To my eye, the priest was just another black, dirty, scrawny Hindu, in the usual dingy dhoti and tulband and nothing else. I would hardly have asked road directions of such a one. I would certainly never have entrusted a small and apprehensive child bride to his attentions. She was bound to be more repelled by him than by anything that could happen on her wedding night.

But perhaps not. According to the temple sculptures, some astonishing things could happen on her wedding night. As the sadhu pointed out this and that, and snickered and leered and rubbed his hands together, I saw depictions of acts that I had not known were possible until I myself was well along in years and experience. The stone men and women were conjoining in every conceivable position and combination and contortion, and in several ways that—even at my present age—I would not have thought of trying. Almost any one of those sculptured acts, if performed in a Christian land, even by a legitimately wedded man and wife, would have required their going immediately afterward to a confessor. And if the performance could be accurately described and related to that priest, he would doubtless stagger away to seek shrift from a superior confessor.

I said, “I will accept, Tofaa, that a girl barely out of childhood might be required to submit to the natural act of surata with her new husband. But are you telling me that she is required to be versed in all these wild variations?”

“Well, she makes a better wife, if she is. But in any case, she should be prepared for whatever tastes her husband might manifest. She is a child, yes, but he may be a mature and lusty and experienced man. Or even a very old man, who has long been surfeited by the natural act, and now requires novelty.”

Having myself been all my life led about by my insatiable curiosity, and led into some curious situations, I was hardly one to point an accusing or ridiculing finger at the private practices of any other person or people. So I merely followed the smirking sadhu around the temple as he gesticulated and jabbered, and I made no surprised or scandalized outcries as Tofaa explained, “This is the adharottara, the upside-down act … this is the viparita surata, the perverse act … .” I was, in fact, regarding the sculptures from a different point of view, and pondering on a different aspect of them.

The carvings might well horrify a prudish spectator, but even the most censorious could not deny that they were fine art, beautifully and intricately done. The acts so explicitly portrayed were bawdy, God knows, even obscene, but the men and women involved were all smiling happily, and they were spirited and vivacious in their attitudes. They were enjoying themselves. So the sculptures expressed both a superb craftsmanship and a wonderful verve for life. They did not at all accord with the Hindus as I knew them: inept in everything they did, and doing everything with joyless sniveling, and doing very little.

As an example of their backwardness: in contrast to the Han, whose historians had been minutely recording every least event in their dominions for thousands of years, the Hindus possessed not one written book recounting any of their history. They had only some “sacred” collections of unbelievable legends—unbelievable because, in them, all the Hindu men were tiger-brave and resourceful, and all the Hindu women angel-sweet and lovable. For another example: the Hindu garments called sari and dhoti were only swathings of fabric. That was because, although the most primitive people elsewhere had long ago invented the needle and the craft of sewing, the Hindus had not yet learned to use a needle and had not any word for “tailor” in any of their multitude of languages.

How, I asked myself, could a people ignorant even of sewing have envisioned and crafted these delicate, artful temple carvings? How could a people so slothful and furtive and woeful have portrayed here men and women joyous and nimble; inventive and adroit, lively and carefree?

They could not have done. I decided that these lands must have been inhabited, ages before the Hindus came, by some other and very different race, one with talent and vivacity. God knows where that superior people had gone, but they had left a few artifacts like this splendidly crafted temple, and that was all. They had left no trace of themselves in the later-come, usurper Hindus. That was deplorable, but hardly surprising. Would any such people have interbred with Hindus?

“Now here, Marco-wallah,” Tofaa said instructively, “this carven couple are entwined in what is called the kaja posture, named for the hooded snake with which you are acquainted.”

It looked snaky enough, and it was a position new to me. The man appeared to be sitting on the side of a bed. The woman lay upon and against him, head down, her torso between the man’s legs, her hands on the floor, her legs about the man’s waist, her buttocks held caressingly by his hands, and presumably his linga inside her (upside-down) yoni.

“A very useful position,” the sadhu recited, Tofaa translating. “Say, for instance, if you wish to make surata with a humpbacked woman. As you must know, you simply cannot put a humpbacked woman on a bed in the usual supine position, or she teeters and rocks on her hump, most inconveniently, and—”

“Gèsu.”

“You no doubt lust to try that kaja position, Marco-wallah,” said Tofaa. “But please do not affront me by asking me to do it with you. No, no. However, the sadhu says he has, inside the temple, an exceedingly capable, exceedingly humpbacked devadasi woman who, for a trifle of silver …”

“Thank you, Tofaa, and thank the sadhu for me. But I will take this one, too, on faith.”

5

“I have your Buddha’s tooth, Marco-wallah!” said the little Raja. “I rejoice in the happy conclusion of your quest!”

Some three months had gone by since his previous similar announcement, during which time no other teeth, small or large, had been brought to the palace. I had contained my impatience, assuming that a pearl fisher was an elusive quarry. But I was glad to have the real thing at last. I was by now very weary of India and of Hindus, and the little Raja had also begun to make plain that he would not weep loudly when I departed. He seemed not to be tiring of my visit, exactly, but getting suspicious of it. Apparently his little mind had conceived the notion that I might be using my tooth quest as a disguise for a real mission of spying out the local terrain in advance of a Mongol invasion. Well, I knew that the Mongols would not have had this dismal land even if it were freely donated to their Khanate, but I was too polite to tell that to the little Raja. I could better allay his suspicions by merely taking the tooth and going, and I would.

“It is a magnificent tooth, indeed,” I said, with unfeigned awe. It was certainly no counterfeit. It was a yellowish molar, rather oblong from front to back, and the grinder surface of it was bigger than my hand, and its roots nearly as long as my forearm, and it weighed almost as much as a stone of equal dimensions. I asked, “Was it the pearl fisher who brought it? Is he here? I must give him his reward.”

“Ah, the pearl fisher,” said the little Raja. “The steward took the good man to the kitchen to give him a meal. If you would care to let me have the reward, Marco-wallah, I will see that he gets it.” His eyes widened as I jingled half a dozen gold coins into his hand. “Ach-chaa, so much?!”

I smiled and said, “It is worth it to me, Your Highness”—not adding that I was beholden to the fisherman, not only for the tooth, but also for my release from this place.

“Overgenerous, but he shall have it,” said the little Raja. “And I will bid the steward find for you a nice box to put the relic in.”