even listen to him. But one night, I woke and saw him sitting in the doorway, silhouetted against the starlight. He was gasping for breath. The next night, he was lying on the floor by the door, as though he’d just fallen over the night before. And the night after that he was dead. His flesh shriveled and hardened, just like ours, just like before. He lay there for days, and then one night I awoke and his body was gone. Just gone.”
Asha nodded. “Scavengers. Dogs or dholes, probably.”
“So you see,” Hasika said. “If we stop eating the fruit, we’ll live only a year or so, and then we’ll die. So we continue to eat the fruit, and we dream.” She shivered. “I’m so tired.”
“Sleep now.” Asha eased the woman’s head back down to the floor. “We’ll talk again later.”
5
“We’ve seen something like this before,” Priya said gently. “Addiction. Hallucination. Dependence.”
“No. Not like this. Nothing like this.” Asha stared at the withered lines of Hasika’s face. “Desiccated. Starved. At death’s door. If they stop eating the fruit, they recover. Then they die a year later. This is different. This is new.”
The sun hung well above the eastern trees, but its light was still pale and the sky was still dark slate in the west, and the breeze blew quite cool through the open windows.
“Can you help them?” the nun asked.
“I have no idea.” Asha began to chew on a fresh sliver of ginger. “But I’ll try.”
“What can I do to help?”
Asha shrugged. “Play with Jagdish. Tell stories. Criticize my outlook on life. You know, the usual.” The herbalist opened her bag and drew out her tools one by one. Glasses, vials, needles, lenses, mortar and pestle, paper packets, cloth bags, silk thread, and clay jars. Musty, earthen aromas hung in the air, lingering close to the woman’s clothes and hands, until the morning breeze rose up and swept them all away.
She inspected each of the motionless dreamers in turn, peering into their yellowed eyes and their pale mouths. She passed scented vials under their noses, rubbed ointments on their skin, pricked their fingers and toes with her needles, and passed her scaled ear over the length of their bodies, listening. She found nothing but brittle limbs wrapped in papery flesh, weak lungs and hearts, and restless minds lost in fantasy.
Priya said, “I’m trying to decide whether these people have succumbed to their desire to escape their suffering, or whether they may have unwittingly found a loophole in the cycle of life and death. I was taught that life is suffering and suffering comes from desire, thus to escape suffering you must free yourself from desire. But these people… They seem to have escaped their suffering by embracing their desire completely. And at the same time, they have escaped death itself. They live forever in perfect bliss in a dream world. And who am I to say their dream world is any better or worse than Lord Buddha’s nirvana?”
Asha hovered over Hasika. “Are you serious? You wouldn’t say that if you could see them. They’re a bunch of delusional vegetables. But if you really think this is paradise, then I can give you some of their little fruits to eat.”
Priya smiled her mysterious smile. “Not today.”
“Afraid?”
“No,” the nun said. “But if I went to sleep here, who would take care of Jagdish?” The little mongoose chattered on her shoulder.
“I’d be happy to let him sit on my shoulder.” Asha began her inspection of Hasika’s body at the feet and worked her way up. “I might even feed him.”
“Ah, but then who would take care of you?”
Asha smiled wryly. “I managed on my own just fine before I met you.”
“Really? You never talk about those days. Tell me a story about how you managed just fine without me.” Priya smiled a bit wider.
Asha paused at Hasika’s knees. “Several years ago I was in Delhi studying the rats. I’d heard a rumor that some people bitten by these rats had been miraculously healed. Arthritis, deafness, blindness. Other people had died instantly, as though they’d been poisoned.”
Priya nodded. “I think I’ve heard of the rats of Delhi. What did you find?”
“Nothing. Nothing but common rats and common lies. I get that a lot, actually.” Asha rubbed gently at the rough, wrinkled skin of Hasika’s leg. “I went to sleep in a nunnery, and in the night I was attacked by one of the men I had spoken with about the rats. He must have followed me there.”
Priya’s smile vanished.
“I woke with a hand on my mouth and a knee on my leg, holding me down. He stank of urine.” Asha spoke softly, her eyes fixed on her patient. “I remember the way my heart pounded in my chest. I was gasping for breath, choking on the stink of him. I felt my bag at my side. I shoved my hand inside the bag and when he leaned down closer, I stabbed him through the ear with one of my needles.”
She paused to glance at her bag where the needle in question lay wrapped in silk.
“You killed him?” Priya asked. “You killed that man?”
“I did. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the last time. And if given the choice, I would do it again exactly the same.” Asha sniffed. “Maybe a little faster.”
“But killing is…evil.”
“No, murder is evil. Rape is evil. But killing an animal in self defense is simply nature’s way.” Asha leaned down to listen to Hasika’s body. She heard the blood flowing thick and sluggish in the veins, the air drifting lazily in the lungs. “Everything that lives must die. Sometimes naturally, sometimes violently. Sometimes for good reasons or bad reasons or no reason at all. Everyone dies. Except for these people, it seems.”
Priya shivered in her corner of the room. “I was taught not to fear death. I was taught… I was told that it…”
“Yeah, I know.” Asha glanced back at the tiny nun hunched in the shadows. “We’re all taught things. And then we go out into the world and start to learn for the first time.”
The herbalist rubbed her eyes a moment and then leaned back down to listen to the rhythms of life in Hasika’s feeble body one last time. The soft heart beat, the faint flutter of breath. And…
Asha frowned. “Unbelievable.”
6
“Hasika? Hasika?” Asha stroked the woman’s cheek. She didn’t dare shake the woman’s brittle shoulder.
It was late. The sun had set hours ago and Asha had sat there all the while, watching and waiting as the shadows grew longer and deeper. Outside the wind whispered through the leaves and the cicadas creaked and droned in the distance.
Three fruits had fallen so far, thumping softly into the bowl in the center of the room. And three hands had crept over the edge of the bowl to claim the fruits and deliver them whole into waiting mouths. But not Hasika. Not yet.
“Hasika?”
The frail old woman opened her eyes halfway. “You.”
Asha smiled. “Me.”
“I thought I had dreamed you. But you’re real. You’re here, in the dark house.”
“It’s only dark at night,” Priya said. “It’s quite bright during the day. Or so I imagine.”
“Hasika, listen to me.” Asha took the woman’s hand. It felt like a bundle of twigs wrapped in old paper. “I have something important to tell you.”
“What?”
“You’re pregnant.”
The words hung in the air. The wind blew, the leaves shivered, the cicadas chirped, and Jagdish squeaked in
