Jitterbug Perfume

For 20 years, Alobar has been under the instruction of Buddhist monks at a lamasery, near a village among the Himalayan mountains called Samye. A newly arrived student, Kudra, is quickly judged to be a woman disguised as a boy. When the “boy” is bid to bathe with the rest of the monks, she runs away, and Alobar follows her. They tell one another their stories while bathing near a river in the shadow of the mountain called Chomolungma.

Kudra says she was born in India to a family of incense makers. When she was eight, she witnessed the first example of a widow throwing herself on a funeral pyre after a dead husband, a practice known as suttee. Coincidentally, the older Alobar was there, too, travelling east in exile. He comforted the girl, noting her similarity to his former wife, Wren. Though he traveled on, he left an impression, and Kudra recognizes him 20 years later. Though the widow appeared to suffer in the suttee, Kudra is informed by her mother that “[t]he life of a widow is worse than fire” (81).

Kudra continues her story. Growing up, she had a strong competence for her father’s line of work and for the art of scent-making in general, but at 15 she was arranged to be married to a rope seller. From her older husband, she received a satisfying sexual education that did not compensate for her loss of a career. She found rope selling dull, and she dreamed of escape. Her husband died young, and so she was given the choice of suttee or widowhood. Widows are traditionally stripped of all social and legal rights, however, and her mother’s prediction rang true: Widowhood would be an extended misery. Kudra considered suttee, but after hearing the Brahmins in charge of the ceremony arguing over who would receive her valuables, she decided to run away instead.

Alobar’s long-dormant sexual passion is rekindled by seeing a woman, but Kudra playfully rejects his advances. Alobar then tells his story. After leaving Aelfric, he travelled many miles, past India, toward the Himalayan village of Samye. A goatherd named Fosco informed him that he might find immortality among the Bandaloop doctors, in a different lamasery far from the main path. He found them, but they behaved in mysteriously hostile ways, pelting him with food when he was hungry, and insulting him while praising him. Alobar reasons that “[t]hose who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it” (92). Still, after some time, Alobar gave up and retreated to the Samye lamasery, where he finds himself today. Kudra notes that Alobar does not appear to have aged a day in the 20 years since she last saw him. Alobar dictates a diatribe against his current mode of living, then asks, “Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls against temptation, why not get better at fulfilling desire?” (97). He attempts to seduce Kudra, but she puts him off, inviting him into the barn in which she sleeps later that night.

After determining that Alobar cannot be aroused if Kudra wears the heavy fragrances of her upbringing, Kudra washes, and the two enjoy a night of sexual intercourse. The next morning, Kudra runs away toward the Bandaloop, certain that Alobar will pursue her. He does, and they nearly die in their attempt to reach the cavern in which the Bandaloop once resided. Upon reaching it, they find it abandoned. They nurse one another back to health among the implements of the former Bandaloop shrine. Kudra declares, “The immortals are gone. Now we are the immortals” (108).

In the present day, Priscilla continues to toil on her experiments in fragrance while working at El Papa Muerte, a restaurant that serves undistinguished tacos. She calls Madame Duvalier, who remembers that a drifter and con artist named The Reverend Wally Lester left Priscilla with her as a baby to raise on her own. She remembers Priscilla’s longing for a steady father, and the fact that Wally Lester wandered in and out of his daughter’s life. She remembers that, within earshot of Priscilla, Lester uttered the mysterious final words, “the perfect taco” (120). V’lu bemoans the fact that Priscilla is in possession of a mysterious, special bottle. In Paris, Luc LeFevre informs the business-minded Claude that the aesthetically-minded Marcel has decided to check himself into in immortality clinic called The Last Laugh, led by a notorious “drug addict and jailbird” named Wiggs Dannyboy (124).