"And now, many years later, you know." She shifted next to him and began unfastening the bells on her ankles. They chimed gently as she carefully laid them aside. Then she opened a small silver box she had brought and placed a red dot in the middle of her forehead, just below the pendant jewel. "I sense the first stirrings of _kama _inside me now. The awakening of desire. And because I feel it, I know you must feel it too." She loosened his doublet and pushed him gently against the bolster. The notes of the flute wound through the dark air around them. Kamala listened a moment in silence, then slowly rose off the bolster. She stood before him, holding his gaze with her eyes, and pulled away the heavy, jeweled belt at the waist of her dance sari. She dropped it at his feet, never averting her eyes. Then she made a half turn and twisted her hip gracefully into a voluptuous bulge. The silk clung even tighter to the statuesque curve of her legs as she crossed her feet with an almost ceremonial deliberation. Wordlessly she slowly drew the silk end of the _sari _from across her shoulder and let it drop before her, revealing the curve of a perfectly spherical breast. Seen from behind her body was fixed in a perfect double curve, a sensuous "S" whose top was the full line of her half-revealed breast and whose bottom was the rounded edge of her hip. In those few simple motions she had transmuted her body, as though through some deep cultural memory, into an ancient fertility totem, a prayer for the bounty of the human loins. It was, Hawksworth suddenly realized, a pose identical to that of a statue he'd seen in a mossy temple in Mandu, on the way north from Burhanpur. It was the essence of the female principle, sharing with the earth itself the power of life. That stone goddess had automatically stirred his desire, as it had the desire of man thousands of years before, as it was meant to do. Now it stood before him. Before he could move, she turned again and swept up the pleats of silk that comprised the front of her _sari_. She whipped the loose ends of silk about her head once, twice, and magically it seemed to evaporate from her body. All that remained was a small drape of silk about her waist, held in place by a thin band of jade. Her body was like ivory, perfect from the band at her neck to the small rings on her toes, and her breasts billowed full and geometrically round, a long necklace of pearls nestled between them. As Hawksworth stared at her dumbfounded, the drummer commenced a finely metered rhythm timed exactly with his heartbeat. She moved to Hawksworth's side and slid her left hand beneath his open doublet. "The very first note of a raga can contain everything if it is sounded with _prahna_. And the first touch between a man and a woman can become the OM, the syllable that carries the totality of creation."