excuse to keep our lethargy a little busy. By late afternoon Father and Mother were as settled in the tea room of our comfortable hotel as two cats sunning themselves at a win-dow. Mother read while Father chatted with fellow guests. There are three hills within Munnar. They don’t bear comparison with the tall hills– mountains, you might call them–that surround the town, but I noticed the first morning, as we were having breakfast, that they did stand out in one way: on each stood a Godhouse. The hill on the right, across the river from the hotel, had a Hindu temple high on its side; the hill in the middle, further away, held up a mosque; while the hill on the left was crowned with a Christian church. On our fourth day in Munnar, as the afternoon was coming to an end, I stood on the hill on the left. Despite attending a nominally Christian school, I had not yet been inside a church–and I wasn’t about to dare the deed now. I knew very little about the religion. It had a reputation for few gods and great violence. But good schools. I walked around the church.It was a building unremittingly unreveal-ing of what it held inside, with thick, featureless walls pale blue in colour and high, narrow windows impossible to look in through. A fortress. I came upon the rectory. The door was open. I hid around a corner to look upon the scene. To the left of the door was a small board with the words Parish Priest and As-sistant Priest on it. Next to each was a small sliding block. Both the priest and his assistant were IN, the board informed me in gold letters, which I could plainly see. One priest was working in his office, his back turned to the bay windows, while the other was seated on a bench at a round table in the large vestibule that evidently functioned as a room for receiving visitors. He sat facing the door and the windows, a book in his hands, a Bible I presumed. He read a little, looked up, read a little more, looked up again. It was done in a way that was leisurely, yet alert and composed. After some minutes, he closed the book and put it aside. He folded

breathtakingly immense, was settling into a smooth and steady motion, with the waves at heel; the wind was soften-ing to a tuneful breeze; fluffy, radiantly white clouds were beginning to light up in a vast fathomless dome of delicate pale blue. It was the dawn of a beautiful day in the Pacific Ocean. My shirt was already beginning to dry. The night had vanished as quickly as the ship. I began to wait. My thoughts swung wildly. I was either fixed on practical details of immediate survival or transfixed by pain, weeping silently, my mouth open and my hands at my head.

Chapter 42 She came floating on an island of bananas in a halo of light, as lovely the Virgin Mary. The rising sun was behind her. Her flaming hair looked stunning. I cried, “Oh blessed Great Mother, Pondicherry fertility goddess, provider of milk and love, wondrous arm spread of comfort, terror of ticks, picker-up of crying ones, are you to witness this tragedy too? It’s not right that gentle-ness meet horror. Better that you had died right away. How bitterly glad I am to see you. You bring joy and pain in equal measure. Joy because you are with me, but pain because it won’t be for long. What do you know about the sea? Noth-ing. What do I know about the sea? Nothing. Without a driver this bus is lost. Our lives are over. Come aboard if your destination is oblivion-it should be our next stop. We can sit together. You can have the window seat, if you want. But it’s a sad view. Oh, enough of this dissembling. Let me say it plainly: love you, I love you, I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. Not the spiders, please.” It was Orange Juice-so called because she tended to drool-our prize Borneo orang-utan matriarch, zoo star and mother of two fine boys, surrounded by a mass of black spi-

cently tinted. The stars were eager to participate; hardly had the blanket of colour been pulled a little than they started to shine through the deep blue. The wind blew with a faint, warm breeze and the sea moved about kindly, the water peaking and troughing like people dancing in a circle who come together and raise their hands and move apart and come together again, over and over. Richard Parker sat up. Only his head and a little of his shoulders showed above the gunnel. He looked out. I shouted, “Hello, Richard Parker!” and I waved. He looked at me. He snorted or sneezed, neither word quite captures it. Prusten again. What a stunning creature. Such a noble mien. How apt that in full it is a Royal Bengal tiger. I counted myself lucky in a way. What if I had ended up with a crea-ture that looked silly or ugly, a tapir or an ostrich or a flock of turkeys? That would have been a more trying companion-ship in some ways. I heard a splash. I looked down at the water. I gasped. I thought I was alone. The stillness in the air, the glory of the light, the feeling of comparative safety-all had made me think so. There is commonly an element of silence and solitude to peace, isn’t there? It’s hard to imagine being at peace in a busy subway station, isn’t it? So what was all this commotion? With just one glance I discovered that the sea is a city. Just below me, all around, unsuspected by me, were highways, boulevards, streets and roundabouts bustling with submarine traffic. In water that was dense, glassy and flecked by millions of lit-up specks of plankton, fish like trucks and buses and cars and bicycles and pedestrians were madly racing about, no doubt honking and hollering at each other. The predominant colour was green. At multiple depths, as far as I could see, there were evanescent trails of phosphorescent green bubbles, the wake of speeding fish. As soon as one trail faded, another appeared. These trails came from all directions and disappeared in all directions. They were like those time-exposure photographs you see of cities

of leaving the island had not crossed my mind once since I had arrived. It had been many weeks now–I couldn’t say how many exactly– and they would stretch on. I was certain about that. How wrong I was. If that fruit had a seed, it was the seed of my depar-ture. The fruit was not a fruit. It was a dense accumula-tion of leaves glued together in a ball. The dozens of stems were dozens of leaf stems. Each stem that I pulled caused a leaf to peel off. After a few layers I came to leaves that had lost their stems and were flatly glued to the ball. I used my fingernails to catch their edges and pull them off. Sheath after sheath of leaf lifted, like the skins off an onion. I could simply have ripped the “fruit” apart–I still call it that for lack of a better word–but I chose to satisfy my curiosity in a measured way. It shrunk from the size of an orange to that of a mandarin. My lap and the branches below were covered with thin, soft leaf peelings. It was now the size of a rambutan. I still get shivers in my spine when I think of it. The size of a cherry. And then it came to light, an unspeakable pearl at the heart of a green oyster. A human tooth. A molar, to be exact. The surface stained green and finely pierced with holes. The feeling of horror came slowly. I had time to pick at the other fruit. Each contained a tooth. One a canine. Another a premolar. Here an incisor. There another molar.