The Year of Rice and Salt

He lingered on his couch but could take no food, and his skin was very hot. Bahram did not tell him that Khalid had died already, very swiftly, felled by grief or anger at the loss of Fedwa and Esmerine and the children – as if by apoplexy rather than plague. Bahram only sat with the Tibetan in the silent compound.

At one point Iwang croaked, 'I wonder if Nadir knew they were infected, and gave them back to kill us.'

'But why?'

'Perhaps he feared the killer of myriads. Or some faction of the court. He had other considerations than us. Or it might have been someone else. Or no one.'

'We'll never know.'

'No. The court itself might be gone by now. Nadir, the Khan, all of them.'

'I hope so,' Bahram's mouth said.

Iwang nodded. He died at dawn, wordless and struggling.

Bahram got all the compound's survivors to put cloths over their faces and move the bodies into a closed workshop beyond the chemical pits. He was so far outside himself that the movements of his numb limbs surprised him, and he spoke as if he were someone else. Do this do that. Let's eat. Then, carrying a big pot to the kitchen, he felt the lump in his armpit, and sat down as if the tendons in the back of his knees had been cut, thinking: I guess it's my turn now.

Back in the Bardo

Well, it was, as might be imagined after an end like that, a very discour aged and dispirited little jati that huddled together on the black floor of the bardo this time around. Who could blame them? Why should they have had any will to continue? It was hard to discern any reward for virtue, any forward progress – any dharmic justice of any kind. Even Bahram could not find the good in it, and no one else even tried. Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of chaoses, no one could discern it; and the story of their transmigrations, rather than being a narrative without death, as the first experiences of reincarnation perhaps seemed to suggest, had become instead a veritable charnel house. Why read on? Why pick up their book from the far wall where it has been thrown away in disgust and pain, and read on? Why submit to such cruelty, such bad karma, such bad plotting?

The reason is simple: these things happened. They happened countless times, just like this. The oceans are salt with our tears. No one can deny that these things happened.

And so there is no choice in the matter. They cannot escape the wheel of birth and death, not in the experience of it, or in the contemplation of it afterwards; and their anthologist, Old Red Ink himself, must tell their stories honestly, must deal in reality, or else the stories m can nothing. And it is crucial that the stories mean something.

So. No escape from reality: they sat there, a dozen sad souls, huddled together at a far corner of the great stage of the hall of judgment. It was dim, and cold. The perfect white light had lasted this time for only the briefest of moments, a flash like the eyeball exploding; after that, here they were again. Up on the dais the dogs and demons and black gods capered, in a hazy mist that shrouded all, that damped all sound.

Bahram tried, but could think of nothing to say. He was still stunned by the events of their last days in the world; he was still ready to get up and go out and start another day, on another morning just like all the rest. Deal with the crisis of an invasion from the east, the taking of his family, if that was what it meant – whatever problems the day happened to bring, trouble, crisis, sure, that was life. But not this. Not this already. Salt tears of timely death, alum tears of untimely death: bitterness filled the air like smoke. I liked that life! I had plans for that life!

Khalid sat there just as Khalid always had, as if ensconced in his study thinking over some problem. The sight gave Bahram a deep pang of regret and sorrow. All that life, gone. Gone, gone, gone altogether beyond… The past is gone. Even if you can remember it, it's gone. And even at the time it was happening Bahram had known how he had loved it, he had lived in a state of nostalgia for the present, every day of it.

Now gone.

The rest of the jati sat or sprawled on the cheap wooden floor around Khalid. Even Sayyid Abdul looked distraught, not just sorry for himself, but distraught for them all, sad to have left that turbulent but oh so interesting world.

An interval passed; a moment, a year, an age, the kalpa itself, who could tell in such a terrible place?

Bahram took a deep breath, exerted himself, sat up.

'We're making progress,' he announced firmly.