Inheritance by Indira Ganesan

nothing more. The crowd, disappointed—the crazy who had appeared two weeks before had let a basketful of snakes travel up and down his arms—dispersed. Luck brought this preacher who was thirsty for water near our table.
    “Where are you from?”
    It was Richard who asked this question, startling me with its directness.
    “From a road that’s rapidly aging,” replied Be’ve’nu.
    “How did you get here?”
    “I walk out on my own, a thousand miles from home, but I do not feel alone.”
    “How do you live?”
    “You don’t need a weatherman to see which way the wind blows.”
    He spoke only in Dylan. He did not use any other words except to tell his miracle. If I supplied mental guitar and harmony, it was like being at a rock and roll concert.
    I went to lie in Richard’s arms that afternoon. The heat of the day made us drowsy, and as I drifted off to sleep, I imagined it was the dark one’s arms that held me, that the preacher’s wild hair lay about me, that it was his face I touched with my fingertips. I lost myself this way, imagining, in a shimmer of strange and vibrant energy. I startled myself out of it, though, realizing who was in the room. I felt awful, as if I’d betrayed Richard in a terrible way. I drew the sheet around me even though it was hot, and shifted to the edge of the bed. Untouched, I lay awake, trying to figure this new thing out. When Richard woke up, I smiled sheepishly, and he knew something was up. He looked at me with his green-grey eyes, but I shrugged mine away, merely saying I had to go.
    What was funny was that Richard seemed as captivated by the preacher as I was, not missing any opportunity to listen to him in the square. It was he who figured out his name was really Bienvenu. Welcome. Richard and I hadcoffee together in the cafe every day for the next week to hear him recite again and again the circumstances of the miracle.
    He said the baby would be delivered out of his mouth, but he wasn’t certain when, whether the period would be longer or shorter than the usual nine months for holy births. He believed it would be five months. He was trying to be careful of his burden but felt he could not really do harm, that the baby was protected from falls and bruises. Still, he said he did not understand how women did it, how they could be in the fields from sunup to sundown, thrashing, thrashing grain with babies in their bellies. And how they could go through the process eight or nine times. Truly, he said, woman is the closest we have on earth to the gods.
    Sometimes people questioned him, asking him to expand on the significance of the birth. He answered in rhyme, from the freewheelin’ years, from the electric era. Others were rude, not believing, wanting a fight, better still an arrest, but he was as Christian as could be and refused to become aroused. Most left him alone, for his prophecy was no longer news, and he was treated as a common street seer.
    Then other rumors began, that he was not as pure as one might think, that he visited a brothel frequently, that he drank a bottle of rum toddy at night, that he smoked ganja. Of all the rumors only one was true: The preacher named Welcome liked to smoke marijuana now and then. When Richard lit up a joint and offered it to me, I,struck by a boldness inspired by the sun, offered it to the madman. He reached out his hand languidly and took the paper wet from my lips. Staring into my eyes, he took a deep drag and handed it back. He didn’t hide the act, he didn’t care if anyone watched. Richard was shocked that Be’ve’nu smoked.
    “What’s the big deal?” I asked, naming the saints and seers who used drugs to induce states of revelation. Even the Oracle at Delphi had been steeped in the fragrance of ganja. Drugs were not anathema to polytheistic religions; it was only the West that demanded that its clergy free their lives of the senses.
    But think of the Buddhists, said Richard; they desire to be stone to temptation, to