The Ninth Buddha by Daniel Easterman Page A

was young and pretty, and he felt almost youthful when he was with her.   But here, without her, he felt age lie upon him like a covering of hard snow that will not lift.   On the walls around him, gods and demons danced and copulated in solemn gradations of ecstasy and pain.   So little ecstasy, he thought; and so much pain.
    Curtains parted in the wall to his left.   A man dressed in the robes of a monk stepped into the room.   His thin, sallow face was covered with the scars of smallpox.
    “Well?”   asked Norbhu Dzasa.
    “Did you hear?”
    The monk nodded.
    “Wylam,” Norbhu Dzasa went on.
    “Looking for his son.”
    “Yes,” said the monk.
    “I heard.”   He ran a thin hand over his shaven scalp.   Light from the lamps flickered on his mottled skin, making small shadows, like ants crawling.
    “The gods are coming out to play,” he said.
    “We must be ready when the game begins.”
    As Christopher returned to the outskirts of Kalimpong, the sun sank steeply in the west.   The light was snatched away with fierce rapidity.   Night invaded the world, precipitately and without resistance, save for a few pockets of illumination in the bazaar and one light burning faintly in St.   Andrew’s church, just visible from where he stood.
    He walked back through the bazaar, filled with flaring lights and the deep, intoxicating scents of herbs and spices.   At one stall, an old man sold thick dhal in rough pots; at another, a woman in a tattered said offered a selection of peppers, chillies, and wild pomegranate seeds.   On small brass scales, in pinches and handfuls, the whole of India was being parcelled out and weighed.   The old kaleidoscope had started to turn again for Christopher.   But now, for the first time, he sensed behind its dazzling patterns an air of cold menace.
    He found the Mission Hospital at the other side of town from the orphanage.   The British cemetery lay symbolically between.
    Martin Cormac, the doctor who had tended the dying monk at the Knox Homes, was not available.
    The nursing sister who saw Christopher was unhelpful.   She said that Cormac had gone to make an urgent call at Peshok, a village between Kalimpong and Darjeeling.   More than that, she said she knew nothing.
    Christopher left a slip of paper bearing his name and the address of the rest-house where he had put up.   The nurse took the paper between finger and thumb as if it bore embedded in its fibres all the diseases of the sub-continent and most of the plagues of Egypt.
    She deposited it in a small, neglected pigeon-hole half-way down the hospital’s austere entrance hall and returned to the ward with a look that promised much wiping of fevered brows.
    He returned to the rest-house, took a cat-nap, and fortified himself with another chota peg before shaving and donning some thing suitable for dinner with the Carpenters.   The rest-house was quiet when he left.   No-one saw him go.
    He was met at the door of the Knox Homes by Carpenter himself, now dressed more formally than before, but not in evening attire.   The missionary conducted him straight away to the orphanage proper, or rather, to what constituted the girls’ division.
    There were more girls than boys in the Knox Homes: boys were economically viable offspring who might grow up to look after their aged parents: girls were burdens who would end up being married into someone else’s family.   Girl babies were dumped quickly on someone else’s doorstep if they were lucky.
    The girls’ orphanage was a scrubbed and spartan place, more a way-station than a home; its walls and floors and furniture were pervaded with the smells of carbolic, coal tar soap, and iodine, and its musty air seemed laden with the ghosts of other, less immediately recognizable smells the thin vomit of children, boiled cabbage, and that faint but unmistakable smell that is common to all institutions where adolescent girls are gathered in one place.   A r sour, menstrual smell