The Cult of Loving Kindness (17 page)

 

The woman in the red smock was Mama Jobe, he explained. Efe was the cook. The man with the painted cheeks was Karan Mang.

 

The cripple spoke in a careful, cultured city accent, lying on his back on the palm mat, staring up at the sky while Cassia sat by him and ate. For a little while she was so hungry she could think of nothing but the food, and then it was all gone. “Thank you,” she said, wiping her mouth.

The baby was quiet now. The little boy stood by his mother, his hands clasped around a cup of greens. Karan Mang had retreated to the border of the trees, where he sat upon a fallen log. He had a metal basin between his feet, and he was washing his hands carefully, finger by finger. “He came last night,” explained the cripple. “This is a resting place along the path. I don’t think he’ll stay with us. He’s carrying a message from an important personage.”

Cassia glanced at him, and she collected in return a brief disdainful look, a flutter of long eyelashes. She turned back to the cripple. “What’s your name?” she asked.

He smiled. “At this moment I have none. ‘Servant of God,’ I call myself. But in two days’ time my oath will be fulfilled. Then I will stand up, and pick up my old name again.”

Mama Jobe flopped down on Cassia’s other side, a radish root clutched in her hand. “All things are possible with God,” she said, shaking her head.

“Or I will not,” continued the cripple softly. “In any case, the oath will be fulfilled.”

“What oath?” asked Cassia.

“He made an oath at the midsummer festival,” said Mama Jobe. “Under risen Paradise. To sit that way, the way the Prince sat on his final ride.”

The position of his withered legs—his knees turned out, his ankles crossed on top of them—had once been popular among mystics and teachers. Mr. Sarnath, when he meditated, had often sat in the same way, sometimes for half an hour at a time. “I was the strongest runner in my zone,” the cripple said. “It was the gift I made to God.”

He was lying on his back, his face turned to the sky. One hand was folded underneath his head; the other chafed the beads of an amber necklace, which hung down on his chest.

Mama Jobe had split the radish with her thumbnail. But she was looking anxiously toward Karan Mang, who was unwrapping a small package of silver foil. “Baklava,” she muttered. “The Prince tells us to share everything we have.”

“And to avoid covetousness,” the cripple reminded her. “Remember when he was in prison, and he told the people not to envy him, for he would soon be dead.”

They were both smiling, and Cassia smiled too. “Who are you talking about?” she asked politely. But Mama Jobe just stared at her, and the cripple raised his head up from the mat.

“Well, if you don’t know, I’m not the one to tell you,” said Mama Jobe after a pause. She had levered out the pink meat of the radish. Now she was scraping her thumbnail along the worthless husk, suddenly industrious, and she was avoiding Cassia’s eyes.

But the cripple was looking at her calmly. “Where are you going, child?” he asked.

Putting one massive palm flat on the ground, he pushed himself upright, aided by a deft movement of his spine. Then he balanced himself on his frail hams and leaned forward toward her, his finger in the air. “Where are you traveling, along the path?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” said Cassia. “I was with Rael.” Just saying his name brought back all the misery of the long night. Where was he now? She could not imagine he had stayed in the garage; she raised her head and looked around the clearing. Perhaps he was standing in the woods somewhere invisible. Perhaps he was standing in the rhododendron trees beyond the clearing’s edge. He would not come to find her, not with these people here.

“I was following Rael,” she said.

And in a little while, she went on. “They built a train from Cochinoor. The university reorganized our town.”

Next to her on the palm mat lay a row of playing cards. She examined the one nearest her hand, a nine of stones, painted in bright colors. She put her hand out to touch it, aware also that the Servant of God was studying her too, just as intently. “Where are you traveling,” he said again, “along this path?”

“This is the road to Brother Longo’s house,” added Karan Mang. “Brother Longo Starbridge.”

He had finished his pastry, and now again was washing off his hands. He skimmed his fingers over the water in the basin. His voice was harsh and full of aspirated consonants. It did not suit his face, and Cassia found his accent difficult to understand. She had barely finished puzzling over the last words when Mama Jobe spat out a clot of insults and invective in some foreign language. Even when she relapsed into common speech, she was using words that Cassia didn’t know. “Eunuch!” she said. “Stupid catamite!”

Not understanding, Cassia concentrated on the tone, which was composed in equal parts of anger and of fear. Unconcerned, Karan Mang had drawn a symbol with the heel of his slipper in the dirt, and then obliterated it by pouring out his basin over it. Now he sat polishing his fingernails, a prim expression on his mouth.

But the Servant of God sat next to her, studying her face. Cassia glanced at him nervously, then bit her lips. She was aware that he was still assessing her, and that his decision, when it came, would be final and irrevocable. “Let me see your hands,” he said. She held them out. Supported by one massive forearm, he leaned toward her.

His own hand, as he raised it from the ground to enclose the two of hers, was the more remarkable—callused and strong, and covered with smudged lines of symbols in black ink, which ran from the base of his palm up to his fingertips. They were meaningless to Cassia, yet seemed somehow portentous, especially when combined with the careful way he studied her own naked hands. Cassia also was aware that Mama Jobe was leaning in to look. Even Karan Mang seemed interested, though Efe, seated on a stump with one child between her knees, the other at her breast, had closed her eyes to blissful slits.

“Have you always had this mark?” asked the Servant of God. He was chafing the middle of her right palm between her finger and thumb.

In fact she had not seen it before. It was a rough, mottled octagon between her headline and her heartline, lighter than the ordinary color of her skin.

“I was born in December of the tenth phase,” she said. “My father was named Sarnath.”

Mama Jobe’s gaze was sharp and piercing. The cripple didn’t look up right away; he sat forward on his ruined legs, chafing the mark upon her hand. “That I doubt,” he said, and when he raised his eyes they seemed unnaturally large, unnaturally liquid. “Where is the other one?” he said. “Is he also here, upon the path?”

She thought he meant Rael, perhaps. She looked around, trying to sense Rael’s presence underneath the trees. There was a hibiscus bush not yet in bloom, a hundred yards beyond the cripple’s shoulder. Perhaps he was there, waiting for her among the tight new buds. She shook her head.

The cripple chafed her hand. “These are the days of grace,” he said. “With Paradise above us—until tomorrow night we can be free and open with each other. Nothing happens now by chance, and nothing now can harm us, till my oath is at an end. Will you come with us? Efe has brought food.”

Distracted, Cassia shrugged her shoulders. Or perhaps Rael was there beyond the ferns, standing in the open, only motionless and silent, hidden in plain view. Often when they were children she had marveled at the way that he could disappear into a patch of woods, merging with the dappled shadows like a leopard or a faun.

She knew he would not show himself. Angry, frustrated, she forced herself to listen to the cripple’s voice: “For these two days, until the festival, the path is free to all. Open to all. Tonight we sleep at Brother Longo’s mission. Will you join us? I would like him to see what I have seen.” Between his finger and his thumb, he squeezed the mark upon her hand.

While he was speaking, Efe had gotten to her feet, and she was breaking camp. She emptied the uneaten manioc onto a big waxy leaf, and with a piece of twine she made a package out of it. This she accomplished with the infant clasped to her hip, while the child took the bucket and trudged off with it. He returned a moment later dragging it along the ground; it was full of water, which his mother used to wash the bowls. That chore finished, she retreated to the far side of the clearing and, still in plain sight, squatted down upon the ground. The urine descended from her body in a noisy, smoking stream; it scented the air, and she was squatting down and holding the infant out in front of her at arm’s length, and she was making faces as it clucked and fretted, its big head lolling in a circle. Then she moved a few steps away, and sitting down with her legs stretched out in front of her, she perched the infant upon her thighs and encouraged him also to relieve himself. After a few minutes she was rewarded with a few ambiguous drips, which fell down into the crack between her legs. In the meantime, the child had dragged out from the ferns a conical woven basket, almost as tall as he, with a tumpline around the open end. This he balanced against the Y-shaped stump and commenced to load with blankets and bundles; he would lift a bundle up above his chest to drop it over the basket’s lip, and then he would climb up onto the stump to tamp it down with the charred stick.

In this way he loaded everything, except for the emptied water bucket and a single blanket, which he kept for last. Then he sat down to wait for his mother, a dour expression on his tiny face. At the same time, Mama Jobe had gathered together her own bundle, and Karan Mang had already packed up and departed. His own equipment had fitted easily into a shoulder bag, and Cassia had watched with interest how he had folded together his imported mylar blanket and his sleeping pad; she had never seen such things. He had walked away into the trees without a word, without a backward glance, and all the while Cassia was sitting on the palm mat. And the Servant of God was sitting with her, studying her face, holding her hand.

 

That day, all day she was aware of him, although she never saw him. But sometimes she could sense him moving along one side of the trail, perhaps a hundred yards into the bush. Sometimes on the other side, sometimes behind them, and once they passed a place where the fallen blossoms made a pattern that she found significant. Once she raised her eyes to a tall tree, the crossing of two branches, and one of them was trembling in a way that seemed unnatural, as if Rael, perhaps, had just leapt down.

 

Sore and peevish, she walked slowly, carrying Servant of God’s guitar and rolled-up mat. He swung along beside her on his heavy hands, balancing occasionally also on his knees. He rested often and she rested with him, until all the others had disappeared in front—Karan Mang, Mama Jobe, who was carrying with sudden poise her bundle on her head.

Finally even Efe and her children had disappeared. With a great deal of grunting and spitting she had loaded her basket onto her back, the conical end of it caught in the cleft where her spine met her buttocks, the tumpline round her brow. At the final instant she had sunk the pail into the top of her basket; wrapped in his blanket, the infant perched inside like a sailor at the masthead of a wide-bottomed boat, and he peered at Cassia over the edge of the pail while his mother labored underneath, his little face jerking up and down with every step she took. Just behind, his brother trudged along with his eyes upon the trail, similarly loaded with a fat small pack.

Eventually they labored out of sight among the trees. Eventually Cassia could no longer hear them, and she was left alone with the Servant of God. But only for an hour or so, because as the day wore on the path became more crowded, and they were often overtaken by other groups of pilgrims. From time to time, also, other smaller paths joined theirs, and at the junctions there were often resting places where the ground was beaten flat, and where families of pilgrims sat and talked. No one was in a hurry—these folk were in a holiday mood. They wore brightly colored clothes and chattered together in loud voices. And although among them there was a complicated mixture of races and languages, still they seemed to be in good humor, and they were smiling and greeting each other, and making conversations out of gestures and repeated phrases. In time this made Cassia restless, because everyone seemed to know Servant of God, and with enormous smiles they would stop him on the path; they would bend down to embrace him and kiss him on both cheeks, and talk to him in unknown languages, while all the time peering at her curiously. Especially on these occasions she would be aware of Rael watching her perhaps, and with hot cheeks she would stand restless in these little glades while Servant of God conversed with Rais and Gurungs and Tamangs—tall spindly folk from Banaree and short squat westerners—specimens, in fact, of all the races Cassia had ever seen when she was on the road with Mr. Sarnath. Despite her natural self-possession, she was awkward and unquiet, because she had never seen so many human beings all together since she was a little girl, and she was not used to their loud voices, their abrasive laughs, the way they never cared how close to you they stood. Awkward also because Servant of God would never introduce her or even look at her during these moments of greeting, though she imagined many of his words and gestures must refer to her; for this reason people glanced at her with smiles on their faces.

Often he would sit down to rest while he was speaking, and he would reach up to take her right hand in one of his, and he would caress her palm in a way that as time went on she felt to be more and more presumptuous. But to let go of him at such an instant would be to let him fall. So she resisted the impulse, and at the same time she reinforced her patience by imagining Rael’s frustration and jealousy to see her standing in what surely would appear to him to be the center of attention, hand in hand with this strange cripple. How jealous he would be! How he would curse his timidity and whatever else it was that kept him lonely and apart—if he were watching her at all, she thought, and were not someplace miles away, running through the forest by himself.