Feeling the Vibes (6 page)

Everywhere we saw signs of war and devastation. Convoys of military vehicles chugged past. In the back young soldiers fidgeted tensely with their guns. One waved at Obi. No one seemed surprised to see a four-year-old child plodding along by a busy main road all alone.

I saw a young girl in traditional Kashmiri forehead jewellery pick her way across the rubble to a minimarket with boarded-up windows. Her shocking pink dress was the one splash of colour against the backdrop of burned-out buildings.

On the snowy pavement a guy carefully adjusted the kerosene burner he was using to boil tea for his one-man tea stall. Spice sellers joked with customers as they scooped cardamom pods and peppercorns into paper bags. It’s amazing what humans can get used to. Even in a war zone life somehow goes on.

The road crossed over a rushing river that literally seemed to be made of cappuccino. The frothy brown water was really melting snow thundering down from the Himalayas. The distant, snow-capped mountains gave off a pure, unearthly vibe, seemingly untouched by the human war raging at their feet.

This lakeside town had once been beautiful and v. stylish. Those houses which had survived the missiles and gunfire had a dilapidated Indian-style glamour even now, helping you to imagine it in its glory days.

I made the mistake of saying this to Brice and immediately he’s like, “Which glory days were you meaning? The time of the great Mughals? The days of the British Empire? India has a LONG history, sweetheart.”

I opened my mouth, but he coldly cut me off. “Angel girl, you have no idea what Kashmir was like in its glory days. I saw it at the time of the Mughals and it was a freaking paradise.”

I tried not to take it personally. Walking through town with a child
bodhisattva
, not knowing if or when his old PODS cronies would try to snatch Obi from under our noses, was fraying Brice’s nerve-endings to breaking point.

If our short, fraught walk to the orphanage was bad for Brice, imagine how it felt for Obi, literally catapulted out of paradise into a war zone. Yet he was a little star, turning where we said to turn, crossing when we said it was safe to cross. “Pothole, pothole,” said Brice urgently.

“Obi!! Look at that truck! They’ve painted a picture of Ganesh on the bonnet, look! I think it’s Ganesh,” I chattered. “Ganesh is the elephant god, isn’t he?”

Obi nodded happily. He loved elephants and he loved the brightly painted truck with its huge laughing, blue-faced Ganesh.

The “pothole” was actually a false alarm. Being responsible for a potential buddha was making Brice unusually jumpy.

Obi’s face suddenly lit up. “I can see the blue door!” he yelled, instantly clapping his hand over his mouth. “I can see the blue door!” he repeated in a hoarse whisper. Reubs and I exchanged relieved smiles. We’d got Obi safely to the orphanage and with absolutely no hassle.

Like everywhere else, the orphanage had taken a major battering. The building had huge scorch marks as if it had caught on fire at some point. The front door was dimpled all over with what looked like tiny bullet holes.

A tough-looking guy sat on his haunches outside, puffing on one of those brown Indian beedis. His eyes slid off Obi like he was of no interest whatsoever. “Scram,” he said in Kashmiri. “We’ve got two hundred little street rats inside already.”

I heard Brice curse. No one at the Agency had thought to mention the orphanage might be full. I felt sick. We’d have to camp on the street until the monks turned up. Obi would be exposed to icy winds, snow, not to mention ugly cosmic influences.

“Relax, Beeby,” Reuben said softly. “Our little
bodhisattva
is going to sort it.”

Obi went on waiting silently in front of the security guy. He didn’t whinge or plead or sob. He was absolutely calm and still.

The security guy had probably experienced just about every horror human life has on offer. He had learned to shut everything out just to stay sane. But he had no defences against the pure vibes emanating from a child
bodhisattva
.

He started to fidget. He scratched his nose. He checked out his ear wax (both ears), but in the end he was forced to look up.

“Why are you still here?” he growled. “I told you to beat it.” I noticed this time he really looked at Obi.

”
Salaam aleikum
,” Obi said shyly. “I am sorry I am still here, uncle, but I have nowhere else to go.”

The man gave an angry laugh. “Nobody in this town has anywhere to go. Do you think I’d be here given a choice?”

A look of compassion came into Obi’s eyes. “Are you all by yourself like me, uncle? It feels very lonely, doesn’t it?”

I saw the man’s breathing change.

“No ammi, eh?” he said fiercely.

Obi shook his head. “No.”

“No abbu either?”

I saw Obi swallow. “I lost them. I walked and walked and I called and called, but I didn’t find them, uncle. I didn’t find my mummy and my daddy again.”

The boys and I exchanged startled looks. This wasn’t the story Obi had rehearsed with Miss Dove. The words had somehow welled up from his store of human memories.

“What is wrong with this world,” the guy muttered. “The angels must be crying themselves to sleep.” He took a last hungry puff of his beedi. “Come! I’ll take you to the sisters.”

The office was at the end of a long green-tiled corridor. You could hear kids’ voices echoing all through the building. I was ashamed to realise I hadn’t given them a single thought, the real orphans.

The elderly nun who ran the orphanage never thought about anything else. I could see it in her face. The security guard whispered to her urgently in Kashmiri. She whipped off her glasses and frowned at Obi across a great toppling pile of papers. I saw the painful pinch marks from her glasses and I knew then that like the town she was all burned out. She didn’t have a drop of energy left to help another soul.

Obi just waited, totally peaceful, trusting that this exhausted human would do what was right, even if it was utterly impossible.

I saw the nun’s expression change. I saw her decide to make room in an overcrowded, underfunded orphanage for one more needy child.

“Yess!” Brice said under his breath and we all sagged with relief.

Obi stood patiently as a younger nun checked him over for fleas, lice and whatever. Then she took him to meet the other kids. One girl immediately pulled him on her knee and started teaching him clapping games. Her name was Fareeda. She had a younger sister, Nansi.

You know those Third World kids on the news who’ve seen much too much? That was Fareeda and Nansi. But like with the security guy, the sweetness in Obi brought out the forgotten sweetness in them.

I remembered something Mr Allbright told us about
bodhisattvas
: sometimes simply being in their presence is all it takes to help other humans wake up and remember who they really are.

And he’s four, I thought. Imagine when he’s finished his training?

At midday each orphan was given a plastic bowl filled with sloppy vegetable curry and a piece of naan bread. Obi seemed totally at home, cross-legged on the floor, scooping up veggies with his bread. Now and then he flashed us a secretive smile from behind his hand, then went on chatting with his new big sisters.

“It’s like he never left,” I said to Reubs. “He’s just fitted right back into India.”

I’m not proud of this, but I felt jealous. We’d only been on Earth a few hours, but already I could feel him being pulled away from me. Obi had rejoined the human world in a way I never could.

“He’s had a lot of Indian lifetimes,” Reuben pointed out. “That must count for something.”

I remembered Obi listening to India’s beating heart. I’d seen it in his face then, a deep longing, but a longing for what?

I looked up to see what Brice was making of all this, but he was at the window watching the street.

“What’s he looking at?” I murmured.

“Potholes,” Reuben said quietly. “He’s looking out for potholes.”

Chapter Eight

A
ll we had to do was wait for the monks.

“Miss Dove did say finding
bodhisattvas
isn’t an exact science,” I sighed to Reubs on the third day. “Maybe some of the stars are in the wrong positions or whatever.”

He and Brice were messing about, picking the nuts out of the angel trail mix, throwing them up and catching them in their mouths, but Brice eventually got bored.

“Who’s for a game of cards?” he asked hopefully.

I don’t want you to think we were just playing cards. We did make ourselves useful. We filled the orphanage with celestial vibes, setting up cosmic shields to keep them at the optimum level (well, the optimum level possible in a war zone).

Faced with a semi-derelict building overflowing with disturbed war orphans, it might seem that just raising vibes is a tragically inadequate thing to do. Let me tell you, the results were like, i
nstant
!

TWO local businesses donated cash the very next day, enough to fix the orphanage’s dodgy plumbing
and
buy new blankets for the kids!

Mr Allbright is always telling us, “When you change the energy of a situation, you are literally rewriting reality!” Now it was finally sinking in. This stuff WORKS!

On the fourth day, with no sign of the monks, Brice and Reuben went into town and volunteered their services to the local angels. The Kashmiri Earth angels were over the moon to have a child
bodhisattva
in their town. A few of them actually came over to peep at him while he was sleeping. One of the angel girls generously brought Kashmiri-style nibbles. “I thought you’d be getting bored of trail mix,” she said shyly.

Lalla wore the complicated forehead jewellery I’d seen on human girls on our walk across town. Her clothes were traditional Kashmiri clothes, a kaftan-style dress smothered in gold embroidery over silk harem-style pants. She didn’t say a lot, but her vibe was so friendly I felt like I knew her really well already.

We stuffed our faces with yummy flat bread and dips, while the Earth angels filled us in on the local situation. They told us the PODS presence had stepped up just before we arrived, then mysteriously died down again soon afterwards.

After our visitors left, we sat chatting in the kitchen. Periodically one of us would peep into the dormitory to check on Obi.

The orphanage was in total darkness except for the glimmer of hurricane lamps here and there. Like the majority of Indian towns, ours got power cuts most nights.

We were trying to figure out if the Dark Agencies had really given up or if they were just playing mind games. I thought they’d ditched the idea of snatching Obi as soon as they realised Brice was part of his divine security. “Whatever they do you’ll be on to them. And now Obi’s safe with the nuns there’s no point hanging around.”

Brice was finishing up Lalla’s bread. “Nice story, darling,” he said, shaking his head, “but I don’t buy it. If anything, they’ll be mad keen to humiliate me. I’m a traitor in the Hell dimensions, remember. No, they’re planning something. I can feel it.”

Later I saw him slip out to check the cosmic shields.

I doubted if any PODS could tolerate the new improved Light levels, yet Brice was outside for ages tinkering around, adding super-powerful protection symbols to the ones we’d put in place.

Watching him through the window I felt a teensy bit paranoid. Brice is not a panicky type but this mission had put him on edge from the start. If he thought there was a reason to be worried, we should probably be v.v. worried.

Next day one of the helpers found a flier advertising a street fair. As well as stalls there were stilt walkers, street magicians, elephant rides. The nuns agreed the kids could go, so long as the older children looked after the little ones.

Here was something else we hadn’t foreseen. A trip to the swings was one thing, but a crowded fairground presented cosmic security problems. I thought we shouldn’t risk it.

“Too dangerous, right?” I asked the boys.

Brice was sending phone pics of the orphanage to Lola. “For sure,” he said without looking up. “On the other hand we can’t exactly stop him.”

“We can! We can get Obi to tell the girls he’s sick.”

Reuben shook his head. “Brice is right. Not to mention Obi is incapable of telling a lie.”

Eventually I had to agree. Short of putting Obi into a magical sleep until the fair was over, there wasn’t much we could do.

We all set off after lunch.

The prospect of a fair had brought hundreds of humans out on to the street. The war had made people grateful for any little treat.

I’d been cooped up for what felt like
aeons
, so it was a relief to be out and about, though the weather was freezing, not to say really mad; one minute fierce bright sunshine, the next tiny snowflakes would come spinning down.

If Fareeda and the other orphans felt the cold in their flimsy hand-me-downs, it didn’t show. They were bubbling with excitement. Fareeda started singing a popular love song she’d heard on the radio. The other girls immediately joined in. One boy grabbed a broom, pretending to be a Bollywood movie star dancing with his beloved. People laughed and clapped. Obi was loving it.