Avvaiyar looked unperturbed. “All our early ancestors lived close to nature. It was outside forces that corrupted our relationship with each other, making us forget our own animal existence, our connection to all living things. If only you’d trained properly, you’d be able to see that.”

  Josephine kept quiet, staring at us. Her eyes were moist and unblinking. We could see the stained ridges of her teeth tearing at her lip. Her braid tossed to the side of her shoulder looked scant. She was tiny, with a too-big hooknose, in an extra-large salwar top. Like someone in disguise, hiding from herself.

  We wondered if we would look like her, alone. Out of place. Fearful.

  We didn’t approach her, but Leela, with her soothing voice, held Josephine by the shoulder and whispered into her ear. Later, in the cafeteria, Kalpana, who had been closest to where they stood, told us what she had overheard. “Radical compassion, like any vision, is limited.”

  It was the first time we had heard any of the older girls express doubt. We did not speak of that doubt to one another, because secretly we had all been struggling in our search for perfect realization, the ultimate state of radical compassion, when loss of the ego revealed reality. And in the mornings we would not need to turn to the mirror to see our true selves or read our mothers’ exasperated letters to feel the essence of their thoughts radiating through us. We’d sense consciousness, the warm embrace at all hours of our being. This was our collective dream, and perhaps, blinded as we were by our own desire, it was unattainable. Fundamental principles negated each other. How were we expected to empty ourselves of thoughts and ideas while also reeducating ourselves with new knowledge? We were a group of Tamil girls but not only Tamil girls. We came from a lineage of ancient warriors but we were not ancient warriors. Alone but not. Alive but not fully. What held radical compassion together was a series of opposing notions. Matters beyond the left and the right brain. It was our own existence we had trouble understanding. We lived in a free country that still felt like a colony. Our own history had been destroyed, rediscovered, and destroyed again. From a fragment, we were trying to tell a whole story. In the library we once found a slim hardcover book published by Oxford University Press called Kingsbury and Phillips’s Hymns of the Tamil Saivite Saints. In the introduction, two Englishmen stated that the purpose of the book was to help the country’s people know the wonderful past of their own country. We laughed as we read these coffee-tinted pages, the absurdity of history. The invaders had turned into the interpreters and saviors of our own lost stories.

  * * *

  Once upon a time, soon after independence, there was a poor actor and a struggling playwright who wanted to stage a revolution. One was from unknown origins, the other from a lineage of musicians and dancers. Film was a new medium traveling through villages and cities. In pitch-dark nights as farm crops slumbered, flickering images were projected to frightening proportions. Crowds gathered to cheer and reenact the feelings they rarely expressed in their daily lives. Who had time to cry and rage when one had children to feed, fees to pay? The black-and-white figures on the screen appeared godlike, reciting poetic lines that shot straight through the heart, and even after the images disappeared, people stood still with a lingering feeling of loss.

  The poor actor mostly did theater productions with a traveling troupe, but he wanted to get into film. The struggling playwright was largely employed only in his own mind, where he rehearsed the stories that he wished he could tell. They met fortuitously on the banks of a river after the harvest holiday, each privately mourning their bad luck. The struggling playwright saw the poor actor’s downturned face and was overcome with feelings, and he thought, This is it, this is my hero. With a hero in tow, he went from financier to financier, and finally someone agreed to take a chance. The poor actor looked at the struggling playwright and said, “Let’s not waste this opportunity.” The poor actor had been haunted by death, losing most of his family, and the struggling playwright had been sidelined as those from dominant castes stepped over him. The first film was made with a small budget, mostly strung together with hopes. The poor actor was willing to do all his own stunts, including jumping off a horse with a sword and being tied six meters up a tree. In the film he was the underdog hero from an oppressed caste, the police were corrupt, his family was killed, and the woman he loved was the daughter of a wealthy mogul. Eloquently, he spoke of the conditions of the poor and the depravity of the rich. He was not especially tall but that did not matter, next to the heroine, who was equivalently sized for their perfect union.

  Soon he was no longer the poor actor, and his friend was no longer the struggling playwright. They were collecting a fan base who lined up, reciting the hero’s lines, calling for an end to caste and religion and the beginning of an era of equality. Fathers dropped their caste names and cut the cord with the past, at least on paper. Out of protest, men married widows, and wives took over their husbands’ work.

  The actor and playwright started a political party because they thought real power resided in the government. Shocking everyone, especially the ruling party, they won, thanks largely to the faithful viewers from the most remote villages, who previously had never bothered to vote because no help ever arrived. On the streets people celebrated, the beginning of a new order. “We will all be reborn,” they cried. The actor and playwright joined them, not realizing a jealousy was growing between them. The actor believed that the playwright was too pushy and controlling. And the playwright believed that the actor received too much adulation and love as the hero. Their fracturing slowly tore apart everything they said they believed. With power came wealth and bribes, and though they rationalized the corruption, thinking they would redistribute it among the people, they had not realized their definition of people had narrowed to just their own families. They locked up their wealth, but now and then, spirits of their old selves would remind them of their revolutionary ideas and they would act out of character, supporting rebels and funding an educational center before returning to a state of forgetfulness. People slowly became disenchanted. They had fallen in love with the hero, not the actor, but it was hard to disentangle the two, and they sang catchy tunes through famines, unemployment, watering their barren fields with blood.

  Though we knew the dangers of those bright images, we did not think much of the small, stout boxes we had smuggled into our rooms, and the senior girls must have believed the experiment was controlled, no unseen variables. How were they to know that inside a Distant-Scene, radical compassion changed properties? Through quantum physics, perhaps, a particle with dual lives, waves pulsing at us. Sixty-three portals connected us to the world, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the cables running like neural networks, overpowering our discipline, leaving us vulnerable. Because in the end, we were too weak-minded, too bone-dry to resist. Unknowingly, we were disassociating, breaking from our starving bodies until we felt nothing.

  On a Sunday when the church bells were ringing, we first became aware of the disconnect. Hymns rose in the wings of the wind while we waited under the heat as three boys were laid out in the sand. One had a respiratory infection while two suffered from kidney failure. They all died on the same day in the refugee camps. The rot of the bodies didn’t bother us, but we kept still waiting for some miracle of awakening. They were between the ages of nine and thirteen, their bodies curved inward so they looked smaller, with fishlike spines. We recognized only one of the boys from the clinic, the rest must have lost faith in our remedies. And maybe they were right to be distrustful because how many did we save?

  Too often we were sending off the ill as if all the mantras we spoke were only for us, talismans of protection. The three bodies were wrapped in white cloth until they were genderless, no longer boys. Before the cocoons on the pyre were lit, we prayed quickly. The form transforms but the essence remains, we told ourselves, half believing our words. The only family present was an uncle of one of the boys. As the fire carried away his nephew, he fell to his knees, mouth open, silent, beyond the realm of sound. We knew we needed to embrace his suffering, allow compassion to connect our minds, synchronize our neurons, so as he crawled inside his emptiness, we were there with him. But that afternoon as we watched the fire burn, we believed the illusion of separate bodies. Atoms no longer were particles of energy. They solidified in our minds. We felt the weight of our limbs, the pain in our lower abdomens as we stepped back, closed our eyes. The smell of flesh and the sound of hymns on that sunny morning left us nauseous. The air between us thickening as we moved farther and farther away. The man crawled on the ground, and we stood apart, watching through a screen.

  * * *

  Avvaiyar said there were only two castes among men: the generous and the ungenerous. Though we thought of one another as belonging to one equal caste, we’d strayed beyond magnanimity into an unknown territory of numbness, where we did not anticipate boredom or the dulling of our senses as the grass dried and the flowers brooded, and even the flies appeared sluggish. Instead, like our ancestors, who had been entranced by film, we returned day after day to the television and fell in love with the flat images of serial stars, who we understood more deeply than our own families. Instead of longing to see our parents, brothers, sisters, we counted the days until we could see these projected visions with their perfect if not enviable lives. Television made radical compassion appear archaic. Was it initially hunger or just boredom that led us inward, seeking to unspool experience in darkness? Everyday life had become predictable, desolate, and in our search for transcendence, did we hope to find refuge in a glowing box, where life was more visceral and complete, by opening our eyes rather than closing them? The projected image contained a new dimension of reality. When all the world was simply a reflection of light, the television was no different, if anything it was brighter, emitting energy we could not sense. Images of strangers comforted us in ways our own parents, brothers, sisters could not, but only because we had real parents, brothers, sisters did we feel anything.

  We are daughters, meaning we emerged from a womb, possessing our own wombs, which should produce more wombs. Like Russian dolls, we are a game of creation. Soon this mitochondrial DNA, passed through mothers and encoding within us our first mothers, will end and we will be the final little babushka that never grew.

  Radical compassion prepared us to be clear souls, but the ego is devious in the way it hibernates and emerges fully fertile and ripe. We had trained our bodies to exist in conditions uninhabitable by the ego. In the end, all it took was a moment of warmth, the ecstasy of feeling, to bring forth the gesture of a root. Like actors, trained in the art of unbridled release, we opened up. Looking into the screen, we began to see ourselves as protagonists of our own lives. The birds sang for us as we dressed, and we obsessed over our faces, scrubbed until the bones glistened. A bout of poor digestion kept us flatulent and flustered. We manufactured pain, processed the actions of others into lasting hurt.

  Jeera, a third-year, whose real name was Jathursha, brought with her a Polaroid camera, which belonged to her brother. Her first photograph was of Madame Sarojini asleep at her desk, her long hair covering her like strips of silk in the afternoon light, and in her slouched posture, her breasts rose from her blouse, the curve of her hips tightened. She looked almost young and attractive, unaware of a future that would keep her tirelessly bitter and unhappy. Gazing at the picture, we felt kinder toward this image of her, not quite the past or the present.

  Because we were just beginning our training, still forming, Jeera decided to take photographs of us. We stood under the archway with the quote from Khalil Gibran. Later the text would seem to distort the image, providing an explanation we did not conceive at the moment. From those blank surfaces, our faces emerged, stark and curious, as we smiled through our skulls. Our frozen figures appeared unrecognizable, because when is a living thing ever completely still except for death?

  Jeera took pictures of us every day, perhaps to chronicle changes in us or to create livelier versions of ourselves. We wrote numbers on each of the photographs, mixed them according to arithmetic games. On certain days we’d act like the girls listed with prime numbers, ending with three or one. We were all natural-born actors.

  Flipping through weeks of photographs, you could sense the slight motion of our bodies, the tilt of a head, a step closer to the archway. Later Jeera would collect those first photographs of us and keep them in a memory book, our aggregate stunned and nameless faces.

  For scientific inquiry on the self, we stripped naked and took photographs of parts of our bodies we could not see. The lower back, the base of the neck, and then deep between our thighs to see what we kept hidden. We had seen pictures in our textbook about female anatomy, but we didn’t expect the color from the photographs, the burst of purple and pink. Almost unremarkable for all the alarm it had provoked in our lives.

  One late afternoon when we had finished classes early, a few of the girls went to buy some chai from one of the street vendors, Mr. Singh, who had traveled from the northernmost part of the country to this southern corner twenty-five years ago, running away from poverty to find more. Still, he was generous, charging us less for chai or calling us his daughters even though he had four children at home. Before the drought, he was plump enough to fold his hands on his belly when he stood. Now he had aged, his fatless face creased into the paper ridges of a book. He was arguing with a friend when he poured us our watered-down chai, mostly boiled water with a few crumbs of sugar and garam masala.

  “Even sex is not enjoyable without a full stomach. All I feel is the emptiness,” his friend said.

  Mr. Singh knocked on the wooden counter. “Listen, my friend, the women here are all bones. It’s like making love to a corpse. You try to hold on to something and you are just grasping death.”

  They did not turn to us and continued to speak freely, with flecks of spit falling to their chins. Later we wondered if hunger heightened certain physical sensations, making us fully aware of our bodies, while ideas of propriety were stripped of meaning. To Mr. Singh and his friend, lost in their voices, the pits of their loins, our presence, our gender did not pertain. Mr. Singh waved away a fly that was circling his tea basin next to us. With our eyes, we followed its erratic but knowing path. Six-legged and as wide as two grains of rice, it was seen. A nuisance.

  According to Avvaiyar, we shouldn’t feel ashamed but shouldn’t be shameless. We shouldn’t lose ourselves in our bodies and the overwhelming urgency of pleasure. Certainly the boys moved with the force of their desperate hunger and continued to visit the brothels, holing up in those dark spaces to find relief with girls who did not know their names, who were disappearing under their hands.

  Without warning, your aunt Zee shows up at the house with gloves and a garbage bag and says she wants to go through your mother’s things. She’s determined and you can’t keep her from coming inside.

  We have to do it sometime or other, she says, and glances at the dried, burnt clumps on the oven.

  You rub a spot of tomato sauce from the counter with your T-shirt. Rosalyn and you are not slobs, just very accommodating to each other’s tendencies for disorder. Cheeze has joined this universe of entropy. Luckily, Cheeze’s bulky presence is hidden in the shower, and your aunt won’t be able to admire his clear skin, which, according to Rosalyn, is a reflection of the memory treatment and not the effects of shelter and regular meals.

  You follow your aunt around the house. She picks up a tennis racket that is supporting a family of porcelain cat dolls. You have the strange urge to save them from their future demise.

  She pulls out a rocking horse. I bet your mother told you it was owned by someone like Ella Fitzgerald.

  Please don’t throw anything away.

  Your aunt turns to you and touches your forehead like you’re sick. Sweet one, you’ve been holding on to all this for too long. It’s been heavy, hasn’t it? She picks up a jar full of coins. Your mother was a hoarder. There’s no getting around it.

  Some people’s junk is other people’s treasure.

  She chuckles but then her voice softens. You can’t see it because you lived here your whole life.

  You sit in the kitchen as she decides to donate a sled, a birdcage, and a vacuum cleaner. You translate one whole paragraph and it’s awful. Like you’ve lost some magnetic center.

  In the other room your aunt screams. Cheeze stands in a towel and smiles like someone is telling him to say cheese. Because you can’t think of any better excuse for having this oversize white man in the house, you tell your aunt he’s your temporary significant other. Somehow, in a matter of seconds, she manages to compose her face and introduce herself. Wonderful to meet you. My niece likes to keep secrets, just like her mother.

  * * *

  Your aunt Zee drinks tea, eyeing Cheeze suspiciously as he watches TV and tells Cookie to quiet.

  I never met anyone you dated before, she says.

  There haven’t been many.

  Make sure he’s kind to you. That’s important.

  Are you okay?

  She lowers her face and pulls out drawings from her purse. Your uncle still doesn’t talk, but he’s been keeping busy.

  Unfolding the paper, you find geometric shapes piled on top of each other into a puzzle. Triangles trapped in trapezoids. An asteroid of endless squares. But even you can see the work has artistic value. Like a return to childhood, days of wonder.

  Your aunt is clearly not amused. She hands over the stack of drawings to you like bills that need to be paid. The only time I hear your uncle make a sound is when he’s in pain or snoring. I actually look forward to when he stubs his toe or bangs his head. The funny thing is he actually looks happy. Can you believe it? He is perfectly fine not expressing his thoughts to anyone.