Lalita rides to Surin in back of a pick-up truck and by using a number of ATM’s manages to extract fifteen thousand dollars. Out of curiosity, McKay calls his bank to check: yep, she took out exactly the agreed sum, not a penny more.

Next day, nine monks appear in their saffron robes, form a semi circle, join themselves together with a length of white string, and start chanting in Pali, while Magnus and his bride kneel with their palms held together near their chests for what seems to McKay like an inordinate period of time. Indeed, he is so tired from keeping his hands up after the first hour, and so bored with listening to the incomprehensible Pali, and at the same time so determined to show he has the stamina of any Thai man, that he does not pay attention to Lalita’s frame of mind, which may be a mistake on his part.

Like most Thais, Lalita understands quite a lot of Pali thanks to the cultural influence of Buddhism. She knows that Pali is a dialect of Sanskrit which is perhaps the only language on earth wholly dedicated to the sacred. Like most people in the world outside of the West, Lalita assumes that everyone, even McKay, has a god-shaped hole in his head, otherwise he could not be human at all, could he? She also assumes that the monks’ words are having the same effect on him as they are on her.

Of course, she knows he does not consciously understand anything, but this is a magical moment and these words are sacred. So sacred, indeed, that she finds she is undergoing that religious experience which she has always known would come to her sooner or later. Quite simply, this is the happiest day of her life and she has quite forgotten the rather legalistic caveats that McKay tried to impose on their union. Indeed, as invariably happens when a soul begins to awaken, the spiritual experience is so powerful that she simply drops her former identity like a set of old and dirty clothes. Miraculously, but not unusually, she is able to forget she was ever on the Game. After all, as far as her community is concerned, in one smart move she has become a rich, respectable, powerful, married woman.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32