Satisfied that there were no other healing gems hidden in the rough of Kasar, she turned her attention to the crowd at the west end of the village. She needed no cursed ear to hear the gathering there. At least a hundred men, women, and children stood and sat in the muddy grass beside the road, all clustered around a gnarled little tree, its branches drooping with shining wet leaves.
“I hear them,” Priya said. The nun smiled and petted the mongoose on her shoulder. “Such soft voices, so full of reverence and expectation. So much joy and eagerness. Like a single great breath being held, awaiting a beautiful sunrise.”
Asha only saw a hundred homeless people with slouching shoulders, dripping hair, and wet clothing plastered to their thin frames. They looked tired. They looked hungry. “I suppose you want to visit this living Buddha right now?”
“No time like the present.”
Asha frowned up at the darkening, overcast sky. It was exactly the same as last evening, and the one before. Recently the days had been a blur of sameness, of routine. “If you say so.”
They turned off the highway and approached the crowd spreading out from the little tree in concentric semi-circles. As the two women moved among the faithful watchers, many hungry eyes shifted to the newcomers, and many empty hands were extended toward them. If Priya sensed the gestures, she made no sign of it. Asha simply ignored them. The fields and forests were full of food for anyone willing to make the effort, and she carried no money at all.
They stood before the little tree among the closest pilgrims and Asha studied the boy seated among the roots, and she described him to her companion. “He looks to be about ten or twelve. Thin. Middling skin. Shaved head. No eyebrows. Seated in the lotus position, completely naked. Clean fingernails. Eyes closed, mouth closed. I can’t see his chest rising as he breathes at all. Not even the slightest tremor or twitch in his hands or feet. No footprints or other marks on the ground around him. The falling rain has spattered a little bit of mud on his lower body. He’s been here a while, that’s for sure. He must be cold and hungry, whether he knows it or not. He won’t last long like this.”
“That is one possibility.”
“It’s the only possibility,” Asha said. “The human body has limits. I’ve seen this sort of thing before. I saw it growing up in Kathmandu. Sages, monks, priests, and other stunt artists. He won’t last, or he has someone secretly feeding him somehow. At best, he’s a fool. At worst, a fraud.”
“Always thinking in dualities,” Priya said. “There are always more than two possibilities.”
Asha sighed. “Yes, well he could be a god or a ghost or a donkey, I suppose. Listen, the sun has just set and I’d like to sleep someplace dry. Or dry-ish. Can we please go find an empty house or stall or something for the night?”
“Of course,” the nun said mildly. “No need to suffer unnecessarily.”
Asha led the way back toward the intersection, but stepped off the road when she found a small market stall with a solid roof. The ground smelled faintly of mangos. It’s always mangos, Asha mused. She spread her wool blanket on the damp earth and shared a handful of nuts and berries with Priya, and then they slept.
Asha dreamed of warm food.
She had no idea what the nun dreamed about.
3
The next morning Priya returned to the congregation at the foot of the little tree. The rain had faded away in the night somewhere over the eastern ridge and the sun rose bright and clear in a pale blue sky. Everything high dripped and everything low gurgled as the water slowly drained across the land toward the nearest river, which roared quietly off to the west beyond a low hill.
Asha was still picking her teeth when Priya set out unaided for the crowd of pilgrims and their young sage. The herbalist finished her teeth in her own good time, draped her hair over her right ear, and trudged carefully after her friend. The mud puddles lay thick and deep about her, and she could hear the worms wriggling in the murky water. She wasn’t afraid of them. She wasn’t afraid of any living creature. But the thought of stepping on a pile of wet worms was… unpleasant.
When she reached the crowd, the first thing Asha looked at was the tree. Not the little tree behind the boy but the other one across the road. The almond tree towered in its prime with leaves both long and broad, and tiny white flowers that would soon bear tiny red fruits, each with a single precious nut inside. Its shade fell across most of the road, though no one sat beneath it, and as she glanced around the hovels of Kasar she could easily pronounce the almond tree to be the most beautiful thing in sight. She had noted it before, but now she could appreciate it fully. Her right ear coursed with the sounds of flowers and unborn fruits, of the rich seeds and the dusky grey-gold wood locked away within the bark. It was a wonderful creature, that tree. Asha could think of a dozen ways to use its leaves and flowers to heal and sooth all manners of ailments, and she reminded herself to gather a few specimens before they left.
Then with a sigh she turned her attention back to the crowd, and the boy, and the miserable little sapling at his back. It was a twisted and gnarled little tree with feeble limbs and precious few leaves and Asha could barely hear the life of it in her scaled ear. She guessed it was a diseased old teak, and that its pathetic appearance in some way made the boy’s meditations all the more holy. Asha shook her head as she tucked a sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth and waded through the crowd of muddy pilgrims still asleep in the middle of the road.
Priya sat on the grass beside the boy, and her saffron robes and bound eyes seemed to add a new layer of majesty and mystery to the setting because Asha noticed dozens of the filthy vagrants sitting up to take notice and make joyful wails and gasps. Asha only spared the boy a glance before turning her attention to the boggy field behind the tree to wonder what useful insects or grasses she might find down there.
“Asha?”
She looked at Priya, who was frowning. Jagdish jumped down off the nun’s shoulder and began sniffing the tree’s roots. “What?”
“Could you please take a look at the boy? I’m afraid I cannot hear his breathing, even with my keen ears. I think your expertise is warranted. But please do not disturb him.”
Asha returned to the tree, aware of the countless eyes fixed on her every movement, and she knelt down beside the boy. He appeared unchanged from the night before. Still sitting in the lotus position, eyes and mouth closed, head perfectly hairless, and not the slightest tremor in his fingers or toes. Asha plucked a blade of grass and ran it lightly along the boy’s feet and palms. There was no reaction. She peered at his eyelids, but could see no darting impressions of his eyes to betray his thoughts or dreams. After watching his chest for several minutes, she could not say she had seen him draw a single breath and she pulled a small mirror from her bag to hold before his nose and mouth, but after several more minutes not even the smallest cloud of fog appeared on the glass.
Asha glanced nervously at Priya and then at the other pilgrims. “I’m going to touch his arm now. Just for a moment.” No one spoke, which she took to be silent permission, so she placed her fingertips on the boy’s inner wrist.
No pulse. His skin was smooth though fairly firm, and he was only slightly warmer than the earth he was sitting on.
“Some sort of comatose state, maybe,” she muttered.
“Like the family we found in the mountains?” Priya asked.
Asha winced and glanced up at the withered tree to check for strange fruits. There were none. “Similar, maybe. But not the same.” She reached up and placed her fingertips against the side of the boy’s throat and waited. Minutes passed, and minutes more. Finally her arm grew too tired to hold up any longer and she relented, leaning back to sit and rest and think. Still no pulse. Not even a very slow pulse. And yet he was slightly warm.