“I did not ask for a bowl,” said Melchior. Joshua had already skirted the cliff and was sitting next to the yogi with his feet dangling over the edge. There was a seagull in his lap.
“Presentation is half the meal,” I said, quoting something Joy had once said.
Melchior sniffed at the rice grains, then picked one up and held it between his bony fingertips.
“It’s raw.”
“Yes, it is.”
“We can’t eat it raw.”
“Well, I would have served it up steaming with a grain of salt and a molecule of green onion if I’d known you wanted it that way.” (Yeah, we had molecules in those days. Back off.)
“Very well, this will have to do.” The holy man held the bowl with the rice grains in his lap, then closed his eyes. His breathing began to slow, and after a moment he appeared not to be breathing at all.
Josh and I waited. And looked at each other. And Melchior didn’t move. His skeletal chest did not rise with breath. I was hungry and tired, but I waited. And the holy man didn’t move for almost an hour. Considering the recent nook vacancies on the cliff face, I was a little concerned that Melchior might have succumbed to some virulent yogi-killing epidemic.
“He dead?” I asked.
“Can’t tell.”
“Poke him.”
“No, he’s my teacher, a holy man. I’m not poking him.”
“He’s Untouchable.”
Joshua couldn’t resist the irony, he poked him. Instantly the yogi opened his eyes, pointed out to sea and screamed, “Look, a seagull!”
We looked. When we looked back the yogi was holding a full bowl of rice. “Here, go cook this.”
So began Joshua’s training to find what Melchior called the Divine Spark. The holy man was stern with me, but his patience with Joshua was infinite, and it was soon evident that by trying to be part of Joshua’s training I was actually holding him back. So on our third morning living in the cliff, I took a long satisfying whiz over the side (and is there anything so satisfying as whizzing from a high place?) then climbed to the beach and headed into the nearest town to look for a job. Even if Melchior could make a meal out of three grains of rice, I’d scraped all the stray grains out of both my and Joshua’s satchels. The yogi might be able to teach a guy to twist up and lick his own balls, but I couldn’t see that there was much nourishment in it.
The name of the town was Nicobar, and it was about twice the size of Sepphoris in my homeland, perhaps twenty thousand people, most of whom seemed to make their living from the sea, either as fishermen, traders, or shipbuilders. After inquiring at only a few places, I realized that for once it wasn’t my lack of skills that were keeping me from making a living, it was the caste system. It extended far deeper into the society than Rumi had told me. Subcastes of the larger four dictated that if you were born a stonecutter, your sons would be stonecutters, and their sons after them, and you were bound by your birth to never do any other job, regardless of how good or bad you were at it. If you were born a mourner, or a magician, you would die a mourner or a magician, and the only way you’d get out of death or magic was to die and be reincarnated as something else. The one skill that didn’t seem to require belonging to a caste was village idiot, but the Hindus seemed to thrust the more eccentric holy men into this role, so I found no openings there. I did have my bowl, and my experience at collecting alms for the monastery, so I tried my hand at begging, but every time I would get a good corner staked out, along would hop some one-legged blind guy to steal my action. By the late afternoon I had one tiny copper coin and the steward of the beggars guild had come along to warn me that if he caught me begging in Nicobar again, he’d see that I was admitted to the guild by the immediate removal of my arms and legs.
I bought a handful of rice at the market and was skulking out of town, my bowl before me and my head down, like a good monk, when I saw before me a most delicate set of toes, painted vermilion and followed by a dainty foot, an elegant ankle ajangle with copper bangles, an inviting calf decorated with hennaed designs as intricate as lace, and from there a bright skirt led me up the seam to a bejeweled navel, full breasts haltered in yellow silk, lips like plums, a nose as long and straight as a Roman statue’s, and wide brown eyes, shaded in blue and lined to make them look the size of a tiger’s. They drank me in.
“You’re a stranger,” she said. One long finger on my chest stopped me on the spot. I tried to hide my rice bowl in my shirt, and in a fabulous display of sleight of hand, ended up spilling the grains down my front.
“I’m from Galilee. In Israel.”
“Never heard of it. Is it far?” She reached into my shirt and began to pick out the rice grains that had caught against my sash, running her fingernail along my stomach muscles and dropping the grains, one by one, into my bowl.
“Very far. I’ve come here with my friend to obtain sacred and ancient knowledge, that kind of thing.”
“What is your name?”
“Biff—or Levi who is called Biff. We do that ‘who is called’ thing a lot in Israel.”
“Follow me, Biff, I’ll show you some ancient and sacred knowledge.” She hooked her finger into my sash and walked into a nearby doorway, for some reason completely confident that I would follow.
Inside, amid piles of colorful pillows strewn about the floors and deep carpets the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Balthasar’s fortress, stood a carved camphorwood stand on which a large codex lay open. The book was bound in brass filigreed with copper and silver, and the pages were made of a parchment finer than I had ever seen.
The woman pushed me toward the book and left her hand on my back as I looked at the open page. The handwritten script was gilded and so ornate that I could barely make out the words, which didn’t matter anyway, because it was the illustration that caught my eye. A man and a woman, nude, each perfect. The man had the woman facedown on a rug, her feet hooked over his shoulders, her arms held behind her as he entered her. I tried to call on my Buddhist training and discipline to keep from embarrassing myself in front of the strange woman.
“Ancient sacred wisdom,” she said. “The book was a gift from a patron. The Kama Sutra, it’s called. Thread of Desire.”
“The Buddha said that desire is the source of all suffering,” I said, feeling like the kung fu master that I knew I was.
“Do they look like they are suffering?”
“No.” I began to tremble. I had been too long out of the company of women. Far too long.
“Would you like to try that? That suffering. With me?”
“Yes,” I said. All the training, all the discipline, all the control, gone in a word.
“Do you have twenty rupees?”
“No.”
“Then suffer,” she said, and she stepped away.
“See, I told you.”
Then she walked away, trailing the scent of sandalwood and roses behind her as she went to the door, her hips waving good-bye to me all the way across the room, the bangles on her arms and ankles ringing like tiny temple bells calling me to worship at her secret grotto. At the door she crooked a finger for me to follow her out, and I did.
“My name is Kashmir,” she said. “Come back. I’ll teach you ancient and sacred knowledge. One page at time. Twenty rupees each.”
I took my stupid, pathetic, useless grains of rice and went back to my holy, stupid, useless, stupid male friends at the cliff.
“I brought some rice,” I said to Joshua when I had climbed to my nook in the cliff. “Melchior can do his rice thing and we’ll have enough for supper.”
Josh was sitting on the shelf of his nook, his legs folded into the lotus position, hands in the mudra of the compassionate Buddha. “Melchior is teaching the path to the Divine Spark,” Joshua said. “First you have to quiet the mind. That’s why there’s so much physical discipline, attention to breath, you have to be so completely in control that you can see past the illusion of your body.”
“And how is that dif
ferent from what we did in the monastery?”
“It’s subtle, but it’s different. There the mind would ride the wave of action, you could meditate while on the exercise posts, shooting arrows, fighting. There was no goal because there was no place to be but in the moment. Here, the goal is to see beyond the moment, to the soul. I think I’m getting a glimpse. I’m learning the postures. Melchior says that an accomplished yogi can pass his entire body through a hoop the size of his head.”
“That’s great, Josh. Useful. Now let me tell you about this woman I met.” So I jumped over to Josh’s ledge and began to tell him about my day, the woman, the Kama Sutra, and my opinion that this just might be the sort of ancient spiritual information a young Messiah might need.
“Her name is Kashmir, which means soft and expensive.”
“But she’s a prostitute, Biff.”
“Prostitutes didn’t bother you when you were making me help you learn about sex.”
“They still don’t bother me, it’s just that you don’t have any money.”
“I got the feeling she likes me. I think maybe she’ll do me pro bono, if you know what I mean?” I elbowed him in the ribs and winked.
“You mean for the public good. You forget your Latin? ‘Pro bono’ means ‘for the public good.’”
“Oh. I thought it meant something else. She’s not going to do me for that.”
“No, probably not,” said Josh.
So the next day, first thing, I made may way back to Nicobar, determined to find a job, but by noon I found myself sitting on the street next to one of the blind, no-legged beggar kids. The street was packed with traders, haggling, making deals, exchanging cash for goods and services, and the kid was making a killing on the spare change. I was astounded at the amount in the kid’s bowl; there must have been enough for three Kama Sutra pages right there. Not that I would steal from a blind kid.
“Look, Scooter, you look a little tired, you want me to watch the bowl while you take a break?”
“Get your hand out of there!” The kid caught my wrist (me, the kung fu master). He was quick. “I can tell what you’re doing.”
“Okay, fine, how about I show you some magic tricks. A little sleight of hand?”
“Oh, that’ll be fun. I’m blind.”
“Look, make up your mind.”
“I’m going to call for the guild-master if you don’t go away.”
So I went away, despondent, defeated—not money enough to look at the edge of a page of the Kama Sutra. I skulked back to the cliffs, climbed up to my nook, and resolved to console myself with some cold rice left over from last night’s supper. I opened my satchel and—
“Ahhh!” I leapt back. “Josh, what are you doing in there?” And there he was, his beatific old Joshua face with the sole of a foot on either side like big ears, a few vertebrae showing, one hand, my ying-yang amulet vial, and a jar of myrrh.
“Get out of there. How’d you get in there?”
I’ve mentioned our satchels before. The Greeks called them wallets, I guess you would call them duffel bags. They were made of leather, had a long strap we could throw over our shoulder, and I suppose if you’d asked me before, I would have said you could get a whole person in one if you had to, but not in one piece.
“Melchior taught me. It took me all morning to get in here. I thought I’d surprise you.”
“Worked. Can you get out?”
“I don’t think so. I think my hips are dislocated.”
“Okay, where’s my black glass knife?”
“It’s at the bottom of the bag.”
“Why did I know you were going to say that?”
“If you get me out I’ll show you what else I learned. Melchior taught me how to multiply the rice.”
A few minutes later Joshua and I were sitting on the ledge of my nook being bombarded by seagulls. The seagulls were attracted by the huge pile of cooked rice that lay between us on the ledge.
“That’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.” Except that you really couldn’t see it done. One minute you had a handful of rice, the next a bushel.
“Melchior says that it usually takes a lot longer for a yogi to learn to manipulate matter like this.”
“How much longer?”
“Thirty, forty years. Most of the time they pass on before they learn.”
“So this is like the healing. Part of your, uh, legacy?”
“This isn’t like the healing, Biff. This can be taught, given the time.”
I tossed a handful of rice into the air for some seagulls. “Tell you what. Melchior obviously doesn’t like me, so he’s not going to teach me anything. Let’s trade knowledge.”
I brought rice to Joshua, had him multiply it, then sold the surplus in the market, and eventually I started trading fish instead of rice because I could raise twenty rupees in fewer trips. But before that, I asked Joshua to come to town with me. We went to the market, which was thick with traders, haggling, making deals, exchanging cash for goods and services, and over on the side, a blind and legless beggar was making a killing on the change.
“Scooter, I’d like you to meet my friend Joshua.”
“My name’s not Scooter,” said the waif.
A half hour later Scooter could see again and miraculously his severed legs had been regenerated.
“You bastards!” said Scooter as he ran off on clean new pink feet.
“Go with God,” Joshua said.
“Now I guess we’ll see how easy it is to earn a living!” I shouted after the kid.
“He didn’t seem very pleased,” said Josh.
“He’s only learning to express himself. Forget him, others are suffering as well.”
And so it came to pass, that Joshua of Nazareth moved among them, healing them and performing miracles, and all the little blind children of Nicobar did see again, and all the lame did stand up and walk.
The little fuckers.
And so the exchange of knowledge began: what I was learning from Kashmir and the Kama Sutra for what Joshua was learning from the holy man Melchior. Each morning, before I went to town and before Joshua went to learn from his guru, we met on the beach and shared ideas and breakfast. Usually some rice and a fresh fish roasted over the fire. We’d gone long enough without eating animal flesh, we had decided, despite what Melchior and Gaspar tried to teach us.
“This ability to increase the bounty of food—imagine what we can do for the people of Israel, of the world.”
“Yes, Josh, for it is written: ‘Give a man a fish and he eats for a day, but teach a man to be a fish and his friends eat for a week.’”
“That is not written. Where is that written?”
“Amphibians five-seven.”
“There’s no friggin’ Amphibians in the Bible.”
“Plague of frogs. Ha! Gotcha!”
“How long’s it been since you had a beating?”
“Please. You can’t hit anyone, you have to be at total peace with all creation so you can find Sparky the Wonder Spirit.”
“The Divine Spark.”
“Whatever, th—ouch. Oh great, and what am I supposed to do, hit the Messiah back?”
“Turn the other cheek. Go ahead, turn it.”
As I said, thus did the enlightened exchange of sacred and ancient teachings begin:
The Kama Sutra sayeth:
When a woman winds her small toes into the armpit hair of the man, and the man hops upon one foot, while supporting the woman on his lingam and a butter churn, then the achieved position is called “Rhinoceros Balancing a Jelly Donut.”
“What’s a jelly donut?” Joshua asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a Vedic term lost to antiquity, but it is said to have had great significance to the keepers of the law.”
“Oh.”
The Katha Upanishad sayeth:
Beyond the senses are the objects,
and beyond the objects is the mind.
Beyond the mind is pure reason,
and beyond reason is the Spirit in man.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You have to think about it, but it means that there’s something eternal in everyone.”
“That’s swell. What’s with the guys on the bed of nails?”
“A yogi must leave his body if he is going to experience the spiritual.”
“So he leaves through the little holes in his back?”
“Let’s start again.”
The Kama Sutra sayeth:
When a man applies wax from the carnuba bean to a woman’s yoni and buffs it with a lint-free cloth or a papyrus towel until a mirror shine is achieved, then it is called Readying the Mongoose for Trade-in.”
“Look, she sells me pieces of sheepskin parchment, and each time, after we’re finished, I’m allowed to copy the drawings. I’m going to tie them all together and make my own codex.”
“You did that? That looks like it hurts.”
“This from a guy I had to break out of a wine jar with a hammer yesterday.”
“Yeah, well, it wouldn’t have happened if I’d remembered to grease my shoulders like Melchior taught me.” Joshua turned the drawing to get a different angle on it. “You’re sure this doesn’t hurt?”
“No, not if you keep your bottom away from the incense burners.”
“No, I mean her.”
“Oh, her. Well, who knows? I’ll ask her.”
The Bhagavad Gita sayeth:
I am impartial to all creatures,
and no one is hateful or dear to me,
but men devoted to me are in me,
and I am in them.
“What’s the Bhagavad Gita?”
“It’s like a long poem in which the god Krishna advises the warrior Arjuna as he drives his chariot into battle.”
“Really, what’s he advise him?”
“He advises him not to feel bad about killing the enemy, because they are essentially already dead.”
“You know what I’d advise him if I was a god? I’d advise him to get someone else to drive his friggin’ chariot. The real God wouldn’t be caught dead driving a chariot.”
“Well, you have to look at it as a parable, otherwise it sort of reeks of false gods.”
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal Page 31