Lamb: the Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal

your birth to never do any other job, regardless of how good or bad you were at it. If you were born a mourner, or a magician, you would die a mourner or a magician, and the only way you’d get out of death or magic was to die and be reincarnated as something else. The one skill that didn’t seem to require belonging to a caste was village idiot, but the Hindus seemed to thrust the more eccentric holy men into this role, so I found no openings there. I did have my bowl, and my experience at collecting alms for the monastery, so I tried my hand at begging, but every time I would get a good corner staked out, along would hop some one-legged blind guy to steal my action. By the late afternoon I had one tiny copper coin and the steward of the beggars guild had come along to warn me that if he caught me begging in Nicobar again, he’d see that I was admitted to the guild by the immediate removal of my arms and legs.
    I bought a handful of rice at the market and was skulking out of town, my bowl before me and my head down, like a good monk, when I saw before me a most delicate set of toes, painted vermilion and followed by a dainty foot, an elegant ankle ajangle with copper bangles, an inviting calf decorated with hennaed designs as intricate as lace, and from there a bright skirt led me up the seam to a bejeweled navel, full breasts haltered in yellow silk, lips like plums, a nose as long and straight as a Roman statue’s, and wide brown eyes, shaded in blue and lined to make them look the size of a tiger’s. They drank me in.
    “You’re a stranger,” she said. One long finger on my chest stopped me on the spot. I tried to hide my rice bowl in my shirt, and in a fabulous display of sleight of hand, ended up spilling the grains down my front.
    “I’m from Galilee. In Israel.”
    “Never heard of it. Is it far?” She reached into my shirt and began to pick out the rice grains that had caught against my sash, running her fingernail along my stomach muscles and dropping the grains, one by one, into my bowl.
    “Very far. I’ve come here with my friend to obtain sacred and ancient knowledge, that kind of thing.”
    “What is your name?”
    “Biff—or Levi who is called Biff. We do that ‘who is called’ thing a lot in Israel.”
    “Follow me, Biff, I’ll show you some ancient and sacred knowledge.” She hooked her finger into my sash and walked into a nearby doorway, for some reason completely confident that I would follow.
    Inside, amid piles of colorful pillows strewn about the floors and deep carpets the likes of which I hadn’t seen since Balthasar’s fortress, stood a carved camphorwood stand on which a large codex lay open. The book was bound in brass filigreed with copper and silver, and the pages were made of a parchment finer than I had ever seen.
    The woman pushed me toward the book and left her hand on my back as I looked at the open page. The handwritten script was gilded and so ornate that I could barely make out the words, which didn’t matter anyway, because it was the illustration that caught my eye. A man and a woman, nude, each perfect. The man had the woman facedown on a rug, her feet hooked over his shoulders, her arms held behind her as he entered her. I tried to call on my Buddhist training and discipline to keep from embarrassing myself in front of the strange woman.
    “Ancient sacred wisdom,” she said. “The book was a gift from a patron. The Kama Sutra, it’s called. Thread of Desire.”
    “The Buddha said that desire is the source of all suffering,” I said, feeling like the kung fu master that I knew I was.
    “Do they look like they are suffering?”
    “No.” I began to tremble. I had been too long out of the company of women. Far too long.
    “Would you like to try that? That suffering. With me?”
    “Yes,” I said. All the training, all the discipline, all the control, gone in a word.
    “Do you have twenty rupees?”
    “No.”
    “Then suffer,” she said, and she stepped away.
    “See, I told you.”
    Then she walked away, trailing the scent of sandalwood and roses behind her as she went to the door, her hips waving good-bye to me all the way across the room, the bangles on her arms and ankles ringing like tiny temple bells calling me to worship at her secret grotto. At the door she crooked a finger for me to follow her out, and I did.
    “My name is Kashmir,” she said. “Come back. I’ll teach you ancient and sacred knowledge. One page at time. Twenty