And anyway, the singing: it was a single voice, probably female; going just by the melody I’d guess it was a song about waiting for a loved one to return from sea; it sounded like something you’d sing as you sat watching the plum blossoms wither. Either Akki noticed me noticing it or he noticed it himself. He stood up and lifted the lantern from the table; the men against the wall seemed to take this as their cue to huddle together by the door, as if they might need to run. “Come,” Akki said. “Now we will see. They are as family to me. Very, very sad, when my son is dying. Lots of crying, much too much crying. They make happiness again.”
The yard wasn’t really so much a yard as it was a pen of dirt, leading out into an endless field. Except that I couldn’t see details beyond Akki’s lantern light, and what I could see, including the stars and the moon, seemed to be turning in a kaleidoscope. There’s something about rural darkness, even or especially when you’re drunk; it feels bottomless; it makes you feel like you’re floating in the ocean. The lone voice had become a handful of voices now, a droning harmony, coming from somewhere that seemed to get farther away as we approached it. I tripped over a clod of broken-up ground and Akki put his arm around me, half affectionate, half stabilizing. He led me to the edge of the field, where there was a brick shed so basic it could have been drawn by a preschooler. The singing was coming directly from inside; if I’d lain my hands on the walls I would have felt a humming. Practically tiptoeing, Akki led me around to the shed’s cutout door: Look.
And there they were, the disciples who’d brought Akki happiness after his son died, the people who were, I realized as soon as I saw them, my only hope of getting to the cave. Raymond had been telling the truth. They were all boys, and they couldn’t, I didn’t think, have been much older than thirteen or fourteen. They wore simple robes, something like orange togas, and had identically shaved heads. The singing seemed to come not so much from them as through them. One of them, the one I’d thought was a woman, would sing something that must have meant: Must I, oh must I, wait forever? And the other three would answer: Yes, yes, you must wait forever.
They sat, the four of them, perfectly still, kneeling on the bare ground in what had been complete dark, singing with their heads tilted slightly toward the ground. It felt like coming upon a cluster of unicorns at a watering hole. In college, in a music appreciation class, the professor had once played us a recording of what she said was the last Italian castrato, this now ancient man, shriveled and broken, singing with the voice of an angelic little girl. That was, I’d always thought, the eeriest, most unworldly music I’d ever hear. Wrong.
Akki and I stood there until the song was done (I’m guessing it was at least a few minutes, because I had time to notice the rolled-up straw mats in the corner of the shed and the wood-framed photo, against the wall, of what must have been a much-younger Sri Prabhakara). Then, as soon as they were finished, all four boys, who I wouldn’t have thought were aware of us, opened their eyes, turned to face us, to face me, and bowed until their foreheads were against the ground. I don’t think the feeling of being wrongly prostrated to is something that most people get to, or have to, experience in their lives; I was lucky to be unsteady enough not to feel the full bizarreness of it.
They sat back upright and closed their eyes, and Akki, looking as if he’d just pulled off the world’s most remarkable magic trick, led me staggering back toward the house. Was it possible that I smelled as strongly of alcohol as he did? Were those tears on his cheeks or was it sweat?
“Are they going to take me to the cave?” I said.
“Tomorrow, yes, yes, yes, tomorrow you will make puja. Now to resting. Now to sleep.”
Someone had made up a bed for me, complete with a folded set of pajamas, while we were out in the backyard, and it looked, in that moment, as welcoming as a bath. It was right by the wall where we’d just eaten dinner, with a lantern tucked into the window nook above. The pajamas would have fit two of me, even with the drawstring pulled tight. I blew out the lantern and lay there listening to what sounded like a large animal just outside the back door, breathing and chewing. The room was warm but I wanted the protection of the blankets on me; either they or I or both of us smelled sweet and gamy. I tried, because exhaustion and the ability to fall asleep had parted company, to count the places I’d slept in India, but I kept losing track, having to double back. Under my mountain of blankets I turned onto one side and then the other, my back and then my front. I felt as if a plate-sized Alka-Seltzer were dissolving in my stomach.