She threw the phone into the creek from the Airoli bridge. It seemed like the kind of thing people did in films, and she was surprised by how much it hurt — four years of photographs, her mother's voice notes — and then surprised again by how light she felt afterward.
She took the Panchavati Express to Nashik with cash, in the general compartment, wedged between a vegetable seller and a family going to a wedding. Four hours. She spent them with her eyes closed, thinking.
If the man at the dharamshala was a con artist, she had just thrown away her career. If he was ill — some rare mutation, a chimerism, a lab error — then the pharmaceutical company funding Helix would want him for exactly the reasons she feared, and she would at least have warned him. And if he was what she was afraid he was, then she was about to meet a man who had been alive during the Mahabharata war and had spent five thousand years learning how to disappear.
In all three cases, she needed to reach him first.
Trimbakeshwar was grey and green and dripping from the monsoon. The temple rose black against the hills, pilgrims in wet saffron queuing at its gates, the smell of camphor and wet earth everywhere. The dharamshala was a two-storey building down a lane of flower sellers, with a painted sign and a tin roof. An old woman in a white saree was sweeping the verandah.
"The man who answers the phone," Ira said, a little breathless. "Tall. He has a bandage — here." She touched her own forehead.
The old woman stopped sweeping.
"Baba left in the night," she said. "He paid for the whole year. He always pays for the whole year." She looked Ira up and down. "You are the doctor."
Ira's heart jumped. "He told you about me?"
"He told me a doctor would come, and then later some men would come, and that I should give the doctor this and give the men tea." She reached into the folds of her saree and held out a small brass box, the size of a matchbox, its lid engraved with a pattern of lotus petals worn almost smooth by handling.
Ira opened it.
Inside, on a bed of red cloth, lay a folded piece of paper and a single dried tulsi leaf. On the paper, in fountain pen, in beautiful, slightly old-fashioned English:
Dr. Menon — If you are reading this, you came yourself instead of sending someone. That is either very kind or very foolish. In my experience the two are usually the same.
They will not stop. They have not stopped for three hundred years — first the Company men, then the maharajas' physicians, then the Germans, then the Americans, now your people. Every age that learns to read blood finds me. I have learned that it is safer to run than to hide.
But I am tired of running, and you warned me, and nobody has warned me since 1857.
If you want to understand what is in my blood, come to the place where it was first spilled. You will know it. Your grandmother told you.
Do not bring the elephant. — A.
Ira stared at the last line. Then she put her hand into her pocket, where the pen drive shaped like a cartoon elephant was sitting against her hip, and felt every hair on her arms stand up.
"Didi," the old woman said sharply. "The men."
At the end of the lane, a white SUV with Mumbai plates had turned in from the main road and was moving slowly through the crowd of pilgrims, its windows tinted black.
Ira went out the back of the dharamshala, through a courtyard full of drying sarees, over a low wall, into a field of wet grass, and did not stop running until she reached the bus stand.
She sat on a bench and made herself breathe.
The place where it was first spilled.
The wound on his forehead. The jewel. Krishna tearing it out on the banks of a river, the morning after the massacre. Her grandmother's voice in the monsoon dark: and the blood of Ashwatthama fell into the earth at Kurukshetra, and where it fell, nothing has grown since.
Kurukshetra. Haryana. Eleven hundred kilometres away.
A bus was pulling in. Its board said SHIRDI. She did not need Shirdi. But next to her on the bench, a boy of about twelve was selling newspapers, and one of them was folded so that its front page faced her, and she read the headline without meaning to:
MYSTERY 'HEALER' SPOTTED AT BRAHMA SAROVAR — DEVOTEES CLAIM WOUNDS CURED BY TOUCH.
Kurukshetra. Yesterday.
Yesterday, when he had still been in Nashik, answering her phone call.
Ira bought the newspaper. Under the headline was a blurred photograph taken on someone's phone: a crowd at the edge of a great sacred tank, and in the middle of them a tall man in white, his face turned away, a bandage around his forehead.
His hand was on the shoulder of a child. And the child, the article said, had walked for the first time in six years.
"He heals people," she whispered. "His blood repairs. Of course it does. That's what the telomeres are. He can't die because his cells can't stop fixing themselves." She thought of the pharmaceutical company, and their shareholder reports, and the white SUV. "And they don't want him to heal a child. They want to bottle it."
She pulled out the elephant. Looked at it. Do not bring the elephant.
Then she did something she had never done in her life. She walked to the nearest dustbin and threw away the only copy of the most important data she had ever generated.
And she bought a ticket to Delhi.
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