“May Shiva watch over you, you heretics. Thank you for returning my daughter.”

Joshua and I gathered up our clothes and satchels, then bought some rice in the market and set out for Tamil. We followed the Ganges south until we came to the sea, where Joshua and I washed the gore of Kali from our bodies.

We sat on the beach, letting the sun dry our skin as we picked pitch out of our chest hairs.

“You know, Josh,” I said, as I fought a particularly stubborn gob of tar that had stuck in my armpit, “when you were leading those kids out of the temple square, and they were so little and weak, but none of them seemed afraid…well, it was sort of heartwarming.”

“Yep, I love all the little children of the world, you know?” “Really?”

He nodded. “Green and yellow, black and white.”

“Good to know—Wait, green?”

“No, not green. I was just fuckin’ with you.”

Tamil, as it turned out, was not a small town in southern India, but the whole southern peninsula, an area about five times the size of Israel, so looking for Melchior was akin to walking into Jerusalem on any given day and saying, “Hey, I’m looking for a Jewish guy, anyone seen him?” What we had going for us was that we knew Melchior’s occupation, he was an ascetic holy man who lived a nearly solitary life somewhere along the coast and that he, like his brother Gaspar, had been the son of a prince. We found hundreds of different holy men, or yogis, most of them living in complete austerity in the forest or in caves, and usually they had twisted their bodies into some impossible posture. The first of these I saw was a yogi who lived in a lean-to on the side of a hill overlooking a small fishing village. He had his feet tucked behind his shoulders and his head seemed to be coming from the wrong end of his torso.

“Josh, look! That guy is trying to lick his own balls! Just like Bartholomew, the village idiot. These are my people, Josh. These are my people. I have found home.”

Well, I hadn’t really found home. The guy was just performing some sort of spiritual discipline (that’s what “yoga” means in Sanskrit: discipline) and he wouldn’t teach me because my intentions weren’t pure or some claptrap. And he wasn’t Melchior. It took six months and the last of our money and we both saw our twenty-fifth birthdays before we found Melchior reclining in a shallow stone nook in a cliff over the ocean. Seagulls were nesting at his feet.

He was a hairier version of his brother, which is to say he was slight, about sixty years old, and he wore a caste mark on his forehead. His hair and beard were long and white, shot with only a few stripes of black, and he had intense dark eyes that seemed to show no white at all. He wore only a loincloth and he was as thin as any of the Untouchables we had met in Kalighat.

Joshua and I clung to the side of the cliff while the guru untied from the human knot he’d gotten himself into. It was a slow process and we pretended to look at the seagulls and enjoy the view so as not to embarrass the holy man by seeming impatient. When he finally achieved a posture that did not appear as if it had been caused by being run over by an ox cart, Joshua said, “We’ve come from Israel. We were six years with your brother Gaspar in the monastery. I am—”

“I know who you are,” said Melchior. His voice was melodic, and every sentence he spoke seemed as if he were beginning to recite a poem. “I recognize you from when I first saw you in Bethlehem.”

“You do?”

“A man’s self does not change, only his body. I see you grew out of the swaddling clothes.”

“Yes, some time ago.”

“Not sleeping in that manger anymore?”

“No.”

“Some days I could go for a nice manger, some straw, maybe a blanket. Not that I need any of those luxuries, nor does anyone who is on the spiritual path, but still.”

“I’ve come to learn from you,” Joshua said. “I am to be a bodhisattva to my people and I’m not sure how to go about it.”

“He’s the Messiah,” I said helpfully. “You know, the Messiah. You know, Son of God.”

“Yeah, Son of God,” Joshua said.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Joshua.

“So what do you have for us?” I asked.

“And who are you?”

“Biff,” I said.

“My friend,” said Josh.

“Yeah, his friend,” said I.

“And what do you seek?”

“Actually, I’d like to not have to hang on to this cliff a lot longer, my fingers are going numb.”

“Yeah,” said Josh.

“Yeah,” said I.

“Find yourself a couple of nooks on the cliff. There are several empty. Yogis Ramata and Mahara recently moved on to their next rebirth.”

“If you know where we can find some food we would be grateful,” Joshua said. “It’s been a long time since we’ve eaten. And we have no money.”

“Time then for your first lesson, young Messiah. I am hungry as well. Bring me a grain of rice.”

Joshua and I climbed across the cliff until we found two nooks, tiny caves really, that were close to each other and not so far above the beach that falling out would kill us. Each of our nooks had been gouged out of the solid rock and was just wide enough to lie down in, tall enough to sit up in, and deep enough to keep the rain off if it was falling straight down. Once we were settled, I dug through my satchel until I found three old grains of rice that had worked their way into a seam. I put them in my bowl, then carried the bowl in my teeth as I made my way back to Melchior’s nook.

“I did not ask for a bowl,” said Melchior. Joshua had already skirted the cliff and was sitting next to the yogi with his feet dangling over the edge. There was a seagull in his lap.

“Presentation is half the meal,” I said, quoting something Joy had once said.

Melchior sniffed at the rice grains, then picked one up and held it between his bony fingertips.

“It’s raw.”

“Yes, it is.”

“We can’t eat it raw.”

“Well, I would have served it up steaming with a grain of salt and a molecule of green onion if I’d known you wanted it that way.” (Yeah, we had molecules in those days. Back off.)

“Very well, this will have to do.” The holy man held the bowl with the rice grains in his lap, then closed his eyes. His breathing began to slow, and after a moment he appeared not to be breathing at all.

Josh and I waited. And looked at each other. And Melchior didn’t move. His skeletal chest did not rise with breath. I was hungry and tired, but I waited. And the holy man didn’t move for almost an hour. Considering the recent nook vacancies on the cliff face, I was a little concerned that Melchior might have succumbed to some virulent yogi-killing epidemic.

“He dead?” I asked.

“Can’t tell.”

“Poke him.”

“No, he’s my teacher, a holy man. I’m not poking him.”

“He’s Untouchable.”

Joshua couldn’t resist the irony, he poked him. Instantly the yogi opened his eyes, pointed out to sea and screamed, “Look, a seagull!”

We looked. When we looked back the yogi was holding a full bowl of rice. “Here, go cook this.”

So began Joshua’s training to find what Melchior called the Divine Spark. The holy man was stern with me, but his patience with Joshua was infinite, and it was soon evident that by trying to be part of Joshua’s training I was actually holding him back. So on our third morning living in the cliff, I took a long satisfying whiz over the side (and is there anything so satisfying as whizzing from a high place?) then climbed to the beach and headed into the nearest town to look for a job. Even if Melchior could make a meal out of three grains of rice, I’d scraped all the stray grains out of both my and Joshua’s satchels. The yogi might be able to teach a guy to twist up and lick his own balls, but I couldn’t see that there was much nourishment in it.