"You're in charge now," said Will, smiling down at the child by his side.
Mary Sarojini nodded gravely and took his hand. "Let's go and see what's happening in the square," she said.
"How old is your Granny Lakshmi?" Will asked as they started to make their way along the crowded street.
"I don't really know," Mary Sarojini answered. "She looksterribly old. But maybe that's because she's got cancer."
"Do you know what cancer is?" he asked.
Mary Sarojini knew perfectly well. "It's what happens when part of you forgets all about the rest of you and carries on the way people do when they're crazy-just goes on blowing itself up and blowing itself up as if there was nobody else in the whole world. Sometimes you can do something about it. But generally it just goes on blowing itself up until the person dies."
"And that's what has happened, I gather, to your Granny Lakshmi."
"And now she needs someone to help her die."
"Does your mother often help people die?"
The child nodded. "She's awfully good at it."
"Have you ever seen anyone die?"
"Of course," Mary Sarojini answered, evidently surprised that such a question should be asked. "Let me see." She made a mental calculation. "I've seen five people die. Six, if you count babies."
"I hadn't seen anyone die when I was your age."
"You hadn't?"
"Only a dog."
"Dogs die easier than people. They don't talk about it beforehand."
"How do you feel about. . . about people dying?"
"Well, it isn't nearly so bad as having babies. That's awful. Or at least it looks awful. But then you remind yourself that it doesn't hurt at all. They've turned off the pain."
"Believe it or not," said Will, "I've never seen a baby being born."
"Never?" Mary Sarojini was astonished. "Not even when you were at school?"
Will had a vision of his headmaster in full canonicals conducting three hundred black-coated boys on a tour of the Lying-in Hospital. "Not even at school," he said aloud.
"You never saw anybody dying, and you never saw anybody having a baby. How did you get to know things?"
"In the school I went to," he said, "we never got to know things, we only got to know words."
The child looked up at him, shook her head and, lifting a small brown hand, significantly tapped her forehead. "Crazy," she said. "Or were your teachers just stupid?"
Will laughed. "They were high-minded educators dedicated to mens sana in corpore sano and the maintenance of our sublime Western Tradition. But meanwhile tell me something. Weren't you ever frightened?"
"By people having babies?"
"No, by people dying. Didn't that scare you?"
"Well, yes-it did," she said after a moment of silence.
"So what did you do about it?"
"I did what they teach you to do-tried to find out which of me was frightened and why she was frightened."
"And which of you was it?"
"This one." Mary Sarojini pointed a forefinger into her open mouth. "The one that does all the talking. Little Miss Gibber- that's what Vijaya calls her. She's always talking about all the nasty things I remember, all the huge, wonderful, impossible things I imagine I can do. She's the one that gets frightened."
"Why is she so frightened?"
"I suppose it's because she gets talking about all the awful things that might happen to her. Talking out loud or talking to herself. But there's another one who doesn't get frightened."
"Which one is that?"
"The one that doesn't talk-just looks and listens and feels what's going on inside. And sometimes," Mary Sarojini added, "sometimes she suddenly sees how beautiful everything is. No, that's wrong. She sees it all the time, but / don't-not unless she-makes me notice it. That's when it suddenly happens. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful! Even dog's messes." She pointed at a formidable specimen almost at their feet.
From the narrow street they had emerged into the marketplace. The last of the sunlight still touched the sculptured spire of the temple, the little pink gazebos on the roof of the town hall; but here in the square there was premonition of twilight and under the great banyan tree it was already night. On the stalls between its pillars and hanging ropes the market women had turned on their lights. In the leafy darkness there were islands of form and color, and from hardly visible nonentity brown-skinned figures stepped for a moment into brilliant exis tence, then back again into nothingness. The spaces between the tall buildings echoed with a confusion of English and Palanese, of talk and laughter, of street cries and whistled tunes, of dogs barking, parrots screaming. Perched on one of the pink gazebos, a pair of mynah birds called indefatigably for attention and compassion. From an open-air kitchen at the center of the square rose the appetizing smell of food on the fire. Onions, peppers, turmeric, fish frying, cakes baking, rice on the boil-and through these good gross odors, like a reminder from the Other Shore, drifted the perfume, thin and sweet and ethereally pure, of the many-colored garlands on sale beside the fountain.
Twilight deepened and suddenly, from high overhead, the arc lamps were turned on. Bright and burnished against the rosy copper of oiled skin, the women's necklaces and rings and bracelets came alive with glittering reflections. Seen in the downward striking light, every contour became more dramatic, every form seemed to be more substantial, more solidly there. In eye sockets, under nose and chin the shadows deepened. Modeled by light and darkness young breasts grew fuller and the faces of the old were more emphatically lined and hollowed.
Hand in hand they made their way through the crowd.
A middle-aged woman greeted Mary Sarojini, then turned to Will. "Are you that man from the Outside?" she asked.
"Almost infinitely from the outside," he assured her.
She looked at him for a moment in silence, then smiled encouragingly and patted his cheek.
"We're all very sorry for you," she said.
They moved on, and now they were standing on the fringes of a group assembled at the foot of the temple steps to listen to a young man who was playing a long-necked, lute-like instrument and singing in Palanese. Rapid declamation alternated with long-drawn, almost birdlike melismata on a single vowel sound, and then a cheerful and strongly accented tune that ended in a shout. A roar of laugher went up from the crowd. A few more bars, another line or two of recitative, and the singer struck his final chord. There was applause and more laughter and a chorus of incomprehensible commentary.
"What's it all about?" Will asked.
"It's about girls and boys sleeping together," Mary Sarojini answered.
"Oh-I see." He felt a pang of guilty embarrassment; but, looking down into the child's untroubled face, he could see that his concern was uncalled for. It was evident that boys and girls sleeping together were as completely to be taken for granted as going to school or eating three meals a day-or dying.
"And the part that made them laugh," Mary Sarojini went on, "was where he said the Future Buddha won't have to leave home and sit under the Bodhi Tree. He'll have his Enlightenment while he's in bed with the princess."
"Do you think that's a good idea?" Will asked.
She nodded emphatically. "It would mean that the princess would be enlightened too."
"You're perfectly right," said Will. "Being a man, I hadn't thought of the princess."
The lute player plucked a queer unfamiliar progression of chords, followed them with a ripple of arpeggios and began to sing, this time in English.
"Everyone talks of sex; take none of them seriously- Not whore nor hermit, neither Paul nor Freud.
Love-and your lips, her breasts will change mysteriously Into Themselves, the Suchness and the Void."
The door of the temple swung open. A smell of incense min gled with the ambient onions and fried fish. An old woman emerged and very cautiously lowered her unsteady weight from stair to stair.