She crept to the bowl and picked up one of the little black objects and found it was a fruit, though not one she recognized. It had a rough, wrinkled, leathery skin covered in prickly little hairs. Asha held the fruit to her ear, listening for the telltale thrum of life, the sound of the seed’s tiny, unborn plant soul. After a moment she heard it. The fruit rang like a silver coin flung into the air to spin on the wind.
“No.”
Asha stumbled away from the bowl and tripped over someone’s legs, falling back hard on her rear with the fruit clutched in her fist. “Who? Who’s there?”
Silence. Asha stared around the room. Priya was still sleeping soundly in the corner. And when Asha turned her right ear from side to side, she heard only the aetheric hums and whines and booms of the forest, the insects, the birds, and the six old people lying on the floor. Souls everywhere, but none of them new.
“Please.”
Asha looked down and saw a wrinkled face with yellowing eyes staring up at her. The old woman was drawn and thin, weathered and withered like an old tree desiccated by the sun and the wind in some dry and thirsty land.
“You’re awake.” Asha knelt beside the woman and cradled her fragile head in her hands. “Why are you all alone here? Who is taking care of you?”
“Fruit.” The woman shook her clawing fingers at the morsel in Asha’s hand.
Asha gave the rough little fruit to the woman, who gently pressed it whole between her lips. After a moment of awkward jawing and grunting, she swallowed it. The woman smiled. “Thank you.”
Asha leaned down close to the woman’s face, trying to inspect her eyes and mouth in the darkness. “Is there someone coming to care for you?”
“No,” the woman whispered. “We’re alone.”
“But you’re dying.”
“No. Not dying.”
Asha frowned. “Go back to sleep. We’ll talk in the morning.”
The woman closed her eyes.
3
When the sun’s first pale pinks and yellows streaked the sky, Asha was still awake. She sat in the corner with her back against the wall, staring out across the room. Priya yawned and sat up. Jagdish rolled out of her hair, shook himself from whiskers to tail, and then squeaked for his breakfast. Priya nudged the little mongoose away and he scampered out the door in search of his own food.
“Did you sleep well?” the nun asked.
“I spoke to that woman.” Asha pointed at one of the motionless figures. Then she pressed one of the rough fruits into her friend’s hand. “I heard these falling through the roof. Eight of them fell into the room during the night.”
Priya rolled the tiny fruit in her palm. “What is it?”
“It looks like a gurbir, almost like a strawberry. But different. Darker and rougher.” Asha took the fruit back. “Don’t eat them.”
“Are they poisonous?”
“I don’t know. But during the night, I watched each of our friends here wake up just long enough to eat one or two of them and then fall back asleep. They swallowed them whole.”
Priya sat very still with her hands resting in her lap and her face pointed out across the room as though she could see the people on the floor. “Then are these people starving to death? They must be if they’re only eating a single berry each day.”
“Maybe.” Asha frowned. “But why would six people all lie down to die in this house, which just happens to be providing enough food to keep them alive? There’s something wrong with these fruits.”
“No,” whispered the woman on the floor. It was same woman Asha had spoken to during the night, and though her eyes were not open, her lips were moving slightly.
Asha crept forward and leaned her left ear down to the woman’s mouth. “My name is Asha. I’m an herbalist. What’s your name?”
“Hasika.”
“Hasika, how did you come to be here like this? Are you sick? Where are you from? And who are these other people?”
“My family,” Hasika whispered. “Father, mother, sisters, brother.”
“Is this house your home?” Priya asked.
“Yes.”
Asha held up one of the dark fruits. “What are these? I’ve never seen them before.”
“I don’t know.” Hasika’s voice sounded like dry leaves on the wind. “We never noticed them either, until one day when we found one had fallen through a hole in the roof. We didn’t have much food, so we started eating those berries.”
“How do they taste?” Asha sniffed the one in her hand.
“Terrible. They sting and burn your throat and nostrils, but only if you bite into them.”
Asha nodded. “So that’s why you swallow them whole. You know, bad tastes are nature’s way of telling you not to eat something, right? How long have you been eating these things?”
“I don’t know. It must have been soon after the little prince was born. Prince Pratap.”
Asha glanced back at Priya before remembering that the nun knew nothing of recent politics and the name meant nothing to her. “Prince Pratap is now Lord Pratap Singh. He was born over thirty years ago.”
The shriveled old woman blinked. “Oh my.”
“I don’t understand,” Asha said. “There’s no way that you could all live so long just eating these little fruits.”
Hasika smiled. “Well, we don’t move about much.”
Asha looked around sharply. “Then who cleans up after you?”
“No one. No need.”
Asha frowned. “That doesn’t seem healthy.”
“It’s healthy. Unless you stop eating them.”
Asha quickly set the fruit down in the bowl and wiped her hand on her sari. “What happens if you stop eating them?”
4
“When I was old enough, I married a young man named Niraj from the village at the bottom of the road,” Hasika said. “He was a very good tracker and trapper, and he was very good at building and fixing things. So when we married, he came to live here with my family instead of having me live with him in the village. Here, he could build his own house and help my father, and be closer to the game trails. And by living away from the village, he said he could keep the smells of people off his clothing, which made it easier for him to go hunting.
“The first year was very nice. We built this house and he was able to catch more than enough food for our table and to sell in the village. But then we had a very dry summer, and there were fires, and Niraj would come home empty-handed more often than not. We were all very worried. We asked everyone for advice, even travelers on the road. There was talk about moving on over the mountains to another village closer to the sea. But one little old man said we should wait a bit longer, so we did. It was easier to wait than to go. And then one night the first of these strange fruits fell through the roof. They tasted terrible, as I said, but we were worried about starving, so we tried boiling them and baking them, and eventually we just swallowed them whole.
“Days went by and Niraj was still unable to find any food in the forest and soon we were all living only on the fruits.” Hasika sighed. “We grew weaker, of course. We knew we were starving, so one night we discussed the matter and decided to leave the next morning for the villages beyond the mountains.
“But that night, something strange happened. We dreamed. We all dreamed about this house and this forest. But the house was huge and beautiful, with rooms for each of us, and more food than we could eat, and the forest was warm and every branch and vine was drooping with bright flowers and delicious berries.” Hasika swallowed. “In the morning we talked and found we had all dreamed the same dream. My parents thought the dream might be a vision of the future, a message from Vishnu, a promise of wealth and happiness if we stayed in this house. So we stayed a little longer. Every day we ate the little fruits that fell through the roof and every night we dreamed of living in another world, a better world. And day by day, we all wasted away until we were too weak to move.”
Priya reached out to touch Asha’s kn
ee. The nun said, “Could this fruit be cursed? Could the tree that drops it be possessed by some restless ghost? What sort of spirit would want to trap these poor people in a living death like this?”
Asha shook her head. “No, I don’t think so.” She brushed her long black hair behind her right ear, tugging free the few strands that snagged on the rough dragon scales on her skin. “We’ve been here half a day and I haven’t heard anything like that nearby.”
“Heard?” Hasika frowned.
Asha tilted her head down to show her scaled ear. “I can hear things, living and otherwise. I can hear you and your family, the forest, the animals, even the tree leaning over your house. But I don’t hear any spirits.”
“What happened to Niraj?” Priya asked. “You said the other people here now were your parents and siblings, but not your husband. Where is he?”
Hasika nodded. “After many months of living like this, lying on the floor, drifting in and out of our blissful dreams, Niraj said he couldn’t go on. He was ashamed of what had become of us. He said he would rather die outside than lie on the floor like a corpse, so he stopped eating the fruit.”
Asha glanced around the room. “What happened to his body?”
Hasika shook her head. “Niraj didn’t die. After two days without the fruit, he found he could sit up. He was still very weak, of course, but his skin was soft and he could breathe easy. He crawled outside and drank from the stream at the bottom of the hill. The next day he crawled back inside with half a mango he found on the ground. Day by day, he grew stronger eating the mangos and drinking from the stream until soon he could stand and walk, and he looked like his old self again. With only one mouth to feed instead of seven, it was easy for him live off the land here.”
“And then he left you,” Asha said.
“No. He stayed. He repaired the house, all but the roof so we could have our fruits,” Hasika said. “Niraj begged us all to stop eating the fruits. He still wanted to cross the mountains and find a new home. And I remember he wanted children.”
“But?” Priya petted her little mongoose.
“But I couldn’t give up the fruits. None of us could. The dreams are so vivid, so real. Sometimes I wonder if the dreams are the real world and this dark, dirty room is just a nightmare I sometimes fall into.” Hasika closed her eyes.
“If Niraj didn’t starve and he didn’t leave, then where is he?” Asha touched the woman’s cheek. “Where is your husband?”
Hasika sighed. “He stayed a year. For a whole year, he stayed here, watching over us, talking to us. I would wake to eat my fruit and hear him whispering to us in the dark, and then I would go back to my dreams. I didn’t even listen to him. But one night, I woke and saw him sitting in the doorway, silhouetted against the starlight. He was gasping for breath. The next night, he was lying on the floor by the door, as though he’d just fallen over the night before. And the night after that he was dead. His flesh shriveled and hardened, just like ours, just like before. He lay there for days, and then one night I awoke and his body was gone. Just gone.”
Asha nodded. “Scavengers. Dogs or dholes, probably.”
“So you see,” Hasika said. “If we stop eating the fruit, we’ll live only a year or so, and then we’ll die. So we continue to eat the fruit, and we dream.” She shivered. “I’m so tired.”
“Sleep now.” Asha eased the woman’s head back down to the floor. “We’ll talk again later.”
5
“We’ve seen something like this before,” Priya said gently. “Addiction. Hallucination. Dependence.”
“No. Not like this. Nothing like this.” Asha stared at the withered lines of Hasika’s face. “Desiccated. Starved. At death’s door. If they stop eating the fruit, they recover. Then they die a year later. This is different. This is new.”
The sun hung well above the eastern trees, but its light was still pale and the sky was still dark slate in the west, and the breeze blew quite cool through the open windows.
“Can you help them?” the nun asked.
“I have no idea.” Asha began to chew on a fresh sliver of ginger. “But I’ll try.”
“What can I do to help?”
Asha shrugged. “Play with Jagdish. Tell stories. Criticize my outlook on life. You know, the usual.” The herbalist opened her bag and drew out her tools one by one. Glasses, vials, needles, lenses, mortar and pestle, paper packets, cloth bags, silk thread, and clay jars. Musty, earthen aromas hung in the air, lingering close to the woman’s clothes and hands, until the morning breeze rose up and swept them all away.
She inspected each of the motionless dreamers in turn, peering into their yellowed eyes and their pale mouths. She passed scented vials under their noses, rubbed ointments on their skin, pricked their fingers and toes with her needles, and passed her scaled ear over the length of their bodies, listening. She found nothing but brittle limbs wrapped in papery flesh, weak lungs and hearts, and restless minds lost in fantasy.
Priya said, “I’m trying to decide whether these people have succumbed to their desire to escape their suffering, or whether they may have unwittingly found a loophole in the cycle of life and death. I was taught that life is suffering and suffering comes from desire, thus to escape suffering you must free yourself from desire. But these people… They seem to have escaped their suffering by embracing their desire completely. And at the same time, they have escaped death itself. They live forever in perfect bliss in a dream world. And who am I to say their dream world is any better or worse than Lord Buddha’s nirvana?”
Asha hovered over Hasika. “Are you serious? You wouldn’t say that if you could see them. They’re a bunch of delusional vegetables. But if you really think this is paradise, then I can give you some of their little fruits to eat.”
Priya smiled her mysterious smile. “Not today.”
“Afraid?”
“No,” the nun said. “But if I went to sleep here, who would take care of Jagdish?” The little mongoose chattered on her shoulder.
“I’d be happy to let him sit on my shoulder.” Asha began her inspection of Hasika’s body at the feet and worked her way up. “I might even feed him.”
“Ah, but then who would take care of you?”
Asha smiled wryly. “I managed on my own just fine before I met you.”
“Really? You never talk about those days. Tell me a story about how you managed just fine without me.” Priya smiled a bit wider.
Asha paused at Hasika’s knees. “Several years ago I was in Delhi studying the rats. I’d heard a rumor that some people bitten by these rats had been miraculously healed. Arthritis, deafness, blindness. Other people had died instantly, as though they’d been poisoned.”
Priya nodded. “I think I’ve heard of the rats of Delhi. What did you find?”
“Nothing. Nothing but common rats and common lies. I get that a lot, actually.” Asha rubbed gently at the rough, wrinkled skin of Hasika’s leg. “I went to sleep in a nunnery, and in the night I was attacked by one of the men I had spoken with about the rats. He must have followed me there.”
Priya’s smile vanished.
“I woke with a hand on my mouth and a knee on my leg, holding me down. He stank of urine.” Asha spoke softly, her eyes fixed on her patient. “I remember the way my heart pounded in my chest. I was gasping for breath, choking on the stink of him. I felt my bag at my side. I shoved my hand inside the bag and when he leaned down closer, I stabbed him through the ear with one of my needles.”
She paused to glance at her bag where the needle in question lay wrapped in silk.
“You killed him?” Priya asked. “You killed that man?”
“I did. It wasn’t the first time, and it wasn’t the last time. And if given the choice, I would do it again exactly the same.” Asha sniffed. “Maybe a little faster.”
“But killing is…evil.”
“No, murder is evil. Rape is evil. But killing an animal in self defense is simply nature’s way.” Asha leaned down
to listen to Hasika’s body. She heard the blood flowing thick and sluggish in the veins, the air drifting lazily in the lungs. “Everything that lives must die. Sometimes naturally, sometimes violently. Sometimes for good reasons or bad reasons or no reason at all. Everyone dies. Except for these people, it seems.”
Priya shivered in her corner of the room. “I was taught not to fear death. I was taught… I was told that it…”
“Yeah, I know.” Asha glanced back at the tiny nun hunched in the shadows. “We’re all taught things. And then we go out into the world and start to learn for the first time.”
The herbalist rubbed her eyes a moment and then leaned back down to listen to the rhythms of life in Hasika’s feeble body one last time. The soft heart beat, the faint flutter of breath. And…
Asha frowned. “Unbelievable.”
6
“Hasika? Hasika?” Asha stroked the woman’s cheek. She didn’t dare shake the woman’s brittle shoulder.
It was late. The sun had set hours ago and Asha had sat there all the while, watching and waiting as the shadows grew longer and deeper. Outside the wind whispered through the leaves and the cicadas creaked and droned in the distance.
Three fruits had fallen so far, thumping softly into the bowl in the center of the room. And three hands had crept over the edge of the bowl to claim the fruits and deliver them whole into waiting mouths. But not Hasika. Not yet.
“Hasika?”
The frail old woman opened her eyes halfway. “You.”
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