At the Bottom of Everything(56)

“We are hearing not to be expecting you,” Akki said. “This, you understand—” He gestured apologetically (I think) at the room, at the lack of special arrangements. I made a pshaw sort of noise and, in desperation, took a worrisomely sour gulp of tea.

“You are coming to us from miles and miles away,” Akki said. “My English, I offer apologies. So many, many apologies.” He moved his chair so he could sit facing me directly. “Bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta, very wonderful. Most wonderful. Telling me. You are a rich man? Important city man?”

No, no, a very unimportant man, I tried to explain. Unless you couldn’t be a bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta without being an important man, in which case, yes, very important, extremely important, from the biggest city of all. I sipped more tea.

The grandmother, Shima, had gone off into the backyard and now she came back in carrying a chicken, which she set to work hacking apart on the tabletop; it took me a surprising number of minutes to connect what she was doing with the sudden absence of rooster crows.

Two things happened then, which, along with its getting dark outside, seemed to mark the tilting of the evening from one phase into another. First, the little girl came back from her errand, which had apparently been to buy two giant bottles of something label-less and golden. And second, as Shima went around the room lighting the lanterns, I began to notice a set of dark shapes gathering by the door where I’d come in. At first I counted three people, then four, then five, all lingering on the porch like carolers. “Do they want to come inside?” I said.

“They are hoping you give them numbers!” Akki said. “Many, many people, not very much educated. Someone say savakabodhisatta, they start to think of lottery. Start to think of magic.” Then, to them, he said something that sounded like a grudging acknowledgment. One by one, bowing and cringing, they stepped inside and took their places against the wall. Were these the people who were supposed to lead me to the cave? They were mostly men, a few of them with mustaches; sometimes they whispered to each other, but mostly they just stood and watched as I served myself chicken bits and a purplish lentil stew. They looked as if they could have been waiting for a bus, or waiting to be called into a police lineup. By the time I’d finished my plate, which is to say picked at what meat I could discern in the half-dark, there were at least seven of them watching us.

“You are very much not feeling fear,” Akki said. “Very much calm, very much preparing, many, many accomplishments. The final night for many, many things.”

I made a noise of general agreement and wiped my hands against my shorts. The food was painfully, eye-reddeningly spicy, and the only way I could outrace the pain was by eating more and faster. Shima and Gita and the granddaughter had joined us, perched on chairs at a slight distance from the table; Gita looked down at her lap and ate only with the fingertips of her left hand, as birdlike as it was possible to be while eating stew without utensils; her daughter stood waiting to climb onto her lap. You’d think this might have been among the more awkward meals I’d ever eaten, but I was fairly well inured to awkwardness by that point, plus I’d resolved that a bhavishyat-savakabodhisatta, at least as I interpreted the role, wasn’t really given to chattering.

Also, there was the alcohol. At some point it became impossible to keep track of how much I’d had, because Akki, like an overeager waiter, poured a refill (we drank from orange plastic mugs) every time I drank so much as an inch. “Tulleho! Tulleho!” If I had to guess I’d say it was whiskey, or maybe gin, but really what it tasted of most strongly was flammability. By the end of the meal I’d noticed that the doorways, formerly very stable, were wobbling whenever I moved my head. One of the wall-lingerers, a pipe-cleaner-thin man in a white undershirt, seemed, each time I looked at him, to be mouthing a message to me, but I couldn’t keep him still enough to decipher it. The possibility of vomiting appeared on the horizon, like a distant ship popping into view. I know I knocked over my mug at some point and I remember thinking, as the grandmother pressed a towel against the puddle and Akki apologized, That’s probably for the best.

It was after dinner, in Akki’s long whiskey-sipping giggling period, that I first noticed the singing coming from the backyard. It could have been going on all throughout dinner; I was having, by then, to keep a fairly vigilant watch on the table to keep the room from spinning. Akki had been in the middle of telling me a story about Gita’s family (she’d gone to put her daughter to bed as soon as the meal was finished); she was, from what I understood, very lonely, much too shy to find a new father for her little daughter. There were other threads in the story too, things I couldn’t quite follow, to do with corrupt judges, shady land deals. As I say, I wasn’t at my best.