6
Six months later.
Priya called out from behind, “Asha! I need to slow down. My knee hasn’t quite recovered yet from that night on the beach. It’s still aching a bit. Silly singing turtles. Are we in a hurry?”
“No, no hurry. Sorry. I forgot about your knee.” Asha stopped and let the nun catch up to her, and then they continued on down the road side by side. Jagdish lay long and fat on the blind woman’s shoulders, all the way around the back of her neck with his tail trailing down over her chest.
“Is there bad weather brewing? Or are we on a dangerous road?”
“No,” Asha said. “But we are on a familiar road.”
“Oh. Where are we?”
“About an hour west of Kasar. Do you remember it?”
Priya nodded and smiled. “We’re going to visit the little sage under the teak tree.”
“It wasn’t a teak tree.”
“I remember now, you said that before. What sort of tree was it?”
Asha said, “I have an idea, but it’s only a theory. I’ve heard about this sort of thing, but never seen it myself. I’ll know for sure when we get there. I’ll tell you then.”
“As you wish.”
An hour later they crossed the last stretch of road through the fields of freshly sown oilseeds. Ahead, Asha saw the familiar huddle of houses and market stalls, and even the flour mill drawn round and round by the same tired old ox. The almond tree stood straight and tall on the south side of the road. And on the grassy shoulder across from it, there was nothing at all.
Asha stopped on the grass where the little tree had been and Priya stopped beside her.
“Very quiet,” Priya observed.
“There’s no one here,” Asha said. “No pilgrims, I mean.”
“But there are voices. Listen.”
Asha heard a distant babble of high voices. Talking. Laughing. The sound drew closer and soon a knot of five young girls emerged from around a corner. They saw the two women by the side of the road and the girls stopped and fell quiet.
Asha smiled. “I think we’re in someone’s way. Come on.” She led Priya up the road into town and the girls continued on to the grassy strip where they sat in a convenient circle of shade cast by the almond tree across the way. Asha smiled a bit wider as the girls flopped down and began whispering to each other.
“So the young sage is gone?” Priya asked.
“Along with his tree, yes.” Asha kept walking. “Let’s find out what happened here.”
They found the miller sitting on a wobbly stool and watching his ox walking its circle as the grindstone crushed wheat into flour.
“Hello again,” Asha said. “I see business is…still going strong.”
The miller shrugged.
“Sorry, but we were here a few months ago and there was a strange boy sitting under a little tree just over there. We were wondering what happened to him. Can you tell us?”
The miller shook his head. “Strangest thing I’ve ever seen. One morning there’s all this shouting so I went over to see what was happening. The boy, he fell over.”
“He died?”
“Sort of. I mean yes. But he didn’t just fall down. He fell in. Inward. Collapsed. Like he was all skin with no insides.” The miller shuddered. “Smelled like the back end of this ox.”
“And the tree?”
“Died. Rotted. Some sort of disease. It turned all black and soggy. It stank too. So we burned it right there, not that it burned too well. Some of the boys hacked it up and dragged it off into the woods somewhere up east.” He waved to his right, which was vaguely east. “They said they were going to try burning it again, and then bury and salt it. I assume they did.”
Asha nodded. “Thanks.” She led the way back onto the main road where she turned north. The sun blazed high in the pale spring sky.
“So what was it?” Priya asked when they were well away from the village.
“A mandrake. Not the common mandrake. That’s just a little root. This was the swamp mandrake, which is related, but very different. It comes from the east.” Asha reached over to pet Jagdish on the nun’s shoulder. “The roots can drink up almost anything. If you feed one tea, they say it will grow blossoms and the crushed flowers can be used to treat all sorts of ailments. Feed it milk and it will grow little fruits good for curing even more diseases. But if you feed it blood…”
“What happens then?”
Asha sighed. “The mandrake will grow a polyp shaped like the creature whose blood it drank. The polyp isn’t good for anything. It’s full of rotted filth. The plant can’t digest blood, I suppose. The filth inside might even be poisonous.”
“Then all those people were praying to a giant pustule? They were waiting for wisdom from a boy-shaped cancer?” Priya frowned. “And so was I.”
“That’s why I couldn’t lift him. Somewhere underneath was the root connecting the boy to the rest of the tree. But it’s all right now. No one was hurt. It didn’t live long after I cut the roots. And from what the miller said, it sounds like they disposed of it thoroughly. No harm done.”
“You cut the roots? You killed it?”
“Yes. You said it yourself, it was just a big cyst full of toxic pus.”
The nun sighed. “You’re missing the point. Whatever it was, it fostered peace and hope and enlightenment among real people. Those people came for a miracle, and they saw a miracle, and they went home with that miracle in their hearts. Given time, such things can transform the world in powerful and wonderful ways.”
“Transform the world?” Asha glared at her. “It lured dozens of people away from their families and their obligations, and led them all to sit in the dirt, sweating under the sun, shivering in the rain, doing nothing, waiting for someone to tell them what to think, what to believe.”
“You take a very dim view of the search for wisdom.”
“It was a fake miracle. It was just a plant. It filled up a country road with tired bodies. But now those people are at home, living their lives, actually doing something with themselves. And where there was a pile of vagrants, now there’s a group of children playing in the shade. The world I helped to make is better, Priya. It’s better because it’s real.”
They walked along for an hour before either one spoke again.
“Why did he do it?” Priya asked softly. “Why did that doctor feed the mandrake seed to the sick boy? Did he think the seed would heal him?”
“No,” Asha said just as softly. “He knew the boy was going to die. He wasn’t feeding him the seed. He was planting the seed.”
“But why?”
“Why else?” Asha shoved a sliver of ginger into the corner of her mouth. “To see what would happen. You see, Priya? They care about the big picture. The long term. Knowledge for its own sake. They have so many high- minded ideals and goals, but they tend to overlook the people that get trampled along the way.”
“I see. I think I understand now. Thank you.”
“They used to tell me that it was all for saving more lives in the future.” Asha looked down at the road at her feet. “But they never seem to mind losing lives in the here and now.”
Priya nodded. “Well, at the very least, I suppose I’m glad those girls have their place to play again. It was nice to hear them laughing.”
