The Ninth Buddha by Daniel Easterman

for whatever poor beast lay sliced and gravied on their plates.   She kept up her end of a stilted conversation with miserable politeness.   “My husband told me of your grief, Mr.   Wylam,” she said, ladling boiled cabbage on to his plate.
    “I have spent most of today in prayer, asking for your son to be restored to you.   And his poor mother at home: she must be stricken.”
    “My wife is dead, Mrs.   Carpenter.   She died a little over a year ago.”
    “I am so sorry.   So very sorry.”   She dropped a slab of something off-white beside the cabbage.
    “Was she carried away by illness?”
    “Consumption, Mrs.   Carpenter.   She died of consumption.   She was thirty-one.”
    For the first time, Moira Carpenter’s eyes seemed to light up.
    Sickness enlivened her much as idolatry enlivened her spouse.
    “It is a scourge, Mr.   Wylam, a dreadful scourge.   We are blessed to live here where the mountain air drives it away.   But, of course, we have our own afflictions to bear.   You can have no conception how these poor people are ravaged.   They pay the price of a depraved system.   Syphilis, Mr.   Wylam, is endemic .. . please, do eat your dinner .. .   and gonorrhoea takes a terrible toll.”
    It was not long before Christopher realized that his hostess was the worst possible dinner companion anyone could have: a hypochondriac who finds interest in nothing else but illness.   As she picked at her food, she regaled Christopher with tales of her own illnesses, her husband’s illnesses, the illnesses that daily afflicted the unfortunate orphans of Kalimpong, the illnesses of the entire sub-continent.
    It was all Christopher could do to force down his sweet a vile yellow custard with indecipherable pieces embedded loosely in it while she expatiated on a recent case of cancer of the nose she had visited in the hospital.
    “This is all very well, my dear,” her husband interrupted at last.
    “But we should not allow our guest to think that our care is chiefly for the physical ailments of these unfortunates.   We leave that to those whose inclinations lie in that direction.   But I assure you, Christopher I may call you Christopher, may I not?   that, however terrible the ills that ravage the flesh of India, they are nothing to the spiritual sicknesses that torment its spirit.   The Dark One is at work in this land, dragging this wretched people down to hell, generation after generation.   We do what little we can, but it is an uphill struggle.”
    And so he went on, detailing what were for him the principal horrors of India and its idolatrous faith.   The Hindus were condemned for worshipping a multiplicity of gods, the Muslims for praying to the wrong one.   Yogis were charlatans and Sufis fakes, for by definition no sort of spirituality could be found without the presence of God and God to John Carpenter was white-skinned and Presbyterian.   Christopher decided there was no point in arguing.   He was little enough of a believer himself to go defending other men’s faiths.
    It was only towards the end of the evening that Christopher began to see that the man was playing an elaborate game with him.   He was not a fool with antiquated and bizarre beliefs about religious practices on his doorstep, nor yet a simple-minded bigot rabbi ting on about his personal obsessions, but a clever man playing a role.
    Christopher remembered the moment earlier that day when Carpenter had removed his glasses and shown himself to him briefly.   Now, as the missionary or his wife rambled on about disease or moral corruption, he caught from time to time a sneaking look on Carpenter’s face whether ironic, derisory, or merely mischievous he could not tell.
    “Tell me, Christopher,” he said while they drank weak tea after the meal, ‘how often have you been in Kalimpong before?”
    “I came here frequently as a child.   My father worked near here.”
    “He was a businessman like you, was