Rune locks up the clinic at midnight. He started seeing outpatients late that evening because of two back-to-back emergency operations. It has been ten years since Mrs. Eleanor Shaw changed his fortunes. On his ambling walk home along the rocky shoreline of Fort Cochin, usually with a book under his arm, it is his custom, weather permitting, to smoke one last pipe on a cement bench that looks out over the sea, and to savor the breeze. The waves celebrate their long voyage with a final splash on the rocks. The moon hangs low like a lantern, illuminating the angular scaffolding of the Chinese fishing nets, more than a dozen of them along the water’s edge. The poles crane out over the water like long-necked shore birds, while the netting billows like the sails of dhows.
Rune considers himself happy. Each day is different. He lacks for nothing, has good friends and many interests outside of medicine. Why then, many a night when he sits on this bench, does he feel restive? The unsettledness comes as unfailingly as the old Musulman who appears at the end of the month, carrying his tattered rent-collection ledger and his so-sorry-to-disturb-you mien. But this restlessness isn’t the kind that took him from port to port until he found a home in Cochin—it’s not about geography. He is where he is meant to be. What then?
A tapping sound gets louder. Rune sees a shape shuffling along, a staff in one hand, silhouetted by moonlight. The flattened profile, the absent nose are immediately recognizable: a leprous facies. Stumps, not fingers, clutch the staff. Coins rattle in a tin cup dangling from the neck. The figure chants in a low voice, a devotional perhaps, the face tilted up to the heavens and swaying from side to side, scanning the unseen sky. The specter stops, his head ceasing its pendulum swing as though he has sensed the low-hanging moon. He’s a statue, unmoving but for the rise and fall of the shoulders with each breath.
In a dizzying shift of perspective, Rune suddenly feels he has become the leper: it’s Rune who looks out through scarred, opaque corneas; Rune who sees cloudy, smeared images with no edges; Rune who discerns light and shadow but remembers what it was like to have moonlight fall on his face; those are Rune’s misshapen, ulcerated feet wrapped in bloodied gunnysack that is secured with coir rope . . . The moment passes. He has no explanation for what just happened, the sense of being momentarily embodied in another.
The figure departs, swallowed by the night, the tap of staff against stone receding. In a rush of clarity Rune sees all the things the leper could not: the distant horizon where sea meets sky, the sky that suspends the moon, and the moon with the shawl of stars draped around it . . . He feels himself disappear in the capaciousness of the universe. He has become the sagging net, the blind leper who must sleep under the stars . . . In the immensity of the cosmos, Rune feels he himself is nothing, an illusion. The difference between him and the leper is no difference at all, they are just manifestations of the universal consciousness.
In this new awareness, the restless chattering in his head abruptly ceases. Just as the ocean manifests as a wave or surf, but neither wave nor surf is the ocean, so also the Creator—God or Brahma—generates an impression of a universe that takes the form of a Swedish doctor, or a blind leper. Rune is real. The leper is real. The fishing net is real. Yet it is all maya, their separateness an illusion. All is one. The universe is nothing but a speck of foam on a limitless ocean that is the Creator. He feels euphoric and unburdened—the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.
In the early hours of morning, his worried watchman comes looking for him. In times past he has pulled his master out of the toddy shop, where the good doctor is slumped over the table. But on this night he finds the doctor rapt as a sadhu, gazing out through unfocused eyes. The watchman shakes him gently. Rune, smiling, reenters the illusion that is the world.
By the end of that week, he has given away all his furniture and stored his instruments and sterilizer in the godown of Salomon Halevi, the Jewish merchant and banker. Cochin now has many doctors, fresh graduates of the medical schools in Madras or Hyderabad, and it has an expanded public hospital system. He will miss his patients, but they’ll manage without him.
Two weeks later, without formal goodbyes, he heads to Bethel Ashram in Travancore. This monastic retreat was founded by a priest, BeeYay Achen, who is guided by the writings of Saint Basil on the pursuit of manual labor, silence, and prayer in order to become closer to the Creator. He was one of the first priests to get a BA, and no one knows him by any other name than BeeYay Achen. He encourages Rune by quiet example: service, prayer, and silence. After seven months, a leaner, almost unrecognizable Rune emerges like a butterfly from its chrysalis, sure of its destination, even if its flight is erratic. The beard, the joy, and the belly laugh are intact, but he is burning with a mystical sense of purpose. BeeYay blesses Rune when he leaves. “I believe God brought you here and revealed to you your life mission. But the important thing is you accepted. Remember, God didn’t speak just to Isaiah, but to everyone, when he said, ‘Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?’ Isaiah said, ‘Here I am. Send me!’ ”
Rune cajoles the enterprising boatman who supplies the monastery with fish, kerosene, candles, and other provisions to take him to his journey’s end. “Where? There? What! Why?” the boatman says, incredulous. “Did you forget something at that place?” When he realizes Rune is serious, he says, “Who knows if my boat can pass? Who knows if the canals are dry? Who knows if anything remains there anymore?”
The two of them set off at dawn into the backwaters, the white man dwarfing his dark companion. The canoe slides through a succession of canals whose sides are built with rock and mud. In the afternoon they cross a vast lake and pass into another narrow channel, which should lead to their destination. They call out to a toddy tapper aloft in a palm tree, who gives them final directions. “Go straight—don’t look left or right! In a furlong a canal will join. Cut in there. Then you’ll see ten or a hundred steps up.”
The “ten or a hundred steps” are fourteen, and so overgrown with moss that they nearly miss them. The boatman helps carry Rune’s sacks to a back gate that has rusted off its hinge, but he declines to go in further. “One more favor,” Rune says, counting out more notes than the boatman has seen at one time. “Sell me this boat.”
His first night alone is spent in the only one of the six crumbling redbrick buildings that has two intact walls and a sliver of thatch overhead. As the sun goes down, he sees a stone move—a snake was sunning itself there. Flat on his back, listening to the scurrying of mice, he looks up at the starscape and questions his sanity. The word “lazaretto” used to refer to a quarantine station where infectious patients could be isolated, but over time it came to mean a leprosy hospital. This lazaretto is tucked away on the furthest inland reach of the backwaters. It was built and abandoned by the Portuguese, rebuilt and abandoned by the Dutch, rebuilt again by a Scottish Protestant mission. The stigma of the unfortunates once housed here is so strong that in the decades since the last mission pulled out, no squatter has claimed the land.
The next morning, a stout staff in hand, Rune explores the large property. He charts the perimeter, explores each ruined building, sounds the well, and examines the intact but rusted front gate. Stepping outside, he finds a well-maintained gravel road that passes directly in front of the lazaretto; in one direction it leads back to the huts and houses of a small village whose canal side he traveled the previous day when they encountered the tapper. In the other direction the road runs as straight as a hair-parting through the vast dusty plain, before rising slightly, then abruptly snaking back and forth to become a ghat road, looking like a sinuous scar at the base of the ghostly, distant, mammoth, mist-shrouded mountains: the Western Ghats.