Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

Chapter 20

The road was just wide enough for the two of us to walk side by side. The grass on either side was as high as an elephant’s eye. We could see blue sky above us, and exactly as far along the path as the next curve, which could have been any distance away, because there’s no perspective in an unbroken green trench. We’d been traveling on this road most of the day, and passed only one old man and a couple of cows, but now we could hear what sounded like a large party approaching us, not far off, perhaps two hundred yards away. There were men’s voices, a lot of them, footsteps, some dissonant metal drums, and most disturbing, the continuous screams of a woman either in pain, or terrified, or both.

“Young masters!” came a voice from somewhere near us.

I jumped in the air and came down in a defensive stance, my black glass knife drawn and ready. Josh looked around for the source of the voice. The screaming was getting closer. There was a rustling in the grass a few feet away from the road, then again the voice, “Young masters, you must hide.”

An impossibly thin male face with eyes that seemed a size and a half too large for his skull popped out of the wall of grass beside us. “You must come. Kali comes to choose her victims! Come now or die.”

The face disappeared, replaced by a craggy brown hand that motioned for us to follow into the grass. The woman’s scream hit crescendo and failed, as if the voice had broken like an overtightened lute string.

“Go,” said Joshua, pushing me into the grass.

As soon as I was off of the road someone caught my wrist and started dragging me through the sea of grass. Joshua latched onto the tail of my shirt and allowed himself to be dragged along. As we ran the grass whipped and slashed at us. I could feel blood welling up on my face and arms, even as the brown wraith pulled me deeper into the sea of green. Above the rasping of my breath I heard men shouting from behind us, then a thrashing of the grass being trampled.

“They follow,” said the brown wraith over his shoulder. “Run unless you want your heads to decorate Kali’s altar. Run.”

Over my shoulder to Josh, I said, “He says run or it will be bad.” Behind Josh, outlined against the sky, I saw long, swordlike spear tips, the sort of thing one might use for beheading someone.

“Okey-dokey,” said Josh.

It had taken us over a month to get to India, most of the journey through hundreds of miles of the highest, most rugged country we had ever seen. Amazingly enough, there were villages scattered all through the mountains, and when the villagers saw our orange robes doors were flung wide and larders opened. We were always fed, given a warm place to sleep, and welcomed to stay as long as we wished. We offered obtuse parables and irritating chants in return, as was the tradition.

It wasn’t until we came out of the mountains onto a brutally hot and humid grassland that we found our mode of dress was drawing more disdain than welcome. One man, of obvious wealth (he rode a horse and wore silk robes) cursed us as we passed and spit at us. Other people on foot began to take notice of us as well, and we hurried off into some high grass and changed out of our robes. I tucked the glass dagger that Joy had given me into my sash.

“What was he going on about?” I asked Joshua.

“He said something about tellers of false prophecies. Pretenders. Enemies of the Brahman, whatever that is. I’m not sure what else.”

“Well, it looks like we’re more welcome here as Jews than as Buddhists.”

“For now,” said Joshua. “All the people have those marks on their foreheads like Gaspar had. I think without one of those we’re going to have to be careful.”

As we traveled into the lowlands the air felt as thick as warm cream, and we could feel the weight of it in our lungs after so many years in the mountains. We passed into the valley of a wide, muddy river, and the road became choked with people passing in and out of a city of wooden shacks and stone altars. There were humped-back cattle everywhere, even grazing in the gardens, but no one seemed to bear them any mind.

“The last meat I ate was what was left of our camels,” I said.

“Let’s find a booth and buy some beef.”

There were merchants along the road selling various wares, clay pots, powders, herbs, spices, copper and bronze blades (iron seemed to be in short supply), and tiny carvings of what seemed to be a thousand different gods, most of them having more limbs than seemed necessary and none of them looking particularly friendly.

We found grain, breads, fruits, vegetables, and bean pastes for sale, but nowhere did we see any meat. We settled on some bread and spicy bean paste, paid the woman with Roman copper coin, then found a place under a large banyan tree where we could sit and look at the river while we ate.

I’d forgotten the smell of a city, the fetid mélange of people, and waste, and smoke and animals, and I began to long for the clean air of the mountains.

“I don’t want to sleep here, Joshua. Let’s see if we can find a place in the country.”

“We are supposed to follow this river to the sea to reach Tamil. Where the river goes, so go the people.”

The river—wider than any in Israel, but shallow, yellow with clay, and still against the heavy air—seemed more like a huge stagnant puddle than a living, moving thing. In this season, anyway. Dotting the surface, a half-dozen skinny, naked men with wild white hair and not three teeth apiece shouted angry poetry at the top of their lungs and tossed water into glittering crests over their heads.

“I wonder how my cousin John is doing,” said Josh.

All along the muddy riverbank women washed clothes and babies only steps from where cattle waded and shat, men fished or pushed long shallow boats along with poles, and children swam or played in the mud. Here and there the corpse of a dog bobbed flyblown in the gentle current.

“Maybe there’s a road inland a little, away from the stench.”

Joshua nodded and climbed to his feet. “There,” he said, pointing to a narrow path that began on the opposite bank of the river and disappeared into some tall grass.

“We’ll have to cross,” I said.

“Be nice if we could find a boat to take us,” said Josh.

“You don’t think we should ask where the path leads?”

“No,” said Joshua, looking at a crowd of people who were gathering nearby and staring at us. “These people all look hostile.”

“What was that you told Gaspar about love was a state you dwell in or something?”

“Yeah, but not with these people. These people are creepy. Let’s go.”

The creepy little brown guy who was dragging me through the elephant grass was named Rumi, and much to his credit, amid the chaos and tumble of a headlong dash through a leviathan marshland, pursued by a muderous band of clanging, shouting, spear-waving decapitation enthusiasts, Rumi had managed to find a tiger—no small task when you have a kung fu master and the savior of the world in tow.

“Eek, a tiger,” Rumi said, as we stumbled into a small clearing, a mere depression really, where a cat the size of Jerusalem was gleefully gnawing away on the skull of a deer.

Rumi had expressed my sentiments exactly, but I would be damned if I was going to let my last words be “Eek, a tiger,” so I listened quietly as urine filled my shoes.

“You’d think all the noise would have frightened him,” Josh said, just as the tiger looked up from his deer.

I noticed that our pursuers seemed to be closing on us by the second.

“That is the way it is usually done,” said Rumi. “The noise drives the tiger to the hunter.”

“Maybe he knows that,” I said, “so he’s not going anywhere. You know, they’re bigger than I imagined. Tigers, I mean.”

“Sit down,” said Joshua.

“Pardon me?” I said.

“Trust me,” Joshua said. “Remember the cobra when we were kids?”

I nodded to Rumi and coaxed him down as the tiger crouched and tensed his hind legs as if preparing to leap, which is exactly what he was doing. As the first of our pursuers broke into the clearing from behind us the tiger leapt, sailing over our heads by half again the height of a man. The tiger landed on the first two men coming out of the grass, crushing them under his enormous forepaws, then raking their backs as he leapt again. After that all I could see was spear points scattering against the sky as the hunters became, well, you know. Men screamed, the woman screamed, the tiger screamed, and the two men who had fallen under the tiger crawled to their feet and limped back toward the road, screaming.

Rumi looked from the dead deer, to Joshua, to me, to the dead deer, to Joshua, and his eyes seemed to grow even larger than before. “I am deeply moved and eternally grateful for your affinity with the tiger, but that is his deer, and it appears that he has not finished with it, perhaps…”

Joshua stood up. “Lead on.”

“I don’t know which way.”

“Not that way,” I said, pointing in the direction of the screaming bad guys.

Rumi led us through the grass to another road, which we followed to where he lived.

“It’s a pit,” I said.

“It’s not that bad,” said Joshua, looking around. There were other pits nearby. People were living in them.

“You live in a pit,” I said.

“Hey, ease up,” Joshua said. “He saved our lives.”

“It is a humble pit, but it is home,” said Rumi. “Please make yourself comfortable.”

I looked around. The pit had been chipped out of sandstone and was about shoulder deep and just wide enough to turn a cow around in, which I would find out was a crucial dimension. The pit was empty except for a single rock about knee high.

“Have a seat. You may have the rock,” said Rumi.

Joshua smiled and sat on the rock. Rumi sat on the floor of the pit, which was covered with a thick layer of black slime. “Please. Sit,” said Rumi, gesturing to the floor beside him. “I’m sorry, we can only afford one rock.”

I didn’t sit. “Rumi, you live in a pit!” I pointed out.

“Well, yes, that is true. Where do Untouchables live in your land?”

“Untouchable?”

“Yes, the lowest of the low. The scum of the earth. None of the higher caste may acknowledge my existence. I am Untouchable.”

“Well, no wonder, you live in a fucking pit.”

“No,” Joshua said, “he lives in a pit because he’s Untouchable, he’s not Untouchable because he lives in a pit. He’d be Untouchable if he lived in a palace, isn’t that right, Rumi?”

“Oh, like that’s going to happen,” I said. I’m sorry, the guy lived in a pit.

“There’s more room since my wife and most of my children died,” said Rumi. “Until this morning it was only Vitra, my youngest daughter and me, but now she is gone too. There is plenty of room for you if you wish to stay.”

Joshua put his hand on Rumi’s narrow shoulder and I could see the effect it had, the pain evaporating from the Untouchable’s face like dew under a hot sun. I stood by being wretched.

“What happened to Vitra?” Joshua asked.

“They came and took her, the Brahmans, as a sacrifice on the feast of Kali. I was looking for her when I saw you two. They gather children and men, criminals, Untouchables, and strangers. They would have taken you and day after tomorrow they would have offered your head to Kali.”

“So your daughter is not dead?” I asked.

“They will hold her until midnight on the night of the feast, then slaughter her with the other children on the wooden elephants of Kali.”

“I will go to these Brahmans and ask for your daughter back,” Joshua said.

“They’ll kill you,” Rumi said. “Vitra is lost, even your tiger cannot save you from Kali’s destruction.”

“Rumi,” I said. “Look at me, please. Explain, Brahmans, Kali, elephants, everything. Go slow, act as if I know nothing.”

“Like that takes imagination,” Joshua said, clearly violating my implied, if not expressed, copyright on sarcasm. (Yeah, we have Court TV in the hotel room, why?)

“There are four castes,” said Rumi, “the Brahmans, or priests; Kshatriyas, or warriors; Vaisyas, who are farmers or merchants; and the Sudras, who are laborers. There are many subcastes, but those are the main ones. Each man is born to a caste and he remains in that caste until he dies and is reborn as a higher caste or lower caste, which is determined by his karma, or actions during his last life.”

“We know from karma,” I said. “We’re Buddhist monks.”

“Heretics!” Rumi hissed.

“Bite me, you bug-eyed scrawny brown guy,” I said.

“You are a scrawny brown guy!”

“No, you’re a scrawny brown guy!”

“No, you are a scrawny brown guy!”

“We are all scrawny brown guys,” Joshua said, making peace.

“Yeah, but he’s bug-eyed.”

“And you are a heretic.”

“You’re a heretic!”

“No, you are a heretic.”

“We’re all scrawny brown heretics,” said Joshua, calming things down again.

“Well, of course I’m scrawny,” I said. “Six years of cold rice and tea, and not a scrap of beef for sale in the whole country.”

“You would eat beef? You heretic!” shouted Rumi.

“Enough!” shouted Joshua.

“No one may eat a cow. Cows are the reincarnations of souls on their way to the next life.”

“Holy cow,” Josh said.

“That is what I am saying.”

Joshua shook his head as if trying to straighten jumbled thoughts. “You said that there were four castes, but you didn’t mention Untouchables.”

“Harijans, Untouchables, have no caste, we are the lowest of the low. We may have to live many lifetimes before we even ascend to the level of a cow, and then we may become higher caste. Then, if we follow our dharma, our duty, as a higher caste, we may become one with Brahma, the universal spirit of all. I can’t believe you don’t know this, have you been living in a cave?”

I was going to point out that Rumi was in no position to criticize where we had been living, but Joshua signaled me to let it go. Instead I said, “So you are lower on the caste system than a cow?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So these Brahmans won’t eat a cow, but they will take your daughter and kill her for their goddess?”

“And eat her,” said Rumi, hanging his head. “At midnight on the night of the feast they will take her and the other children and tie them to the wooden elephants. They will cut off the children’s fingers and give one to the head of each Brahman household. Then they will catch her blood in a cup and everyone in the household will taste it. They may eat the finger or bury it for good luck. After that the children are hacked to death on the wooden elephants.”

“They can’t do that,” Joshua said.

“Oh yes, the cult of Kali may do anything they wish. It is her city, Kalighat.” [“Calcutta” on the Friendly Flyer map.] “My little Vitra is lost. We can only pray that she is reincarnated to a higher level.”

Joshua patted the Untouchable’s hand. “Why did you call Biff a heretic when he told you that we were Buddhist monks?”

“That Gautama said that a man may go directly from any level to join Brahma, without fulfilling his dharma, that is heresy.”

“That would be better for you, wouldn’t it? Since you’re on the bottom of the ladder?”

“You cannot believe what you do not believe,” Rumi said. “I am an Untouchable because my karma dictates it.”

“Oh yeah,” I said. “No sense sitting under a bodhi tree for a few hours when you can get the same thing through thousands of lifetimes of misery.”

“Of course, that’s ignoring the fact that you’re a gentile and going to suffer eternal damnation either way,” said Josh.

“Yeah, leaving that out altogether.”

“But we’ll get your daughter back,” Joshua said.

Joshua wanted to rush into Kalighat and demand the return of Rumi’s daughter and the release of all the other victims in the name of what was good and right. Joshua’s solution to everything was to lead with righteous indignation, and there is a time and a place unto that, but there is also a time for cunning and guile (Ecclesiastes 9 or something). I was able to talk him into an alternate plan by using flawless logic:

“Josh, did the Vegemites smite the Marmites by charging in and demanding justice at the end of a sword? I think not. These Brahmans cut off and eat the fingers of children. I know there’s no finger-cutting commandment, Josh, but still, I’m guessing that these people think differently than we do. They call the Buddha a heretic, and he was one of their princes. How do you think they’ll receive a scrawny brown kid claiming to be the son of a god who doesn’t even live in their area?”

“Good point. But we still have to save the child.”

“Of course.”

“How?”

“Extreme sneakiness.”

“You’ll have to be in charge then.”

“First we need to see this city and this temple where the sacrifices will be held.”

Joshua scratched his head. His hair had mostly grown back, but was still short. “The Vegemites smote the Marmites?”

“Yeah, Excretions three-six.”

“I don’t remember that. I guess I need to brush up on my Torah.”

The statue of Kali over her altar was carved from black stone and stood as tall as ten men. She wore a necklace of human skulls around her neck and a girdle made of severed human hands at her hips. Her open maw was lined with a saw blade of teeth over which a stream of fresh blood had been poured. Even her toenails curved into vicious blades which dug into the pile of twisted, graven corpses on which she stood. She had four arms, one holding a cruel, serpentine sword, another a severed head by the hair; the third hand she held crooked, as if beckoning her victims to the place of dark destruction to which all are destined, and the fourth was posed downward, in a manner presenting the goddess’s hand-girded hips, as if asking the eternal question, “Does this outfit make me look fat?”

The raised altar lay in the middle of an open garden that was surrounded by trees. The altar was wide enough that five hundred people could have stood in the shadow of the black goddess. Deep grooves had been cut in the stone to channel the blood of sacrifices into vessels, so it could be poured through the goddess’s jaws. Leading to the altar was a wide stone-paved boulevard, which was lined on either side by great elephants carved from wood and set on turntables so they could be rotated. The trunks and front feet of the elephants were stained rusty brown, and here and there the trunks exhibited deep gouges from blades that had hewn through a child into the mahogany.

“Vitra isn’t being kept here,” Joshua said.

We were hiding behind a tree near the temple garden, dressed as natives, fake caste marks and all. Having lost when we drew lots, I was the one dressed as a woman.

“I think this is a bodhi tree,” I said, “just like Buddha sat under! It’s so exciting. I’m feeling sort of enlightened just standing here. Really, I can feel ripe bodhies squishing between my toes.”

Joshua looked at my feet. “I don’t think those are bodhies. There was a cow here before us.”

I lifted my foot out of the mess. “Cows are overrated in this country. Under the Buddha’s tree too. Is nothing sacred?”

“There’s no temple to this temple,” Joshua said. “We have to ask Rumi where the sacrifices are kept until the festival.”

“He won’t know. He’s Untouchable. These guys are Brahmans—priests—they wouldn’t tell him anything. That would be like a Sadducee telling a Samaritan what the Holy of Holies looked like.”

“Then we have to find them ourselves,” Joshua said.

“We know where they’re going to be at midnight, we’ll get them then.”

“I say we find these Brahmans and force them to stop the whole festival.”

“We’ll just storm up to their temple and tell them to stop it?”

“Yes.”

“And they will.”

“Yes.”

“That’s cute, Josh. Let’s go find Rumi. I have a plan.”

Chapter 21

“You make a very attractive woman,” Rumi said from the comfort of his pit. “Did I tell you that my wife has passed on to her next incarnation and that I am alone?”

“Yeah, you mentioned that.” He seemed to have given up on us getting his daughter back. “What happened to the rest of your family, anyway?”

“They drowned.”

“I’m sorry. In the Ganges?”

“No, at home. It was the monsoon season. Little Vitra and I had gone to the market to buy some swill, and there was a sudden downpour. When we returned…” He shrugged.

“I don’t mean to sound insensitive, Rumi, but there is a chance that your loss could have been caused by—oh, I don’t know—perhaps the fact that you LIVE IN A FUCKING PIT!”

“That’s not helping, Biff,” Joshua said. “You said you had a plan?”

“Right. Rumi, am I correct in assuming that these pits, when someone is not living in them, are used for tanning hides?”

“Yes, it is work that only Untouchables may do.”

“That would account for the lovely smell. I assume you use urine in the tanning process, right?”

“Yes, urine, mashed brains, and tea are the main ingredients.”

“Show me the pit where the urine is condensed.”

“The Rajneesh family is living there.”

“That’s okay, we’ll bring them a present. Josh, do you have any lint in the bottom of your satchel?”

“What are you up to?”

“Alchemy,” I said. “The subtle manipulation of the elements. Watch and learn.”

When it was not being used, the urine pit was the home of the Rajneesh family, and they were more than happy to give us loads of the white crystals that covered the floor of their home. There were six in the family, father, mother, an almost grown daughter, and three little ones. Another little son had been taken for sacrifice at the festival of Kali. Like Rumi, and all the other Untouchables, the Rajneesh family looked more like skeletons mummified in brown leather than people. The Untouchable men went about the pits naked or wearing only a loincloth, and even the women were dressed in tatters that barely covered them—nothing as nice as the stylish sari that I had purchased in the marketplace. Mr. Rajneesh commented that I was a very attractive woman and encouraged me to drop by after the next monsoon.

Joshua pounded chunks of the crystallized mineral into a fine white powder while Rumi and I collected charcoal from under the heated dying pit (a firebox had been gouged out of the stone under the pit) which the Untouchables used to render the flowers from the indigo shrub into fabric dye.

“I need brimstone, Rumi. Do you know what that is? A yellow stone that burns with a blue flame and gives off a smoke that smells like rotten eggs?”

“Oh yes, they sell it in the market as some sort of medicine.”

I handed the Untouchable a silver coin. Go buy as much of it as you can carry.”

“Oh my, this will be more than enough money. May I buy some salt with what is left?”

“Buy what you need with what’s left over, just go.”

Rumi skulked away and I went to help Joshua process the saltpeter.

The concept of abundance was an abstract one to the Untouchables, except as it pertained to two categories, suffering and animal parts. If you wanted decent food, shelter, or clean water, you would be sorely disappointed among the Untouchables, but if you were in the market for beaks, bones, teeth, hides, sinew, hooves, hair, gallstones, fins, feathers, ears, antlers, eyeballs, bladders, lips, nostrils, poop chutes, or any other inedible part of virtually any creature that walked on, swam under, or flew over the subcontinent of India, then the Untouchables were likely to have what you wanted lying around, conveniently stored beneath a thick blanket of black flies. In order to fashion the equipment I needed for my plan, I had to think in terms of animal parts. Fine unless you need, say, a dozen short swords, bows and arrows, and chain mail for thirty soldiers and all you have to work with is a stack of nostrils and three mismatched poop chutes. It was a challenge, but I made do. As Joshua moved among the Untouchables, surreptitiously healing their maladies, I barked out my orders.

“I need eight sheep bladders—fairly dry—two handfuls of crocodile teeth, two pieces of rawhide as long as my arms and half again as wide. No, I don’t care what kind of animal, just not too ripe, if you can manage it. I need hair from an elephant’s tail. I need firewood, or dried dung if you must, eight oxtails, a basket of wool, and a bucket of rendered fat.”

And a hundred scrawny Untouchables stood there, eyes as big as saucers, just staring at me while Joshua moved among them, healing their wounds, sicknesses, and insanities, without any of them suspecting what was happening. (We’d agreed that this was the wisest tack to take, as we didn’t want a bunch of healthy Untouchables athletically bounding through Kalighat proclaiming that they had been cured of all ills by a strange foreigner, thus attracting attention to us and spoiling my plan. On the other hand, neither could we stand there and watch these people suffer, knowing that we—well, Joshua—had the power to help them.) He’d also taken to poking one of them in the arm with his finger anytime anyone said the word “Untouchable.” Later he told me that he just hated passing up the opportunity for palpable irony. I cringed when I saw Joshua touching the lepers among them, as if after all these years away from Israel a tiny Pharisee stood on my shoulder and screamed, “Unclean!”

“Well?” I said after I’d finished my orders. “Do you want your children back or not?”

“We don’t have a bucket,” said one woman.

“Or a basket,” said another.

“Okay, fill some of the sheep bladders with rendered fat, and bundle the wool in some kind of hide. Now go, we don’t have a lot of time.”

And they all stood and looked at me. Big eyes. Sores healed. Parasites purged. They just looked at me. “Look, I know my Sanskrit isn’t great, but you do know what I am asking?”

A young man stepped forward. “We do not want to anger Kali by depriving her of her sacrifices.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Kali is the bringer of destruction, without which there can be no rebirth. She is the remover of the bondage that ties us to the material world. If we anger her, she will deprive us of her divine destruction.”

I looked at Joshua across the crowd. “Do you understand this?”

“Fear?” he said.

“Can you help?” I asked in Aramaic.

“I’m not good at fear,” Joshua said in Hebrew.

I thought for a second as two hundred eyes pinned me to the sandstone on which I stood. I remembered the red-stained gashes on the wooden elephant statues at the altar of Kali. Death was their deliverance, was it?

“What is your name?” I asked the man who had stepped out of the crowd.

“Nagesh,” he said.

“Stick out your tongue, Nagesh.” He did, and I threw back the cloth that covered my head and loosened it around my neck. Then I touched his tongue.

“Destruction is a gift you value?”

“Yes,” said Nagesh.

“Then I shall be the instrument of the goddess’s gift.” With that I pulled the black glass dagger from the sheath in my sash, held it up before the crowd. While Nagesh stood, passive, wide-eyed, I drove my thumb under his jaw, pushed his head back, and brought the dagger down across his throat. I lowered him to the ground as the red liquid spurted over the sandstone.

I stood and faced the crowd again, holding the dripping blade over my head. “You owe me, you ungrateful fucks! I have brought to your people the gift of Kali, now bring me what I ask for.”

They moved really quickly for people who were on the edge of starvation.

After the Untouchables scattered to do my bidding, Joshua and I stood over the bloodstained body of Nagesh.

“That was fantastic,” Joshua said. “Absolutely perfect.”

“Thanks.”

“Had you been practicing all that time we were in the monastery?”

“You didn’t see me push the pressure point in his neck then?”

“No, not at all.”

“Gaspar’s kung fu training. The rest, of course, was from Joy and Balthasar.”

I bent over and opened Nagesh’s mouth, then took the ying-yang vial from around my neck and put a drop of the antidote on the Untouchable’s tongue.

“So he can hear us now, like when Joy poisoned you?” Joshua asked.

I pulled back one of Nagesh’s eyelids and watched the pupil contract slowly in the sunlight. “No, I think he’s still unconscious from me holding the pressure point. I didn’t think the poison would work quickly enough. I could only get a drop of poison on my finger when I loosened my sari. I knew it would keep him down, I just wasn’t sure it would put him down.”

“Well, you are truly a magus, now, Biff. I’m impressed.”

“Joshua, you healed a hundred people today. Half of them were probably dying. I did some sleight of hand.”

My friend’s enthusiasm was undeterred. “What’s the red stuff, pomegranate juice? I can’t figure out where you concealed it.”

“No, actually I was going to ask you about that.”

“What?”

I held my arm up and showed Joshua where I had slashed my own wrist (the source of blood for the show). I had been holding it against my leg and as soon as I removed the pressure the blood started spurting again. I sat down hard on the sandstone and my vision began to tunnel down to a pinpoint. “I was hoping you could help me out with this,” I said before I fainted.

“You need to work on that part of the trick,” Joshua said when I came to. “I might not always be around to fix your wrist.” He was speaking Hebrew—that meant for my ears only.

I saw Joshua kneeling above me, then beyond him the sky was blotted out by curious brown faces. The recently murdered Nagesh was in the front of the crowd. “Hey, Nagesh, how’d the rebirth go?” I asked in Sanskrit.

“I must have strayed from my dharma in my last life,” Nagesh said. “I have been reincarnated, once again, as an Untouchable. And I have the same ugly wife.”

“You challenged master Levi who is called Biff,” I said, “of course you didn’t move up. You’re lucky you’re not a stink bug or something. See, destruction isn’t the big favor you all thought it was.”

“We brought the things you asked for.”

I hopped to my feet feeling incredibly rested and energized. “Nice,” I said to Joshua. “I feel like I just had one of those strong coffees you used to make at Balthasar’s.”

“I miss coffee,” said Josh.

I looked at Nagesh, “I don’t suppose you…”

“We have swill.”

“Never mind,” I said. Then I said one of those things that as a boy growing up in Galilee, you never think you’ll hear yourself say: “Okay, Untouchables, bring me the sheep bladders!”

Rumi said that the goddess Kali was served by a host of black-skinned female demons, who sometimes during the feast would bring men to corners of the altar and copulate with them as blood rained down from the goddess’s saw-tooth maw above.

“Okay, Josh, you’re one of them,” I said.

“What are you gonna be?”

“The goddess Kali, of course. You got to be God last time.”

“What last time?”

“All of the last times.” I turned to my intrepid minions. “Untouchables, paint him up!”

“They’re not going to buy that a burr-headed Jewish kid is their goddess of destruction.”

“O ye of little faith,” I said.

Three hours later we were again crouched beneath a tree near the temple of Kali. We were both dressed as women, covered from head to toe by our saris, but I was looking much lumpier under mine due to Kali’s extra arms and garland of severed heads, played tonight by painted sheep bladders filled with explosives and suspended around my neck by long strands of elephant tail hair. Any observers who might get close enough to notice my protrusions were quickly deterred by the smell coming off of Joshua and me. We had used the goo from the bottom of Rumi’s pit to paint our bodies black. I didn’t have the courage to ask what the substance had been in life, but if there was a place where they allowed vultures to ripen in the sun before pounding them into a smooth paste and mixing it with just the right amount of buffalo squat, then Rumi called it home. The Untouchables had also painted huge red rings around Joshua’s eyes, fitted him with a ropey wig of oxtails, and affixed to his torso six pert little breasts fashioned from pitch.

“Stay away from any open flame. Your tits will go up like volcanos.”

“Why did I have to have six and you only had to have two.”

“Because I am the goddess and have to wear the garland of skulls and the extra arms.”

We’d made my arms from rawhide, using my primary arms as models, then drying the molded arms in place over the fire. The women made a harness that held the extra arms in place under my own, then we painted the arms black with the same black goo. They were a little wobbly, but they were light and would look realistic enough in the dark.

It was still hours from the height of the ceremony at midnight, when the children would be hacked to death, but we wanted to be there in time to stop the revelers from cutting off the children’s fingers if we could. Now, the wooden elephants were empty on their turntables, but the altar of Kali was already filling with gruesome tribute. The heads of a thousand goats had been laid on the altar before the goddess, and the blood ran slick over the stones and in the grooves that channeled it into large brass pots at the corners of the altar. Female acolytes carried the pots up a narrow ladder at the back of the great statue of Kali, then dumped them through some sort of reservoir that fed it through the goddess’s jaws. Below, by torchlight, worshipers danced in the sticky shower as the blood flowed down upon them.

“Look, those women are dressed like me,” Joshua said. “Except they only have two breasts each.”

“Technically, they’re not dressed, they’re painted. You make a very attractive female demon, Josh. Did I tell you that?”

“This isn’t going to work.”

“Of course it’s going to work.”

I guessed that there were already ten thousand worshipers in the temple square, dancing, chanting, and beating drums. A procession of thirty men came down the main boulevard, each carrying a basket under his arm. As they reached the altar, each man dumped the contents of the basket over the rows of bloody goat heads.

“What are those?” Joshua asked.

“Those are exactly what you think they are.”

“They’re not the heads of the children?”

“No, I think those are the heads of strangers who happened down the road we were on before Rumi came along to pull us into the grass.”

After the severed heads were dispersed across the altar, the female acolytes came out of the crowd dragging the headless corpse of a man, which they laid on the steps leading to the altar. Each one mimed having intercourse with the corpse, then rubbed their genitalia against the bloody stump of its neck before dancing away, blood and ochre dripping down the insides of their thighs.

“There’s sort of a theme developing here,” I said.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” Joshua said.

“Mindful breath,” I said, using one of the phrases that Gaspar was always barking at us when we were learning meditation. I knew that if Joshua could stay with the yeti for days at a time without freezing to death, he could certainly conjure up the bodily control to keep from throwing up. The sheer magnitude of the carnage was all that was keeping me from vomiting. It was as if the atrocity of the whole scene couldn’t fit in my mind all at once, so I could only see just enough for my sanity and my stomach to remain intact.

A shout went up in the crowd now and I could see a torch-lit sedan chair being carried above the heads of the worshipers. On it reclined a half-naked man with a tiger skin wrapped around his hips, his skin painted light gray with ashes. His hair was plaited with grease and he wore the bones of a human hand as a skullcap. Around his neck hung a necklace of human skulls.

“High priest,” I said.

“They aren’t even going to notice you, Biff. How can you even get their attention after they’ve seen all this?”

“They haven’t seen what I’m going to show them.”

As the sedan chair emerged from the crowd in front of the altar, we could see a procession following it: tied to the back of the sedan chair was a line of naked children, most of them not more than five or six, their hands tied together, a less ornately dressed priest on either side of them to steady them. The priests began to untie the children and take them to the great wooden elephants lining the boulevard. Here and there in the crowd I could see people beginning to brandish edged weapons: short swords, axes, and the long-bladed spears Joshua and I had seen over the elephant grass. The high priest was sitting on the headless corpse, shouting a poem about the divine release of Kali’s destruction or something.

“Here we go,” I said, pulling the black glass dagger from under my sari. “Take this.”

Joshua looked at the blade shimmering in the torchlight. “I won’t kill anyone,” he said. Tears were streaming down his cheeks, drawing long red lines through the black and if anything making him look more fierce.

“That’s fine, but you’ll need to cut them loose.”

“Right.” He took the knife from me.

“Josh, you know what’s coming. You’ve seen it before. Nobody else here has, especially those kids. You can’t carry all of them, so they have to have enough of their wits about them to follow you. I know you can keep them from being afraid. Put your teeth in.”

Joshua nodded and slipped the row of crocodile teeth attached to a piece of rawhide under his upper lip, leaving the teeth to protrude like fangs. I put in my own false fangs, then ran into the dark to circle the crowd.

As I approached the rear of the altar I pulled the special torch I’d made from under my girdle of human hands. (Actually my girdle of human hands was made of dried goat’s udders stuffed with straw, but the Untouchable women had done a pretty good job as long as no one bothered to count fingers.) Through Kali’s stone legs I could see the priests tying each of the children on the trunk of a wooden elephant. As soon as the bonds were tight, each priest drew a bronze blade and held it aloft, ready to strike off a finger as soon as the high priest gave the signal.

I struck the tip of my torch on the edge of the altar, screamed for all I was worth, then threw my sari off and ran up the steps as the torch burst into dazzling blue flame that trailed sparks behind me as I ran. I hopped across the array of goat heads and stood between the legs of the statue of Kali, my torch held aloft in one hand, one of my severed heads swinging by the hair in the other.

“I am Kali,” I screamed. “Fear me!” It came out sort of mumbled through my fake teeth.

Some of the drums stopped and the high priest turned around and looked at me, more because of the bright light of the torch than my fierce proclamation.

“I am Kali,” I shouted again. “Goddess of destruction and all this disgusting crap you have here!” They weren’t getting it. The priest signaled for the other priests to come around me from the sides. Some of the female acolytes were already trying to make their way across the dance floor of decapitations toward me.

“I mean it. Bow down to me!” The priests charged on. I did have the crowd’s attention, though unfortunately they weren’t cowering in fear at my angry goddessness. I could see Joshua moving around the wooden elephants, the guarding priests having left their posts to come after me. “Really! I mean it!” Maybe it was the teeth. I spit them out toward the nearest of my attackers.

Running across a sea of slick, bloody heads is evidently a pretty difficult task. Not if you’ve spent the last six years of your life hopping from the top of one post to another, even in ice and snow, but for the run-of-the-mill homicidal priest, it’s a tough row to hoe. The priests and acolytes were slipping and sliding among the goat and human heads, falling over each other, smacking into the feet of the statue, one even impaling himself on a goat’s horn when he fell.

One of the priests was only a few feet away from me now, trying not to fall on his own blade as he crawled over the mess. “I will bring destruction…oh, fuck it,” I said. I lit the fuse on the severed head I held in my hand, then swung it between my legs and tossed it in a steep arch over my head. It trailed sparks on its way into the black goddess’s open maw, then disappeared.

I kicked the approaching priest in the jaw, then danced across the goat heads, leapt over the head of the high priest, and was halfway to Joshua at the first wooden elephant when Kali, with a deafening report, breathed fire out over the crowd and the top of her head blew off.

Finally, I had the crowd’s attention. They were trampling each other to get away, but I had their attention. I stood in the middle of the boulevard, swinging my second severed head in a circle, waiting for the fuse to burn down before I let it sail over the heads of the receding crowd. It exploded in the air, sending a circle of flame across the sky and no doubt deafening some of the worshipers who were close.

Joshua had seven of the children around him, clinging to his legs as he moved to the next elephant. Several of the priests had recovered and were storming down the steps of the altar toward me, knives in hand. I pulled another head from my garland, lit the fuse, and held it out to them.

“Ah, ah, ah,” I cautioned. “Kali. Goddess of destruction. Wrath et cetera.”

At the sight of the sparking fuse they stopped and began to backpedal. “Now that’s the sort of respect you should have shown before.”

I started whirling the head by the hair and the priests lost all semblance of courage and turned and ran. I hurled the head back up the boulevard onto the altar, where it exploded, sending a spray of real severed goat heads in all directions.

“Josh! Duck! Goat heads!”

Joshua pushed the children to the ground and fell over them until the pieces settled. He glared at me a second, then went on to free the other children. I hurled three more heads into different directions and now the entire temple square was nearly deserted but for Joshua, the children, a few injured worshipers, and the dead. I had built the bombs without any shrapnel in them, so those who had been injured had been trampled in the panic and the dead were those who had already been sacrificed to Kali. I think we pulled it off without killing anyone.

As Joshua led the children down the wide boulevard and out of the temple square, I covered our exit, backing down the boulevard, my last explosive head swinging in one hand, my torch in the other. Once I saw that Joshua and the children were safely away, I lit the fuse, whirled the head around and let it fly toward the black goddess.

“Bitch,” I said.

I was out of sight when it exploded.

Joshua and I got as far as a limestone cliff overlooking the Ganges before we had to stop to let the children rest. They were tired and hungry, but mostly they were hungry, and we had brought nothing for them to eat. At least, after Joshua’s touch, they weren’t afraid, and that gave them some peace. Josh and I were too jangled to sleep, so we sat up as the children lay down on the rocks around us and snored like kittens. Joshua held Rumi’s little daughter, Vitra, and before long her face was smeared with black paint from nuzzling his shoulder. All through the night, as he rocked the child, all I heard Joshua say was, “No more blood. No more blood.”

At first light we could see thousands, no, tens of thousands of people gathering at the banks of the river, all dressed in white, except for a few old men who were naked. They moved into the water and stood facing east, heads raised in anticipation, dotting the river as far as the eye could see. As the sun became a molten fingernail of light on the horizon, the muddy surface of the river turned golden. The gold light reflected off its surface onto the buildings, the shanties, the trees, the palaces, making everything in sight, including the worshipers, appear to have been gilded. And worshipers they were, for we could hear their songs from where we sat, and although we could not discern the words, we could hear that these were the songs of God.

“Are those the same people from last night?” I said.

“They would have to be, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t understand these people. I don’t understand their religion. I don’t understand how they think.”

Joshua stood and watched the Indians bowing and singing to the dawn, looking occasionally to the face of the child that slept on his shoulder. “This is testament to the glory of God’s creation, whether these people know it or not.”

“How can you say that? The sacrifices to Kali, the way the Untouchables are treated. Whatever they might believe, in practice their religion is hideous.”

“You’re right. It’s not right to condemn this child because she was not born a Brahman?”

“Of course not.”

“Then is it right to condemn her because she is not born a Jew?”

“What do you mean?”

“A man who is born a gentile may not see the kingdom of God. Are we, as Hebrews, any different from them? The lambs at the temple on Passover? The wealth and power of the Sadducees while others go hungry? At least the Untouchables can reach their reward eventually, through karma and rebirth. We don’t allow any gentile to do so.”

“You can’t compare what they do to God’s law. We don’t sacrifice human beings. We feed our poor, we take care of the sick.”

“Unless the sick are unclean,” Joshua said.

“But, Josh, we’re the chosen. It’s God’s will.”

“But is it right? He won’t tell me what to do. So I’ll say. And I say, no more.”

“You’re not just talking about eating bacon, are you?”

“Gautama the Buddha gave the way to people of all births to find the hand of God. With no blood sacrifice. Our doors have been marked with blood for too long, Biff.”

“So that’s what you think you’re going to do? Bring God to everyone?”

“Yes. After a nap.”

“Of course, I meant after a nap.”

Joshua held the little girl so I could see her face as she slept on his shoulder.

When the children awoke we led them back to their families at the pits, handing them into the arms of their mothers, who snatched each child away from us as if we were devils incarnate; they glared over their shoulders as they carried the babies back to their pits.

“Grateful bunch,” I said.

“They are afraid that we’ve angered Kali. And we’ve brought them another hungry mouth.”

“Still. Why did they help us if they didn’t want their children back?”

“Because we told them what to do. That’s what they do. What they are told. That’s how the Brahmans keep them in line. If they do what they are told, then perhaps they will not be Untouchables next life.”

“That’s depressing.”

Joshua nodded. We only had little Vitra to return to her father now, and I was sure that Rumi would be happy to see his daughter. His distress over losing her had basically been the reason he had saved our lives. As we came over the sandstone rise we could see that Rumi was not alone in his pit.

Rumi stood on his sitting rock, stark naked, sprinkling salt on his erect member as a large humpbacked cow, which nearly filled the rest of the pit, licked at the salt. Joshua held Vitra so she faced away from the pit, then backed away, as if he didn’t want to disturb the moment of beefy intimacy.

“A cow, Rumi?” I exclaimed. “I thought you people had beliefs.”

“That’s not a cow, that’s a bull,” Joshua said.

“Oh, that’s got to be your super-bonus abomination there. Where we come from whole cities get destroyed for that kind of thing, Rumi.” I reached over and put my hand over Vitra’s eyes. “Stay away from Daddy, honey, or you’ll turn into a pillar of salt.”

“But this is my wife, reincarnated.”

“Oh, don’t try that one on me, Rumi. For six years I lived in a Buddhist monastery where the only female company was a wild yak. I know from desperate.”

Joshua grabbed my arm. “You didn’t?”

“Relax, I’m just making a point. You’re the Messiah here, Josh. What do you think?”

“I think we need to go to Tamil and find the third magus.” He set Vitra down and Rumi quickly pulled up his loincloth as the child ran to him. “Go with God, Rumi,” Joshua said.

“May Shiva watch over you, you heretics. Thank you for returning my daughter.”

Joshua and I gathered up our clothes and satchels, then bought some rice in the market and set out for Tamil. We followed the Ganges south until we came to the sea, where Joshua and I washed the gore of Kali from our bodies.

We sat on the beach, letting the sun dry our skin as we picked pitch out of our chest hairs.

“You know, Josh,” I said, as I fought a particularly stubborn gob of tar that had stuck in my armpit, “when you were leading those kids out of the temple square, and they were so little and weak, but none of them seemed afraid…well, it was sort of heartwarming.”

“Yep, I love all the little children of the world, you know?” “Really?”

He nodded. “Green and yellow, black and white.”

“Good to know—Wait, green?”

“No, not green. I was just fuckin’ with you.”

Chapter 22

Tamil, as it turned out, was not a small town in southern India, but the whole southern peninsula, an area about five times the size of Israel, so looking for Melchior was akin to walking into Jerusalem on any given day and saying, “Hey, I’m looking for a Jewish guy, anyone seen him?” What we had going for us was that we knew Melchior’s occupation, he was an ascetic holy man who lived a nearly solitary life somewhere along the coast and that he, like his brother Gaspar, had been the son of a prince. We found hundreds of different holy men, or yogis, most of them living in complete austerity in the forest or in caves, and usually they had twisted their bodies into some impossible posture. The first of these I saw was a yogi who lived in a lean-to on the side of a hill overlooking a small fishing village. He had his feet tucked behind his shoulders and his head seemed to be coming from the wrong end of his torso.

“Josh, look! That guy is trying to lick his own balls! Just like Bartholomew, the village idiot. These are my people, Josh. These are my people. I have found home.”

Well, I hadn’t really found home. The guy was just performing some sort of spiritual discipline (that’s what “yoga” means in Sanskrit: discipline) and he wouldn’t teach me because my intentions weren’t pure or some claptrap. And he wasn’t Melchior. It took six months and the last of our money and we both saw our twenty-fifth birthdays before we found Melchior reclining in a shallow stone nook in a cliff over the ocean. Seagulls were nesting at his feet.

He was a hairier version of his brother, which is to say he was slight, about sixty years old, and he wore a caste mark on his forehead. His hair and beard were long and white, shot with only a few stripes of black, and he had intense dark eyes that seemed to show no white at all. He wore only a loincloth and he was as thin as any of the Untouchables we had met in Kalighat.

Joshua and I clung to the side of the cliff while the guru untied from the human knot he’d gotten himself into. It was a slow process and we pretended to look at the seagulls and enjoy the view so as not to embarrass the holy man by seeming impatient. When he finally achieved a posture that did not appear as if it had been caused by being run over by an ox cart, Joshua said, “We’ve come from Israel. We were six years with your brother Gaspar in the monastery. I am—”

“I know who you are,” said Melchior. His voice was melodic, and every sentence he spoke seemed as if he were beginning to recite a poem. “I recognize you from when I first saw you in Bethlehem.”

“You do?”

“A man’s self does not change, only his body. I see you grew out of the swaddling clothes.”

“Yes, some time ago.”

“Not sleeping in that manger anymore?”

“No.”

“Some days I could go for a nice manger, some straw, maybe a blanket. Not that I need any of those luxuries, nor does anyone who is on the spiritual path, but still.”

“I’ve come to learn from you,” Joshua said. “I am to be a bodhisattva to my people and I’m not sure how to go about it.”

“He’s the Messiah,” I said helpfully. “You know, the Messiah. You know, Son of God.”

“Yeah, Son of God,” Joshua said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Joshua.

“So what do you have for us?” I asked.

“And who are you?”

“Biff,” I said.

“My friend,” said Josh.

“Yeah, his friend,” said I.

“And what do you seek?”

“Actually, I’d like to not have to hang on to this cliff a lot longer, my fingers are going numb.”

“Yeah,” said Josh.

“Yeah,” said I.

“Find yourself a couple of nooks on the cliff. There are several empty. Yogis Ramata and Mahara recently moved on to their next rebirth.”

“If you know where we can find some food we would be grateful,” Joshua said. “It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten. And we have no money.”

“Time then for your first lesson, young Messiah. I am hungry as well. Bring me a grain of rice.”

Joshua and I climbed across the cliff until we found two nooks, tiny caves really, that were close to each other and not so far above the beach that falling out would kill us. Each of our nooks had been gouged out of the solid rock and was just wide enough to lie down in, tall enough to sit up in, and deep enough to keep the rain off if it was falling straight down. Once we were settled, I dug through my satchel until I found three old grains of rice that had worked their way into a seam. I put them in my bowl, then carried the bowl in my teeth as I made my way back to Melchior’s nook.

“I did not ask for a bowl,” said Melchior. Joshua had already skirted the cliff and was sitting next to the yogi with his feet dangling over the edge. There was a seagull in his lap.

“Presentation is half the meal,” I said, quoting something Joy had once said.

Melchior sniffed at the rice grains, then picked one up and held it between his bony fingertips.

“It’s raw.”

“Yes, it is.”

“We can’t eat it raw.”

“Well, I would have served it up steaming with a grain of salt and a molecule of green onion if I’d known you wanted it that way.” (Yeah, we had molecules in those days. Back off.)

“Very well, this will have to do.” The holy man held the bowl with the rice grains in his lap, then closed his eyes. His breathing began to slow, and after a moment he appeared not to be breathing at all.

Josh and I waited. And looked at each other. And Melchior didn’t move. His skeletal chest did not rise with breath. I was hungry and tired, but I waited. And the holy man didn’t move for almost an hour. Considering the recent nook vacancies on the cliff face, I was a little concerned that Melchior might have succumbed to some virulent yogi-killing epidemic.

“He dead?” I asked.

“Can’t tell.”

“Poke him.”

“No, he’s my teacher, a holy man. I’m not poking him.”

“He’s Untouchable.”

Joshua couldn’t resist the irony, he poked him. Instantly the yogi opened his eyes, pointed out to sea and screamed, “Look, a seagull!”

We looked. When we looked back the yogi was holding a full bowl of rice. “Here, go cook this.”

So began Joshua’s training to find what Melchior called the Divine Spark. The holy man was stern with me, but his patience with Joshua was infinite, and it was soon evident that by trying to be part of Joshua’s training I was actually holding him back. So on our third morning living in the cliff, I took a long satisfying whiz over the side (and is there anything so satisfying as whizzing from a high place?) then climbed to the beach and headed into the nearest town to look for a job. Even if Melchior could make a meal out of three grains of rice, I’d scraped all the stray grains out of both my and Joshua’s satchels. The yogi might be able to teach a guy to twist up and lick his own balls, but I couldn’t see that there was much nourishment in it.

The name of the town was Nicobar, and it was about twice the size of Sepphoris in my homeland, perhaps twenty thousand people, most of whom seemed to make their living from the sea, either as fishermen, traders, or shipbuilders. After inquiring at only a few places, I realized that for once it wasn’t my lack of skills that were keeping me from making a living, it was the caste system. It extended far deeper into the society than Rumi had told me. Subcastes of the larger four dictated that if you were born a stonecutter, your sons would be stonecutters, and their sons after them, and you were bound by your birth to never do any other job, regardless of how good or bad you were at it. If you were born a mourner, or a magician, you would die a mourner or a magician, and the only way you’d get out of death or magic was to die and be reincarnated as something else. The one skill that didn’t seem to require belonging to a caste was village idiot, but the Hindus seemed to thrust the more eccentric holy men into this role, so I found no openings there. I did have my bowl, and my experience at collecting alms for the monastery, so I tried my hand at begging, but every time I would get a good corner staked out, along would hop some one-legged blind guy to steal my action. By the late afternoon I had one tiny copper coin and the steward of the beggars guild had come along to warn me that if he caught me begging in Nicobar again, he’d see that I was admitted to the guild by the immediate removal of my arms and legs.

I bought a handful of rice at the market and was skulking out of town, my bowl before me and my head down, like a good monk, when I saw before me a most delicate set of toes, painted vermilion and followed by a dainty foot, an elegant ankle ajangle with copper bangles, an inviting calf decorated with hennaed designs as intricate as lace, and from there a bright skirt led me up the seam to a bejeweled navel, full breasts haltered in yellow silk, lips like plums, a nose as long and straight as a Roman statue’s, and wide brown eyes, shaded in blue and lined to make them look the size of a tiger’s. They drank me in.

“You’re a stranger,” she said. One long finger on my chest stopped me on the spot. I tried to hide my rice bowl in my shirt, and in a fabulous display of sleight of hand, ended up spilling the grains down my front.

“I’m from Galilee. In Israel.”

“Never heard of it. Is it far?” She reached into my shirt and began to pick out the rice grains that had caught against my sash, running her fingernail along my stomach muscles and dropping the grains, one by one, into my bowl.

“Very far. I’ve come here with my friend to obtain sacred and ancient knowledge, that kind of thing.”

“What is your name?”

“Biff—or Levi who is called Biff. We do that ‘who is called’ thing a lot in Israel.”

“Follow me, Biff, I’ll show you some ancient and sacred knowledge.” She hooked her finger into my sash and walked into a nearby doorway, for some reason completely confident that I would follow.

Inside, amid piles of colorful pillows strewn about the floors and deep carpets the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Balthasar’s fortress, stood a carved camphorwood stand on which a large codex lay open. The book was bound in brass filigreed with copper and silver, and the pages were made of a parchment finer than I had ever seen.

The woman pushed me toward the book and left her hand on my back as I looked at the open page. The handwritten script was gilded and so ornate that I could barely make out the words, which didn’t matter anyway, because it was the illustration that caught my eye. A man and a woman, nude, each perfect. The man had the woman facedown on a rug, her feet hooked over his shoulders, her arms held behind her as he entered her. I tried to call on my Buddhist training and discipline to keep from embarrassing myself in front of the strange woman.

“Ancient sacred wisdom,” she said. “The book was a gift from a patron. The Kama Sutra, it’s called. Thread of Desire.”

“The Buddha said that desire is the source of all suffering,” I said, feeling like the kung fu master that I knew I was.

“Do they look like they are suffering?”

“No.” I began to tremble. I had been too long out of the company of women. Far too long.

“Would you like to try that? That suffering. With me?”

“Yes,” I said. All the training, all the discipline, all the control, gone in a word.

“Do you have twenty rupees?”

“No.”

“Then suffer,” she said, and she stepped away.

“See, I told you.”

Then she walked away, trailing the scent of sandalwood and roses behind her as she went to the door, her hips waving good-bye to me all the way across the room, the bangles on her arms and ankles ringing like tiny temple bells calling me to worship at her secret grotto. At the door she crooked a finger for me to follow her out, and I did.

“My name is Kashmir,” she said. “Come back. I’ll teach you ancient and sacred knowledge. One page at time. Twenty rupees each.”

I took my stupid, pathetic, useless grains of rice and went back to my holy, stupid, useless, stupid male friends at the cliff.

“I brought some rice,” I said to Joshua when I had climbed to my nook in the cliff. “Melchior can do his rice thing and we’ll have enough for supper.”

Josh was sitting on the shelf of his nook, his legs folded into the lotus position, hands in the mudra of the compassionate Buddha. “Melchior is teaching the path to the Divine Spark,” Joshua said. “First you have to quiet the mind. That’s why there’s so much physical discipline, attention to breath, you have to be so completely in control that you can see past the illusion of your body.”

“And how is that different from what we did in the monastery?”

“It’s subtle, but it’s different. There the mind would ride the wave of action, you could meditate while on the exercise posts, shooting arrows, fighting. There was no goal because there was no place to be but in the moment. Here, the goal is to see beyond the moment, to the soul. I think I’m getting a glimpse. I’m learning the postures. Melchior says that an accomplished yogi can pass his entire body through a hoop the size of his head.”

“That’s great, Josh. Useful. Now let me tell you about this woman I met.” So I jumped over to Josh’s ledge and began to tell him about my day, the woman, the Kama Sutra, and my opinion that this just might be the sort of ancient spiritual information a young Messiah might need.

“Her name is Kashmir, which means soft and expensive.”

“But she’s a prostitute, Biff.”

“Prostitutes didn’t bother you when you were making me help you learn about sex.”

“They still don’t bother me, it’s just that you don’t have any money.”

“I got the feeling she likes me. I think maybe she’ll do me pro bono, if you know what I mean?” I elbowed him in the ribs and winked.

“You mean for the public good. You forget your Latin? ‘Pro bono’ means ‘for the public good.’”

“Oh. I thought it meant something else. She’s not going to do me for that.”

“No, probably not,” said Josh.

So the next day, first thing, I made may way back to Nicobar, determined to find a job, but by noon I found myself sitting on the street next to one of the blind, no-legged beggar kids. The street was packed with traders, haggling, making deals, exchanging cash for goods and services, and the kid was making a killing on the spare change. I was astounded at the amount in the kid’s bowl; there must have been enough for three Kama Sutra pages right there. Not that I would steal from a blind kid.

“Look, Scooter, you look a little tired, you want me to watch the bowl while you take a break?”

“Get your hand out of there!” The kid caught my wrist (me, the kung fu master). He was quick. “I can tell what you’re doing.”

“Okay, fine, how about I show you some magic tricks. A little sleight of hand?”

“Oh, that’ll be fun. I’m blind.”

“Look, make up your mind.”

“I’m going to call for the guild-master if you don’t go away.”

So I went away, despondent, defeated—not money enough to look at the edge of a page of the Kama Sutra. I skulked back to the cliffs, climbed up to my nook, and resolved to console myself with some cold rice left over from last night’s supper. I opened my satchel and—

“Ahhh!” I leapt back. “Josh, what are you doing in there?” And there he was, his beatific old Joshua face with the sole of a foot on either side like big ears, a few vertebrae showing, one hand, my ying-yang amulet vial, and a jar of myrrh.

“Get out of there. How’d you get in there?”

I’ve mentioned our satchels before. The Greeks called them wallets, I guess you would call them duffel bags. They were made of leather, had a long strap we could throw over our shoulder, and I suppose if you’d asked me before, I would have said you could get a whole person in one if you had to, but not in one piece.

“Melchior taught me. It took me all morning to get in here. I thought I’d surprise you.”

“Worked. Can you get out?”

“I don’t think so. I think my hips are dislocated.”

“Okay, where’s my black glass knife?”

“It’s at the bottom of the bag.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?”

“If you get me out I’ll show you what else I learned. Melchior taught me how to multiply the rice.”

A few minutes later Joshua and I were sitting on the ledge of my nook being bombarded by seagulls. The seagulls were attracted by the huge pile of cooked rice that lay between us on the ledge.

“That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” Except that you really couldn’t see it done. One minute you had a handful of rice, the next a bushel.

“Melchior says that it usually takes a lot longer for a yogi to learn to manipulate matter like this.”

“How much longer?”

“Thirty, forty years. Most of the time they pass on before they learn.”

“So this is like the healing. Part of your, uh, legacy?”

“This isn’t like the healing, Biff. This can be taught, given the time.”

I tossed a handful of rice into the air for some seagulls. “Tell you what. Melchior obviously doesn’t like me, so he’s not going to teach me anything. Let’s trade knowledge.”

I brought rice to Joshua, had him multiply it, then sold the surplus in the market, and eventually I started trading fish instead of rice because I could raise twenty rupees in fewer trips. But before that, I asked Joshua to come to town with me. We went to the market, which was thick with traders, haggling, making deals, exchanging cash for goods and services, and over on the side, a blind and legless beggar was making a killing on the change.

“Scooter, I’d like you to meet my friend Joshua.”

“My name’s not Scooter,” said the waif.

A half hour later Scooter could see again and miraculously his severed legs had been regenerated.

“You bastards!” said Scooter as he ran off on clean new pink feet.

“Go with God,” Joshua said.

“Now I guess we’ll see how easy it is to earn a living!” I shouted after the kid.

“He didn’t seem very pleased,” said Josh.

“He’s only learning to express himself. Forget him, others are suffering as well.”

And so it came to pass, that Joshua of Nazareth moved among them, healing them and performing miracles, and all the little blind children of Nicobar did see again, and all the lame did stand up and walk.

The little fuckers.

And so the exchange of knowledge began: what I was learning from Kashmir and the Kama Sutra for what Joshua was learning from the holy man Melchior. Each morning, before I went to town and before Joshua went to learn from his guru, we met on the beach and shared ideas and breakfast. Usually some rice and a fresh fish roasted over the fire. We’d gone long enough without eating animal flesh, we had decided, despite what Melchior and Gaspar tried to teach us.

“This ability to increase the bounty of food—imagine what we can do for the people of Israel, of the world.”

“Yes, Josh, for it is written: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to be a fish and his friends eat for a week.’”

“That is not written. Where is that written?”

“Amphibians five-seven.”

“There’s no friggin’ Amphibians in the Bible.”

“Plague of frogs. Ha! Gotcha!”

“How long’s it been since you had a beating?”

“Please. You can’t hit anyone, you have to be at total peace with all creation so you can find Sparky the Wonder Spirit.”

“The Divine Spark.”

“Whatever, th—ouch. Oh great, and what am I supposed to do, hit the Messiah back?”

“Turn the other cheek. Go ahead, turn it.”

As I said, thus did the enlightened exchange of sacred and ancient teachings begin:

The Kama Sutra sayeth:

When a woman winds her small toes into the armpit hair of the man, and the man hops upon one foot, while supporting the woman on his lingam and a butter churn, then the achieved position is called “Rhinoceros Balancing a Jelly Donut.”

“What’s a jelly donut?” Joshua asked.

“I don’t know. It’s a Vedic term lost to antiquity, but it is said to have had great significance to the keepers of the law.”

“Oh.”

The Katha Upanishad sayeth:

Beyond the senses are the objects,

and beyond the objects is the mind.

Beyond the mind is pure reason,

and beyond reason is the Spirit in man.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You have to think about it, but it means that there’s something eternal in everyone.”

“That’s swell. What’s with the guys on the bed of nails?”

“A yogi must leave his body if he is going to experience the spiritual.”

“So he leaves through the little holes in his back?”

“Let’s start again.”

The Kama Sutra sayeth:

When a man applies wax from the carnuba bean to a woman’s yoni and buffs it with a lint-free cloth or a papyrus towel until a mirror shine is achieved, then it is called Readying the Mongoose for Trade-in.”

“Look, she sells me pieces of sheepskin parchment, and each time, after we’re finished, I’m allowed to copy the drawings. I’m going to tie them all together and make my own codex.”

“You did that? That looks like it hurts.”

“This from a guy I had to break out of a wine jar with a hammer yesterday.”

“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d remembered to grease my shoulders like Melchior taught me.” Joshua turned the drawing to get a different angle on it. “You’re sure this doesn’t hurt?”

“No, not if you keep your bottom away from the incense burners.”

“No, I mean her.”

“Oh, her. Well, who knows? I’ll ask her.”

The Bhagavad Gita sayeth:

I am impartial to all creatures,

and no one is hateful or dear to me,

but men devoted to me are in me,

and I am in them.

“What’s the Bhagavad Gita?”

“It’s like a long poem in which the god Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna as he drives his chariot into battle.”

“Really, what’s he advise him?”

“He advises him not to feel bad about killing the enemy, because they are essentially already dead.”

“You know what I’d advise him if I was a god? I’d advise him to get someone else to drive his friggin’ chariot. The real God wouldn’t be caught dead driving a chariot.”

“Well, you have to look at it as a parable, otherwise it sort of reeks of false gods.”

“Our people don’t have good luck with false gods, Josh. They’re—I don’t know—frowned upon. We get killed and enslaved when we mess with them.”

“I’ll be careful.”

The Kama Sutra sayeth:

When a woman props herself up on the table and inhales the steam of the eucalyptus tea, while gargling a mixture of lemon, water, and honey, and the man takes the woman by the ears, and enters her from behind, while looking out the window at the girl across the street hanging out her laundry to dry, then the position is called “Distracted Tiger Hacking Up a Fur Ball.”

“I couldn’t find that one in the book, so she dictated it to me from memory.”

“Kashmir’s quite the scholar.”

“She had the sniffles, but agreed to my lesson anyway. I think she’s falling for me.”

“How could she not, you’re a very charming fellow.”

“Why, thank you, Josh.”

“You’re welcome, Biff.”

“Okay, tell me about your little yoga thing.”

The Bhagavad Gita sayeth:

Just as the wide-moving wind

is constantly present in space,

so all creatures exist in me.

Understand it to be so!

“Is that the kind of advice you’d give someone who’s riding into battle? You’d think Krishna would be saying stuff like, ‘Look out, an arrow! Duck!’”

“You’d think,” Joshua sighed.

The Kama Sutra sayeth:

The position of “Rampant Monkey Collecting Coconuts” is achieved when a woman hooks her fingers into the man’s nostrils and performs a hokey-pokey motion with her hips and the man, while firmly stroking the woman’s uvula with his thumbs, swings his lingam around her yoni in a direction counter to that in which water swirls down a drain. (Water has been observed swirling down the drain in different directions in different places. This is a mystery, but a good rule of thumb for achieving Rampant Monkey is to just go in the direction counter to which your own personal drain swirls.)

“Your drawings are getting better,” Joshua said. “In the first one I thought she had a tail.”

“I’m using the calligraphy techniques we learned in the monastery, only using them to draw figures. Josh, are you sure it doesn’t bother you, talking about this stuff when you’ll never be allowed to do it?”

“No, it’s interesting. It doesn’t bother you when I talk about heaven, does it?”

“Should it?”

“Look, a seagull!”

The Katha Upanishad sayeth:

For a man who has known him,

the light of truth shines.

For one who has not known, there is darkness.

The wise who have seen him in every being

on leaving this life, attain life immortal.

“That’s what you’re looking for, huh, the Divine Spark thing?”

“It’s not for me, Biff.”

“Josh, I’m not a satchel of sand here. I didn’t spend all of my time studying and meditating without getting some glimpse of the eternal.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Of course it helps when angels show up and you do miracles and stuff too.”

“Well, yes, I guess it would.”

“But that’s not a bad thing. We can use that when we get home.”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

Our training went on for two years before I saw the sign that called us home. Life was slow, but pleasant there by the sea. Joshua became more efficient at multiplying food, and while he insisted on living an austere lifestyle so he could remain unattached to the material world, I was able to get a little money ahead. In addition to paying for my lessons, I was able to decorate my nook (just some erotic drawings, curtains, some silk cushions) and buy a few personal items such as a new satchel, an ink stone and a set of brushes, and an elephant.

I named the elephant Vana, which is Sanskrit for wind, and although she certainly earned her name, I regret it was not due to her blazing speed. Feeding Vana was not a difficulty with Joshua’s ability to turn a handful of grass into a fodder farm, but no matter how hard Joshua tried to teach her yoga, she was not able to fit into my nook. (I consoled Joshua that it was probably the climb, and not his failure as a yoga guru that deterred Vana. “If she had fingers, Josh, she’d be snuggling up with me and seagulls right now.”) Vana didn’t like being on the beach when the tide came and washed sand between her toes, so she lived in a pasture just above the cliff. She did, however, love to swim, and some days rather than ride her on the beach all the way to Nicobar, I would have her swim into the harbor just under water, with only her trunk showing and me standing on her forehead. “Look, Kashmir, I’m walking on water! I’m walking on water!”

So eager was my erotic princess to share my embrace that rather than wonder at the spectacle as did the other townsfolk she could only reply:

“Park the elephant in back.”

(The first few times she said it I thought she was referring to a Kama Sutra position that we had missed, pages stuck together perhaps, but it turned out such was not the case.)

Kashmir and I became quite close as my studies progressed. After we went through all the positions of the Kama Sutra twice, Kashmir was able to take things to the next level by introducing Tantric discipline into our lovemaking. So skillful did we become at the meditative art of coupling that even in the throes of passion, Kashmir was able to polish her jewelry, count her money, or even rinse out a few delicates. I myself had so mastered the discipline of controlled ejaculation that often I was halfway home before release was at last achieved.

It was on my way home from Kashmir’s—as Vana and I were cutting through the market so that I could show my friends the ex-beggar boys the possible rewards for the man of discipline and character (to wit: I had an elephant and they did not)—that I saw, outlined on the wall of a temple of Vishnu, a dirty water stain, caused by condensation, mold, and wind-blown dust, which described the face of my best friend’s mother, Mary.

“Yeah, she does that,” said Joshua, when I swung over the edge of his nook and announced the news. He and Melchior had been meditating and the old man, as usual, appeared to be dead. “She used to do it all the time when we were kids. She sent James and me running all over the place washing down walls before people saw. Sometimes her face would appear in a pattern of water drops in the dust, or the peelings from grapes would fall just so in a pattern after being taken out of the wine press. Usually it was walls.”

“You never told me that.”

“I couldn’t tell you. The way you idolized her, you’d have been turning the pictures into shrines.”

“So they were naked pictures?”

Melchior cleared his throat and we both looked at him. “Joshua, either your mother or God has sent you a message. It doesn’t matter who sent it, the message is the same. It is time for you to go home.”

We would be leaving for the north in the morning, and Nicobar was south, so I left Joshua to pack our things on Vana while I walked into town to break the news to Kashmir.

“Oh my,” she said, “all the way back to Galilee. Do you have money for the journey?”

“A little.”

“But not with you?”

“No.”

“Well, okay. Bye.”

I could swear I saw a tear in her eye as she closed the door.

The next morning, with Vana loaded with my drawings and art supplies; my cushions, curtains, and rugs; my brass coffeepot, my tea ball, and my incense burner; my pair of breeding mongooses (mongeese?), their bamboo cage, my drum set, and my umbrella; my silk robe, my sun hat, my rain hat, my collection of carved erotic figurines, and Joshua’s bowl, we gathered on the beach to say good-bye. Melchior stood before us in his loincloth, the wind whipping the tails of his white beard and hair around his face like fierce clouds. There was no sadness in his face, but then, he had endeavored his entire life to detach from the material world, which we were part of. He’d already done this a long time ago.

Joshua made as if to embrace the old man, then instead just poked him in the shoulder. Once and only once, I saw Melchior smile. “But you haven’t taught me everything I need to know,” Josh said.

“You’re right, I have taught you nothing. I could teach you nothing. Everything that you needed to know was already there. You simply needed the word for it. Some need Kali and Shiva to destroy the world so they may see past the illusion to divinity in them, others need Krishna to drive them to the place where they may perceive what is eternal in them. Others may perceive the Divine Spark in themselves only by realizing through enlightenment that the spark resides in all things, and in that they find kinship. But because the Divine Spark resides in all, does not mean that all will discover it. Your dharma is not to learn, Joshua, but to teach.”

“How will I teach my people about the Divine Spark? Before you answer, remember we’re talking about Biff too.”

“You must only find the right word. The Divine Spark is infinite, the path to find it is not. The beginning of the path is the word.”

“Is that why you and Balthasar and Gaspar followed the star? To find the path to the Divine Spark in all men? The same reason that I came to find you?”

“We were seekers. You are that which is sought, Joshua. You are the source. The end is divinity, in the beginning is the word. You are the word.”