'Tell me.'

The old woman looked into her face for a time. Then she rolled over, opened her sewing basket. She showed Kokila a small dried plant, then some berries. 'This is water hemlock. These are castor bean seeds. Grind the hemlock leaves to a paste, add seeds to the paste just before you place it. It's bitter, but you don't need much. A pinch in spicy food will kill without any taste. But it looks like poisoning afterwards, I warn you. It's not like being sick.'

So Kokila watched and made her plan. Shastri and Shardul continued their work for the zamindar, gaining new enemies every month. And it was rumoured Shardul had raped another girl in the forest, the night of Gaurl Hunnime, the woman's festival when mud images of Siva and Parvati are worshipped.

Meanwhile Kokila had learned every detail of their routine. Shastri and Shardul ate a leisurely breakfast, and then Shastri heard cases at the pavilion between his house and the well, while Shardul did accounting beside the house. In the heat of midday they napped and received visitors on the verandah facing north into the forest. In the afternoons of most days they ate a small meal while lying on couches, like little zamindars, then walked with Gopal or one or two associates to that day's market, where they 'did business' until the sun was low.

They returned to the village drunk or drinking, stumbling cheerfully through the dusk to their home and dinner. It was as steady a routine as any in the village.

So Kokila considered her plans while spending some of her firewood walks on the hunt for water hemlock and castor beans. These grew in the dankest parts of the forest, where it shaded into swamp, and hid every manner of dangerous creature, from mosquito to tiger. But at midday all such pests were resting; indeed in the hot months everything alive seemed sleeping at midday, even the drooping plants. Insects buzzed sleepily in the sleepy silence, and the two poison plants glowed in the dim light like little green lanterns. A prayer to Kali and she plucked them out, while she was bleeding, and pulled apart a bean pod for the seeds, and tucked them in the band of her sari, and hid them for the night in the forest near the defecation grounds, the day before the Durga Puja. That night she did not sleep at all, except for during short dreams, in which Bihari came to her and told her not to be sad. 'Bad things happen in every life,' Bihari said. 'No anger.' There was more but on waking it all slipped away, and Kokila went to her hiding place and found the plant parts and ground the hemlock leaves furiously together in a gourd with a stone, then cast the stone and gourd away in beds of ferns. With the paste on a leaf in her hand she went to Shastri's house, and waited until their afternoon nap, a day that seemed to last for ever; then put the little seeds in the paste, and smeared a tiny dab of the paste inside the doughballs made for Shastri and Shardul's afternoon snack. Then she ran from the house and through the forest, her heart taking flight like a deer ahead of her – too like a deer, in that she ran wild with the thrill of what she had done, and fell into an unseen deer snare, set by a man from Bhadrapur. By the time he found her, stunned and just starting to struggle in the lines, with some of the paste still on her fingers, and took her to Dharwar, Shastri and Shardul were dead, and Prithvi was the new headman of the village, and Kokila was declared a witch and poisoner and killed on the spot.

Two. Back in the Bardo

Back in the bardo Kokila and Bihari sat next to each other on the black floor of the universe, waiting their turn for judgment.

' You're not getting it,' said Bihari – also Bold, and Bel, and Borondi, and many, many other incarnations before, back to her original birth in the dawn of this Kali-yuga, this age of destruction, fourth of the four ages, when as a new soul she had spun out of the Void, an eruption of Being out of Non being, a miracle inexplicable by natural law and indicative of the existence of some higher realm, a realm above that even of the deva gods who now sat on the dais looking down at them. The realm that they all sought instinctively to return to.

Bihari continued: 'The dharma is a matter that can't be short changed, you have to work at it step by step, doing what you can in each given situation. You can't leap up to heaven.'

'I shit on all that,' Kokila said, making a rude gesture at the gods. She was still so angry she could spit, and terrified too, weeping and wiping her nose on the back of her hand, 'I'll be damned if I cooperate in such a horrible thing.'

'Yes, you will! That's why we keep almost losing you. That's why you never recognize your jati when you're in the world, why you keep doing your own family harm. We rise and fall together.'

'I don't see why.'

Now Shastri was being judged, kneeling with his hands together in supplication.

'He'd better be sent to hell!' Kokila shouted at the black god. 'The lowest nastiest level of hell!'

Bihari shook her head. 'It's step by step, as I said. Little steps up and down. And it's you they're likely to judge down, after what you did.'

'It was justice!' Kokila exclaimed with vehement bitterness. 'I took justice into my own hands because no one else would do it! And I would do it again, too.' She shouted up at the black god: 'Justice, damn it!'

'Shh!' Bihari said urgently. 'You'll get your turn. You don't want to be sent back as an animal.'

Kokila glared at her. 'We are animals already, and don't you forget it.' She took a slap at Bihari's arm and her hand went right through Bihari's which somewhat deflated her point. They were in the realm of souls, there was no denying it. 'Forget these gods,' she snarled, 'it's justice we need! I'll bring the revolt right into the bardo itself if that's what it takes!'

'First things first,' Bihari's said. 'One step at a time. just try to recognize your jati, and take care of them first. Then on from there.'

Three. Tiger Mercy

Kya the tiger moved through elephant grass, stomach full and fur warm in the sun. The grass was a green wall around her, pressing in on every side. Above her the grass tips waved in the breeze, crossing the blue of the sky. The grass grew in giant bunches, radiating out from their centre and bending over at the tops, and though the clumps were very close, her way forward was to find the narrow breaks at the bottom between clumps, pushing through the fallen stalks. Eventually she came to the edge of the grass, bordering a parklike maidan, burned annually by humans to keep it clear. Here grazed great numbers of chital and other deer, wild pig, and antelopes, especially the nilghai.

This morning there stood a lone wapiti doe, nibbling grass. Kya could imitate the sound of a wapiti stag, and when she was in heat, she did it just to do it; but now she simply waited. The doe sensed something and jolted away. But a young gaur wandered into the clearing, dark chestnut in colour, white socked. As it approached Kya lifted her left forepaw, straightened her tail back, and swayed slightly fore and back, getting her balance. Then she threw her tail up and leapt across the park in a series of twenty foot bounds, roaring all the while. She hit the gaur and knocked it down, bit its neck until it died.

She ate.

Ba loo ah!

Her kol babl, a jackal that had been kicked out of his pack and was now following her around, showed his ugly face at the far end of the maidan, and barked again. She growled at him to leave, and he slunk back into the grass.

When she was full she got up and padded downhill. The kol bahl and ravens would finish the gaur.

She came to the river that wound its way through this part of the country. The shallow expanse was studded with islands, each a little jungle under its canopy of sal and shisharn trees, and several of these held nests of hers, in the matted undergrowth of brake and creepers, under tamarisk trees overhanging the warm sand on the banks of the stream. The tiger padded over pebbles to the water's edge, drank. She stepped in the river and stood, feeling the current push her fur downstream. The water was clear and warmed by the sun. In the sand at the stream's edge were pawprints of a number of animals, and in the grass their scents: wapiti and mouse deer, jackal and hyena, rhinoceros and gaur, pig and pangolin; the whole village, but none in sight. She waded across to one of her islands, lay in the smashed grass of her bed, in the shade. A nap. No cubs this year, no need to hunt for another day or two: Kya yawned hugely in her bed. She fell asleep in the silence that extends out from tigers in the jungle.