back into the morass of animals, bauble sellers, brass workers, fortune-tellers, precariously balanced fruit stands, pilgrims of various castes — some nearly naked, many with ash smeared across their aged breasts — and up a long hill, where Janice could see the breathtaking spectacle of nearly two thousand spires, domes, minarets, and towers rising like a vast rock crystal garden, glittering in mosaic brilliance against a pure blue sky. Now she could see the great brown river, the Ganges, rolling imperturbably toward the Bay of Bengal. The shores were hidden by clusters of shops and crumbling houses, but beyond was that same muddy wasteland of the great, hot flood plain.

The taxi swerved around a corner and stopped. In front of her was an imposing white edifice, its top story on supports, creating the impression of a vast fortress. A sign read, in three languages, Hindu University.

The entrance to the administration hall led to a series of foyers, each of which led to complexes of reception and office space. Janice walked slowly through the vast, black-tiled area, where the light came in through tall, narrow windows high over her head, and her heart was beating so violently she thought it would echo off the stone.

A steel-framed door led to a narrow corridor. File cabinets made the corridor even more narrow. Janice walked down through the dusty channel and emerged at a second door that opened onto a large typing pool. The typists were all women, with brightly colored saris, and they typed with manic efficiency.

Janice leaned against a marble-topped counter and looked around. The women clattered away, some at electric machines, others at older, upright models. Finally, a young girl with jet black eyes and hair, and a subtle mustache over her full red lips, sauntered to the counter. She said nothing.

“I’m looking for Sesh Mehrotra,” Janice said. “Here. Let me write it down.” She spelled out the name. The girl stared blankly at it.

“He is a student here?” the girl asked.

“I don’t know. He might be an instructor.”

The girl walked to a horizontal steel bin. Her bracelets jangled as her dark arms riffled quickly among the entries there. From time to time, she pulled out a file, checked it against the name, and slid the file back into its holder. At last she copied something down on the slip of paper, and came to the counter. On the paper she had written: Department of Philosophy.

It was a small office, dominated by a single desk with a middle-aged woman, her floral print sari and brass bangles glimmering like a fallen chandelier. Behind was the landscape of Benares, leading down to the warm brown Ganges. The receptionist had white hair twined into the black, and under her dense black eyebrows her eyes were soft and brown. She waited for Janice to speak.

“I’m looking for Mr. Sesh Mehrotra,” Janice said softly.

With a subtle nod, the woman disappeared toward the office in the rear. Janice waited. The receptionist returned brandishing a piece of paper. She handed it to Janice.

“This street is in Benares?” Janice asked.

“Why don’t you just telephone?” she offered, indicating the desk phone.

Trembling, Janice’s fingers traced out the number inscribed on the paper. There was a muted storm of static, a buzz and three clicks, and then a voice answered. It sounded old, neither male nor female, and it was asking a question.

“I’m sorry,” Janice said, trying to control her voice, “do you speak English?”

Quizzically, the voice responded by repeating its question.

“English,” Janice repeated, louder. “Do you speak English?”

Now the voice became irritated, in the manner of nearly deaf persons, and for the third time it shouted back its question. Janice looked around helplessly. The receptionist took the receiver from her hand. A few quick words were exchanged, and the receptionist hung up.

“Mr. Mehrotra has several jobs,” the receptionist explained, pulling out a small map from a drawer. “Most likely he is at his position here.”

“Thank you — thank you.”

Elated, Janice carefully folded the map and put it into her handbag. She was so happy, she almost did not know where she was going. At a small shop — more a three-sided booth than a shop — she bought a more durable blouse and a pair of the cheap wicker sandals that all the women of Benares wore. She hailed a taxi and showed the map to the driver, who nodded and sped off.

At last the taxi found the street. It was slimy with cow dung, wet, squashed, and mingled with dropped fruit, long mashed into a single green slime on the stones. The street was ancient, the walls leaned over it, and shadows of buyers and sellers mingled into a single ever-changing black shape against the ground. Janice paid the fare, and walked slowly, as though feeling her way. The street intersection circled on the map turned out to be the junction of two alleys, dense with brassware, portraits of religious gurus, and men who stared out at her with vacant black eyes.

Janice approached a shop. A clerk labored over a huge ledger at one side of his shelves of brass. He looked angry, as though he would rather be almost anywhere else. He looked too educated, out of place. With a burst of energy, he began computing the long columns of entries.

“Mr. Mehrotra,” Janice said gently.

He looked up. His face was round, and he wore black-rimmed glasses. He needed a shave. His black hair was curly, and his eyes small and nearsighted. He wore a white shirt and white pantaloons, sandals, and three gold rings. He seemed glad to be interrupted.

“Mr. Mehrotra,” Janice said. “My name is Janice Templeton.”

Uncomprehending, Mehrotra shook her extended hand. Then his face paled. His eyes widened until he stared at her.

“Yes,” she said simply. “It’s really me.”

Mehrotra leaned across the shelf, staring unashamed into her face. He swallowed nervously and tried to smile.

“I gave your letter to Elliot Hoover,” he said.

“Thank you. I’ve come to meet Mr. Hoover.”

Mehrotra smiled, but it was not a pleasant smile. It was nervous, and he backed away, casting quick glances at the neighboring shops.

“Why?” he asked. “Why is it you have to meet him?”

“Because my husband is ill.”

“What? I do not understand, Mrs. Templeton.”

Janice paused. She sensed that Mehrotra was guarding Hoover, that he would have to be won over or she would never get past the clerk. At least it meant that Mehrotra and Hoover were still in close contact.

“Will you have some time free this morning?” she asked softly, “so that I can explain?”

“Time?” Mehrotra laughed. “I have nothing but time.”

He threw his columned book back onto his canvas chair. Then he violently closed the shop, shoving revolving shelves of brass trays and pots inside the booth, rolling down a quick iron gate, and locking it. He tucked the key into his pocket and took Janice by the elbow.

“Please, do not slip on the blood.”

Janice gasped. In the fetid quarters of the back alleys, a heap of diseased chickens had been thrown, and the dogs had charged into them, sending flickers of blood against the walls.

“Be careful of the ox cart.”

A dark brown bullock rumbled by, pulling a creaking wagon in which a man appeared to be fast asleep, holding a short black whip.

They left the system of alleys, emerged into the sunlight, and the air smelled of the turbulent Ganges not far away. Mehrotra suddenly turned on Janice.

“Why have you come for Mr. Hoover?” he demanded.

Tongue-tied, Janice did not know how to begin.

“You know,” she began, “you know — about Ivy?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, after she was cremated, my husband became ill. He began to study, to think that Ivy — that Ivy might come back.”

Mehrotra stamped his foot with impatience.

“Of course she will come back! What has that to do with your husband’s illness?”

“I’m— You’re making it so hard to explain.”

“Come! Come with me and tell me.”

They walked out from the last of the cramped buildings, the last of the brilliant wood and stone temples, the last of the ox carts. It was suddenly spacious. Enormous steps led down to the Ganges, and periodically tall sculptured stones, like rounded pyramids, rose to punctuate the miles of riverbank. The activity on the huge steps was incredible, thousands of human beings crowding into the water, some under wicker umbrellas on the steps, and smoke rising from clusters of wood and cloth, trailing high into the implacable blue sky.

“Is this — is this where Ivy’s ashes—” Janice stammered, reeling, holding on to Mehrotra’s arm, which stiffened as it felt her weight.

Mehrotra understood and gently supported her, putting an arm lightly around her shoulder. His voice softened.

“It was not exactly here,” he admitted, “but nearby.”

He pointed to a stretch of the stone steps beyond a cluster of men so old and emaciated they looked as though they had already become corpses. Mehrotra paused, sensitive now, and his voice lowered.

“In the early dawn,” Mehrotra said gently, “we took the canister of ashes and went down to the Ghats — these steps — and spread the ashes slowly into the middle of the Ganges. Elliot Hoover and I. And I watched him pray, and then we came to the shore and the sun dried our clothes.”

“And did he say anything?” Janice asked.

“Only that he hoped Ivy’s soul had found peace.”

Mehrotra took Janice down the Ghats. She was afraid of the dense groups of Hindus, afraid of the smoke, which she now realized came from funeral pyres shamelessly arranged in public. It seemed as though the whole of Benares was dedicated to death, a methodical, sober business, neither morbid nor joyful, but matter-of-fact, like selling vegetables.

“It is nothing,” Mehrotra reassured her. “Death is Benares’s biggest business. All these temples, woodcutters, tourist vendors — this is Lord Shiva’s city, and Lord Shiva, the Dancer, is the god of destruction.”

Pyres were now visible all down the Ghats, on all the levels, almost down to the lapping water itself. Children walked among the fire-tenders, barely cognizant of the consumption of human bodies all around them.

“Was that… was that the last time you saw Mr. Hoover?” Janice asked, trying to keep pace with Mehrotra as they climbed down the riverbank.

“No, I saw him twice more. He came to my brother’s wedding, and then about four months ago…”

Black-skinned men, absolutely naked, faces flattened and aboriginal, came in between them. Janice fought her way to Mehrotra again. Suddenly they were on the lowest step. The Ganges splashed up and soiled her beige slacks.

“Four months ago?” Janice insisted, breathing hard. “Where is he now?”

Mehrotra turned, the sunlight brilliant on his unshaven cheeks. He smiled softly.

“Elliot Hoover has gone on a pilgrimage,” he said quietly.

Janice, startled, found herself unable to say anything.

“To the South,” he continued, smiling at her mysteriously.

“Will he come back?”

Mehrotra shrugged. “Normally one is gone about a year. That would mean eight months from now.”

Janice covered her ears as a white boat, its decks overloaded with passengers, sounded its horn.

“Eight months?” she yelled. “That’s impossible!”

Mehrotra took her slowly along the bottom step of the Ghats. He gave a coin to a beggar, but stepped over the others.

“Why is that impossible?” Mehrotra asked placidly.

“I need to see him.”

“Tell me why.”

“My husband thinks that Ivy — feels very sure that Ivy has come back.”

“You already told me that.”

“And we must know for certain.”

Mehrotra looked at her, surprised.

“Why?” he asked blandly.

“Because he has been institutionalized for thinking it!” she said, and then burst out, “Because he believes he’s found her.”

Mehrotra’s eyes fastened upon hers. “And you? What do you believe?”

Janice could only return his piercing gaze as the great and overwhelming question hung between them. She shrugged in helpless dismay.

“You mustn’t have doubts,” he said earnestly. “Reincarnation is a fact of life. With all of us.”

“Yes, here. But in New York…”

“You’re not in New York now. Look, believe your heart. What does your heart tell you?”

“It’s my head,” she laughed ruefully. “It doesn’t quite want to latch onto it.”

“You Westerners,” Mehrotra mocked. “You live in little cages. Would you believe me if I proved it to you?”

She looked at him, surprised at the jocularity in his voice.

“If you had faith,” he said, holding up a finger, “you would not need proof. Nevertheless, I can show you something. Yes? Come with me.”

Janice followed him into a dank, dark alley. It was so moist that a kind of thick, green moss grew at the base of the walls.

Then the alley grew narrow. Finally, it was no more than a passageway between leaning stone walls.

Mehrotra turned at a wooden gate, climbed rickety steps, and stepped onto a wide, surprisingly clean, stone floor. Tall windows poured rectangles of warmth onto the stone. An aged woman, a younger woman, and five black-eyed children stared shyly at Janice.

Mehrotra spoke rapidly, pointing to Janice. She thought she heard Elliot Hoover’s name mentioned. Then he identified the family to her, one by one.

“My sister, Aliya. Her mother-in-law and the children. They’re Aliya’s.”

Aliya smiled pleasantly.

As Mehrotra chatted with his sister, deferring in his speech to the mother-in-law, Janice looked around at the children. They huddled at the door, and when they saw her looking, they ran back into the kitchen. The enormous depths of the black eyes startled her. They were like shaded pools, naive, and troubling in their purity.

Aliya gently handed Janice a cup and saucer, then set a strainer on the cup. The tea burbled musically into the small chinaware. Aliya did the same for Mehrotra and the motherin-law, casting shy glances at Janice.

“Arun!” Mehrotra called.

Shyly, a slender boy, about ten years old, emerged from the kitchen and nestled himself onto Mehrotra’s lap.

“Now,” Mehrotra said, “my sister’s mother-in-law will tell you the story of her Uncle Vinoba.”

Mehrotra directed the mother-in-law to begin. The lady had a slightly humped back, so she had to move the chair to face Janice.

“I will translate,” Mehrotra said.

The woman began. The language did not seem even to have syllables, only melodic rambling.

“She is speaking a very old dialect,” Mehrotra whispered, “about the days of her mother. It was when the British were in India. She always begins the same way.” Mehrotra translated: “In those days, not far from here, the British had rubber plantations. But they always made the men elect a foreman of their own choosing to be the go-between. In this way, they controlled the workers more easily.”

The aged voice continued.

“Now Uncle Vinoba wanted to be that foreman. After all, the pay was good, he could have a hut to himself and sometimes wear the company watch on a chain.”

Janice leaned toward Mehrotra to hear better.

“Now, in those days, there were always rebellions in the rubber plantations. Uncle Vinoba ingratiated himself with the workers. But also with the British. To make a long story shorter, he was elected to lead a rebellion. Now this was very bad, because he was afraid of the British. But he did not want to anger the rebels. So he said yes.”

Janice nodded, sensing Mehrotra waited for a reaction. The old woman rattled on.

“The rebellion was planned for the full moon. One group would attack the soldiers on the north road. One group would sneak into the company headquarters and kill the British. Naturally, as leader, Uncle Vinoba would go to the headquarters.”

Janice watched the children. Now they sat quietly in the room on the floor, as though eager to hear the story over again. Some of them anticipated, their mouths moving, as though they had nearly memorized it.

“Suspecting nothing, the men watched Uncle Vinoba walk to the headquarters building. But when he got inside, he told the British everything. A messenger sneaked out the back way to alert the soldiers. Guns were brought down from upstairs. Then Uncle Vinoba went back to the rebels.”

The old woman took a very deep breath and suddenly leaned forward.

“Well, Uncle Vinoba sweated like a pig. But exactly at midnight he led the men forward. They tiptoed up the red carpets — the British love red carpets — Uncle Vinoba in front. All at once, the British jumped out from the side of the stairwell, from the bottom floor, and down from the upstairs. An enormous roar of gunfire, and all the rebels were killed. Except Uncle Vinoba. It was said that the blood was found even on the ceiling.”

There was a long pause. The old woman fanned herself with a paper and bamboo fan.

“Uncle Vinoba became the foreman. He lived alone, never married, and always carried a knife with him, even though he never cut the rubber himself. After all, most of the workers were related to the dead men.”

Mehrotra patted Arun on the stomach. Arun giggled.

“One night, about a year later, the widows broke into his hut. They grabbed him, tied him up, and dragged him screaming out into the forest. There they secured him between two rubber trees. The elephants were brought in, and for each man who had died, an elephant was made to step on him. That was twenty-one times, because there were fifteen in the fields and six killed in the headquarters. Anyway, his screams echoed all over the plantations. The soldiers were too frightened to come, because they thought it was an unnatural sound, or maybe the wild dogs from the mountains. In the morning the British found a length of rope, broken ferns all around, and tangled-up pieces of broken, red bones. Poor Uncle Vinoba.”

The story went on, but Mehrotra ignored the old woman.

“Now, Mrs. Templeton. There are fifteen dead men in the fields. Six in the headquarters. How many is that?”

“Twenty-one.”

Mehrotra lifted Arun’s shirt. Spread across his back, in uneven double rows, were peculiar cherry red markings, like scallops in shape. Their shape fascinated Janice. They were almost delicate, not at all gruesome or disfiguring, and Arun smiled shyly.

“Have you ever seen an elephant’s footprint?” Mehrotra asked.

She looked at him, startled.

“Look, Mrs. Templeton. Here are the toes, the heavy weight at the back, where the marks are thicker.”

She found it difficult to believe.

“Twenty-one marks, Mrs. Templeton,” Mehrotra said measuredly. “Five years ago, when we visited our cousins where the rubber plantation used to be — it’s a shirt factory now — Arun became very frightened, and he did not know why. Now he will tell you what he said.”

Mehrotra whispered in the boy’s ear.

Arun turned to face Janice, closed his eyes, and with difficulty, formed the words, “I — hear — guns.”

“See?” Mehrotra demanded. “‘I hear guns.’ In English, Mrs. Templeton! And he never studied English, then or now!”

“I — hear — guns,” Arun repeated, pleased at the reaction.

Arun slid off his lap, and went to join the other children.

“Every village, every town, every quarter of every large city is filled with these stories. A girl has the markings of a dead aunt. Or a man suddenly acts strangely and speaks a different dialect. Or a child must visit a certain area where he has never been. Why? Because they are the living incarnations of the dead! That’s why! Believe, Mrs. Templeton!”

Janice followed Mehrotra back into the brilliant sunshine that poured upon the multitudes who pressed upon the sacred Ganges. He took her by the elbow and led her through waves of ascetics and urban faithful.

“About Elliot Hoover,” Janice stammered.

“I was afraid — I must confess — you had some romantic interest,” Mehrotra shouted above the prayerful cacophony. “I protect him.”

“Then you can tell me where he is?”

“Elliot Hoover is at an ashram on the Cauvery River.”

“Where is that?”

“In the State of Tamil Nadu.”

“Is there a telephone there?”

Mehrotra laughed. “Not at the ashram. And it will take at least a week, if you are lucky, for a letter to find its way into the mountains.”

Mehrotra pulled her gently toward him, just as an ox cart lumbered by, dropping loose sticks of firewood for the Ghats. He felt her trembling.

“I think you must go yourself,” he said quietly. “It is the quickest.”

Janice looked at the round, still-unshaven face, the owl glasses, and she saw the steadfast darkness of his eyes, the unwavering compassion. She knew now why he and Elliot Hoover were friends.

“I think I’d be afraid to,” she said weakly.

“Afraid? Of India? Don’t travel after dark, that’s all.”

The mere thought made Janice’s head dizzy. The South conjured up an unpleasant image, vague but festering with gross jungle growth, animals like baboons, villages with dysentery.

“Do you have money?” he asked.

“I can change some more.”

“Good. You can fly to Mysore City. I will show you what to do after that. I only wish I could go with you. Elliot and I have a firm friendship.”

Mehrotra led her into his shop. He shoved several volumes of Schopenhauer, Hume, and Tagore onto the floor. Several notebooks he pushed more gently onto his chair. From a drawer he extracted an ancient atlas printed in German, and paged through the faded color areas.

“This is the Cauvery River,” Mehrotra said matter-of-factly. “It is like the Ganges, a holy river.”

Janice watched, fascinated as the lean brown finger traced the path southeast from Mysore City into the mountains and then to the valley of the upper Cauvery.

“You see? Not so far,” he said smoothly. “From Mysore City there is a train. To Kotagiri. Then you must take a bus — I will write down its name — going east toward Erode, then it goes south. Right here”—he indicated an area where few village names were inscribed on the map—“is the ashram.”

The empty area on the old map looked intimidating. There were German phrases in parentheses which seemed to indicate the central mountains were poorly explored.

“How do I know when I get to the ashram?” she finally asked.

“It is a Hindu temple and it is dedicated to Tejo Lingam—the fire incarnation of God. I can write that down for you.”

Mehrotra sat at his desk and in a lovely calligraphy wrote out the name of the ashram. On a separate sheet of paper, he wrote a brief description of the ashram’s location, in various languages.

“In case nobody speaks English, just show them this,” he said, handing her the letter. “But pilgrims go there all the time. You will have no difficulty.”

Janice gingerly took the letter. She folded it and put it carefully into her handbag. For a long time, she looked at the gleaming brassware on curved trays, many hanging from silver chains over the shop.

“Please tell Elliot that I—” Mehrotra faltered. “That I have been unable to come this year, but that I look forward to seeing him again in Benares.”

Moved by the depth of his feeling, Janice agreed. She thanked him, they shook hands, then Janice stood up. Mehrotra looked very sad.

“You will have good luck. I will pray for you.”

She smiled, waved good-bye as she stepped away, and it was only when she reached the empty boulevards of the residential area that the anxiety returned. She stepped resolutely into the hotel.

12

I need to fly to Mysore City,” she told the desk clerk. “Can you connect me with the proper airline?”

“Mysore City?” he asked, raising an eyebrow. “Of course.”

In fifteen minutes, all was set. At 9:55 in the morning, a plane would leave, stopping only once at Hyderabad. Trains for Kotagiri left only twice daily, but there seemed to be an hour for her to make the connection, provided she reserve a seat immediately. She did so, through the clerk, and he advised her to wait until they reached Kotagiri before attempting to locate the proper bus.

“Mrs. Templeton,” the desk clerk asked, in a changed tone of voice.

“Yes?”

“Excuse me, but why are you going to such a place?”

“To visit an ashram.”

“But there are plenty of ashrams, much more famous, much more beautiful.”

Janice looked at him quizzically. The desk clerk cleared his throat.

“What I mean to suggest, Mrs. Templeton, is that this area has been under attack.”

“Attack?”

“Not exactly attack. One should say, a small rebellion. Really, they are only bandits with a flag, but still, I would advise you…”

“Is the area unsafe?”

“Not exactly unsafe. Only there are no conveniences. The post offices are not reliable. There is no television. Even the telephones are a matter of good karma.”

He laughed feebly at his own witticism. Janice smiled.

“Thank you,” she said. “I’ll be very careful.”

“If I could advise you…?”

“Yes. Please do.”

“When you go south of Kotagiri, do not travel at night.”

“Thank you,” Janice said, smiling graciously. “Good night.”

She slept well, considering that she felt she had just walked off a gangplank. All decisions had been made. If not tomorrow night, then the night after, she would finally see Elliot Hoover. Surely he would know the trials she had gone through to see him. Kindness was the core of his being. That alone would force him to respond, to help them. And if he didn’t?

Mercifully, sleep came before an answer did.

This time the flight seemed to last days, not hours. It was late afternoon when she touched down at Mysore City. It was early evening by the time she secured her seat on the train. The night was sultry, and it smelled like stagnant water.

It was not until 10:45 that the train chugged unevenly into the dirty town of Kotagiri. Remembering what the desk clerk in Benares had recommended, and longing for a clean bath and some sleep, Janice went in search of a tourist office. It was closed. There were no taxis.

She carried her small suitcase down the street. A small “hotel” sign blinked on and off. No answer. She knocked again. A sound of muffled steps. A man in a dirty undershirt looked out at her, blinking in surprise.

“One night,” Janice said, holding up a single finger, gesturing sleep.

The man nodded. Janice entered the hotel and instantly regretted it. It smelled of stale beer and urine. Outside, Kotagiri looked even worse. The man closed the door. From his desk, he pulled out a battered ledger, turned on a small amber desk lamp and pulled out a black fountain pen, carefully shaking it three times. He wrote out the cost and handed it to her on a slip of paper.

Janice paid him the rupees. He seemed surprised that she did not argue. He beckoned her to follow, and they went up a narrow staircase. Her room was barely wide enough for the bed and standing room. The bathroom was down the hall.

As she undressed, she smelled the changed atmosphere in the South. It was impregnated with rain, and yet the rain remained in the clouds. Unwilling to bathe in the dirty bathroom, she washed standing up at the cracked basin. Mrs. Templeton, she thought wryly to herself, you have stayed in fleabag hotels in your time, but this one not even a self-respecting flea would come to.

On the street below, a police car drove by, and behind it a dark convoy truck with about ten soldiers bumping along in the back, rifles pointed up.

Janice felt reluctant to climb into the sheets. The smell of rain increased, and several times Janice looked out the window. Rain would have been lovely since it would have broken up the pressure in the atmosphere. But each time she looked, it was the identical dusty, caked iron railing that she saw. Perspiring in the hot night, she fell into an uncomfortable sleep. In the morning, she needed something to drink, but she refused to touch the water from the tap. At the bus station, not far from the train station, she bought a warm bottle of Coca-Cola.

The morning was overcast and even more humid. A bright, painful haze was scattered over Kotagiri, so that nobody cast shadows. It was all subsumed in the overcast heaviness of a rain-filled sky that did not rain. Janice waited in line behind short, round-limbed men who argued excitedly among themselves. She was reminded of Mexico, the relaxed pace of life that had something lethal in it.

She showed her note to the man behind the ticket cage. He wrote out the cost with a contemptuous air, and she paid. At 11:25 there was an announcement over the loudspeaker; the ticket seller waved to get her attention, then pointed to the bus coughing smoke outside. Janice emerged into the main yard, followed the dark-coated men into the bus, and sat down in the back. As the bus pulled away, a few spires rose into view, and some leafy streets, but Janice hoped she would never again see Kotagiri for the rest of her life.

As the bus continued east, then cut to the south, Janice saw mountain ranges to both the east and west. The land was rolling, green and gray where the boulders were stacked, and there were no fences. It looked unbounded, wild, and primitive. The villages the bus rumbled through were composed of mud-encrusted wood huts, many with thatch intertwined on the roof, and rusted iron which helped support the porch pillars. Children watched in amazement, a curious passivity on their lovely faces, as though the bus belonged to a different, and superior, solar system.

The road turned pink, then red. The villages were fewer and farther in between, smaller, and now no children came to gawk. Army soldiers watched, bored, at key crossroads.

Janice felt certain that the ashram could not have taken this long to reach. She went to the front of the bus and showed the driver the note that Mehrotra had written. The driver became so confused, he stopped the bus in the middle of the highway and engaged the entire crowd of passengers in a heated argument concerning its location. Then he gestured for Janice to sit down, and he started the engine and serenely drove on.

A sudden spasm shook her abdomen, making her gasp. Silently, she cursed whatever it was that made Western digestive systems vulnerable to half the world.

The driver stopped the bus and motioned for Janice to step forward. As she came near the driver’s seat, he pointed to a small dirt road just off the highway.

“Ashram?” Janice asked again and again, and showed him her note.

He brushed her note aside and pointed to the dirt road. He opened the door and ushered Janice out into the blazing day. Another man gently handed her the suitcase and with a smile pointed to the dirt road. The bus coughed, ground its gears, and rumbled on, ever uphill, toward the distant southern peaks.

Janice had never felt so lost. She fought back tears. Who the hell knew how far away the ashram really was? Was it just a short walk up the road? Or far across the valley? Or in some no-man’s-land where the soldiers forbade entrance to tourists?

Janice walked down the road raising brown dust over her trousers. From time to time she paused, catching her breath. Though she was thirsty, she would have to wait until she got to the ashram. Not only would they have a well, they would take pains to boil the water for her first. Janice came to the top of the slope. There was no ashram.

There was a gentle valley, covered in loose deciduous forest. She noticed that the road continued down the slope toward the forest. Maybe the ashram was tucked among the thick trees. It made sense, that feeling of being reclusive in the woods.

Janice crossed the top of the slope. The road twisted down into the darkness of the forest. As she walked, she felt certain that the ashram must be around the next curve. Monkeys leaped among the treetops, screeching. The trees became so dense and the clouds so dark, that it was like night. The sweat had long since ruined her blouse and her trousers, and the ubiquitous red clay soiled her sandals like a tanduri food dye. The suitcase pulled heavily at her arm. She looked for the orange robes among the trees, but saw only the thick, tangled roots of trees that seemed perched halfway into the air.

She became frightened that she might pass the ashram without seeing it. It might be disguised in the thickets, the shrine being no more than a conglomeration of vines, branches, and a tiny stone sculpture. Perhaps it had a secret entrance. Janice had heard of religious orders holed up in caves turned into temples.

The forest cover became so thick that, had the rain finally broken, she would not have noticed. She listened to the birds making a raucous din overhead. The whole of India seemed to be screeching at her, warning her not to enter. At least, if the animals of the forest set up a racket, she thought, the ashram would immediately know a stranger had come. Surely at least one member would have the curiosity to take a look. A Western woman in the foothills. Hoover would have to catch wind of that. If Hoover was anywhere around at all.

There was a sound of heavy wooden wheels. Janice stopped. Out of the gloom of the down-winding road came a farmer, his ragged black hair plastered down with dirt and sweat. His clothes were so dirty that there was no color under the caked earth and dung on them. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Janice. As she approached, she took out Mehrotra’s letter and gently showed it to him. He backed away, being illiterate, frightened of the script. He picked up the support poles of his cart and began hurrying up the trail.

“Ashram?” Janice shouted after him, feeling like a fool.

He cast one dark glance backward over his shoulder, turned the corner and was gone. Janice listened to the silence. It was an uncanny silence. A second ago the monkeys, birds, and chattering insects had kept up a din of voices, and now it was silent. As soon as she had shown the farmer the note, like a magic talisman, everything had become still. Now when she walked, her own footsteps made the only sound.

Her sandals padded softly on the dark red clay, winding down, down toward the river. There were no clearings in the forest, only the rank, primeval growth. Gradually, as she walked, distraught, the chatter of the forest began again, until the air was filled with a shrill crescendo of screams.

Then she saw a marker: a post painted red at the top. Within the red paint was an image. She leaned closer. It was a crude carving of a tiger. A smaller path led from the post into the depths of the forest. She paused. It was obvious that something lay at the end of the path. But what? Tejo Lingam meant incarnation of fire, or something about fire — not tiger. Still, the path invited her. It wound gently into the darkness, through the creeping vines and the glossy plants that looked like a hothouse gone rebellious. What attracted her was that the path was neatly cut. Somebody tended it. It was the kind of activity that a religious order would do — like the Temple in Manhattan — that neatness, that manicured care which expressed internal harmony.

Janice looked down the path, walked twenty paces, and saw the path emerging from the woods into the sultry fields again. She returned to the tiger post. She glared down at the hideous face, cut so deep that the vermilion paint had filled in the carved lines, making a pure red against the grain of the wood. Janice took a deep breath and entered the narrow path.

13

No sunlight filtered down through the woods. Only a gray, leaden light that seemed to belong to the Pleistocene Era, it was so rank, so humid. Orchids burst into glorious sprays of white overhead, but they no longer looked beautiful, they looked carnivorous in some strange way. She avoided huge, glistening black beetles under her feet.

There was a second tiger post. The path continued, meandering into thickets. The birds flew low under the canopy of overhanging leaves, diving among the vines. There was a third post, a fourth. Then she smelled smoke far away, coming in low through the cool, dry odor of rotting roots and dead logs. Janice paused to catch her breath.

She knew Elliot Hoover was near. This was his landscape. Primeval. Frightening. Yet strangely beautiful. He would have the courage to live here, in prayers and ritual, afraid of nothing. There was something savage in his faith, some power that Janice never comprehended. Yet it was for that strength, for that charismatic compassion, that she had come so far, against every shouting voice in her conscience. For Bill. It seemed so strange that her destiny had led her to such a hideously lovely forest, so far from home, so alien to everything she knew. She suddenly wondered if Bill knew where she was. And was there something deep inside her that wanted to see Elliot Hoover, not for Bill, but for herself? Janice became frightened. The thoughts had a life of their own, as though the tangled wealth of forest creepers, flaming flowers, and glittering leaves had whispered their own ideas into her brain. Was she just frightening herself with false ideas? Or was a dark truth emerging, now that she was on the threshold of finding him?

She walked on. Abruptly, there was a pair of tiger posts, and then a clearing. Yellow, dry grass grew where the forest had been cleared, an island of tranquility surrounded by dense undergrowth. The yellow grass was parched, sloped upward to a small house made of forest logs tied together. Inside the hut — it had no door — was a smooth, polished floor, and it looked like burnished mahogany. There was brass, or gold, gleaming inside the hut, and a vermilion image of a deity rising from the painted flames, and next to it several ocher bowls hanging from the roof.

Next to the shrine was a second, longer house. Janice now saw men on its porch, and her heart raced violently.

They were all Hindus, their bodies short, rounded, faces down low to the ground as they conversed. They wore carmine cloth tucked up into their belts, and their hair was so greasy or pomaded that it glistened from across the empty field.

Janice desperately looked between the two buildings. There was no Hoover. A figure came from behind the long house, carrying a bucket of water. The figure was tall, his slender shoulders sloped slightly from the weight of the load. Janice gasped. As the figure turned, she saw that the face was aboriginal, flat-nosed, nearly black, and the slim limbs graceful and jet black. Two more figures came into view as Janice walked slowly toward the compound. They tended a rusted can strung over a fire by a single wire on stick supports. Neither was Elliot Hoover.

Janice took another step, left the path, and entered the compound itself, where a small gate had been erected with a small brass bell. Suddenly, one of the men tending the fire leaped to his feet and raced forward, his orange robe flying behind. He waved his arms violently at her.

“No woman!” he shouted. “No woman!”

“But I must find—”

“No! Forbidden!”

Backing away at his vehemence, Janice was appalled at the ferocity of his black pupils, the narrow slits of anger that the eyes had become. She had no doubt whatsoever that he would kill her if necessary to preserve the sanctity of the ashram.

“Elliot Hoover,” Janice called from the path where she had retreated. “An American! Is Elliot Hoover here?”

But the man only glared at her. Janice backed away farther to the edge of the forest. Satisfied, the man walked slowly back to the fire and sat down cross-legged, poking at the coals with a sharpened stick.

Janice walked back out from the path, but this time did not approach the gate with the bell. She went past it, parallel to the field of yellow grass. The man looked up from his fire but did not move. She looked from her new perspective, but saw only a single woodcutter, hacking branches from a dead tree with a primitive instrument that looked like a hoe.

“Elliot Hoover!” she called.

There was no answer. After ten minutes of standing alone, feeling ridiculous and yet determined, Janice saw a monk walking slowly toward her. His head was down, and yet his legs seemed to move in a familiar stride, direct and yet soft, as though his whole being knew exactly where he was going and how many paces it would take, and that he had all of eternity to get there.

“Elliot?” she whispered.

The monk looked up. It was a brown face, thin, the face of an ascetic. The eyes were very dark, almost black, and they seemed to look out at her with irritation.

“Why is it you have come to disturb us?” he asked calmly.

“I beg your pardon,” she stammered. “I truly am sorry….”

“What is your purpose here?” he asked in a flutelike voice that reminded her of one who took drugs, it was so otherworldly and disassociated.

“I am looking for a friend,” Janice said softly.

“Who is your friend?”

“Elliot Hoover, an American, about six feet tall, blue eyes—”

“Yes. We know Elliot Hoover very well. He is not here.”

“Not here?”

The monk sighed, as though regretting the complication of an explanation. Over his shoulder, Janice saw the other monks, oblivious of her presence, worshiping, some out in the field now, in the lotus position of trance.

“There was a subdivision among the order,” the monk said. “You must know that we believe in performing works of charity and ahimsa—that is, peace and nonviolence to all living beings.”

Janice pretended to know it with a nod.

“And you must, by now, know about the revolts to the south?”

“Revolts?”

“Yes. The North has repressed the facts. But it is very bad. This whole area has been evacuated.”

Astounded, Janice’s mouth opened. The idea of warfare was incongruous against the tranquility of the ancient forest and the sloping field of prayer.

“Then why are you still here?” she finally asked.

The monk smiled indulgently.

“The vicissitudes of material life do not concern us,” he said defiantly, looking directly into her eyes, challenging her very existence.

“But Elliot Hoover…?”

“He and several others decided to help the victims of the conflict. They left nearly a week ago.”

Janice felt weak. If she had known where he was, if she had flown straight from Tel Aviv to Mysore City and then taken the train south…

“Where? Where is he now?” she asked.

“I am sure that he is where the fighting is. And that is over the mountains.”

The monk gestured to the heavy black clouds to the south. Janice heard a deep rumble of thunder that echoed through unseen mountain valleys. She looked up. There was a sense of rain, but the forest, the path, the compound were all bone dry.

“Very bad,” the monk added sorrowfully. “When the rains come, the villages suffer disease. Disease from the floods, you understand?”

“Yes, I see. Do you expect floods?”

“There are always floods. It is the nature of things.” The monk gazed at her with compassion. “Perhaps if you go down to the village in the valley below, you can ask at the military compound. They screen everybody who goes beyond the Cauvery River. They will know where our members are.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Do not fear the army. Do you have your passport?”

“Yes.”

“Explain to them that you come from the ashram. So they will not be suspicious. But do not fear them. They are still disciplined.”

“Thank you very much.”

“May you find your friend.”

The monk turned abruptly and walked slowly, placidly, back to the compound. The birds screamed at his departure. Janice stood alone in the shadow of the great forest, feeling utterly alone. At length she picked up her small suitcase and followed the road down into the valley. She felt more secure when it entered the main road. As she descended the slope, the forest rapidly thinned until she looked across a steep drop of dried grass to the rapid Cauvery.

Across the river was a stone bridge, buttressed by logs. A flag flew from what appeared to be a military outpost. At least there were two convoy trucks and a jeep parked in front of it. The ground was heavily plowed by the tires of the heavy trucks, as though they had only come there recently, and it was still the scene of feverish activity. But now there was no one visible. The river made a dull music against the stones of the bridge, and the logs rose and fell, banging and grating against the wires that held them.

Janice walked out from the forest. Sheep moved slowly away from her, looking for green grass. The dried pellets of manure covered the path and were impossible to avoid. Janice looked for a sign of life, but there was still no movement in the village.

A donkey suddenly brayed, a vicious, snarling laughter. Then a soldier walked around the rear of one of the convoy trucks. He stopped as soon as he saw her and bristled. He looked illiterate, his uniform was two sizes too large, and suddenly the monk’s phrase “still disciplined” came to mind. It was easy to see that military discipline was a burden barely imposed on the village mind.

Janice reached into her handbag and showed her passport. The soldier examined it, saw that the photograph matched the person, but did not know the purpose of a passport. He went to the door of the outpost, knocked deferentially, and opened it. He gestured for Janice to follow him in.

A sergeant sat at a large, scarred desk. He had a drooping mustache and black hair. His uniform was spotless and a little tight. He took special pride in his leather cross-belt with its shining medals. A black revolver hung at his belt. He was very surprised to see Janice walk in by herself. He kept looking for someone to come in after her and when no one did, he ordered that the door be closed. In the gloomy dank air, Janice finally noticed a second soldier, as unkempt as the first, who had snapped to attention when she entered.

Suddenly, the thunder rolled overhead, drowning out the sound of the river. Janice presented her passport. The sergeant took a long time to study it and her, buying time, since he clearly did not know what to do.

“American?” he finally said.

“Yes. You speak English?”

“No.”

He scrutinized her entry stamp in the passport, showed it to the soldier, who spoke a few words while still at attention. The sergeant handed her the passport.

“Area is closed,” he said in good English.

“I’m looking for someone.”

“No.”

“I’ve come from the ashram.”

The sergeant stroked his mustache and looked at her clothes.

“Tourist?”

“I’m not a tourist. I have business here. I’m looking for my husband.”

“Husband?” the sergeant said suspiciously.

“Yes,” Janice faltered.

Suddenly the air had taken a chill. The sergeant glanced nervously over his shoulder at the black sky.

“Rain,” he said, agitated. “Soon too much rain.”

He snapped his fingers, pointed at Janice’s passport in her hand; she dropped it on the desk. He telephoned and waited a long time. He spoke quickly, then pronounced her name very slowly, with bad pronunciation. Janice waved to get his attention.

“His name is not Templeton,” she whispered.

“But he is your husband?”

“Yes.”

“What is he called?”

“Elliot Hoover.”

“Ell-i-ot Hoo-ver,” he said into the receiver, then waited.

“American,” Janice whispered.

The sergeant gestured impatiently for her to be quiet. He nodded, listening, then hung up.

“Mr. Hoover is registered in a village in sector number five. He is with three members of the ashram that worships—Tejo Lingam.”

“Yes, I understand.”

“The sector is stable, so it is not impossible to meet him.”

“God bless you,” Janice blurted.

“Excuse me?”

“I said, thank you very much. Very, very much.”

The sergeant blushed, cleared his throat, and stood up. He tried to be angry, as though to restore a sense of his command.

“A truck will move to sector five tonight.”

Janice nodded.

“There is a small house,” he continued, “next to the river. You can rest there.”

The sergeant smiled, satisfied that things were under control. He spoke to the soldiers waiting at the door. They indicated for Janice to follow them down a small path among the saplings.

The house had once been whitewashed, but now it was caked with dried mud along the bottom and large cracks showed down the walls. Inside it smelled of feces and dry dust. She saw a tattered mattress, heavily mildewed and rotted at one end. On it the soldiers had carefully placed two blankets stamped with the insignia of the Indian Army, and one soiled pillow. From her suitcase Janice selected fresh underwear and stockings. She changed beneath the privacy of her blanket and gingerly settled on the mattress. Then she put one blanket under her, the other around her, and lay her head on the clean end of the pillow. The saplings outside rustled in the wind. The river splashed, strangely irregular, as though too much water was funneling down from the heights. She wondered if the rains had started further south. Janice dropped into a heavy sleep, and the last thing she thought she heard was bells far away, perhaps from the Tejo Lingam ashram.

Janice awakened at eight. It was dark. Fires were lit to boil tea. Then boots quickly stamped them out. Shouts were heard. The trucks exploded into action, the engines roaring, soldiers jumping into their seats. The sergeant looked anxiously for Janice and found her on the stone steps of the headquarters.

“Come,” he ordered. “You shall ride with me. First class.”

Janice swallowed and climbed into the cab. She was pinched between the sergeant, who stroked his mustache and kept looking into his own sideview mirror, and the driver, a short man with a sloping forehead and thick eyebrows. The sergeant waved an arm, and the two trucks slowly pulled out of the outpost.

In the darkness, Janice saw the headlights pick out rough tracks of other trucks. Scrub brush grew in profusion along the rutted road. The trucks were climbing, at first gradually, then making hairpin curves that left the driver sweating and offering apologies to the sergeant.

“The bandits all run away,” the sergeant chuckled. “Look. How many do you see?”

Janice looked straight ahead, hoping to see nothing but the livid forms of dirt that the powerful headlights threw up suddenly from the humid void. The truck plowed into the hard clay at the side of the road and stopped. The supply truck had innocently followed and was now also stuck in the dust. Cursing, the sergeant had the men dig out the supply truck, and the two vehicles then backed down the road. Shamefaced, the driver bent low over his wheel and peered into the darkness.

“You must love your husband very much,” the sergeant said after a while. “To come all this way for him.”

Janice smiled. “Yes, I do,” she said simply.

After two hours, the supply truck honked its horn. The lead truck stopped, the sergeant jumped out, and there was a waving of arms and arguments. Janice looked into the sideview mirror. She saw the sergeant slap a soldier across the face. Then the soldiers leaped back into the cab of the supply truck. Soon they were laboring up the mountainside again.

“The problem,” the sergeant said, when he had regained his composure, “is the monsoon.”

“The monsoon?”

“Yes. When it does not come, the earth dies. When it comes, the earth drowns. And these stupid people, they do not understand why the government must interfere in their lives and build dams!” He laughed. “They are like children. Like baboons. They believe in magic. Their children die, but still they go to the magician, not the doctor. I tell you, we shall teach them a lesson!”

Again, he patted his revolver. What worried Janice was his need to reassure himself. The sergeant licked his lips and peered anxiously into the darkness on all sides. After half an hour, the trucks stopped, maps were brought out, and the sergeant finally decided which of two mountain roads to take. The trucks rumbled on.

Janice was just dozing off when the trucks abruptly halted.

“Sector Number Five,” the sergeant said.

Eagerly, Janice jumped down from the cab. The ride had taken so long that her legs had cramped, and she had to walk slowly, unstiffening them. As the soldiers clumsily unloaded their wooden boxes, she followed the sergeant toward a dark hut.

“I will ask about your husband,” he said softly.

As he went inside, the horizon glimmered. Jagged mountain peaks were suddenly visible. Then the thunder rumbled into the darkness. Soldiers ran back and forth in rain ponchos, but there was no rain. The breeze turned cold as it had the night before. The sergeant came out.

“The group from the ashram are in the first village. The village is in the valley. When the rain comes, the village will drown.”

“But I have to go there!”

“My officer says no. It is a bad idea.”

“My husband is there!”

“There is nothing I can do.”

The sergeant walked away. Janice ran after him.

“What if I disobey your officer and go?” she called.

“You will drown.”

“How can you be so sure?”

The sergeant looked at her, fatigued, bored with her, and eager to get some sleep.

“Every year the village drowns,” he said. “I told you, they are like baboons. Like children.”

As the sergeant turned, Janice shouted after him.

“What will you do to me if I go?”

He shrugged. “Bury you,” he said.

Dismayed, Janice walked back to the two trucks. They were empty. Blocks had been placed around the tires. The compound looked deserted. She walked back toward the huts where the soldiers slept. She found the sergeant coming back from the latrine.

“I am going down,” she told him. “Tonight.”

The sergeant sighed, then shrugged. “The road continues down the mountain. Follow it.”

“How far?”

“Two miles.”

“All right, then. I’m going. May I leave my suitcase?”

“As you wish.” Janice shivered. Her own bravado began to sound hollow. Nevertheless, she had come too far only to find another empty village, a place where Hoover had been. By now, he might have heard from a pilgrim, stopping at the Tejo Lingam ashram that an American woman was looking for him. Perhaps Mehrotra had been able to reach him in some way. He might be in Benares, or back at the ashram, looking for her. Or he might be over the mountain. Or he might be dead.

14

The road was tricky to follow, since she had no light. She also felt like a fool. India was full of tigers, as everybody knew. India was full of poisonous snakes. India was full of rebels and scorpions and panthers. But it seemed so unreal. There was only the night, and the hard, baked road that she sensed out of the corner of her eye, leading down, going around curves through the scrub brush and dry earth. India also had monsoons. Her imagination began to conjure images of walls of water, islands of houses swimming around, sucked under in great whirlpools.

“Come on,” she whispered. “Get hold of yourself.”

After half an hour the vegetation at the side of the road had become dense. She was soaked through with sweat, and she knew she was grimy from head to toe. She thought she heard rain. She stopped. Nothing. The leaves of unknown bushes throbbed in a crosscurrent of chilly and warm winds.

An hour passed, and she began to wonder if the sergeant had really known how far the village was. Clods of dark clay crumbled under her broken sandals. She felt too frightened to turn around and go back. She cursed herself for being such a fool as to end up in a strange country, on a dark road, waiting for the thunderstorm. It was like a fate that she had relentlessly pursued since the day she landed in India. Well, finally she had caught up with it.

She passed a deserted hut. Then a second. Debris littered the fields, dry and broken, where nothing seemed to grow but dead stalks. The debris meant the village was near. She peered into the darkness, but saw nothing but the road. It was so dark she had to feel her way, her foot scraping at the clay that meant the road.

Another half hour passed, and a third hut, this one with a donkey outside, and babies crying inside. Janice paused. The road branched suddenly into a fork. Standing in the middle of the road, she heard a strange, laughing yell. It sounded like an insane dog. Her heart beating almost out of control, she walked quickly down the right branch. After ten minutes a light bobbed into view, then another. Janice almost wept as the fear evaporated. She stumbled down into the main village, which was only five small buildings and two broken-down sheds. Bottles were littered all over the ground. There was no river in this valley. It was deathly silent, now that the dogs were quiet. Only the incoming wind hissed over the cracked piles of dirt in the fields.

Thunder boomed nearby. It was barely a mile away. The echoes died very slowly. Janice walked through the village, but all the lights were off. It was well past midnight. She was afraid to knock on any door that was closed.

She would have to wait until the morning before she could spot the orange robes of the monks and, hopefully, Elliot Hoover.

Janice peered into the first shack with an open door. Something slithered rapidly across the dirt floor. It occurred to her that body warmth would attract snakes. She walked to the second shack. It was evil-smelling but it looked cleaner. Heat lightning flared over the horizon, casting its soft glare onto the boxes and metal bolts and nails on the floor. She went in and lay down on a pile of empty canvas bags, neatly folded.

The night was endless. There was no possibility of sleep. Elliot Hoover was certainly in the next hut, or in the field she had passed, or sleeping with the animals at the edge of town. She thought of Bill, probably strapped in his bed. She wondered if Dr. Geddes would consider her as insane as Bill. It would not occur to him that half the world believed as Bill did, as she almost did, having come to believe stronger and stronger since seeing Benares. But what was the use? Bill was not in Benares. He was on Long Island. On Long Island they put you away for too many religious ideas. Or at least for acting on them.

She fastened upon one consoling thought: Elliot Hoover would know exactly what to do. Janice prayed the night would pass swiftly, that she would finally find him before the dew was dry.

Janice lay on the canvas sacks and stared upward at a bare electric wire. The filaments dangled in tiny radiating circles. Lightning flashed behind her back, shot through the cracks and holes of the far wall, and made her silhouette leap out in front of her eyes. Rain was falling. It came without an interruption of sound, a steady drumroll on the roof. The air was cold and wet.

Something cold grazed her cheek. She screamed, bolted upright, and saw a dark trickle flinging itself down from the roof crossbeam. She stood up and dragged the canvas bags to the other side of the floor and lay down miserably again. Instantly the canvas bags were soaked. Janice moved to the far corner, sat down on the dusty floor, and disconsolately watched a large puddle form around the sacks. The thin trickle of water had widened to a black stream thudding into the dirt floor.

“Jesus Christ,” she whispered.

Just then a chunk of mud fell from the roof beams. A column of water roared into the room, and with it the cold of the predawn. Janice stood as though afraid of the watery intruder and stared at the floor turning into mud. She backed against the wall. That wall was also wet, oozing the monsoon rain like cold sweat. When she looked up, she saw the roof beams bending down, weirdly elastic, sagging toward the floor.

Janice ran to the door. As her hand touched the doorjamb, the roof caved in. It was like being on a ship that was breaking up. Waves of water billowed down, flung by roaring black winds. The night thundered its storm, a horror of death in a steady, roaring imprecation.

“Oh God!” Janice called, her voice unheard in the roar.

The water was already ankle deep. The canvas sacks and boxes were floating, nudged back and forth by the storm. Bits of debris from the walls and corner supports bobbed at her feet. Overhead Janice saw a clear track of lightning, a perfect forked tongue of livid white against massed black sky. There was no roof anymore.

Janice stood under the doorjamb. Beyond the door was the dirt road and the village, and small palm trees driven down under the weight of the rain. The mud in the village was moving, carrying dead animals, rusted cans and vague shapes that looked like corpses.

“Elliot!” she screamed.

She could not even hear her own voice. Lightning illuminated the village. There were three structures standing and two structures with only walls. A dog was frightened and half swam, half walked uphill against the moving mud, its coat matted and slicked back until it looked like a wart hog. The darkness returned, and with it a low roar was heard under the storm: a house had collapsed, its clay and timbers were crashing together.

“Elliot!”

It was absurd. The dog was also howling. But the only thing audible now was the driving rain and the sucking, sliding mud. The mud had become more liquid, and it flowed faster downhill and around the standing houses, eddying, pushing, relentless. The support over Janice’s head blew off and, soaked to the skin, she saw the mud coming her way.

She groped out into the night. An electric wire somewhere was live, flashing and spitting sparks where it flapped hideously at the violent trickles of water. Figures were moving inside, but there were no lights, and they looked as helpless as the dog. Far in the distance a piece of the hill bulged behind the outpost. Then it opened up into five holes and spouted water like a fountain. The dark earth vomited forth and shot forward into the outpost with the force of the water. A small supply truck tipped over slowly, grandiosely, like a ballet of elephants. With horror Janice saw the distant remnants of the army fighting for their lives, ignoring cries for help, grabbing and kicking for higher ground.

Janice looked around her. A raft went by — a morass of saplings, mud, a piece of religious shrine, and a screaming cat — right where her hut had been. Janice panicked, but her legs found incredible strength, and they dug against the oozing mud. Her arms paddled at the heavy liquid around her calves. The only thought in her existence now was higher ground, higher ground. A crimson robe floated by, oddly elegiac, like Ophelia, on the vicious waters. Janice screamed.

The water plastered her trousers to her legs, her shirt to her breasts. She felt soaked as she had never felt soaked. Her hair was a dense black mass, heavy and sodden, lumped in front of her eyes. She reached for a firm root, but the root slid upward out of the liquefied earth. Janice fell backward, rolled into the rushing water, and smelled the noxious odor of the red clay in her mouth.

Tiny sharp bits — gravel or nails — stung her face. She fought to stand up, but her feet were being washed out of the mud, until there was no mud, nothing to stand on, only water. She was being pulled downstream. She swam, her arms and legs kicking in unison, swallowing the heavy water that slammed at her face. Her lungs were bursting; there was no way to breathe in the ferocious river. She felt herself trailing away, falling backward into a deep darkness, down river, down the hill, always downward into the maelstrom.

Her arms clutched something that floated. She threw her clinging hair to one side and looked behind her. Matted clumps of army boxes, blankets, and food tins bobbed up and down, catching the light of a cold gray day. The rain came down like a wall. There was no village. Only a moving river of mud, water, and bits of things that had once been huts, fences, or chairs. A piece of colored cloth rapidly floated by, and Janice remembered the crimson robe. Desperately she turned to look down the stream, and then she saw what she was clinging to: two dead goats, their forelegs locked in a death embrace.

Janice screamed, but her arms only grappled tighter against the cold, hairy forms, feeling the bones underneath. Somehow there was sufficient air in their bellies to keep them afloat. There was no sense of a river anymore, only an angry ocean of currents going in opposed directions, filling the valley, destroying everything it reached.

Far away in the darkness, form crumbled from form, and Janice knew that the hills were giving way. Huge splashes showed where boulders and entire trees on the upper slopes were rolling into the rising water. Lightning cracked in two places. Janice sensed utter physical defeat, and her arms grew weak. In horror, feebly protesting, her cramped fists beating uselessly against her fate, she saw the monsoon rip her two dead goats away, and the muddy taste knocked into her nostrils again.

Then eternity seemed to pass through her. It was loathsome and dark and vicious. She had no will, no intelligence, only a small spark of something that was afraid. It was as though she did not exist. Strange sounds, like bells, clanged far away. She felt no sensation in her legs or arms, or even her head and chest. Something dark was coming to reclaim her, to make her disintegrate once again.

Sounds of the monsoon; her head was above water; a knock from a dislodged timber; screams of iron wrenched from its beams; something steady underfoot, dislodged, whirling around; a whirlpool, falling, with timbers. The small spark inside flickered, tried to go out; lungs bursting, on fire, under water…

Rough hands. She knew the sensation. Rough hands, callused. With bone underneath. Along her shoulder and back. An illness, a nausea that she could not expel, shot through her. The roaring was inside, not in the storm. The rough hands dragged her upward. She sensed her own feet, far away, dragging through slimy mud. She wanted to open her eyes, but they were closed in the opiate of a leaden fatigue. Just then a sheet of pain flared along her left leg.

“Elliot!” she blurted.

Still she could not open her eyes. An undulating green roof seemed to be lifting in front of her. Something was under the stinking roof: it was herself, in some way, the remnants of what she was. She felt warmth everywhere like a fever, and she knew she was alive.

She opened her eyes. A mud plain stretched under her feet. Around her were dead bodies, most bloated, naked, their genitals scarred, their arms and faces caked with mud, their eyes squeezed sockets where the skulls had caved in. There was no river, no village, not a tree, not a blade of grass — just the mud, with a thousand sloping channels where the water had receded. A cool drizzle plopped into the mud, making a million tiny holes.

Janice was being dragged up the slope. Her two feet made a trail that stretched as far as she could see. Suddenly she passed a huge bulk: a dead bull, its front legs folded peacefully underneath, its enormous horns jammed into the mud. Still she was dragged higher. Just as she wondered who was pulling her, and turned to look, the curtains seemed to come down again, and she slipped into nothingness.

Slowly her eyes opened. She was in a large room. The ceiling was mottled with decay and mildew, but it was dry. Two naked light bulbs hung from the ceiling, both on, even though the small windows showed it was day. Rain came down on the roof, but it was a smaller rain. Janice heard a chorus of moans. She turned her head. Next to her was an aged woman’s face, the hands tucked under the cheek, the mouth and eyes open in silent horror, dead.

She was in a makeshift hospital. At least that was what it looked like. Two doctors in dirty white coats, pockets bulging, pants soiled by mud, pus, and streaks of dried blood, darted among twelve mattresses on a cold stone floor. The doctors were both North Indian, with the longer, more oval faces and slender noses. They were totally fatigued, their eyes glazed with weariness, and they stumbled as they walked, barking orders, irritated. Wails rose from the twelve beds; Janice realized her own mouth was giving out moans, and she grew silent.

Through the door the smaller, darker South Indians were visible. Two of them hauled a corpse up from the mud. They all wore handkerchiefs over their mouths and nostrils. A fire burned ferociously despite the rain, and Janice watched in fascinated horror as the corpse was laid, with the barest formality, on top of the flames. She turned her head to avoid the charring of flesh.

To her left Janice saw the doctors operate on a man whose arms beat wildly into the air. They had no anesthetic, and it took three villagers to hold his feet and two more to hold his other arm. Finally the doctors found a piece of rope and lashed the punctured arm to a beam in the wall, where they quickly began their incisions. Janice turned away and stared at the ceiling.

Already the dead woman next to her had been removed. Another body, this one making tiny gasps like a frightened rabbit, took her place. Janice knew where the old woman had gone. She heard the villagers throwing sticks onto the fire. Janice stared up continually at the ceiling. She had difficulty remembering who she was, or why she was among these dark people. The ceiling rose and fell as she breathed, her fever making it almost glow.

Through the day she slept, woke, watched the ceiling, and slept again. She did not turn to look when the body next to her was removed and another put in its place. Vaguely she wondered why she did not die, why they did not drag her out to the huge bonfire. She turned. In the same fire that burned the bloated bodies, the doctors were sterilizing instruments in cans of boiling water.

Night came, and the steady rain kept up. The doctors did not sleep. Janice remembered how she had been pulled from the mud. She remembered the mud swirling through the village. But only gradually did she remember why she had been in the village. She craned her neck, looking for orange robes. There were only the dull, matted clothes of the villagers, many of whom slept against the walls.

This was a chamber of death, Janice thought. They had all been pulled from the mud, and those who survived at first nevertheless died later. Maybe the soldiers had shot them. Maybe they had the cholera. But they were all thrown onto the twelve mattresses until they could die and be burned.

She raised herself to an elbow, looked all around the dark room. A chorus of heavy breathing, whimpers, and grunts of pain came back to her. A primeval fear of doctors overwhelmed her and she became frightened that they would come to her with their lethal scalpels. She sank back onto the mattress.

The soldiers on the porch to the long room, their arms in slings, argued loudly. The doctors remonstrated with them and stalked off. Janice wondered if the sergeant was there, or the officer who had been so unfriendly at the crest of the hill. She saw only the unkempt, wild-eyed soldiers, who bore not the slightest trace of being disciplined.

A warm hand soothed her forehead with a damp cloth.

“Elliot?” she asked, startled, looking up.

Two pale blue eyes looked down at her from a thousand miles away. A rough face, a familiar face, grizzled, drawn from lack of sleep, with a small scar on the lower lip. The hand wiped away the sweat, the mud and the confusion. Her eyes blurred in hot tears.

“My leg…” she whispered.

There was a general flow of pain through her left leg, clear to the hip, and a sensation of rough hands under her. The leg was straightened and the pain became diffuse again. The sheet, dirty and bloodied, was tucked under her shoulders. The face began to swim away from her, and she reached for the hand that had soothed her forehead.

It was not there. No one was there. Only the wall, where flies had gathered, anticipating death.

She blacked out, feeling the familiar sheet of oblivion cover her.

Days seemed to pass. Gradually voices became more distinct. In the front room the soldiers barged in, pushing the doctors aside. Janice recognized the officer from the crest of the hill. He was angrily pointing and shouting orders. The soldiers dragged a sick man from a mattress and dumped him in the rain. A wounded soldier was gently laid in his place. All this Janice saw through a feverish haze like a movie in a hot theater.

More soldiers were brought in, more villagers dragged out. Then the soldiers shouted in surprise, discovering Janice. Grizzled faces peered into her eyes. Hands poked and prodded her in amusement. The officer shouted and Janice felt rough hands pull her up. The room jostled, she cried out in the shock of pain shooting up from her hip, and then she was outside.

The soldiers carried her like a dead log. The mud slopes were visible again: a few clots of grass, but mostly the rivulets of rainwater and mud trickling down the morass of tangled logs, boulders and dead animals far below. Janice had never seen death on such a scale. It was the earth itself that had been mortally wounded. Hills were gouged out, roads dislodged, and whole forests cracked and rubbed away.

They lowered her to the ground next to the rusted canister in which the doctors sterilized their used bandages and knives. The rain came softly, cooling her forehead. Moans rose like the sound of distant barges. A sick cow, the huge rump in the air and the forelegs buckled, lowed pitifully.

“I’m burning… burning up…” Janice heard herself say.

No one turned to look at her. An ox was brought up slowly through the rain, pulling a small cart. A tall man, head lowered, led the ox. Villagers lifted two shivering children into the cart, then Janice, and then the cart jolted, she gasped, and the landscape began to recede.

The cart brought her higher into the hills. The field hospital became smaller, and the soldiers like tiny tin figures. Smoke rose without a waver from the fire. As she watched, another small body was placed onto the fire. The villagers hardly stirred. The entire slope of the hill, the valley floor, even the higher hills where the forest had been, was mud, still slithering occasionally in sudden spurts downhill — a foul landscape, viscous with disease.

So this is death, came the thought. It’s like a fever and it looks like mud.

The cart jolted regularly as the ox found its footing in the wet earth. As they went higher, bits of dead root and choked pools of black water went by. With each step four points of pain stabbed into Janice. The cart stopped. The man stepped down, examined the faces of the shivering children, and covered them with a thick blanket.

“Elliot—” she whispered. “Is it you?”

A voice came from the other end of the earth, gentle and kind, but almost broken by the exhaustion of suffering.

“Yes,” he said distinctly.

Astounded, Janice wiped the rain from her eyes. She blinked rapidly, and her hands groped toward the hallucination. But the hallucination took hold of her hands and gently pushed her back down against the children and the blankets.

“I heard from Mehrotra,” came the voice. “I went to the outpost at the river. They said I’d just missed you.”

“Is it really you?”

“Lie down, Janice. We have to get away from the soldiers.”

He went back to the front of the cart. The ox exhaled a steamy breath and pulled. The landscape began juggling again. A child whimpered. Janice pulled herself backward, wondering if she were dreaming. By instinct her arm went around the child; a small boy nestled against her chin, and the eyes began to close in sleep.

Janice craned her neck, staring at the driver. Now he did not look like Hoover. He was squatted down, with the posture of inexhaustible patience that all the farmers showed. Nothing moved except his chest as he breathed. He coughed, sending small puffs into the chill atmosphere.

He did not turn around. Janice sank back and huddled against the children. One of them asked her a question. She could only smile and caress the feverish cheek. It was getting dark, and the landscape was dissolving into a heavy gloom. The cart rumbled up, up to the crest of a hill, then it wound along a path that snaked its way across a green plateau. Night came, and the cart still moved on. Janice kept waking up to different patches of black earth, to different dead trees, and finally the cart began going down the other side. The trees here were still alive. Grass glittered in the moonlight, rain-wet but alive. Water trickled everywhere, a musical, pleasant sound that made sleep easier.

A child cried out. The cart stopped. Hoover came to the rear and asked a question in Tamil. The child responded. Gently Hoover spoke again, smiled, and made a joke. The child laughed and lay down in the blanket.

“Elliot, thank God it’s you.”

A strong hand felt her forehead. “You’re burning up. Try to sleep.”

He went back to the front, slapped the ox with his stick, and the cart rumbled down. Janice watched the clouds overhead, rolling in phantasmagoric shapes in front of the round moon, obscuring it, revealing it, like the eye of a distant god — the god of destruction, satisfied with what he had wrought. The next time she looked they were in a grove of trees, miraculously still tall, still luxuriant. She slept. When she looked again, the cart was pushing its way across a swollen stream, and the moonlight glittered like a million silver fish in the leaping black water.

Then she sensed peace. The cart had stopped, she was in his arms, and he was carrying her across a wet field toward a dark house. She lay against his chest like a child, her arms around his neck. He smelled like wet canvas and like mud and like medicines. The night grew even darker, and it was deathly quiet. She was inside the house. It was dry. Quiet. She lay on a clean bed.

“You’ll be all right here,” he said quietly. “Back there the soldiers might have mutinied.”

She nodded, not comprehending, but wanted to hear the voice go on. She stared at the face. It was Elliot Hoover.

“I’ve pulled the dirt from your wound,” he said. “Cleaned it out well. But I have no antibiotics.”

Janice focused her eyes on the calm face. Her hands traveled over the familiar features. There was no doubt. The pale blue eyes, the sensitive skin, now badly in need of a shave. The compassion that glowed like hot coals from deep inside. His hands covered hers.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered.

He smiled. “I have no choice, Janice. I have to help others. I’ll leave some food for you. Some bread and cheese that won’t spoil.”

“Please, don’t go! I must talk to you.”

“I’ll be back.”

Her fingers tightened around his collar, but he gently uncurled them and laid her hands across her breast. A clean blanket covered her. He stood over her, more shadow than solid form, looking down. For a long time he only breathed there, as though confused, uncertain whether to go or remain. Then he went to the two children sharing a bed next to her. They spoke quietly together. One of the children coughed badly. He showed them a white cheese. He kissed them gently on the forehead, then went outside. The ox cart began rumbling again.

The night passed slowly. Sleep was impossible. It was not the blanket but the fever that kept her warm. Janice was convinced that she would die before dawn. In the next bed two boys, aged about nine or ten, slept fitfully, their arms comically tangled. One of them kept whispering what sounded like a name — probably his mother’s — but the other only wheezed steadily, frighteningly. Through the window she watched the moon go down over the jagged horizon. They were high in the mountains, and here the vegetation was still thick, even dense, like a tropical forest. Black fronds rustled near the window, whispering obscenities, and Janice finally slept.

Dawn showed white sheep foraging peacefully on green slopes. White rocks interrupted the steady green of the slopes. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish the sheep from the rocks until there was a movement. Janice sat on the edge of the bed, shivering. She watched down the road. No sound. The emptiness was as profound as the vista of mud that had flattened the other side of the mountains.

She ate the flat bread, dry and unpleasant, and then encouraged the two boys to eat. Their small faces, round and flushed, dimly focused on her, and their mouths slowly worked at the bread. Then she had them eat some of the white cheese, though it tasted like rancid butter to her. They seemed to relish the cheese. She cooled their foreheads with a damp cloth and they fell asleep in each other’s arms.

Children, she thought, helpless as newborn fawns. They were also waiting. Perhaps they had more trust than she. If she could speak their language she would ask them who was the man who had driven off in the ox cart, if he was an American, if he had really spoken English to her, or if she had hallucinated the whole thing.

Night came. Janice looked over at the boys and removed the blanket which had slipped over their faces. Once again she dampened a cloth and cooled their foreheads. She ran the cloth over their chests, down their arms, legs and necks. One pair of dark brown eyes fluttered open, gazed at her in misery, and then closed again in slumber. Wearily, Janice went to the window.

It was nearly dawn. Against a hazy purple range of mountains, tinged pink at the crest where the unseen sun hit the upper slopes, came a dot the size of a fly, soundlessly, groping its way forward. As she fed the boys the last of the white cheese and bread, Janice looked again. The dimly perceived dot had separated into an ox, a man, and a cart, silhouetted now as the earth warmed and the road showed brown against the green hills.

For nearly an hour she watched it come closer. A boy came to the window, feebly pointed, and spoke to his brother, who smiled. Then it was no hallucination, Janice realized. Never had she doubted her own senses so completely. The illness, the dislocation from nearly drowning had thrown her system into a shock from which it had not yet recovered. Something deep inside had activated a kind of primal fear, and she felt instinctively the livid hostility of the earth.

Janice went to her bed and sank down. The chills began to emanate from her belly, until they were spasms, and she was shaking uncontrollably under the blankets. In a daze she heard the snorting of the ox. The boys tried to open the door but found the latch too heavy. Then a man came into the stone house with a wooden box on his shoulder. He put the box on the earth floor and took the boys by the hand back to bed. He spoke to them gently in a strange, flutelike language, and began preparing a mixture of powders from pills and capsules that he broke open and mixed with water. He spoon-fed the medicine into their mouths, then kissed them gently on the eyes and bade them sleep.

It was still a dream to Janice. His features, blocked up in a silhouette by the crisp sunlight of early morning, were indecipherable. At times he looked like an avenging angel, stern, the forehead well chiseled over a sensitive, an unmistakably American face. Other times he looked dark, South Indian dark, and his dirty hands were slender and bruised as though by a lifetime of manual labor.

He lifted his bag of medicines, and came to Janice’s bed. Her hands instinctively groped upward at the face, like a blind person trying to read the features. Two strong, calloused hands caught hers and restrained them.

“Elliot. Everything is so strange. I don’t know what’s real anymore.”

He bent down, made a paste of medicines, crushed them into a spoonful of water, and forced it into her mouth. She swallowed, still peering at the pale, glittering eyes of the man at the edge of the bed.

“Am I going to die?” she whispered.

His hand pushed her back onto the bed. Two pale blue eyes fixed her, speared her, frightened her with their intensity.

“Listen to me,” he said, examining her face, “you swallowed a lot of contaminated water. Do you understand?”

Astounded that she understood him, astounded that some measure of reality returned with the sound of his voice, she nodded dumbly.

“You’re going to live on boiled water, cheese and antibiotics,” he said, “and you do what I tell you.”

Her hand closed around his. She smiled, but was still confused. The room had begun to swim around her, growing elongated with every pass in front of her eyes.

“I have so much to tell you, Elliot,” she whispered. “I need your help….”

“Later,” he said.

She tried to whisper, but her voice had evaporated. Only her thoughts appeared, and they were inchoate, more like sensations than ideas. It was impossible even to begin to speak about Bill, about Dr. Geddes, about Juanita and the Master — and just as she tried, she began to fear that he would float away. He would evaporate like a dream. She clutched at his arm, but felt strong fingers remove her grasp. Then she sank backward into a sensuous river of sleep.

15

When Janice awoke, her body was clean and fragrant, and her hair, soft and recently washed, fanned out blackly against the clean linen of the pillow. A beautiful sunlight slanted in from the mountain clouds, creating strong polygons against the rough stone wall. The two boys sat up, drinking soup out of a tin so hot their eyes winced as they greedily consumed the broth.

Hoover stepped into the house, his tall figure bending under the low-cut wooden doorjamb.

“My hair smells so pretty! I feel so clean,” she said, laughing.

He cleared his throat, and dug a small, sharp knife into the edge of the door.

“You’ve lost a lot of weight,” he said.

She blushed. She lay against the pillow, happy to be alive, breathing in the fresh odor of green grass, the cool mountain water outside the house, and to know that she had at last found Hoover.

Janice stared at him. He too looked abnormally thin, almost bony around the face, but a sense of strength radiated from him, as though the monsoon flood had burned away everything but the core of his masculinity. He was like a wolf, grown lean but sinewy from hunger.

“You must have wanted very much to see me.”

“I did. I’ve come a long way. I have so much to tell you.”

Disturbed, he walked into the room, and began boiling more soup in the corner for the boys. Their small bodies, sitting up and more animated now, blocked his face. A smell of hot water, vegetables, and fatty meats swirled around the room.

“Do you mind that I’ve come?” she asked hesitantly. “There’s been an emergency. I needed you.”

Hoover rose and rubbed his face with both hands. He deliberately ignored her.

“I went back to the ashram,” he said, leaning against the wall. “They told me an American — a woman — had been looking for me — black hair…”

“Did you know then it was me?”

He nodded. For a long time neither spoke. A strong but indecipherable emotion clouded Hoover’s face. He turned away, as though to examine the clouds breaking up overhead, but in reality to avoid her stare.

“I didn’t want to see you,” he said softly.

She watched him, sitting on the windowsill, feet on the floor, and he looked exhausted, more exhausted than it seemed possible for any man to be. His words came tonelessly.

“But when they told me you had crossed the river,” he said, “I knew I had to get you out of there. The monks don’t understand warfare. To them it’s all a temporal part of life.”

“So you followed my footsteps to the outpost. And all the time I thought I was following you.”

He continued to ignore her, as though he were deaf or trying to obliterate her, to make certain that it was he who dominated the house. He began to look worried, and his voice grew louder but less certain of itself.

“To them your death would have been accepted quite philosophically. Like an insect’s.”

Janice said nothing. India had changed Elliot Hoover from what he had been in Manhattan.

Something had altered him forever.

“Anyway, what does it matter?” he said. “We’re both still alive.”

He slumped further against the sill, looking tired enough to sleep standing up.

“I didn’t want to see you,” he repeated. “But I was afraid of what the soldiers might do. You don’t understand this country. Down in the south, what happens during even a small war…”

“I can only thank you, however feeble that must sound.”

“Forget it. When you feel better you’ll tell me why you came to India. Now you should sleep.”

She drifted into a haze of heat, a reddish cloud of slumber that was draining. Hoover slept on the floor, his soft snores rising and falling rhythmically. Janice thought she saw the two boys remove his muddy coat, push a pillow under his head, but then she fell asleep again. When she awoke, many hours later, the boys were outside, and it was late afternoon, and the ox was stamping its foot into the earth while it munched long yellow stems of grass.

“We have to go down into the valley,” Hoover said quickly.

“What? Why?”

“The soldiers are moving this way. But now they’re only a bunch of bandits.”

Dizzily Janice saw Hoover load the cart, and the boys climb inside; then he came back into the house, took her by the arm, and led her into the warm sunshine. She walked slowly, leaning against his side. She followed his glance and saw, far off on the slope, a cluster of dark dots in a ragged movement coming down the road toward them.

“Once we get into the valley we’ll be safe,” he confided. His eyes shifted to her eyes and discerned the fear in them. “The Tejo Lingam is sacred. They won’t bother us.”

Janice put a foot onto the cart, but stumbled, and Hoover lifted her bodily like a sack of stones and set her onto the dirty wooden back of the wagon. He got quickly into the front, slapped the ox with a thin sapling, and the cart rumbled downhill, away from the mountain house, away from the soldiers five miles behind them.

The cart jostled down toward the south. As they descended the air grew humid again, but not as oppressive and suffocating as it had been before the monsoon struck. This was a delicate moisture, and it brought the fragrance of crushed ferns and palm fronds.

The two boys now watched, their eyes wide, as the new landscape rolled past. They were twins. Orphans, Janice was certain. To them, life had just revealed its most brutal realities, and they were still in a daze. Instinctively they trusted Hoover. To them death was not new. It had just come closer to them this time instead of to their elders or to the animals of the field. Janice toyed with them, tickling their small bellies until laughter came and their happy cries rose like bird melodies over the sad, death-infested forest.

Hoover stopped the cart where two tiny streams buckled into a small rapids. A thatched hut stood in a small muddy clearing, and enormous bougainvilleas stormed upward on vines and branches around the conical roof. Crimson-robed men stopped, amazed, frozen in their tracks.

Hoover approached, put his palms together in greeting, and the men returned his bow. One of the men, overcome, suddenly embraced him. The sound of Hoover’s weeping was extraordinary. A sweet, harmonious sound, like the lifting of a death curse. It seemed to release something deep inside him, unfreeze something horrible, and make him live again. He wiped his eyes, and the monks came with him to the cart.

As the monks carried the twin boys toward a series of smaller conical-roofed huts, Hoover helped Janice down to the ground. She still found it difficult to keep her balance, as she was light-headed. The brilliance of the sunlight dazzled her. The yellow butterflies among the red flowers were like a profusion of sensory impressions too strong to absorb. It was warm, and she made her way slowly toward a small hut.

“These are my friends,” Hoover said.

“Yes, I know. One of the monks here told me where to find you.”

Hoover looked at her, surprised. “Usually they do not speak to strangers.”

“Perhaps I looked desperate.”

“Probably. At any rate, they thought I was dead. We are not indifferent to one another down here.”

They entered a small hut. The earthen floor was hard, swept clean, and a simple white basin and pitcher stood on a flat rock that was worn smooth by a thousand human hands.

“This ashram has functioned for a thousand years,” Hoover said. “It’s for pilgrims going to the big temples on the coast. There are several different sects that use the shrine.” Hoover smiled. “You are the first woman in a long series of pilgrims,” he said kindly.

Her head rolled pleasantly against a wicker mat rolled into a tube and used as a pillow. He still seemed to waver in front of her, as rays of bright sunshine outlined his shoulders and his fair hair.

“Elliot,” she said, not wishing him to go, “we must talk.”

“Later.”

“No. It can’t wait. I have to leave soon for New York.”

He laughed. “Do you know how long it would take you to get to Bombay, much less New York? Do you even know where you are? Listen to me, Janice. You have illusions of health. It’s going to take days before you can walk more than twenty yards without help.”

Janice felt the awful fever coming again. It was the helplessness that she dreaded. At bottom, there was the fear that she would wake and Hoover would be gone.

“Elliot, I…”

“Go to sleep, Janice. When you wake, we’ll talk.”

Janice saw his face darken, the jaws lightly clench. She knew he did not want to know why she had come to India. She became afraid that he was going to ride out of the ashram, out of her life forever.

“You won’t leave me?” she begged weakly. “Not before I’ve explained — oh Christ, I feel like such a helpless child. I can’t lift my own arms. I can’t keep my eyes open. Elliot, I need your help.”

“I know,” he said, confused, both angry and yet softening to her obvious desperation. “I know you do. But…”

“But what?”

“Things are different, Janice. They’ve changed.”

“Don’t frighten me. You sound so dead.”

“Reality is not what I thought it was, Janice. I’ve made a terrible mistake.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What do you think I’m talking about?” he said almost angrily.

He suddenly knelt down closer to her. She drew back. His eyes blazed, and his feet kicked up a small cloud of brown dust that caught the shaft of sunlight and drifted toward the door.

“I’m talking about Ivy,” he said, his voice taut with the difficulty of saying the name. “Your daughter, Ivy, and Audrey, my Audrey Rose.”

His voice choked and he retreated to the wall. The small earthen hut had become an arena. It was as though he were fighting her to the death, yet Janice did not understand why. His passion took hold of him, animating his slender arms, blazing out of his steel blue eyes. He crouched in her direction for emphasis, as though he were ready to pounce on her.

“I had thought,” he fumbled, “I had thought that there would be peace, that Ivy’s death had ended the struggle, the struggle of a soul in torment.” He rubbed at his eyes as though trying to gouge out the sight of Ivy broken by shattered glass, lying on the hard tile floor of the Darien hospital. “I should never have gone to New York,” he whispered darkly, gutturally, a strange voice that must have been bottled up for nearly a year. “Never, never, never. My being near the Audrey that was in her, called up this struggle. I started it, Janice. I started it and I kept it up. I wouldn’t let go of her. I pursued her until I killed her.”

He stared blankly at her, blinking away tears. Furiously he wiped his eyes. He was not the man she remembered, not the man she had come ten thousand miles to get help from.

“I should have gone away once I realized that I was causing her nightmares. And I did know it. But I rationalized, temporized. I couldn’t go away. Not when I was so close again.”

Janice struggled to a sitting position. Though the room was undulating due to her fever, she followed the words carefully, as though a revelation were unfolding in the hot shaft of sunlight.

“Because of me,” he said simply, “the soul of Audrey and Ivy was filled with fear and confusion. Therefore there was no tranquility when death claimed Ivy. There was no peace for her soul. Though I believed it at the time, I know better now.”

Janice watched him pour a small stream of water into an earthen mug. He brought it to her. She drank, the water was cool, and then he dipped his hands into a basin and began to wash her hot face. The spinning stopped slowly. She focused on his sorrowful eyes.

“Her terrible death prevented a peaceful transition,” he said quietly. “There must be a rebirth. No doubt it has already taken place.” His voice cracked. “Somewhere, a child lives with a soul that continues to cry out in terror….”

He could not continue. For a long time he stood there, drained by his own confession. He looked at her.

“Have you understood what I’ve said?” he asked gently.

“More than you know.”

“Really?” he said, surprised. “What does that mean?”

“It’s why I’ve come to India. It’s why I’ve had to find you.”

“I don’t understand.”

He looked as though her words fulfilled his worst fears.

“Bill needs your help, Elliot.”

Hoover watched her, studying her face suspiciously. “I don’t believe that could be possible,” he said simply.

“Then I had better explain. After Ivy died — immediately after — Bill had a nervous breakdown. He began to study — to study all kinds of things. Religious things. He became fixated, fascinated, utterly absorbed in it.”

“Bill Templeton? Involved in religious studies? That would have been funny once.”

“And not just religion, Elliot. Eastern religion.” Janice took a deep breath. “He’s become convinced, just as you are, that Ivy’s been reborn. And that he’s found her.”

Hoover’s face dropped. He stared at her, blinking rapidly.

“And you?” he asked in a choked voice. “What do you think?”

Janice faltered. She found herself dizzy in front of him. She gathered her courage and looked him in the eyes.

“I think it may very well be true,” she said. “But I don’t know. That’s why I came to India. To ask for your help. To beg you to return with me.”

Hoover laughed, a disdainful laugh; but underneath there was acute anxiety.

“Do not even suggest the possibility,” he said, trembling.

Janice leaned forward but he visibly retreated as though she might contaminate him.

“Elliot,” she whispered urgently, “Bill and I are lost without you.”

“It’s taken me a year to find even a small amount of peace.”

His booming voice dropped into an abrupt silence. He paced the room, his face hideous in confusion. His arms waved wildly as though protecting himself from visible thoughts.

“It’s punishment,” he whispered. “That’s why you’ve come.”

“Elliot, if you loved Audrey Rose… listen to me…”

He stopped dead in his tracks and glared at her. “For love of Audrey Rose I ruined the soul’s progress,” he said quietly. “I won’t do it again.”

His face clouded with the memories of New York. He found it impossible to maintain his composure. He sat down on the edge of a chair.

“What do you expect me to do, Janice?” he asked desperately.

She rose and walked slowly to his side. “You admit to having made a terrible mistake with Ivy. Can you allow Bill to make the same mistake? You must come to New York, Elliot. You must speak to him. Reason with him.”

Hoover laughed hideously.

“New York?” he hooted. “Why don’t I just go down into hell? What are you asking of me?”

“Elliot, only you can reach him. Only you can break through to him. You must explain to him…”

“What? That I did the equivalent of killing his daughter? Caused her to be reborn in misery? Is that what Bill needs to hear?”

Hoover calmed himself by a violent exertion of will, like wrestling against his own body. Slowly his face and breathing returned to normal.

“Bill has to learn to live,” Janice said, pleading. “He has to give up this obsession.”

Hoover softened. He was wavering.

“Yes,” he whispered sadly. “He must give up the obsession. I’d give my right arm if someone could have prevented me.”

Outside the monks chanted, a rock-steady chorus, attuned to each change in the timbre of their voices. The sound of them restored Hoover’s self-discipline.

“But I can’t do it, Janice,” he said, rising again. “Don’t even ask.”

Slowly Janice stood up to face him.

“Bill escaped from the sanitarium last February. He went searching for his daughter.”

Hoover’s face became even more drawn.

“I pity your husband,” he mumbled. “I pray for his soul. But you must leave me alone. You don’t know what your being here has done to me.”

“He kidnapped a little girl, Elliot. He went to Spanish Harlem and stole her from her mother’s arms.”

“Dear God,” he whispered.

“They shot him, Elliot, to get the girl back. I had to betray him so they could shoot him on a rooftop—”

His large rough hand sealed her lips.

“Please stop,” he whispered stridently. “You’re crucifying me. Isn’t one soul burden enough? Am I to bear Bill’s too?”

She saw the moist eyes, white and an annihilating blue. A stranger on whom her life depended.

“You’re the only man in the world he will believe anymore,” she said. “As long as he believes his daughter exists again…”

“Then what?”

“Then he lives inside his own black world. No one can reach him. He trusts no one. He just disintegrates more each day.”

A baboon laughed raucously among the dense black tropical forms far away. Hoover’s head turned, attuned to the signals of the forest. The branches creaked in a sudden breeze, lifting and falling. He watched them as though they communicated a secret, occult message.

“I can’t go to New York, Janice,” he said softly.

“Elliot, what about the belief in ahimsa—nonviolence to living beings?”

Suddenly he leaped forward, grabbed her arm, and hissed into her ear. “Go home! I need to be alone! I need to atone! I need isolation.”

His breath was hot, sweet-smelling. His body was crushed up against hers, and his eyes were wild.

“I need to be where there are no women!” he blurted.

Then he stormed out of the hut and across the compound. Through the open door she watched him run toward the edge of the ashram, pick something from the ground— a bedroll — and disappear like a wild beast into the forest.

“Elliot!” she shouted, her voice shocking the humming of the forest into silence. “Elliot!”

But he was gone. Janice hesitated, then returned to her hut. His last words buzzed angrily through her mind. What disturbed her most was how vulnerable Hoover turned out to be. It was he who was lost, utterly alone, fighting for his sanity as much as Bill.

Janice lay on the reed mat. She looked at the thatched roof. There were no answers for her. None.

16

Elliot Hoover did not appear in the morning or in the afternoon. The monks ignored her. They did not object when she prepared a few tomatoes and peppers for herself, or drank from the well. Neither did they help her in any way. At nightfall only the two boys, Meti and Sunjay, acknowledged her existence. Though she looked she found no paths that led from the ashram into the jungle.

On the third day one of the monks bowed slightly to her and beckoned for her to follow. Janice rose from the doorway of her hut and followed the flapping crimson robe into the thickets.

As the monk led her away from the compound a weird gloom enveloped them, a perpetual twilight caused by the thickness of the vines and leaves overhead. Butterflies floated twenty feet over their heads like underwater fish, brilliant scarlet, yellow, and white. The monk never looked back. There were no posts, no notched trees, no signs that she could see, but he walked unerringly, rapidly into the depths of the forest.

They found Elliot Hoover at a small pool. A trickle of rainwater fell like a thin waterfall over a mossy ledge into the pool. Apparently pilgrims had used the site often, for one edge of the shore was worn smooth, and a tiny wooden shrine had been built, supported on posts. A painting of a many-armed deity was visible, and below it, Elliot Hoover, legs folded, aware of all things around him and within him. The monk spoke lightly to him, bowed slightly, and left. For a long time neither Janice nor Hoover moved. Then he opened his eyes and looked peacefully at the placid pool, where the jungle breeze created cross-patterns of ripples on the silvery green surface.

“This was the only peace I ever knew,” he said distantly.

“There are those who have never known peace,” she replied very quietly.

He closed his eyes.

Tall grasses shivered on the shore. Peculiar floating reeds moved in subtle currents just under the surface, making the water dense and green. Yellow fish darted through the reeds, gulping. Hoover seemed to be aware of them, smiling sadly in sympathy, listening to the movement of water, though his eyes remained closed.

“I have prayed to Lord Shiva,” he said. “And to Lord Krishna. And I must go to New York.” A gentle breeze stirred his nearly blond hair, as though caressing his sorrowful face. “One accumulates debts,” he said. “Spiritual debts. And one must repay them.”

“There is no way that I can thank you enough,” Janice whispered, afraid to say more, afraid of disturbing his unearthly tranquility.

For a long time he said nothing else. A branch floated like a spear, turning around slowly, end over end, as it reached the base of the waterfall. It glided like a living thing over the dense mass of submerged reeds, nosing its way toward Hoover, black and glistening.

“Whether or not your husband has found his daughter,” he said gently, “I must insure that he not commit the same crime that I did.”

He closed his eyes. His days of prayer seemed to have drained his physical strength. Once again his face looked drawn, as though he needed more than anything to sleep quietly again.

“Yes,” he concluded, to himself, “such is my duty.”

Hoover stood up painfully. Gently he dusted off his dark crumpled trousers. He looked defeated. He gazed at the pond in affection.

“It will take us a week to get out of the mountains,” he said. “Are you well enough for the journey?”

“Yes. I can make it.”

He laughed, a laugh that seemed to come from the far side of the ocean, not his at all, as though his soul had laughed and his soul was no longer in his slender body.

“Physical journeys wear out the body, but spiritual journeys are the most dangerous.”

“Believe me,” she said earnestly, “I do not underestimate the self-sacrifice.”

“No, but you underestimate the dangers.”

Hoover led her back into the forest. She had the intuition that he was frightened of her. More than that. As she followed his sure steps over the thick green vines, on the ever-damp jungle floor, she knew that his spirit found no peace in her presence. A woman knows what a man means when he holds her, even for a split second. And the passion that had pressed her against the darkness of the hut had nothing to do with religion.

That was why he avoided her eyes. Like a country pilgrim going to Benares, he shifted his glance away, afraid of himself in her presence. Afraid of her in his presence. For the body also speaks, and in the jungles of South India it speaks with authority.

The ashram compound was busy with new arrivals, on their way south. They had brought many orange flowers, wreaths, but were humble and silent. The ashram absorbed them easily. Nothing ever disturbed the compound. For a thousand years monks had modestly cleared a few square yards from the jungle, kept it beautiful, and attended to the rites. The ashram had survived scores of generations, and it might last until the end of history.

“Wait here,” he whispered.

Hoover ducked into a small hut, spoke for a long time with three of the monks. There was a short ritual, a prayer, and a long farewell. As they left, the monks did not watch their departure. Nor did Hoover expect them to.

They walked in unison on a rutted road, and the moon, nearly full, peeked over the edge of the jungle. Silhouettes of mountains were at their side, the air was warm and pleasant, and the moonlight was so strong they could easily see miles down the clay of the road.

They slept in a small thicket of low-hanging trees. Hoover unrolled his slender bedroll for Janice, and she got into it. He slept at the base of a thick white tree that gleamed in the shafts of moonlight. She sensed him aware of her, like a gravitational force in the darkness. Finally he stirred and moved farther into the jungle until he was out of sight.

When they woke he came back out of the woods, and after a sparse breakfast they continued on their journey.

As they walked, perspiring in the heat, their steps together, it seemed that they understood one another perfectly. When to rest, when to eat from his rucksack. Questions were answered before the questions were verbally uttered. They stopped simultaneously to watch a small herd of water buffalo cross the road, the heavy tread mashing the road into mud. Then they continued, ever downhill, toward the heat, until their clothes were indistinguishable from the mud and insects that clung to them.

The second night they slept in a small ravine that cut upward into a tangle of brilliant red roots. Hoover moaned in his sleep. Janice watched him, as the fading moon made his shape barely discernible against the matted jungle floor. She knew the meaning of his restlessness. She knew the meaning of the sleep-drowned moan. She was not afraid of him, though with each hour of walking in the hot sunlight he seemed to grow more turbulent inside, more distressed, and several times he stopped, meditating on something before continuing. Now, while he slept, she watched his face in fascination. It twitched as though avoiding the horrors of his tortured dreams.

When she woke, she found him watching her.

The third day they came to a fork in the road; they took the eastern fork, and continued down the slopes. A farmer gave them a lift on his manure-ridden cart. Janice did not object to the smell or the sight of the manure. Nothing mattered to her anymore but getting back to America. As the cart jostled slowly onward it threw Hoover against her side. She felt the heat of his body through his filthy shirt, and he was trembling, his muscles knotted with the effort of keeping his balance.

Then, as the clay road receded in slow bumps, as they both watched the hills change gradually into flatlands of tall grass, scattered farms and short canals, a strange idea came to her. It was an idea that came of its own accord, floating into her brain like one of those wild scarlet butterflies, driven by its own nature. Suppose Hoover embraced her? Suppose his weight covered hers, drowned her weary body with his hunger? Suppose he entered her, found satisfaction within her? The image came to her, clear as though it had happened, and it surprised her. It was as though her body— loveless now for over a year — had begun speaking its own language.

The cart stopped. They descended, Hoover helping her down. They took a different fork, and the cart bounced slowly away. Hoover stopped her and his hands gently pried the filth from her arms, her legs, and her soft, rounded breasts. She did not object, but only watched him work.

“Excuse me,” he said, smiling. “But they do not allow shit in the finer restaurants of Pondicherry.”

She laughed. But his hand hesitated at touching her more, and they caught the subtle tremble of their own bodies, and avoided looking into each other’s face. The body was taking over the mind, Janice realized in fear. More than anything else in the world she wanted the comfort of his strong arms around her — and yet she was taking him home to save her husband. The confusion made her dizzy, and the dizziness had a sensuous quality, a seductive vagueness, that altered every thought until it returned to Elliot Hoover.

Then, there was a small village. After a few questions Hoover found a tiny, unused shed. They slept the night there. Hoover paced the floor, and the moon fitfully illumined him through the juggling palm fronds. Janice did not sleep. He knew she was awake. Then his hand rested on her shoulder. Gently, as though he were touching a child. Her heart seemed to pause, then raced forward.

She did not move. The slender, trembling fingers stroked her shoulder. They came around to the front and slid softly under her dirty shirt. Her breasts expanded, her breathing became harder, as the soft fingers rounded under the fabric. Instinctively she pressed his hands into her breasts, until her whole chest was tight in his grasp. His face came closer, the heat of his cheek against the back of her neck, and she felt his desire through the back of her clothes.

“Elliot,” she whispered.

Something scampered across the floor of the hut — a tiny lizard — and darted toward the exterior. A child in the village cried, and its mother softly sang it back to sleep. The jungle stood only in small thickets around the tilled fields, but it still exuded the humid warmth of fetid growth.

“Elliot — please…”

“Janice,” he breathed hotly into the back of her neck.

His hand slid gently, firmly, down the inside of her shirt, over her belly, along her hip. She stirred, rolled over, until they were pressed close against one another. Suddenly a jackal laughed hideously in the darkness, and the echoes trailed slowly through the village. Hoover released his grasp as though stung. He went to the window and peered out. Still breathing heavily, Janice slowly buttoned her shirt, her breasts rising and falling; the darkness had become a moral darkness, and she felt herself falling into a whirlpool of hell because she wanted this man — and all his hard, hot strength, and an end to the torment that had been eating at her for an eternity, though she had tried to deny it.

“Forgive me,” he whispered.

“There’s nothing to forgive.”

“I’d better sleep outside.”

“Elliot…”

Abruptly he went outside, leaving her inside with his bedroll, and he slept at the edge of a tilled field. She saw his form vaguely, as it slithered downward, miserably, to the mound of hard earth that had been plowed up. Once again the jackal cried.

She wanted to go to him, to beg him for love, if necessary. She found herself a slave to something so deep inside her that it altered her, made her a creature she barely recognized. Dimly she realized how strong the passions were — like a storm that easily crushes any ship foolish enough to set sail on the sea — and it took nearly an hour before she knew she would not leave the shed to join Hoover.

In the morning he bought several eggs, some milk, tomatoes, and yogurt from village families. He prepared them swiftly at the side of the road, and he also boiled some water, knowing that Janice still had no immunity against the south country microbes.

“We must be very strong,” he said.

She blushed, turning her head. The day was different from the night. In the dark she was so different, so overmastered by her primitive instincts, but in the day she wanted to think clearly, to see clearly, to act correctly.

“The stakes are too high,” he said, trying to be matter-of-fact. “For both of us. In different ways.”

“I know,” she replied without conviction.

He looked at her. “It should be easier now that we come closer to civilization. Still, I don’t want to take any chances.”

“Nor do I,” she said defensively.

“Good,” he said simply, embarrassed. “Very good.”

By noon a passing truck stopped in the village and met them two miles out on the road. They squeezed in the cab. The driver spoke a little Hindi and a little Tamil, and soon Hoover had him chuckling loudly. The truck careened down the road. Suddenly the road became paved — a miracle of a smooth ride — and the driver agreed to drive all the way into Pondicherry.

He left them at a small hotel. There was only a single room left so Hoover slept on a lumpy couch in the fetid lobby, oblivious of the heat. Janice washed herself as best she could, soaked her clothes — her pitiful underclothes made her wince — and lay naked in the sheets. She tried to recapitulate all that she had seen in India, but it seemed to have happened to another person. As it had, she thought. Because she sensed that she was different. She was physically able to endure things that once would have crushed her. She had seen death — death on a vast scale. She had endured the hostility of the indifferent universe and survived.

And something else had changed. Had Hoover stepped quietly up from the lobby and knocked gently at her door, she would have let him in. It was not moral. It was indefensible. It would destroy Bill if he even suspected. But then, India had taught her about the struggle for existence. About the close relationship between fecundity and annihilation. And she was part of it now. She did not fight it, she welcomed it. Like Hoover, she would have to relearn how to graft a veneer of civilization upon a living being that had been through far too much.

Janice pondered long into the darkness of the night. She wondered if she had become tough or had merely degenerated in some terrible way. For an hour she nearly followed her impulse to go down to Hoover, to seek comfort from his warmth. But she resisted, though she did not know why. Who would know? Who would care? Down here, on the southeast coast of the Indian subcontinent? She stared into the darkness and wondered. Mercifully, sleep drifted into the seedy hotel and she knew only the partial answer of oblivion.

Elliot Hoover had prevailed upon the hotel keeper to prepare an English breakfast: muffins, bacon, tea, and marmalade. Sitting in a small dark room, with pictures of erotic sculptures of Kharjuraha, it felt more like a honeymoon than a rescue mission — the warmth of the morning, the wallpaper peeling decorously from the wall, even a painting of the Duke of Wellington, much faded, over the table. The scene was too relaxed, too humorous to speak of the emergency waiting for them in Manhattan.

Hoover cleared his throat, enjoying watching Janice consume her hearty breakfast. There was a twinkle in his eye.

“I thought we would take a boat up to Calcutta,” he said. “Then a flight from Calcutta. I think it hops to Munich and then to New York.”

“But what about our belongings? I’ve left everything in — God knows where sector five is.”

“You’re right. I’ve an account at Barclay’s in Calcutta, but there must be a branch office in Pondicherry.” He smiled. “I’ll draw out enough money to see us back in style.”

“When we return I want to pay for your trip to New York,” she said soberly.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Please. I’d rather.”

“As you like. But don’t forget that I am not exactly in want.”

She studied him. He was a complex man, a gathering of contradictions. He could chant prayers all night with the utter belief of a Hindu native, and yet he was as shrewd as a stockbroker when it came to managing his fortune. He lived in two worlds, fit into them equally well, a man whose charisma seemed to flow outward from himself in an undisciplined discharge.

Hoover bought a brown jacket and trousers, some white shirts, leather shoes from Italy, and he had his hair cut at Pondicherry’s best hairstylist, where the barber threw up his arms at the matted, wild locks when Hoover walked in. Janice chose two short skirts, white blouses, and a new handbag. She bought a pair of sandals. Slipping into new underwear was an almost erotic thrill. She had forgotten the soft luxuries. It was like remembering a former life. Then she had her hair shampooed, cut, and styled. When she saw Hoover on the street they burst out laughing.

“I feel very strange,” she confessed, displaying her new skirt.

“It takes a few days to get used to it,” he agreed. “When I first arrived in New York from India I felt weird for a week.”

They booked passage on a freighter that left Pondicherry for the north. After four hours of pacing the deck in agitation, Hoover calmed down. There was a magnificent toot overhead that resounded through the harbor, the hawsers were thrown off, and a tiny tug nudged the coffee freighter out into deep water. As they turned around, Pondicherry seemed to bank slowly, gliding into the distance, its crowded white alleys and waterfront busy with traffic the way ants swarm over a dead white log.

The eastern seacoast of India glided by: sand dunes, bits of jungle refuse thrown up into clotted tangles at the mouths of rivers, and the broad blue ocean churned into a long white trail, arching backward as far as the eye could see. Janice and Elliot Hoover leaned against the orange rail and watched the continent go by.

“It’s a lovely land,” Janice said softly.

“The most beautiful in all creation.”

“I never suspected, never realized.”

He smiled. “Most people never do. India is too big. Too profound. One must come here to be changed.”

For nearly an hour they watched the herons dip low over the shore marshes, the tall egrets nesting where the tidal flats were shimmering in seawater. Boys were visible, pushing boats with long poles, nets outstretched for fish, and wooden shacks leaned precariously over the muddy concourse of the incoming tides.

“It’s life itself,” mused Hoover. “It is the source of all beauty. Life in all its complexity. It is the only source.”

Janice watched the sunlight reflecting from his well-tanned face. In his new clothes it would be difficult for anyone else to know what spiritual depths animated his every action, his every word. He looked like a German tourist on his way back to Bremen.

“In the mountains,” she confessed, “it occurred to me that you might have lost your faith. But I see I was mistaken.”

“Not lost it. Just realized it was far more difficult than I had thought. One wishes to do good, and ends up doing…doing…”

She placed her hand on his. “And ends up by doing good,” Janice said quietly.

Hoover smiled gratefully. He tried to express his feelings, but found himself curiously tongue-tied. Then the crew became extraordinarily busy, and the freighter curved around a semisubmerged obstruction and plowed serenely to the north.

It was not until well into the night that they reached Calcutta. The wharves were ablaze with lights from cranes and towers. Ship after ship was piled into the harbor, an army of sweating laborers bending low, pulling ropes, lifting coffee, rubber, bales, and auto parts up from holds. The sea was black, glistening with reflections of the world’s freighters at anchor.

They stayed at a large dark hotel near the waterfront. In separate rooms. Hoover went to his bank in the morning to cash another draft, and emerged with the equivalent of a thousand dollars in cash and a small packet of checks. The balance of the day was spent at the American Embassy trying to secure a temporary visa to replace the passport Janice had lost in the flood. The difficulty was in establishing proper bona fides. It was a dreary wait between cables to and from New York and Washington. That finally accomplished, it then took an eternity to find a taxi. Another eternity to get to the airport. They sat on the couches of the Calcutta airport for four hours. Once Hoover’s hand squeezed hers and an electric thrill went through her. Their fingers slowly relaxed and drew apart. Not looking at him, Janice went to the large plate-glass window and watched the runways. It seemed impossible that she was leaving India. Somehow it was her home now, her real home, where she had become someone else, someone a thousand times more mature, a thousand times stronger.

She cabled Elaine and Dr. Geddes. No apologies. A brief explanation. Would see them in New York. Regards. Hoover rose, took her arm, and they joined the line of passengers filing into the entrance corridor.

“Nothing seems real anymore,” Janice said.

Hoover knew exactly what she meant. They had had the chance to express the beauty of themselves to one another, but had not, and the chance would most likely never come again.

“Nothing is real,” he said. “But one learns to survive.”

They went onto the plane. The flight was delayed for two hours due to a faulty tire. Then the crewman waved a yellow flag, and Air India lifted its plane into the skies. There was a brief circle of a sensuous, compact city, and Calcutta banked and drifted under the wings of the plane, and then there were only clouds. Clouds that tore apart as the plane roared through. Janice closed her eyes.

She was crying, and she did not know why.