Empire of Bones Read online

  “No, that’s no good. I can see the edge.”

  Jaya looked up and said with guilty defiance, “I can’t do it. My hands are too small.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether your hands are small or not. These tricks are best learnt while you’re young; I’ve told you a thousand times. If you were a boy—” He broke off. His hand cuffed the side of her head, not lightly. “Watch what I do.” The coin glittered in the firelight as his skillful hand turned. “Now, again.”

  SHE thought she would never learn, Jaya remembered now. Once, these tricks would have been the province of the conjuror’s son alone, but Jaya had no brothers. Her mother had died, leaving only a cheap garnet ring and the memory of sandalwood, faint and fragrant as the smoke from the funeral pyres. Her mother, so her father said, had not liked tricks and conjuring, for all that she’d married a gilli-gilli man. But within a year or two, Jaya had picked up all the tricks that had made her father’s name as a magician, a man to whom gods listened.

  Memory unscrolled like a film: now, from the prison of the hospital bed, Jaya watched herself traveling the dusty roads of Uttar Pradesh. She saw her father sitting back on his heels in the dirt as his magical child conjured ash and money and medals and rings to fool the villagers of rural Bharat. She saw the avid gaze of the crowds as she was killed and resurrected, over and over again. She saw the seeds of her life beginning to green and grow.

  The summers wore on and the rains still came, but each year was drier than the last. By the time she was ten, Jaya had made a name for herself in the district. People seemed to trust her, though she didn’t understand why that should be. Even then Jaya knew that her life was a lie. Tricks and conjuring and illusion—it was like eating air. Every time she performed a faked miracle in a god’s name, she expected Heaven to strike her down. But it never happened, and at last she came to wonder whether the gods were even there.

  Yet she was always troubled by the sense that there was something more, something beyond the lies and the tricks. In the stillness of the long, burning nights, she lay awake, listening, and it sometimes seemed to her that she could hear a voice, speaking soft and distant beyond the edges of the world. It was faint and blurred with static, like a radio tuned to the wrong station, but she did not think it was a dream—though maybe, she would muse, it was just that she wanted too much to believe. The voice fell silent, for months at a time, and Jaya would give up hope all over again, but then she’d hear it once more. It was the only secret she had.

  Lying restlessly in the hospital bed, she blinked, conjuring the memories back. She was thirteen years old. The monsoon season was beginning, and Jaya ran out into the welcome rain, spinning in the dust until the fat drops churned it into mud. She spun until she was dizzy and her sari was soaked, then she bolted for the shelter of the trees. She crouched in the long grass, reveling in the feeling of being unseen. Then she realized that something was watching her after all. There was a locust climbing a stem of grass. The grass bent beneath the locust’s stout green body, and Jaya held her breath, waiting for it to reach the tip of the stem and leap away. And as she stopped breathing, so time stopped, too. The day seemed to slow and slide. Darkness engulfed Jaya’s sight, and then there was a brightness at the edge of the world, like the sun rising. The locust turned to her, gazing through golden eyes, and said without words, I have been waiting for you.

  Jaya felt her mouth fall foolishly open. The locust said impatiently, When the Tekhein designate speaks, you hear, do you not?

  “I don’t understand,” Jaya whispered, and the locust gathered itself up and sprang away out of sight. She sat in the grass for a long time, listening. She could hear something humming, just at the edge of sound, and she couldn’t get it out of her head. Slowly, she rose and made her way back to the hut.

  She wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing, but she had become too used to telling what was real from what was not: the legacy of the conjuror’s child. Her throat was dry with the thought that there might be something beyond the tricks after all.

  But then, with a bitter pang of disappointment, she learned what she at that time believed to be the truth—that the magical locust, and the voice she heard, were nothing more than the result of sickness. That night, she woke in a fever, and the next few days passed in a blur of heat and pain. Her father’s worried face swam above her, begging her to get well; promising her that if she did he’d give up the tricks and listen to the gods. Even in the depths of the fever, Jaya didn’t believe him. She heard a woman’s calm voice saying in poorly articulated Hindi, “I’m giving her a dose of antibiotics; we’ll see if that brings the fever down.”

  “But what’s wrong with her?”

  “I don’t know. I’m sorry. We’re seeing a lot of new diseases; some people say it’s due to the crops they’re growing now, the genetic modifications… No one knows for sure.”

  And later, her father’s uneasy, shifty voice: “I don’t know where I’ll find the money to pay, you see.”

  “The mission will pay, don’t worry. That’s why we’re here.”

  Eventually, Jaya woke and found that the fever had gone. Light-headed, she stumbled through the door of the hut into the compound. Chickens were scratching in the dry earth and a small child, one of the neighbor’s babies, stared at her with an unblinking gaze. Then suddenly the child’s eyes became as yellow as the sun, and Jaya screamed, but no sound came. The baby’s gaze was abruptly soft and dark. Shaking, Jaya leaned against the wall of the hut. Her joints burned and ached, and when she reached for her plait of hair she was horrified to find that it was gone. Tears welled up in her eyes. Then her father was there, with the nurse from the mission.

  “Where’s my hair?” Jaya shouted, and saw the nurse stifle a smile.

  “Don’t worry, sweetheart, it isn’t gone forever. It’ll grow back. We had to cut it, you see; it was full of lice. You wouldn’t want that, now, would you?”

  In a little voice like a child’s, Jaya heard herself say, “No.”

  “Well, then. Now, do you feel better?”

  “A bit. My hands hurt.”

  The nurse took Jaya’s hand in her own pale fingers and turned it over, as though she was going to read Jaya’s palm.

  “How does it hurt?”

  “It burns.”

  “Your knuckles are swollen—you poor little thing! I’m going to leave some medicine with your dad; we’ll see if that works. We’ll soon have you feeling better, won’t we?”

  Jaya was silent. The nurse was very kind, but she was talking to Jaya as though she were a baby, not an almost-grown woman with a role to play in the world. Her father nudged her. “Thank you,” Jaya said after a pause, and the nurse smiled.

  “You’re a good girl. You’ll soon be well again.”

  But this, too, turned out to be a lie.

  “COULD we just go over this again, for the benefit of these people?” Dr. Fraser said. It was the day after Jaya’s latest escape attempt. She’d had it figured out. This time, she’d use the tranquilizers to drug the duty nurse and slide out down the back stairs. But just before six a medical team had shown up from England, arriving on an early flight. Now, they were clustered around the bed: two men and one woman. All of them were staring at Jaya as though she was nothing more than an interesting problem to be solved. Fraser continued, “Let’s just run through your symptoms, shall we?”

  Jaya sighed. “At first, my joints would get stiff, like arthritis, and they’d burn in the monsoon season. I used to feel shaky and hot. But it came and went, and it didn’t really get that bad until a few years ago.”

  Dr. Fraser reached for her laptop and began to download data. In between discussing the case with her colleagues in English, she made a great effort to explain to Jaya what she thought was wrong. She used clear, simple words and drew little pictures on the screen with a lightpen. Jaya bit back a sharp remark. A cigarette might have helped her mood, but she knew it was illegal in the West and she hadn’t dared ask
the doctor if she could smoke. She had a feeling that the answer would be an outraged No. Only Westerners could refuse you something on the grounds of your health when you were on the verge of death.

  On the little laptop, Jaya could see the spirals of her own DNA uncoiling, strands highlighted crimson and green, bright as jewels against the dawn-background of the screen. There was a part of the pattern that the program seemed unable to represent properly: it shifted and changed, twisting around the core in an unstable formation. It was, Jaya was given to understand, a mutation, lodged deep in her genetic makeup, and it was this that was probably the reason for her long illness.

  Someone said in English, “Dr. Fraser, is your view that whatever this woman is suffering from is in some way related to the Selenge retrovirus?”

  The speaker was a middle-aged man, with fair, thin hair and a high-arched nose. His face was red from sunburn. Jaya became very still. Fraser glanced at her, and she schooled her face to show nothing.

  “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 particular 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 ramifications 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, people 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, asking 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 believe 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 government of Bharat was planning a treaty with the Novy Soviet. And as it spoke, Jaya began to echo what it said, beneath her breath, over and over until she realized that her father 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 expression: 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, desperate 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 convince 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 succumb 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 concerned 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 explained, 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. T
hey 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 simply be mad, lying awake in the soft darkness with that remote murmur of information traveling through her mind; sometimes she believed it was just the sickness.

  The pain still hadn’t gone away. It twisted her body, sometimes 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.