"And Ranga's his own boy," said the little nurse. "He's free to do what he likes."

Will thought of Babs's strawberry-pink alcove and laughed ferociously. "And free above all," he said, "to do what he doesn't like." He looked from one young face to the other and saw that he was being eyed with a certain astonishment. In another tone and with a different kind of smile, "But I'd forgotten," he added. "One of you is abnormally sane and the other is only a little left of center. So how can you be expected to understand what this mental case from the outside is talking about?" And without leaving them time to answer his question, "Tell me," he asked, "how long is it-" He broke off. "But perhaps I'm being indiscreet. If so, just tell me to mind my own business. But 1 would like to know, just as a matter of anthropological interest, how long you two have been friends."

"Do you mean 'friends'?" asked the little nurse. "Or do you mean 'lovers'?"

"Why not both, while we're about it?"

"Well, Ranga and I have been friends since we were babies. And we've been lovers-except for that miserable white pajama episode-since I was fifteen and a half and he was seventeen- just about two and a half years."

"And nobody objected?"

"Why should they?"

"Why, indeed," Will echoed. "But the fact remains that, in my part of the world, practically everybody would have objected."

"What about other boys?" Ranga asked.

"In theory they are even more out of bounds than girls. In practice . . . Well, you can guess what happens when five or six hundred male adolescents are cooped up together in a boarding school. Does that sort of thing ever go on here?"

"Of course."

"I'm surprised."

"Surprised? Why?"

"Seeing that girls aren't out of bounds."

"But one kind of love doesn't exclude the other."

"And both are legitimate?"

"Naturally."

"So that nobody would have minded if Murugan had been interested in another pajama boy?"

"Not if it was a good sort of relationship."

"But unfortunately," said Radha, "the Rani had done such a thorough job that he couldn't be interested in anyone but her- and, of course, himself."

"No boys?"

"Maybe now. I don't know. All I know is that in my day there was nobody in his universe. No boys and, still more emphatically, no girls. Only Mother and masturbation and the Ascended Masters. Only jazz records and sports cars and Hitlerian ideas about being a Great Leader and turning Pala into what he calls a Modern State."

"Three weeks ago," said Ranga, "he and the Rani were at the palace, in Shivapuram. They invited a group of us from the university to come and listen to Murugan's ideas-on oil, on industrialization, on television, on armaments, on the Crusade of the Spirit."

"Did he make any converts?"

Ranga shook his head. "Why would anyone want to exchange something rich and good and endlessly interesting for something bad and thin and boring? We don't feel any need for your speedboats or your television, your wars and revolutions, vour revivals, your political slogans, your metaphysical nonsense from Rome and Moscow. Did you ever hear of maithuna?" he asked.

"Maithuna? What's that?"

"Let's start with the historical background," Ranga answered; and with the engaging pedantry of an undergraduate delivering a lecture about matters which he himself has only lately heard of, he launched forth. "Buddhism came to Pala about twelve hundred years ago, and it came not from Ceylon, which is what one would have expected, but from Bengal, and through Bengal, later on, from Tibet. Result: we're Mahayanists, and our Buddhism is shot through and through with Tantra. Do you know what Tantra is?"

Will had to admit that he had only the haziest notion.

"And to tell you the truth," said Ranga, with a laugh that broke irrepressibly through the crust of his pedantry, "I don't really know much more than you do. Tantra's an enormous subject and most of it, I guess, is just silliness and superstition-not worth bothering about. But there's a hard core of sense. If you're a Tantrik, you don't renounce the world or deny its value; you don't try to escape into a Nirvana apart from life, as the monks of the Southern School do. No, you accept the world, and you make use of it; you make use of everything you do, of everything that happens to you, of all the things you see and hear and taste and touch, as so many means to your liberation from the prison of yourself."

"Good talk," said Will in a tone of polite skepticism.

"And something more besides," Ranga insisted. "That's the difference," he added-and youthful pedantry modulated into the eagerness of youthful proselytism-"that's the difference between your philosophy and ours. Western philosophers, even the best of them-they're nothing more than good talkers. Eastern philosophers are often rather bad talkers, but that doesn't matter. Talk isn't the point. Their philosophy is pragmatic and operational. Like the philosophy of modern physics-except that the operations in question are psychological and the results transcendental. Your metaphysicians make statements about the nature of man and the universe; but they don't offer the reader any way of testing the truth of those statements. When we make statements, we follow them up with a list of operations that can be used for testing the validity of what we've been saying. For example, tat tvam asi, 'thou are That'-the heart of all our philosophy. Tat tvam asi," he repeated. "It looks like a proposition in metaphysics; but what it actually refers to is a psychological experience, and the operations by means of which the experience can be lived through are described by our philosophers, so that anyone who's willing to perform the necessary operations can test the validity of tat tvam asi for himself. The operations arc-called yoga, or dhyana, or Zen-or, in certain special circumstances, maithuna."

"Which brings us back to my original question. What is ntaithuna!"

"Maybe you'd better ask Radha."

Will turned to the little nurse. "What is it?"

u Maithuna," she answered gravely, "is the yoga of love."

"Sacred or profane?"

"There's no difference."

"That's the whole point," Ranga put in. "When you do maithuna, profane love is sacred love."

"Buddhatvanyoshidyonisansritan," the girl quoted.

"None of your Sanskirt! What does it mean?"

"How would you translate Buddhatvan, Ranga?"

"Buddhaness, Buddheity, the quality of being enlightened."

Radha nodded and turned back to Will. "It means that Buddhaness is in the yoni."

"In the yoni?" Will remembered those little stone emblems of the Eternal Feminine that he had bought, as presents for the girls at the office, from a hunchbacked vendor of bondieuseries at Benares. Eight annas for a black yoni; twelve for the still more sacred image of the yoni-lingam. "Literally in the yoniV he asked. "Or metaphorically?"

"What a ridiculous question!" said the little nurse, and she laughed her clear unaffected laugh of pure amusement. "Do you think we make love metaphorically? Buddhatvan yoshidyonisan-sritan" she repeated. "It couldn't be more completely and absolutely literal."

"Did you ever hear of the Oneida Community?" Ranga now asked.

Will nodded. He had known an American historian who specialized in nineteenth-century communities. "But why do you know about it?" he asked.

"Because it's mentioned in all our textbooks of applied philosophy. Basically, maithuna is the same as what the Oneida peopie called Male Continence. And that was the same as what Roman Catholics mean by coitus reservatus."

"Reservatus," the little nurse repeated. "It always makes me want to laugh. 'Such a reserved young man'!" The dimples reappeared and there was a flash of white teeth.

"Don't be silly," said Ranga severely. "This is serious."