Not a single kitten was to be seen in the alleys. Their heads spinning with drink, intoxicated by the arrack, they stormed into the agrahara in a frenzy and made their way to Narayanappa’s house, pushing open the door. Boldly, without hesitation, they went straight inside. Under the influence of the liquor, reckless and unthinking, they climbed directly up to the attic. Shripati switched on the battery torch. Where? Where? There was no sign of Narayanappa’s corpse. Suddenly, all five of them were seized by mortal fear. “Ah! Narayanappa has risen as a ghost and walked away,” said Nagaraja. No sooner had he spoken than, in panic, he flung the arrack bottle into his bag, and all five of them, stumbling and shouting, ran out, terrified of falling or dying.

Unable to sleep, Lakshmidevamma, half-awake and muttering curses, opened her door and came out onto the agrahara street, shouting, “Look, look, they’ve seen ghosts!” and scolded them with a loud “Hey!”

Chapter Three

Though it was late into the night, the Brahmins, dismayed by what Praneshacharya had written, shut all their doors and windows tightly, pinched their noses as if to keep their hearts from rising to their mouths, and lay down to sleep. But sleep would not come. Hungry, afraid, they tossed on the cold ground. From another world, it seemed, came the soft sound of footsteps in the night, the rumble of cart wheels, the dreadful howling of Lakshmidevamma’s dog, her wailing, the shrill, piercing cries that seemed to shake the very breath from their bodies. The agrahara felt like a deserted forest, as though the guardian deity had abandoned them. In every house, children, mothers, and fathers clung to each other in the darkness, trembling. When the darkness finally lifted and the sun’s rays slipped in through cracks in the walls, forming tiny circles of light in the shadowy rooms, courage returned. Slowly, everyone rose, pushed aside the bolts, and peered out through the doors.

Boundary, limit, the line of battle. And again, the boundary that perched, unmoving, upon each house, driving away the crows. They sighed. They clapped their hands. When nothing they did could make it budge, in despair they blew conches and rang brass bells. Like on a Dwadashi morning, auspicious sounds filled the air at dawn, and Praneshacharya, stepping outside, saw and was overcome: in the confusion that he could not unravel, he paced from inside to outside, outside to inside, wringing his fingers, asking himself, “What should I do? What should I do?”

When he gave the usual medicine to his suffering wife in the eating room, his hand trembled and the medicine spilled. It felt as if, in a dream, he was falling headlong into a bottomless abyss—like the sudden jerk of pulling up one’s legs in sleep. The gaze of his frail, ailing wife—her sunken eyes, her directionless stare, the touch of the medicine to her lips—seemed to him the end of a long, worn path of regret, the path of the patient and physician bound together for centuries. He shivered on the mat. He wondered if all the misfortune that had gathered at his nose came from this very root.

Like a baby monkey that slips from its mother’s belly as it leaps from branch to branch, he felt he had fallen away from the samskara rituals he had clung to all this while. Lifeless, like a beggar in misery, he wondered: Was it I who clung to dharma in order to save this wife lying bedridden, or was it dharma, born of samskara and karma, that held my hand and led me down this path?

When I married her, I was sixteen, she was twelve. I wanted to become a sannyasi, or else to lead a life of renunciation. It was only because I was that boy, burning with the stubborn zeal of sacrifice, that I married her, a girl sickly from birth. Leaving her in the house of my grateful father-in-law, I went to Kashi and became a Vedantashironmani...

I returned. I believed that God had placed her, sick and frail, in my hands here, to test whether I had the strength to live a life of desireless action. With joy, I devoted myself to her service. I cooked with my own hands, prepared thin gruel from rava and fed her, performed the daily worship of the gods with all the proper rituals, and every evening read and explained the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Bhagavata to the Brahmins, accumulating my tapas like a miser hoarding his wealth. This month, a hundred thousand Gayatri mantras; next month, another hundred thousand; on Ekadashi, two hundred thousand more—bead after bead on the tulasi mala, I kept count of my austerities.

Once, a Smarta pandit came and argued: “Isn’t your doctrine, which says only the sattvic attain liberation, a kind of pessimism?” To this, the acharyas replied with logic: “What is despair? Is it not to desire something and fail to attain it? The tamasic have no desire for liberation, so their not attaining it is not despair. To say ‘I will become sattvic’ is a lie; only ‘I am sattvic’ is true. Only those of sattvic nature, who yearn for the Lord’s grace, are worthy.”

Thus, believing himself to be born sattvic, seeing his ailing wife as the sacrificial ground for his sattvic nature, he immersed himself in the cultivation of liberation. In the same way, he saw Narayanappa as a test of his sattvic resolve. Now, all his deepest certainties overturned, he felt as if he had returned to where he began at sixteen. Where was the path?

Where was the path, like a ledge at the edge of the abyss? Sitting beside his wife, a servant to her needs, he lifted her to bathe her as he did every day, afflicted by the meaningless rituals of conch and bells. He led her to the bathroom, drew water, and, seeing her shriveled chest, sunken nose, matted hair, felt