Discovering these artefacts, these relics of love, seemed to be an incomprehensible problem at first. I was sure that the fog would settle down, and Baba would guide me on a path to discovery. Digging up troubled graves, though, was a disastrous proposition. Some secrets, I believed, were best left untouched. But such virtues had been the core of her existence. She loved scraping a wound until it turned ripe and ulcerous so that she could cry and laugh at the same time, deriving pleasure from the self-inflicted pain. “Where can I find these relics?” I asked Baba Sen. “There are no maps. No flowcharts.” Baba smiled. “The journey leads to the destination. We ask the right questions. Look in the right places.”One of Baba’s disciples, her head draped in a white pallu, walked in and handed over a black pouch to him. Baba held the sack in the flat of his palm and weighed it. Then he nodded his head and the disciple retreated as unassumingly as she had appeared. Baba brought his hand close to his mouth and whispered a prayer under his breath. Then he blew a gasp of air on the black pouch. It moved, as if it was alive. A knot was tied on the top. He opened the pouch, and began emptying its contents. White flour poured out. There was a neat pattern in the white lines Baba was drawing on the floor. For a small pouch, it seemed to contain a tremendous amount of flour. Kilos, in fact. The lines that Baba had drawn were thick and generous. They were meant to keep one safe from evil spirits. “Will these lines protect you?” I asked Baba. “I can take care of myself.” Baba chuckled. “These lines are for your protection, beta.”A jolt ran down my spine. I looked around and realised that Baba had drawn a pentagram and I was at the centre of it. The pentagram was a union of opposites, just like me and her. In ancient Japanese sensibility, it symbolised the five elements. I stared at the painting on the wall behind Baba. It was a depiction of the solar system, of giant planets being dwarfed by the sun. Where did I, a mere mortal, stand in the scheme of such grand things? Baba now sat across me, his legs crossed over each other, each toe on the opposite knee. I was no yogi so I sat in a rather simple cross-legged posture and placed my palms on my knees. Baba extended his hands. He chanted, and his words travelled through the space and time between us. My wrists were now rising of their own volition until they were in the grasp of his fingers. Baba looked into my eyes with all the seriousness of the world. “We are going to a dark, dark place,” he said. “Be brave.”I nodded. For a few moments, nothing happened. Then time slowed down; I could feel it in the lingering seconds that never seemed to pass. And then, time paused. Soft tremors shook my glutes. The floor shivered as if something was waiting to erupt from within. There was movement in the painting on the wall behind Baba Sen. Something had affected its solidity. I saw something change in the painting: the order of the universe. I was drawn out of my body, into a vortex, spinning at a rapid pace until I fell somewhere, where I was present and not present at the same time, protected by those white lines that Baba had drawn around me. And Baba? I could see him clearly. He was standing in the Red Valley. Baba Sen looked around the vast expanse of red flowers on the ground. The starless sky above him was laced by the thin crescent of the moon. A soft wind was blowing through the valley, lifting the pollen through the air like white specks. From a distance, a river brushed against the bedrock. The colour of the flowers was a ripe red, and Baba first thought they were roses. But they smelled different. And the colour was dripping off them. Baba touched a petal, and his fingers turned red as the flower oozed a dark, red liquid, which he felt between the tips of his fingers and found it to be blood. These were not red roses but white lilies soaked in warm blood. She loved white lilies, didn’t she? A figure was sitting in the distance, right in the midst of the valley. He began walking towards the woman who had her back to him. It was Nahid. When he reached close, she turned and leaned forward with a stem in her hands. She tugged at its stigma, her lips buried into the filament of the lily. Then she whispered something. Her breath reverberated through the mist and Baba tried to control the shock he endured upon sighting her face. Half of her jaw had been shattered by the impact of the bullet she had fired. The bullet had exited from her left eye and it had fallen out of its socket like a crushed pear. The rest of her face was as beautiful as it had ever been. “Plants grow faster when you talk to them,” she said. “More so if the voice belongs to a woman,” Baba said. “There’s a research paper on that.”“A woman can nurture well.” She paused. “I nurtured him. But see what he did to me?” She pointed to her chin. “This! This?”“You fired the bullet.”“But he loaded the gun. Figuratively.”“Why don’t you –”“Use all your might. You can’t save him.”“We’ll see how that goes,” Baba said and touched a flower. “Blooming flowers signify a new beginning,” she said. “Be careful of places where the flowers do not bloom anymore; for that is stagnation.” She paused. “Stagnation is decay.” Another pause. “And decay is death.”Now the wind billowed, and it was coming from a distance, screaming and ranting. When it hit, a hail of pollen blew in the air. The world was nothing but flying specks of white. Baba Sen coughed and coughed like a man whose lungs had been infected by a deadly virus. He was trying to catch his breath and wave the pollen away. All of this continued until the dust settled and she was gone. Baba was able to breathe again and …We were back inside the chamber in the ashram. Baba was still holding my hands. Everything had come back to normal, and the painting behind him wasn’t moving anymore. Natural order had been restored. But for how long? No one knew. Baba let go of me and circled his forehead with his index finger. Thrice. “Do you know where the flowers do not bloom anymore?” he asked. I nodded. “Then, you must dig there when it rains,” Baba said. “Hidden underneath, you will find a clue to the first relic.” He paused. “But remember, only when it rains.”A couple of days had passed since June had begun. I checked the weather forecast on my phone. The skies were about a week and a half away from the south-west monsoon. I could wait for the clouds to move. In my erstwhile line of work, patience was a much-needed virtue. I stood up and asked for Baba’s permission to leave. He smiled and I took that as his assent. I was at the door of the chamber when another spirit overwhelmed Baba Sen. This time, he sounded like the woman who’d been killed by her husband, who’d fallen in love with a bar dancer. Baba asked me a question in that woman’s voice. Why does she love white lilies? Tell me, you slimy bastard. I knew why but I didn’t tell him. Or her. I just ran. As fast as I could. The question was asked in the present tense. Yet, its answer was rooted in the past. I had first met Nahid 12 years ago.Those days, I was the young man who had fallen for her charms. And when I first saw her, sitting at the corner table of a bar in Colaba, I had little doubt that she was the most beautiful woman in the world. Memories of that moment were vivid, as if it had just passed …Excerpted with permission from Relics of Love, Kashif Mashaikh, Westland.