The Journeyer

INDIA

1

NO sooner had our vessel cast off from the Akyab dock than Tofaa Devata said to me, very primly, “Marco-wallah,” and began to lay down rules for our good behavior while we traveled together.

Since I was no longer being a Lord Justice, I had given her leave to address me less formally, and she told me that the -wallah was a Hindu suffixion which denoted both respect and friendliness. I had not given her leave, as well, to preach at me. But I listened politely and even managed not to laugh.

“Marco-wallah, you must realize that it would be a grave sin for us to lie together, and exceedingly wicked in the sight of both men and gods. No, do not look so stricken. Let me explain, and you will be less heartbroken by your unrequited yearning. You see, your judicial decision resolved that dispute back yonder in Akyab, but without deciding on the merits of the opposing arguments, so those arguments must still be taken into account in our relationship. On the one hand, if my dear late husband was still my husband at his death, then I am still sati, unless and until I remarry, so you would be committing the very worst of sins when you lay with me. If, for example, over yonder in India, we were caught in the act of surata, you would be sentenced to do surata with a fire-filled, incandescent brass statue of a woman, until you scorched and shriveled horribly to death. And then, after death, you would have to abide in the underworld called Kala, and suffer its fires and torments, for as many years as there are pores on my body. On the other hand, if I am now technically the slave of that Akyab creature who won me at dice, then your lying with me, his slave woman, would make you also legally his slave. In any event, I am of the Brahman jati—the highest of the four jati divisions of Hindu humankind—and you are of no jati at all, and therefore inferior. So, when we lay together, we would be defying and defiling the sacred jati order, and in punishment we would be thrown to those dogs trained to eat such heretics. Even if you were gallantly willing to risk that frightful death by raping me, I am still held to be an equal defiler and subject to the same grisly punishment. If it is ever known in India that you put your linga into my yoni, whether I actively engulf it or only passively spread myself for it, we are both in terrible disgrace and peril. Of course I am not a kanya, a green and unripe and flavorless virgin. Since I am a widow of some experience, not to say talent and ability and a capacious, warm, well-lubricated zankha, there would be no physical evidence of our sin. And I daresay these barbarian sailors would take no notice of what we civilized persons might do in private. So it would probably never be known in my homeland that you and I had reveled in ecstatic surata out here on the gentle ocean waters under the caressing moon. But we must desist as soon as we touch my native land, for all Hindus are most adept at scenting the least whiff of scandal, and crying shame and jeering nastily, and demanding bribes to keep silent about it, and then gossiping and tattling anyway.”

She had exhausted either her breath or the myriad aspects of the subject, so I said mildly, “Thank you for the useful instruction, Tofaa, and set your mind at ease. I will observe all the proprieties.”

“Oh.”

“Let me suggest just one thing.”

“Ah!”

“Do not call the crewmen sailors. Call them seamen or mariners.”

“Ugh.”

The Sardar Shaibani had gone to some trouble to find for us a good ship, not a flimsy Hindu-built coasting dinghi, but a substantial lateen-rigged Arab qurqur merchant vessel that could sail straight across the vast Bay of Bangala instead of having to skirt around its circumference. The crew was composed entirely of some very black, wiry, extraordinarily tiny men of a race called Malayu, but the captain was a genuine Arab, sea-wise and capable. He was taking his ship to Hormuz, away west in Persia, but had agreed (for a price) to take me and Tofaa as far as the Cholamandal. That was an open-sea, no-sight-of-land crossing of some three thousand li, about half as far as my longest voyage to date: the one from Venice to Acre. The captain warned us, before departure, that the bay could be a boat-eater. It was crossable only between the months of September and March—we were doing it in October—because only in that season were the winds right and the weather not murderously hot. However, during that season, when the bay had got itself nicely provided with a copious meal of many vessels bustling east and west across its surface, it would frequently stir up a tai-feng storm and capsize and sink and swallow them all.

But we encountered no storm and the weather stayed fine, except at night, when a dense fog often obscured the moon and stars, and wrapped us in wet gray wool. That did not slow the qurqur, since the captain could steer by his bussola needle, but it must have been miserably uncomfortable for the half-naked black crewmen who slept on the deck, because the fog collected in the rigging and dripped down a constant clammy dew. We two passengers, however, had a cabin apiece, and were snug enough, and we were given food enough, though it was not viand dining, and we were not attacked or robbed or molested by the crew. The Muslim captain naturally despised Hindus even more than Christians, and stayed aloof from our company, and he kept the seamen forever busy, so Tofaa and I were left to our own diversions. That we had none—beyond idly watching the flying fish skimming over the waves and the porkfish frolicking among the waves—did not discourage Tofaa from prattling about what diversions we must not succumb to.

“My strict but wise religion, Marco-wallah, holds that there is more than one sinfulness involved in lying together. So it is not just the sweet surata that you must put out of your mind, poor frustrated man. In addition to surata—the actual physical consummation—there are eight other aspects. The very least of them is as real and culpable as the most passionate and heated and sweaty and enjoyable embrace of surata. First there is smarana, which is thinking of doing surata. Then there is kirtana, which is speaking of doing it. Speaking to a confidant, I mean, as you might discuss with the captain your barely controllable desire for me. Then there is keli, which is flirting and dallying with the man or woman of one’s affection. Then there is prekshana, which means peeping secretly at his or her kaksha—the unmentionable parts—as for example you frequently do when I am bathing over the bucket back yonder on the afterdeck. Then there is guyabhashana, which is conversing on the subject, as you and I are so riskily doing at this moment. Then there is samkalpa, which is intending to do surata. Then there is adyavasaya, which is resolving to do it. Then there is kriyanishpati, which is … well … doing it. Which we must not.”

“Thank you for telling me these things, Tofaa. I shall manfully endeavor to restrain myself even from the wicked smarana.”

“Oh.”

She was right about my having frequently glimpsed her unmentionable kaksha, if that was what it was called, but I could hardly have avoided it. The wash bucket for us passengers was, as she had said, on the high afterdeck of the ship. All she had to do, for a measure of privacy while she sponged her nether parts, was to squat facing astern. But she seemed always to face the bow, and even the timorous Malayu crewmen would discover chores needing doing amidships, so they could peep upward when she opened the drapery of her sari garment and spread her thick thighs and mopped water up from the bucket to her wide-open and unclothed crotch. It bore a bush as black and thick as that on the black men’s heads, so maybe it inspired lustful smarana in them, but not in me. Anyway, though repellent itself, that thicket at least concealed whatever was within it. All I knew of that was what Tofaa insisted on telling me.

“Just in case, Marco-wallah, you should fall enamored of some pretty nach dancing girl when we get to Chola, and should wish to make conversation with her as flirtatiously and naughtily as you do with me, I will tell you the words to say. Pay attention, then. Your organ is called the linga and hers is called the yoni. When that nach girl excites you to ravening desire, that is called vyadhi, and your linga then becomes sthanu, ‘the standing stump.’ If the girl reciprocates your passion, then her yoni opens its lips for you to enter her zankha. The word zankha means only ‘shell,’ but I hope your nach girl’s is something better than a shell. My own zankha, for example, is more like a gullet, ever hungry, near to famishment, and salivating with anticipation. No, no, Marco-wallah, do not beseech me to let you feel with your trembling finger its eagerness to clasp and suck. No, no. We are civilized persons. It is good that we can stand close together like this, watching the sea and amiably conversing, with no compulsion to roll and thrash in surata on the deck, or in your cabin or mine. Yes, it is good that we can keep tight rein on our animal natures, even while discoursing so frankly and provocatively as we do, about your ardent linga and my yearning yoni.”

“I like that,” I said thoughtfully.

“You do? !”

“The words. Linga sounds sturdy and upright. Yoni sounds soft and moist. I must confess that we of the West do not give those things such nicely expressive names. I am something of a collector of languages, you see. Not in a scholarly way, only for my own use and edification. I like your teaching me all these new and exotic words.”

“Oh. Only words.”

However, I could not endure too many of hers at a time. So I went and sought out the reclusive Arab captain and asked him what he knew of the pearl fishers of the Cholamandal—whether we would be encountering them along the coast.

“Yes,” he said, and snorted. “According to the Hindus’ contemptible superstition, the oysters—the reptiles, as they call them—rise to the surface of the sea in April, when the rains begin to fall, and each reptile opens its shell and catches a raindrop. Then it settles to the sea bottom again, and there slowly hardens the raindrop into a pearl. That takes until October, so it is now that the divers are going down. You will arrive right when they are collecting the reptiles and the solidified raindrops.”

“A curious superstition,” I said. “Every educated person knows that pearls accrete around grains of sand. In fact, in Manzi, the Han may soon cease diving for the sea pearls, for they have recently learned to grow them in river mussels, by introducing into each mollusc a grain of sand.”

“Try telling that to the Hindus,” grunted the captain. “They have the minds of molluscs.”

It was impossible, aboard a ship, to evade Tofaa for very long. The next time she found me idling at the rail, she leaned her considerable bulk to wedge me there while she continued my education in things Hindu.

“You should also learn, Marco-wallah, how to look with knowing eyes at the nach dancing girls, and compare their beauty, so that you fall enamored only of the most beautiful. You might best do that by comparing them in your mind with what you have seen of me, for I fulfill all the standards of beauty for a Hindu woman. As it is set down: the three and the five, five, five. Which is to say, in order of specification, that three things of a woman should be deep. Her voice, her understanding and her navel. Now, of course I am not so talkative as most—giddy girls who have not yet attained to dignity and reserve—but on the occasions when I do speak, I am sure you have taken note that my voice is not shrill, and that my utterances are full of deep feminine understanding. As for my navel …” She pushed down the waistband of her sari, and lifted up the billow of dark-brown flesh there. “Regard! You could hide your heart in that profound navel, could you not?” She plucked out some matted old fluff that had already hidden there, and went on:

“Then there are five things that should be fine and delicate: a woman’s skin, her hair, her fingers, toes and joints. Surely you can find no fault with any of those attributes of mine. Then there are the five things that should be healthily bright pink: the woman’s palms and soles and tongue and nails and the corners of her eyes.” She went through quite an athletic performance: sticking out her tongue, flexing her talons, exhibiting her palms, tugging at the sooty pouches around her eyes to show me the red corner dots, and picking up each of her grimy feet to show me their leathery but rather cleaner undersides.

“Last, there are the five things that should be high-arched: the woman’s eyes, nose, ears, neck and breasts. You have seen and admired all of those except my bosom. Regard.” She unwound the top part of her sari, and bared her pillowlike dark-brown breasts, and somewhere down the deck a Malayu uttered a sort of anguished whinny. “High-arched they are indeed, and set close together, like nestling hoopoe birds, no gap between. The ideal Hindu breasts. Slide a sheet of paper in that tight cleft and it will stay there. As for putting your linga there, well, do not even consider it, but imagine the sensation of that close, soft, warm envelopment of it. And behold the nipples, like thumbs, and their halos, like saucers, and all black as night against the golden fawn skin. When examining your nach girl, Marco-wallah, be sure to look closely at her teats, and give them a wet lick with your tongue, for many women try to deceive by darkening theirs with al-kohl. Not I. These exquisite paps are natural, given me by Vishnu the Preserver. It was not casually that my noble parents named me Gift of the Gods. I budded at the age of eight, and was a woman at ten, and a married woman at twelve. Ah, just see the nipples, how they expand and writhe and stand, even though touched only by your devouring gaze. Think how they must behave when actually touched and fondled. But no, no, Marco-wallah, do not dream of touching them.”

“Very well.”

Rather sulkily, she covered herself again, and the numerous Malayu who had congregated behind nearby deckhouses and things dispersed again about their business.

“I will not,” Tofaa said stiffly, “enumerate the Hindu qualifications for beauty in the male, Marco-wallah, since you fall lamentably short of them. You are not even handsome. A handsome man’s eyebrows meet above the bridge of his nose, and his nose is long and pendulous. My dear late husband’s nose was as long as his royal pedigree. But as I say, I will not list your shortcomings. It would not be ladylike of me.”

“By all means, Tofaa, be ladylike.”

She may have been a beauty by Hindu standards—in truth, she was, as I later was often told by admiring Hindu men, openly envying me my companion—but I could think of no other people that would have judged her even passable, except possibly the Mien or the Bho. Despite Tofaa’s daily and highly visible and well-attended ablutions, she somehow never got quite clean. There was always that measle on her forehead, of course, and always a gray scurf about her ankles and a darker gray curd between her toes. But while I cannot say that the rest of her, from the measle down to the curd, was ever actually, in the Mien and Bho manner, encrusted, it was always just perceptibly dingy.

Back in Pagan, Hui-sheng had gone always barefoot in the Ava fashion, and Arùn had done so all her life, and even after a day of padding about the dusty city streets, their feet had always been, even before bath time, kissably clean and sweet. I honestly could not understand how Tofaa always managed to have such dirty feet, especially out here on the sea, where there was nothing to smirch them but fresh breezes and sparkling spindrift. It might have had something to do with the India-nut oil with which she coated all her exposed skin after each day’s washing. Her late dear husband had left her with very little in the way of personal possessions: not much but a leather flask of the nut oil and a leather bag that contained a quantity of wood chips. As her employer, I had voluntarily bought her a new wardrobe of the sari fabrics and other necessities. But she had regarded the leather containers as necessities, too, and brought them along. I had known that the oil of India-nut was to keep herself glistening in that unattractively greasy way. But I had no notion of what the wood chips were for—until one day, when she did not emerge from her cabin at mealtime, I tapped on her door and she bade me come in.

Tofaa was squatting in her immodest bathing position, and facing me, but her thicket was hidden by a small ceramic pot she was pressing to her crotch. Before I could make my excuses and step back out of the cabin, she calmly lifted the pot away from herself. It was the sort of pot used for brewing cha, and the spout of it came sliding, slick with secretions, out from among the hair. That would have been surprising enough, but even more so was the fact that the spout was emitting blue smoke. Tofaa had evidently put into the pot some of those wood chips, and set them smoldering, and stuck the smoking spout up inside herself. I had seen women play with themselves before, and with a variety of playthings, but never with smoke, and I told her so.

“Decent women do not play with themselves,” she said reprovingly. “That is what men are for. No, Marco-wallah, daintiness of the inside of one’s person is more to be desired than any merely exterior appearance of being clean. The application of nim-wood smoke is an age-old and cleanly practice of us fastidious Hindu women, and I do this for your sake, though little you appreciate it.”

I frankly saw little there to appreciate: a plump, greasy, dark-brown female squatting on the cabin floor, with her legs shamelessly apart, and the entrapped blue smoke oozing lazily up through her dense bush. I could have remarked that some exterior daintiness might have improved her chances of attracting someone nearer to her interior, but I chivalrously refrained.

“Nim-wood smoke is a preventive of unexpected pregnancy,” she went on. “It also makes the kaksha parts fragrant and tasty, should anyone happen to nuzzle or browse there. That is why I do this. Just in case you should sometime be overwhelmed by your brute passions, Marco-wallah, and seize me against my will, despite my pleas for mercy, and fling yourself upon me without giving me time to make ready, and force your rigid sthanu through my chaste but soft defenses, I take this precaution of administering the nim-wood smoke every day.”

“Tofaa, I wish you would stop.”

“You want me to?” Her eyes widened, and so must her yoni have done, for a voluminous puff of the blue smoke came suddenly up from there. “You want me to bear your children?”

“Gèsu. I want you to cease this everlasting preoccupation with matters below the waist. I engaged you to be my interpreter, and I am already shuddering for fear of what words you are likely to speak, ostensibly mine. But right now, Tofaa, our rice and goat meat are getting wet with salt spray. Come and put something in your other end.”

I really believed, at that time, that in choosing a Hindu woman for my translator in India, I had unfortunately chosen a particularly unlovely and witless and pathetic specimen. How she had come to be the consort of a king was beyond my comprehension, but I sympathized more than ever with that wretched man, and thought I better understood now why he had thrown away a kingdom and his life. But I have here recounted a few of Tofaa’s charmless attributes—only a few of them—and have repeated some of her fatuous garrulity—only some of it—by way of making her both visible and audible in all her awfulness. I do that because, on arriving in India, I discovered to my horror that Tofaa was not an anomaly. She was an unexceptional and purely typical adult Hindu female. From a crowd of Hindu women, whatever the assortment of classes, or jati, I could hardly have picked out Tofaa. Worse yet, I found the women to be immeasurably superior to the Hindu men.

In my journeying I had got acquainted with numerous other races and nations before visiting those of India. I had concluded that the Mien droppings of the Bho of To-Bhot had to be the lowest breed of mankind, and I had been mistaken. If the Mien represented humanity’s ground level, then the Hindus were its worm burrows. In some of those countries I had earlier inhabited or visited, I could not help seeing that some of the people despised and detested other people—for their different language or their lesser refinement or their lower class in society or their peculiar ways of life or their choice of religion. But in India I could not help seeing that everybody despised and detested everybody else, and for all those reasons.

Let me be as fair as I can. Let me say that I was in some small error from the start, in thinking of all Indians as Hindus. Tofaa informed me that “Hindu” was only a variant of the name “Indian,” and properly referred only to those Indians who practiced the Hindu religion of Sanatana Dharma, or Eternal Duty. Those preferred to be dignified by the name of “Brahmanists,” after the chief god (Brahma the Creator) of the three chief gods (the other two being Vishnu the Preserver and Siva the Destroyer) of their numberless multitude of gods. Other Hindus had picked out some lesser god from that mob—Varuna, Krishna, Hanuman, whoever—and gave more devotion to that one, and thereby rated themselves superior to the greater ruck of Hindus. Many others of the population had adopted the Muslim religion seeping in from the north and west. A very few Indians still practiced Buddhism. That religion, after originating in India and spreading afar, had almost died out in its homeland, possibly because it enjoined cleanliness. Still other Indians followed other religions or sects or cults: Jain, Sikh, Yoga, Zarduchi. In all their teeming diversity and jumble and overlap of faiths, however, the Indian people maintained one holy attribute in common: the adherents of every religion despised and detested the adherents of every other.

The Indians did not much like, either, to be lumped all together as “Indians.” They were a seething and still unmixed caldron of different races, or so they claimed. There were the Cholas, the Aryans, Sindi, Bhils, Bangali, Gonds … I do not know how many. The lighter brown Indians called themselves white, and claimed they were descended from fair-haired, pale-eyed ancestors who came from somewhere far to the north. If that was ever true, then there had since been so much intermingling that, over the centuries, the darker browns and blacks of the southern races had predominated—as mud does when poured into milk —and all the Indians were now but shades and tints of muddy brown. None was of any color worth boasting about, and the insignificant differences of hue served only as one more basis for their abhorring each other. The lighter brown ones could sneer at the darker brown, and they at the indisputably black.

Also, depending on their race, tribe, family lineage, place of original origin and place of current habitation, the Indians spoke one hundred seventy-nine different languages, hardly any two of them mutually comprehensible, and every one was deemed by its speakers the One True and Holy Tongue (though few of them ever bothered to learn to read and write it, if indeed it had a script or character or alphabet to be written in, which not many did), and the speakers of every True Tongue scorned and reviled those who spoke any False Tongue, which meant any of the one hundred and seventy-eight others.

Whatever their race, religion, tribe, or tongue, all the Indians spinelessly submitted to a social order imposed by the Brahmanists. That was the order of jati, which divided the people into four rigid classes and an overflow of discards. Jati having been first devised by some long-ago Brahman priests, their own descendants naturally constituted the highest class, called Brahman. Next were the descendants of long-ago warriors—very long ago, I surmised; I saw no man of the present day who could conceivably be imagined as a warrior—next, the descendants of long-ago merchants, and last the descendants of long-ago humble artisans. Those would have been the bottommost order, but there were also the discards, the paraiyar, or “untouchables,” who could claim no jati at all. A man or woman born into any of the jati could not associate with anyone born into a higher, and of course would not with anyone of a lower. Marriages and alliances and business transactions were done only between matching jati, so the classes were eternally perpetuated, and a person could no more ascend to a higher one than he could ascend to the clouds. Meanwhile, the paraiyar dared not even let their defiling shadow fall on anyone of jati.

No person in India—except, I suppose, a Hindu of the Brahman class—was pleased with the jati he found himself born into. Every lower-jati person I met was anxious to tell me how his forebears had, in the long-ago, occupied a much nobler class, and had been undeservedly debased through the influence or trickery or sorcery of some enemy. Nevertheless, all preened in the fact that they were of higher order than somebody else, even if only the vile paraiyar. And any of the paraiyar could always point derisively to some still more miserable paraiyar to whom he was superior. What was most contemptible about the jati order was not that it existed, and had existed for ages, but that all the people caught in its toils—not just Hindus, but every single soul in India—willingly let it go on existing. Any other people, with the least scintilla of courage and sense and self-respect would long ago have abolished it, or died trying. The Hindus never had even tried, and I saw no sign that they ever would.

It is not impossible that even a people as degenerate as the Bho and Mien may have improved in the years since I was last among them, and made something halfway decent of themselves and their country. But, from what travelers’ report I have had of India in these later years, nothing has changed there. To this day, if a Hindu ever feels bad about his being one of the dregs of humankind, he has only to look about for some other Hindu he feels better than, and he can feel good. And that satisfies him.

Since it would have been unwieldy for me to try to identify every person I met in India according to all his entitlements of race, religion, jati and language—one man might be simultaneously a Chola, a Jain, a Brahman and a Tamil-speaker—and since the whole population, in any event, was under the sway of the Hindu jati order, I continued to think indiscriminately of them all as Hindus, and to call them all Hindus, and I still do. If the fastidious Lady Tofaa considered that an improper or derogatory appellation I did not and do not care. I could think of numerous epithets more fitting and a lot worse.

2

THE Cholamandal was the most dreary and uninviting shore I ever sailed to. All along it, the sea and land merely and indistinctly blended, in coastal flats that were nothing but reedy, weedy, miasmal marshes created by a multitude of creeks and rivulets flowing sluggishly out from India’s distant interior. The merging of land and water was so gradual that vessels had to anchor three or four li out in the bay, where there was keel room. We made landfall off a village called Kuddalore, where we found a motley fleet of fishing and pearl-fishing boats already riding at anchor, with little dinghis ferrying their crewmen and cargoes back and forth from the anchorage to the almost invisible village far inland across the mud flats. Our captain adroitly maneuvered our qurqur among the fleet, while Tofaa leaned over the rail and peered at the Hindus aboard the other vessels and occasionally shouted queries at them.

“None of these,” she finally reported to me, “is the pearl-fisher boat that was at Akyab.”

“Well,” said the captain, also to me, “this Cholamandal pearl coast is a good three hundred farsakhs from north to south. Or, if you prefer, more than two thousand li. I hope you are not going to suggest that I cruise up and down its whole length.”

“No,” said Tofaa. “I think, Marco-wallah, we ought to go inland to the nearest Chola capital, which is Kumbakonam. Since all pearls are royal property, and go ultimately to the Raja, he can probably easiest direct us to the fisher we seek.”

“Very well,” I said, and to the captain, “If you will hail a dinghi to take us ashore, we will leave you here, and we thank you for the safe crossing. Salaam aleikum.”

While a scrawny little black dinghi-man rowed us across the brackish bay water, then poled us through the fetid marshes toward the distant Kuddalore, I asked Tofaa, “What is a Raja? A king, a Wang, what?”

“A king,” she said. “Two or three hundred years ago reigned the best and fiercest and wisest king the Chola kingdom ever had, and his name was King Rajaraja the Great. So ever since, in tribute to him and in hope of emulating him, the rulers of Chola—and most other Indian nations, as well—have taken his name as their title of majesty.”

Well, that was no uncommon sort of appropriation even in our Western world. Caesar had originally been a Roman family name, but became a title of office, and in the form of Kaiser remains so for the rulers of the more recent Holy Roman Empire, and in the form of Czar is used by the petty rulers of the many trivial Slavic nations. But I was to discover that the Hindu monarchs were not satisfied just to appropriate the former Raja’s name—that was not pretentious enough, all by itself—they had to elaborate and embroider upon it, to affect even more royalty and majesty.

Tofaa went on, “This Chola kingdom was formerly immense and great and unified. But the last high Raja died some years back, and it has since fragmented into numerous mandals—the Chola, the Chera, the Pandya—and their lesser Rajas are all contending for possession of the whole of the land.”

“They are welcome to it,” I grumbled, as we stepped onto the dock at Kuddalore. We might have been stepping from the Irawadi River into a Mien village. I need not describe Kuddalore further.

On that dock a group of men were jabbering and gesticulating, as they stood around a large wet object lying on the boards. I took a look at it and saw that it was evidently some fisherman’s catch. It was a dead fish, or at least it stunk like a fish, though I might better call it a sea creature, for it was bigger than I was, and like nothing I ever saw before. From midway down its body, it was definitely fishlike, terminating in a crescent fish tail. But it did not have fins or scales or gills. It was covered with a leathery skin, like that of a pork-fish, and the upper body was very curious. Instead of pork-fish flippers, it had stubby things like arms, ending in appendages like webbed paws. Even more remarkable, it had on its chest two immense but unmistakable breasts—very similar to Tofaa’s—and its head was vaguely like that of an extremely ugly cow.

“What in God’s name is it?” I asked. “If it were not so appallingly hideous, I should almost believe it a mermaid.”

“Only a fish,” said Tofaa. “We call it the duyong.”

“Then why all the fuss about a fish?”

“Some of the men are the crew of the boat that speared it and brought it in. The others are fishmongers who wish to buy portions of it to sell. The one well-dressed man is the village magistrate. He is demanding oaths and affidavits.”

“Whatever for?”

“It happens every time one is caught. Before the duyong is allowed to be sold, the fishermen must swear that none of them did surata with the duyong on their way to shore.”

“You mean … sexually coupled with it? With a fish?”

“They always do, though they always swear they did not.” She shrugged and smiled indulgently. “You men.”

There would be many later occasions and reasons for me to resent and lament my being included in the gender that also included male Hindus, but that was the first time. I walked in a wide circle around the duyong and the men, and proceeded on along Kuddalore’s main street. All the plump women villagers wore the wrap-around sari which adequately covered most of their body dirt, except where the belly roll of flesh was exposed. The skinny men, having less to expose, exposed it, wearing nothing but a messily wound tulband and a loose, large, baggy diaper called a dhoti. The children wore nothing but the measle painted on the forehead.

“Is there a karwansarai?” I asked Tofaa. “Or whatever you call it, where we can take lodging while we make ready to journey on?”

“Dak bangla,” she said. “Traveler’s rest house. I will inquire.”

She abruptly reached out and seized the arm of a passing man, and snapped a question at him. He did not, as a man of any other country would have done, take offense at being so brazenly accosted by a mere woman. Instead, he almost quailed, and spoke meekly in response. Tofaa said something that sounded very nearly accusing, and he replied even more feebly. The conversation went back and forth like that, she almost snarling, he finally almost whimpering. I regarded them with amazement, and at last Tofaa reported the result.

“There is no dak bangla in Kuddalore. So few strangers ever come here, and fewer care to stay as long as a night. It is typical of the lowly Cholas. In my native Bangala, now, we would have been most hospitably received. However, the wretch offers us lodging in his own house.”

“Well, that is hospitable enough, certainly,” I said.

“He asks that we follow him there, and wait until he is inside for a few moments. Then we are to knock at the door and he will open it, and we are to request a bed and a meal, and he will rudely refuse us.”

“I do not understand.”

“It is usual. You will see.”

She spoke again to the man, and he went off at an anxious trot. We followed, picking our way among the pigs and fowl and infants and excrement and other litter on the streets. Considering what the residents of Kuddalore had to live in—no house being any more substantial or elegant than a hut of the Ava jungle Mien—I was rather grateful that there was not a dak bangla for us, since anything maintained only for the occasional transient would have had to be a sty indeed. Our host’s residence was not much more—built of mud bricks and plastered with cow dung—as we saw when we halted outside and he disappeared into the dark interior of it. After a brief wait, as commanded, Tofaa and I went up to the shack and she knocked on the rickety doorjamb. What happened thereafter I relate as Tofaa later translated it all to me.

The same man appeared in the doorway, and reared his head back to look down his nose at us. This time, Tofaa addressed him only in an obsequious mumble.

“What? Strangers?” he bawled, loudly enough to have been heard down at the bayside dock. “Pilgrim wayfarers? No, indeed, not here! I do not care, woman, if you are of Brahman jati! I do not give shelter to just any caller, and I do not allow my wife—”

He not only broke off in mid-bellow, he totally vanished, whisking sideways beyond the door opening, as a meaty brown-black arm thrust him aside. A meaty brown-black woman appeared in his place, and smiled out at us, and she said, syrup sweetly:

“Wayfarers, are you? And seeking a bed and a meal? Well, do come in. Pay no heed to this worm of a husband. In his speech, but in his speech alone, he plays the great lord. Come in, come in, do.”

So Tofaa and I lugged our packs inside the house and were shown the bedchamber in which to stow them. The cow-dung-plastered room was entirely occupied by four beds, somewhat like the hindora bed I had encountered in other places, but not quite as good. A hindora was a pallet hung on ropes from a ceiling, but this kind, called a palang, was no more than a sort of slit cloth tube, like a sack opened lengthwise, roped at each end to the walls and swinging free in between. Two of the palangs held a swarm of naked brown-black children, but the woman swept them away as unceremoniously as she had done her husband, and made it plain that Tofaa and I would sleep there in the same room with her and him.

We went back to the other of the hut’s two rooms, and the woman swept the children farther, outside onto the street, while she made a meal for us. When she handed us each a slab of wood, I recognized the food on it—or rather, I recognized that it was mostly the mucous kàri sauce I had, a long time ago, eaten in the Pai-Mir mountains. Kàri was the only native word I could remember from that long-ago journey in company with other men of the Chola race. As I remembered, those other brown-black men had shown at least a trifle more manly spirit than my present host. But then, they had had no Chola women with them.

This man and I, since we could not converse, simply squatted together and ate our unappetizing meal and occasionally nodded companionably to each other. I must have seemed as much a flattened and trampled zerbino as he was, both of us mute and mousily nibbling, while the two women chattered vociferously, trading comments—as Tofaa later informed me—on the general worthlessness of men.

“It is well said,” remarked the woman of the house, “that a man is a man only when he is filled with angry passion, when he bears no vexation submissively. But is there anything more contemptibly pitiful”—she waved her food slab to indicate her husband—“than a weak man being angry?”

“It is well said,” Tofaa volunteered, “that a small pond is easily filled, and the forepaws of a mouse, and likewise a man of no account is easily satisfied.”

“I was first married to this one’s brother,” said the woman. “When I was widowed, when my husband’s fellow fishermen brought him home dead—crushed on the very deck, they said, by a newly caught duyong flailing about—I should have behaved like a proper sati, and thrown myself on his funeral pyre. But I was still young, and childless, so the village sadhu urged me to marry this brother of my husband, and have children to carry on the family line. Ah, well, I was still young.”

“It is well said,” Tofaa remarked, with a salacious giggle, “that a woman never grows old below the girdle.”

“True, indeed!” said the woman, with a lubricous giggle. “It is also well said: A fire cannot be laid with too many logs, nor a woman with too many sthanu.”

They both giggled lasciviously for a time. Then Tofaa said, waving her food slab to indicate the children swarming on the doorstep, “At least he is fruitful.”

“So is a rabbit,” grunted the woman. “It is well said: A man whose life and deeds are not outstanding above those of his fellows, he does but add to the heap.”

I finally got tired of seeming submissively to share my host’s cowed silence. In an attempt to make some communication with him, I indicated my still-heaped food slab and made insincere lip-smackings, as if I had enjoyed the slop, and then made gestures of asking what was the meat under the kàri. He comprehended, and told me what it was, and I realized that I did know one other word of the native language:

“Duyong.”

I got up and left the hut to inhale deeply of the evening air. It reeked of smoke and fish and garbage and fish and unwashed people and fish and pukey children, but it helped some. I kept on walking the Kuddalore streets, both of them, until well after dark, and returned to the hut to find all the children asleep on the front-room floor, among the detritus of our used food slabs, and the adults all asleep, fully dressed, in their palangs. With some difficulty at first try, I got into mine, and found it more comfortable than it had appeared, and fell asleep. But I was awakened at some dark hour, by scuffling noises, and determined that the man had climbed into his wife’s palang and was noisily doing surata, though she kept snarling and hissing something at him. Tofaa had waked and heard it, too, and later told me what the wife had been saying:

“You are only brother to my late husband, remember, even after all these years. As the sadhu commanded, you are forbidden to enjoy yourself while performing your seed function. No passion, do you hear? Do not enjoy yourself!”

I had by now rather come to the opinion that I had at last found the true homeland of the Amazons, and the source of all the legends about them. One of the legends was that they kept only some rather vestigial men about, to impregnate them when it was necessary to make more Amazons.

The next day, our host kindly went out and inquired among his neighbors and found one who was driving his ox cart to the next village inland, and would take me and Tofaa along. We thanked our host and his wife for their hospitality, and I gave the man a bit of silver in payment for our lodging, and his wife instantly snatched that for herself. Tofaa and I perched on the rear of the ox cart, and jostled a good deal as it lumbered off through the flat and feculent marshland. To pass the time, I asked her what that woman had meant when she spoke of sati.

“It is our old custom,” said Tofaa. “Sati means a faithful wife. When a man dies, if his widow is properly sati, she will fling herself on the pyre consuming his body, and die herself.”

“I see,” I said thoughtfully. Perhaps I had been wrong in thinking of the Hindu women as all being overbearing Amazons, of no uxorial qualities. “It is not entirely a grotesque idea. Almost winsome in a way. That a faithful wife accompanies her dear husband to the afterworld, wanting them to be together forever.”

“Well, not exactly,” said Tofaa. “It is well said: The highest hope of a woman is to die before her husband. That is because the plight of a widow is unthinkable. Her husband is probably worthless, but what does she do without one? So many females are constantly ripening to the marriageable age of eleven or twelve, what chance does a used and worn and not-young widow have of marrying again? Left alone and undefended and unsupported in the world, she is an object of uselessness, scorned and reviled. Our word for widow means literally a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So, you see, she might as well jump in the fire and get it over with.”

That somewhat took the luster of lofty sentiment off the practice, but I remarked that still it took some courage, and was not devoid of a certain proud dignity.

“Well, actually,” said Tofaa, “the custom originated because some wives did plan to remarry, and had their next husbands already picked out, and so poisoned their current ones. The practice of sati-sacrifice was mandated by the rulers and religious leaders, just to avert those frequent murders of husbands. It was made the law that, if a man died for whatever reason, and his wife was not demonstrably innocent of causing his death, she was to leap onto the pyre, and if she did not, the dead man’s family were to throw her onto it. So it made wives think twice before poisoning their husbands, and even made them solicitous about keeping their men alive, when they fell ill or got old.”

I decided I had been mistaken. This was not the homeland of the Amazons. It was the homeland of the Harpies.

That latest opinion was not shaken by what next transpired. We got to the village of Panruti well after sunset and found it also lacking any dak bangla, and Tofaa again snatched at a man in the street, and we went through the same performance as yesterday. He went home, we followed him, he loudly refused us entrance and was immediately overridden by a blustering female. The only difference in this case was that the henpecked husband was quite young and the hen was not.

When I thanked her for inviting us in, and Tofaa translated my thank-you, it came out something of a stammer. “We are grateful to you and your … uh … husband? … son?”

“He was my son,” said the woman. “He is now my husband.” I must have gaped, or blinked, for she went on to explain. “When his father died, he was our only child, and he would soon have been of an age to inherit this house and all its contents, and I would then have been a dead-woman-waiting-to-die. So I bribed the local sadhu to marry me to the boy—he being too young and ignorant to object—and thereby maintained my share in the property. Unhappily, he has not been much of a husband. So far, he has sired on me only these three: my daughters, his sisters.” She indicated the slack-jawed and witless-looking brats sitting lumpishly about. “If they are all I have, their eventual husbands will inherit next. Unless I give the girls to be devadasi temple whores. Or perhaps, since they are woefully deficient in their mentality, I could donate them to the Holy Order of Crippled Mendicants. But they may be even too imbecile to make proper beggars. Anyway, I am naturally anxious, and naturally trying mightily every night, to produce another son, and so keep the family property in the direct family line.” Briskly, she set before us some wood slabs of kàri-sauced food. “Therefore, if you do not mind, we will all eat in a hurry, so he and I can get to our palang.”

And again that night I overheard the moist noises of surata going on in the same room, this time accompanied by urgent whispers, which Tofaa repeated to me the next morning—“Harder, son! You must strive harder!” I wondered whether the avaricious woman planned next to marry her grandson, but I did not really care, and I did not ask. Nor did I bother remarking to Tofaa that all she had told me during our voyage —regarding the Hindu religion’s concern about sin, and strictures against it, and dire punishments for it—seemed to have had little elevating effect on Hindu morality in general.

Our destination, the capital city called Kumbakonam, was not impossibly far from where we had landed on the coast. But no Hindu peasant had any riding mounts to sell us, and not many men were willing to take us for hire to the next village or town down the road—or more likely, their wives would not let them—so Tofaa and I had to proceed by exasperatingly slow stages, whenever we could find a carter or a drover going our way. We rode jouncing in ox carts, and splayed across the sharp spine ridges of oxen, and dragged along on stone sledges, and straddling the rumps of pack asses, and once or twice riding real saddle horses, and many times we just set out walking, which usually meant we had to sleep in the roadside hedgerows. That was no intolerable hardship for me, except that on every one of those nights Tofaa gigglingly pretended I was bedding us down in the wilderness only to rape her, and when I did no such thing, she grumbled long into the night about the ungallant way I was treating a nobly born Lady Gift of the Gods.

The last outlying village on our way had a name that was bigger than its total population—Jayamkondacholapuram—and was otherwise remarkable only for something that happened, while we were there, to diminish its populace even further. Tofaa and I were again squatting in a cow-dung hut and supping on some mystery substance disguised in kàri, when there arose a rumbling sound like distant thunder. Our host and hostess immediately sprang erect and shrieked in unison, “Aswamheda!” and ran out of the house, kicking aside several of their children littered about the floor.

“What is aswamheda?” I asked Tofaa.

“I have no idea. The word means only a running away.”

“Perhaps we ought to emulate our hosts and run away.”

So she and I stepped over the children and went out into the single village street. The rumbling was nearer now, and I could tell that it was a herd of animals coming at a gallop from somewhere to the south. All of the Jayamkondacholapuramites were runing away from the noise, in a panicked and headlong mob, heedlessly trampling under their feet the numerous very young and very old persons who fell down. Some of the more spry villagers climbed up trees or onto the thatched roofs of their dwellings.

I saw the first of the herd come galloping into the southern end of the street, and saw that they were horses. Now, I know horses, and I know that, even among animals, they are not the most intelligent of creatures, but I also know that they have more sense than Hindus. Even a wild-eyed and foam-flecked running herd of them will not step on a fallen human being in its path. Every horse will leap over, or swerve aside, or if necessary execute a tumbler’s somersault, to avoid a fallen man or woman. So I simply threw myself prone in the street and dragged Tofaa with me, though she squealed in mortal terror. I held us both lying still and, as I expected, the maddened herd diverged around us and thundered past on our either side. The horses also took care to avoid the inert bodies of aged and infant Hindus already mashed by their own relatives and friends and neighbors.

The last of the horses disappeared on up the road to the northward, and the dust began to settle, and the villagers began to clamber down from roofs and trees and to amble back from whatever distances they had run to. They immediately commenced a concerted keening of grief and lament, as they peeled up their flattened dead, and they shook their fists at the sky and squawled imprecations at the Destroyer God Siva for having so unfeelingly taken so many of the innocent and infirm.

Tofaa and I went back to our meal, and eventually our host and hostess also returned, and counted their children. They had not lost any, and had trodden on only a few, but they were as sorrow-stricken and distraught as all the rest of the village—she and he did not even, after we all went to bed, perform surata for us that night—and they could not tell us anything more about the aswamheda except that it was a phenomenon which occurred about once a year, and was the doing of the cruel Raja of Kumbakonam.

“You would be well advised, wayfarers, not to go to that city,” said the woman of the house. “Why not settle down here in tranquil and civilized and neighborly Jayamkondacholapuram? There is ample room for you, now that Siva has destroyed so many of our people. Why persist in going to Kumbakonam, which is called the Black City?”

I said we had business there, and asked why it was so called.

“Because black is the Raja of Kumbakonam, and black his people, and black the dogs, and black the walls, and black the waters, and black the gods, and black the hearts of the people of Kumbakonam.”

3

UNDETERRED by the warning, Tofaa and I went on southward, and eventually crossed a running sewer that was dignified with the name of Kolerun River, and on the other side of it was Kumbakonam.

The city was much larger than any community we had yet come through, and it had filthier streets bordered with deeper ditches full of stagnant urine, and a greater variety of garbage rotting in the hot sun, and more lepers clicking their warning sticks, and more carcasses of dead dogs and beggars decaying in public view, and it was more rancid with the odors of kàri and cooking grease and sweat and unwashed feet. But the city really was no blacker of color or layered no thicker with surface dirt than any lesser community we had seen, and the inhabitants were no darker of skin and layered no thicker with accumulated grime. There were a great many more people, of course, than we had seen in one place before, and, like any city, Kumbakonam had attracted many eccentric types that had probably left their home villages in search of wider opportunity. For example, among the street crowds I saw quite a few individuals who wore gaudy feminine saris, but had on their heads the untidy tulbands usually worn by men.

“Those are the ardhanari,” said Tofaa. “What would you call them? Androgynes. Hermaphrodites. As you can see, they have bosoms like women. But you cannot see, until you pay for the privilege, that they have the nether organs of both men and women.”

“Well, well. I had always supposed them mythical beings. But I daresay, if they had to exist anywhere, it would be here.”

“We being a very civilized people,” said Tofaa, “we let the ardhanari parade freely about the streets, and openly ply their trade, and dress as elegantly as any women. The law requires only that they also wear the headdress of a man.”

“Not to deceive the unwary.”

“Exactly. A man who seeks an ordinary woman can hire a devanasi temple whore. But the ardhanari, although unsanctioned by any temple, are kept far more busy than the devanasi, since they can serve women as well as men. I am told they can even do both at once.”

“And that other man, yonder?” I asked, pointing. “Is he also peddling his nether parts?”

If he was, he could have sold them by bulk weight. He was carrying them before him in a tremendous basket which he held by both hands. Although the parts were still attached to his body, his dhoti diaper could not have contained them. The basket was completely filled by his testicular sac, which was leathery and wrinkled and veined like an elephant’s hide, and the testicles inside it must each have been twice the size of the man’s head. Just to see the sight made my own parts hurt in sympathy and revulsion.

“Look below his dhoti,” said Tofaa, “and you will see that he also has legs of elephant thickness and elephant skin. But do not feel sorry for him, Marco-wallah. He is only a paraiyar afflicted with the Shame of Santomè. Santomè is our name for the Christian saint you call Thomas.”

The explanation was even more astounding than the sight of the pitiable man-elephant. I said unbelievingly, “What would this benighted land know of Saint Thomas?”

“He is buried somewhere near here, or so it is said. He was the first Christian missionary ever to visit India, but he was not well received, because he tried to minister to the vile paraiyar outcasts, which disgusted and offended the good jati folk. So they paid Santomè’s own congregation of paraiyar converts to slay him, and—”

“His own congregation? And they did it?”

“The paraiyar will do anything for a copper coin. Dirty work is what they are for. However, Santomè must have been a powerfully holy man, albeit a heathen. The men who slew him, and their paraiyar descendants ever since, have been cursed with the Shame of Santomè,”

We pressed on to the center of the city, where stood the Raja’s palace. To get to it we had to cross a commodious market square, as crowded as all market squares, but on this day not with commerce. There was some kind of festa in progress, so Tofaa and I made our way across it leisurely, to let me see how the Hindus celebrated a joyous occasion. They seemed to be doing it more dutifully than joyously, I decided, for I could not see a happy or animated face anywhere. In fact, the faces, besides having a more than usually ornate measle painted on the forehead, were smeared with what looked like mud, but smelled worse.

“Dung of the sacred cattle,” said Tofaa. “First they wash their faces in the cows’ urine, then put the dung on their eyes, cheeks and breast.”

I refrained from any comment except, “Why?”

“This festival is in honor of Krishna, the God of Many Mistresses and Lovers. When Krishna was only a lad, you see, he was a simple cowherd, and it was in the cowshed that he did his first seductions of the local milkmaids and his fellow cowherds’ wives. So this festival, in addition to being a blithe celebration of high-spirited lovemaking, also has its aspect of solemnity in honoring Krishna’s sacred cows. That music the musicians are playing, you hear it?”

“I hear it. I did not know it was music.”

The players were grouped about a platform in the middle of the square, wringing noises from an assortment of devices—cane flutes, hand drums, wooden pipes, stringed things. In all that concert of strident screeching and twanging and squawking, the only perceptibly sweet notes came from a single instrument like a very long-necked lute with a gourd body, having three metal strings played with a plectrum on the musician’s forefinger. The Hindu audience sweatily massed roundabout looked as morosely unmoved by the music and as barely enduring of it as I imagine I did.

“What the musicians are playing,” said Tofaa, “is the kudakuttu, the pot-dance of Krishna, based on an ancient song the cowherds have always sung to their cows while milking them.”

“Ah. Yes. If you had given me time, I should probably have guessed something like that.”

“Here comes a lovely nach girl. Let us stay and watch her dance Krishna’s pot-dance.”

A brown-black and substantial female, lovely perhaps by the standards Tofaa had previously recited to me, and properly mammalian for the cow-worship occasion, got laboriously onto the platform, carrying a large clay pot—symbolic of Krishna’s milking pot, I assumed—and began limbering up by doing various poses with it. She tried shifting it from one arm’s crook to the other, and put it on top of her head a few times, and occasionally stamped a broad foot, evidently clearing the platform of ants.

Tofaa confided to me, “The worshipers of Krishna are the most lighthearted and blithesome of all the Hindu sects. Many condemn them for preferring gaiety to gravity and vivacity to meditation. But, as you see, they imitate the carefree Krishna, and they maintain that enjoyment of life gives bliss, and bliss gives serenity, and serenity gives wisdom, all together making for wholeness of soul. That is what the nach girl’s pot-dance conveys.”

“I should like to see that. When does she commence?”

“What do you mean? You are seeing that.”

“I mean the dance.”

“That is the dance!”

We continued on across the square—Tofaa seeming exasperated, but I not feeling much chastened—through the crowd of woebegone and nearly inanimate celebrants, and to the palace gates. I was carrying Kubilai’s ivory plaque slung on my chest, and Tofaa explained to the two gate guards what it represented. They were clad in not very military-looking dhotis and holding their spears at lazily disparate angles, and they shrugged as if disinclined either to bow us in or to take the trouble to keep us out. We went through a dusty courtyard and into a palace which was at least palatially built of stone, not the mud-and-dung that constituted most of Kumbakonam.

We were received by a steward—perhaps of some rank, since he wore a clean dhoti—and he did seem impressed by my pai-tzu and Tofaa’s explanation of it. He fell flat on his face, and then scrabbled off like a crab, and Tofaa said we should follow him. We did, and found ourselves in the throne room. By way of describing the richness and magnificence of that hall, I will only say that the four legs of the throne stood in tureens full of oil, to keep the local kaja snakes from climbing up into the seat and to keep the local white ants from gnawing and collapsing the whole thing. The steward motioned for us to wait, and scuttled off through another door.

“Why does that man go about on his belly?” I asked Tofaa.

“He is being respectful in the presence of his betters. We too must do so, when the Raja joins us. Not fall down, but make sure your head is never higher than his. I will nudge you at the proper moment.”

Half a dozen men came in just then, and stood in a line and regarded us impassively. They were as nondescript in person as any of the celebrants out in the square, but they were gorgeously attired in gold-threaded dhotis, and even fine jackets to cover their torsos, and almost neatly wound tulbands. For the first time in India, I supposed I was meeting some people of upper class, probably the Raja’s retinue of ministers, so I began a speech for Tofaa to translate, addressing them as “My lords,” and starting to introduce myself.

“Hush,” said Tofaa, tugging at my sleeve. “Those are only the Raja’s shouters and congratulators.”

Before I could ask what that meant, there was a stir at the door again, and the Raja strode ceremonially in at the head of another group of courtiers. Instantly, the six shouters and congratulators bellowed—and believe this or not, they bellowed in unison:

“All hail His Highness the Maharajadhiraj Raj Rajeshwar Narendra Karni Shriomani Sawai Jai Maharaja Sri Ganga Muazzam Singhji Jah Bahadur!”

I later had Tofaa repeat all that for me, slowly and precisely, so I could write it down—not just because the title was so marvelously grandiose, but also because it was so ludicrous a title for a small, black, elderly, bald, paunchy, oily Hindu.

It seemed for a moment to perplex even Tofaa. But she poked me with an elbow and she knelt—and, because she was no small woman, she discovered that even kneeling she was still a fraction taller than the little Raja, so she lowered herself still deeper, into an abject squat, and began falteringly, “Your Highness … Maharajadhiraj … Raj …”

“Your Highness is sufficient,” he said expansively.

The shouters and congratulators roared, “His Highness is the very Warden of the World!”

He made a genial and modest gesture for them to be silent. They did not bellow again for a while, but neither were they ever entirely silent. Every time the little Raja did anything, they would comment on it, in a murmur, but somehow still in unison, things like: “Behold, His Highness seats himself upon the throne of his dominion,” and: “Behold, how gracefully His Highness pats a hand upon his yawn …”

“And who,” said the little Raja to Tofaa, “is this?” turning a very haughty look upon me, for I had not knelt or bent at all.

“Tell him,” I said in Farsi, “that I am called Marco Polo the Insignificant and Unsung.”

The little Raja’s look of hauteur became displeasure, and he said, also in Farsi, “A fellow white man, eh? But a white-skinned one. If you are a Christian missionary, go away.”

“His Highness bids the lowly Christian go away,” murmured the shouters and congratulators.

I said, “I am a Christian, Your Highness, but—”

“Then go away, lest you suffer the fate of your long-ago predecessor Santomè. He had the outrageous nerve to come here preaching that we should worship a carpenter whose disciples were all fishermen. Disgusting. Carpenters and fishermen are of the lowest jati, if not downright paraiyar.”

“His Highness is rightly and righteously disgusted.”

“I am indeed on a mission, Your Highness, but not to preach.” I decided to temporize for a while. “Mainly, I wished to see something of your great nation and”—it cost me an effort, but I lied—“and to admire it.” I waved toward the windows, whence came the mournful music and the sullen muttering of the festival, so called.

“Ah, you have seen my people making merry!” the little Raja exclaimed, looking not so petulant. “Yes, one tries to keep the people happy and content. Did you enjoy the exhilarating Krishna frolic, Polo-wallah?”

I tried hard to think of something enjoyable about it. “I was much—much entertained by the music, Your Highness. One instrument in particular … a sort of long-necked lute …”

“Say you so?” he cried, seeming unaccountably pleased.

“His Highness is royally pleased.”

“That is an entirely new instrument!” he went on, excitedly. “It is called a sitar. It was invented by my very own Court Musicmaster!”

It appeared that I had, all fortuitously, melted any incipient frost between us. Tofaa gave me an admiring look as the little Raja bubbled enthusiastically, “You must meet the instrument’s inventor, Polo-wallah. May I call you Marco-wallah? Yes, let us dine together, and I will bid the Musicmaster join us. It is a pleasure to welcome such a discerning guest, of such good taste. Shouters, command that the dining hall be prepared.”

The six men trotted off down a corridor, bellowing the command, still in concert, and even trotting in step together. I discreetly gestured a suggestion to Tofaa, and she comprehended, and timidly asked the little Raja, “Your Highness, might we wash off some of our travel dust before we are honored by joining you at table?”

“Oh, yes. By all means. Forgive me, lovely lady, but your charms would distract any man from noticing any trivialities. Ah, Marco-wallah, again your good taste is evident. It is also evident that you have admired our country and our people, seeing that you have taken a lady wife from among them.” I gasped. He added, archly, “But did you have to take the most beauteous, and thereby so sorely deprive us poor natives?” I tried to make an instant correction of that horrific misapprehension, but he went to where the steward was still lying on his face, and kicked the man and snarled, “Misbegotten wretch! Never to be twice-born! Why did you not lead these eminent guests immediately to a state apartment and see them cared for? Do so! Prepare for them the bridal suite! Assign them servants! Then see to the banquet and the entertainers!”

When I saw that the bridal suite had two separate beds, I decided it would not be necessary to demand other quarters. And when a number of stout dark women dragged in a tub and filled it, I found it not inconvenient for me and Tofaa to have the same bathing chamber. I took the masculine prerogative of bathing first, then stayed to oversee Tofaa’s ablutions and direct the women servants—causing some incredulity among them at my insistent thoroughness—so that, for once, Tofaa got well washed. When we put on the best clothes we carried and went downstairs to the dining hall, even her bare feet were clean.

And I made certain, before indulging in any small table talk, to inform the little Raja and all others present, “The Lady Tofaa Devata is not my wife, Your Highness.” That sounded brusquely uncomplimentary of the lady, so, to maintain his estimation of her importance, I added, “She is one of the noble widows of the late King of Ava.”

“Widow, eh?” grunted the little Raja, as if instantly losing all interest in her.

I continued, “The Lady Gift of the Gods most graciously consented to accompany me on my journey through your fair land, and to interpret for me the wit and wisdom of the many fine people we have met along the way.”

He grunted again, “Companion, eh? Well, to each his custom. A sensible and tasteful Hindu, going on a journey, takes not a female Hindu, but a Hindu boy, for his temper is not so like a kaja snake’s, and his hole not so like a cow’s.”

To change the subject, I turned to the fourth at our table, a man of my own age, bearded like me, and seeming more tan than black of complexion behind the beard. “You would be the inventive musician, I believe, Master …”

“Musicmaster Amir Khusru,” said the little Raja proprietorially. “Master of melodies, and also dances, and also poetry, being an accomplished composer of the licentious ghazal poems. A credit to my court.”

“His Highness’s court is blessed,” crooned the shouters and congratulators, standing against the wall, “and blessed most by the presence of His Highness”—during which the Musicmaster only smiled self-deprecatingly.

“I never before saw a musical instrument with strings made of metal,” I said, and Tofaa—now subdued to meekness—translated as I went on, “Indeed, I had never before thought of Hindus as inventors of anything so good and useful.”

“You Westerners,” the little Raja said peevishly, “are always looking to do good. We Hindus seek to be good. An infinitely superior attitude to life.”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “that new Hindu sitar is a doing of good. I congratulate Your Highness and your Master Khusru.”

“Except that I am not a Hindu,” the Musicmaster said in Farsi, with some amusement. “I am of Persian birth. The name I gave the sitar is from the Farsi, as you may have perceived. Si-tar: three-stringed. One string of steel wire and two of brass.”

The little Raja looked still more peeved at my having learned that the sitar was no Hindu achievement. I wished to put him in a good mood again, but I was beginning to wonder if there was any subject that could be discussed without its blatantly or subtly denigrating the Hindus. In mild desperation, I turned to praising the food we had been served. It was some kind of venison, drowned as usual in the kàri sauce, but this kàri was at least colored a sightly yellow-gold and a little enhanced in its flavor, though only with turmeric, which is an inferior substitute for zafràn.

“Meat of the four-horned deer, this is,” said the little Raja, when I complimented it. “A delicacy we reserve for only the most favored guests.”

“I am honored,” I said. “But I thought your Hindu religion forbade the hunting of wild game. Doubtless I was misinformed.”

“No, no, you were rightly informed,” said the little Raja. “But our religion also bids us be clever.” He gave a broad wink. “So I ordered all the people of Kumbakonam to take holy water from the temples and go into the forests and sprinkle that holy water about, loudly declaring that all the forest animals were henceforth sacrifices to the gods. That makes our hunting of them quite permissible, you see—each killing being a tacit offering—and of course our hunters always give a haunch or something to the temple sadhus, so they will not inconveniently decide that we are misinterpreting any sacred text.”

I sighed. It really was impossible to light on an innocuous subject. If it did not explicitly or implicitly denigrate the Hindus, it made them impugn themselves. But I tried again:

“Do Your Highness’s hunters hunt on horseback? I ask because I wonder if some horses might have been lost from your royal stables. The Lady Tofaa and I encountered quite a herd running loose on the other side of the river.”

“Ah, you met my aswamheda!” he cried, sounding now most jovial again. “The aswamheda is another cleverness of mine. A rival Raja, you see, holds that province beyond the Kolerun River. So every year, I have my drovers deliberately whip a horse herd over to there. If that Raja resents the trespass and keeps possession of the horses, then I have excuse for declaring war on him and invading and seizing his lands. However, if he rounds them up and returns them to me—which he has done every year so far—then it betokens his submission to me, and all the world knows I am his superior.”

If this little Raja was the superior, I decided, as the meal concluded, then I was glad not to have encountered the other. Because this one marked the close of the banquet by leaning to one side, raising one little buttock and gustily, audibly, odoriferously passing wind.

“His Highness farts!” bellowed the shouters and congratulators, making me flinch even more than I had already done. “The food was good, and the meal acceptable, and His Highness’s digestion is still superb, and his bowels an example to us all!”

I really had not much hope that this posturing monkey could be of any help in my current quest. However, as we sat on at the table, drinking tepid cha from elaborately jeweled but slightly misshapen cups, I recounted to the little Raja and the Master Khusru the events that had brought me hither, and the object of my pursuit, concluding, “I understand, Your Highness, that a pearl-fisher subject of yours was the man who acquired the Buddha’s tooth, hoping that it would confer good fortune on his pearl fishing.”

The little Raja, as I might have expected, responded by taking my story as a reflection on himself, on Hinduism and on Hindus in general.

“I am distressed,” he muttered. “You imply, Marco-wallah, that some one of my subjects imputed supernatural power to that fragment of an alien god. Yes, I am distressed that you could believe that any Hindu has so little faith in his own stalwart religion, the religion of his fathers, the religion of his benevolent Raja.”

I said placatively, “Doubtless the new possessor of the tooth has by now realized his error, and found the thing not at all magical, and repented his acquisition of it. He, being a good Hindu, would probably throw it in the sea, except that it cost him some time and perhaps some uncertainty in the winning of it. So, for a suitable exchange, he would probably be glad to give it up.”

“Give it up he most certainly will!” snapped the little Raja. “I shall make proclamation that he come forward and surrender it—and surrender himself to the karavat!”

I did not know what a karavat was, but evidently Master Khusru did, for he remarked mildly, “That, Your Highness, is not likely to make anyone come hastening forward with the object.”

“Please, Your Highness,” I said. “Do not make demand or threat, but publish only a persuasive request and my offer of reward.”

The little Raja grumbled for a while, but then said, “I am known as a Raja who always keeps his word. If I offer a reward, it will be paid.” He eyed me sidewise. “You will pay it?”

“Assuredly, Your Highness, and most liberally.”

“Very well. And then I will keep my word, which I have already spoken. The karavat.” I did not know whether I should remonstrate on behalf of some unsuspecting pearl fisherman. But anyway, before I could, the little Raja summoned his steward and spoke rapidly to him. The man scuttled from the hall, and the Raja turned again to me. “The proclamation will immediately be cried throughout my realm: bring the heathen tooth and receive a munificent reward. It will bring the desired result, I promise you that, for all my people are honest and responsible and devout Hindus. But it may take a while, because the pearl fishers are constantly sailing back and forth between their coastal villages and the reptile beds.”

“I understand, Your Highness.”

“You will be my guest—your female, too—until the relic is retrieved.”

“With gratitude, Your Highness.”

“Then let us now cast off all dull business and sober care,” he said, dusting his little hands to demonstrate, “and let mirth and joy reign in here as it does in the square outside. Shouters, bring on the entertainers!”

This was the first entertainment: an aged and very dirty, brown-black man, so ragged of dhoti that he was quite indecent, shuffled woefully into the room and fell prostrate before the little Raja. Master Khusru helpfully murmured to me:

“What we call in Persia a darwish, a holy mendicant, here called a naga. He will perform to earn his supper crust and a few coppers.”

The old beggar went to a cleared space in the room and gave a hoarse call, and an equally ragged and filthy young boy came in bearing a roll of what seemed to be cloth and rope. When the two of them unrolled the bundle, it proved to be one of the swing-style palang beds, its two ropes terminating in little brass cups. The boy lay down in the palang on the floor. The ancient naga knelt and slipped the two brass cups onto his eyeballs, and pulled down his wrinkled black eyelids over them. Very slowly, he stood erect, lifting the boy in the palang off the floor—not using his hands or teeth or anything but his eyeballs—then swinging the boy from side to side until the little Raja felt moved to applaud. Khusru and Tofaa and I politely did, too, and we men threw the old beggar some coppers.

Next came into the dining hall a portly, squat, dark-brown nach girl, who danced for us, about as listlessly as the woman I had seen dancing at the Krishna festa. Her only accompanying music was the jingling of a column of gold bracelets which she wore from wrist to shoulder of just one arm, and she wore nothing else at all. I was not much enthralled—it might have been Tofaa stamping her familiar soiled feet and undulating her familiar bushy kaksha—but the little Raja giggled and snorted and slavered throughout, and applauded wildly as the woman withdrew.

Then the tattered and filthy old mendicant returned. Rubbing his eyes, which had got bulged and reddened by his performance with the palang, he made a brief speech to the little Raja, who turned and told me:

“The naga says he is a Yogi, Marco-Wallah. The followers of the Yoga sect are accomplished in many strange and secret arts. You will see. If you truly harbor any belief, as I suspect you do, that we Hindus are backward or lacking in aptitude, then you are about to be convinced otherwise, for you will now witness a wonder that only a Hindu could show you.” He called to the waiting beggar, “Which Yoga miracle will you show us, Oh Yogi? Will you be buried for a month underground and come up still alive? Will you make a rope stand erect and climb it and disappear into the heavens? Will you carve your boy assistant into pieces and then restore him whole? Will you at least levitate for us, Oh holy Yogi?”

The decrepit old man began to speak in a creaking small voice, but sounding earnest, as if making a momentous announcement, and doing much gesticulation. The little Raja and the Musicmaster leaned forward to listen intently, so now it was Tofaa who explained to me what was going on. She seemed pleased to do so, saying eagerly:

“It will be a wonder which you may wish to observe closely, Marco-wallah. The Yogi says he has discovered a revolutionary new way to do surata with a woman. Instead of his linga gushing out its juice at the climactic moment, as a man’s customarily does, his gives a great inhaling suck inward. Thereby he ingests the life-force of the woman without expending any of his own. He says his discovery not only provides a fantastic new sensation, its continual practice could accrue to a man so much life-force that he might live forever. Would not you like to learn that ability, Marco-wallah?”

“Well,” I said, “it sounds like an. interestingly novel variation on the ordinary.”

“Yes! Show us, Oh Yogi!” the little Raja called to him. “Show us this instant. Shouters, bring back the nach girl. She is already undressed and ready for use.”

The six men went trotting out in lock step. But the Yogi held up a cautionary hand and declaimed some more.

“He says he dare not do it with a valuable dancing girl,” Tofaa translated, “because any woman must wither to some degree when his linga does its sucking inside her. Instead, he requests a yoni with which he can demonstrate.”

The six shouters trotted back in again, bringing the naked girl, but at another command from the little Raja they ran out once more.

I asked, “How can the Yogi be provided with a yoni without a woman attached?”

“A yoni stone,” said Tofaa. “Around every temple you will see standing carved linga stone columns, which are representative of the god Siva, and also open-holed yoni stones, representative of his consort goddess Parvati.”

The six men came back, one of them bringing a stone like a small wheel, with an oval opening cut through it, roughly resembling a woman’s yoni, even having the kaksha hair carved around it.

The Yogi did a number of preparatory gesticulations, and spoke what sounded like solemn incantations, then parted his dhoti rags and unashamedly pulled out his linga, which was like a black-barked twig. With more incantations and gestures of demonstration—this is how it is done, gentlemen—he pushed his limp organ through the yoni hole in the stone. Then, holding the heavy stone against his crotch, he beckoned to the nach girl, who was also standing watching. He bade her take his linga in her fingers and bring it to arousal.

The girl did not recoil or complain, but she did not appear delighted with the idea. Nevertheless, she took hold of what protruded beyond the stone, and began working it, rather as if she were milking a cow. Her own udder bounced and all her bracelets jingled in rhythm to the motion. The old mendicant chanted down at the yoni and at the girl’s hand yanking at him, and he narrowed his red eyes in intense concentration, and rivulets of sweat began to course down the dirt of his face. After some while, his linga grew enough to protrude farther past the stone, and we could even see its brown bulbous head creeping out a little beyond the nach girl’s fricating fist. Finally the Yogi said something to her and she let go of him and stepped away.

Presumably the old beggar had stopped her just before she brought him to spruzzo. The stone was held to him now simply by the stiffness of his organ. He stared down at that peg and its constricting hoop, and so did the by now slightly breathless nach girl, and so did we at the table, and the shouters against the wall, and all the servants in the dining room. The Yogi’s linga had attained to a respectable size, considering the man’s age and general scrawniness and beggarly debilitude. But it looked somehow strained and inflamed, bulging as it did from the narrow yoni of the stone it held firmly at his crotch.

The Yogi made several more gesticulations, but in a rather hurried and sketchy manner, and yammered a whole string of incantations, but in a rather strangled voice. Nothing happened that we could see. He glanced about at all of us, looking somewhat abashed, and glowered really hatefully at the nach girl, who was now humming indifferently and examining her fingernails, as if to say, “See? You should have used me.” The Yogi yelled some more at his linga and borrowed yoni, as if cursing them, and made some more violent gestures, including shaking his fist. Still nothing happened, except that he sweated more copiously, and his tightly pinched organ was adding a distinct purple hue to its brown-black. The nach girl gave an audible snicker, and the Musicmaster an amused chuckle, and the little Raja began drumming his fingers on the tabletop.

“Well?” I said aside to Tofaa.

She whispered, “The Yogi appears to be having some difficulty.”

Indeed he did. He was now dancing in place, more vigorously than the professional dancing girl had done, and his eyes were more redly extruded than they had been after the palang-swinging performance, and his vociferations were no longer incantatory, but recognizable even to me as cries of pain. His ragged boy assistant came running, and tugged at the imprisoning stone, at which his master gave a frightful screech. The six shouters then also dashed forward to help, and there was a confusion of hands at that empurpled center of attention, until the agonized Yogi reeled wailing away from them and fell down, writhing and hammering his fists on the floor.

“Take him away!” the little Raja commanded, in a disgusted voice. “Take the old fraud to the kitchen. Try an application of grease.”

The Yogi was carried from the room, not without some trouble, for he was contorting like a gaffed fish and trumpeting like a speared elephant. The entertainment appeared to be over. We four sat on at the table, in a mutually embarrassed silence, listening to the shrieks gradually diminishing down the corridors. I was the first to speak. I naturally did not remark on this having been one more affirmation of my opinion of Hindu foolishness and futility. Instead I said, by way of graciously excusing it:

“That happens all the time, Your Highness, to all the lower animals. Everyone has seen a dog and a bitch stuck together until the bitch’s clasping yoni relaxes and the dog’s swollen linga wilts.”

“It may take some time for the Yogi,” said Master Khusru, still with amusement. “The stone yoni will not relax and his linga’s swelling therefore cannot go down.”

“Bah!” exclaimed the little Raja, in furious exasperation. “I should have insisted that he levitate, not try something new. Let us go to bed.” And he stamped out of the room, with no shouters present to congratulate himself and the world on the grace of his gait.

4

“I have your Buddha’s tooth, Marco-wallah.”

That was the very first thing the little Raja said to me when we first met the next day, and he said it about as cheerfully as he might have said, “I have a murderously aching tooth.”

“Already, Your Highness? Why, that is wonderful. You said it might take some while to find.”

“I thought it would,” he said pettishly.

I understood his rancorous demeanor when he shoved at me a basket and I looked in. It was piled half full of teeth, most of them yellowed and mossy and carious, quite a few of them still bloody at the root, and some of them identifiably not even human—dogs’ fangs and pigs’ tushes.

“More than two hundred there,” the little Raja said sourly. “And people are still arriving with more, from all points of the horizon. Men, women, even holy naga mendicants, even one temple sadhu. Gr-r-r. You can present a Buddha’s tooth not only to your Raja Khakhan. You can give one to every Buddhist of your acquaintance.”

I tried not to laugh, for his anger was justified. He had boasted of his people’s honesty and of their devotion to their Hindu faith, and here they came in flocks to confess that they possessed a relic of the discredited Buddhist religion—meaning they had to lie about it, besides.

Holding my face impassive, I inquired, “Am I expected to pay a reward for every one of these?”

“No,” he said, gritting his own teeth. “I am doing that. The cursed reprobates come in the front door, hand their counterfeit tooth to the steward, and are passed on out the back door to where the Court Executioner is rewarding them with fervent enthusiasm in the rear courtyard.”

“Your Highness!” I exclaimed.

“Oh, I am not according them the karavat,” he hastened to assure me. “That is reserved for men who have done crimes of some account. Also it takes a bit of time, and we would never have done with this procession.”

“Adrìo de mi. I can hear the wretches screaming from here.”

“No, you cannot,” he growled. “They are being very quietly dispatched with a wire loop whipped around the throat and yanked. What you hear is that other fraud—that degenerate old Yogi, still screeching in the kitchen. No one has yet been able to get him loose from his clinging rock yoni. We have tried greasing him with cooking fats, softening him with sesame oil, shrinking him with boiling water, wilting him by various natural means—surata by the nach girl, buccal blandishment by his boy assistant—nothing works. We may have to break the sacred yoni stone, and what revenge the goddess Parvati will inflict, I dare not think about.”

“Well, I will not sympathize with the Yogi. But the tooth bringers, Your Highness—it really is a trivial misdemeanor they have tried to commit, and in a trivially witless way. These teeth they brought would not fool even me, let alone a Buddhist.”

“That is what is especially deplorable! My people’s imbecility! That they would shame their Raja and insult their religion, and with trickery so transparent. They are incapable even of a decent crime. Dying is too good for them! They will only be reborn immediately in some lesser form—if there is any.”

I frankly believed that any depletion of the Hindus could only improve the planet, but I did not want the little Raja later to realize how severely he had depopulated his realm, and be dismayed, and maybe hold me to blame for it. I said:

“Your Highness, as your guest I formally request that the surviving imbeciles be spared, and any newcomers turned away before they also can perjure themselves. This was, after all, the fault of an apparent omission in Your Highness’s proclamation.”

“Mine? An omission? Are you suggesting I am at fault? That a Brahman and a Maharajadhiraj Raj can have a fault?”

“I think it was only an understandable oversight. Since Your Highness is of course aware that the Buddha was a man nine forearms tall, and that any tooth of his must have been as big as a drinking cup, Your Highness no doubt assumed that all your people likewise knew that.”

“Hm. You are right, Marco-wallah. I did take for granted that my subjects would remember that detail. Nine forearms, eh?”

“Perhaps an amended proclamation, Your Highness …”

“Hm. Yes. I will issue one. And I will mercifully pardon the dolts already here. A good Brahman kills no living thing, however lowly, unless it is necessary or expedient.”

He called for his steward, and gave the instructions for the proclamation, and commanded also an end to the procession through the rear courtyard. When he returned to me, he was restored to quite good humor.

“There. It is done. A good Brahman host acquiesces in his guest’s wishes. But enough of dull business and sober care! You are a guest, and you are not being entertained!”

“Oh, but I am, Your Highness. Constantly.”

“Come! You shall admire my zenana.”

I half expected him to fling open his dhoti diaper and expose something nasty, but he only reached up and took my arm and began walking me toward a far wing of the palace. As he escorted me through a succession of sumptuously furnished rooms, inhabited by females of various ages and various hues of brown, I realized that zenana must be the local word for an anderun—the apartments of his wives and concubines. The women of mature age I found no more attractive than I had Tofaa or the nach dancers, and they were mostly surrounded by swarms of children of all sizes. But some of the little Raja’s consorts were mere girls themselves, and not yet gross of flesh or vulturine of eye or corvine of voice, and some were delicately pretty in a dark-skinned way.

“I am frankly a bit surprised,” I remarked to the little Raja, “that Your Highness has so many wives. From your evident aversion to the Lady Tofaa, I had rather assumed …”

“Ah, well, if she had been your wife, as I first thought, I should have plied you with concubines and nach girls to distract you, while I seduced that lady to surata. But a widow? What man wishes to couple with a cast-off husk—a dead-woman-waiting-to-die—when there are so many still-juicy wives of one’s own and of others to be had, and also so many newly-budding virgins?”

“Yes. I see. Your Highness is a manly man.”

“Aha! You took me for a gand-mara, did you? A man-lover and a woman-hater? For shame, Marco-wallah! I grant you that, like any sensible man, for longtime companionship I prefer a quiet and mannerly and compliant boy. But one has one’s duties and obligations. A Raja is expected to maintain a teeming zenana, so I do. And I dutifully service them in regular rotation, even the youngest, as soon as they have had their first flow.”

“They are married to Your Highness before their first menstruum?”

“Why, not just my wives, Marco-wallah. Every girl in India. The parents of any daughter are anxious to get her married off before she is a woman, and before any mishap to her virginity, which would make her unmarriageable. For another reason, every time a daughter has her flow, her parents are guilty of the hideous crime of letting die an embryo that might prolong the family line. It is well said: If a girl is unwed by the age of twelve, her ancestors in the other world are mournfully drinking the blood she sheds every month.”

“Well said, yes.”

“However, to return to the subject of my own wives. They enjoy all the traditional wifely rights, but those do not include any queenly rights, as in less civilized and more debile monarchies. The women take no part in my court or my rule. It is well said: What man would heed the crowing of a hen? This one here, for instance, this is my premier wife and my titular Maharani, but she never presumes to sit on a throne.”

I bowed politely to the woman and said, “Your Highness.” She only gave me the same look of dull detestation she had given her Raja husband. Still trying to be polite, I indicated the dark-brown swarm about her, and added, “Your Highness has some handsome princes and princesses.”

She still said nothing, but the little Raja growled, “They are not princes and princesses. Do not give the woman ideas.”

I said, in some wonderment, “The royal line is not of patrilineal primogeniture?”

“My dear Marco-wallah! How do I know if any of these brats are mine?”

“Well, er … really … ,” I mumbled, embarrassed to have broached the subject right in front of the woman and her brood.

“Do not cringe, Marco-wallah. The Maharani knows I am not insulting her specifically. I do not know if any of my wives’ offspring are of my begetting. I cannot know that. You cannot know that, if you ever marry and have children. That is a fact of life.”

He waved around at the various other wives whose rooms we were strolling through, and repeated:

“That is a fact of life. No man can ever know, for certain, that he is the father of his wife’s child. Not even of a seemingly loving and faithful wife. Not even a wife so ugly a paraiyar would shun her. Not even a wife so crippled she cannot possibly stray. A woman can always find a way and a lover and a dark place.”

“But surely, Your Highness—the young little girls you wed before they could possibly be fecundated—”

“Who knows, even then? I cannot always be on the spot the instant they first flow. It is well said: If a woman sees even her father or brother or son in secret, her yoni grows moist.”

“But you must bequeath your throne to somebody, Your Highness. To whom, then, if not your presumed son or daughter?”

“To the firstborn son of my sister, as all Rajas do. Every royal line in India descends sororially. You see, my sister is indisputably of my own blood. Even if our royal mother was promiscuously unfaithful to our royal father, and no matter if my sister and I were sired by different lovers, we did drop from the same womb.”

“I understand. And then, no matter who sires her firstborn …”

“Well, of course, I hope it was I. I took my eldest sister for one of my early wives—fifth or sixth, I forget—and she has borne I think seven children, presumably mine. But the oldest boy, even if not my son, is still my nephew, and the royal bloodline remains intact and inviolate, and he will be the next Raja here.”

We emerged from the zenana quite near to the part of the palace where the kitchen was, and we could still hear from in there moans and whimpers and sounds of thrashing about. The little Raja asked me if I could amuse myself for a while, since he had to attend to some royal duties.

“Go back to the zenana, if you like,” he suggested. “Although I am careful to marry none but wives of my own white race, they keep producing children of disappointingly dark skin. A sprinkling of your seed, Marco-wallah, might lighten the strain.”

Not to be discourteous, I murmured something about having taken a vow of continence, and said I would find something else to occupy me. I watched the little Raja strut away, and I quite pitied the man. He was a sovereign of sorts, holding the power of life and death over his people, and he was the tiny cock of a whole hen yard—and he was infinitely poorer and weaker and less contented than I, a mere journeyer with only one woman to love and cherish and keep for the rest of my life; but that one was Hui-sheng.

That reminded me: I could now dispense with my temporary co-journeyer. I went in search of Tofaa, who had been stertorously snoring when I left our chambers that morning. I found her on a palace terrace, gloomily watching the gloomy Krishna celebration still going on in the square below.

She immediately and accusingly said, “I smell the pachouli on you, Marco-wallah! You have been lying with perfumed women. Alas, and after such an admirably sinless long time of behaving gentlemanly with me.”

I ignored that, and said, “I came to tell you, Tofaa, that you may resign your menial position of interpreter, whenever you wish, and—”

“I knew it! I was too demure and ladylike. Now you have been beguiled by some shameless and forward palace wench. Ah, you men.”

I ignored that, too. “And, as I promised, I will arrange for your safe journey back to your homeland.”

“You are eager to be rid of me. My genteel chastity is a reproach to your goatishness.”

“I was thinking of you, ungrateful woman. I have nothing to do now but wait here until the proper Buddha’s tooth is found and delivered. In the meantime, if I need anything translated, both the Raja and the Musicmaster are fluent in Farsi.”

She sniffled noisily, and wiped her nose on her bare arm. “I am in no hurry to go back to Bangala, Marco-wallah. I would be only a widow there, too. In the meantime, the Raja and the Master Khusru have occupations of their own. They will not take time to lead you about and show you the splendid sights of Kumbakonam, as I can do. I have already inquired and sought them out, just for your benefit.”

So I did not compel her to leave. Instead, on that day and during the days thereafter, I let her take me about and show me the splendid sights of the city.

“Yonder, Marco-wallah, you see the holy man Kyavana. He is the holiest inhabitant of Kumbakonam. It was many years ago that he determined to stand still, like a tree stump, to the greater glory of Brahma, and he is doing it yet. That is he.”

“I see three aged women, Tofaa, but no man. Where is he?”

“There.”

“There? That is only an enormous white-ant hill, with a dog wetting on it.”

“No, that is the holy man Kyavana. So still did he stand that the white ants used him as framework for their clay hill. It gets bigger every year. But that is he.”

“Well … if he is in there, he is dead, surely?”

“Who knows? What does it matter? He stood just as immobile when he was alive. A most holy man. Pilgrims come from everywhere to admire him, and parents show their sons that example of high piety.”

“This man did nothing but stand still. So very still that no one could tell if he was alive—or if now he may be dead. And that is called holy? That is an example to be admired? Emulated?”

“Do lower your voice, Marco-wallah, or Kyavana may manifest his great holy power at you, as he did at the three girls.”

“What three girls? What did he do?”

“You see that shrine a little way beyond the anthill?”

“I see a mud shack, with those three old hags slumped in the doorway, scratching themselves.”

“That is the shrine. Those are the girls. One is sixteen years old, the others seventeen, and—”

“Tofaa, the sun is very hot here. Perhaps we should go back to the palace so you can lie down.”

“I am showing you the sights, Marco-wallah. When those girls were about eleven and twelve years old, they were as irreverent as you. They decided, for a frolic, to come here and open their garments and reveal their pubescent charms to the holy man Kyavana, and tempt at least one part of him out of immobility. You see what happened. They were instantly struck old and wrinkled and white-haired and haggard, as you see them now. The city built the shrine for them to live out their few remaining years in. The miracle has become famous all over India.”

I laughed. “Is there any proof of this absurd story?”

“Indeed, yes. For a copper apiece, the girls will show you the very kaksha parts, once fresh and young, that were so suddenly made old and sour and stinking. See, they are already spreading their rags for you to—”

“Dio me varda!” I stopped laughing. “Here, throw them these coins and let us depart. I will take the miracle on faith.”

“Now,” said Tofaa, on another day, “here is a special sort of temple. A storytelling temple. You see the marvelously detailed carvings all over its exterior? They illustrate the many ways a man and a woman can do surata. Or a man and several women.”

“Yes,” I said. “Are you suggesting this is holy?”

“Very holy. When a girl is about to marry, it is assumed—because she is still a child—that she does not yet know how a marriage is consummated. So her parents bring her here, and leave her with the wise and kindly sadhu. He walks the girl about the outside of the temple, pointing to this sculpture and that, and gently explaining to her, so that, whatever her husband may do on the wedding night, she will not be terrified. Here is the good sadhu now. Give him some coppers, Marco-wallah, and he will take us about, and I will repeat in Farsi what he tells us.”

To my eye, the priest was just another black, dirty, scrawny Hindu, in the usual dingy dhoti and tulband and nothing else. I would hardly have asked road directions of such a one. I would certainly never have entrusted a small and apprehensive child bride to his attentions. She was bound to be more repelled by him than by anything that could happen on her wedding night.

But perhaps not. According to the temple sculptures, some astonishing things could happen on her wedding night. As the sadhu pointed out this and that, and snickered and leered and rubbed his hands together, I saw depictions of acts that I had not known were possible until I myself was well along in years and experience. The stone men and women were conjoining in every conceivable position and combination and contortion, and in several ways that—even at my present age—I would not have thought of trying. Almost any one of those sculptured acts, if performed in a Christian land, even by a legitimately wedded man and wife, would have required their going immediately afterward to a confessor. And if the performance could be accurately described and related to that priest, he would doubtless stagger away to seek shrift from a superior confessor.

I said, “I will accept, Tofaa, that a girl barely out of childhood might be required to submit to the natural act of surata with her new husband. But are you telling me that she is required to be versed in all these wild variations?”

“Well, she makes a better wife, if she is. But in any case, she should be prepared for whatever tastes her husband might manifest. She is a child, yes, but he may be a mature and lusty and experienced man. Or even a very old man, who has long been surfeited by the natural act, and now requires novelty.”

Having myself been all my life led about by my insatiable curiosity, and led into some curious situations, I was hardly one to point an accusing or ridiculing finger at the private practices of any other person or people. So I merely followed the smirking sadhu around the temple as he gesticulated and jabbered, and I made no surprised or scandalized outcries as Tofaa explained, “This is the adharottara, the upside-down act … this is the viparita surata, the perverse act … .” I was, in fact, regarding the sculptures from a different point of view, and pondering on a different aspect of them.

The carvings might well horrify a prudish spectator, but even the most censorious could not deny that they were fine art, beautifully and intricately done. The acts so explicitly portrayed were bawdy, God knows, even obscene, but the men and women involved were all smiling happily, and they were spirited and vivacious in their attitudes. They were enjoying themselves. So the sculptures expressed both a superb craftsmanship and a wonderful verve for life. They did not at all accord with the Hindus as I knew them: inept in everything they did, and doing everything with joyless sniveling, and doing very little.

As an example of their backwardness: in contrast to the Han, whose historians had been minutely recording every least event in their dominions for thousands of years, the Hindus possessed not one written book recounting any of their history. They had only some “sacred” collections of unbelievable legends—unbelievable because, in them, all the Hindu men were tiger-brave and resourceful, and all the Hindu women angel-sweet and lovable. For another example: the Hindu garments called sari and dhoti were only swathings of fabric. That was because, although the most primitive people elsewhere had long ago invented the needle and the craft of sewing, the Hindus had not yet learned to use a needle and had not any word for “tailor” in any of their multitude of languages.

How, I asked myself, could a people ignorant even of sewing have envisioned and crafted these delicate, artful temple carvings? How could a people so slothful and furtive and woeful have portrayed here men and women joyous and nimble; inventive and adroit, lively and carefree?

They could not have done. I decided that these lands must have been inhabited, ages before the Hindus came, by some other and very different race, one with talent and vivacity. God knows where that superior people had gone, but they had left a few artifacts like this splendidly crafted temple, and that was all. They had left no trace of themselves in the later-come, usurper Hindus. That was deplorable, but hardly surprising. Would any such people have interbred with Hindus?

“Now here, Marco-wallah,” Tofaa said instructively, “this carven couple are entwined in what is called the kaja posture, named for the hooded snake with which you are acquainted.”

It looked snaky enough, and it was a position new to me. The man appeared to be sitting on the side of a bed. The woman lay upon and against him, head down, her torso between the man’s legs, her hands on the floor, her legs about the man’s waist, her buttocks held caressingly by his hands, and presumably his linga inside her (upside-down) yoni.

“A very useful position,” the sadhu recited, Tofaa translating. “Say, for instance, if you wish to make surata with a humpbacked woman. As you must know, you simply cannot put a humpbacked woman on a bed in the usual supine position, or she teeters and rocks on her hump, most inconveniently, and—”

“Gèsu.”

“You no doubt lust to try that kaja position, Marco-wallah,” said Tofaa. “But please do not affront me by asking me to do it with you. No, no. However, the sadhu says he has, inside the temple, an exceedingly capable, exceedingly humpbacked devadasi woman who, for a trifle of silver …”

“Thank you, Tofaa, and thank the sadhu for me. But I will take this one, too, on faith.”

5

“I have your Buddha’s tooth, Marco-wallah!” said the little Raja. “I rejoice in the happy conclusion of your quest!”

Some three months had gone by since his previous similar announcement, during which time no other teeth, small or large, had been brought to the palace. I had contained my impatience, assuming that a pearl fisher was an elusive quarry. But I was glad to have the real thing at last. I was by now very weary of India and of Hindus, and the little Raja had also begun to make plain that he would not weep loudly when I departed. He seemed not to be tiring of my visit, exactly, but getting suspicious of it. Apparently his little mind had conceived the notion that I might be using my tooth quest as a disguise for a real mission of spying out the local terrain in advance of a Mongol invasion. Well, I knew that the Mongols would not have had this dismal land even if it were freely donated to their Khanate, but I was too polite to tell that to the little Raja. I could better allay his suspicions by merely taking the tooth and going, and I would.

“It is a magnificent tooth, indeed,” I said, with unfeigned awe. It was certainly no counterfeit. It was a yellowish molar, rather oblong from front to back, and the grinder surface of it was bigger than my hand, and its roots nearly as long as my forearm, and it weighed almost as much as a stone of equal dimensions. I asked, “Was it the pearl fisher who brought it? Is he here? I must give him his reward.”

“Ah, the pearl fisher,” said the little Raja. “The steward took the good man to the kitchen to give him a meal. If you would care to let me have the reward, Marco-wallah, I will see that he gets it.” His eyes widened as I jingled half a dozen gold coins into his hand. “Ach-chaa, so much?!”

I smiled and said, “It is worth it to me, Your Highness”—not adding that I was beholden to the fisherman, not only for the tooth, but also for my release from this place.

“Overgenerous, but he shall have it,” said the little Raja. “And I will bid the steward find for you a nice box to put the relic in.”

“May I request also, Your Highness, a pair of horses for me and my interpreter, that we may ride back to the coast and seek sea transport from there?”

“You shall have them, first thing in the morning, and likewise a stalwart pair of my palace guards for your escort.”

I hurried off to start my packing for departure, and told Tofaa to do the same, and she complied, though not very cheerfully. We were still at it when the Musicmaster stopped by our chambers to say his farewells. He and we exchanged compliments and good wishes and salaam aleikum, and then his eye chanced to fall on the things laid out on my bed to be packed, and he remarked:

“I see you are taking with you an elephant’s tooth as a memento of your stay.”

“What?” I said. He was regarding the Buddha’s tooth. I laughed at his jest and said, “Come, come, Master Khusru. You cannot fool me. An elephant’s tusk is taller than I am, and I could probably not lift one.”

“A tusk, yes. But do you think an elephant chews its fodder with its tusks? For that, it has ample tiers of molars. Like this one. You have never looked into an elephant’s mouth, I take it.”

“No, I have not,” I muttered, quietly gnashing my own molars. I waited until he had made his last salaam and left us, and then I burst out, “A cavàl donà no se ghe varda in boca! Che le vegna la cagasangue!”

“What are you shouting, Marco-wallah?” asked Tofaa.

“May the bloody gripes take that cursed Raja!” I raged. “The little wart was worried by my continued presence here, and evidently he despaired of anybody ever coming with another Buddha’s tooth, real or false. So he provided one himself. And took my reward for it! Come, Tofaa, let us go and revile him to his face!”

We went downstairs and found the chief steward, and I demanded audience with the little Raja, but the man said apologetically:

“The Raja went out, borne in his palanquin, to ride through the city and grant his subjects the privilege of observing him and admiring him and cheering at him. I was just explaining that to this importunate caller who insists he has come a far distance to see the Raja.”

As Tofaa translated that, I glanced only impatiently at the caller—just another Hindu man in a dhoti—but my eye caught on an object he was carrying, and at the same moment Tofaa cried excitedly:

“It is he, Marco-wallah! It is the very pearl fisher whom I remember from Akyab!”

And indeed the man was carrying a tooth. It was another immense one, and quite similar to my own latest acquisition, except that it was cupped in a mesh of gold tracery, like a stone set in a jewel, and the whole had a patina of unmistakable great age. Tofaa and the man jabbered together, then she turned to me again.

“It is truly he, Marco-wallah. The man who gamed with my late dear husband in the Akyab hall. And this is the relic he won with the dice that day.”

“How many did he win?” I said, still skeptical. “He has already delivered one.”

Jabber, jabber, and Tofaa spoke to me once more. “He knows nothing of any other. He has only this moment arrived, having trudged on foot all the way from the coast. This tooth is the only tooth he has ever had, and he is sad to part with it, for it much increased his crop of pearls in the season past, but he is dutifully heeding his Raja’s proclamation.”

“What a happy coincidence,” I said. “This seems to be a day for teeth.” I added, as I heard a commotion in the courtyard outside, “And here the Raja returns now, just in time to greet the one honest Hindu in his realm.”

The little Raja strutted in, trailed by his fawning entourage of courtiers and congratulators and other toadies. He halted in some surprise at seeing our group waiting in the entry hall. Tofaa and the steward and the fisherman all collapsed to lower themselves below the Raja’s head level, but, before any of them could speak, I addressed the little Raja in Farsi, and said silkily:

“It appears, Your Highness, that the good pearl fisher was so pleased with the reward for the first tooth—and the meal to which you treated him—that he has brought another.”

The little Raja looked startled and bewildered for a moment, but he quickly comprehended the situation, and realized that I had caught him out in his chicanery. He did not act guilty or abashed, of course, but only indignant, and flashed a look of pure venom at the innocent fisherman, and contributed another blatant lie:

“The greedy wretch is only trying to take advantage of you, Marco-wallah.”

“Perhaps he is, Your Highness,” I said, continuing to pretend that I was believing his farce. “But I will gratefully accept this new relic, as well. For now I can make this one a gift to my Khakhan Kubilai, and leave the other as my parting gift to Your Gracious Highness. Your Highness deserves it. There is only the question of the reward I have already paid. Do I give the fisher an equal amount for this new delivery?”

“No,” the little Raja said coldly. “You have already paid most generously. I shall persuade the man to be satisfied with that. Believe me, I shall persuade him.”

He snapped instructions to the steward to take the man to the kitchen for a meal—another meal, he thought to add—and went stamping furiously off to his quarters. Tofaa and I returned to our own to finish packing. I carefully wrapped the new, gold-meshed tooth for safe carrying, but left the other for whatever disposition the little Raja might wish to make of it.

I never saw the man again. Perhaps he could not face me, realizing that I was leaving Kumbakonam with my never very high opinion of him lowered even further, now knowing him to be not only a posturing travesty of a sovereign, but also a giver of false gifts, a cheater of his own people, an embezzler of another’s rightful recompense and—worse than all that—a man incapable ever of admitting error or wrong or fault. Anyway, he did not say goodbye or even get out of bed to see us off, when at dawn we took our leave.

Tofaa and I, in the rear courtyard, were standing about while our two assigned escorts saddled our horses and strapped our packs on the cantles, when I saw two other men emerge from a back door of the palace. In the early half-light, I could not see who they were, but one of them sat down on the ground while the other stood over him. Our escorts paused in their work and muttered uneasily, and Tofaa translated for me:

“Those are the Court Executioner and a condemned prisoner. He must be guilty of some noteworthy crime, for he is being accorded the karavat.”

Curious, I went a little closer to them, but not close enough to interfere. The karavat, I finally could see, was a peculiar sort of sword blade. It had no handle, but was simply a crescent of sharp steel, like a new moon, each of its points ending in a short chain, and each chain ending in a sort of metal stirrup. The condemned prisoner—not in any hurry, but not too reluctantly either—himself put the crescent blade at the back of his neck, with the chains draped over his shoulders in front. Then he bent his knees and drew up his feet to where he could put a foot in each of the stirrups. Then, after the briefest moment to take a last deep breath, he leaned his neck back against the blade and kicked both feet out straight. The karavat very neatly, and by his own unaided action, sliced his head from his body.

I went closer yet and, while the executioner relieved the body of the karavat, I looked down at the head, which was still opening and shutting its eyes and mouth in a surprised kind of way. It was the pearl fisher who had brought the real Buddha’s tooth, the only enterprising and honorable Hindu I had encountered in India. The little Raja had rewarded him, as he had said he would.

As we rode away, I reflected that I had at last seen something which the Hindus could be proud of calling their own. They had nothing else. They had long ago disowned their native-born Buddha and relinquished him to alien lands. The few splendors they could boastfully display to visitors had, in my opinion, been crafted by some different and vanished race. The Hindus’ customs and morals and social order and personal habits had, in my opinion, been taught to them by the monkeys. Even their distinctive musical instrument, the sitar, was the contribution of a foreigner. If the karavat was the Hindus’ own invention, then it had to be their only one, and I was willing to concede them that one—a lazy way of letting the condemned kill themselves—as the highest achievement of their race.

We could have ridden straight east from Kumbakonam to the Cholamandal coast, to seek the nearest village where the bay-crossing vessels put in. But Tofaa suggested, and I agreed, that we might best return the way we had come, to Kuddalore, since we knew from experience that considerable numbers of vessels called there. It was as well that we did, because, when we arrived and Tofaa began inquiring for a ship that we might engage, the local seamen told her there was already a ship there looking for us. That puzzled me, but only briefly, for the word of our presence quickly circulated about Kuddalore, and a man who was no Hindu came running and calling, “Sain bina!”

To my great surprise, it was Yissun, my former interpreter, whom I had last seen starting on his way from Akyab back through Ava toward Pagan. We pummeled each other and shouted salutations, but I cut them short to inquire, “What are you doing in this forsaken place?”

“The Wang Bayan sent me looking for you, Elder Brother Marco. And, because Bayan said, ‘Bring him quickly,’ the Sardar Shaibani this time did not just engage a ship, but commandeered one, with all its crew, and put aboard Mongol warriors to urge the mariners on. We ascertained that you had made landfall here at Kuddalore, so this is where I came. But frankly, I was wondering where to look next. These stupid villagers told me you had gone inland only to the next village of Panrati, but that was many months ago, and I knew you must have gone farther than that. So it is a blessing that we have met by accident. Come, we will set sail for Ava at once.”

“But why?” I asked. This worried me. Yissun’s spate of words seemed intended to tell me everything but why. “What need has Bayan of me, and in such hurry? Is it war, insurrection, what?”

“I am sorry to say no, Marco, nothing natural and normal like that. It seems that your good woman Hui-sheng is in poor health. As best I can tell you—”

“Not now,” I said instantly, feeling even on that hot day a cold wind blow. “Tell me on board. As you say, let us sail at once.”

He had a dinghi and a Hindu boatman waiting at his service, and we went immediately out to the anchored ship, another good substantial qurqur, this one captained by a Persian and crewed by an assortment of races and colors. They were quite willing to hurry back across the bay, for the month was now March, and the winds would soon drop and the heat worsen and the drenching rains come. We took Tofaa with us, since her destination was Chittagong, and that chief port of Bangala was on the same eastern side of the bay as Akyab, and not far up that coast, so the ship could readily take her there after dropping me and Yissun.

When the qurqur had weighed anchor and was under way, Yissun and I and Tofaa stood at the stern rail—he and I thankfully watching India disappear behind us—and he told me about Hui-sheng.

“When your lady first discovered she was with child--”

“With child!” I cried in consternation.

Yissun shrugged. “I repeat only what I have been told. I am told that she was both overjoyed at the fact and worried that you might disapprove.”

“Dear God! She did not try to expel it, and hurt herself?”

“No, no. I think the Lady Hui-sheng would not do anything, Marco, without your approval. No, she did nothing, and I gather she did not even realize that anything might be wrong.”

“Well, vakh, man! What is wrong?”

“When I left Pagan, nothing—nothing that anyone could see. The lady appeared to me to be in perfect health, and radiant with expectation, and more beautiful even than before. There was nothing visibly amiss. What it is, I gather, is something that cannot be seen. Because, at the very beginning, when she first confided to her maidservant that she was pregnant, that servant—Arùn, you remember her—took it upon herself to approach the Wang Bayan and inform him that she had misgivings. Now remember, Marco, I am only telling you what Bayan told me the servant told him, and I am no shaman or physician, and I am not much knowledgeable about the internal workings of women, and—”

“Do get to it, Yissun,” I pleaded.

“The girl Arùn informed Bayan that, in her opinion, your Lady Hui-sheng is not physically well adapted for childbearing. Something about the shape of the bones of her pelvic cradle, whatever that is. You must excuse my mentioning intimate details of anatomy, Marco, but I am only reporting. And evidently the servant Arùn, being your lady’s chamber attendant, is well acquainted with her pelvic cradle.”

“So am I,” I said. “And I never noticed anything wrong with it.”

At that point, Tofaa spoke up, in her know-everything way, and inquired, “Marco-wallah, is your lady extremely obese?”

“Impudent woman! She is not at all obese!”

“I only asked. That is the most usual cause of difficulty. Well, then, tell me this. Is your lady’s mount of love—you know, that little frontal cushion, where the hair grows—is it perhaps delightfully protrusive?”

I said coldly, “For your information, women of her race are not matted with sweaty hair there. However, now that you mention it, I would say yes—that frontal place on my lady is a trifle more prominent than I have seen on other women.”

“Ah, well, there you are, then. A woman of that conformation is sublimely sweet and deep and enfolding in the act of surata—as no doubt you are well aware—but it can ill suit her for childbearing. It indicates that her pelvic bones are shaped in such a way that the opening of her pelvic cradle is heart-shaped instead of oval. Clearly, that distortion is what her maid servant recognized, and was worried by. But surely, Marco-wallah, your lady herself should have been aware. Her mother must have told her, or her nursemaid, at the time she became a woman and was sat down for her woman-to-woman counseling.”

“No,” I said, reflecting. “She could not have been told. Hui-sheng’s mother died in her childhood, and she herself … well, thereafter she heard no counseling, she had no confidantes. But never mind that. What should she have been told?”

Tofaa said flatly, “Never to have children.”

“Why? What does it mean, this pelvic conformation? Is she in great danger?”

“Not while she is pregnant, no. There would be no difficulty in carrying the baby through all the nine months, if she is otherwise healthy. It should be an uneventful pregnancy, and a pregnant woman is always a happy woman. The problem comes at the time for delivery.”

“And then?”

Tofaa looked away from me. “The hardest part is the extrusion of the infant’s head. But its head is oval, and so is the normal pelvic opening. Whatever the labor and pain involved, it does get out. However, if that passage is constricted, as in the case of a heart-shaped pelvis …”

“Then?”

She said evasively, “Imagine that you are pouring grain from a sack that has a narrow neck, and a mouse has got into the grain, and it stops the neck. But the grain has to be emptied, so you press and wring and squeeze. Something must give.”

“The mouse will burst. Or the neck will split asunder.”

“Or the whole sack.”

I moaned, “God, let it be the mouse!” Then I whirled on Yissun and demanded, “What is being done?”

“Everything possible, Elder Brother. The Wang Bayan well remembers that he promised you he would see to her safekeeping. All the physicians of the court of Ava are in attendance, but Bayan was not satisfied to trust in them. He sent couriers galloping to Khanbalik to apprise the Khakhan of the situation. And the Khan Kubilai dispatched his own personal court physician, the Hakim Gansui. That aged man was himself nearly dead by the time he was hauled all the way south to Pagan, but he will wish he were dead if anything happens to the Lady Hui-sheng.”

Well, I thought, after Yissun and Tofaa had gone away and left me to brood alone, I could hardly blame Bayan or Gansui or anyone else for whatever might happen. It was I who had put Hui-sheng in this peril. It had to have happened on that first night she and I and Arùn frolicked together, so excitedly that I had neglected what was my responsibility and my pleasure—the nightly emplacing of the preventive lemon cap. I tried to calculate when that had been. Right after our arrival in Pagan, so that was how long ago? Gèsu, at least eight months and perhaps nearly nine! Hui-sheng must by now be almost at term. No wonder Bayan was anxious for me to be found and brought to her bedside.

He was no more anxious than I. If my darling Hui-sheng were in the least difficulty, I wanted to be beside her. Now she was in the worst possible trouble, and I was unforgivably far away. In consequence, this crossing of the Bay of Bangala seemed excruciatingly slower and longer than the first traverse, outward bound. The captain and crew did not find me a very agreeable passenger to be transporting on their ship, and my two fellow passengers did not find me a very agreeable companion. I snapped and snarled and fretted and paced the deck, and I cursed the mariners every time they did not have every single scrap of sail stretched to the mast top, and I cursed the uncaring immensity of the bay, and I cursed the weather every time the least cloud appeared in the sky, and I cursed the unfeeling way time was behaving—passing so slowly out here, but elsewhere hastening Hui-sheng toward the day of reckoning.

And mostly I cursed myself, because, if there was one man in the world who knew what he was inflicting on a woman when he made her pregnant, it was I. That time on the Roof of the World when, under the influence of the love philter, I briefly had been a woman in the throes of childbirth—whether it was fancy or reality, a drug-caused delusion in my mind or a drug-caused transfiguration of my body—I most definitely had experienced every ghastly moment and hour and lifetime of the birthing process. I knew it better than any man, better even than a male physician could know it, however many births he had attended. I knew there was nothing pretty or dulcet or felicitous about it, as all the myths of sweet maternity would have us believe. I knew it to be a filthy business, nauseous, humiliating, terrible torture. I had seen a Fondler do vile things to human Subjects, but even he could not do them from the inside out. Childbirth was more terrible, and the Subject could do nothing but scream and scream until the torment ended in the final agonizing extrusion.

But poor Hui-sheng could not even scream.

And if the groping, raging, tearing thing inside her could not ever get out … ?

I was to blame. I had neglected, on just one occasion, to take the proper precaution. But actually I had been more culpably neglectful than that. Ever after my own horrendous childbed experience, I had said, “I will never subject any woman I love to such a fate.” So, if I had rightly loved Hui-sheng, I would never have lain with her and never have put her even remotely at risk. It was hard to regret all the lovely times she and I had engaged in the act of love, but now I did regret them, for even with precautions there was no certainty, and she had every time been in danger. Now I swore to myself and to God that if Hui-sheng survived this peril, I would never lie with her again. I loved her that much, and we would simply have to find other ways of mutually demonstrating our love.

That bitter decision made, I tried to bury my apprehensions in happier recollections, but their very sweetness made them bitter, too. I remembered the last time I had seen her, when Yissun and I rode away from Pagan. Hui-sheng could not have heard or responded to my calling as I went, “Goodbye, my dear one.” But she had heard, with her heart. And she had spoken, too, with her eyes: “Come back, my dear one.” And I remembered how, bereft of ever hearing music, she had so often felt it instead, and seen it, and sensed it in other ways. She had even made music, though unable to do it herself, for I had known other people—even dour servants engaged in uncongenial labor—often to hum or sing happily, just because Hui-sheng was in the room. I remembered one occasion, one summer day, when we had been caught outdoors in a sudden thundershower, and all the Mongols about us were quaking uneasily and muttering their Khakhan’s protecting name. But Hui-sheng had only smiled at the displays of lightning, unafraid of the menacing noise it made; to her, a storm was only another beautiful thing. And I remembered how often, on our walks together, Hui-sheng had run to pluck some flower my unimpaired but duller senses had failed to perceive. Still, I was not totally insensitive to beauty. Whenever she dashed away on one of those forays, I had to smile at the awkward, knee-tied way a woman runs, but it was a fond smile and, every time she ran, my heart went tumbling after … .

After another eternity or two, the voyage was done. As soon as we raised Akyab on the horizon, I had my packs ready and said my farewells and thanks to the Lady Tofaa, so that Yissun and I were able to leap from the deck to the dock even before the ship’s plank was down. With only a wave to the Sardar Shaibani, we vaulted onto the horses he had brought to the bayside, and we put the spurs to them. Shaibani must also, as soon as our vessel was sighted in the distance, have sent an advance courier riding hard for Pagan, because, as swiftly as Yissun and I covered the four-hundred-li distance, the Pagan palace was expecting us. The Wang Bayan was not waiting to be the first to greet us; no doubt he had decided he was too gruff for such a delicate duty. He had posted instead the old Hakim Gansui and the little maidservant Arùn to receive us. I got down from my mount, trembling, as much from inner palpitation as from the muscular strain of the long gallop, and Arùn came running to take my hands in hers, and Gansui approached more sedately. They did not need to speak. I saw from their faces—his grave, hers grieving—that I had arrived too late.

“All that could have been done was done,” said the hakim when, at his insistence, I had taken a bracing drink of the fiery choum-choum. “I did not get here to Pagan until well along in the lady’s term, but I could yet have easily and safely made her miscarry. She would not let me. Insofar as I could comprehend her, through the medium of this servant girl, your Lady Hui-sheng insisted that that decision was not hers to make.”

“You should have overruled her,” I said huskily.

“The decision was not mine to make, either.” He kindly refrained from saying that the decision should have been made by me, and I merely nodded.

He went on, “I had no recourse but to await the confinement. And in fact I was not without some hope. I am not one of the Han physicians, who do not even touch their female patients, but instead let them modestly point out on an ivory figurine the spots where they hurt. I insisted on making a full examination. You say you have only recently learned that your lady’s pelvic cavity was constricted. I found that its oblique diameters were diminished by the sacral column’s forward intrusion and the pubic extremity’s being more pointed than rounded, giving the cavity a triradiate instead of oval shape. That is not usually any impediment to a woman—in her walking, riding, whatever—until she contemplates becoming a mother.”

“She never knew,” I said.

“I believe I managed to convey it to her, and to warn her of the possible consequences. But she was stubborn—or determined—or brave. And in truth I could not tell her that the birth was impossible, that it must be terminated. In my time, I have attended several African concubines, and of all races the black women have the most narrow pelvic passages, but they have children nonetheless. An infant’s head is quite malleable and pliable, so I was not without hope that this one could effect its egress without too much trouble. Unfortunately, it could not.”

He paused, to choose his next words carefully. “After some time of labor, it became evident that the fetus was inextricably impacted. And at that point, the decision is the physician’s to make. I rendered the lady insensible with oil of teryak. The fetus was dissected and extracted. A full-term male infant of apparently normal development. But there already had been too much strain on the mother’s internal organs and vessels, and bleeding was occurring in places where it is impossible to stanch. The Lady Hui-sheng never awoke from the teryak coma. It was an easy and a painless death.”

I wished he had stopped short of the last words. However compassionately intended, they were an outright lie. I have seen too many deaths to believe that any is ever “easy.” And “painless,” this one? I knew, better than he did, what “some time of labor” was like. Before he mercifully granted her oblivion, and minced the baby and plucked it out piecemeal, Hui-sheng had endured hours indistinguishable from Hell’s own eternity. But I only said dully:

“You did what you could, Hakim Gansui. I am grateful. Can I see her now?”

“Friend Marco, she died four days ago. In this climate … Well, the ceremony was simple and dignified, not one of the local barbarities. A pyre at sunset, with the Wang Bayan and all the court as mourners …”

So I would not even see her one last time. It was hard, but perhaps it was best. I could remember her, not as a motionless and forever silent Echo, but as she once had been, alive and vibrant, as I last had seen her.

I went numbly through the formalities of greeting Bayan and hearing his rough condolences, and I told him I would depart again as soon as I was rested, to bear the Buddha relic to Kubilai. Then I went with Arùn to the chambers where Hui-sheng and I had last lived together, and where she had died. Arùn emptied closets and chests, to help me pack, though I selected only a few keepsakes to take with me. I told the girl she might have the clothes and other feminine things Hui-sheng no longer had any use for. But Arùn insisted on showing me every single item and asking my permission each time. I might have found that unnecessarily hurtful, but really the clothes and jewels and hair ornaments meant nothing to me without Hui-sheng the wearer of them.

I had determined that I would not weep—at least not until I reached some lonely place on the trail northward, where I could do so in seclusion. It required some exertion, I confess, not to let the tears flow, not to fling myself on the vacant bed we had shared, not to clutch her empty garments to me. But I said to myself, “I will bear this like a stolid Mongol—no, like a practical-minded merchant.”

Yes, best to be like a merchant, for he is a man accustomed to the transitoriness of things. A merchant may deal in treasures, and he may rejoice when an exceptional treasure comes to hand, but he knows that he has it for only a while before it must go to other hands—or what is he a merchant for? He may be sorry to see that treasure go, but if he is a proper merchant he will be the richer for having possessed it even briefly. And I was, I was. Though she was gone from me now, Hui-sheng had immeasurably enriched my life, and left me with a store of memories beyond price, and perhaps even made me a better man for having known her. Yes, I had profited. That very practical way of regarding my bereavement made it easier for me to contain my grief. I congratulated myself on my stony composure.

But then Arùn inquired, “Will you be taking this?” and what she held was the white porcelain incense burner, and the stone man broke.