The Breath of God. Jeffrey Small

flopped his head on the thin pillow. “I suppose email is out of the question too?”

      Kinley shook his head. Grant thought he detected something in the monk’s eyes. Is this amusing to him? Grant stared at the fine lines crisscrossing the beige ceiling. Bedridden in a jail cell of a room in a remote monastery with some monks who were enjoying his predicament. For the first time since he’d woken, Grant became aware of the throbbing pain in his leg. He also realized that his left shoulder was bruised, and he had a pounding headache behind his temples.

      “What about the bathroom?” he asked, not sure he wanted to know the answer.

      The doctor chuckled and bent over to retrieve a battered metal bedpan from the floor beside the bed. “I brought this from town.”

      Grant wiped his palms off on the sheets. Accepting this situation for six weeks was out of the question. He needed to devise a plan.

      “Pen and paper?” he asked the men.

      “That we can do,” Kinley said, nodding to the doctor. Karma reached into his black bag—the kind of doctor’s bag that Grant had seen in old TV shows but didn’t think were used anymore—and produced a ballpoint pen and a blank prescription pad.

      Grant wrote Harold Billingsly’s office number at Emory and the name of his hotel in town, the Zangdho Pelri, and handed it to the doctor. “Room oneoh-eight. If you don’t mind, I have a backpack with my clothes, and my laptop is on the desk.”

      Before Karma could respond, the door to the room opened. A third monk, a boy no older than ten or eleven with a perfectly round bald head, dressed like Kinley’s apprentice Jigme in a crimson robe, entered carrying a steaming cup centered on a tray.

      Kinley took the cup from the boy and patted his shoulder in a fatherly way. “Thank you, Ummon.”

      After the boy bowed to the older monk and left the room, the doctor emptied the contents of a small envelope into the cup. “Drink this,” he said. “It will ease your discomfort.”

      Grant sniffed the cup, wondering what sort of herbal concoction he was about to consume. He took a sip. Just a little bitter. He hoped the effects would kick in quickly. After Grant finished the tea, the doctor left, but the two monks remained, watching him silently.

      “I appreciate your help, but really you don’t need to stay.” Grant focused on the notepad on his lap. He drew a line down the center of the page and wrote at the top of the left column “Options.” At the top of the right he wrote “Plan of Attack.”

      Kinley sat on the edge of the bed, his hands folded in his lap.

      “Grant, you are experiencing the dukkha of life.”

      Without looking up from his notepad, he responded, “Suffering.” He resisted the temptation to glance at the monk to gauge his surprise at Grant’s knowledge of the Pali word: it was the language of the ancient Buddhist canon. Grant enjoyed near-photographic recall of the texts he’d studied. His comparative religions class had been six years earlier, but he still remembered the basic tenets of Buddhism as if he’d read them yesterday.

      “Yes, that’s the common translation, but not entirely accurate,” Kinley said without missing a beat. “Actually, dukkha means out of balance, like a cart with a broken wheel.”

      “So you’re saying that my life is out of whack right now.” Grant put his pen down and looked Kinley in the eye. “I could have told you that.”

      “Indulge me in a story,” Kinley began, as if he were telling a fable to a group of children gathered at his feet. “A farmer in the foothills of the mountains had a beautiful horse that ran away. The farmer’s neighbor stopped by to console him on losing such a magnificent animal, but the farmer surprised his neighbor by saying, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’ The next day his horse returned, bringing with it a herd of similarly beautiful wild horses. The neighbor returned and said, ‘You were right yesterday not to wallow in your loss. Look how fortunate you are now with all these horses.’ But the farmer surprised him again by repeating his comment from the previous day, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’ A few weeks later the farmer’s son fractured his leg while trying to break in one of the new horses. Of course, the neighbor returns to offer his condolences again, certain that the farmer cannot be unaffected by his son’s injury.”

      “Let me guess,” Grant intervened, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “Even with his son lying in bed, his leg in a splint, the farmer repeats his previous response, ‘Who am I to judge what is an unlucky event or a fortunate one?’”

      Kinley grinned and rested a hand on Grant’s cast. “The following week the army came through the farmer’s village, drafting men to go to war, but they passed over the farmer’s son because of the broken leg.”

      “Well, I’ll be safe then, if the Bhutanese army comes looking for soldiers,” Grant said. He added a smile so the monk who had just saved his life wouldn’t think him rude. But really, he thought, I need time alone to work through my predicament.

      “You are a student?” Kinley asked.

      “Grad school. I’m ABD, sorry, all but—”

      “Dissertation,” Kinley added. “I spent some time in a Western university.”

      Grant raised his eyebrows. “Well, that explains the accent. Which one?”

      “When I was a young monk, I often asked questions my elders felt were out of place. Spent quite a few hours in extra cleanup duty. The senior monk suggested to my parents that my taking a break from the monastery would be better for everyone. Fortunately, I earned the highest marks in my class and was given the rare opportunity to attend Oxford on scholarship.”

      “Oxford? Impressive.” This gentle monk who had saved his life was also a scholar?

      Kinley shrugged. “Once I finished, I returned to Bhutan and to monastic life. And you? You didn’t travel to the East on a spiritual quest?”

      Grant shook his head. “My PhD is in religious studies, but my interests are strictly academic—historical.” Unlike my father’s, he thought. Grant’s sole regret concerning his father’s death was that he hadn’t had the opportunity to prove to him the many ways in which the preacher was wrong where religion was concerned.

      “You believe that the nature of religion lies in history?”

      Grant’s eyelids were becoming heavy from the effects of the doctor’s tea, but he willed them open. His body wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep, but this Oxford-educated monk intrigued him. “I’m interested in the early development of Christianity during the first century, and”—he hesitated for a moment as he pondered how to phrase the next part—“how contact with other cultures may have influenced this development.”

      “What kind of influence?”

      “I’ve been tracking several apocryphal stories.” Grant remembered his promise to himself not to reveal too much. In spite of Kinley’s Western education, Grant knew that the culture of these monasteries was insular and cautious of outside disruptions. Finding what he was seeking would certainly cause a disruption. He decided to use an example from his first trip to India, rather than his most recent. “For example, some evidence suggests that in fifty-two AD, twenty years after the death of Jesus, the apostle Thomas sailed to India. A small Christian community on the coast in Kerala traces its founding to Thomas and the several churches he established before he was martyred.”

      “Have you found what you came for?”

      Grant shook his head. “I’m still missing a key piece of my research, which is why I’m ABD.” He closed his eyes, giving in to the weight of his eyelids.

      Kinley rose from the bed. “Sometimes we find not what we are looking for, but what we should be looking for.”

      Through closed eyes Grant noted