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By Root 1291 0

up. One morning Clyde Pettengill, who used a cane, stood up to lament the recent accident at the Embalse nuclear plant in Argentina, where there had been a total loss of coolant. His wife, Mildred, felt compelled to speak next. Not getting up as her husband had, but remaining seated with her eyes closed, she spoke in a clear voice, her pretty old-woman’s face lifted in smiling remembrance. “Maybe because it’s summer—I don’t know—but I’m put in mind today of going to Meetings when I was a little girl. Summer always seemed like the hardest time to sit still and be quiet. So my grandmother developed a strategy. Before the Meeting began, she used to take a piece of butterscotch candy out of her purse. She’d make sure I saw it. But she wouldn’t give it to me. She’d hold it in her hand. And if I was good, and behaved like a proper young lady, my grandmother would give me the candy after forty-five minutes or so. Now I’m eighty-two, almost eighty-three, and do you know what? I feel exactly the same as I did then. I’m still waiting for that piece of butterscotch candy to be placed in my hand. It’s not candy that I’m waiting for anymore. It’s just a sunny summer day like this, with the sun like a great big butterscotch candy in the sky. I see I’m waxing poetic now. That means I had better stop.”

As for Mitchell, he didn’t say anything at the Meetings. The Spirit didn’t move him to speak. He sat on the bench, enjoying the stillness of the morning and the musty scent of the Meeting House. But he didn’t feel entitled to illumination.

The shame he felt for running away from Kalighat hadn’t gone away, even with the passage of six months. After leaving Calcutta, Mitchell had traveled around the country with no fixed plan, like a fugitive. In Benares, he’d stayed at the Yogi Lodge, going down to the funeral ghats every morning to see bodies being cremated. He hired a boatman to take him out on the Ganges. After five days, he took the train back to Calcutta, heading south. He went to Madras, to the former French outpost of Pondicherry (home to Sri Aurobindo), and to Madurai. He stayed a single night in Trivandrum, at the southern end of the Malabar Coast, and then began traveling up the western shore. In Kerala the literacy rate soared and Mitchell ate his meals off jungle leaves instead of plates. He kept in touch with Larry, writing him at AmEx in Athens, and, in mid-February, they were reunited in Goa.

Instead of flying to Calcutta, as his ticket originally stipulated, Larry changed his stop to Bombay, and traveled down to Goa by bus. They had arranged to meet at the bus station at noon, but Larry’s bus was late. Mitchell came and went three times, scanning the passengers disembarking from different multicolored buses before Larry finally climbed off of one around four in the afternoon. Mitchell was so happy to see him that he couldn’t stop smiling and patting Larry on the back.

“My man!” he said. “You made it!”

“What happened, Mitchell?” Larry said. “Get your head caught in a lawn mower?”

For the next week they rented a hut on the beach. It had a tropical-seeming thatch roof and a disagreeably utilitarian concrete floor. The other huts were full of Europeans, most of whom went around without clothes. On the terraced hillside, Goan men clustered amid the palm trees to ogle the immodest Western women below. As for Mitchell, he felt too translucently white to expose himself, and stayed in the shade, but Larry braved sunburn, spending a good portion of each day on the beach with his silk scarf wrapped around his head.

During the serene, zephyr-filled days and coolish nights, they shared stories about their time apart. Larry was impressed by Mitchell’s experience at Kalighat. He didn’t seem to think that three weeks of volunteering were of no consequence.

“I think it’s great you did it,” he said. “You worked for Mother Teresa! Not that I would want to do something like that. But for you, Mitchell, that’s right up your alley.”

Things with Iannis hadn’t turned out so well. Almost immediately, he’d begun asking Larry how much money