Try as I might, I couldn’t. In Houlihan’s words, I was “a lost soul in a strange world,” a world of love and a world of magic that nothing in my experience permitted me to understand. For, like the little Dutch boy who found a hole in a dike that, left unchecked, would unbolt the sea, so I seemed to have come across a tear in the very fabric of existence—a hole that led to God-knows-where! That the book’s strange effect was like nothing I’d encountered was beyond discussion. Whether it was “enchanted” or not, I really couldn’t say. I did know this: I couldn’t speak of it to anyone but Vidya. To have even hinted to my colleagues I possessed a codex that was somehow “charmed” would have been career suicide. Grants, funding, affiliations, publication and access to sites and materials would have dried right up. The only person who might have explained it to me was Jai, and Jai was in a place beyond all explanations. Somehow, I’d crossed a border. And if I had crossed in one direction, who was to say that a Rajput warrior, as Vidya had surmised, could not have crossed it in the other and, leaping from the pages, slain Jai with his sabre before vanishing back from whence he’d come, where no earthly Houlihan would ever find him.
What do You think about My Lady Of The Bog (2014)?
