Namaste (22 page)

It was the same thing Suni would say to Woo. Suni didn’t approve of Amit’s quest, and he didn’t approve of Woo’s. A few weeks ago, that hadn’t mattered. A few weeks ago, Woo had been like a father, and Suni was the cranky elder who’d never understood. Amit knew better. As had Woo.
 

Of all the Sri, only Woo had encouraged Amit not to quell anger over his mother’s death so many years ago. There was no talk of transmutation, of washing himself clean of his fury. Woo argued that it was an asset. Emotion was human. It was why, Amit felt certain, Woo would have understood — even championed — his growing affection for Nisha.
 

You are a monk, Amit
.
But below it, you are a man. Sri does not define you.
 

As Sri did not define Woo, who’d never shaved his silver hair.
 

Miles passed. Amit was not fatigued. He cut his feet but did not feel it. His arms brushed sharp rocks and came away streaked in red. It was like walking a gauntlet, nature lashing him with whips. It was a walk of penance, of cleansing.
 

Have I done wrong?

Amit wasn’t sure, and realized he never had been. He was arrogant, as the abbot said. He never took the time to think. He obeyed what he wanted, but had not known what was best. He’d wanted the men who killed Nisha to suffer. He’d fantasized about it, reliving it often once finished. He’d wanted them alive so he could kill them again. He wanted them to wake up with their throats slit and look up at him, so that he could pull the skin from their muscles, and peel them like a fruit. Even now, even as he walked, even as he pondered his own motivations, Amit wondered if he had ever truly listened to what the others were trying to teach him. He stuffed emotions down as if into boots, so low he could walk atop them in victory.
 

Meditate. Plan. Deduce. Concentrate. Repeat.
 

There were drills for speed and balance, and drills for discipline. He’d fasted for days; he’d walked rocky paths like this one with no surety that he’d return from a kind of vision quest; he’d encountered animals in the wild that had wanted to cut and gut him like a fish. He’d remained silent for two months; he’d starved himself to nothing then re-experienced gluttony. He’d stood atop a post on one foot for a day; he’d hung by his neck (as if hanged) and by his bound hands (as if crucified). He’d been whipped to learn what whips felt like, to see if he could leave his body behind as it healed. He’d taken decimated muscles and rebuilt them. He’d excelled at every test.
 

Sit still, Amit, and don’t think about your mother’s murder,
Woo would tell him. That test he always lost. Woo was like a human medical instrument, watching his pulse and breathing. He always knew. And when Amit allowed himself to be goaded into anger rather than consciously choosing it for himself, he performed poorly. Woo could get him angry over his past, then spear him with a sword as easily as goring a cloth-and-wood dummy. When he took the insults and goading of others and chose to grow irritated, he forgot everything and was easily bested. Just as Suni, the old man, had done to him in the garden.
 

Tell me, Amit, what good is training your muscles if you can be undone with a word?

Amit had manufactured words in his mind. The boys used to insult him, and he’d choose to be wounded. Now the stimuli weren’t words; they were stimuli that Amit himself held keys to. He undid himself. Others needed only to hold firm, and the knot inside himself, repressed but never quelled, would rise like a bubble of gas.
 

Sit still, Amit, and don’t think about Nisha’s murder.
 

That anger drove him forward. It was an engine. It wound him, like the key at the back of a toy. It served him. But was he the one in control? Or had it been like a great red cloud, controlling his strings? Had he ever been doing karmic work? Or was he doing the work of ego, spurred by the one thing he’d never learned to control?
 

Was Woo his enemy?
 

Of
course,
Woo was his enemy. He’d heard the abbot’s story. Maybe Suni had never agreed with Amit’s tendency toward anger, and perhaps the abbot had never agreed with his quest for vengeance, but Suni did agree that the man who had sold himself and his brothers to those who trafficked in lies, theft, and murder was the one who had gone bad. At least in principle. Amit had seen how the abbot had shaken his head, and the way his gaze had dropped. He was giving monk-like, philosophical lip service to the idea that Woo’s position might be as valid as his, but it was not how Suni felt. What his
soul
felt. What his
karma
and
dharma
said. Amit had never liked the abbot, but the man had never stepped a single toe from his true path. He was an insufferable, honorable man.
 

Amit watched the horizon. Maybe he’d been wrong, and maybe he hadn’t. What was done was done. All that mattered was what came next. He would face Woo, this time with the certainty that he was doing the right thing. He would control his anger — focus and use it to his advantage, to be the machine he could be, and that both masters always saw.
 

He would control himself, and face Woo.
 

Maybe Amit would ask why Woo why he’d not been invited.
 

The thought leapt into his mind unbidden. Once there, he couldn’t deny it. Woo had left to start the second monastery, and had taken his best warriors with him. Why not him? It didn’t make sense. Amit was the best — or at least had potential. At the time, he would have done and believed anything Woo said. If he had sworn to Amit that greater goods could be addressed by committing some wrongs, he would probably have reluctantly accepted that. Amit remembered how he’d been — how, he had to admit, he still was. He’d wanted to believe anything. He’d been robbed of his life and parents, left to starve. It all seemed so unfair. The streets teemed with disease, and the cities frothed with poverty and despair. It was easy to believe in nothing, yet Woo gave aim to his faith. There was a universal spirit: a reason for everything. The mind could be cleared by meditation. After enough practice, peace could be found. The Sri, save the occasional insult from the other boys and girls, delivered on those promises. Amit would have marched as a good soldier, even (and especially) then.
 

Why hadn’t Woo brought him along?
 

And why had he ordered Nisha’s murder?

The thought unhinged Amit so much that his foot slipped. He had to cling to the cliff for support. He found a clear spot and sat, crossing his legs and closing his eyes. He saw his anger as a ball inside his chest, then breathed in to quench it, out to allow it. Calm returned. Like a man testing a hot brand, Amit edged back toward the question, because it was important.
 

This was all about Nisha. Amit was here at the end of her trail. It should have been obvious, but when the Möbius strip underfoot was rematched end to end — Nisha next to Woo — something defied logic. If Woo had wanted Nisha dead, why didn’t he kill her himself? He must have known where she was staying; lines of communication to the old monastery couldn’t be that tattered. They’d been a handful of miles apart, and even Suni said that monks sometimes defected and repatriated. Woo could have come. He could have sent an assassin. They were Sri; they could have easily killed her. Why had he sent word down, spanning the sea and back? Why was the chain long enough to wrap the globe?
 

Amit didn’t know why. But this was where the money led, and in the end, it came down to that. Woo’s Sri didn’t have any more goods to sell than Suni’s, so they sold their services. Nisha had died because of dollars. Maybe she’d been in someone’s way; maybe she’d known something she shouldn’t have, maybe she’d soured a deal.
 

Amit stood and resumed walking, his anger returning. It was empowering; it made his hands seem to fill with strength from the inside, as if slipping into gloves. He had let it go, so that he could fight. His anger drove him to battle, but he ironically couldn’t spar if it drove him. To pile one irony atop another, Amit fought best when he allowed it to surface in the end and flow through his fists.
 

Maybe he’d done wrong. He wasn’t sure, and it didn’t matter. What was done was done. He could only keep moving forward, and think of Nisha. Without love, despair, or anger. He had to think of her, who she’d been and how she’d died.
 

Amit didn’t know if it was right, but it was all he had.
 

Nisha.
 

Nisha.
 

The lone man in blue walked, sun high in the sky, and indecision on his back like a beast of burden’s yoke.
 

Chapter 23

T
HREE
W
EEKS
A
GO

T
HEY
WERE
in the barn. It had become their place. When your guardians were monks fluent in observation and stealth, privacy — genuine privacy, rather than merely perceived privacy — came at a premium.
 

Amit ran his hand up Nisha’s side. She was wearing the secondhand dress that one of the monks had brought up from town following her arrival. She hadn’t been willing to tell the monks where she’d lived, so they could bring her belongings. She had offered to pay for replacements, but the monks, once they’d committed to harboring her, would hear nothing of it. She’d worked off the implied debt anyway, tending fields and washing dishes.
 

“Watch your hands,” Nisha told him.
 

Amit ran his hand higher. The dress moved maybe an inch, revealing a slightly larger area of skin near her knee. His gaze took in the skin, and the hand slowly exposing it.
 

“I am watching it,” Amit reported. He bugged his eyes out dramatically, then moved his hand higher.
 

Nisha pushed it away, laughing. His hand moved to her face and cupped it in his palm. He kissed her lightly. It was a few shades past platonic, but enough. A month ago Nisha wouldn’t accept a kiss. Even today, Amit, raised a monk, found what was given almost more than he could take.
 

“I am a respectable lady in hiding.”

“And I am your protector.”
 

“The abbot
is my protector.”

It was true. Suni hadn’t wanted Nisha or her brother in the monastery at all (Amit thought Suni might be worried about what was already happening with the pretty young girl), but once Nisha was in, she was in. The abbot might treat her and Sameer like the unwanted wards that they were, but they were wards nonetheless.
 

Amit rolled onto his side, and began to lightly rub his fingers along the swell of Nisha’s hip, toward her dress’s edge farther down, where bare skin beckoned.
“The abbot,”
he said, voice dripping with sarcasm. “Suni wanted to throw you out. You came in need of help, and he would have thrown you to the wolves.”
 

Nisha kissed him again. “Be nice.”
 

“How is he protecting you now? I have kidnapped you. Taken you down the path and away from his protection. It is me you must please.”
 

“Oh, is that how it is?”
 

“Yes.” Amit wanted to add,
So, please me,
but it sounded like something Rafi would say. Not that Rafi had any more experience being pleased than Amit. Rafi was gone. He’d vanished a few days after Nisha’s arrival. Maybe he’d gone to wherever Woo was. Amit heard nothing.
 

“I believe I may be done being a monk.”

Nisha turned.
 

“I am serious. I have meditated on it. You will not stay with us forever, and you will need someone when you go.” He smiled. “I wish to be that someone. But of course, you must first tell me why you are running.”
 

He said it as jokingly as he’d said everything else — except for the idea of leaving; that was serious. Still, Nisha turned her head. He watched her beautiful profile in the barn’s sparse light. She had awakened so much within him. His anger was gone, but other emotions had risen in their place. What would Woo say about the new sensations? Would he say to embrace them — but to keep them tamed, like a leashed dog? Probably, yes. But was that what he was doing now, taking her so far from the monastery?
 

“I will,” she said. “Soon. I have to decide how to do it.”
 

“Just say it. Tell me. What happened? What sent you to us?”
 

“In time.”
 

“But why?”
 

Nisha took Amit’s hand in hers. She squeezed it between her breasts, giving him a wordless answer that was, of course, not an answer at all. It was as innocent a gesture as everything else they’d done together. Still, he felt desire stir, with no want to control it.
 

She sighed, then shook her head, ready to change the subject. “Are you really thinking about leaving? Or was that a joke?”
 

“I was serious. You have dealt with Suni for two months. I have dealt with him for nearly 20 years. He understands what it is to be a monk, but not what it is to be human.”