Oh the taste of food! The sensation of it sliding down my throat. I didn't know how much I had come to appreciate these pointless little earthly things... maybe I've been here too long, if I had to stay much longer I'd be in danger of becoming earth-bound. But there's not much time left. One last thing to do and then I must, I really must, go.
The girl is looking into the fire with longing in her eyes. I know what she wants to know.
I pull her close to me, she's so small and child-like. Such responsibility rests on those thin shoulders. I enfold her in my rugs and shawls and she leans her head on my shoulder.
"You want to ask me something, child?"
She nods. "Yes, I, I want to ask you... well, you know... so many things!" Her mind hovers around the edge of questions - drawn and at the same time horrified - about how I can even be here after all this time, about the goddess, the ice-cave, the shape-shifting face in the shadows... but these things were not meant for a human mind to encompass, and hers lurches away from it, a curious kitten scalded by the flame. I let her take her time.
"Great Grandmother... " her voice is soft, tentative - testing the ground. "Something happened to me in the forest..."
"The old tree... In Manjaria."
She looks up at me, surprised, yet not surprised - relieved that her instinct that I'd know was correct. Her mind skittering away from questions about how on earth I would know about something that happened miles from here while I was... elsewhere. She's learning at last. Learning to go with the flow...even if logic points another direction.
"What happened? Do you know? And why? Why me?"
"It's a long story... "
She nods again. I begin;
"In the beginning..."
Her eyebrows shot up, "Didn't know you meant that long!" and we both laugh, but actually, it's true, the story does begin when the Universe begins...
The Darkness is complete. There is only Darkness. There is nothing else.
And yet, because it is complete, it contains the possibility of everything.
At some unpinpointable point in what would have been time, if time had existed, the possibility of the Darkness changing occurs, as slight as the unconscious memory of an instinct feathering the mind of a sleeping foetus.
The pinprick of possibility grows imperceptibly - becomes more and more insistent... memory transmutes into desire, desire into need. Need will wake the foetus in the end. And when the foetus wakes, hungry... all life will break loose.
It is calling. A tiny, keening cry for being. Every point of the infinite ocean of Darkness experiences its pull and yearns infintessimally towards it.
Darkness masses at the pin prick. More and more - hurling itself towards the yearning point, building up an unsupportable density. Possible is congealing into probable. The membrane between 'what could be' and 'what will be' is stretching, the pressure to Be becomes unbearable. It can no longer support its own weight. With a booming, howling scream that began before time and echoes into the infinite future, the Darkness, at its densest point, turns itself inside out - and becomes a diamond point of light. The crowning of a baby's head.
The needles of light pierce every direction, they stream and soar and plunge. Whipping up in their wake entities which never existed before. Whipping the inert Darkness into gusts of gases, bubbles of matter. Now Dark and light - matter and anti-matter - snake around each other. Pools of shadow merge and part - dancing. The two extremes of nothing and something meet, and turn about, and part. Two-headed, thousand-armed, four-legged, limbs embracing Shiva-Shakti - circling and circling. Exploding. Separating. Shiva, he can Be… but he can’t Become.
Shakti, it is she who calls him, she who spins and weaves the Universe into Being. She who must return to the source and replenish it when darkness threatens again, weave the particles of life, the protons, the photons, the electrons back into a thousand petall'd lotus of living creation.
Now - in your time, my Kamala, billions of years on - the darkness is sugared with stars, scratched with comet paths, clouded with milky pools of matter. But it's still mostly darkness - dark matter. In the outer reaches of what became the Universe, chunks of matter - rock, gas, heat - boom and fizz and bubble within a stolid range of logic, the faint post partum echoes of that cosmic primal moment.
But at the point where the yearning began, at the white-hot centre of concentrated Creation, there's a pearly blue planet. Here, blasted by the full power of Possibility, a pandemonium of life is still gibbering, screeching, boiling, spitting, writhing, dreaming up ever more fantastic possibilities. The Darkness is still streaming into Being... through the minds of poets, the wombs of wombats, the phosphorescence of molecules at the furnace heart of the planet - through the gnarled old umbilical cord that has come to resemble a tree. This is the channel, the portal of the Potent, of the infinite potential. The earth grows thirsty every few aeons, and then the channel must be opened, aligned, and the life blood, the light flood - be allowed to replenish her again.
The key is a virgin, a vessel of wisdom. The key is the human expression of Shakti, the female principle, one in whom Kundalini is awake and alive. She is the conduit, the conductor, the medium. This time the key, my sweet namesake, was you. And Dhanmatbai, the ise woman, the woman of the forest, was the midwife, just as I had been for many centuries, before I had to pack myself away to wait for you. I can wear my cloak of mortality for longer than your flickering little lives, much longer - but it can't last forever. So when we knew that the darkness was returning, the danger was coming - centuries after my time - we knew I had to stop moving through Time... and wait. That's when I came to the Ice Cave.
Because power like that can't go unnoticed. When it flowered, with its white hot radiance, ancient peoples threw themselves on the ground and prayed for forgiveness to gods they thought they'd angered, sacrificed lambs, their own children... And all the time people's nervous systems are growing more refined, your brains more enlightened, your eyes more open, your vision more clear... so it was only a matter of time (yes, it's all about time and matter...) before you started to see the power... the real thing, the prototype of the pale shadows of power you'd chased up to then, emotional, psychological, political, military, industrial...
Because for you, power is a drug - the bigger the power, the bigger the kick, and this... this has the biggest kick in the Universe... and now they've spotted it, the addicts are being drawn towards it. They've had the money hit, the toys-money-can-buy hit, the power-behind-the-money hit, the power-that-money-controls hit... and now they've spotted something so powerful it could transcend money and transform into pure power. If they had any inkling of the true magnitude of the power they are planning to toy with, they would throw themselves down and pray for forgiveness too. But they don't know what they're doing. "They know not what they do". And it's their very innocence that's so terrifying.
That's where your part in the story begins, Kamala. You have re-opened the birth canal and let the Life pour back in. As you blazed alive within the living walls of the tree, the forest was on fire with life, the stones were alight with it, the women were aflame with it, Deepak burned with it. The crickets were bright sparks of consciousness, the leopard a livid tongue of flame, the serpents were aglow, the river was boiling... Life, the love-child of Shiva and Shakti was born again. You, who are of this age, yet of my blood. You whose nervous system is so tuned to the undercurrents of the universe, yet who are versed in the knowledge of this age - you are the one we were waiting for - you are science and sentience, sensuous yet pure - you are the one we had planned for...
And, though you've done so much, your part in all this is not over... As well as replenishing the source, you also lit the beacon to draw the deaths-head moth towards its own demise. He is coming, and when he does... we must be ready. Time is running out now - maybe literally running out... so we must move. We must move quickly.
The girl is sleeping now... but the knowledge has entered her consciousness. I pull her rug over her and mine over me and lie down beside her, close to the fire, hoping that it, and the closeness of her body, will go a little way towards warming the chill deep in my bones.
* * *
There is no sound except for our footsteps, our breath, the odd, lazy bird call and the gentle sizzling of the heat of the jungle. Kamala and Deepak still can't quite fathom why I am taking them back to Manjaria, right into the heart of Greenfield's security operation after all their efforts to escape, to hide. Deepak protested feebly for a while but then succumbed. But Kamala trusts me, or knows it's not worth arguing with me. She can sense my rightness, my knowingness, my strength. She understands we have a job to do. What job? That was another of those questions which her mind could sense crouching in a corner - but was studiously, and sensibly, looking the other way.
We have to be there, we have no choice. What is about to happen is running on rails of inevitability that were laid at the beginning of Time. But if I can manage to sidestep Time for an instant, I may be able to derail the engine of destruction that's bearing down on us. If I don't what is about to happen will tip the balance, put everything that exists out of synch with everything else. And since everything co-exists in such a fine, interwoven, inter-dependent web, once the balance of the Tree has been disturbed, first Kamala will be destroyed - and then everything else will start to disintegrate.
Not die - death is part of regeneration, it is the inside-out of life. No, everything will dis-integrate. Cease to be integrated. Things will fall apart, mere anarchy will be loosed upon the world. Our atoms and our molecules will lose their attraction for each other and all solid matter will turn first back to a boiling primal soup and then into hot, vaporous gasses, and then into nothingness. And then there will be no life. No Time. Nothing.
We are all tired. We left the ashram at 6 am (two hours later a long, sleek silver car pulled up at the foot of the hill and two men wearing shades and shiny black shoes got out). It was a long journey, first by another rattling, creaking, swaying bus, packed to the rafters with bodies, then after the last bus stop, by hitching a lift in an air conditioned car with some nice NGO people who said that they weren't really allowed to give people lifts, but they would make an exception for us. I don't think they were very happy when I asked them to turn off the air conditioning and open the windows to the strengthening warmth of the sun, but they obliged politely. They shared their oranges and bottled water with us. They said they were on their way to a new settlement for oustees - people who have been ousted by the creation of one of the big new dams, apparently.
Kamala was excited at first, saying she'd heard about the project, it sounded great and how was it going? The NGO people smiled wanly and tried not to say anything too damning. Deepak helped them out...
"Don't tell me" he said "The houses - which they've chopped down half a forest to make room for - have been designed without any consultation with the people themselves, they are completely unsuitable to their lifestyles, the solar powered lighting has broken down and no-one in the village knows how to fix it and no-one from the government or the power company can be bothered to travel out to the back of beyond where they've stuck them to fix it. The soil is such bad quality they can't grow anything, there's no road to the market so they couldn't have sold anything they might have produced anyway. There's a school, but no teacher will agree to live out in the sticks, there's a clinic, but ditto the doctor, the people are so demoralised and impoverished that men have taken to drink and/or migrant labour and the women have taken to drink and/or prostitution and now the whole community is dying of AIDS. Does that about cover it?"
The NGO people nodded sadly. "Pretty much." They said.
When we arrived at the settlement, one look at the rows of neat little white doll's house shaped huts interspersed with little wrought iron streetlamps, one look in the people's dead eyes confirmed Deepak's prediction. Kamala set her jaw tight. She looked like she wanted to be sick.
"If I ever get my hands on that bastard Andreas White...!".
And she marched away...
We've been half walking half climbing ever since. The young people are sweating, but not me - despite the couple of nice Kashmiri wool shawls I bought at the bus stop pulled tight around my head and shoulders. I still feel rather chilly to be honest.
We stop by a stream, drink, the young people soak their tired feet in the cool water. Kamala dips a corner of her appalling rag of a sari in the water and mops her brow with it. They laugh at me for sitting back against a rock in the full glare sun. But the boy's smile is edged with worry (Kamala is a little afraid too, but she has faith in me). He is brooding about the news they both heard on the ashram's rather incongruous satellite television set this morning:
Negotiators are now admitting that the situation in the Middle East has reached a total impasse. The world super-powers are vying openly for control of the few remaining productive oil wells there. Insufficient alternative fuel sources have been developed so far to feed the world's voracious appetite for power. Analysts are predicting a sharp increase in the already prevalent conflicts, terrorist attacks, hijackings and so on, as countries and individuals start competing for the dwindling pockets of energy left, energy which is essential for production, for distribution of goods, for processing... for the very survival of our economies and our civilizations.
On one small positive note, Andreas White, CEO of White Enterprises International has arrived in India to preside at the grand opening of the White Dam - dubbed 'The Saviour' by a number of energy experts who hope that its power will help regenerate not just India's, but the world's economy. The dam is being billed as the preparation for the biggest hydro-electric power station the world has ever seen.
The pictures showed a tanned, silver-gold maned, white-suited, man of indeterminate age emerging from an aeroplane smiling, waving, receiving garlands from the Minister for Industry, waving from the window of a dark, stretch limousine - with the three-leaf Greenfields logo on the side. Beside him throughout was a shorter, paler, heavier man who did not smile, whose eyes shifted quickly this way and that, taking in all the options, all the exits.
In local news, representatives of a remote scheduled tribe, the Manjaria, have filed a case against Greenfields Asia Incorporated in a bid to win back access to sacred land which they claim that Greenfields is denying them.
Pictures of Manjaria women sitting on the steps of the court singing protest songs, fists upraised. Just as a policeman enters the frame, baton upraised, the bulletin ended and moved on to the latest cricket scores...
It is nearing evening now. Though the light is fading, Kamala is starting to recognise her surroundings, she says she recognises particular trees and bushes. Deepak is sceptical about this. To him a tree's just a tree.
We must be cautious now. We are nearing the eye of the storm. The guards are watching, waiting. But they are looking in the wrong direction. They don't understand the forest paths, her veins and arteries, they don't feel how her nerves tingle. They trample over her face - tear out her trees to ram roads through her flesh, and wait, rifles at the ready... for what? They don't know. They don't understand who the enemy is - surely not those shy, primitive tribal women in the village muttering into their cooking pots? - they don't even fully understand the value of the treasure they are guarding with their little pop guns! That's what makes them so terrifying, their ignorance, their arrogance... like a little boy in a tantrum who's got hold of the controls of a nuclear submarine and is mesmerised - thrilled - by the horror in the grown-ups' eyes, watching his every move.
There's one of them now. I gesture to the boy and girl to be still, hide themselves. I pick up a hard, round seedpod from the forest floor and throw it at the uniformed guard leaning against the tree right in our path. He turns instantly, the muzzle of his gun pointed between my eyes - my eyes... his eyes lock with them and he is lost. His knees buckle, his gun falls from his hands. He is a little boy, lost without his mama. He curls up into the foetal position, thumb in mouth and rocks gently in the shadows of the forest undergrowth.
Somewhere in the hills below us, the NGO driver is seeing the reflection of his own contorted face in a pair of dark, mirrored glasses, while his right arm is twisted, stretched almost to breaking point behind his back...
Evening falls suddenly, like the lights being turned down in a theatre hall. Somewhere on the other side of this hill, Andreas White's helicopter is landing. He wants to see this mysterious tree for himself. He and Laine have invested a lot into finding it, now they want to find out its secret. That local scientist had done his best, but he couldn't give them a proper, scientific explanation. Couldn't prove otherwise than that it was just an ordinary tree. White knew that Laine had pressed him - hard - for an explanation, a theory, and that finally he had caved and stammered that it was probably some precise combination of circumstances that triggers the power surges off; the tree, the full moon, something to do with the tribal women, potions, chanting...
Laine had barked "Crap! Load of bloody voodoo gibberish. We must have been mad to employ a fucking native!"
But White knows better. His earliest perceptions have been formed in the jungle, he has seen - or perhaps simply sensed - how the mysterious chemistry of woman and wood and water can conjure life from the brink of death... so what more might it be capable of? He's cannier than to disregard any explanation - even an implausible sounding one - when there is no other. He'll cover his bases, take no chances. Laine's brought an international team to the jungle - particle physicists, meteorologists, bio-fusionists, thermo-nuclear specialists, geo-physicists, seismologists... each armed with shiny new state-of-their-art instruments and the threat of grants shrivelling up for the rest of their lives if they fail to unlock the secret of those beautiful, big mysterious bursts of energy.
White's brought just one thing, or rather person. Just in case.
He slashes the undergrowth away from his leather booted ankles with a matching leather riding crop, protecting himself from hated snakes at the same time as looking pretty damn elegant. Laine, torch-bearing guards, the scientists and government and Greenfields officials trot frenetically behind him barely able to keep up. He is close to it now, the power. He can feel it. Giga-electron-volts of power that set Geiger-counters chattering like herds of monkeys - Laine can feel it too, he can taste it, he licks his lips until they glisten like the rest of his pink, sweat glazed-face.
They reach a huge clearing. In the middle of it is a tree. The tree. White stops, his heart pounding. (His entourage concertinas to a halt behind him). The tree is not impressive looking, but then White has never been one to be impressed by mere appearances - so he is not dismayed at the sight of this small, crooked, old stump. All the trees for two hundred yards around it have been hacked down. Flood lights have been set up in a circle - throwing a spiky crown of shadow around it. The armed guards ringing the circumference of the clearing stand to attention and salute.
Laine turns to the scientists. "Get to work! I want this bloody tree cracked and generating power as soon as fucking possible, understand?"
"Yes, sir!" They chorus, tripping over churned up tree roots and each other and their cases of instruments in their hurry to obey. Laine watches them, hands on ample hips.
He turns when he hears White laugh quietly behind him. "You don't seriously think they're going to find anything out with those scientific instruments, do you, Laine?"
"Why not? These guys are the best in their fields. They're using the most expensive instruments with the finest-tuned calibrations on the planet."
"'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy'" White murmurs...
"Hmmm? Well, science has managed to find out a thing or two in the past, hasn't it?" Laine is more focused on the flurry of investigations going on around the tree. Soon the tree is drilled and shaved and threaded with gleaming silver wires, pierced and studded with glittering, flickering gadgets, dials and gauges, shiny metal receptors...
White turns to an aide. "Bring me something to sit on, would you? And bring her." He says quietly. The aide disappears and comes back a few minutes later with a folding chair in one hand and the upper arm of a crumpled looking figure in the other.
"You got an interpreter?"
The interpreter is ushered forward and waits for White to speak.
White takes his time. Looks calmly at the tall, composed old woman standing before him, apparently unfazed by the destruction wrought on her forest home by these invaders, by the odds so clearly stacked against her. He knows what he is dealing with. At least he thinks he does.
"Greetings, mother." He says quietly, and, while theinterpreter murmurs into Dhanmatbai's ear smiles... his best, most beaming beacon of a smile. The woman gazes blankly at him as though he is a weevil in her rice. She has seen many weevils in her lifetime. They do not excite her.
"I need your help, mother." He uses the word as a term of respect - saying it in a way that does not sound ironic, despite the circumstances. "Won't you help me?"
She spits. Casually. Not at him, but over her shoulder, as though his presence is of no concern to her. He laughs.
"Then I'm sorry, mother. I know this is disrespectful - but the stakes here are bigger than both of us. We've each got to do what we've got to do..."
He waves the aide towards her.
We reach the far edge of the clearing. The Manjaria women are waiting for us as arranged. How? asks Deepak. Kamala has more sense than to ask. She's beginning to understand the porous nature of the divide between 'reality' and 'fantasy'. I smile knowingly at Deepak in reply. I don't think this quite satisfies him, but it will have to do. This is no time for explanations.
The women prostrate themselves at my feet, and then - before she can stop them - at Kamala's feet, before we settle down in the shadows outside the ring of light around the Tree to observe and bide our time. The women have brought fresh, clean, Manjaria clothes for Kamala and she goes behind a large tree trunk to change from her ragged sari into them. The guards a few feet ahead of us, to our left and to our right hold their weapons high, chins jutting forward, neck tendons straining, looking this way and that, but somehow never our way. Poor boys!
We watch as the white people carve small pieces off the Tree, drill into her roots, scrape dried sap from her sides, sample the soil at her feet, trying to find the answer to a secret that is older than Time itself, to harness a power that is greater than Life itself. Like children trying to fathom the power of the ocean by picking up grains of sand from the beach and holding them under a plastic magnifying glass... like trying to understand a nuclear bomb by studying (pressing and prodding) the chemical make-up of the plastic button you hit to launch it. It would be very amusing if it were not for the fact that they are closer than they know, and for different reasons than they think. We have got here just in time.
I hear Kamala give a little gasp as she sees that it is Dhanmatbai standing before White's seated figure across on the other side of the searingly bright clearing. The lights glint off an implement that a uniformed man is moving towards her arm.
Dhanmatbai stands tall. Sister, this is one moment when I would wish you had less courage, less dignity. If you were to run now, scream, cry, collapse, we would not have to go through what we have to go through. But you are doing what you have to do. The needle enters your arm, the serum enters your bloodstream and your will is no longer your own.
Behind me Kamala is panting with distress - I turn to look into her eyes. Courage. Courage. She draws herself up, shoulders back, chin out. She really is so very small and slight.
"I believe we need a virgin to make this work, don't we, mother?" White is saying. "Could you, by any chance, find me one?"
Dhanmatbai turns until her unseeing gaze is trained precisely on the spot where we are waiting. She holds out her arms to us. It's time. Kamala and the other women step out of the shadows and walk forwards.
White rises from his chair and follows Dhanmatbai - signalling the guards to let us through. He hasn't noticed that they had not moved. Laine sees White coming. He barks an order and the scientists fall away from the Tree. The women take their places in the circle beside it. The mesmeric drone of their chanting begins. Dhanmatbai gestures to Kamala. Kamala knows what to do - she senses it, like a fine Lipizzaner stepping high to the music, fine-tuned to every nuance of my intention. She rises and slowly starts taking off her clothes. There's a strangled growl beside me, and I see Deepak's eyes blazing, his jaw set tight - but he finds he's rooted to the spot. I'm not. I walk quietly into the clearing. There used to be a rumour that I could make myself invisible. That is not quite true, but somehow not a single person's gaze happened to cross the piece of space I was occupying. It may have had something to do with the fact that all eyes were glued to the body of the beautiful young girl swaying gently in the glare of the spotlights. The question is, can I get Time itself to look the other way?
The mouth of the tree is creaking open, an ancient crone's dry yawn - a crone with the power of Creation between her dry gums.
Once Kamala enters it, although the energy her body will channel will not reach a fraction of that released by her combined with the full moon, it will be enough. She is the most powerful channel we have seen for centuries. It will be at the wrong time and for the wrong reason. It will be enough to tip the balance of the earth, to tip the balance of Time, to put everything that exists out of synch with everything else. And then the inevitable train of events will follow each other like prisoners chained together with leg irons walking over a cliff overhanging a void... until there are no events left. No life. No Time. Nothing.
The moon, as if summoned, steps out from behind a the clouds and the artificial shadows spiked around the tree go pale. Dhanmatbai stops, looks up at the moon... then beckons Kamala. Kamala walks forwards closing the distance between herself and the tree - the distance between eternity and nothingness. At the very last moment I step forward and push my body between hers and the Tree's - Time gives a terrible, sickening, groaning lurch, like when something hard and unyielding has been thrown into the innards of a great machine. The circumference of the moon distorts and its light dims plunging the clearing into a split second of darkness. In that split second, it is my body instead of Kamala's that fills the space inside the Tree. I see Dhanmatbai open her mouth to shriek as the Tree starts to close around me, but before the sound reaches me, I am shuttered in darkness.
The women don't miss a beat. The incantation continues setting every atom in the air of the clearing vibrating. White's jaw is hanging open. The veins in Laine's forehead are writhing like snakes, sweat is coursing down his face, his fingers and knees are twitching but nothing is moving. Nothing is moving. Except Kamala.
She walks towards White, her stride slow and sure. He watches her coming, this sweet, bare virgin who has been dancing for him - and his mind still numbed by the blinking of the eye of time, he forgets where he is and why and a smile twitches around the corners of his mouth.
And although she is naked, although her frame is as slight as a child's there is a terrifying dignity about her progress. White's smile becomes fixed. She locks into his eyes with hers, and his body flinches as though it would like to step back, regain the high ground. But nothing is moving. Except Kamala. She stops with her face a few inches from his and looks up into his still locked-on eyes.
"Enough." She says quietly. Her voice is strangely ill suited to her frail body. It sounds too ancient, too big. It sounds like it is coming from a long way away - from the very centre of the universe.
"Wh-what?"
"Enough. Stop."
"What do you mean? Who the hell are you anyway? Do you know who I am?"
"Who are you?"
"I'm... I'm... well, you know. I'm... er..." Strange tides are moving inside him, continental drifts of emotion are creaking creeping crosswise in his chest, rising up.
"Andreas?" She says - but her voice has changed. Soft, loving, lilting...
"Mother?!" The tides bubble up and seize his throat, he chokes, wetness welling from eyes and nose - he falls to his knees at her feet and flings his arms around her tiny waist, pressing his face into her smooth, pale stomach.
The watchers can't quite make out over the constant, maddening hum that's thrumming the air all around them, pulling their sinews and tendons so tight that nothing will move, if the sound coming from Andreas' baby-bird gaping mouth is an infant's cry "Whaaaaaah!" or a question... "Why?" "Where?" And she bends forward towards his ear and her lips are moving.
Two new arrivals come thrashing through the undergrowth to the edge of the clearing - their suits torn and stuck with twigs - the glare of the floodlights reflecting off the shiny black patches on their mostly scuffed up shoes and their dark, mirrored glasses and their mouths hanging open in dismay at the tableau before them; white-coated scientists standing like statues, an old tree stump stuck all over with glinting instruments of torture - a grotesque Christmas tree parody - guards with guns dangling impotently from numb fingers, Andreas White on his knees, bawling like a baby, clinging around the waist of a naked girl - the girl whose trail they've been following, on his instructions, for two days.
Lightening strikes the tree with a crack that is louder than anything anyone has ever heard, and the spell is broken. (Although, to be honest, the lightening strikes from the tree - but that can't be right, can it? So the brains of the watchers reverse the information that their eyes supply.) Dhanmatbai collapses as if shot by a bullet, but it is Laine who has actually been shot... a long, slim shard of steel - etched with the finest-tuned calibrations on the planet - erupts from the flank of the old tree and buries itself deep in his side, piercing his lungs, his heart, his liver.
Kamala turns slowly as the tree begins to burn with a fierce, cold grey light, crackling, terrifying, radiating energy. The air is filled with shrieking cries as if a city full of women is being tortured to death. Some of the men have thrown themselves onto the ground, their hands over their ears. Many are crying for their mothers. Andreas White is curled in the foetal position around Kamala's ankles, rocking backwards and forwards.
The Manjaria women draw closer around Kamala - sharp black silhouettes against light of the white flame, and watch the Tree burning, with, Kamala's mind screams silently, Great Grandmother inside it... The flames are the only source of light now. The floodlights exploded with the first lightening strike. The moon has scuttled back behind dark cloud again. The guards, scientists, officials and the two men in suits have crept away - first slowly and then as fast as their feet and their cars can carry them.
Some of them might have stayed - the shrieking of that old woman, the naked dancing girl, the Boss blubbing like a baby, the bloody great explosion, the other old dame appearing from nowhere and then burning alive in the flames - exciting stuff! A real live action horror flick. But the snakes were the final straw. Hundreds of them, flickering tongues of ground-lightening, swarming through the forest edge towards the clearing - until every inch of ground beneath the watchers' feet is squelchy and reptilian. The last of the people flee, and now it is serpents that ring the clearing, heads upraised to the light, swaying slightly to the sizzling, bubbling music of the sap, and whatever other living juices are secreted within the ancient tree. The serpents form a quivering, writhing crown for the tree-shaven head that's haloed in light from the burning tree.
The women and the serpents watch. They watch all night until there is nothing left of the ancient tree but a pile of blackened ashes. When the last of the flame has gone out and has been replaced by a weak, reluctant daylight, the Manjaria women kneel in a circle around the place where the tree used to be. It starts to rain, sizzling off the splintered, dying embers, gently, sadly - like a sonata weeping forgiveness. With the hiss of the rain the serpents drop their hoods and slip away.
Deepak comes out of the jungle and goes to Kamala, and, stepping over White's now comatose body, puts his shirt around her shivering shoulders. His eyes are shot through with horror, like one suffering from shell shock, from post-traumatic disorder. But he sees that Kamala is weeping, that she needs comforting, so he goes to her. He's been told to protect her - that is his duty. The rain catapults off the supine figure of Dhanmatbai, who has lain motionless since the lightening bolts struck. The women ignore everything and everyone around them. With their bare fingers, they scrape at the pile of ashes. Kamala thinks they must be searching for Great Grandmother's bones, and cannot bear to look. But also cannot bear to look away. But there are no bones. Only, finally, right at the centre of the crater they have scraped in the middle of the pile of wet, black ashes - a tiny, green shoot, twisting and bouncing and springing back under the pelting rain drops.
Deepak urges Kamala to come away and finally she gives in. Together they raise up Dhanmatbai. She's alive, but only just. Deepak carries her back to the Manjaria village, Kamala holding her thin, limp hand. The women follow carrying White at shoulder level, like a corpse. Kamala turns now and then to look back at him, his lolling golden head, trying to synchronise the powerful international business-man she'd seen so often on TV and PC screens, with the lost little boy she'd encircled, communed with, comforted in that strange time outside time before the tree started burning.
The rest of the villagers are expecting them, they have huge pots of water ready, heated on bonfires of wood from the chopped down trees of the clearing. Dhanmatbai, Kamala and White are bathed, gently, with warm water that is tinged with the scent of healing herbs, and are put to bed. As she falls asleep Kamala hears the sing-song murmur of incantations.
Just like the last time she lay in this wooden cot, Kamala sleeps as if in a coma for many, many hours. But this time she doesn't wake refreshed. She wakes drained and trembling. Deepak tries his best to comfort her, but nothing can stop the tears from haemorrhaging out of her. She lets them, knows they must be shed because they are weighing her down, holding her back. Knowing that she needs to get rid of them, if she is to re-enter life again. Great Grandmother is gone, and although she's only known her for a few days, and although no-one has the right to know a Great Grandmother who should have died decades before - it feels like she's lost a mother, a sister, a child, it feels like she's lost herself. But she reminds herself again and again that there's still Mother, Aunty Seema, Jerome, Amelia... even Deepak, who, though he will clearly never love her, is kind to her and looks after her. And after she has repeated their names to herself over and over, slowly it starts to feel like they matter again. Like it's worth living for them - for herself - again.
