Anita came into my room, but she couldn’t see me. She only saw the clothes I wore as I rose from my bed in the frigid room. The black knit hat, the long underwear, the sweater unraveling at the elbows and the ends of the sleeves. But the clothes were empty. I sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at her. Anita could see my arms were crossed over my stomach where my unseen body gave form to the wool, but she saw no hands. She could see that my knees were trembling and weak from the sickness, but on the floor, where my feet were trying to find their footing, she saw nothing but empty air. My hat only floated in space. I had, in fact, become invisible. This happened gradually over the last seventeen days. At first, I simply looked pale. I suspected something was off relatively that first day, but not sure. The following day, I was certain. The people of the village, though, didn’t notice; my fair skin had already seemed impossibly white and sickly to them to begin with. I remember that the very first days of being there were filled with the children crowding around to see me, some bashful, some inquisitive, all convinced that I couldn’t be entirely well. 
In those first few days, the changes were still subtle. Each morning I would wake up just slightly fainter, skin just slightly whiter. It was strange more than anything else, but I’ll admit that it was beginning to gnaw at me even by then. I’d brought it up a few times in the evenings as we huddled together on the floor, Anita, Santos-ji, the children and I, eating daal baat. But in between handfuls of rice, they’d just smile. 
“You worry too much. I see your head has many white hairs, no?” they’d laugh, especially Santos-ji, “Too young for these hairs, no?”
And, so in those first days, partly out of deference to them as their guest (to not be so insistent on that I risked being thought argumentative), and partly out of the genuine belief, or at least hope, that maybe they were right, I chose to be silent about the matter for the most part. Just wait and see, I tried to hold on to the mantra. They certainly were right about my tendency towards anxiety, anyways. Had they really seen that so clearly so early on? 
It must have been about a week - perhaps Day Eight of symptoms - that things got much more alarming. I woke up feeling more or less the same as before. The same general malaise, a vague weakness or fatigue. Nothing acute, though, and the lighting in those houses being so dark, I didn’t notice it while getting ready. But when I left for the day and headed out into the morning sun, red through the haze as is typical of the Kathmandu Valley in February, I noticed it: I was translucent. I froze, confused. I held my hand up within inches of my gaze, studying it like an ancient text. I tried to decipher the wrinkles of my knuckles, to decode the tiny hairs that grow on my fingers. I searched for them as a Brahmin scholar searches for new meanings in old Sanskrit inscriptions on a vellum page. Of course the Brahmin struggles less than I did… It’s not to say I was transparent, though. This would come later. But still. To see oneself fade into translucency is frightening enough in its own right. A wave of panic began to crash over me. “What is happening to me?” 
But there were no doctors out there. When my Nepali counterparts started to see it, too, they gathered around much like the children from when I first arrived. They took turns making conjectures, trading theories across the circle they’d formed. Some even got heated as a few among them began to debate the validity of other theories in the face of their own, speaking much too fast for me to understand fully. It was obvious they cared. After all, in Hindu belief, Guest is God. But none of their guesses, as right or wrong as they might have been - and we will never know anyhow - actually healed me. If anything, I was filled with more dread than ever. Now there were twenty different possible causes, twenty different possible ways I could end up, and not one of them sounded at all positive. I walked myself back down the hills to the house, knelt down on the floor in my room, and searched through the cartons of medicinal tablets provided by the colonial, provisional government’s medical corps. They’d issued these to me with no instructions, not that they’d have been of much help. It all seemed very mystical. Strange viles of indigo glass containing pills in the shapes of moons, stars, crosses, wheels… If I’d paid better attention to learning Latin when younger I might have had some idea of what it was these labels meant, because even though the labels appeared to be in English at first glance, it seemed that the more I attempted to read them, they more unclear they got. It seemed to be some kind of alchemical scribbling reserved only for the initiated. I gave up. 
By Day Fifteen, I was transparent. Practically invisible, though not quite so yet. The children gathered around again, fascinated. “Ghost man”. The older kids pointed out, correctly, that my body was like those charts in their school houses - the ones of the constellations of Sagittarius and the Great Bear, where their bodies are simply the threads of silver gossamer, just outlines and empty space with a few scattered stars showing through behind them and betraying their emptiness. Then, on Day Seventeen, even this much I lost. I was gone. Completely so. And the gravity of this was starting to hit me, too. Now it wasn’t just my body that had faded. My voice was leaving me rapidly, and to some degree, also, my thought. I could hear people from the village outside my window commenting - there was no debate now - that I wouldn’t be long for this world now. That I would fade. And by “I”, I mean myself. That is to say, as in my self. That my very essence would fade. Not into death, but something even more feeble and lonely. That I’d just be somehow without being, no substance at all. To be a ghost would be much preferred, so I heard. As for my lot, it would just be emptiness. 
Anita knew the moment was dire, too. An old bangle seller at the marketplace in Kavre had told her that she’d heard of something similar happening to other Westerners stationed in Ghorka. It had not ended well for them, either. 
“They were lost forever,” the bangle seller said. “I mean, not lost, I guess. They walked around like hollow, um, what are they called… scarecrows, no? You’d see their pants and boots and vests and all walking around. But, you know what I mean. Not of our world, and unrecoverable.”
“They never came back?” Anita asked.
“No, never came back.” 
Anita was in my room, looking to me, to where she’d estimated my eyes to be. And she sighed, wincing a brief flash of a smile both of pity and of love, and asked me the following words which I am not likely to ever forget. 
“You are one of those who believes in God and not in medicine, no?”
She saw my head, marked by my woolen cap, nod. 
“Yes,” I gasped, barely a whisper and much more like the draft coming through the window frame from behind the curtain. 
“Right,” she said, “stay here.”
She whirled around, ducked her head to pass under the beam of the shallow door frame, and was gone. Ten minutes later she was back, and not alone. 
“I’ve brought a dhami jakri,” she gestured to the older, portly woman to her side. 
“A witch doctor, you mean? Isn’t that what that word means?” My whisper was somehow curious, somehow apprehensive. I felt distant from myself, that my consciousness was left on the opposite corner of the room and just barely out of reach. Fading. 
“A faith healer,” she corrected, steadily. 
The other woman stepped forward. She didn’t ask if I was ready, nor did she have to. I could tell that she was the one person that could still see me, for she looked straight into my eyes. And the crows feet of hers told me of her calm and readiness to heal. I clasped my hands together in greeting, exhaled an inaudible “namaste”, to which she reached forward to bat my hands away. 
“No need. It’s almost over,” she said warmly. Teasingly. Was this of no concern to her? She placed her hands on my stomach, and began. Her head she tilted back and then her chants began, some Vedic scriptures that flew from her mouth fast as arrows aflame, as shooting stars. 
I found, after a handful of minutes, that I had more than a handful of tears. No, truly. I had noticed that she’d been true to the promises of the crows feet around her gentle eyes. I felt the evidence from my tears falling, pooling up in my palms facing towards the ceiling in supplication. There, tributaries formed in my life and love lines, and a basin condensed in the lowest contours of my hands as little oases, which, though the sands of those deserts that held them were still pale like white ash, they were no longer invisible. I looked to her, stunned, indebted. When I’d finally wrangled back the tears, restrained and clenched enough for words to leave my throat and not sobs, I thanked her. 
“No, thank God”. She smiled, shaking her head.
So I turned to the framed picture of blue-bodied deities and multi-armed avatars that I’d bought in the marketplace upon my arrival and said “danyabaad”, to which she laughed again. 
“No, no,” she reached for the curtains, pulling back the Indian block printed cloth to show the outside world, and nodded towards the mountains in the distance. 
She repeated, “Thank God.”
And I did. And I could have sworn that I felt the faintest tremble of my first earthquake, but I couldn’t be sure, because I was laughing heartily with the joy of being back upon this earth and that in itself shook the room.