Chapter 9 — What Kamla Devi Is

She searched the community hall in the hour between Paro's warning and the morning meal.Systematically — the way she searched when the stakes required it. Every drawer, every surface, the storage chest in the corner, the gap between the wall and the bed frame.Under the bed frame she found a bundle wrapped in cloth. Old cloth — the kind of thick cotton weave that was manufactured fifty years ago, not available now. She unwrapped it carefully.Inside: a notebook. Handwriting she had not seen before. Hindi. The penmanship of someone educated in the formal script style that was taught before the 1980s.She sat on the floor and read.It was dated 1979 to 1983 — four years of irregular entries, the record of someone observing Sunderkhal as an outsider. A researcher, she thought initially. A journalist or anthropologist.She read further.The writer was a woman named Dr. Amrita Bhardwaj. She had come to Sunderkhal in 1979 as a botanist studying high-altitude plant communities. She had stayed, she wrote, because of the water.The well in the square was the only water source in the village. The aquifer it drew from was, Dr. Bhardwaj had determined over six months of analysis, unique. It contained, she wrote, a compound she had not been able to fully characterize with the equipment available to her — something that was present in the water in extremely low concentrations and was not found in any other water source in the district. Something that was, she hypothesized, produced by a specific combination of geological and biological conditions deep in the mountain.The compound was bioactive. This she had established from her own experience of accidentally drinking the water on her second day and noticing, over the following weeks, changes she had tried to document clinically despite having no clinical training.She had not aged. Not visibly. She had been in the village for four years and she looked the same as when she'd arrived. She felt — she wrote this in the uncertain language of someone trying to describe something outside the available vocabulary — sustained. Like a fire that was being fed.But: she had stopped sleeping. Not insomnia — a more fundamental cessation. She did not need sleep. She sat through the nights in complete wakefulness and felt no fatigue.She had stopped crying. She had written about this at length — not with relief but with a specific loss. She had not been able to cry since the third month in the village. The tear ducts were dry. She knew this because she had cut her finger badly in November and had felt pain and had wanted to cry and could not.And she had stopped blinking. She had not noticed this until a passing shepherd, stopping for water, had looked at her and gone white and asked why she stared that way. She had not known she was staring. She had not been aware of not blinking. It had been gradual.She wrote: I am trying to understand if this is a gift or a trap and I find I cannot determine the difference because the thing that would tell me — the feeling — is also changing.She wrote: The children are worse. The children drank this water from birth. They are — I don't know how to write this accurately — they are becoming something else. Not developing into adults. Developing into something parallel. The compound does not age them. It suspends them. They are the age they were when they first drank and they will be that age indefinitely and they understand this but they understand it the way a fish understands water — it is the medium, not the fact.She wrote, in the last entry, dated March 1983: I think I am too far in to come back. I think the woman who came here in 1979 with a backpack and a notebook and plans to publish in a botanical journal is no longer available. Someone else is using her body and her name. I do not know if she is still here somewhere inside or if she left without my knowing.I think Kamla Devi was a person once. I think she was the one who came before me. I think she knows what happens and cannot stop it and has been here so long that she cannot imagine not being here.God help whoever comes next.Meera sat on the floor of the community hall with her hands on the notebook and the specific cold of understanding moving through her.Kamla Devi had not been the name of the woman before the current Kamla Devi.Kamla Devi was the name the village gave to whoever had been here longest.The one who brought the water.The one who prepared the tea.