Devanagari-style script on upper arm

In the days when the ferry at Sangam Ghat ran on hemp ropes, a scribe named Mohini Bai sat under the neem tree with a reed pen and a pot of lamp-black. Her hand was steady because she had buried two husbands and no longer feared anything that could be written down. One evening a boatman called Ramdas came up the bank with a grey face and asked her for a word. His daughter had gone out at dusk to fetch a goat that had wandered onto the sandbar, and the flood was rising behind her.

Mohini did not ask what the word was for. She drew the letters slowly on a strip of palm leaf, the long bar across the top first, then the looping strokes that hold the sound like a cupped hand. Abhay, she said. Fearless. Ramdas laughed and said a word was no use as an oar. She told him to tie it to his wrist and go.

He went. The girl came back before midnight, soaked to the bone, the goat bawling in her arms. When Ramdas found the leaf again it had gone soft and grey, but the black strokes had held. He pinned it to the prow of his boat, and there it stayed, rowing out each morning through the mist, until the wood rotted and the river carried it off.