“I couldn’t find that one in the book, so she dictated it to me from memory.”

“Kashmir’s quite the scholar.”

“She had the sniffles, but agreed to my lesson anyway. I think she’s falling for me.”

“How could she not, you’re a very charming fellow.”

“Why, thank you, Josh.”

“You’re welcome, Biff.”

“Okay, tell me about your little yoga thing.”

The Bhagavad Gita sayeth:

Just as the wide-moving wind

is constantly present in space,

so all creatures exist in me.

Understand it to be so!

“Is that the kind of advice you’d give someone who’s riding into battle? You’d think Krishna would be saying stuff like, ‘Look out, an arrow! Duck!’”

“You’d think,” Joshua sighed.

The Kama Sutra sayeth:

The position of “Rampant Monkey Collecting Coconuts” is achieved when a woman hooks her fingers into the man’s nostrils and performs a hokey-pokey motion with her hips and the man, while firmly stroking the woman’s uvula with his thumbs, swings his lingam around her yoni in a direction counter to that in which water swirls down a drain. (Water has been observed swirling down the drain in different directions in different places. This is a mystery, but a good rule of thumb for achieving Rampant Monkey is to just go in the direction counter to which your own personal drain swirls.)

“Your drawings are getting better,” Joshua said. “In the first one I thought she had a tail.”

“I’m using the calligraphy techniques we learned in the monastery, only using them to draw figures. Josh, are you sure it doesn’t bother you, talking about this stuff when you’ll never be allowed to do it?”

“No, it’s interesting. It doesn’t bother you when I talk about heaven, does it?”

“Should it?”

“Look, a seagull!”

The Katha Upanishad sayeth:

For a man who has known him,

the light of truth shines.

For one who has not known, there is darkness.

The wise who have seen him in every being

on leaving this life, attain life immortal.

“That’s what you’re looking for, huh, the Divine Spark thing?”

“It’s not for me, Biff.”

“Josh, I’m not a satchel of sand here. I didn’t spend all of my time studying and meditating without getting some glimpse of the eternal.”

“That’s good to know.”

“Of course it helps when angels show up and you do miracles and stuff too.”

“Well, yes, I guess it would.”

“But that’s not a bad thing. We can use that when we get home.”

“You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you?”

“Not a clue.”

Our training went on for two years before I saw the sign that called us home. Life was slow, but pleasant there by the sea. Joshua became more efficient at multiplying food, and while he insisted on living an austere lifestyle so he could remain unattached to the material world, I was able to get a little money ahead. In addition to paying for my lessons, I was able to decorate my nook (just some erotic drawings, curtains, some silk cushions) and buy a few personal items such as a new satchel, an ink stone and a set of brushes, and an elephant.

I named the elephant Vana, which is Sanskrit for wind, and although she certainly earned her name, I regret it was not due to her blazing speed. Feeding Vana was not a difficulty with Joshua’s ability to turn a handful of grass into a fodder farm, but no matter how hard Joshua tried to teach her yoga, she was not able to fit into my nook. (I consoled Joshua that it was probably the climb, and not his failure as a yoga guru that deterred Vana. “If she had fingers, Josh, she’d be snuggling up with me and seagulls right now.”) Vana didn’t like being on the beach when the tide came and washed sand between her toes, so she lived in a pasture just above the cliff. She did, however, love to swim, and some days rather than ride her on the beach all the way to Nicobar, I would have her swim into the harbor just under water, with only her trunk showing and me standing on her forehead. “Look, Kashmir, I’m walking on water! I’m walking on water!”

So eager was my erotic princess to share my embrace that rather than wonder at the spectacle as did the other townsfolk she could only reply:

“Park the elephant in back.”

(The first few times she said it I thought she was referring to a Kama Sutra position that we had missed, pages stuck together perhaps, but it turned out such was not the case.)

Kashmir and I became quite close as my studies progressed. After we went through all the positions of the Kama Sutra twice, Kashmir was able to take things to the next level by introducing Tantric discipline into our lovemaking. So skillful did we become at the meditative art of coupling that even in the throes of passion, Kashmir was able to polish her jewelry, count her money, or even rinse out a few delicates. I myself had so mastered the discipline of controlled ejaculation that often I was halfway home before release was at last achieved.

It was on my way home from Kashmir’s—as Vana and I were cutting through the market so that I could show my friends the ex-beggar boys the possible rewards for the man of discipline and character (to wit: I had an elephant and they did not)—that I saw, outlined on the wall of a temple of Vishnu, a dirty water stain, caused by condensation, mold, and wind-blown dust, which described the face of my best friend’s mother, Mary.

“Yeah, she does that,” said Joshua, when I swung over the edge of his nook and announced the news. He and Melchior had been meditating and the old man, as usual, appeared to be dead. “She used to do it all the time when we were kids. She sent James and me running all over the place washing down walls before people saw. Sometimes her face would appear in a pattern of water drops in the dust, or the peelings from grapes would fall just so in a pattern after being taken out of the wine press. Usually it was walls.”

“You never told me that.”

“I couldn’t tell you. The way you idolized her, you’d have been turning the pictures into shrines.”

“So they were naked pictures?”

Melchior cleared his throat and we both looked at him. “Joshua, either your mother or God has sent you a message. It doesn’t matter who sent it, the message is the same. It is time for you to go home.”

We would be leaving for the north in the morning, and Nicobar was south, so I left Joshua to pack our things on Vana while I walked into town to break the news to Kashmir.

“Oh my,” she said, “all the way back to Galilee. Do you have money for the journey?”

“A little.”

“But not with you?”

“No.”

“Well, okay. Bye.”

I could swear I saw a tear in her eye as she closed the door.

The next morning, with Vana loaded with my drawings and art supplies; my cushions, curtains, and rugs; my brass coffeepot, my tea ball, and my incense burner; my pair of breeding mongooses (mongeese?), their bamboo cage, my drum set, and my umbrella; my silk robe, my sun hat, my rain hat, my collection of carved erotic figurines, and Joshua’s bowl, we gathered on the beach to say good-bye. Melchior stood before us in his loincloth, the wind whipping the tails of his white beard and hair around his face like fierce clouds. There was no sadness in his face, but then, he had endeavored his entire life to detach from the material world, which we were part of. He’d already done this a long time ago.

Joshua made as if to embrace the old man, then instead just poked him in the shoulder. Once and only once, I saw Melchior smile. “But you haven’t taught me everything I need to know,” Josh said.

“You’re right, I have taught you nothing. I could teach you nothing. Everything that you needed to know was already there. You simply needed the word for it. Some need Kali and Shiva to destroy the world so they may see past the illusion to divinity in them, others need Krishna to drive them to the place where they may perceive what is eternal in them. Others may perceive the Divine Spark in themselves only by realizing through enlightenment that the spark resides in all things, and in that they find kinship. But because the Divine Spark resides in all, does not mean that all will discover it. Your dharma is not to learn, Joshua, but to teach.”