Empire of Bones (3 page)

"It's okay," Fraser said offhandedly, "she doesn't speak English," and Jaya thanked whatever gods there might be that she had lied to the doctor about
that
, too. "Well, to be honest with you, I'm not sure. We still know so little about Selenge. She has some of the hallmarks of the disease, but it's as though it's in a chronic form, rather than the short-term, fatal variety."

"And she's an untouchable?" He reached out and, without even looking Jaya in the face, turned over her wrist to display the scarred circle of skin. "Yes. I can see where she's had her caste mark removed."

Fraser looked uncomfortable. "Well, she is
dalit
, as they prefer to be called—that or Scheduled Caste—but—"

"And the retrovirus is principally confined to that particu-lar caste," the male doctor persisted.

"Yes, that's true. But Selenge is a relatively new disease, and as I'm sure you're aware, we're not really sure what the rami-fications of it might be. It seems to be related to a virulent form of lupus, but it doesn't respond to treatment." Fraser added, "This might be a related set of symptoms, or it might not." She was trying to be conciliatory, but Jaya could hear the edge of anger beneath her voice, and smiled to herself.

The doctors began a long discussion. Jaya wished they'd go away. She could even smell them: they stank of milk and meat and disinfectant. She turned her head away and closed her eyes, forcing their loud voices out of her mind. Drifting back into the past, she did not even notice when at last they left.

HER father was unusually gentle with Jaya during the days of her convalescence. He brought her food, anything she fancied, and he told her stories about his childhood in faraway Mumbai: the long struggle to get out of the slums, only to be plunged back into poverty with a shift of political mood. His kindness made Jaya nervous. She could feel a kind of tense impatience underneath it, as though he couldn't wait for her to get back to work. She knew he only wanted the best for her, and yet… The countryside was full of miracle workers, peo-ple playing on the need and greed of the villages—and full of members of the Rationalist Society, following hot on their heels, showing how the "wonders" and "miracles" were truly done.

"Rationalists," Jaya's father said with a snort. "They're right, of course. It's nothing but tricks, but that's not the point. People want to believe, Jaya. That's what the movies are all about, after all. There's a
shrine
to Amitabh Shektar down the road—he's not a bloody god, he's an actor; I knew his brother-in-law back in Mumbai. But they've seen him as Shiva in the films and that's what they want to believe in, don't they? City folk say they're stupid, but they're not, it's just that they need
something
.

Don't you agree?" He was pleading with her, ask-ing her to sanction a lifetime of fraud. "These people, the Rationalists, they don't understand what our lives are like. If you live a life of drudgery, you need magic. You need to be-lieve in something beyond yourself."

He talked on, trying to convince Jaya and himself that it was a public service they were performing. Jaya huddled on the slats of the
charpoy
, not listening.
There has to be something better than this
, she thought.
There has to be something more than cheap tricks
. She wished she could believe in gods, but perhaps they were all just actors, too.

Heat spilled over the sill of the window and dust danced in the heavy air. The compound smelled of fried cumin and the astringency of the cow piss that the women swilled over the floors to keep the insects away. She could hear a bird in the trees beyond the village: a long, repetitive call like a drop of water falling into a pool. And gradually, slowly, she heard the voice again.

It began to tell her about the sun, and how it absorbed the light of the sun into itself. The voice told her many things, all at the same time. It started to relay information: telling her that Assam and Kashmir would soon be at war, that the gov-ernment of Bharat was planning a treaty with the Novy Soviet. And as it spoke, Jaya began to echo what it said, be-neath her breath, over and over until she realized that her fa-ther had fallen silent and was staring at her.

"What?" she stammered, and the day spun around her. "What did I say?"

Her father was looking at her with an unfamiliar expres-sion: wariness, calculation, a hint of fear. "How do you know all this?"

She said, "I—I don't know. Something's speaking to me."

"You're making it up, aren't you? You're lying to me!"

She flinched at the whip of anger in his voice, protesting, "No! I'm not making it up. How could I? I don't know about these things. Something's
talking
to me," she repeated, desper-ate to make him believe that what she was saying was the truth. At the time, she did not realize it was a mistake.

It took a while for Jaya's reputation as an oracle to grow. But the villagers of Uttar Pradesh remembered the little girl who could so wonderfully produce objects out of thin air, who for a short time satisfied them that the gods were real, and over the next few months a steady stream of people came to visit her. When she realized what she'd done, she tried to con-vince her father that it was nothing more than the usual lies after all. But perhaps he wanted to believe in something other than himself, too, for he wouldn't listen. He started to talk, to anyone and everyone, telling them that his daughter spoke with the voice of the gods.

More visitors came, and Jaya began to learn the extent of her powers. The voice, it seemed, was telling the truth. Things that Jaya predicted came to pass, and word spread. It both elated and scared her.

Having believed in nothing for so long, she couldn't quite bring herself to suc-cumb to her own growing legend. Her talent was impressive, but the visitors didn't want to hear about grand events on a world scale. They wanted to hear about their own futures, their own lives, and about these things Jaya knew nothing.

"Just tell them anything," her father raged, frustrated.

"But I don't know!"

"Then make something up. You've had enough practice."

She refused at first, but after a while she came to see that her father was right: people needed something to believe in. And it soon became evident to her that any vague hint would satisfy them. But though it would have been easy to despise them, to become a cynic like her father, Jaya couldn't help feeling guilty instead, even as the money kept coming in.

The nurse at the mission came to visit, and she seemed con-cerned as much by the pain in Jaya's joints, which had yet to go away, as by the voice that Jaya said she heard. The nurse did some tests, but they didn't show anything, and soon after this Jaya's father took her away. They had a new place, he ex-plained, granted by a benefactor. At first, this was no more than a larger, whitewashed hut from which goats had hastily been evicted, but with the money coming in they were soon able to move to a small house. Jaya had never known so much luxury. She had
chappals
on her feet now, and a new dress. She wore wealth in her ears and on her fingers, alongside the old garnet ring, which now fitted closely onto her finger. Then Westerners started coming, to see this new guru for themselves. They brought dollars with them, and everything changed.

By Jaya's fifteenth year, the ashram extended over several acres and the visitors were flooding in from America and Europe. Jaya's father hired a tutor—a good one, educated at Oxford, who crammed her full of knowledge like someone stuffing a fig. She learned mathematics, history, geography, English, a host of things, and she drank in the knowledge as though it were water after a long thirst. After all, her father said, what was the use of being a prophet if you didn't know what you were talking about? Education, that was the thing.

Articles were written about the young oracle, whom some people were claiming was not an ordinary
dalit
girl after all, but an avatar of Sarasvati, Goddess of Wisdom. But Jaya knew that it was the same old thing: illusion and lies, with the disturbing, discordant voice of the truth running beneath it like water under mud. Sometimes she thought she might sim-ply be mad, lying awake in the soft darkness with that remote murmur of information traveling through her mind; some-times she believed it was just the sickness.

The pain still hadn't gone away. It twisted her body, some-times so badly that it bent her forward like a little old woman. There was a thick white streak in her dark hair. Sometimes she wondered whether it was a punishment for the throat-cutting trick, for cheating the gods of what was rightfully theirs, the power over life and death. Maybe threefold Shiva was watching—the creator, the destroyer, and the balance in between—reaching down with his trident to cut her life away, piece by piece. If this was what it was like to be a goddess, Jaya thought, then she'd rather just be a girl.

And then something happened to change her mind.

The woman and her small son had come all the way from Mumbai; they were untouchables. They had saved money from rag-picking, the mother told Jaya, and eventually they had enough for the bus fare. It had taken three days to reach the ashram. The mother was widowed, and she wanted Jaya to tell the little boy's future for him in exchange for a bag of rupees. It was all the money they had, she said anxiously, but she wanted Jaya to have it. Jaya looked at the woman, saw the holes in her nose and ears, and knew that she had sold her rings to pay for the offering. Her sari was worn, and stained with mud and dust from the journey. Jaya was about to tell the widow to keep the money when her father reached over her shoulder and whisked the bag away before she had time to protest.

"Well, what are you waiting for?" he snapped. "This lady's come halfway across the country to hear her fortune."

The widow's face was full of hope. Jaya, feeling like the world's biggest fraud, put a benedictory hand on the little boy's head. And instantly, she knew that something was very wrong. The voice was a murmur in her mind, telling of sickness, of death. As the child gazed up at her, Jaya could see the first faint silvery striations of Selenge beneath the skin of his throat. Her father had seen it, too; she glimpsed the warn-ing in his eyes.

"Can I speak to you privately?" she said to the widow.

"Jaya—"

"The gods have a message for this woman, Father," Jaya told him, sounding as pompous as possible.

"No one else must hear it."

Standing, she swept the widow and the little boy into the sanctum that stood behind the main room, and as gently as she could, she told the woman that the child was sick. She did not say that she had seen his death. Selenge took its victims hard; the muscles wasted away, the victims failing fast. The widow's face buckled with shock. She plucked at Jaya's sleeve.

"Are you sure?"

"It's possible I might be wrong," Jaya said clumsily. "But you can see it for yourself."

And then she realized that the widow already knew. Like the conjuror's audience, she was blotting out the truth, seeing only what she wanted to see: hoping to be deceived, praying for a last-minute miracle.

Jaya expected tears and recrimina-tions, but after a long moment the widow said quietly, "Do you believe in karma? Do you believe this is somehow my fault, and the fault of the child?"

Jaya thought for a moment. One of her earliest memories was of her father, shouting that fate was unkind, railing about what he must have done in a past life to be made so wretched now. But then the voice had come and brought them riches; was that destiny, too? Was it some virtue inherent in her soul that made her superior and blessed whereas this woman was about to lose the thing most precious to her? And was it the karma of
the dalits
as a caste that had caused them to fall from grace beneath the whim of Hindu fundamentalism and the curse of a modern plague, reversing the beneficial conse-quences of half a century of progress? Jay a decided, once and for all, that destiny had nothing to do with it.

"No," she said. "I don't believe in karma. I don't think any of it—your position, your caste, the boy's illness—is your fault. You're not responsible for this." Anger rang in her ears. "But the system is."

She told the widow they could stay at the ashram as long as they wanted, free of charge. Her father protested, but Jaya wouldn't listen. And the widow was only the beginning. Disregarding her father's pleas, she began to house more and more people at the ashram, and put money into adding more buildings. She read Gandhi, and Marx. She read about the green revolution of the twentieth century. And she started to have ideas.

"Think what we could do," she urged her father one day as they sat in the flower-filled hall of the ashram.

"Look at the others. Shrimati Avati. Rama Krishna. Those Mumbaikars running Rajneesh's old outfit.

They publish
books
. People buy them in London, even. New York. And they're no more than showmen, like we were. If I start speaking out against the caste system… Just think what we could accomplish."

At that point the first visitors of the day came in. Jaya and her father hastily composed themselves into smiling serenity before anyone noticed anything, and the consultation of the oracle began. But throughout the day a thought kept return-ing to her, fueled by what she later realized to be adolescent idealism. /

know I'm not a goddess, but maybe the gods are real and put me here… Maybe 1 can make a
difference
.

She stood in front of the mirror, gazing at her grave face: thin, with the bones too prominent and her eyes like wells be-neath the arched brows. She wondered, as she always did, whether she resembled her mother. A not-quite Dravidian face: sharp northern bones and dark southern skin. Her face looked fierce.

She found that it was frighteningly easy to become Joan of

Arc, or Phoolan Devi. When she spoke out, questioning the injustices of the restored caste system, questioning the ancient hierarchies on which Bharat was based, it was as though her words were a flame racing through the dry grass, setting everything on fire. She wasn't saying anything new; the sys-tem had been questioned many times before, and changed, and changed back again. But now it was as though everyone was waiting for a new figurehead. A stream of people queued at the gates of the ashram: ardent young men; angry dispos-sessed widows; civil servants who had lost their positions to the upper castes in the last stages of restoration; Western ideal-ists. Before Jaya knew it, she had an army.