died.”
“Can you ask her to come please?” Asha asked. “It’s very important. She needs to come and see this boy. I need to know if he looks like her son.”
The farmer shrugged and said he would ask Sati when he went home that evening.
Asha thanked them both and crossed the street back toward the crowd, but she didn’t come very close. Standing at the edge of the gathering, she watched Priya sitting beneath the tree, petting Jagdish, and talking quietly with the people sitting closest to her. The entire congregation sat quietly, some with heads bowed and eyes closed, some chanting or singing softly, but most just sitting and squinting at the sky as they dragged their fingers through the muddy road, waiting.
Asha and Priya left the pilgrims at sundown, retiring to their abandoned market stall to eat and sleep. Asha told her friend about her conversation with the miller, about Sati and her son, and the doctor. Priya nodded along until she finished.
“A doctor.” Priya spread her blanket on the ground and lay down. “You don’t use that word often.”
“Only when I need to.”
“Then I take it that you think this boy is not a boy, but some creature or spirit, or maybe a ghost made flesh through this doctor’s evil craft.”
“I think those people out there are fools for lying in the road, starving themselves, and waiting for a strange child to give some meaning to their sad little lives.”
“He’s already given some meaning to their lives,” Priya said. “He’s given them hope. Belief. Everyone hears stories about sages and monks and nuns, about gods and demons, miracles, and paradise. But they’re only stories. This boy is real. And whether or not he ever speaks, whether or not he ever reveals any wisdom to us, he is real. He’s sitting out there right now, surviving without consuming a single living thing, at perfect peace with the universe, and mystically bound to the earth. He’s a living miracle. He inspires these people. You should have heard them today. They were all vowing to go home and spread the boy’s teachings.”
“What teachings? He hasn’t said anything.”
“He’s said volumes.” The nun smiled. “He isn’t afraid of droughts or floods. He’s not arguing with his family or friends. He’s not laboring to level a forest or dam a river. He isn’t fighting with the world for his own survival. He’s just quietly, calmly, serenely coexisting with the universe. Effortlessly. Can you imagine an entire world of such people?”
“A world in which no one laughed or sang or played or loved? You can have it.” Asha lay down on her own blanket.
“Asha?”
“Hm?”
“Will you tell me about the doctors who trained you? Not now, but some day, when you’re ready?”
“Good night, Priya.”
5
It was several hours after sunrise when Asha saw the lone woman coming down the eastern road from the distant farms. Priya had gone back to the pilgrims long before and the scene around the teak tree looked just as it had the day before, and the day before that. Some faces in the crowd changed as new wanderers arrived and old ones left, but they sat and waited just the same.
The woman coming down the road was middle aged, with a few streaks of gray in her black hair, and quite a few lines around her eyes and mouth. Her faded green sari swayed sharply around her legs as she moved, but she walked calmly with her head held high and came straight up to Asha in the middle of the street. “Good morning. Are you the herbalist?”
“Yes. I’m Asha. You must be Sati.”
“Yes, and I know what you want me to do, or to see.” The woman paused, her face lined a bit more deeply with thought and worry. “Come along then.” Sati led Asha back toward the western end of the village, and did not display any particular reaction to the crowd sitting in the road. She only said, “I don’t remember that little tree being there.”
Asha nodded and waited for the woman to continue, and they walked together around the pilgrims to the tree where Priya sat next to the silent boy. Asha gestured to the seated figure and said, “Please, look closely. Take your time. I need you to be certain.”
Sati knelt down beside the boy and studied his face for a moment. Asha tried to imagine whether the boy Kavi would have looked very different with hair and eyebrows and eyelashes. Will she even be able to recognize him? After a moment, Sati reached out with a steady hand to touch the boy’s arm, and then to caress his cheek. And then she stood and backed away from him.
“I can’t be certain. Kavi had such thick hair,” she said quietly. “And he was thinner. His cheeks, I mean. But the nose is the same. Maybe. No, no, they’re not the same really. His hands, his chin. I’m trying to imagine this boy dirty and hairy and laughing. No, they’re not quite the same. But they are very similar.” Sati stared at the boy a bit longer and then turned away. “And no one knows his name or where he came from?”
Asha shook her head.
“I see. Then I wish you all well. I hope I was helpful.” Sati turned to leave.
“Wait.” Asha followed her. “Don’t you want to stay and see if he speaks?”
“No.” The woman shuddered. “I don’t.”
“One last question then,” Asha said. “Do you remember the doctor who came to help Kavi just before he died? Can you describe him to me?”
Sati nodded. “He was short. Maybe my age, maybe a little older. Thinning hair. Round face. He smiled a lot, even when he acted sad. I remember that. The smiling. I didn’t like it.”
Asha thanked her again and watched the woman walk away across the village and up the long road to the eastern farms. And then Asha spent the rest of the day wandering through the fields around the village, peering down at little weedy sprouts and black bugs wriggling through the rich earth, and trying not to think about the boy.
That night, after they ate the last of the dried fruit in Asha’s bag, she said to Priya, “It’s not a teak tree.”
“What is it then?” the nun asked.
Asha didn’t answer.
“Asha?”
“Can we leave tomorrow? Are you ready to move on?”
“All right. I doubt our young Buddha will be revealing his wisdom any time soon. We can leave in the morning.”
When morning came, Asha slipped out of their shelter as quietly as she could and climbed down the muddy slope behind the gnarled tree. The sun had yet to rise and the whole world felt gray and cool, still clinging to the quiet of the night. She stopped just above the level of the oily water covering the corner of the field, and studied the dirt and grass at her feet. It took a moment in the feeble predawn light to find what she was looking for, but she did find it.
She reached down into the soft wet earth and pulled up a heavy tangle of pale roots. Asha took the steel scalpel from her bag, but hesitated as she saw the bright blade in her fingers, remembering that same blade in another’s fingers, painted red. But the moment passed and she quickly severed each of the roots, cutting some in two places just to be certain. When she was done, she tossed the lower half of the roots into the dark water and pushed the upper half of the roots back into the soil.
At the top of the slope she found a handful of pilgrims already awake, already staring at the boy under the tree. None of them looked at her. Back at the old market stall she found Priya sitting up and petting Jagdish. The nun asked, “Are you ready now?”
Asha nodded, more to herself than to her friend. “If you are.”
And they left the village.
