The fine print

Disclaimers

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons living, dead, or in-between is probably intentional, but not to be taken seriously.

This novel is for entertainment purposes only. Obviously you should not assume that anything on a web site with a name like “Buddhism for Vampires” is religiously or historically accurate.

Do not try this at home. The stunts in this story were performed by highly-trained Buddhist professionals, under carefully controlled conditions. Attempts to imitate them may result in injury or undeath.

Acknowledgments

Should any actual Buddhism be found in this book, it is thanks to my teachers, particularly Ngak’chang Rinpoche and Khandro Déchen. They are, of course, not responsible for my monstrous distortions (intentional and otherwise) of the precious Dharma.

I would like to thank my vampire-loving friends, family, and sangha for their enthusiasm and for helpful comments on drafts.

Uma Kate Bode prompted the writing of The Vetali’s Gift, via a comment on my Approaching Aro site.

Dedication

The telling of the tale

The young monk found his way up to the cave, a day’s walk from Nalanda University. He stopped at the entrance—curious, and apprehensive. He pulled aside the blanket covering the opening, and called out “Sir?”

Hello! Dear boy! Please do come in. It is so nice to meet you at last… Yes, of course I know you. You are a young man with a most unusual and valuable talent. Valuable to me, anyway, when you accompanied me on my Final Quest. What? Oh, yes, I am sorry, that Quest hasn’t happened yet. We’ve only just met, haven’t we? Time is so confusing.

Do sit down. Make yourself comfortable. You will be here some while. Oh! It is so kind of you to bring me these. Would you like one yourself? No? I’m sorry, I know most people think they are horrifying; I should not have offered you one. I do adore them; I hope you don’t mind if I eat one now?

So. Your teacher, the Chancellor of Nalanda, has sent you here, yes? To learn about the Matter of Life and Death. But what you would really like to hear is about your teacher. You would like to hear how, when he and I were young, we saved Nalanda, and Buddhism, and the world. How we travelled into the realms of the dead and defeated the Dark Lord and all his armies. You have heard a little of that story, haven’t you? And you don’t know whether to believe it. The Chancellor will not speak of it. There is much he did on that Quest that most monks should not learn about, lest they get ideas…

So you hope to hear the story from me. Yet you have heard that I’m a dazed old man, who can’t remember which century he’s living in. Still, whether true history or an old man’s dream, you’d find it a good tale—and you’d learn much about your Chancellor. More than he’d like his students to know.

But the time will come when you have to save Buddhism yourself. That time comes for all of us, in every century. Five hundred years from now, Nalanda was torched by a Muslim army. They hated Buddhism. Thousands of monks were burned alive. It took months to destroy all the books in the university library. Buddhism was completely obliterated in India.

I’ve told your Chancellor about that. So he went north, to the land of the red-faced barbarians, and he planted the seeds of Buddhism there. You went too, and you had important work to do. Oh, yes, I mean, you and he will go there! Please forgive an old man—I came unstuck in time, back when I was your age. A little accident I had on the Quest.

Anyway, the northern barbarians kept Buddhism alive for more than a thousand years. Then a Chinese army that hated religion destroyed their land, and Buddhism had to be saved again, in lands to the west. So it goes.

You’ll have to hear about all that, in time. Before the Final Quest. But your teacher sent you to learn about Life and Death—and that is what I will tell you now.

Of life, there is too much to say; or nothing at all. About death, I know only a little. Really, there is only one thing that is important. Will you remember this for me? Please? The one thing to know is:

Next time you die—pay attention!

I learned that from the vetali. Almost everything I know about life and death I learned from the vetali. So what I will tell you is how I came to be on the Quest of Life and Death; and how I met the vetali; and what I learned from her.

Now, you know, I must begin at the beginning, and continue until I reach the end. Then I will stop. Please try not to interrupt too much! It is so easy for me to lose track of time. I may get hopelessly confused and start complaining about this cave’s lack of modern plumbing, or something. There is a great deal to be said for plumbing, you know. Anyone would think we were living in the Dark Age. It’s not like plumbing is actually difficult, or complicated. It’s just a matter of will. You just need to decide to have hot water, and then—

Sorry—where was I? Yes, I haven’t quite been born yet. We are starting at the beginning, aren’t we?

My father was a Tantrika—a Buddhist sorcerer. I never knew him. He died before I was born. He died defending our village…

My father dies

“We are starting at the beginning, aren’t we?” said the old man.

My father was a Tantrika—a Buddhist sorcerer. I never knew him. He died before I was born. He died defending our village… I was proud of that.

On that day, a girl ran into the village, exhausted, sobbing and incoherent. It seemed that her own village, a few miles to our west, had just been attacked and destroyed by the army of a rising warlord from Kannauj. They were marching east.

Our village sent a runner to the nearest garrison town to beg for help; the women and children prepared to flee, and the men—some of them—to fight to cover their escape.

The soldiers arrived minutes later. Our men were untrained, unready, and armed only with kitchen knives and farming tools. The slaughter began—but my father, sitting alone in the common space at the center of the village, singing black words, nearly turned the tide.

He turned the soldiers’ own bodies against them.

One enemy’s brains fountained out of a hole in the top of his skull. He fell twitching to the ground. Another vomited up his intestines, which wrapped themselves around his neck and strangled him. The bare hands of an immensely strong man tore open his chest and ripped out his own heart, as he watched in horror, unable to stop them.

Another soldier’s skin abandoned him. When the battle was over and our survivors crept back to the village, they found the skin crouching beside his flayed body. It leapt onto a village woman, trying to find a new host to cover. It took three men to pull it off. They had to throw it in a fire to stop its struggle.

When the soldiers realized what was happening, they wavered. Some began to run. But this was not a band of free-lance thugs, nor an army of conscripted farmers. Their commander ordered a charge against my father. He could kill only one at a time; and so he sank in a sea of swords. Still, the diversion had granted the village enough time that most of the women and children, and the less brave of the men, were able to escape into the forest. Among them, his pregnant wife—my mother.

I learned this story in fragments. None of the village adults would tell me anything about my father. Sometimes I extracted a piece from some child who knew something—usually by pinning them to the ground and threatening severe injury if they did not tell me what they knew. Each had heard only confused fragments of the story of that day, mainly about their own families’ part in it.

I was practically grown before I got most of the picture. That was one night when half the village grown-ups had snuck off into the forest, to sit in a clearing drinking millet-beer. I snuck after them and hid and listened.

Everyone had heard everything a thousand times; but they could not stop telling the stories, or lay the arguments to rest, not after a decade and more.

Our village was mostly Buddhists. Several insisted, annoyed that anyone could disagree, that the Buddhist First Precept is perfectly clear. You should not kill. Not animals, and especially not people. It is bad karma—the worst.

(No one pointed out the unpleasant obvious, that drinking millet-beer might itself be bad karma. There’s bad karma, and then there’s bad karma. Anyway, millet-beer isn’t really intoxicating. And besides, there was no one there except them, and they were sneaking, so it didn’t count.)

I had no doubt that my father was a hero—but that day he killed many men.

“Of course killing is wrong usually,” said the smith. He was the only one besides my father who had killed an enemy in that battle. “But everyone knows there are exceptions. Nobody could expect you not to fight back if someone’s about to put a sword through you.”

“There are no exceptions,” replied my foster-mother. “I asked the monks. They said ‘no exceptions.’ You didn’t believe me, so I asked them again, the next time they came here. And you heard them! No exceptions.”

“Oh, well, monks,” said the smith. “There’s what’s right for monks, and then there’s what’s right for ordinary people.”

“Anyway, it wasn’t just self-defense,” said the clothes-dyer. “You can’t ask men to stand by and do nothing while their wives and children are slaughtered!”

“There’s no eksheption for that, neither,” said my foster-mother. Her voice was slurring a little. She was a devout Buddhist, but she did like millet-beer.

“What I say is, not even those pig-sons deserved to die like they did.” That was the miller. “You were safely off in the forest. You can’t imagine it. I saw one of them grow a mouth on his belly, a mouth as big as his head. His own hands and feet went in there. It had eaten down to the elbows and knees before one of the other bastards cut off his head to end it.”

“No one deserves to die like my Chandra did, either!” said the baker’s wife. Her late husband had taken two sword-blows. One left him with half a face; the other spilled his guts. He was left for dead by the enemy, but he was a strong man, and was three nights dying after that.

“Some say killing is always wrong, and some say not,” said the village headman, shaking his head. He was a Brahmin—a Hindu priest—not a Buddhist. “What everyone knows is that sorcery, consorting with demons, is evil. It doesn’t matter what he did or why. It doesn’t matter what happened. It’s an abomination. I say having that man in our village is what brought the enemy on us in the first place. He offended the gods, and they sent a just punishment.”

“It’s not right, creepy men like that bringing disaster on decent people,” said my foster-mother. She and the Brahmin were natural allies in their piety, despite worshipping different gods. “And his brother’s another one like that.” She meant my uncle.

“Maybe he is a Tantrika,” said the smith. “But he pays you more than well enough to take care of the kid—enough to feed you and your own children as well. He gave you the boy because your husband died bravely, not for the sweetness of your tongue. But you could still speak better of him.”

“Hey, you sleeping with him? Giving him his money’s worth?” asked the barber.

“No!” said my foster-mother.

“I sure wouldn’t mind,” said the rope-maker, to general laughter. She had a reputation, and she didn’t care who knew it. She wasn’t the only one with eyes for my uncle, though.

“He pays none too much,” my foster-mother said. “That boy is a dakini-child. He’s nothing but trouble, and he’ll come to a bad end. If he doesn’t take after his father, he takesh after his mother. His soul is as black as her skin. He’ll bring another cursh on this village, you wait and see.”

Oh, hell. I’ve gotten lost in time again. Here I am telling you about my foster-mother, and my own mother hasn’t even been murdered yet.

My mother dies

“Mother, what is a dakini?”

She looked troubled. “Why do you want to know, dear?”

“They said—they said—they called me a ‘dakini child.’ ”

I was close to tears. “They said—they said you were a dakini, and dakinis eat people. And dakinis are what make people sick. They said everyone knows you are a dakini because you have black skin and talk funny.” It was true that my mother spoke with an accent, and her grammar was a bit off. I was just old enough to have noticed that. And even my own skin was darker than most of the villagers. “Is it true? Are you a dakini?”

She took me in her lap, and stroked my hair. “I am your mother,” she said.

“B—but—but is it true? Are you a dakini?”

She bit her lip. “Well… maybe I used to be one… but I don’t eat anyone, not ever.” That was true—she wouldn’t eat meat at all, never mind people. “Never anymore. And you know I make people better, not sick.”

After my father died, she married his younger brother. She did not see much of him. He was a Tantrika, like my father; but he was always away, coming to our village for only a few days, once or twice a year.

My uncle always brought her money when he visited. She was not strong enough to work the field that had been my father’s. But she also accepted payment in kind for her work: curing sick calves, injured children, sometimes broken hearts. The men of the village would have nothing to do with her, but the humbler women respected her help, and I think her kindness.

Although there were plenty in our village who feared and hated her, it was not because she was a dakini that she was murdered. Or only incidentally. Our house was just outside the village, reflecting my family’s role in community life. And one day, maybe that was fatal.

They were dressed as soldiers; but I think they were freelance roving thugs. Perhaps they were mercenaries without a job; or men who had been conscripted, seen the horrors of war, and then summarily discharged. Probably without the pay they were promised. That is how it usually goes.

At any rate, they came to our village, heavily armed, in broad daylight. They came to our house because it was first on the road. My mother saw them coming, and spotted trouble.

“Quick, Surya,” she said. “You must hide in the rafters.” I loved to climb up into the rafters of our little house, where I could lie hidden, seeing and hearing everything that happened when villagers came to visit. “Whatever it happen, you must be quiet—say not a sound!”

I saw and heard everything. I said not a sound.

No one heard her screams but me; most of the villagers were off working in the fields, and our house was nearly out of earshot of the village anyway.

When the men were done with her, and left, and she lay broken and dying on the floor, I came down from the rafters.

She smiled and tried to comfort me, but she had lost the use of her limbs. She could not hold me.

“Surya,” she said, “the kartika.” She gestured with her eyes, because she could not move her neck. Lying on the floor was a tiny metal charm, in the shape of a butcher’s knife. It had been on a silver chain around her hips, under her skirt. She must have worn it there always, because I had never seen it before. When they were stripping her, one man broke the chain and held the pendant up to look at for moment; then he threw it away as worthless.

I went to put the little thing in her palm, but she curled her fingers weakly around my hand, so she held my fist holding it. “Keep it secret,” she said. “Keep it safe.”

Then she died.

The old man was silent for a while.

“Do you know your mother?” he asked then.

“Slightly,” said the young monk. “I have met her on a few occasions.”

“How old were you, when…” asked the old man.

“I don’t remember,” replied the young monk. “I think I must have been about three, when I was given to the monastery.”

“Then perhaps you cannot understand how I felt,” said the old man.

25 vampire stories

“Tell me a story,” I demanded.

It was the first evening of one of my uncle’s rare visits, after my mother was killed.

“It’s late, Surya,” he said. “I have come a long way today, and I am tired.”

“Um—with respect—why are you telling me about all this?” asked the young monk. “I thought you were supposed to teach me the Secret of Life and Death, or something.”

“I am,” said the old man. “But the story my uncle told is personally meaningful for me. Please don’t interrupt!”

“It’s late, Surya,” my uncle said. “I have come a long way today, and I am tired.”

“But you must tell me a story! Every day you are here, you must tell me a story!”

“All right. I wish I could be here more often… you need to hear more than stories!” He sighed. “Right… what’s a good story to tell you? Give me a minute…”

I sat and waited impatiently, kicking my seat.

“Right. So, once up on a time, there was a great sage named Nagarjuna. And there was a king named Shankarabhadra. There were seven evil sorcerers, and—”

“I know this story,” said the young monk.

“Yes,” said the old man. “It is The Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire.”

“I have heard that,” said the young monk.

“You may have heard a version,” said the old man. “The story starts with Nagarjuna rescuing the king. The king asks what Nagarjuna wants in return for saving his life, and Nagarjuna sends him to fetch a vampire. The king is brave, but the vampire is wily. It tricks the king into allowing it to tell a story—and when the king interrupts the story, the vampire is able to escape. Then the king has to go back and capture the vampire again, and it tells another story, and—”

“Yes,” said the young monk. “The bit with the vampire is really just an excuse to tell a series of unrelated tales.”

“A ‘frame-story,’ I believe story-tellers call it,” said the old man.

“Why do they do that?” asked the young monk.

The old man frowned and rubbed his nose. “Well… There are several reasons. First, some stories get a slow start. The listener needs to hear the boring beginning bit to understand what comes later; but they don’t know whether that’s worth waiting for. The fictional narrator in the frame-story can give an overview before the inner story starts. That might give the listener enough of a taste that they are willing to wait.

“Or, maybe the beginning of the story is really grim. Then the narrator’s introduction can be comic, so the listener knows the real story will have a happy ending.”

“I see,” said the young monk. “But that’s not what happens in the Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire.”

“No,” said the old man. “Another reason is that when you listen to a story, you enter a new world, created out of words. And you are willing to let the world be as the teller tells it. But that can only go so far, and if the world does not make sense, you will interrupt the tale and argue. By putting the story within a story, the teller of the inner story becomes only a character himself, so you cannot argue with him. Then the inner story can be less realistic. If you wrap it in enough layers of indirection, you can tell a completely ridiculous story and have it seem somehow believable.”

“I see… I think…” said the young monk.

“And then, a story always works some transformation in the hearer. It is not ‘information’; it works on the heart. Although it is made of words, the true meaning of a story cannot be put in words. So the story teller has to stop the hearer from using their ordinary mind to listen. When the teller says ‘once upon a time…’, the listener knows it is time to listen with the heart. But the listener’s mind may still get in the way. To confuse ordinary mind, the story-teller wraps worlds in worlds, until the hearer gets lost, and can listen without judgment.”

“Oh,” said the young monk. “So your uncle wanted to confuse you… But I know the vampire story, so I would not be confused.”

“Perhaps not, and that is your loss. But I think you have not heard the story he told me. There are as many versions of the Twenty-five Tales of the Vampire as there are story-tellers…”

“Oh, all right, go on then!” said the young monk.

“And this is the story the vampire told him,” my uncle said:

“ ‘Once upon a time, there lived a farmer who had three sons. The youngest son died when he was just a boy—’ ”

“Why did he die?” I asked.

“Well, because he was not pure of heart. He had bad thoughts, and the demonic minions of Lord Yama, the god of death, dragged him down to Hell.”

“Oh!” I said. That was a bit of a shock. I knew such things happened, but—

“What sort of bad thoughts did he have?” I asked.

My uncle looked at me closely. “He was angry,” he said. “He was jealous of his older brothers and sometimes wished they were dead.”

I think he could see I was usually angry. I was jealous of my older foster-brothers, and often wished them dead.

“Does that always happen to boys who have bad thoughts?” I asked.

“Well… sooner or later,” he said. “But there are ways to stop being angry.”

“Like what?”

“You can use anger to cut itself.”

“Oh,” I said. I had no idea what that meant. I thought for a while, and then asked, “What about the other two brothers?”

“Well, the oldest brother was pure of heart. And the middle brother… not so much. So anyway, do you want to hear the story the vampire told?”

“Yes, please.”

“ ‘One day when they were of age, they determined to set out on a Quest, to seek their fortune in the wide world. Their father pleaded with them not to go, for there are many dangers in the wide world…

The tale the vampire told

“ ‘One day when they were of age, the two remaining brothers determined to set out on a Quest, to seek their fortune in the wide world. For they were brave and handsome and clever—or at least the older brother was—and their village seemed too small for them. Their father pleaded with them not to go, for there are many dangers in the wide world, and he counted on their work for the farm. But try as he would, he could not dissuade them.

“ ‘Finally, he gave their Quest his blessing. “Never forget,” he said, “that you are Buddhists. Always pray to the gods. And especially in times of great peril; that is a Test of your devotion. If you are pure of heart, your prayers will be answered.”

“ ‘The two brothers set off with light hearts. But they had not gone far when they came upon a band of bandits. The bandits took the little money their father had given them, and abused them most severely. That night they heard the bandits talking among themselves, and saying that the brothers were to be sold as slaves.

“ ‘They remembered their father’s advice, and realized that they had come already to their First Test. So they both prayed. Nothing happened when the middle brother prayed, but a goddess appeared to the oldest brother. She was dressed all in green and was holding a flower.’ ”

“That was Green Tara!” I said.

“Yes,” said my uncle. “ ‘She smiled sweetly, and said “Because you are pure of heart, I will give you a mantra that will free you from the bandits.” So the two brothers repeated over and over the mantra she had given them: Om Tare Tuttare Ture Svaha. The one bandit who had been set to watch over them, to see they did not escape, miraculously fell asleep. The older brother was able to wriggle free from his bonds. Quickly he untied the middle brother, and they slipped away from the bandits’ camp.

“ ‘After many days’ walk they came to a colossal ring of mountains, so high their tops touched the sky. Their road took them to a gate that led through the mountain. A constant stream of people went through that gate, in and out, soldiers and traders, carts and bullocks and horses and elephants.

“ ‘Inside the ring of mountains was a great city, like nothing the brothers had ever seen. They had come to the capital of the king. They marveled at the riches of the town, the ladies in brilliant multi-colored silks, the gilded carriages, the shining temple towers. They had no money, for the bandits had taken it all; but they were told they could indenture themselves.’”

“What does ‘indenture’ mean?” I asked.

“They didn’t know,” said my uncle. “What it meant was that they had to work for their master for ten years, with almost no pay, just enough to eat, and do whatever he said, and they could not escape. And he beat them sometimes.”

“Oh!” I said. “I don’t want to indenture myself.”

“You will never need to, if I can help it,” said my uncle.

“ ‘The man they were indentured to was, by chance, the chief sorcerer of the king. When he saw that they were clever, he began to teach them sorcery, to help him with his work. They learned quickly, especially the oldest brother. But sorcery troubled him, and he was not sure the sorcerer was a good sorcerer—nor the king a good king.

“ ‘After a few years, he said, “Brother, we have come to our Second Test. We must escape this place and find honest work.” But the middle brother saw that the sorcerer was rich and powerful. Eventually the indenture would end, and he would be a sorcerer himself. He did not want to go on the run and have always to hide from the king’s men. In short, he was greedy, and afraid.

“ ‘So the older brother prayed to the gods, and a blood-red goddess appeared. She was dancing naked and she held a half-skull filled with blood.’”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“That was Vajra Varahi,” my uncle said. “She had the head of a boar.”

“ ‘The middle brother was very afraid, but because the older brother was pure of heart, he prostrated to her, and she laughed like a madwoman, and promised to protect him.

“ ‘So that night, he slipped out of the capital city, and as fast as he could, he headed in the direction of the rising sun—because that was the nearest way out of the kingdom. What lay beyond, he did not know.

“ ‘After many days’ walk, he came to the land of the cannibal witches. There at once he was captured. Because he did not know their secret signs, the witches thought he was an enemy, and they decided to kill him.

“ ‘He realized he had come to the Third Test. Again he prayed, and a terrifying black goddess appeared. She was surrounded by gouts of flame and she wore a necklace of severed human heads.’”

“Who was that?” I asked.

“That was Krodha Kali,” my uncle said. “She grants the power of cutting your own anger.”

“ ‘When she appeared, the witches were afraid. But because he was pure of heart, he was not afraid, and he prostrated to her. She roared like a tiger, said nothing, and vanished.

“ ‘But there was a young witch who saw that he was fearless and pure of heart. She saw that he was brave and handsome and clever. And in an instant, she fell in love with him.

“ ‘That night, she freed him, and they escaped together.’”

“Was she a princess?” I asked.

“No,” said my uncle.

“But the hero is supposed to rescue a princess, and then they get married,” I said.

“Well, she wasn’t a princess. But she was very beautiful. Or at least the oldest brother thought so; and that is what matters.

“ ‘The witches were furious when they found out what she had done. They chased the young witch and the oldest brother as they ran away, screaming that she had broken their sacred law, and both must die.

“ ‘So she turned and spat on the ground behind her. And where her spit landed, a lake formed. It spread wider and wider, until they could hardly see the witches on the far bank. They were shaking their fists, because witches cannot cross water. So the young witch and the oldest brother went on.

“ ‘But then after a while they could see that the witches had made their way around the lake and were coming up quickly behind them. The witches were gnashing their teeth because they wanted to eat them up. So the young witch took some of the hairs from between her legs, and she blew them off her palm, and where the hairs landed, a black forest of tangled thorn-trees grew up. So the young witch and the oldest brother ran on, hand in hand.

“ ‘Just when they came to a wide river, they saw that the wicked witches had gotten through the thorn-forest and were catching up, close behind them. The witches were cursing and muttering, because they wanted to send demons to kill the young witch and the oldest brother.

“ ‘The river was dry at that time of year, a plain of sand. The young witch and the oldest brother made it across. And when they reached the far shore, the young witch took some of the blood from between her legs, and she shook it onto the dry river bed. And the empty river filled with roaring river-water, which swept the wicked witches away. And that was the last anyone ever heard of them.

“ ‘The young witch and the oldest brother came back to the village where he was born. For he had had enough of the wide world. He wanted now just to be a farmer, and to love his wife.

“ ‘In the village, they found that his father had died. His house had fallen into ruin, and his field was overgrown with scrub.

“ ‘So the oldest brother rebuilt the house, and cleared the thicket, and planted the field; and they lived happily ever after.’ ”

It was the end of the story. I thought for a minute. “What about the middle brother?” I asked.

“Well… he became the king’s chief sorcerer, when the old one died.”

“Oh… Did the oldest brother and the witch have children?”

“Yes—they had one son.” Suddenly, he looked angry. “Now it is time for bed! No more talk.”

I had more questions, but I could see he was not in a mood to be disobeyed, so I went to bed, and thought about the strange story.

“It is a bit odd,” said the young monk. “I have not heard that one before.”

“No,” said the old man. “You would not have… My mother never spoke of the past, so it was years later that I realized it was the story of how my parents met.”

“Oh!” said the young monk, startled.

He thought for a moment. “So your uncle was the middle brother in the story?”

“Yes,” said the old man. “And I was the one son.”

Lord Buddha

After my mother was murdered, my uncle arranged for me to be reared by one of the village women. She was a Buddhist, and her husband had died valiantly in the same battle that killed my father.

My foster-mother did not love me. I think now that she feared me, for her own sake, and on behalf of her own two sons.

Perhaps she was right. For my part, I hated her, and I hated them.

My foster-mother was obsessed with purity. Whatever I did, it was impure, and she would punish me for it. It was an offense against Lord Buddha, she said. It was bad karma, and would send me to hell.

She described all the hells vividly—the Freezing Hell, where your flesh turns black, splits, and peels off from the cold; the Crushing Hell, where you are smashed between red-hot iron plates; and the Hell of Black Weapons, where swords and spears fall from the sky and spring from the earth and slice you to bits. And each time you die, you are instantly reborn again in just the same place.

She wanted me to be a monk. Only monks could escape such disastrous rebirths. But to be a monk, one must always be perfectly pure, to avoid bad karma.

At times, terrified of hell, I tried to learn all the rules of proper Buddhist conduct. But no matter how hard I tried, she found fault.

Monks had come to our village often, before the wars started, people said. They were kind and noble and brilliant. That was the story. But we saw monks only once in a blue moon; and a sorry lot they were. I did not want to end up like them. Rag-tag beggars, thin and coarse, they seemed interested in little besides how much food we gave them.

My foster-mother treasured every word they spoke, and she had them explain morality to me. The essence of Buddhism, I learned, was to choose never to do anything you wanted. Fun, especially, was against the word of Lord Buddha.

I began to hate this Lord Buddha. Supposedly, he was to protect us from all suffering; but actually, he wanted everyone to be miserable. Especially me. What he wanted and what she wanted were always the same.

I became suspicious. And I noticed that she did not intend her own children to become monks—just me.

Maybe everyone in the village was wrong about what Lord Buddha wanted. The monks too. Or maybe my foster-mother bribed them with extra food into telling me what she wanted, instead.

Wasn’t my real mother a Buddhist? She never talked about purity or karma. Or Lord Buddha! She liked fun; she made up games for me to play; she mostly let me do what I wanted.

My real mother was a dakini­—a witch. Could you be a Buddhist and hate Lord Buddha? Could you be a Buddhist and be a witch?

Had my mother gone to hell?

Was she, even now, being fried, squashed, or diced?

That was a terrible, awful, intolerable thought.

My resentment extended to my foster-brothers. I hurt them whenever I could.

The younger was hardly older than me, a newborn at the time of the invasion. We were physically matched, but I learned that I could trick him with words. I could cheat him, make him look an idiot, dare him into disobeying his mother, or—once—into jumping out of a tree and breaking his leg. When he realized I had fooled him again, we would fight, and I would lose as often as not; but torturing him was worth the pain.

My other foster-brother was four years old when our fathers died. He was quiet as a child, and silent as a man. He did whatever his mother told him, however senseless, never complaining.

He mostly ignored my provocations. At first that made me all the more determined to rile him up. Occasionally, when I got seriously out of control, he laid me out flat with his fist, so I learned not to go too far. Even then, he seemed abnormally devoid of anger. He held no grudge.

He was a man in the year I met Sukhi, strong enough to drive a plow. He had taken over the field that had been my father’s, as well as the one that belonged to his family.

He was more than old enough to marry. But the girls ignored him. Instead, that year, they flocked around me.

“Surya, do you like my skirt? Do you like my necklace? Do you like my eyes or hers better?”

“Surya, Surya, I burnt my finger making chapatis—please will you look at it?”

“Surya, I am going to the spring in the woods to fetch water, will you come with me?”

I had no interest. I had known them all my life. I hated them along with everyone else in the village.

Life is remarkably unfair. He was a good man and would have made a good husband.

Whereas, as for me… I went to hell.

Sukhi

It was Sukhi who saved my life in my fourteenth year. Not by doing anything heroic, but just by being Sukhi.

That year, my life went from merely awful to utterly impossible. I was bored senseless. Living even another year with my hateful foster-family was an unbearable prospect.

And after that, what? I certainly was not going to become a monk. So I would be a farmer, and live and die in a village in which a still-born calf was conversation for weeks; in which nothing more significant than that had happened since I was born; in which nothing would happen unless it were some new catastrophe; in which everything and everyone was loathsomely familiar.

And I was full of vast new, inchoate desires; desires that had no known direction, no possibility of consummation; desires I could not name or understand. Desires for what, I mostly had no idea. It was sex, of course, but I understood that only dimly; and it was not only sex.

The one thing I knew was that I had to get away. Life was a living hell. I thought daily about killing myself to escape; but that sends you straight to the Cold Hell. Living hell or dead hell; the hot hell of rage and desire, or the freezing hopeless hell underground? If I didn’t kill myself, I was going to kill someone else—and it was going to be my foster-mother or her younger son.

I walked out of the village in a blind seething rage. I took the path north, into the forest. I knew it went, half a day on, to a charnel ground, where corpses were left to rot or to be eaten. Few would ever choose to pass that way.

Charnel grounds are the realm of ghosts and demons, hyenas and tigers, bandits and spies. I didn’t care about danger, I thought. I welcomed it. I needed something to happen—even if it was sure to be awful, because everything in life was awful.

The sky was overcast as I walked into the forest. It was dark and wet, the path faint and overgrown. It wandered among towering shala trees. Stories say those are the abode of yakshinis—powerful, unpredictable spirits who take the form of beautiful women. The eerie limbs of strangler figs wrapped the shalas, and their twisted roots coiled across the path.

The only sound was black water dripping from the moss that covered everything. Then I heard a big creature crashing through the understory, a hundred yards off. I looked about and seized a large stick. No use against a rhinoceros or wild elephant, but better than nothing. I waited until the noise died in the distance.

I must have taken a wrong turn, lost the path, and turned off onto an animal track. The spongy wet ground turned to mud and reeds. There was a foul smell of rot. I nearly turned back, but there was light ahead. Squidging through the gloomy swamp, I came out of the forest at a river’s edge.

The sun had come out, and its reflection on the river blinded me at first. The forest had been felled on the opposite bank; the yellow-green of the field beyond and the blue sky above were a shock after the forest gloom.

Looking around, I saw there was someone on the far side, a dozen paces upstream from me. At first I thought she was an ordinary girl, sitting cross-legged in a white skirt on the river bank. There was something odd, though. She was perfectly motionless, staring straight ahead at the river.

Many of my uncle’s tales of adventure began with the hero meeting a goddess, witch, or demoness. Or a princess who needed rescuing. Perhaps she had been frozen by a spell? Here, at last, was danger. Something was about to happen.

Uncertain, I watched her for long minutes. Not the slightest movement.

Fear of an evil spirit tempered my excitement. Better to be cautious.

I reached down slowly, letting go of my stick. I picked up an egg-sized river rock, and hurled it at her.

My shot landed short, splashing into the river. Her head turned slowly and she looked straight at me. I thought I could see a smile.

I walked along the bank to face her across the river. She adjusted her skirt. She had a little painted basket with her.

She was about my age. She did look quite ordinary. I took a deep breath, looked around for crocodiles, and waded on into the river.

My adventure had begun.

The water was shockingly cold as it washed up mid-thigh. It was snow melt from the Himalayas; but I did not know that then. Living on the Ganges plain, mountains were as magically mysterious to me as flying sorcerers or cannibal demons.

I teetered in the middle of the river, where it swirled past boulders; but did not fall. I stopped several paces from her and scowled, trying to assess the danger.

“Are you a demon?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

“What are you doing here, then?”

“Escaping my mother,” she said.

“How come?” I asked, and took two steps closer. The chill of the river ran up my back, and I was starting to shiver.

“Because we are brahmins,” she said. She scowled too, looked aside, and plucked a leaf from a weed on the ground beside her.

“Everything is about duty,” she said, twisting the leaf in her fingers as she talked. “Everything has to be pure. Everything has to please the gods. Do this, don’t do that, don’t touch this, don’t think that. Especially if you are a girl. Everything you do is wrong.”

She tore the leaf in half. She looked up. “What about you?”

“Same thing,” I said, climbing out of the river and sitting down next to her.

“You are a brahmin?” she said. She looked surprised, but pleased. “Your skin is so dark…”

“No, I’m a Buddhist,” I said. “But it’s the same thing.”

“Oh,” she said. “I thought Buddhists could do anything they liked.”

“What!?”

“My mother says no-caste trash do whatever they want. That’s why the gods made their skin dark, to show they are impure. I’d rather have skin like yours if I could come to the river any time I wanted.”

“She sounds like my foster-mother!”

“Huh,” she said, and nodded. “What happened to your real mother?”

“She died,” I said. I didn’t want to talk about it.

“I wish mine would,” she said.

“How can you say that!” I asked, surprised. I would never dare to, even if I thought it. “You can go to hell for saying things like that.”

“I will anyway,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

Even without trying, the tip of her nose wiggled when she talked. She looked like a rabbit. Her upper lip was too narrow, so whenever she closed her mouth to pronounce m her nose twitched.

I wanted to keep her talking so I could see it happen again. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Sukhi,” she said. “Short for Sukhadevi. What’s yours?”

“Surya—short for Suryapavan.”

“That’s a strange name,” she said, and laughed.

“Sukhadevi” means “Bliss Goddess”; and she was that.

Dragonflies

Sukhi stretched her legs out so her toes dangled in the river water.

“Why were you not moving when I saw you?” I asked. I wanted her nose to wiggle again.

“It’s why I come to the river,” she said. “That and the dragonflies.”

“I thought you came to the river to escape your mother,” I said.

“Yes, but I bring her with me.”

I didn’t understand.

“Before I learned the river magic, when I hid from my mother, I could always still hear her nagging at me. In my head.”

I understood. Me too; no matter where I went, there was the horror of my mother’s death, the rage at my intolerable foster-mother, and the hopeless trap of my future.

“So?” I asked.

“The river can carry her away.”

“What?”

“It’s what you saw,” she said. “Hold perfectly still. Look at the river.” She pointed. “Don’t let your eyes move. If you hear voices in your head, listen to the river instead.”

“That’s weird,” I said. But I wanted her to like me. So I turned to the river and looked.

There were reeds, in a shallow, a few paces in front of us. I had skirted them when I crossed the river. The reeds bent and swayed as the water rushed past.

A fish jumped. I could barely hear its splash above the constant gurgling sound. That reminded me she said listening would stop my foster-mother’s voice. But now I heard my foster-mother telling me that Lord Buddha hated idleness.

“It doesn’t work,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about my foster-mother until I tried to listen to the river, and that reminded me.”

She laughed. “You have to try for more than a minute! You have to wait. Half an hour, maybe. You have to stay perfectly still, and let her go. You have to let the river wash her away.”

I frowned; but she seemed to expect me to try again. I turned back again to the river.

The sun flickered on the surface, bright snaking loops of light.

The water tugged my eyes downstream. I jerked them back, and a moment later they were sailing off again.

This is stupid, I thought. If she can do this, so can I. I’m not going to look weak in front of a girl.

I gritted my teeth, determined to control my eyes. For a moment, now and then, I could get them to stop; but then I would remember that this was supposed to be magic, and I would think of my mother, or my uncle, and I would lose it. My foot hurt, and then my back, and I kept moving them about before remembering she said to sit perfectly still. How could she do that? I listened to the river, trying to put it in place of my foster-brother’s whine, and realized I was looking at the trees on the far bank instead of the water.

I was not going to give up. Even if I had to cheat. If I could just hold still, how would she know what my eyes and ears were doing?

Just hold still… And then, the river’s voice rose to a roar, the flashing sun went blinding, and I was lost. There was no me, no family, no past or future, nothing outside the pounding appalling vastness of now, nothing to hold on to—

There was Sukhi. I remembered her with a start. I tore my eyes away from the river and shook my head hard, clearing it.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “It makes me dizzy.”

She smiled.

“What about the dragonflies?” I asked.

“Just look,” she said. She pointed to one landing in the reeds.

It looked like every other dragonfly. It was red and shiny. And its head was horrifying, looked at closely. I was not going to stare at it for half an hour. Anyway, it buzzed off after a moment or two.

“What about it?” I asked.

“Dragonflies are like memories,” she said. “They zoom in from nowhere. They land and quiver. And then they take off and disappear without a trace.”

“My memories stick around for hours sometimes,” I said.

“If you watch closely, you’ll see they don’t,” she said.

“Who told you all this?” I asked.

“It’s just obvious,” she said.

I couldn’t make much sense of it. But her magic was meant to stop the hopeless anger, and I realized I didn’t need it. I had barely felt it since I’d started talking to her. Maybe it was Sukhi that was magic, not her river or dragonflies.

She reached into the basket beside her and lifted out something no longer than her little finger. She placed it flat on her palm. “Look what I made,” she said.

It was a surprising likeness of a dragonfly. I bent close to see better. She had wrapped bright red thread around a twig to form the body. A single loop of black thread marked each joint in its tail. Dried black stalks, crimped in their centers, were legs. She had knotted tiny loops of red thread to form the wings, and then dipped them in hide glue. The translucent glue had dried to look like the dragonfly’s invisible membrane.

“The eyes—” I said. They were two broken shards of red glass. They were the least believable part; and I instantly regretted mentioning them.

“I found them,” she said. “Aren’t they beautiful?”

I stared at them, glittering in her tiny hand. The sun, reflecting from the whiteness of her soft palm, lit the glass eyes from beneath. For a long moment, I was drawn into their ruby depths; and then I saw the harsh white of the sun glinting from their sharp edges. A sudden image flashed of the splinters slicing into her skin, blood welling up along the line of the tear, and I felt shocking sympathetic pain in my own palm. I pulled back with a gasp and looked into her face.

“Quite ordinary,” I had thought when I first saw her. “Funny-looking,” I thought when her nose first wiggled like a rabbit’s.

Why didn’t I notice?

She was beautiful.

She was the first beautiful girl I had ever seen. She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.

Isn’t it odd that we use the same word, “beautiful,” for a sliver of glass and for a woman’s face? No jewel, no painting, no rose or mountain or ocean has one hundredth the beauty of a pretty girl. These are not the same thing. And yet we find faults even in the face of a famous courtesan; and who ever found fault with the beauty of a rose?

Was she really as beautiful as I remember her? I can see her clearly now… But memory plays tricks. You’ll find that too, when you are older. Even if you don’t come unstuck in time, as I did.

I was staring at her funny nose, thinking about the way it quivered as she talked, pulled by her upper lip. I had stopped breathing.

I reached out and touched my finger into that groove that lies in the middle of the upper lip. It fit perfectly. The cavity was so soft. She held utterly still. My heart pounded, making my finger tremble invisibly, so I could feel the springy warmth of her lip cradling my fingertip.

For an age I stared into her eyes, without thinking, without moving.

Then I had to breathe again.

She turned away and put the dragonfly back in the basket. “I have to go,” she said. “My mother will kill me.”

“Why?”

“I am not allowed to come here. ‘There could be a man,’ she says.”

I looked around, startled, angry, to see if there was one lurking in a bush somewhere about.

She laughed. I didn’t understand why.

I wanted to protect her. And I wanted to rescue her.

“Sukhi, you have to marry me,” I said. “Then I can take you away from your mother, and we can live how we want.”

“Oh, Surya,” she said. “Don’t be silly. It is forbidden for an outcaste even to let their shadow to cross the path of a brahmin. If my father knew you touched me, he really would kill me. And you.”

“He doesn’t have to know,” I said. “We can live in my village. Come with me now.”

“He’d find us there. Anyway, how would we live? You are not old enough—”

My mind was racing; there had to be a solution. “We can go to the city, and live with my uncle,” I said.

“Would your uncle say yes to that? Why aren’t you living with him now?” she asked. She looked angry.

I didn’t know the answer, actually. I saw my uncle only once a year. Why had he abandoned me?

“I expect so. I will ask him when he next comes to visit,” I said. “But you have to ask your parents, too. There has to be a way.”

“It’s impossible, Surya,” she said. “ “A brahmin does what the gods want, not what the brahmin wants.’ And the daughter of a brahmin… the gods hate us.”

She turned to go.

“Sukhi—when will I see you again?”

She was struggling not to cry. “In a week. If I can.”

That week, everything was Sukhi. When I was weeding, a mustard flower was Sukhi smiling. My eyes saw the flower, but I saw Sukhi. My foster-mother’s old goat was Sukhi frowning. A crow’s caw was Sukhi’s hard laugh, and a thrush’s song her giggle.

I thought constantly about the feel of my finger in the groove on her lip.

I stroked my own philtrum, feeling the softness of it, how it felt to be touched. I wondered what she felt as I touched her.

Sukhi’s forgetting-magic stayed with me. Nothing meant anything except her. I didn’t think about my mother and didn’t care about my foster-family. I paid no attention and picked no fights. My younger foster-brother tried harder than ever to annoy me, and I ignored him.

“What’s wrong with him?” he asked at dinner.

“He’s in love,” said my older foster-brother.

That pulled me out of a daydream. “I’m getting married,” I announced.

“You can’t!” said my foster-mother. She looked angry; but also frightened.

“You are going to be a monk,” she said.

“Mother—” began my older foster-brother.

Her furious warning look cut him off; but it was too late.

Now at last I understood her scheme. In two or three years, I would be strong enough to work my father’s field. Then my uncle’s payments to her would stop. If I became a monk, the field would fall to her family by default. Her older son was already working it, doubling their income.

I would need that field to support Sukhi. If I could. Somehow.

“I will marry Sukhi,” I said. “I will not become a monk—and I am keeping my father’s field. You have no right.”

A week later, I was at the river bank as soon after dawn as I could reach it.

I waited all day, full of plans and dreams, imaginings joyful and awful.

It was late afternoon when she arrived. She carried the little basket.

“Sukhi! What—”

Most of her hair had been cut off. Jagged tufts stuck out at odd angles. She had black blotches under her eyes. Her arms, her legs, her whole body was yellow and gray and green, week-old bruises in patches and rough parallel lines. Here and there were long black scabs where her father’s cane had broken her skin.

“Sukhi—”

She shook her head hard, scowling. She opened the basket and took out the toy dragonfly. She held it out to me. I hesitated, then took it.

“Sukhi—”

She put her finger on my lip, and I stopped. She stood on her toes and kissed me.

Then she turned and walked away; hard, determined steps.

I knew not to follow.

You need to learn tantra

Help from my uncle was my only hope for winning the hand of my beloved Suhki—but he only wanted to talk about sorcery, spies, wars, and witches.

Each time my uncle arrived in our village, everything changed for the duration.

He immediately took command, and everyone deferred to him. Even the village headman, the brahmin; although my uncle always addressed him courteously. This seemed the natural order of things when I was a child; it was only when I lost Sukhi that I started to wonder about it.

My uncle’s dress was outlandish. He wore silk trousers, one leg blood-red and one black, belted with an emerald sash. His pointed boots, embroidered with peculiar symbols, were in the style of the northern barbarians, the horse lords. He kept a coil of matted hair mounded beneath a broad-brimmed black hat. Its high peak had staring blood-shot eyes embroidered on it. He wore hoop earrings, as big as my palm, made from the crowns of human skulls. His massive chest was bare apart from a broad leather strap that ran diagonally from shoulder to waist.

A series of pouches attached to that harness. As a child, I begged to see what was in them. He was reluctant at first, but eventually I won him over.

They were tools of a sorcerer. A two-sided drum made from a pair of babies’ skulls. Bells of various sizes and shapes, with sounds sweet and harsh. A trumpet made from a human thigh-bone. The sawed-off end of a buffalo’s horn, sealed with a metal stopper.

He would not let me open that.

“What is in it?” I asked.

“Hell,” he answered.

“Oh… What is the bone trumpet for?”

“Summoning demons.”

Two triple-edged stakes hid beneath his sash. One was wood, shaped just like the ones you thrust in the earth and tie goats to. The other was black metal, and its pommel was in the shape of a hideous grinning demon.

“What are those?” I asked.

“The wooden kila paralyzes; the metal kila kills.”

“Why does it have that face on it?” I asked. It scared me.

“Sometimes you have to use demons to slay demons.”

“Is it a good demon?” I asked.

“It is a Buddhist demon,” he said.

My uncle’s dress inspired fear and curiosity; his stature and strength demanded respect; his booming laugh and friendly words negated the fear, for some, and put them at ease; his liberality with silver made him welcome in any case. He visited once a year. He brought money for my foster-mother, and spent two days talking with me.

That year, to my huge relief, my uncle arrived just two weeks after my second meeting with Sukhi. As soon as we were alone, I started to tell him about her. But he started talking instead about “training.” He didn’t seem to understand how important Sukhi was.

I was sure that if I could get him to listen, he would pay attention—but not if he was going to launch into a long lecture. Within a minute, we were yelling at each other. My uncle was terrifying when he was angry, but I was not going to be shut up.

He pulled the wooden kila out of his sash and pointed it at me. He held it above his head with his little finger and index finger extended, the middle fingers curled around its shaft. In an instant, I could not breathe, much less argue. He kept his hand high, glowering at me, as the pain in my chest grew and I got desperate for breath. Then he lowered it and I could take a long shuddering gulp of air.

“Now,” he said, “you are going to listen to me, without interrupting. There are things it is long past time for you to know. Matters of life and death. And then when I have finished, I promise I will listen to you tell me about this girl. Understand?”

I nodded, still struggling for breath.

“You will soon be a man. It is long past time your education began.”

“What, do you want me to be a monk, too?” My foster-mother thought monks knew everything. The ones I had met, I thought fools, though.

“No!” he said. “The time of monasteries is over. They have no place in the modern world. Their money came from emperors and bankers. The last emperor died before your father’s father’s father was born. The banks were seized by warlords when the empire collapsed and the wars began. Our king gives token support to Nalanda University, but even that is is a fading relic. It was once the greatest monastery in the world. Now all that’s left is a few old men quarreling about whether the nonexistence of pots is the same or different from the nonexistence of rabbit horns.”

“What!” I said.

“The point is,” he said, “what you need to learn is the new Buddhism. You need to learn tantra.”

“Sorcery?”

My father was a tantrika—a sorcerer—but he died before I was born. My uncle was a tantrika too, but I saw him only once a year; and before this demonstration with the wooden kila, I had never seen him perform his art. I knew about sorcerers only from stories, in which they were usually evil and came to bad ends. I was a village boy; I had never seriously considered such a thing.

“Tantra is the transformation of the dark emotions—greed, hate, lust, paranoia, delusion—into power. Power, and sometimes wisdom. Power is what kings pay for nowadays, though.”

“What is wisdom?”

“Power can be used for good or ill. Often it is hard to see which is which. Wisdom tells you. They say.” He frowned.

“Now,” he continued, “you are not cut out to be a farmer, either. You will soon grow too big for village life—weeding the same damn field year after year.”

A month ago, I would have agreed fervently. Now, I wanted nothing but Sukhi. Living in the village would be paradise if she were with me.

“Your father and I left for the city when I was your age. If you marry some village girl, you are going to be stuck here forever.”

“Sukhi is not ‘some village girl’! She’s special!”

My uncle put his hand on the kila again. I shut up.

“You need to be trained. Now, I had always planned to train you myself. Each year, I thought: next year, I will begin my brother’s son’s training. And each year it has been impossible. I cannot be away from Rajagriha for long, and it would be too dangerous to bring you there.”

“Dangerous? Why?”

“I have enemies; the king has enemies; Magadha has enemies. If they knew I had family, they would use you against me.”

I thought that through for a minute. Now I understood why my uncle had left me in a remote village. And then another thought: if there was a danger of my being taken hostage, Sukhi would be in danger too. And expendable.

“Now, perhaps, with training, you are getting old enough to take care of yourself. And so, I thought, this year, it would be time to take the risk and bring you to the capital. But that is not to be.

“The greatest threat is Kannauj, the kingdom to the west. The king of Kannauj is ambitious and ruthless. And he hates Buddhists, and he hates Magadha. Magadha is still too strong for him, but he is conquering south. He has taken Gwalior, and is gathering wealth and mercenary armies. In time, he will strike east, at Magadha. But when? Would it be better for us to invade now, perhaps to take his seat by surprise while he is off campaigning? Or to build our own strength against him?

“Our king has sent me to Kannauj to find out. In secrecy. Of the spies he has sent before, none have reported back. The head of the last was returned by courier, with the king of Kannauj’s compliments, and without its tongue.”

I had been waiting impatiently for the end of the politics lecture, but this regained my attention.

“Any one spy may be detected by ordinary means; but only by magic could he uncover all of them. His chief sorcerer must be powerful. I need to find out how powerful. I must test his strength, without showing my own.

“For that encounter, I cannot disguise the fact that I am a magician; but I shall play the clown. I mean to be taken for some conjurer of cheap tricks.

“If I am exposed, I shall probably die. If my mission is successful, I will take you to Rajagriha next year, and we will begin your training.

“You know that tantra comes from the dakinis.” (I didn’t know. No one would tell me anything about either of them.) “Only the dakinis can initiate you; only they can grant you the greater powers. Yet they are witches, and to be feared.” (My mother was a dakini; I wasn’t afraid of her.) “They are not Buddhists. They have their own gods and their own dark purposes.

“When I collect you in a year—if I survive—I will take you to them. You will live with them for a time. The dakinis here in Magadha are not as dangerous as those of the East. Some speak our language. But still you must learn their secret signs, and approach them in the right way.

“If you do not see me in a year, you will be on your own. I wish I had been able to introduce you to the dakinis, or at least to teach you the hand-signs. But you were too young, and now there is no time.

“Now, about this girl. You understand that if you marry, training with dakinis would be extremely difficult. I know that you think you are hot as hell for her now, but that won’t last. What’s important in the long run is your training.”

I didn’t understand. And I didn’t care. I would love Sukhi forever, and nothing else mattered.

Love and death

“Marrying a village girl is out of the question,” my uncle said. “What matters now is your training with the dakinis.”

Two days later, my uncle had arranged my marriage to Sukhi.

He returned from her village in good humor. I had persuaded him to negotiate the match only by shouting, wailing, sobbing, cajoling, begging, promising, and threatening to kill myself. (I think I meant the last.)

So when he came back grinning, I suspected he was glad to have failed—or to have only pretended to make the attempt.

He was, instead, pleased with himself to have accomplished the impossible: the betrothal of a brahmin’s daughter to an outcaste Buddhist. The first day, he had visited the village’s astrologer, who was also its chief religious authority. The two passed several pleasant hours talking shop about planetary exaltations and lunar mansions. At some point, my uncle let slip that his royal employment was rather remarkably remunerative; and finally brought the conversation circuitously round to his true agenda.

“It is often surprising,” my uncle told me, “how agreeable the gods may be to exceptions in sacred law, when gold is brought into proximity with a priest. A fact usually better not mentioned.”

Armed with this divine dispensation, he spent the second morning flattering Sukhi’s father. After lunch, my uncle waived dowry, and in fact offered a considerable bride-price; which, after a great show of reluctance, Sukhi’s father accepted.

“I saw the girl,” my uncle said. “Are you quite sure about her? She’s kind of cute, but awfully funny-looking. It’s not like you’ve seen real beauties. If you come to the city—”

At any other time, I would have been furious; but I was so giddy with happiness that all I could manage was “She’s not funny-looking. And I love her!”

There was a hitch. The astrologer had consulted his star charts and determined that the first auspicious date for such a match was slightly more than a year away.

During the year, I was to be permitted one visit with Sukhi each month. They were to be strictly chaperoned, and the deal was off if my behavior was not impeccable.

This was ghastly; but I could wait a year. Just.

“I have failed you,” my uncle said. “I would have raised you as my own son, if I could. I wish things were different. But I have done what I can. I hope to live to see you again. Otherwise… do not forget what your father was, and your mother.”

It was only after he left that I began to suspect my uncle had given the date to the astrologer. The stars, like the gods, may be swayed by gold. My uncle, I supposed, hoped that I would lose interest in Sukhi during that year; and he would return before the wedding to try again to talk me out of it. Fat chance.

Isn’t it strange how tiny choices can have unimaginable consequences? If my uncle had arranged the wedding for a few weeks earlier, I would not be talking to you now. I might be married to Sukhi still. I used to curse him for that… I might now be a farmer in the village I was born in. I might have nothing more to teach you about life and death than any other farmer in any other village.

But if I had married Sukhi, there might be no one to teach you about life and death. There might be no Nalanda, no Magadha, no India, no Persia, no China. There might be no you and no me. There might be no life on earth; only death.

Some of my meetings with Sukhi were chaperoned by her mother; some by her older sister. The ones with her mother were awful. Her sister didn’t care what we said to each other, so long as I was kept at a proper distance, and there was no possibility that my contaminating outcaste shadow would fall across one of theirs.

Her mother lectured me about morality and the duties of a husband. Neither Sukhi nor I could say a word. All we could do was exchange agonized longing glances—and not even many of them, since her mother demanded my constant attention. I forced down my rebellion, lest she use it as an excuse to break the engagement.

When we could, Sukhi and I talked about our future together. The uncomfortable fact was that we had no way to live if my uncle did not return. I was not yet strong enough to drive a plow, and as the daughter of a brahmin Sukhi had no useful skills. Yet somehow, we would find a way. So long as we could be together, we would overcome any difficulty.

So instead, I told her fantastic stories about what I would do once we were married. I did not want to be a farmer, or a monk, or a sorcerer. I wanted to be a hero, like in the stories my uncle told when I was younger.

In stories, the hero sets out alone; he rescues the princess; and after they are married, she stays home, while he ventures on new quests. I had rescued my princess—with some help from my uncle—but Sukhi objected to the “staying home” part. So in our stories, she came with me. She helped tell the tales, and in her versions, she often outwitted the wicked witches or ogres that threatened us.

It was the day of my last chaperoned visit before our marriage. No sign of my uncle.

He had paid the bride-price in advance, so the wedding could go on without him. I worried, though, that if he didn’t show up, Sukhi’s parents—and her whole village—might find an excuse to forbid the wedding after all. After his demonstration with the wooden kila, I had no doubt that my uncle could enforce the deal. On the other hand, I also worried that he would appear at the last moment and break the engagement himself. Perhaps he had only arranged it in order to keep me from killing myself during the year he was away in Kannauj, spying.

Sukhi’s village was united in hostility to me. Everyone there was twice-born and proud of it. On each visit, I had to thread a gantlet of hateful glares, making sure I did not come too close to any of the holy ones and contaminate their purity.

Not this time. There was none of the usual morning village bustle. All the houses were shut. Was this the sign that the whole village would refuse the marriage? Would they keep Sukhi from me? I started to run toward her house.

As I ran, I heard cries and groans, but saw no one.

I banged on the door to Sukhi’s house.

Nothing. Except an awful, sour smell.

I banged again.

Sukhi’s sister opened the door. Her face was thin and pale.

“You can’t see her,” she said.

I forced my way past her. I no longer cared what her parents would say about my shoulder brushing her arm holding the door.

“You will wish you hadn’t!” she said.

I had never been in the house; Sukhi and I were permitted to meet only outside. All the shutters were drawn, and my eyes were slow to adjust to the darkness. No one was there—but I heard a bubbling cough from a back room. Again I had to push past Sukhi’s sister to open its door. Her skin was burning hot.

The bedroom was even darker, and it was hard to see clearly. The sick stink was overwhelming. There was movement from one corner. It was someone—Sukhi?—on a cot. Thrashing.

I took a step closer. She was tied to the bed, wrists and ankles, on her back, naked. Panting, exhausted. I had never seen a girl naked before; I couldn’t help looking.

The horrible acrid stench was vomit and diarrhea, which spilled from the cot onto the floor. Both were black, and she was covered in black blood.

“Surya?” she said, in a hoarse rasp, gasping for breath. Her face turned to the door. “Surya, is that you?”

I stared in horror, speechless.

“She can’t see you,” her sister said. “Her eyes turned flame-red. Then they exploded.”

Sukhi’s eye sockets were black empty pits, except for tattered threads of tissue and blood.

“Mother and Father died right after that happened,” her sister said. “Last night. We were caring for them.”

Sukhi’s body convulsed, and with a tearing shriek she coughed up a gelatinous dark-red glob. It fell to the floor, quivering. It was part of a lung, I think.

“Surya, help me!” she cried. “Please, help me!”

She caught some breath, made a violent effort, and tore one hand free.

She reached it out to me.

“Surya!”

I turned and ran.

I threw her sister aside from the door. I stumbled through the front room, out of the house, and ran out of the village. I did not stop running until the searing pain in my lungs would let me run no more.

Then I fell to the ground, and shook, and howled.

The rat

“Demons,” said my younger foster-brother.

That was the general opinion, when news reached our village that everyone in Sukhi’s village had died in a night and a day, in explosions of blood.

My foster-mother had more to say, though.

“A just punishment. It was their karma, naturally. Engaging the daughter of a brahmin to the son of a dakini went against every point of Dharma. The brahmins’ Dharma is not the same as Lord Buddha’s, but everyone knows mixing the pure and impure is an abomination. That whole village was guilty. They all stood by and allowed it, seduced by that sorcerer uncle of yours.

“It was a judgement from Yama, Lord of Death; he sent his minions to take them to hell.”

Her life tottered on a knife edge. I am still surprised I did not murder her in that instant.

I left—for good, I thought. Going on living with her was out of the question.

I went to the ruins of the one-room house my father had built, by his field, just outside the village. It was where I was born; where my mother was killed.

My father had built it with upright posts an arm’s length apart; they held up the roof. He wove flexible branches between them as laths, and plastered the chinks with mud.

Most of the mud was gone, washed away by the rains of six monsoons since my mother died. The thatch was gone from the roof. The laths were bleached, gray and brittle, many broken off, or missing.

It was a skeleton. But most of the uprights were firm. It would be adequate shelter for the dry season, at least. Perhaps I could get it waterproof before the monsoon.

I sat on the dirt floor, my back to a wall, and stared through the holes in the roof.

The streaming rage was more than my body could contain. The heat of it forced its way out of my chest and spilled across the floor in heaving waves. It crashed against the walls and fountained up through the roof. It was choking, wrenching. My breath came in shuddering gasps or not at all.

My eyes saw the ragged walls and roof-beams; but I saw flames. A roaring conflagration exploded from my head and reduced the hut to ash. It rolled out across the village, destroying everything and roasting everyone. It expanded to cover the entire world in all-consuming, purifying fire. The universe was burned to cinders, leaving only lifeless gray heaps of slag.

In time my breathing evened out. Nothing left to destroy. The sky was still blue; the late-afternoon air was cool. The walls of the hut were intact.

In the intensity of my rage there had been no room for thought; but now my mind began to fit together the jagged shards of my life.

I hated my foster-mother; but killing her wouldn’t bring back Sukhi.

I hated the men who killed my father, and the ones who murdered my mother in this very hut; but I had no idea who they were, or where. Killing them wouldn’t bring back my parents either.

I hated myself for abandoning Sukhi as she died. But killing myself was just the fast route to the Cold Hell.

Where was Sukhi now? She said she was sure to go to hell. I hated to think that. Perhaps if I went to hell, too, I could find her there?

Everyone I had ever loved was dead. Except perhaps my uncle. I was not sure I loved my uncle; and I did not know for sure whether he was dead. Anyway, he was no help now.

Although… People say tantrikas can raise the dead. Evil sorcerers do it in stories, sometimes.

Could a sorcerer bring Sukhi back?

Could my uncle? He would know, at least.

Why did Sukhi have to die?

Karma, people say. When your good karma from previous lives is used up, you die. Then Yama judges you according to the karma of this life.

Would Yama really send Sukhi to hell for disobeying her mother? Sweet Sukhi, who loved dragonflies, who loved me, who told such clever stories, who combined everything good in the world in herself?

I began to cry.

What purpose is there in living, if we are only to lose everything to death?

“Justice,” my foster-mother said. There is no justice in hell, if Sukhi went there. If my mother was sent there.

I hated Yama most of all.

The Dharma of Lord Buddha, the Dharma of the brahmins, the Dharma of my foster-mother—they were all just the Dharma of Yama, the Dharma of karma, the Dharma of death. Dharma had no purpose except to terrorize everyone and force them into submission. Dharma existed only to justify Yama’s scheme to enslave and torture the entire world.

If Dharma was justice, if Dharma was virtue, I was on the other side. I would choose evil. If I was destined for hell, I might as well revel in it.

There was a sour smell in the hut. In a corner I found the corpse of a dead rat, partly mummified in the dry heat of the season, bits of skin eaten away by beetles.

Everyone knows how to do black magic. You don’t need to be taught. The principles are obvious. When you apprentice to a sorcerer, you learn to control the forces; but they are always available to all.

After my mother died, I had hidden the kartika she gave me in a tree beside the field that had been my father’s. It was all I had as a keepsake of her. When I was a child, I climbed the tree to visit it sometimes, in evening, when the light was fading, and I could slip away from my foster-mother’s house. There was strange writing cut in the blade. All letters were foreign to me then; I did not learn to read until long after the Quest. But these did not look like any I had seen.

I went again, at twilight, and retrieved it from the tree.

I put the mummified rat on the floor in the center of the hut. I smeared it with semen to make it mine.

I poured into it all my rage, the black hatred, the searing loss; self-loathing, horror, and my implacable lust for vengeance.

I cut the tip of my finger with the kartika. The twisting letters on it shimmered and shifted in the half-light.

I let a drop of blood fall into the rat’s mouth, to give it life.

Its spine jerked.

I let another drop of blood fall.

The rat spasmed. Its legs kicked. It shook itself and rolled upright.

It staggered round and turned to face me. Its eyes glinted red in the deepening twilight.

The dead rat stood up on its hind legs, like a man. I had been kneeling bent over it; I straightened up, unconsciously mimicking its motion.

It shuddered, and pulled itself an inch taller. My exultation began to turn to apprehension.

It grew in spurts. With each spurt, its spine lengthened, and the rat shook, as if in pain; but its staring red eyes never left mine.

It was turning into a strange standing snake-shape, much longer and thinner than a rat, holes in its flesh here and there where the beetles had eaten at it. Its hind legs thickened, but stayed disproportionately short; stocky pillars that barely lifted its hindquarters above the ground.

Its forelegs elongated into arms, stick-thin, with muscles like whips. It grew hands in the shape of a man’s, but with terrible claws.

I leaped to standing and took a step back.

“No! I didn’t mean it!” I shouted. “Stop! No! I command you! Go back to death!”

It glared at me with its glowing red eyes. The spasms came a few seconds apart, and with each one it grew taller, and its claws longer.

The door to the hut blew open and slammed against the wall. Outside, there was the orange light of a furnace. Intense heat spilled into the room.

I squinted into the glare. Two paces outside the door, a naked woman was chained to an iron post. Flames licked her legs, her buttocks, up her back. I could hear her screams over the thunder of the firestorm. Her hair caught fire, and then burned up all together at once with a “foomp” sound.

Behind her stood a demon with the head of a crocodile. He watched as her skin cracked and blackened. He stepped forward. With a curved knife as long as his forearm, he sliced a long strip of flesh off one side of her back, and then the other. The woman flailed in agony, pulling at the chains, trying to twist away from the demon. Her thrashing brought her into contact with the post, which was beginning to glow red; she pulled away from it with a jerk and a shriek louder than ever.

Without thinking, I cried out with her.

The crocodile demon looked up in surprise and gazed directly at me. “Surya!” he bellowed, and beckoned to me.

“Suryapavan! Come!”

The woman slumped against the red-hot iron pole. I could hear the sizzle of fat. She stopped moving.

“Surya!” called the demon again, and began to stride toward me.

The rat bared its fangs and snarled like a hyaena. It was taller than a man now, impossibly thin, with arms that dangled almost to the floor.

I stepped back as it advanced. I had created it, raised it from the dead; I must be able to control it.

“Go back!” I yelled. I put everything I had into willing it dead, into undoing what I had done.

Still it came, waddling on its too-short legs. It reached for me with spider-like arms.

I backed hard into the wall. The sharp end of a broken upright, leaning crazily, gouged my back.

I reached behind and wrenched it out of the wall. I took it with both hands, and thrust the sharp end into the center of the rat-thing.

The monster howled. It grabbed my head with both clawed hands and pulled itself forward, working my makeshift spear through its body, trying to reach my face with its fangs. Claws raked the back of my neck.

I could not break its grip; I needed both hands to hold the stake. They were slick with sweat from the burning heat in the room.

Behind, the crocodile demon was at the door.

I twisted the stake up and down, side to side, trying to shake off the rat. Black blood poured from the widening hole in its chest. It lunged and snapped at my face.

That was my creation’s final effort. I dodged the fangs, and it collapsed, falling twitching to the floor.

The door slammed shut. The blast-furnace roar died.

It was totally dark. The crocodile demon was gone.

The Quest of Life and Death

After I had seen hell, I would do anything at all to avoid it.

The first thing was to forget. It was my rage that opened the door to hell, and it was my memories that brought the rage.

I would forget Sukhi, and my mother, and my uncle. Immediately and forever.

I would forget my life. I would forget what I had done, and had not done, as Sukhi died.

And most of all, I would forget what I had done in the empty skeleton of my father’s house.

I would pray to Buddha whenever the memories came. I would pray to him to kill the memories, to drive away the past, to protect me from rage—and so from hell.

And so I returned to my foster-mother. I resolved to be the perfect Buddhist. If that meant doing whatever she said—so be it.

I had had no concept of how much work could be found on a farm, and in a farm house. Found or created. She had me working from the moment I woke until the moment I collapsed at night.

I was glad. The more work I had, the less time there was to remember. The less sleep I got, the less I could think.

Thinking was dangerous. When thoughts came, I pushed them away. Buddha. Instead, Buddha.

My younger foster-brother discovered he could taunt and torture me now without retaliation.

I. Would. Not. Be. Angry. Far better my foster-brother’s torture than what I had seen in hell.

I slept in the goat-shed. After I had woken up screaming too many times, my foster-mother sent there to make a loft above the pens.

Months passed.

When there was nothing to do but think, I thought about the Five Buddhist Precepts.

Some are easy. Not to steal, not to drink. I could simply choose not to do those things.

To avoid “sexual misconduct”—what is that? But that is easy too. No sex, no sexual misconduct.

(Often, at night, I saw again Sukhi’s naked body. Lying in her dark room, smeared with blood, struggling against her bonds. And then I thought, urgently, about Buddha, to keep memories away.)

Avoiding “false speech” seems easy. But there is more to the Fourth Precept than just lying. There is “idle chatter” and “divisive speech” and “abusive speech,” and who knows what might count for those? Safest to say nothing to anyone, except to answer my foster mother’s questions about work.

The hard one is “to abstain from taking life.” You can’t work a farm without killing bugs and worms. I tried; desperately, because killing is the sin that sends you to the Hot Hells. But it’s impossible.

So, constantly, I was creating new bad karma, on top of all the old bad karma I had from before.

Was there any way out?

Just how good do you have to be to escape hell?

Was there any way I could do extra good to burn off some of the mountains of bad karma I had piled up?

I needed to know more. I set aside my “say nothing to anyone” precaution. When I could, I asked anyone who might know anything.

Some thought bugs don’t count. Some thought actions you can’t help, don’t count. Some thought farmers all go to hell. Most thought everyone goes to hell, except maybe monks.

Nearly all the grown-ups drank millet-beer. I knew that. It wasn’t a huge secret who snuck into the forest with whose wife, either. And if idle chatter sends you to hell, well…

But no one seemed actually worried. I couldn’t understand it. Everyone said they believed in the Law of Karma, but no one acted like they did.

All I could figure was, they believed in hell, but I knew. Shouldn’t I tell them? Could I bring people around to the true Way of Buddha, if they knew what I knew?

But then, to explain how I knew, I would have to say what I had done… And my questions were already making people uneasy. They didn’t like being reminded about karma and the lower realms of rebirth.

“You have to get on with life,” they said. There’s no way for ordinary people to avoid bad karma, so it’s better not to think about it.

I returned to silence, and toil, and trying not to think about it.

I thought about becoming a monk. If people give you your food, then they get the bad karma of producing it, not you. That part made sense.

And to get rid of their past karma, monks do holy stuff. Could I do the holy stuff without being a monk? But no one knew what it was. Or cared.

The fact was, no monks had been seen since before Sukhi and I were engaged. Still, there must be some somewhere. I could go searching for them.

But then, my uncle had said that time of monks had passed. “You need to learn Tantra,” he said. “The new Buddhism.”

His “new Buddhism” seemed to be about demons, and I never wanted to see a demon again. I didn’t trust him. It was his sorcery that had put the black magic in my mind. The rat was his fault.

I didn’t want to admit it, but I had been waiting for him. It was a year, now, since Sukhi and I would have been married; and he said he would be there if he could. Probably he was dead. But he knew things. No one in the village could tell me why good people went to hell, or what to do before death to escape it. I might not believe my uncle’s answers, but I wanted to hear them, at least.

My grim year of trying, every way I could, to follow the Way of Lord Buddha: it was a failure. Every day I just added to my bad karma.

I didn’t want to be a monk. I didn’t want to be a sorcerer. What did I want?

I let myself remember the past, just a little. Of course, I wanted Sukhi. And… I knew, for sure, that raising the dead was possible. But that was a thought I would not think.

Instead, I remembered the stories I had told her. I had wanted to be a hero, on a Quest, like in the stories my uncle told me when I was younger.

That is what I wanted. I wanted to be a Buddhist hero. Could there be such a thing?

Could I be such a thing? To be a hero, you should have a sword, and a steed. But I didn’t, and how would I get them? And what would I do with them if I did?

That stopped me; until I realized that what saves the hero in the stories is not his sword, or his magic, but his heroism. I could be heroic, I thought—if I knew where to start. There was no room for heroism in my village. But in the stories, the hero sets off, and soon comes to a Test. If he is brave and true, he passes the Test, and receives magical aid. I could be brave and true, I thought.

But then, the heroes in stories were born special. The hero is a prince, or the seventh son of a seventh son, or some such. There should be a prophesy.

I wasn’t special. Although—my father was a hero. In my opinion, anyway. And my mother wasn’t exactly special, but she was no ordinary village woman. She was a dakini. My uncle’s parting words, I remembered now, were “Do not forget what your father was, and your mother.”

Perhaps I did have a special mission—a remarkable destiny.

I needed answers. The people in my village, all headed to hell, needed answers. I would set out to find answers, for the benefit of all sentient beings.

It would be—The Quest Of The Answer To Life And Death.

I took my mother’s kartika-charm, again, from the tree I’d kept it in. I was a little afraid of it, now. But it was also the only possession I had, aside from the clothes I wore. And I was going to find my mother’s people, the dakinis. My uncle had said they knew things; that I should go to them for my education.

I knotted the broken chain and slipped it around my neck, under my shirt. And I set off.

For great justice!

I go to the dakinis

I left on the afternoon before the night of the empty moon. In the stories, dakinis met then, to perform their dark magic.

It was the same path I had taken many times to visit Sukhi, except for the last mile or two. A left turn at a forest junction rather than the right.

I could smell the charnel ground well before I reached it. The mixed stench of the slaughter-pit, the latrine, and the reek of decay.

I approached carefully. There were worse things than dakinis, perhaps, that lived in charnel grounds—ghosts, demons, wild animals, desperate outlaws—all preying on the dead, but ready to attack the living as well.

Besides, it had gotten completely dark.

The narrow forest path opened into a clearing. I stopped at the edge, keeping to the shadow. By starlight, I could pick out blacker shapes scattered on the dark ground, and pale ones. Human bodies; parts of bodies; bones.

A pelvis, with most of the meat still on it, lay three steps ahead of me. The leg bones, gnawed clean, were attached, but splayed at impossible angles. A mound that must have been half a dozen bodies piled together lay beyond. To the right, mainly skeletons. To the left, dark chunks—parts of newer bodies. I could not see clearly across the open space.

I listened. There was thudding in my ears—my heart—and I was breathing too fast. I could hear nothing else, apart from wind in the trees.

Then the call of an owl, close by; and another. I froze, waiting. There was a strange growl, directly behind me. I whirled to face the danger—and could see nothing in blackness.

The point of a knife bit my neck. I had heard nothing—but a strong arm twisted my right arm behind me painfully.

“Move and you die,” said a woman’s voice, by my ear.

I nodded, trying to hold my neck away from the blade.

“Bind him,” she said.

There was a girlish giggle, also from behind me. Someone—the girl?—held my other wrist. The knife stayed poised at my throat as she tied my hands. The first woman's breasts brushed my back and arms as she moved to let the other one finish the work. Then she pulled my arms back hard, to test the knot.

While I was off-balance, mewling in fear and pain, she kicked my feet together. The girl tied my ankles.

“Kneel,” said the first woman, and I did. I had still seen nothing—my face was to the sky as I tried to avoid impaling myself on the knife-point. Someone tied my wrists to my ankles.

Apparently satisfied that I was helpless, the women came from behind to face me.

There were three. All were as black as my mother, but their naked bodies were smeared with ash. There was dark liquid around their mouths and spattered on their chests. Blood.

One was the age my mother would have been, if she had lived, but taller than me; and her shoulders and arms were bigger than many grown men’s. She had held the knife to my neck and caught my arm. It was a kartika, a butcher’s knife; like my mother’s charm, but full-sized.

Another was my age, and seemed to be enjoying herself immensely. The last was old and thin and bent—but still tall. She stood a pace or two back, in shadow.

“Who are you?” asked the strong one.

“My name is Suryapavan. Surya.” The young one snickered.

“Why have you come here?”

“My uncle sent me.”

“Why?”

“He said I needed an education.” The young one laughed full-out.

“You have come here for karma mudra.” The strong woman was scowling.

“No, he said when I was a man I should go to the dakinis.” I had no idea what “karmamudra” was supposed to be. “You are supposed to teach me something. He said it is better than being a monk. Also, I am on a Quest—”

“You have come for karma mudra. Do you know the signs?”

“—for the benefit of all sentient beings. What signs?”

The girl dropped to her knees just beside me. She grinned and drew her middle finger slowly along one eyebrow. I looked blank. She pulled the opposite earlobe and waited. Apparently this meant something, and she expected a response.

“What, am I supposed to pull my earlobe too? You have to untie me for that!” Crafty, I thought.

She pouted and stood.

“He does not know the recognition-mudras,” said the old one, from the shadow. “He is not a member of the Clan. He has interrupted the rites of the Sky-Goers, following his lust. The penalty is death.”

“Death!?” I said. This was moving too quickly.

The strong woman looked unhappy. “That is how the chant goes,” she said. “He seems to just be an idiot, though. And who may know that he has come to us? Killing idiots will lead to trouble.”

“Death is our ancient law,” said the ancient one. Her voice seemed to come from far away. “We are the Empty Ones. We are the Night-Eagles. The Executioners. He must die.”

“Can’t we teach him a little bit, first?” asked the young one. “He is so—”

“He dies now, little one. You may have his head. It will be your first Great Liberation. Take the kartika.”

The other two looked at each other, and back to the old one. The strong woman shook her head slowly, and held out the kartika to the young one. The girl looked over at me, and then took the kartika, moving like someone in a dream.

She knelt beside me again. I tried to think of what I should say—whether to beg, or reason with them, or threaten them somehow. It seemed unreal. Time was going too fast and too slowly at once. I was shaking but I could not find words.

She bit her lip. I could see tears.

She pulled my shirt open to bare my whole neck.

I looked down as my mother’s charm was exposed. The strange letters on it shone and writhed in the starlight.

“Ooooh!” the girl said, and jumped to her feet.

I fall into the sky

The dakini girl took the knife, and pulled my shirt open to bare my neck. I looked down as my mother’s kartika-charm was exposed. The strange letters on it writhed in the starlight. “Ooooh!” she said, and jumped to her feet.

The middle dakini stepped forward to look. “Where did you get this?” she demanded.

“It was my mother’s—she was a dakini.”

“You are lying. No man can be the son of a dakini. You took it. Whose was it? Did you kill her?” She reached for her own kartika-knife.

“I’m telling the truth! ‘Keep it secret, keep it safe,’ she said. When she died.”

The old dakini came out of the deep shadow. She glanced at the kartika-charm and then searched my face.

“He speaks truly,” she said.

“Can we keep him?” asked the young one.

“He is not of the Clan,” said the ancient one. “And yet he is the son of a dakini… He will take a strange path.

“Your father is not of our people,” she said to me. “What sort of man is he?”

“He was a Tantrika. He is dead.”

“Ah. And what… is your quest?”

“It is the Quest of the Meaning of Life and Death.”

“Now I see… You will go to the vetali.”

“What is the vetali?”

“She is a beautiful woman,” said the middle-aged dakini. She looked troubled. “But—”

“She will teach you karmamudra!” said the young one.

“I don’t want to learn that,” I said. “I seek the Answer to Life and Death.”

“That is what you will learn,” said the old one. “Now… the Essence, girl.” She handed the young dakini a small container.

To me, she said: “It shows things that were, and things that are, things that yet may be.”

The girl took the vial, and the kartika from the third dakini. She stepped forward, a little awkwardly, legs wide, so she straddled my legs.

I was still kneeling, my hands tied behind my back.

She was open, a tongue’s length in front of my face. As she sank to her knees, her nipples slid down my bared chest. She saw me looking, and wriggled, and giggled.

I swallowed hard, and strained against my bonds, involuntarily.

The weight of her thighs, as she knelt straddling my legs, was just below my hips. She reached down and squeezed me through my trousers, just by her own hips.

I was painfully hard already, and her touch was not gentle. I cried out.

“Stop torturing him!” said the old one. “Get on with it.”

The girl had a ferocious grin. She opened the silver top of the bone vial. She stuck her right index finger in and scooped out a glob of pink goo.

It quivered on her fingertip, and glistened in the starlight. It seemed even to shine with its own faint light.

Putting the vessel aside, she touched a finger of her left hand to my lips. “Open,” she said.

I eyed the goo warily, but did as she said.

She slipped the finger of her right hand inside my mouth and twisted it to wipe the goop across my tongue. At the same moment she pulled her finger out, she brought the point of the kartika up under my chin with her left hand. With her right, she pushed my head back as far as it could go.

The stuff writhed on my tongue. It was sticky and slippery and it moved like a bloated leech.

I gagged. I wanted to spit it out, but the point of the kartika kept my teeth firmly clenched—if I did not want to impale myself on it. I swallowed, trying to get it down.

It caught in my throat and wriggled there. I swallowed again and again. My mouth was dry except for the slime it had left.

The girl put the kartika aside.

My eyes were streaming and I felt dizzy.

As I lowered my head, I saw the ancient dakini. Now she had the head of a black eagle.

That didn’t seem odd.

I blinked the wet away. Through tears, I saw the girl whose body was pressed against mine.

Her skin was a delicate shell of transparent crystal. Inside was black velvet sky. Her body—awesome vast emptiness—was filled with stars. A scattering of motes of light. Slowly they circled within her.

Everyone’s body is always like that, I thought. I looked down to check. My chest was a view into infinity. How strange I never noticed before, I thought.

The letters on the kartika-charm, resting at my solar plexus, blazed: too bright to look at.

It occurred to me that my eyes were the windows I looked out of. I widened my gaze, pulling back away from my eyes, and found that I could see the inside of my skull. As I hung suspended in the empty space within, the bone was brilliant white, and I faced two round openings: my eye sockets.

Flying out through them, I saw the face of the dakini-girl. Her smile had softened. Her eyes were wide and shining.

They had no white, now. She was entirely open into the cosmos. Stars wheeled behind her twin portals.

I fell into her sky.

Visions in the charnel ground

I hurtled, ever-faster, toward the stars. Screaming, tumbling, twisting, kicking: desperate to find something to hold onto.

Cold night air howled past, tearing at my face.

Then my wings caught the wind.

One caught first, and the wind nearly tore it from my shoulder.

I screamed, the long ragged shriek of an eagle:

Khheeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrr!

Then the other wing met the air, and flipped me upright; and I remembered how to fly.

Clumsy at first, then confident, I spiraled up. Far below, even on this moonless night, my eagle eyes could pick out single leaves in the forest canopy. Starlight glinted on the river; and now I was high enough to see Suhki’s village: a ghost town, emptied by plague.

I flew south, and passed over my own village. How small it looked, toy houses, strips of fields in a clearing. There was nothing there for me now. Still, I circled over it, picking out the hut my father had built; where I had been born; where my mother was murdered. Where I had—

Better not to think of that. I turned away, and flew on south.

Leaving my useless former life behind, I exulted in flight, in the power of my wings, in the slipping buoying force of the air, in the unrolling landscape below. I passed over the Ganges at sunrise, and marveled at its breadth, at the water reflecting the peach and gold of the dawning sky.

Warmed by the sun, I few ever faster, and higher. Mountains rushed beneath me, and a desert plain.

I could find no limit to my speed. Day turned to night, and then night to day, passing it seemed in minutes. Still speedier I went, dizzy, until night and day flashed by, and then flickered faster than eagle eyes could see.

A couple—a man and a woman—sat on the bank, looking out over a lake.

The man wore a loose white robe. But it was the woman’s that caught my eye, though neither garment looked like any I had seen, nor heard of in stories.

Her dress was silk, the blue-black of the center of the sky as night falls. Two silver bats clasped shoulder straps, gathering folds of cloth that held her breasts high. A twisted coil of many silver and blue-black ribbons belted the dress just below them. The silk fell in pleats to her knees. Beneath, I could see that a second belt rode just above her hips. That held in place an underskirt of the same fabric, which reached to her ankles. The wide border of each skirt was embroidered in silver thread, spangled with countless tiny stars.

Her arms were bare; around her wrists and above her elbows she wore silver bands in the shape of snakes. At her neck was a choker, silver again, ornamented with a row of grinning skulls. Her long hair fell free.

She rose, and the man stood also. She danced: slow, sinuous, sensual. But the man was looking again at the lake; and he began to chant. I could not understand the language he spoke. Facing the water, he made strange gestures.

The surface of the lake boiled, and burst.

An enormous black snake rose from it. Water sheeted off its scales. Its body was thicker than a man’s middle. It wore a crown of gold, set with black jewels. Though its head rose more than man-height above the surface, most of its length must have been coiled deep below.

The man, unsurprised, finished his chant and bowed low. The woman also ended her dance—but did not bow.

The snake spoke.

The man sat and wrote rapidly on dried palm-leaf, nodding as the snake’s deep voice finished each cadence.

Again I understood nothing.

The woman sat on the bank, her arms clasped around her knees. She watched the snake speak, and grinned like a lunatic.

I was in a dark circular pit, a shaft, not much wider than I could reach on either side. The walls were lined in stone. A dim light descended from far above. I hovered—I could not say how—twice a man’s height above the bottom.

A man sat there on the dirt; a man in chains. It was my uncle.

He looked up and saw me and seemed surprised. He spoke to me—or so it seemed; his lips moved, but I could hear nothing.

“Uncle?” I asked, and he spoke again, but there was no sound in my ears.

There was a crackling sound, like walking on dry leaves, and then I could hear him: “Surya! Can you hear me?” His voice sounded as if coming from the bottom of a well, with a booming echo.

“Uncle!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

Crackling again, and whatever he said was lost.

“Surya! Don’t try to say anything! Just raise your hand when you can hear me!”

“But uncle!” I began.

“Shut up!” he yelled. “Damn these astral connections to hell! They never work right. Can you hear me? Raise your hand!”

I did as he said.

“Good! Now listen carefully. It’s extremely important that you take a message to—”

And then cracking again. I waved my hand frantically, but there was only silence as he talked, then frowned, and glared, and cursed violently and noiselessly.

Half of him slid sidewise. The rest rippled like a reflection on a wind-blown puddle.

Abruptly, all motion ceased. His wavy forearm and upraised fist were as a statue.

Then there was a popping sound, and total darkness.

I leaned on the balustrade of a balcony, far above a twilit plain. The balustrade was of red brick. Turning, I saw that I stood on a red brick tower, among a forest of red brick towers.

There were men around me: a dozen of them, dressed as monks. Grim-faced, they too were looking across the plain.

Turning back to look out, I saw movement. In the murk, in the distance, a great dark mass of men, marching toward us.

Silently we waited.

Black shapes drew nearer.

There was the stench of a slaughter-pit, a reek of decay.

The charnel-ground! I thought.

Wait! I am dreaming… the dakinis… it’s the smell of the charnel-ground that has put me in a nightmare.

I watched the approach with rising terror.

I have to wake up! I thought. But I could not.

Close below now, they walked awkwardly, shambling with stiff legs. They carried axes, maces, black swords. Even in the gloom I could see the white of bone, some with legs or arms stripped of flesh, some further gone, ribcage or skull fully exposed.

The army stretched back as far as I could see. Untold myriads of the dead.

I walked up a valley. The sky was blue, the grass was green.

Beside me was the River of the Black Mother—a clear-flowing stream. High mountains rose on either side, white-capped.

The village I had been born in—the village I had left behind, setting forth on the Quest of the Riddle of Life and Death—lay on the Ganges plain. Before my eagle flight, which seemed now from another life, I had never seen a hill or a valley, far less the Himalayas.

This valley was dotted with fruit trees. Sapphire and ruby-red birds sang from the branches and played in the air.

I came to a place where an elegant, arched bridge crossed the river. Beyond, the paved path led up the flowered side of the valley.

It brought me then to a palace, with roofs of gold. Makaras sprouted from the gables.

I mounted a flight of steps, and enormous doors swung silently open. Inside, two rows of pillars, carved to look like banyans, supported a deep-blue star-spangled ceiling, far above.

I walked down the center of the hall, and saw that at the end there was a dais; and on the dais a throne.

On the throne there was a girl, about my age. As I approached, she stood and stepped down to greet me, smiling all over.

“This is the vetali,” I thought.

The cave-ghoul

My eyes opened. It was day. I was lying in the charnel ground, with a ferocious headache.

There was a ribcage an arm’s length from my nose.

The bonds that tied my limbs were gone. I sat up.

The clearing was less frightening in daylight, but more alien. The scattered body parts seemed incomprehensible, meaningless. It was quiet apart from the buzzing of flies.

My mother’s kartika-charm was gone. The dakinis must have taken it.

It took me weeks to reach the River of the Black Mother. I walked north. I was sure of the way, although I had never been far from my village.

I traded field work for food. There was not much of that. Tax collectors took most of it. People were fearful. Distant wars were growing less distant. So went the rumors, along with grim stories of sorcery, disease and death.

I spent a night in a village on the River at the foot of the mountains. In the morning I started up the river-valley.

Growing up on the flat, I had never seen a hill or large rock. I found the way difficult as the land grew rough and steep. There was only a faint path beside the water; but I was nearing my destination.

The shape of the valley matched my vision, but nothing else did.

Something was wrong. No verdant sward and flowering fruiting trees; the valley sides were bare apart from dead, twisted scrub. Birds there were, but not the bright songsters of my vision. Only vultures wheeled and wobbled, far above.

The valley narrowed to a gorge and turned to the right. Rounding the corner, I could see the place the palace should be, perched high on the right bank.

It was not there.

Nor was the bridge.

Fording the frigid stream, I fell. Soaked and scraped but undrowned.

I saw a cave-mouth on the side of the mountain where the palace had been. A way, steep as a ladder, led up.

I was torn. This was certainly the valley of my vision, though nothing fit. But what purpose would the dangerous climb to a cave serve? I was shaking with cold, and my fall frightened me.

But if there was a path to the cave, there must be someone who used the path. The path-maker could answer questions, at least. Perhaps this cave-dweller was a caretaker on the way to the palace, or the guardian of a magic entrance to it.

As I made my way up the cliff, I distracted myself from fear by rehearsing my grand speech. I would announce my Quest, in the elegant language suitable for a hero. I would order the caretaker to take me to the vetali.

The way came out on a wide rocky ledge. Nothing grew there, but I had to pick my way carefully through a mass of coiling thorn bushes, their stems black and brittle, leafless and long-dead.

A pair of carved wooden doors leaned against the cliff-face by the cave mouth. It seemed that they had once closed the opening, but now were crumbling with dry-rot.

The entrance was dark and narrow. The sun was setting. It had taken me the whole day to walk from the village.

Two vultures perched by the gloomy hole. They eyed me curiously.

I glared at them. I was a hero, I reminded myself, on a Quest.

I strode confidently into the cave.

My foot twisted on something hard. I stumbled; nearly caught myself on the other leg; and landed on a palm and knee, skinning both.

I did not fall on my face.

I looked back, my eyes starting to adjust to the light, and saw that the offending impediment was a human skull, lying by the doorway.

“You took your time,” came a voice.

“What?” I asked. The noble speech had gone entirely out of my mind.

“You are late,” said the voice. “We haven’t got much time. Probably not enough.”

I looked around, wishing my knee didn’t hurt so much.

The voice came from a very large, extraordinarily ugly, and entirely naked woman.

She was sitting on a stool made from human bones. Her face was lit by a single oil lamp.

“Um,” I said, trying to remember what I had meant to say. “Take me to the vetali!”

“I can show you the vetali,” she said. “But why do you come looking for her?”

“I seek the Secret of Life and Death!”

“Oh, that’s no secret,” she said.

“You think you know the Secret of Life and Death?” I asked.

“Life! Ha! What you call life… eating and shitting and fucking; that’s life. There’s no mystery in that.”

There was considerable mystery—for me, at least—about what she called fucking; but I did not want to say so.

“That is not all there is to life!”

“Oh?” she said.

“There are higher things. There is the Way of Lord Buddha.”

“Ha! This ‘Buddha’ you speak of—who is he?”

I had thought everyone knew that, before my journey. But I had come through villages without Buddhists.

“He is the god we worship, in my village,” I replied.

“And why worship this ‘Buddha’?”

“He is the true god! And he is our protector.”

“So… he protects your family… they are all well, I hope?”

“They are dead,” I admitted.

“That is a poor sort of protector. You worship a puny god, it seems.”

I was annoyed. And her impiety was not likely to go unpunished. “Lord Buddha teaches the True Dharma, the Law of Karma.”

“And what is this ‘Law of Karma’?” she asked.

She was obviously feeble-minded. Even where there were no Buddhists—“Everyone knows the Law of Karma! If you think bad thoughts, the minions of Lord Yama drag you down to hell to burn in flames for eons.”

“He dooms you to hell if you think bad thoughts?” she asked. “This is another of your gods?”

“Yes…”

“That is an evil god, then. You should kill him.”

She was insane. “What gods do you worship, then?” I asked.

“I worship no gods,” she replied. “I rest my mind in primordial purity.” Seeing my scowl, she added “You may call that Samantabhadri, if you like.”

Her expression said she thought she was being generous.

I had had enough of this gibberish. “I have not come to argue with a madwoman,” I said.

I gathered what dignity I could; her prattling had left my mind in disarray.

“I am on a Quest, for the benefit of all sentient beings. It is imperative that you take me to the vetali, at once.”

“And what gift have you brought for the vetali?” she asked.

“Gift?”

“Everyone brings the vetali a gift.”

This was unexpected. There had been nothing about a gift, in the vision.

“I… I have nothing,” I admitted. “I only ever had the kartika charm of my mother; and the dakinis took that.”

She stood and looked at me closely. Her expression was like my foster-mother’s, opening a two-day-old pot of stew that had grown maggots.

“I suppose you’ll have to do,” she said. “I am going hunting. You can sleep on the cot there.”

She swept out of the cave, before I could say anything, into the night, now completely black.

I strode out onto the ledge, but she was already out of sight in the dark.

I stood a while in indecision. Making my way back down to the river without light seemed near-suicidal; and what would I do then?

I explored the cave carefully.

There was a back room, separated from the front by a hanging skin. I had the idea that it might lead to a tunnel or magic door that would take me to the vetali’s palace, but I could not find anything of the sort. The back room held little besides a cot, made of skins on a frame of human bones.

The front room had a hearth with a pot, the stool, another bed, a scattering of bones on the floor, and some odd tools on the wall. One was a kartika, like the dakinis’: a butcher’s flensing knife.

She was some sort of ghoul or ogress. Sleeping in her cave was an obviously bad idea. On the other hand, she said she could take me to the vetali, and she had not attacked me when she could have. And she was only a woman. She had not mentioned anyone else living in the cave—though there were two beds.

In the end I decided I had no choice. I curled up on the cot in the outside room, telling myself to sleep only lightly, so I could leap up in case of danger.

A final gift

She was some sort of ghoul or ogress. Sleeping in her cave was an obviously bad idea…

I woke the next morning with daylight streaming in through the cave mouth. Pulling aside the skin that hid the cave’s back room, I saw that the ogress had returned while I slept, and now lay on her bed of bones.

She knew the way to the vetali’s palace, and I needed to argue her into cooperation.

I coughed loudly to wake her, with no result. I clapped my hands and called out “Hello!”, but she seemed to be dead to the world. Evidently she had been out the whole night on some loathsome errand.

I was still quite sure that the palace must be somewhere nearby. I spent the day exploring the area, up and down the valley and hillsides.

Nothing.

My knee hurt. I limped back to the cave at dusk. Getting the ogress to tell me where to find the palace seemed the only way forward.

I had not eaten since the morning before, so I was now quite hungry, and not in a mood for nonsense. If I could not find the palace the next day, I would have to go back to the village at the foot of the mountains to get food.

She was waiting for me on the cliff-ledge at the cave mouth. “Come down to the river with me,” she said.

“What? Why?” I asked.

“Because I said so,” she said.

“Why should—” I began, but she was already heading down, faster than I could go. I followed her reluctantly.

When I reached the bottom, she was standing by the river, gazing downstream. I could see nothing.

“What…” I began, and then decided not to bother.

She stood completely motionless, apparently waiting for something.

I fidgeted.

Peering into the gloom, I saw a dark mass in the water downstream. It was floating toward us. Its motion was smooth and constant, ignoring the twists and eddies of the fast-moving stream.

I realized that since it was floating upstream, it could not be floating at all, but moving under its own power. It must be an animal of some kind—a crocodile, perhaps. It could be dangerous; I stepped back from the stream bank.

The thing floated up to the bank by the ogress and stopped. She kneeled down, and before I could give a warning, reached out and turned it over.

It was a human corpse that had been floating face-down.

She stroked its face.

“He has sent me a final gift,” she said.

She took a knife from her belt and cut a strip of flesh from the thing’s thigh. “Eat,” she said, handing it to me.

I froze.

I am a Buddhist, not a cannibal!, I thought. But—

I realized that I had reached my first Test, on the Quest of Life and Death. Death… I had thought I wanted to know about death…

“Why?” I asked.

“Do you want to see the vetali?” she asked.

It was a Test. The fate of my Quest hung in the balance. Should I threaten to kill this woman, to compel her to take me to the vetali? Or was she somehow the vetali’s faithful servant, and I should pretend to be nice to her to get her to cooperate? She was plainly evil… but I remembered that my own mother had eaten human flesh.

“Are you a dakini?” I asked. She looked nothing like my mother, or like the dakinis I found in the charnel ground.

She laughed. “Some will say so.”

In the stories, when the hero comes to a Test, he doesn’t stand around wondering what to do. He just does the right thing, heedless of danger. The question is not what he should do, but whether he can do it.

This was the wrong type of Test. I had no idea what I was supposed to do.

I remembered again that I was a Buddhist. I should pray. Maybe a goddess would appear and instruct me.

Om Tara Tara Tutti Tutti Svaha, I prayed.

Nothing happened.

I wasn’t sure I remembered the mantra. Om Tutti Tutti Tara Tara Tara.

That wasn’t right, either.

I settled on Help Help Please Help Please Please Help Me Goddess.

The ogress waited, holding out the dead flesh.

I took it.

My hand stopped just before my mouth. I couldn’t help looking at the thing. It was horrible.

I closed my eyes and forced it into my mouth.

Don’t taste it! Don’t taste it! I thought.

I bit into it once and then swallowed it whole.

It caught in my throat. I choked, and then it came back up. Watery yellow vomit followed. I needed to empty my stomach, but there was nothing much in there.

I fell to my knees and hunched over. I was dizzy with hunger and shock.

I was crying as well as retching.

When I had finished vomiting, the ogress helped me up.

“You’ll like him better cooked,” she said.

She turned back to the body on the stream bank. She touched her hand to her forehead, her throat, and her chest. She knelt and touched the corpse in the same places.

Then she scooped it out of the water with one arm. She swung it onto her hip like a baby, limp legs dangling uselessly beside hers.

“Come along,” she said, and started up the path.

I followed, trying to keep up, while she climbed the steep bank as if the body weighed nothing.

Who is the monster?

“Come along,” the ogress said, and started up the path. I followed, trying to keep up while she climbed the steep bank.

I was tired and hungry. It was dark. My knee hurt. She was going too fast.

I slipped and fell, landing with my foot twisted round.

There was a snap and horrendous pain.

I yelled.

The ogress reappeared immediately. I was sitting on my butt and holding my leg, howling.

“Does this hurt?” she said, poking my ankle.

“Yes!” I screamed. What did she expect?

“How about this?”

That hurt even worse. I tried to kick her away with the other leg; she batted it aside without looking.

“Broken,” she said. “It’ll be as big as your head tomorrow. And it’ll be a month before you can walk properly. You’ll have to stay with me.”

She got me back to the cave, and then fetched the corpse she had fished out of the river.

The delay in my Quest was a setback, especially since I had seemed so close. Worse, though, was being stuck in a cave with a monster for a month.

I couldn’t believe how ugly she was. Every time I looked away, I forgot; and then when I turned back to look at her, I would be amazed again. I would wind up staring at her, trying to figure out how she could be so repellent. When she caught me looking, she would grin like I was the funniest thing.

I tried to teach her some of the basics of Buddhism. Everyone knows that is a meritorious act: giving the gift of Dharma to unbelievers. And, as I explained, perhaps even a monster could hope for a better rebirth if she practiced Buddhism virtuously.

It wasn’t much use. No matter what I said to her, she would reply with questions that made no sense. She seemed to be incapable of understanding the simplest things.

I was lying on the bed one evening when I saw an orange centipede, longer than my hand, crawling across the cave floor. I grabbed my shoe. It’s safest to kill them with a long stick, but there wasn’t one.

The ogress caught my arm.

“Are you crazy?” I asked. “That’s the poisonous kind!”

“Leave it be,” she said. “It has its life, you have yours.”

“Those things can kill you with one bite!”

“So put it outside.”

I had tried to teach her the Buddhist Precepts two nights before. Those are the absolute basics of virtuous action. You can’t avoid constantly creating bad karma if you don’t know the Precepts. My explanation had gotten hopelessly bogged down by her confusion. I realized now that some little bit must have penetrated, but she had a childish misunderstanding.

“Are you worried about the Precept against killing? Because centipedes don’t count. Everyone knows that. Even monks kill them. They’re evil; it’s better for them to be dead.”

She laughed. “I don’t care in the least about your Precepts. I like centipedes. Here,” she said, and put her hand on the floor just in front of the thing’s path. I watched in horror as it stopped and reared up, wiggling its antennae, smelling her flesh. Then it scuttled onto her palm. She rose carefully as it snaked up her arm, and carried it out of the cave.

I continued to demand that she tell me where the vetali was. My suspicion grew that she had killed the vetali, or captured her and was keeping her prisoner somewhere. Quite likely the vetali needed rescuing. Once my ankle recovered, I could kill the ogress, save the vetali, and then she would marry me.

The ogress brushed off my demands with excuses, and countered with questions about my Quest. I didn’t consider that any of a monster’s business; but I was stuck in her cave for a month, and there was nothing to do except talk to her. I told her about the death of my father, and my mother, and Sukhi, and how I had resolved to find The Answer to Life and Death, for the benefit of all sentient beings.

“And what would you do with that answer?” she asked.

This was, I realized, a weak point in my plan. I had no clear picture beyond finding it. The Answer was bound to be valuable, though, and I imagined everyone acclaiming me a hero. Also… sorcerers can bring people back from death.

“Your lover? You would raise her as a vetali? That is a terrible thing…”

“No! You don’t understand. I am looking for the vetali, to get the Answer! Then maybe I can bring Sukhi back.”

“Do you know what a vetali is?” she asked.

“She’s like a princess,” I said.

“A vetali is a corpse, reanimated by a demon.”

“No! That’s not true. The dakinis sent me to find the vetali, because she has The Answer to Life and Death.”

“These dakinis… they are friendly, reliable, down-to-earth sort of people?”

It had actually not occurred to me that the dakinis might have deceived me. But: “I had a vision!”

“Get those often, do you?”

“No! Never! I mean, except this time. The dakinis gave me a magic essence, and then—”

“What did they say about the Essence?” she asked.

I said nothing.

“ ‘It shows things that were, and things that are, things that yet may be,’ ” she suggested. “That is the usual formula, I believe?”

The word may had been lost on me before.

“There are demons,” she said, “that have no corporeal form. They flock around graveyards, hoping for a body that has not been sealed with the proper funeral rituals. When they find one, they enter it, and the corpse walks. That is a vetala—or a vetali, if it is female.

“At first the demon’s hunger for life knows no bounds. If you raise your lover as a vetali, she will turn on you, and rip you apart in her thirst for blood. If your sorcery is powerful enough, you might keep her in check. You could use her body, perhaps. But, although the vetali may keep some of her memories, it will not truly be her, but a demon. If you feed her on the life of others, in time the hunger will wane, somewhat. Over a few hundred years. The really old vetalas can seem quite civilized. It is a mask, though. That hunger never completely leaves.”

I refused to hear any more like that. I turned away, determined to sulk for a few days.

Worst was the corpse. She gave me a choice: to eat it, or to starve.

I tried arguing, and pleading, and yelling at her, insisting that she go to the village, a day away, to get me real food; none of which got me anywhere.

She did let me cook it. She didn’t eat any herself. She would tap an artery for blood, instead. She drank it out of a bowl made of the top half of a skull.

“It’s the way I maintain my girlish figure,” she said.

I shook my head in disgust. Her body was bloated and horrible; her mind wicked and deranged.

The cadaver did not rot. Instead, as I ate my way up from the feet, day by day, what was left got younger. She had pulled the waterlogged carcass of a gray old man from the stream. After a couple weeks, his face was ruddy and unlined, his hair glossy black.

“He was a great guru, you know,” she said.

“What? How do you know?” The dead man had been naked. Maybe she thought she saw some sign of holiness in his body?

“He lived here for three years.” (She had known him?)

“When you were here?”

“Yes!”

I did not understand. “He was your guru?”

“He was an idiot—like you. When he came here. Later he wrote famous books and sat on a high throne.”

She stroked his cheek. “Perhaps you will return to me this way someday also,” she said.

I still trying to make sense of the corpse being someone holy, whom she had known; so I didn’t take that in.

I had an awful thought, instead. “Do I have to eat the brains?”

“Yes,” she said. “Raw. They will be good for you.” She burst out laughing.

“Is that supposed make me smart, or something?” There was no way I was going to eat raw brains.

“In your case? Not much chance of that.”

The rigid self-control I had imposed on myself, after I saw hell, broke. I lost it then. She was calling me an idiot?

I would have hit her if I could have stood up. I ranted and railed at her. I called her a monster.

“You are trying to think of a way to kill me,” she said. “And you call yourself a Buddhist? Or are you a monster?”

“Monsters don't count!” I wanted to shout. But that made me stop for an instant.

Lord Yama punishes anger by sending you to the Hot Hells. That is why I had sworn I would never be angry again.

Do monsters count? My foster-mother said there are no exceptions to the First Precept.

I’d heard others disagree. But no one had actually said there’s an exception for monsters.

On the other hand, heroes always kill monsters. It’s what they do, because monsters are evil. Heroes are the good guys; they can’t go to hell for that.

“You are a cannibal,” the ogress said, looking smug. “Some would call that monstrous.”

“I am only eating it because you are forcing me to!” I yelled.

“You should be grateful,” she said. “Hardly anyone gets to eat an entire epistemologist.”

Eating an entire epistemologist

“You should be grateful,” she said. “Hardly anyone gets to eat an entire epistemologist.”

“An epis-what?” I asked. Then I realized, too late, that she was side-tracking me.

“An epistemologist. He wanted to know how you can know things.”

“Like what?”

“Like anything.”

“Like what?”

“Well… How do you know that the Buddha was enlightened?”

“Everyone knows that!”

“How?”

“Are you saying the Buddha wasn’t enlightened? Because everyone knows that—even Brahmins say so.”

“Maybe I chose a bad example… Although he spent years working on that one… Do you know whether you are in a dream now?”

“What?”

“Have you ever had a dream in which you knew you were dreaming?”

I thought of the nightmare I had had in the charnel ground, after the dakinis forced me to drink something horrible. An encircling army of the dead, and I couldn’t wake up.

“Yes…”

“And you have had dreams in which you didn’t know you were dreaming.”

“So what?”

“So are you dreaming now?”

“No!”

“How do you know?”

“Because this is real. Nothing strange is happening, like in a dream.”

The ogress looked at the half-eaten corpse. It now seemed to be the body of a thirty-something year old.

I pressed my lips closed. That was weird… and I was not dreaming.

She sighed. “You know the earth is flat, right?”

“Yes, of course it is!”

“How do you know?”

“Well, everyone knows that.”

“Which everyone? Who is someone who knows that?”

“Um, my foster-mother, for one.”

“Is everything she believes true?”

“Well, no…”

“So she could be wrong.”

“Yes, but everyone knows the earth is flat.”

“In the country of the Yavanas, everyone says the earth is round, like a ball.”

“That’s crazy!”

“If you had been born in the country of the Yavanas, everyone you knew would agree that the earth is a sphere.”

“That wouldn’t make it true!”

“Just so. So he said that you can’t rely on what everyone says. Just because everyone agrees, doesn’t make it so.”

“But anyone can see that the earth is flat!”

“Around the village you were born in, the earth is flat. But here, it is not.”

I knew the answer to that one. “The earth is inconceivably large. Mountains are tiny bumps on it, like the fingerprints left by a potter on a flat plate.”

“And you can see that?”

I scowled.

She picked up the nearest handy object. “If seeing is knowing, what is this?”

“It’s a finger bone, of course!”

“Are you sure? Here, take a good look.” She tossed me the bone.

“Yes,” I said, “it’s obviously a finger bone.”

“It might not be. I might be a witch who put a spell on you, so you see it as a finger bone, but actually it is a poisonous centipede.”

I flinched. I knew from my uncle’s stories that there were witches who could create such illusions. But, “It’s been lying there for days. You couldn’t fool me for that long. Anyway, I can feel it is finger bone, not a centipede.”

“Still, sometimes your senses can deceive you. If you stare at the blue sky, what do you see?”

“A blue sky.” This stupid conversation was going nowhere. I hated being stuck in a cave with a stupid ogress and a broken ankle.

“You see blue, and if you keep staring you see grey wriggling worms that slide across the sky. But you know they aren’t really there.”

I had seen that, and had wondered why.

“So he said that anything we see might be an illusion. In fact, he said that everything we see is an illusion. Only a Buddha can see things as they really are.”

“Yeah? What does a Buddha see, then?”

“He said that a Buddha might see that bone as a precious jewel.”

“That’s stupid.”

“He said that a Buddha might see this cave as a palace, and me as a beautiful girl.”

I had had far more than enough of this game. She was making the dead guy out to be someone special, but it was obvious from the corpse—or what was left of it—that he was perfectly ordinary. Except for aging backwards.

“Yeah, so how could he possibly know what a Buddha sees?”

She looked at me with an enormous grin. “That is the first half-way intelligent thing I have ever heard you say.”

That made me feel odd. While I was trying to come up with a reply, she said, “He wrote poems for me, you know.”

“Poems?” I asked, involuntarily. Immediately I regretted it. Again she had tricked me into letting her change the subject. It was impossible to force her to talk sense, or stick to a topic.

The grammar books all say that ‘mind’ is neuter,

And so I thought it safe to let my mind

        Salute her.

But now it lingers in embraces tender:

For Panini made a mistake, I find,

        In gender.

“He was frightfully clever,” she said.

It went right over my head. I had barely heard of “grammar” and had no idea who Panini was. She is taunting me, I thought.

As I was trying to find a cutting response, she interrupted: “Would you like another one?”

Ignoring my non-answer, she recited:

A hundred times I learnt from my philosophy

To think no more of love, this vanity,

This dream, this source of all regret,

        This emptiness.

But no philosophy can make my heart forget

        Her loveliness.

“What? Whose loveliness?” I asked. I was lost. This poem made hardly any more sense than the last one.

“Mine, of course,” she said.

“Loveliness!”

“He was a monk then, you know.”

She was delusional. I didn’t care if he was a monk—nobody could possibly have thought she was lovely.

“And I was younger then,” she added.

“Did you—” I began.

“Make love to him? No! He was too caught up in trying to be the perfect monk, in those days. It’s a pity. He had a stick up his butt, all-round. It hurt his philosophy… If he hadn’t been trying so hard to be a saint, I could have loosened him up a bit.”

“I suppose you think I need to be loosened up a bit?”

“Hoping I’ll make love to you?”

I was appalled at the possibility.

“No, I don’t think you need loosening up,” she said. “What you need is quite different. You need to be tamed.”

“Tamed?”

“Yes. You are so full of pain and rage and resentment, it makes you stupid and mean.”

I felt the familiar flare of anger. “I don’t want to be tamed!”

“Oh, well, go on being angry all the time, then, if you like that better.”

“I don’t like it! But how can I help it, if everybody dies, and you force me to eat a corpse!”

“You could be grateful. If he hadn’t sent me his body, you might not have anything to eat at all.”

“That’s stupid. How could I be grateful to him? He’s dead. It wouldn’t do him any good.”

“Gratitude isn’t for the person you are grateful to. Gratitude is for you.”

I thought of Sukhi. It was the sort of thing she would say, when I was hating everyone. It was only when I was with Sukhi that I could stop being angry.

“You could say a few words of gratitude every time you eat him,” the ogress said.

“I didn’t even know him. What would I say?”

“It doesn’t matter. Anything, so long as you mean it.”

I decided to play along with this lunacy.

“Dear—” I began. “Did he have a name?”

“Dharmakirti.”

Dear Dharmakirti, um. Thank you for sending me your dead body. I mean, thank you for sending her your body. I am eating it. It is all there is, so I am grateful you did. It’s not really all that bad. I hope you are having a good rebirth. Sincerely, Suryapavan.

I waited for her to laugh at me. I certainly felt like an idiot, and regretted my spur-of-the-moment complaisance. But I also felt a strange sensation of lightness.

“Yah, OK, good,” she said.