35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

‘IT IS NOT MY FIRE THAT BURN YOU HERE’
oars twice as wide as his legs, and pushed off, this time straining
against the current.
‘What exactly do they do anyway, those sadhus?’
‘Ah . . .’ The dom raja sighed, glaring up again at what could have
been clouds or smoke, as if annoyed. ‘They do their job. Like you,
like me.’
‘What is their job?’
We collided with the rotting hulk of a houseboat emblazoned
across one side with a legend PEPSI - THE CHOICE OF A NEW
GENERATION. All of us lurched, grabbing for support. The
oarsman cursed and spat, and considered whether rowing with his
back to the direction he was heading might not be such a good idea.
‘To be there is their job.’ The dom raja laughed. ‘To be who they
are. If this were not so, they would not be there, would they?’
‘So what?’
He reminded me of John Cleese playing a Vedic sage: you knew
he could be serious, but you weren’t sure when. It was a kind of hell:
to be surrounded by wisdom but see it all as a joke. Lead me from the
Unreal to the Real . . .
‘There is a small creature – a worm, isn’t it?’ the dom raja
continued, as if to confirm my terrors. ‘Why is it there? Who would
miss it? But if it was not there –’ he sighed mightily again, ‘– then
perhaps we would miss it, no?’
‘Do they steal souls, those sadhus?’
He laughed so loudly that the noise bounced back from
crumbling palace walls, bounced back from damp tiers of rotting
steps rising indefinitely into the smoke or cloud, then bounced away
and dissolved over the dark, lugubrious expanse of the Ganges.
‘Who would want to steal a soul?’ he managed between epileptic
fits of mirth. ‘Would you?’ His lungs barked what sounded like an
angry Huh?
I shrugged. ‘If I didn’t have one, I might.’
‘You understand much, and yet nothing at all,’ he then said, clear
as a temple bell.
‘Yeah?’
‘But you do not want as much as most, do you?’
‘What?’
421