Guntur could not wake Candra from the sleep that clung to her as a mist does the water until the sun, rising high into morning, can burn it off. Hers was not now the sleep in which she was drowned inside the blue silk pavilion. It was a sleep such as anyone living might undergo who had been brought by sickness to the brink of death. She was not dead; and so he let her sleep, watching her the while intently, like someone blind who all of a sudden sees.

Arjuna sat in the thickest shadow, in a corner of the room — mute, his head on his arms, not because of weakness or weariness (for he was incapable of either), but because he was without occupation. He had played his part and would not be summoned to another. (Only his puppet would, after audiences had rebelled at Guntur’s heretical idea of theater.) Like the sun’s mirage seen everywhere for a time after one has looked at the sun, so Arjuna — also luminous — would remain inside the playhouse until he faded gradually from Guntur’s mind.

Guntur was entranced by Candra’s beauty.

Without the story-screen to conceal her, he studied her face avidly. With his hand, he traced the outline of her slumbering form. He was seized by a desire to remove her sarong but was stayed by a countervailing emotion — part fear, part reverence, both incited in him by the contemplation of a mystery and both comprising love. He could have spoken her awake just as he had spoken her from out the Land of the Dead. But he was glad that she slept, for he doubted he could have looked at her so wantonly otherwise. Sleep protected both of them from the consequences of wakefulness.

Guntur was made aware of time’s passing only by the alternation of light and darkness on the face and shoulder of the woman. The silence of the theater was such that not even the sedulous wasp could disturb it.

Arjuna sat huddled in shadow, himself no more than a heap of shadow.

The morning of the third day, Candra woke. It might have been that she had first to let her body rid itself of death, as a poison is slow to let go its hold on the heart; or maybe she had given up dreaming only with reluctance. Guntur could not guess what those who dwelled in Yama’s kingdom might dream, what quality of sweetness or ecstasy. Arjuna might have known; but he was already forgotten, with only his shadow left behind in Guntur’s shadow theater where so many times before, it had been cast from a place that was neither life nor death but partook of each. For whatever reason, Candra woke to find Guntur sitting next to her.

“Who are you?” she asked, disturbed by the covetousness of his gaze.

“The dalang who gave you puppets for the clothmaker. Duryodhana and Abhimanyu have been waiting more than ten years for you to wake.” He nodded toward the table in the corner of the room where two leather puppets lay, pelted with dust. “You’ve been asleep.”

Candra let her eyes wander the room. She seemed unable to rise from the jute mat. Sitting crosslegged beside her, Guntur made no move to help her.

“I was dreaming ––”

In the street, the iron-bound wheels of a cart rattled over loose stones, and a shrill voice shouted in Persian a warning to the driver.

Candra wetted her dry lips with her tongue.

Guntur rose and poured water into a clay cup. With one hand, he held the woman’s head while with the other he helped her to drink.

“What were you dreaming?” he asked.

“I –– I don’t remember.”

“Try to remember!” he exhorted her, so great was his desire to know the nature of death’s dreaming.

But she could not; and Guntur saw in his mind a pale light go out at the farthest reach of experience — heard a door softly close on a secret of the afterlife.

She sat up and, tidying her sarong, looked again at Guntur — this time with recognition.

“You sat behind a white cotton cloth and asked me questions,” she said. “I told you stories. You gave me puppets which I pretended to buy with the clothmaker’s money. I kept the money to buy a piece of blue batik to make a dress for my friend’s wedding. I got sick and died.” She felt her arms and face, looked at the palms of her hands. “I burned on the pyre.”

The shadow of his inordinate grief crossed Guntur’s face.

“How did I come to be here?”

“I brought you back,” he said, forgetting Arjuna.

“Where was I?” she asked, understanding nothing.

“Asleep in a blue silk pavilion, on the Island of the Dead. Don’t you remember?”

“I was dead,” she said in a way that could be interpreted either as a question or as a declaration.

“Yes — don’t you remember?”

“Why did you wake me?” she asked, perplexed.

“I adore you,” he answered foolishly.

She wrenched her body free of the fixity of his gaze — the bangles noisy with her anger.

* * *

Candra could not rid herself of the feeling she was dead. But not even with the imprecision of memory, which constructs from the ruins of time a replica of a vanished past, could she invoke her experience of the afterlife. Had any of the possible sensations felt in that remote existence been present — however faintly — to her waking or dreaming mind, she could not have conveyed them to Guntur: there was neither a mortal form nor language that might begin to encompass them. Not that Candra searched her recollections or looked into any of her mind’s shut-up rooms for things forgotten or ignored. Their mere intimation caused her to shudder because of the living’s natural fear of death or because of the desire once more to give herself up to it.

Was Candra in love with death?

Half in love, as are we all.

What she remembered — what she saw when her gaze was fixed on nothing was this: herself asleep inside the blue pavilion, surrounded by a multitude of other sleepers. And at the boundary between this—

But she had told Guntur that she remembered nothing.

After a time, she remembered this much: herself among a multitude of sleepers — sleeping and seeing while she slept the island, the far sea, and the far side of the sun separating that fatal island from the world of living beings. She saw them — there is no way to say how it was she saw except by resorting to commonplaces such as: through a mist, or fog, or a pane of water. That last is the least inept of all possible comparisons for how it was that Candra saw from death’s magisterial vantage. She saw what lay around her like a diver viewing the distant sky from underneath the water. She was permitted to remember no more of her life on the island ––

Her life?

A kind of life, or half life.

By whom, “permitted”?

By the gods, by the inexorable law of the world, by Candra herself. How can I be expected to answer such a question? For her death was an interlude between a past life and a life to come. According to all the sacred texts, is it not always so?

If Candra had not been silenced by death and by the ill will she bore Guntur, she might have told him this:

“While I was sleeping, I saw you coming from far off with the morning light. Arjuna was with you, standing a little apart or sometimes so close that you and he seemed one and the same. You were hunting the boundary between the two worlds for a way inside. I would not have known you were there except for the noise — the turbulence you made as you crossed over finally into that sea and came up onto that beach in my father’s boat. It was a commotion never before heard in that windless, breathless place. Those around me muttered in their sleep, as did I to hear it where only silence was heard — the silence of stone — and a song that something even older than stone might sing. I was not unhappy there, nor was I content. Those words have no meaning there. Does one say he was happy or unhappy to have been asleep? Even if you have dreamed a nightmare, it is not a matter of happiness or unhappiness. And so it is in that other life, which is and is not life.

“I watched with my closed eyes how you searched for me — you and Arjuna. So long a time it took you to find my pavilion! (Though there, there is no time.) I did not want you to find it, but you did and still I thought: he will never find me among all these dead! (I did not wish to be found — didn’t want to wake!) Arjuna whispered, reminding you of my blue hands. I tried to hide them but couldn’t. Movement is impossible there save for that unrest caused by the agitation of a dream. I saw through my closed eyes where my hands lay folded below my breast on the brown cloth of my sarong. How beautiful! I thought. Never before this did I notice how blue hands are beautiful! I did not regret them, though they would soon betray me. I trembled when at last your eyes fell on them and Arjuna gathered me up, as if I were nothing at all. My bangles shook with my fear and anger.”

When Candra did finally open her eyes, she saw Guntur standing over her. She did not know him, but she remembered having been in the room—recalled that she had once looked up, because of a wasp’s insistence, and seen the rafters.

She seems …

What does she seem?

That she is no more than Guntur’s dream, his figment, his creature. Obedient or sullen, she has no life apart from his.

He imagines her in every atom of her being save this: her mind’s extinction. I mean: what it was she knew or might have known inside the blue pavilion. Because he has yet to know death, he cannot know her innermost portion of — I cannot call it life. But it is what remains apart from Guntur’s life.

Why must she remain silent?

So that Guntur cannot possess her story.

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