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  This was totally my old Rathi.

  Her eyes blazed. “You!” she grated again.

  I took a step back. That made me bump into a couple of half-naked women. A parrot screeched in my ear.

  I stepped forward carefully. “What are you mad about?”

  Her finger came up. The parrot flew off it and rocketed in a circle around the room, screaming. She jabbed my bare chest.

  “You really are the Hindu god of lust!”

  I gaped. “I told you.” The parrot buzzed me again. “What’s with the birds?”

  “The goddess manifested them,” said the priestess chick.

  “Whoa. Manifested,” I repeated, impressed.

  Rathi jabbed me again. “You did something to me, you—”

  “Asshole,” the priestess supplied.

  “Thank you. You asshole,” my Rathi said. “You did something to me. And now I’m turning into this—this—and it’s frightening me to death, and you won’t tell me anything! Well, now you will tell me.”

  “Uh, okay.” I sent a wary glance around. “Do we need the chorus?”

  “They’re your devotees, O Kamadeva,” she said with a malicious smile. “Your apsaras, your celestial nymphs, your faithful one-night stands, your discarded past. And they’ve called you here to haunt you.”

  I glanced around the room with alarm. I couldn’t identify a one of them. Well, why would I? I’m not looking at their faces, as a rule.

  Something told me this wouldn’t be a good time to point that out.

  “Uh, what do you want to know?” I said.

  Her patrician-cut nostrils flared. I prayed that she’d hold onto her temper. I was painfully reminded of our last fight, four hundred and fifty-odd years ago.

  “You did something to me. What did you do?”

  I sweated. “I found you, Rathi. You’ve been gone so long. I didn’t try to wake you—I think you just did, because we met, because we were finally together again.”

  “You did try. You did it. You touched me here.” She laid her fingertips on her solar plexus. “And I won the case.”

  My gaze fell. “I wanted you to have all your powers, not just sex. The serpent has to rise all the way, or else you—”

  “Or else I what? Set fire to my underpants?”

  I inched forward and took her hand in mine. It was ice cold, but heat beat off her body like open flame.

  I wheedled, “What happened? Please tell me.”

  “You slept with all these women and discarded them after one night. You’ve been seducing me in my place of work! My career could be destroyed! Everyone at work knows you were after me! How do you plan to slither out of it, with me in that office every day? Or will you drive me out of my job?”

  They were fair questions, but I knew that wasn’t what had her upset. If I could just get her out of this room!

  I said, “It’s just a job, Rathi.” I heard a collective gasp in the room. I ignored it. “I know it’s important to you now, but you don’t remember yourself yet. That’s what reincarnation does to you. It wipes the slate clean. Once you come into yourself again, you’ll remember it all. And then you’ll tell me. I want to know everything you have been doing all these centuries.” My voice trembled. “I’ve missed you.”

  While I said all this she flushed, then paled, then flushed again. Her hand quivered. She snatched it out of mine. “It’s just a job?”

  Now I’d done it. I shrugged. “How long can you work there? Thirty, thirty-five years? That’s nothing. I was a fry cook for thirty-eight years. I’ve been a sex demon off and on for two hundred and fifty.”

  “You’ve been a what?” said the priestess girl who called herself Lotus Bride.

  The gasps came with murmuring and muttering this time.

  I knew it was a mistake to try to talk to her with all these people listening. I put the puppy eyes to work. “Let’s go have dinner and talk about this in private.”

  “You—listen, you mail-room clerk,” she said in a sharp voice I hadn’t heard in half a millennium. “I am a full partner in the biggest civil rights firm in Chicago. I just won a case my firm was sure they would lose. I have been fighting my whole life for this chance to defend women’s rights, and you think it’s just a job. Do you intend to sabotage that?” Her tone turned scornful. “I doubt you could win a harassment suit against me since you have slept with so many women at the firm already.” Her face began to crumple. “I should have known, when I realized you’d seduced my assistant!”

  Lotus Bride put her arm around Rathi. Rathi turned away from me and wept on her shoulder.

  The minions glared at me with loathing.

  “How could you?”

  “That was so lame!”

  “He’s just like all the rest!”

  The abuse got personal.

  “You’re a dick!”

  “What an asshole!”

  “You jerk, she’s a professional! You’re just jealous!”

  “How can you be so mean to her?”

  “Pencil dick!”

  “Hey!” I protested. “My dick is no pencil—” A pillow shot across the room and bapped me in the dick. I snatched it up and covered myself. “Hey!” I ducked another pillow.

  Parrots screamed around the room and took flight. The women yelled at me. Why did they all have parrots, for fuck’s sake? None of this made sense. Pillows flew and women shrieked and parrots squawked and then Lotus Bride used her outside voice.

  “Silence! Peace, sisters!”

  The pillows stopped coming. The abuse kept up.

  “He should be flogged!” said one of my celestial nymphs.

  “He’d probably like that,” sneered another.

  Lotus Bride’s eyes flashed. “Not in my apartment, please.”

  “Take him outside,” someone suggested.

  “Throw him in the lake.”

  “Throw him under a bus!”

  “No. Let’s burn him,” someone said in a low, mean voice.

  My back rippled all by itself. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Oo, he hates that. Let’s do it.”

  The suggestion seemed to take well with the mob.

  I raised my voice. “All you have to do is wait.” To Rathi I said, “Remember what happened in Judge Green’s chambers?”

  Rathi gasped. “If you dare say a word—”

  I put up a hand. “Not one word, I swear. But you remember. Now imagine if it happened all over your body. That’s what’s gonna happen to me…in about…” I squinted, counting back to the day I met her. “Two days, holy shit.” I felt the blood drain out of my face. I pleaded, “It’s this body. If I don’t get laid at least once a month, it’ll go foom.” I made foom! with my hands.

  “Oh, sure,” Lotus Bride said, her voice dripping sarcasm. “We’ve all heard that one before.” She mocked, “‘You hafta have sex with me, I’m burning alive!’”

  “Prove it!” called someone from the back of the group.

  “Let’s watch!”

  I shrank behind my pillow while they discussed it.

  “Rathi!” I appealed to her. “You won’t let them do anything to me, will you?”

  She was wiping tears off her cheeks with her forefinger. “I would hold the matches for them.” She sniffled.

  The mob gave a growl.

  “Rathi!” I begged.

  She drew herself up. “Talk yourself out of this one.”

  Watching her cry steadied my nerves. I’d really hurt her.

  “Okay. Okay,” I said soothingly. “Calm down. I’ll—” I looked around at Lotus Bride and her nymphs. They were quiet for the moment. “I’ll try to explain.”

  Rathi looked down her nose at me, hard and goddess-like. “Try.”

  I took a deep breath. I got down on one knee in front of her. “Okay, to start with, I’m an idiot. I’m not a dickhead, really, I’m just an idiot. It’s my way of coping with immortality. I always was an idiot. And I was pissed when you left. I admit that.�
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  “Begin at the beginning,” Rathi said. She sounded grim, but she wasn’t crying, and for the moment she wasn’t egging them on to burn me at the stake.

  I got down on both knees, then sat back on my heels. I sighed. “I guess the beginning was when the Shaivite cult moved into our part of India. They brought Mister Big Shot with them, and eventually he took over heaven, and there was a lot of iconotropy and moving idols around in temples and fast talking among the priests to explain how he had been the boss all along since the dawnatime, you know how it goes. Oh, that’s right, you don’t. Well, if you were a student of the history of comparative religion, you’d know.”

  “I am,” Lotus Bride said. “I get that. Go on.”

  “Oh.” I blinked at her. “Good.” I turned back to my virgin amnesiac runaway bride. “So then the Muslim invaders came north, bringing more austerity. Cultural syncretism between them and Shiva worship worked like a nutcracker, squeezing women’s rights. Tightening class distinctions. Rich getting richer, poor getting poorer, yadda yadda.” I held my palms out. “I was an idiot. I thought it didn’t matter. People still had to get laid, right? I couldn’t picture any of this affecting us.”

  The celestial nymphs made derisive sounds. I ignored them.

  “And then you know what happened. It’s the only part of the story still in print. Except, of course, the whole thing’s been whitewashed to make Shiva look better.”

  “What did you do?” Rathi said in the voice of a mother whose teenager has been sent home from school. She sat down.

  The tension in the room eased a smidge.

  I worked my shoulders. “Well, he was such a snot. Lording it over everybody—”

  Lotus Bride interrupted again. “A demon was stealing all the other gods’ wives, and only a son of Shiva and Parvati could defeat him, but Shiva wouldn’t stop meditating—”

  I raised my hand and wiggled it. “Me.”

  “What?” Rathi said.

  “Wife-stealing demon here. I wore a disguise.” I rolled my eyes. “Okay, not my best idea, but he was such a dick, you know? And it seemed like a good idea at the time. Finally they all asked me to do it.”

  “What did you do?” Rathi said again, more sternly.

  I hung my head. “I shot him. With the arrows of love.”

  Everybody said, “Ohhh.”

  “And he burnt you to ashes,” Rathi said. “How did this result in me—in your goddess leaving you?”

  “You went to him and pointed out that without me, crops wouldn’t grow, trees wouldn’t leaf, flowers wouldn’t bloom, lambs wouldn’t be conceived, nor woman breed for man. Oh, and by the way, the locals wouldn’t accept him if he tried to make them give up worshipping the god of love. He didn’t believe you, but it turned out to be true. So he gave me my body back.”

  I quacked out a hacking laugh. “My spiritual body. Generous of him? Not! It was totally a political move. He could let people keep up my holidays and ceremonies, and they would accept him as boss god. But my actual job—god of sexual love—was completely gutted.”

  “Ah-hah!” Lotus Bride said. “Now we’re coming to it.”

  I sent her an unpleasant look and turned back to my wife.

  “I couldn’t fight him, Rathi,” I pleaded. “His technology was far superior. I make love, not war. I didn’t like being turned into a god of bodiless love any more than you wanted to be married to one. You kept telling me to reincarnate. Yeah, right. If I wanted to get burned to a crisp again. But you didn’t care,” I added bitterly.

  “I can kind of see his point,” said a grudging voice behind me.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I slumped with relief. At least one person wouldn’t be celebrating my spontaneous combustion.

  “It got worse,” I admitted. I met Rathi’s eyes. “You were right. About women’s rights. I’m saying that now, and it took me a long, long time to realize it.”

  She let her eyelids droop. Right then, I knew I had her. “How?”

  “Things only got worse for women. Honor killings. Education segregated by gender. Then that weasel dick from the Lodi court rewrote our book, the Kama Sutra, into the Ananga Ranga, deleting the women’s fun. And you snapped. You wanted me to stop them somehow. I hadn’t a clue how to stop them. I was scared shitless of Shiva’s death ray. And finally you walked out.”

  I took a long, shivering breath.

  “So how did you get your physical body back?” Rathi said. “You have a body now.”

  She let her scornful gaze sweep over me where I knelt naked at her feet. I was pleased to notice that her gaze lingered. Then she looked away, blushing.

  “Yeah, where did this body come from?” someone jeered to my right.

  I wasn’t proud of this part, either. “In a way, you did it.” I bowed my head. “You had gathered up my ashes. Shiva demanded them from you—that way he could keep me on a leash. But you kept a pinch of my ashes.” I raised my eyes to Rathi’s. “That’s all this is. Just a pinch of ashes.” I gestured at my body.

  “I don’t get it,” Lotus Bride said.

  I kept my eyes on Rathi. “When you stomped out, my mother found where you had hidden that pinch of ashes, and she made this body for me. It works pretty well,” I said, understating it, since every woman but one here knew damned well my body was amazing. Once again I felt a sizzle of scorching heat along my skin.

  I put my palms up and showed them to Rathi, showed her the flames dancing on them. “But if I don’t keep it serviced, and I mean regularly, it’ll burn up. And then…pffft!…no more Kamadeva, ever.”

  “Unless you get your ashes back from Shiva,” said a thoughtful voice to my left.

  “Yeah, right,” I growled.

  “Go on,” Rathi said.

  “After you left, I realized Shiva’s plan had worked. I was a cardboard cutout of a god. For a while people sneaked off to our groves and temples and did the old ceremonies, but then wives were afraid to keep it up, and young girls weren’t allowed out of the house at all, and then widows were expected to die with their husbands. The spring festival was reduced to people throwing colored chalk at each other on the street.”

  I choked out, “That’s how gods die, Rathi. Only they don’t. We don’t know how anymore,” I added bitterly. “We just…trickle off behind the curtain one day, while everybody is giving lip service to the cardboard cutout, and we go find another job.”

  She snorted. “Sex demon. Fry cook. Mail-room clerk.”

  “Don’t be snotty. You’re a lawyer.”

  She put her head on one side and gave a grudging little smile.

  “The point is, my love, I got out there in the field, as my sex demon buddies call it. Sex demon work was always available. It seemed like the whole world was being taken over by sex-hating ascetic regimes. That’s where I scored. Wherever you demonize sex, your administration has to hire sex demons. The Christian hell used to have thousands and thousands of us on their payroll.” I took a deep breath. “And that’s how I found out how right you were and how wrong I had been.”

  I peeked at her. She was really listening now.

  “Back in the day, when you and I ruled, sex was fun for everybody. By the time I got to Europe, even men were afraid to have fun with sex. They hated their wives, and they hated themselves for wanting to fuck ’em. But the women!”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t know how right you were until I’d spent fifty or sixty years as a sex demon. All I ever do now is sexual first aid. Women are bleeding inside, in their sexual souls. They’re crushed by shame and pain and sheer fucking ignorance of how to have fun in bed.

  “I feel like one of those army doctors in M*A*S*H. Here comes another woman with a mangled sexuality, get her on the table, pick out the shrapnel, sew her up, try to point her in the right direction, and send her on her way. Because, holy shit, here comes another one. Decades of it. Centuries. Can you blame me for spending my off hours with a beer and a bong?”

  I lowered myself to
my heels and put my palms together. “I am the ultimate master of pleasure. Give me enough lead time and I can make you come in your pants by touching you on the wrist with my little finger. Just by talking to you. Give me,” I said, my voice trembling again. “Give me a chance to heal you, Rathi. All this time, while I’ve been in the tent with choppers bringing me torn and bleeding women, you’ve been reincarnating, getting farther and farther away from your own sexuality. I—I know you do important work. The lawyer stuff. But you—you’re starving to death inside. It hurts me to wonder what’s been done to you, to make you starve yourself.

  “I’m not a fancy lawyer. I can fetch pencils and boss a photocopier. And I sleep with women.” I stared into her face, willing her to believe me. “I’m damn good at what I do.”

  I reached out and took her hand. It was ice cold, though I could feel the heat radiating off her body. “I screwed up. You were right. But it’s a whole new ball game now. Neither of us can go back to the way we were. We’ll just have to make it up as we go along.”

  He looked so ridiculous, small and naked on his knees, begging me to give him a chance. I felt like laughing. I seemed to be floating above my body. I was also deathly afraid of sinking back down into the blood and bone, the heat, the urgency.

  I wanted the sex. Oh, how I wanted it! It was the great unknown, the secret garden of delights I had righteously forbidden myself all this time. My body wanted it. I was slippery and hot and badly confused by desire.

  But with it came the goddess. I knew that now. I was horrified to realize that Kama had told the truth.

  Even worse, he had been right all along to deny me sex. The more I wanted it, the more I felt myself transforming, growing larger, forgetting how to be human even though I couldn’t yet remember being a goddess.

  I couldn’t go back. I was afraid to go forward.

  I wanted very, very much to go forward.

  His hand burned on mine. I felt desire drawing me back down into the fire. I leaped up and backward, knocking the chair over, making the parrots squawk. Just the thought of letting him touch me again made flames rush over my cheeks. I wanted it. Yet I cried, “Don’t!”