Wise men who have abandoned all thought of the fruit of action
Are freed from the chains of birth in this world
And go to regions of eternal happiness.
—Bhagavad Gita

“Come, you must drink this,” a gravelly voice ordered, and Ishvari’s eyes fluttered open to see a man garbed in a white loincloth proffering to her a clay bowl brimming with a milky-green concoction. His narrow chest was bare, and his skull shaven clean, but for a tuft of gray hair erupting from just behind its centre. So immense was her relief at seeing another human that she obeyed him before falling back on to the matting as new radiance suffused her.

He placed the empty bowl on the window ledge and sat beside her on the kusha matting. She stared...

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