Where Nothing Grows

There is a patch of ground near Kurukshetra, a few kilometres outside the town, that the local people will not farm.

It is not marked on any map. The guidebooks do not mention it. When Ira asked the auto driver to take her to where nothing grows, he did not ask what she meant. He just looked at her in the mirror for a long moment, then turned off the highway onto a dirt road through mustard fields so yellow they hurt her eyes.

The fields stopped at the edge of a shallow depression in the land, perhaps fifty metres across. Inside it, the soil was red-brown and cracked and absolutely bare. Not a blade of grass. Not a weed. Around its edges, the mustard grew right up to the border and then stopped, as if the plants had agreed on a line.

In the middle of the bare ground, a man was sitting cross-legged, facing the setting sun.

"I will wait," the auto driver said, and did not get out.

Ira walked across the cracked earth. It was warm under her sandals, warmer than the air. When she was ten metres away, the man spoke without turning around.

"You threw away the elephant."

"How do you know that?"

"Because you are here, and they are not." He turned his head. His face was ordinary, which was the strangest thing about it: a North Indian face of perhaps thirty-five, a few grey hairs at the temples, a slight crookedness to the nose as if it had once been broken. His eyes were dark and very still. Around his forehead, a clean white bandage. Through the centre of it, slowly, a small red stain was spreading. "Sit, Dr. Menon. The ground does not bite. It only refuses."

She sat. The sun was going down behind the fields, huge and orange.

"Are you really him?" she said. "Drona's son. The one who—"

"Who killed children in their sleep." He said it flatly. "Yes. I have had a long time to stop pretending I was anyone else. For the first thousand years I told myself I was following orders. For the second thousand, I told myself they deserved it. For the third, I stopped telling myself anything. Now I just say what I did." He touched the bandage. "It helps the wound, a little. Not to lie."

"The healing. In the newspaper. The child in Kurukshetra—"

"I cannot die," Ashwatthama said. "My body repairs itself — endlessly, uselessly, cell by cell, age after age. Your machines have probably told you that already, in their way. What your machines cannot tell you is that for five thousand years I thought it was the curse." He looked down at the red earth. "It is not the curse. The curse is only this wound. The one thing in me that cannot heal. Everything else — the repairing — that is my father's gift. Drona was a teacher. He wanted his son to never be defeated. He gave me a body that would never break." He smiled, very slightly. "Krishna did not take that away. He just made sure I would have to live in it."

"And you can pass it on," Ira said. "Through blood. Through touch."

"Through blood, a little. A few drops, a few years of health. Through touch, sometimes, if I want it very badly." He was quiet for a moment. "In 1857, a British surgeon in Meerut took twelve pints of my blood over three weeks and gave it to officers of his regiment. Every one of them lived to be over a hundred. I was chained to a bed in a cantonment hospital the whole time. A young sepoy's widow brought me water every night and one night she brought the key." He looked at Ira. "She warned me. Then she ran, too. Nobody had warned me since. Until you."

Ira's throat was tight.

"They'll come here," she said. "The company. They have satellite images, phone records, they'll find the newspaper story—"

"Yes." He nodded. "They will be here in about twenty minutes. I heard their helicopter leave Delhi an hour ago." He tilted his head, listening to something she could not hear. "Two vehicles on the highway as well."

"Then why are you sitting here?"

Ashwatthama looked at her for a long time. The red stain on his bandage had stopped spreading.

"Because I have been running for three thousand years," he said, "and it has never once made anything better. Because a doctor threw away the only proof of what I am, which no one in five thousand years has done. And because I think that for the first time since the war, I would like to choose what happens to me, instead of fleeing from it." He reached up and, slowly, began to unwind the bandage from his forehead. "Dr. Menon. You study why things age. I would like you to study something else now."

The bandage fell away.

The wound in the centre of his forehead was not a hole. It was light. A deep, slow, pulsing red glow, like an ember breathing, the size of a jewel — the exact size, Ira thought dizzily, of the stone Krishna had torn out five thousand years ago.

"Not why I cannot die," Ashwatthama said. "Why this cannot heal. Because I think the answer is not in my blood. I think it is in me." He held out his hand to her, palm up. "And I think that if we find it — I will finally be allowed to rest."

Across the mustard fields, the sound of rotor blades came beating out of the dusk.

Ira looked at his hand. At the red ground that refused to grow anything. At the helicopter lights rising over the horizon, and the headlights of two black SUVs turning off the highway onto the dirt road.

The auto driver, behind her, had started his engine.

(Ira takes his hand — or she runs for the auto. The helicopter lands — or it doesn't. What is the jewel, and can the oldest wound in Indian mythology ever close? Continue the protocol.)